President Obama's News Conference on Health Care Reform

My head is spinning like the rest of Americans right now. What are we to think about this issue of health care reform? Tonight, President Barack Obama attempted to reassure us, inform us, as Americans, on the complexity and the need to reform our current health care system.

I just didn't feel that the President came out swinging tonight. I wanted to see more fight. I wanted him to defend the public option and explain it better. I wanted him to take on the right win radio lunatics who must be aligned with insurance companies who are destroying health care in this country. I wanted him to take on the insurance companies and I wanted him to take on the Republicans who are intent on obstructing anything that this man wants to do, even if it's the best thing for our country.

Most Democratic Americans are still behind our President, confident of his ability to pull together the disparate partisan fighters on this topic. From the far liberal left to the middle of the road Blue Dog Democrats, we're trying to figure out a way to pull together our own Democratic party in an earnest desire to provide affordable good health care insurance and coverage for those millions of Americans who need it.

And yet, we too, can admit to feeling nervous, unsure of the facts, not for sure which expert we should believe or whose advice we should take. And so tonight, we turned to our elected President, tonight, July 22, and listened to his televised news conference in hopes that we could see and hear the complete package in a clear way. I want to understand and I know many other Americans do also.

Sure there are those, who are going to just deny that President Obama has their best interest at heart. They are set in their belief that any effort to find a better national health care plan is another step closer to socialism and further decline in our economic status. Fear is the mantra they chant. Do nothing is their call. And obstruction is the plan they employ to stop this President and this administration. Nothing he offers is going to be listened to by a majority of Republican Americans.

But this can not be about Democrats versus Republicans. Somehow we have to find some way to connect on this issue. And yet President Obama just did not sell me tonight on this subject. I don't feel any more empowered. I hear the numbers, the ideas, the facts and I even heard his desire for us to support the ideas. There just wasn't enough clear plan for this American.

My thoughts are that while our president is trying to convince us that we need to get behind the idea of health care reform and I'm willing to sacrifice to pull this together. I feel that President Obama just didn't convince me, a loyal Democrat follower, that the current proposed plan is the right one. I wanted him to convince, but he didn't.

Perhaps this is what he needs to hear, so that Congress and the Senate can go back to work and try to figure out a plan that helps the least amongst us. I know we have a moral imperative to do that. This problem, one of the many that have been left to this President to sort out after 8 years of Republican do nothingness except destroy the economy, is al of ours to solve. Not just President Obama or a Democratic congress or a Republican opinion piece.

We must sit together and discuss what good alternatives are. Republicans can be the opposition party by putting forth their own health care plan. They admit that changes have to be made. So what are they?

And Democrats need to be willing to listen to the opposition and strive for compromise. Will it be the health care plan we need? I don't know, but we must be willing to move forward in some direction to begin rectifying the problems that face us, together or we will win our own little corners.

I am such a fan of this President. I think he needed a nap today..he was just off his game.

http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2009/07/excerpts-obamas-health-care-speech.html