State Senator Karen Keiser responds to President Obama’s healthcare address
State Senator Karen Keiser, chair of the Senate Health & Long-Term Care Committee, hosted a series of four healthcare town halls last month with Representative Eileen Cody. You can read about those here and here.
This afternoon Senator Keiser responded to last night’s healthcare address by President Barack Obama and the effects of healthcare reform on Washington State.
The health reform goals outlined in the President’s speech, ─slowing health care costs, covering the insured and providing families with more security and stability─ are goals we have worked for years to achieve at the state level. Those are Washington state values. It’s clear we have a strong federal partner to help us solve this critical issue.
The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) supports the public health insurance option, while over 850 individual states legislators from all fifty states with the Progressive States Network have called for any federal reform bill to include a public health insurance option, strong affordability protections, and shared employer responsibility for health care costs.
More than 876,000 Washingtonians have no coverage and many others are underinsured. They are just one illness or accident away from financial ruin. We need reform now, not yelling and screaming. Going forward, we need to tone down the rhetoric and focus on the issue at hand ─fixing our broken health care system.
States will be responsible for implementing any plan Congress passes and the President signs, so we will have a lot of work to do during the 2010-2011 sessions.
We’ve been working on health reform for years in our state with good success. Having the backing and support of the federal government will help us reduce waste, fraud and abuse in the industry and provide our citizens with the coverage they need and deserve.
I was glad to see bogus claims such as death panels debunked. The President set a new tone with the speech. As chair of the Senate Health & Long-Term Care Committee, I hope that spirit of cooperation will be evident at upcoming health reform hearings in both chambers of the state legislature.
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