Thursday, June 11, 2009

Obama speaks in Wisconsin on health care

See "The healthcare industry isn't going to play nice" by Mike Madden here.

Obama came to Green Bay because Wisconsin, and the Green Bay area in particular, spend less money on healthcare than most other parts of the country, without compromising the quality of the service patients get. "There are places where doctors typically work together as teams," he told his audience. "And they start off asking themselves, 'How can we provide the best possible care for this patient?' And because they're coordinating, they don't order a bunch of duplicative tests. And the primary-care physician who initially sees the patient is in contact with all the specialists so that in one meeting they can consult with each other and make a series of decisions ... that improve quality, increase coordination, but actually lower costs." . . .

What Obama knows, and reminded his audience, is that even opposition that sounds silly at first can build momentum in politics. "This next eight weeks is going to be critical," he said. "And you need to be really paying attention and putting pressure on your members of Congress to say, there's no excuses. If we don't get it done this year, we're probably not going to get it done." As with nearly all of his policies, the White House realizes the president is his own best salesman here. If he can't push healthcare reform through now, he's probably right -- we're probably not going to get it done.

Contact Congress here. Contact Senators here.

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