In the last couple of days, President Obama has been pushing back against critics, both Republican and Democrat, who say that by focusing so heavily on a national health care bill, which is not the public’s top priority — and which is opposed by a plurality of the American people — he is neglecting the issue of jobs, which is, by far, the public’s top priority. Obama’s answer is not that he is going to spend less time on health care and more on jobs. It’s that health care reform is a jobs program, so that when his administration works 24/7 on a national health care makeover, it is in fact working on jobs for the American people.
“What has happened is a lot of the debate in Washington has been around health care, so people think, well, I guess they must not be working on jobs,” Obama said Friday in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “No, we’ve been working on jobs the whole time. Health care is part and parcel with where we need to take our economy.”
Obama argued that insurance premiums are taking a greater and greater toll on small businesses, so therefore, “Us being able to control health care costs and giving small businesses the opportunity to pool with other small businesses and individuals around the country so that they have the same kind of leverage with insurance companies that the big guys have — that’s an economic plan. That’s part of our jobs growth.”
Just to make things perfectly clear, Obama pledged in his Saturday address that he will “focus every single day” on the jobs issue. As far as health care is concerned, he repeated that he’s doing it for jobs. “I’m determined to meet our responsibility to do what we know will strengthen our economy in the long-run,” Obama said. “That’s why I’m not going to let up in my efforts to reform our health care system…”
