Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Obama Health Care News Analysis


President Obama continues to rally for support for his health care reform bill tomorrow in his televised speech on Tuesday Sept. 9, 2009.

Obama had hoped to get the bill passed at the end of Aug. before Congress went on hiatus, but failed and is continuing to rally for support.

The president seems to be one of the few people still fighting for the bill as many democrats are growing tired from the battle, according to Robert Pear and David Herszenhorn in their article "Democrats grow wary as health care bill advances."

Time is running out for the bill to be passed and many are getting nervous.

""We’re not in the second inning. We’re not in the fourth inning. We’re in the eighth or ninth inning here, and so there’s not a lot of time to waste,” said the president's senior advisor Dave Alexrod, in Mike Allen's article "President Obama to address Congress."

"His goal is to create the best possible situation for consumers, create competition and choice," Axelrod said. "We want to bring a measure of security to people who have health insurance today. We want to help those who don't have coverage today, because they can't afford it, get insurance they can afford. And we want to do it in a way that reduces the overall cost of the system as a whole."

But why does there need to be competition in health care? Doctors, nurses and other health care providers do not work in a business but a service.

Axelrod says that making health care a competition will make people feel safer and that it will be less expensive for those who can currently not afford it. Making health care competitive and potentially a monopoly sounds like it could become more expensive than it was prior to the bill, which also makes one wonder how it would make citizens feel safer.

Obama is quoted as saying that the health care plan is his "moral obligation."

Depending on viewpoints, it is hard to understand how the health care bill is a moral obligation when funds the plan which will allow citizens to be able to get abortions in hospitals as out patients, rather than just being able to get them in abortion clinics.

How is it a moral obligation to make it so doctors have to give abortions in hospitals, whether they choose to or not?

Some citizens and political leaders also believe the bill to be socialist, since the inexpensive health care is similar to what many other socialist countries are currently practicing.

“These struggles always boil down to a contest between hope and fear,”Obama said. “That was true in the debate over Social Security, when F.D.R. was accused of being a socialist. That was true when J.F.K. and Lyndon Johnson tried to pass Medicare. And it’s true in this debate today.”

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