Why Obama wants Healthcare reform?

Health care reform in U.S. is a hot topic discussed everywhere from President Obama to any adult who tried to access affordable healthcare in the past decade.

President Barack Obama is committed to pass comprehensive health reform in his first year in order to control rising health care costs and ensure high-quality and affordable health care for all Americans.

The United States spent approximately $2.2 trillion on health care in 2007, or $7421 per person, nearly twice the average of other developed nations and employer-sponsored health insurance premiums have doubled in the last 9 years, a rate three times faster than cumulative wage increases, according to the White House.

Americans spend more on health care than on housing or food. If rapid health cost growth persists, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2025, one out of every four dollars in our national economy will be tied up in the health system.

“Rapidly escalating health care costs are crushing family, business and government budgets and that forces families to sit around the kitchen table to make impossible choices between paying rent or paying health premiums,” Obama said in a statement.

“This growing burden will limit other investments and priorities that are needed to grow our economy. Rising health care costs also affect our economic competitiveness in the global economy, as American companies compete against companies in other countries that have dramatically lower health care costs,” Obama said in White House.

The health care plan will cost between $50 and $65 billion a year when fully phased in. Many Americans were skeptical about it after it was stalled this week in the U.S. Congress.

But the Obama administration said that it will be paid from savings in the system and from discontinuing the Bush tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 per year.

Obama claims that his health care reform plan will save the typical family up to $2,500 every year.

I suffer no illusions that this will be an easy process. It will be hard, Obama said.

But I also know that health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year, he said.