President Obama Holds Online Town Hall on Health ReformPresident Obama takes questions submitted through YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter at a town hall in Virginia. July 1, 2009.After days of taking video questions online, and with massive online discussions unfolding during the event, the President took questions on health reform directly from the public in an online town hall. For a taste, here's the transcript of the first question:MS. JARRETT: I'm going to be in charge. Thank you very much, Mr. President.
So in my opening remarks, Mr. President, I mentioned that when you released your YouTube video over the weekend, we received literally hundreds of video questions from all across the country. Your staff looked through all those questions and have selected a cross-section that represents a broad cross-section of the kinds of questions that came up.
I want to emphasize that the President has not seen the questions ahead of time. (Laughter.) Absolutely not.
And so we're going to begin with a video question, Mr. President, if you look at the screen.
THE PRESIDENT: All right.
VIDEO Q Hi, my name is Steve White. I'm in Spring Valley, New York. And my question for the President is: Why are we considering a health care plan which maintains the private insurance companies with their high overhead costs, instead of a single-payer plan, which would eliminate the high overhead costs, saving the American taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars, while covering everyone in our country? Thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: Sure. Well, it's a terrific question. I'm not sure if everybody could hear it, but the gist of the question is, why have we not been looking at a single-payer plan as the way to go?
As many of you know, in many countries, most industrialized advanced countries, they have some version of what's called a single-payer plan. And what that means is essentially that the government is the insurer. The government may not necessarily hire the doctors or the hospitals -- a lot of those may still be privately operated -- but the government is the insurer for everybody. And Medicare is actually a single-payer plan that we have in place, but we only have it in place for our older Americans.
Now, in a lot of those countries, a single-payer plan works pretty well and you eliminate, as Scott, I think it was, said, you eliminate private insurers, you don't have the administrative costs and the bureaucracy and so forth.
Here's the problem, is that the way our health care system evolved in the United States, it evolved based on employers providing health insurance to their employees through private insurers. And so that's still the way that the vast majority of you get your insurance. And for us to transition completely from an employer-based system of private insurance to a single-payer system could be hugely disruptive. And my attitude has been that we should be able to find a way to create a uniquely American solution to this problem that controls costs but preserves the innovation that is introduced in part with a free market system.
I think that we can regulate the insurance companies effectively; make sure that they're not playing games with people because of preexisting conditions; that they're not charging wildly different rates to people based on where they live or what their age is; that they're not dropping people for coverage unnecessarily; that we have a public option that's available to provide competition and choice to the American people, and to keep the insurers honest; and that we can provide a system in which we are, over the long term, driving down administrative costs, and making sure that people are getting the best possible care at a lower price.
But I recognize that there are lot of people who are passionate -- they look at France or some of these other systems and they say, well, why can't we just do that? Well, the answer is, is that this is one-sixth of our economy, and we're not suddenly just going to completely upend the system. We want to build on what works about the system and fix what's broken about the system. And that's what I think Congress is committed to doing, and I'm committed to working with them to make it happen. Okay?
