“Nowhere is reform more needed than when it comes to our health care system.”
Speaking on health reform in Missouri yesterday, President Obama made the case for why we can't wait any longer for reform, and he made it clear that he is pushing forward to get this done:
“We’ve seen years -- decades -- where Washington just puts off dealing with our toughest challenges because it’s too hard, because we don't know how the politics works. And the will and the capacity to act, to do serious things in this country, starts just getting sucked away. Just gets sacked by partisanship and political gamesmanship and debates about who’s up and who’s down, and how does this play politically -- instead of asking what’s right and what’s wrong. And we’ve seen terrible consequences -- not just these last two years of turmoil, but a decade of struggle for middle class families.
We can’t accept the status quo. We can’t accept the same old-same old. I won’t accept it... Not when it comes to how we manage taxpayer dollars. Not when it comes to how our health care system works. Not when it comes to meeting the difficult challenges that we face...Now is the time. Now is the moment. Now is the time for us to leave for the next generation and generations to come a stronger and more prosperous country. We are not backing down. We are not quitting, St. Charles. And we are going to get this done.”
President Obama also focused on a challenge the White House has taken on in all of its work: fighting waste, fraud, and abuse.
"Nowhere is reform more needed than when it comes to our health care system -- nowhere. Nowhere. The health care system has billions of dollars that should go to patient care and they’re lost each and every year to fraud, to abuse, to massive subsidies that line the pockets of the insurance industry."
The President gave an example of a problem called "improper payments," where Medicare and Medicaid payments are sent to the wrong person, or sent for the wrong reason or in the wrong amount. It's estimated to have cost taxpayers nearly $100 billion last year. President Obama then announced that earlier in the day, he'd signed an order calling on all federal agencies to launch audits to recover some of the lost money. So far, pilot programs of these types of audits have recovered a billion dollars, just looking at a few states.
The President also announced his support for a bipartisan bill -- the Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act -- which expands the government's ability to do these audits.
With a vote on health reform coming any day now, the President has made it clear that supporters need to make their voices heard by Congress now. Click here to make a call to your representative to let them know you support the President’s plan for health reform.
