In his speech to a joint session of Congress, Tuesday, Feb. 24, President Obama offered some additional assurances that his approach to budget policy will focus on saving taxpayer dollars without undermining the social safety net and harming working families.

Obama targeted health care reform. “[T]he cost of our health care has weighed down our economy and the conscience of our nation long enough. So let there be no doubt: health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait and it will not wait another year,” he told Congress.

Obama’s agenda for fiscal responsibility looks to other places for savings. He said, “In this budget, we will end education programs that don’t work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don’t need them. We’ll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we’re not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don’t use. We will root out the waste, fraud and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier, and we will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.”
In a statement following the speech, Barbara Kennelly, director of the national Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, said, “The President is right, comprehensive healthcare reform is the best way to strengthen Medicare for the future and that healthcare reform should come sooner rather than later.”

Comprehensive health care reform that controls costs, provides universal access and offers public options in addition to private options to consumers will reduce overall costs of health care and ease the burden on taxpayers over the long haul.

Experts in the health care field believe that Obama’s reference to waste in Medicare targets the issue of overpayments to insurance carriers implemented under the Bush Medicare privatization law in 2005. They suggest that a reform in this area alone could save billions annually. The White House Web site specifically calls for “eliminating subsidies to the private insurance Medicare Advantage program,” which could produce a savings of about $15 billion.