It’s official: President-elect Obama announced in Chicago last week he will be nominating former Senator Tom Daschle for Secretary of Health and Human Services — and as director of the White House Office of Health Reform. The President-elect also announced his pick of Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Jeanne Lambrew as Daschle’s deputy director. (Official announcements from the transition team: the press release with the President-elect’s prepared remarks, and the blog post, with photos from the event.)

At the National Journal Lost In Transition blog, Mary Gilbert explained:

Daschle, in his new dual role, will be responsible not only for crafting a health care plan but also for implementing it. Calling him “one of America’s foremost health care experts,” Obama claimed that Daschle’s knowledge of health care policy and extensive legislative experience make him uniquely suited to steer an effective reform package through Congress. As “the original no-drama guy,” Obama said, Daschle is also someone who can be trusted to use the HHS Department to implement the new policy on the ground.
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Pressed by a reporter on how he plans to pay for an overhaul of the health care system, Obama spoke about first cutting costs and then finding ways to make the system pay for itself over the long run, though he was short on specifics. He stressed, however, that fixing health care must be “intimately woven” into his team’s overall economic recovery plan. “We can’t put this off because we’re in an emergency,” he said. “This is part of the emergency.”

From Sarah Rubenstein on the WSJ Health Blog:

For his part, Daschle, who will also head up a new White House office dedicated to health reform, emphasized that this won’t happen behind close doors. (See our post from earlier today.) “We’re going to bring the American people into this conversation and make health-care reform an open and inclusive process that goes from the grassroots up.”

Says Greg Sargent at TPM Election Central:

Advocates had been awaiting a clear statement that Obama views health care reform as key to fixing the economy, a key talking point of reformers, and now they got one.

Paul Testa at The New Health Dialogue blog agrees:

The dual role guarantees that health reform will stay in the spotlight for the new administration.
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In both their remarks, Obama and Daschle stressed that restoring our nation’s economy requires reforming the health care system.

So did Ezra Klein:

The Obama presser on Tom Daschle and health care was promising. The first big signal concerned scheduling. “The time has come – this year, in this new Administration – to modernize our health care system for the twenty-first century; to reduce costs for families and businesses; and to finally provide affordable, accessible health care for every American.” Key words: “This year.”
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But won’t it be too expensive? On this question, Obama’s answer was positively Orszagian.. “Some ask how, at this economic moment, can we afford the challenge of reforming our economic system. I ask a different question. How can we afford not to?” That’s not only good rhetoric. It’s empirically accurate. “If we are to overcome our economic challenges,” Obama continued, “we must finally overcome our health care challenges.”

On The American Spectator AmSpecBlog, Philip Klein discusses highlights from Daschle’s book and the “Obama-Daschle proposal” that will come sometime in the next few months:

In his book, Daschle discusses the unraveling of the Clinton health care push in 1993-94 in great detail, and will try to learn from the mistakes that were made at the time. By having him lead the health care effort (somebody with vast experience moving legislation through Congress) Democrats will already be a step ahead of where they were with Hillary Clinton in 1993. He realizes that he’ll have to involve members of Congress in the process, rather than huddling in secrecy, coming out with a plan, and telling Congress how it’s gonna be. He also recognizes that one of the major problems with the original bill was that it was so long and detailed, that it was too complicated to explain to the public, and easy to pick apart by opponents.

Finally, at The Plank, Jonathan Cohn had high praise for Jeanne Lambrew:

One more note: I mentioned briefly, below, the significance of Jeanne Lambrew’s appointment. But it goes beyond the fact that she happens to know a heck of a lot about health care. She, too, has a strong commitment to what you might call the “social justice” side of the debate: Making sure everyobdy has insurance and, more important, good insurance. She also focuses heavily on issues like prevention and public health–which get less attention than simply extending insurance to everybody but may, in the long run, be more important when it comes to actually making all Americans healthy.

Related posts:

1. Blog Roundup: Daschle, HHS, and American Heart Month
2. Watch, Discuss and Engage: HHS Secretary Sebelius & Health Reform Director Nancy-Ann DeParle
3. Reactions to President-Elect Obama’s Staff Selections
4. Did You Watch Yesterday’s Live Chat with HHS Secretary Sebelius & Health Reform Director Nancy-Ann DeParle?
5. Blog Roundup: President Obama's budget plan for health care reform

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 14th, 2008 at 2:50 am and is filed under Policy, Politics, Roundup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.