Obama tells GOP to offer a better health care plan

GREEN BAY, Wis. — President Obama challenged Republican critics Thursday to offer alternative plans for overhauling U.S. health care, saying he's "happy to steal people's ideas" but doing nothing about out-of-reach costs and uninsured Americans is not an option.

"What else do we say to all those families who spend more on health care than on housing or on food?" Obama said at a town hall-style meeting. "What do we tell those businesses that are choosing between closing their doors and letting their workers go?"

Undertaking an aggressive new effort to push a major health-care measure through Congress by August, Obama rebuked critics from the right and the left: conservatives who say his support for creating a government-sponsored insurance option alongside private coverage would send the country toward an unsustainable nationalized plan and liberals who are concerned he won't go far enough to mandate universal coverage.

Obama said what to do about health coverage has reached near-emergency status.

"I know there are some who believe that reform is too expensive, but I can assure you that doing nothing will cost us far more in the coming years," Obama said. "Our deficits will be higher. Our premiums will go up. Our wages will be lower, our jobs will be fewer and our businesses will suffer."

There is emerging bipartisan consensus around many big issues of health-care overhaul, including a need to move all Americans toward coverage and to prohibit insurance-industry practices that deny coverage to people with health problems.

But major disagreements remain over how to pay the estimated $1.5 trillion it will cost over the next decade to cover the 50 million Americans who lack coverage, as well as whether employers should be required to offer coverage and whether government-sponsored insurance should be one option.

Obama has detailed few specifics, and he did not break any new ground Thursday.

But his steadfast support for a public-insurance component in any plan is a major obstacle to a final bill.

The American Medical Association, to which Obama speaks in Chicago on Monday, is wary of the idea. Republicans are campaigning hard against it.

"We see that as a slippery slope to having the government run everything," said Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.

Conservative activists appear to be mobilizing. Several hundred protesters lined the president's brief motorcade from the airport to a suburban high school.

Obama said creating the option of a government-sponsored health plan alongside private insurers would increase competition and lower costs. But in answering a question Thursday, he also said that no one — "certainly not me" — is interested in a nationalized health-care system like that in Britain.

The president said the government is not going to force any change upon people who are pleased with the plans. "When you hear people saying socialized medicine, understand, I don't know anybody in Washington who is proposing that," he said.