Obama Announces Daschle Appointment to HHS, to Head White House Healtcare Reform Office

Human Health, Quipu Economic Forum :: Comments (0)

14 December 2008 :: by J.E. Robertson

CafeSentido.com :: President-elect Barack Obama held a press conference today in Chicago to announce his choice for Health and Human Services secretary, former Democratic Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. Daschle is a top adviser to Obama and the two have made clear their commitment to ending the problem of underinsurance and the uninsured and making sure that no Americans go without treatment.

When Obama took the podium, he led off with comments on a few other issues, including escalating job losses and the Blagojevich affair. The president-elect said he was “as appalled and disappointed as anybody” to learn of what Gov. Blagojevich was attempting to do, according to the wiretaps. “I have never spoken to the governor on this subject.” He also said he was “confident” that no one on his team had been involved in any dealmaking.

“This Senate seat does not belong to any politician to trade; it belongs to the people of Illinois”, Obama said, reiterating his own long commitment to ethics reform and to ushering in a new kind of politics across the nation, where money cannot buy influence and public servants are rewarded for the quality of their service.

He urged the Illinois legislature to take the necessary steps to ensure that an appropriate individual fills the seat in a timely fashion, without specifying what action the legislature should take. He also said it was important that whoever fills the seat not be stained in any way by the wrongdoing alleged against Gov. Blagojevich.

Obama called Daschle “one of the foremost healthcare experts” and said that Jean Landrieu has worked to help create the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had done some of the most vital research into ways of improving the government’s budgetary policy toward healthcare to improve and expand coverage.

In formally accepting the nomination, Daschle told the press “Our growing costs are unsustainable and the plight of the uninsured is unconscionable”. He added that “One of the first conversations I had with then Senate-candidate Obama was about the need for meaningful healthcare reform” and thanked the president-elect for his vote of confidence and the opportunity to serve and to work for that reform.

As HHS secretary, Daschle will be responsible for administering Medicare and Medicaid, overseeing drug safety and drug testing. He says he will work to make healthcare reform “an open and inclusive process” working from the grassroots up through the policy-making level of leadership in the White House.

Obama’s first question was on the subject of disgraced Illinois governor Blagojevich. He said that for him, a life in public service must be devoted to helping ordinary people, the citizens and constituents “to reclaim their hopes and their dreams”, but that some people enter public office with the wrong motives. Obama said Blagojevich “can no longer effectively serve” and therefore should consider stepping down.

Obama repeated that he had no contact with Blagojevich on the question of his vacant Senate seat, but that he would like to “gather all the facts” about any staff contacts with the governor’s office. The president-elect also said he was “absolutely certain” that no one from his team was involved in any deal-making regarding the Senate seat.

“I have not been contacted by any federal officials and we have not been interviewed by them. I think as reflected in the US attorney’s report, we were not seen as being amenable to any deal”.

He was asked the prickly question of how it came to be that Blagojevich became so convinced that Obama and his personal preference for filling the seat, Valerie Jarrett, were so unwilling to “play ball” that he would be reduced to cursing and swearing about them on the wiretaps released by the US attorney.

Asked what was wrong with Illinois politics, Obama first said that Illinois produces a great tradition of talented and committed public servants, but that “habits and a culture that thinks of public service as a means of self-aggrandizement” also corrupt many in politics. He said the Blagojevich affair is “the far end of the spectrum” in terms of the “business” approach to politics, characterized by near total commitment to self-serving corruption and indifference to the work of public service.

Returning to the healthcare issue, Obama said that his plan would be paid for first by finding room for savings in wasteful government spending. He said the policy-making atmosphere would be open to the best and most viable ideas. And he said healthcare must be “intimately woven into our overall economic recovery plan”, as 50% of individual bankruptcies are the result of out of control healthcare costs.

Jonathan Alter, talking to MSNBC’s David Gregory, noted that “the reason Gov. Blagojevich went on this ‘crime spree’” —as US attorney Patrick Fitzgerald called it— was because on 1 January 2009, a new ethics law comes into effect that rules out most of the so-called “pay to play” dealings in Illinois politics, an initiative Blagojevich vetoed, but which candidate Obama forcefully backed, persuading the state legislature to override the governor’s veto.