Obama on healthcare

President Obama delivered a major speech today to the American Medical Association (AMA)in which he deplored the current state of America's healthcare system and made a pitch for his healthcare reform plan.

While congress has been working on their version of the plan in recent weeks, Obama repeated many of the reform issues that were on his wish list during the campaign: a push for computerized healthcare records, a focus on health outcomes rather than government imbursements for individual medical procedures, a push for more emphasis on preventative medicine, a mandate to do away with insurance companies discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions, and a federal plan that would help cover the nations uninsured or anyone who wants to switch healthcare plans. And unlike Obama's campaign platform, he mentioned providing waivers on health insurance for extremely poor people and some small business.

One issue that Obama went the distance to stress was that the government health insurance option was NOT a move toward an eventual single-payer healthcare system. He emphasized this point in his speech about six times and went as far as to call anyone who made this claim a liar.

Obama has a lot riding on his shoulders with healthcare reform. As he mentioned in his speech, efforts to re-make America's healthcare system have always failed in the past. As criticism over Obama's massive public spending initiatives have mounted in the last few weeks, he has the enormous take of not only reforming the healthcare system, but he also has to prove to the public that this investment is worth the money during these harsh economic times.