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Obama sees 'hard choices' on health costs

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Obama sees 'hard choices' on health costs

President Barack Obama used his second inaugural address to underline his promise to reduce federal health care costs without cutting benefits.

In an address light on health care references, he never mentioned the landmark 2010 health care reform law.

President Obama's speech on Monday echoed campaign trail comments that while changes are needed to keep Medicare and Medicaid solvent, they should not impact beneficiaries.

“We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit,” he said. “But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.”

In the runup to another round of discussions on changes to the federal entitlement programs, President Obama framed the federal health care programs in the sharp terms of a divisive election that turned in part on Republicans' proposed changes to the federal entitlement programs.

“The commitments we make to each other with Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security — these things do not sap our nation, they strengthen us,” he said. “They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., released a statement after President Obama's speech echoing the need to address the “unsustainable federal spending and debt.”

“Republicans are eager to work with the president on achieving this common goal, and we firmly believe that divided government provides the perfect opportunity to do so,” he said.

President Obama, though, never directly addressed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

However, President Obama made several oblique references to benefits the law provides. He decried a time when “parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn.” That could have referred to the law's expected expansion of insurance coverage to about 30 million people without insurance or its ban on insurer coverage denials for pre-existing conditions.

The president and other speakers at the inaugural repeatedly referenced the work that lies ahead for his final term in office. And much of that work will include implementation of many of health care law's most far-reaching provisions, such as the launch of health insurance exchanges later this year, the expansions of Medicaid in states that choose that option and educating the uninsured in how to purchase coverage for the first time.

Rich Daly writes for Modern Healthcare, a sister publication of Business Insurance.