$2 Trillion Dollar Health Care Savings Needs Congressional Push!

$2 Trillion dollars in Health Care Savings is how much the American Health Care Industry recently pledged to help President Obama accomplish his vast goal of Health Care Reform.

However I'm not buying it...from the Health Care Industry that is.

After all these are the same people who've spent millions of dollars over the years to oppose Health Care Reform.

I strongly believe that without Congress passing a bill of some kind and President Obama signing it into law, the type of reform our country so desperately needs will never, ever happen.

President Obama: "Today, half of all personal bankruptcies stem from medical expenses. And too many Americans are skipping that check-up they know they should get, or going without that prescription that would make them feel better, or finding some other way to scrimp and save on their health care expenses."

"What is a growing crisis for the American people is also becoming an untenable burden for America's businesses. Rising health care costs are commanding more and more of the money that our companies could be using to innovate and to grow, making it harder for them to compete around the world. These costs are leading the small businesses that are responsible for half of all private sector jobs to drop coverage for their workers at an alarming rate."

"And, finally, the explosion in health care costs has put our federal budget on a disastrous path. This is largely due to what we're spending on Medicare and Medicaid -- entitlement programs whose costs are expected to continue climbing in the years ahead as baby boomers grow older and come to rely more and more on our health care system. That's why I've said repeatedly that getting health care costs under control is essential to reducing budget deficits, restoring fiscal discipline, and putting our economy on a path towards sustainable growth and shared prosperity."

"We, as a nation, are now spending a far larger share of our national wealth on health care than we were a generation ago. At the rate we're going, we are expected to spend one fifth of our economy on health care within a decade. And yet we're getting less for our money. In fact, we're spending more on health care than any other nation on Earth, even though millions of Americans don't have the affordable, quality care they deserve, and nearly 46 million Americans don't have any health insurance at all."

"This problem didn't just appear overnight. For decades, Washington has debated what to do about this. For decades, we've talked about reducing costs, improving care, and providing coverage to uninsured Americans. But all too often, efforts at reform have fallen victim to special interest lobbying aimed at keeping things the way they are; to political point-scoring that sees health care not as a moral issue or an economic issue, but as a wedge issue; and to a failure on all sides to come together on behalf of the American people."

"And that's what makes today's meeting so remarkable -- because it's a meeting that might not have been held just a few years ago. The groups who are here today represent different constituencies with different sets of interests. They've not always seen eye to eye with each other or with our government on what needs to be done to reform health care in this country. In fact, some of these groups were among the strongest critics of past plans for comprehensive reform."

"But what's brought us all together today is a recognition that we can't continue down the same dangerous road we've been traveling for so many years; that costs are out of control; and that reform is not a luxury that can be postponed, but a necessity that cannot wait. It's a recognition that the fictional television couple, Harry and Louise, who became the iconic faces of those who opposed health care reform in the '90s, desperately need health care reform in 2009. And so does America."

(The President gives remarks after hosting what was a remarkable health reform meeting, both for the $2 trillion in national savings that was discussed, and for the stakeholders in attendance.)



Sources: Whitehouse.gov, Healthreform.gov, Slate, Flickr, Wikipedia, Youtube