Obama to continue with healthcare reform

State-run health system

Lambasting critics who claim he is out to frame a "socialised" state-run health system, Obama vowed to cut costs of existing private plans and to use preventative medicine as a way to reduce the long-term price of health care.

He also made a moral case based on the fact that despite America's immense wealth, tens of millions of people languish with no insurance whatsoever.
 
"We are not a nation that accepts nearly 46 million uninsured men, women and children ... we are a nation that cares for its citizens, we are a people who look out for one another."
 
A pitched political fight is already raging in Congress over health care reform, which confounded the previous Democratic president Bill Clinton, and was a central plank of Obama's 2008 campaign program.
 
If the president prevails, he will bolster his political muscle for key political battles to come on all manner of domestic and foreign policy issues.
 
Obama's foes, though, sense a chance to cripple his young presidency by inflicting a damaging defeat -- much as happened to Clinton in 1993.

Now or never
 
The White House argues that America has reached a "now or never" moment on health care reform, and proposes a new "public" program to compete with private insurance plans many US workers get through their employers.
 
Reform proponents argue that the burden of fast-rising health care costs is becoming too great on employers at a time of economic crisis and when families are struggling to make ends meet.
 
Obama critics claim reform plans would starve patients of choice, erode the quality of health care and saddle the industry with an inefficient new government bureaucracy.
 
Republican congressman Tom Price, who is also a physician, claimed Obama wanted to take away the decision on appropriate health care from doctors and patients and hand it to the government.
 
"The number one concern is where are medical decisions going to be made?" said Price on a conference call with reporters.
 
Critics also argue that with the US budget deficit soaring to a projected $US1.8 trillion ($A2.23 trillion) this year, the government cannot afford to intervene in the health care market.
 
Republicans reject any government-run component for health care, which they liken unfavourably to national health systems in Canada and Britain.
 
Even some senior Democrats doubt the votes in Congress are there to support any form of government intervention.
 
"For virtually every Republican, a government plan is a non-starter," said Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate on Sunday on the CBS program, Face the Nation.
 

Kent Conrad, the chairman of the influential Senate Budget Committee, who will play a key role in the reform debate, concurred.
 
"You have got to attract some Republicans, as well as holding virtually all the Democrats together," Conrad said on CNN's State of the Union program.
 
"That, I don't believe, is possible with the pure public option. I don't think the votes are there."

Non-profit network
 
Conrad has suggested a new idea - a network of non-profit health insurance cooperatives free of direct government control, to bypass critics of a federal health plan.
 
A new Rasmussen Reports poll on Monday found voters split on the reform effort. Forty-one per cent of those asked said they backed the establishment of a government-run firm to compete with private insurers.
 
An identical portion - 41 per cent - disagreed.