The pundits and the public will be batting around last night's debate for a while, but I think when the dust settles, we'll see that, as Hillary said last night, Obama came away with the win, going three for three in the Presidential debates. There were several topics where Barack excelled, in particular abortion, education and health care.
On health care, Obama laid out his plan very clearly, and the public responded. In this morning's CNN poll, viewers chose Obama on health care 61-32.
Here's the transcript of Obama on the issue from last night's debate.
So here's what my plan does. If you have health insurance, then you don't have to do anything. If you've got health insurance through your employer, you can keep your health insurance, keep your choice of doctor, keep your plan.The only thing we're going to try to do is lower costs so that those cost savings are passed onto you. And we estimate we can cut the average family's premium by about $2,500 per year. If you don't have health insurance, then what we're going to do is to provide you the option of buying into the same kind of federal pool that both Senator McCain and I enjoy as federal employees, which will give you high-quality care, choice of doctors, at lower costs, because so many people are part of this insured group.
We're going to make sure that insurance companies can't discriminate on the basis of pre-existing conditions. We'll negotiate with the drug companies for the cheapest available price on drugs.
We are going to invest in information technology to eliminate bureaucracy and make the system more efficient.
And we are going to make sure that we manage chronic illnesses, like diabetes and heart disease, that cost a huge amount, but could be prevented. We've got to put more money into preventive care.
This will cost some money on the front end, but over the long term this is the only way that not only are we going to make families healthy, but it's also how we're going to save the federal budget, because we can't afford these escalating costs.
McCain followed up by distorting Sen. Obama's health care plan, and Obama responded:
Video Credit: presdebate08
JK spoke on the topic of health care and the differences between McCain and Obama's plans in Wisconsin on Tuesday, and YouTuber 'lanceburri' captured that part of the speech and several others.
Video Credit: lanceburri
19 days before we start to turn this country around. I think we're ready.
