WASHINGTON – As early as last January, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), then a Democrat primary contender for the presidency, called for universal healthcare in the United States by no later than 2012.
At the time, Obama was the first to set a time frame for such a goal, though his Democratic rivals also supported universal healthcare.
Obama, now the Democratic candidate for president, has said that universal healthcare must not be “a question of whether, it must be a question of how.” He plans to begin work promoting it within his first year in office and would not mandate healthcare coverage, except for children.
Obama's platform calls for a new national health plan for all Americans, including the self-employed and small businesses, to buy affordable health coverage that is similar to the plan available to members of Congress.
“We have the ideas, the resources and now we need the will,” he said in a speech earlier this year. “There is no reason why we can’t accomplish that. It is time to act.”
In a survey conducted by the American Academy of Family Physicians, Obama said he endorses health savings accounts, promoted by his rival Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), as "a helpful way" of saving taxpayers money. "But the current health care environment in unsustainable and health savings accounts don’t do nearly enough," Obama said. "In the long run, it’s going to take more than health savings accounts to provide the kind of comprehensive health coverage Americans need and deserve."
Obama's running mate, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) is not a convert to universal healthcare coverage; it was part of his platform as Obama’s opponent in the primaries.
At a presidential candidate healthcare forum hosted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Biden said the next president has “a golden opportunity” to provide healthcare to all Americans. “But in my view, it is less, quite frankly, the plan than the man or the woman proposing the plan.”
Biden, who has served as a senator from Delaware since 1973 and is chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said there is increasing bipartisan agreement about the need for healthcare coverage. “We used to have this polemic argument about whether or not healthcare was a right that all Americans had, or it was a privilege,” he said. “We’re well beyond that.”