Health Reform Must Be Priority One

Health system—not Social Security—reform is the nation's most pressing domestic issue, said newly elected Sen. Barak Obama (D-Ill.).

Obama, the young freshman senator who spoke at last year's Democratic convention and whom some observers have called the future of the Democratic Party, told an audience at a conference sponsored by Families USA that lack of access to health care and increasing medical debt were pervasive issues, simmering beneath the radar of an administration that was looking the other way.

Obama said that in his campaign across the state of Illinois, those problems were expressed by people in every demographic.

“The single constant in every conversation I had in every community was the belief backed by facts that our health care system was badly broken and that it needed to be repaired fundamentally, not at the margins, and that it was serving nobody particularly well,” Obama said.

“But there has not been a single comment from this administration, beyond the issue of medical malpractice, about the health care system, and we have an administration that has decided it's going to invest its entire political capital into fixing a Social Security system that's not broke instead of fixing a health care system that everyone knows is broke.”

Beyond that, Obama said that entrenched interests aligned against change are unlikely to move without leadership from the top or a groundswell from the bottom. “It's not just the bad guys, it's not just venal insurance companies and drug companies, it's the fact that you've got hospitals and doctors and insurance companies and drug companies and, in some cases, patients who prefer the devil they know to the devil they don't,” he said.

“It would help if we had a president who was using the bully pulpit to encourage and nudge and push those entrenched interests and the public in general into believing that we have to change and that change is better than the status quo. But we don't have that, so we are going to have to generate from the ground up a set of organizations and conversations and institutions that will galvanize people and embolden politicians to take a stand on this issue.”