Health Industry’s Pledge to Cut Costs Adds Urgency to Reform Bid

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• KWAME HOLMAN:

  Representatives from half-a-dozen health industry groups met with President Obama. They delivered a proposal White House officials said would save $2 trillion over the next decade.

  The president called the gathering a "watershed event."

• U.S. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:

  The groups who are here today represent different constituencies with different sets of interests.

  They've not always seen eye to eye with each other or with our government on what needs to be done to reform health care in this country. In fact, some of these groups were among the strongest critics of past plans for comprehensive reform.

  But what's brought us all together today is a recognition that we can't continue down the same dangerous road we've been traveling for so many years, that costs are out of control, and that reform is not a luxury that can be postponed, but a necessity that cannot wait.

• KWAME HOLMAN:

  It was all a marked change from when President Clinton tried to tackle health care reform in the early 1990s. Then, insurance industry leaders in particular put up fierce resistance.

  Now insurers are joining drug-makers, hospitals, and doctors in a bid to slow the rate of growth in health care costs by 1.5 percent a year.

  They say they'd do it by streamlining paperwork and changing the way hospitals bill patients, among other things. The groups estimated that, within five years, under the proposal, a family of four could save $2,500 a year.

  At a briefing, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs acknowledged the pledge is voluntary, so there's no hard and fast way to enforce it.

  ROBERT GIBBS, White House press secretary: Well, the president, in meeting with the group this morning, before they went out, he said to this group, "You've made a commitment. We expect you to keep it."

  And we certainly believe that the players that are involved and the trade associations that they represent are genuinely serious about moving health care reform forward. But we will be, certainly, evaluating throughout this process how effective they're being, how effective the government is being at curtailing costs for Medicare and Medicaid, in hopes of making sure that that savings is realized by American families.

• KWAME HOLMAN:

  The overall goal is to free more money to fund the president's plan for insuring nearly 50 million Americans who now go without health insurance. The costs of that plan could range to $1.5 trillion over 10 years.

  The need for health care savings was underscored today when White House officials forecast an even larger budget deficit. The new estimate increased by $89 billion to surpass $1.8 trillion for this fiscal year. That's about four times the record set last year.

  That announcement gave new urgency to the president's call for reform.

• BARACK OBAMA:

  I've said repeatedly that getting health care costs under control is essential to reducing budget deficits, restoring fiscal discipline, and putting our economy on a path towards sustainable growth and shared prosperity.

  So we as a nation are now spending a far larger share of our national wealth on health care than we were a generation ago. At the rate we're going, we are expected to spend one-fifth of our economy on health care within a decade, and yet we're getting less for our money.

• KWAME HOLMAN:

  The president is pushing Congress to overhaul the health care system this year and control those costs. But even with today's industry ideas, he still will face questions about whether the nation can afford his plan.

• JIM LEHRER:

  And Gwen Ifill picks up the story from there.