Obama's gamble on a health care overhaul

Bloomberg BusinessWeek examines President Obama's long push for health care reform. "That Obama chose to stake his presidency on the U.S. health overhaul will define his legacy even as he risked the careers of many fellow Democrats in doing so. ... Obama's pursuit of health care reflected his desire to succeed where no other president had, as much as a determination to seize the chance to fix a broken system, according to [former Sen. Tom] Daschle. 'Once committed, he felt he just couldn't afford to lose,' Daschle said last week. When Obama, 48, signed the last piece of the legislation yesterday, he cemented the biggest changes to the health system since the 1965 creation of the Medicare insurance program for the elderly. He also brought to a close a year-long fight in which he gambled his presidency and came out on top" (Jensen and Chen, 3/31).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.