Obama's Quick Pitch
By Marcus Gilmer in News on Jun 16, 2009 4:00PM
Much was made yesterday morning about the cost of President Obama's quick trip back to Chicago for his speech before the American Medical Association's annual meeting, pitching his proposed health care reform plan. But the speech itself was received warmly for the most part. Calling the current cost of health care a "ticking time-bomb" and while not supporting caps on malpractice lawsuits, Obama did call for improvements to the system that would:
"explore a range of ideas about how to put patient safety first; how to let doctors focus on practicing medicine; how to encourage broader use of evidence-based guidelines. I want to work with the AMA so we can scale back the excessive defensive medicine that reinforces our current system, and shift to a system where we are providing better care, simply -- rather than simply more treatment."
While Obama's trip home was brief, the speech was one of the longest so far of his presidency.
Click here for full text of the speech and check out video of the speech here.