The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking places.

President Obama has arranged for several large trade groups, including the AMA, to join an event Monday afternoon to discuss ways to wring cost savings from the health system through more efficient practices, according to officials who briefed reporters on tomorrow’s meeting.

The President is expected to say that we can’t continue the same way we’ve been going, with costs that are out of control — that reform is not a luxury that can be postponed, but a pressing necessity.

According to a Reuter’s article published on Sunday:

“A centerpiece of Obama’s health proposal would be a new government health insurance plan that would compete with private insurers. The administration says the public plan would help cut costs by introducing competition, and cover the uninsured.

Republicans and insurers oppose a government plan, arguing that it would undermine the private healthcare market.

By focusing on delivering more efficient care, Obama is weighing in on one of the least controversial aspects of his healthcare proposal rather than the much more heated topic of whether to establish a new public insurance plan.”

While you’re wondering why anybody would oppose a plan that would both cut costs and cover the uninsured, do ask your friends that same question. Health Care is a 2 trillion dollar per year industry.  Maybe somebody’s making some serious green? Point friends at the article, perhaps.  It’s at:
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE54A01P20090511?sp=true

The fight’s not over. Obama’s said all along he prefers the ideal of single-payer system, but in practical terms doubts we can get there quickly, if at all, given our starting position. Meanwhile with public support we can at least begin to close the coverage gap and get everybody on a plan – and if we can bring costs more in line with what other countries spend, so much the better.

Sure, special interests have been working for years to woo key Senators and Representatives. Just a few short years ago it seemed like you had to be an old, white dude to be President of the U.S. Did you hear President say change would only come about if you believed in it and worked for it? Did you, in your wildest dreams, expect a senior Republican Senator to change parties early in President Obama’s first term?

Bring the message back to your friends, families, and local activists, especially in Montana and Washington.  As somebody once observed, “the road to success is dotted with many tempting parking places.“ There’s still time to give Senators Baucus and Murray and their peers reason to rethink their stand even though they’re tempted to preserve the profits of the big insurance companies.

Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock,
perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two,
and I know it was not the last blow that did it,
but all that had gone before.

~ Jacob A. Riis