Last week, Senator Barack Obama threw his hat into the presidential ring for 2008. Today, you have a chance to hear what Sen. Obama has to say about one of the issues Kossacks care most about: Health Care.
Sen. Obama will be addressing the topic of health care at our Health Action 2007 conference--the biggest conference for health care advocates in America--today at 9 AM EST. You can watch the speech LIVE through our webcast. Click here to watch Sen. Obama live at 9 AM EST.
In addition, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) will be speaking at our conference this afternoon. You can watch Senator Brown live today at 2:45 PM EST via the same link. And while she won't be on the webcast, Daily Kos’ own nyceve will be a panelist at a workshop on blogging and health care. We're very excited to have her at our conference!
We hope you'll watch--or better yet, live-blog it! More after the jump.
Senator Obama is no stranger to our conference: He spoke at Health Action 2005, only a couple of months after being elected Senator. An excerpt:
I would say that the single constant across the State of Illinois—and Illinois to a large degree is a microcosm for the country, because it’s north, south, east, west, urban, rural, black, white, Hispanic, Asian—the single constant in every conversation that I had in every community was the belief backed by facts that our healthcare system was badly broken and that it needed to be repaired, fundamentally, not at the margins, but rather that it was serving nobody particularly well. And that was true when you talked to low-income folks who were having trouble because Medicaid reimbursements were insufficient to get the kind of quality care that were needed, and doctors were refusing to take Medicaid patients because it just wasn’t economical for them. It was true when you went into high income neighborhoods and areas where you had owners of small businesses and large businesses alike who were seeing double-digit inflation in their healthcare and wanted to do the right thing by their employees but were finding it more and more difficult to sustain insurance for them, and it certainly was true to ordinary middle-class and working-class families, who even if they were fortunate enough to have health insurance were seeing their copayments and their deductibles and their premiums going up, so that it was not infrequent that I would meet people that worked every day and had obtained healthcare coverage for their families, but did not cover themselves because it was simply too expensive. And it was also not infrequent that you would meet families who said, "We are bankrupt or on the verge of bankruptcy as a consequence of an illness in the family." This is something all of you know, and so I’m preaching to the choir with respect to the urgency of the problem that we face.
The question is, how do we translate that urgency into a sense of political will on Capitol Hill and in state legislatures all over the country? You know, President Bush had an inaugural address in which he spoke at times n moving fashion about the desire for freedom and democracy all across the globe, and yet, what was striking, was not a single mention by this President that all of us are hearing about every single day, and many of us are experiencing firsthand. There has not been a single comment from this Administration beyond the issue of medical malpractice about the healthcare system, and we have an Administration that has decided that it’s going to invest its entire political capital into fixing a Social Security system that’s not broke instead of fixing a healthcare system that everybody knows is broke [applause]. It doesn’t make any sense!
Again, you can watch this year's speech live via webcast. Click here to watch Sen. Obama live at 9 AM EST.