OBAMA on Health Care last night.

KEY QUOTES:

--'I understand how easy it is for this town to become consumed in the game of politics, to turn every issue into a running tally of who's up and who's down. I've heard that one Republican strategist told his party that, even though they may want to compromise, it's better politics to go for the kill, another Republican senator, that defeating health reform is about breaking me.

'So let me be clear: This isn't about me. I have great health insurance, and so does every member of Congress. This debate is about the letters I read when I sit in the Oval Office every day and the stories I hear at town hall meetings. This is about the woman in Colorado who paid $700 a month to her insurance company only to find out that they wouldn't pay a dime for her cancer treatment, who had to use up her retirement funds to save her own life.'

--'This debate is not a game for these Americans, and they can't afford to wait any longer for reform. They're counting on us to get this done. They're looking to us for leadership. And we can't let them down. We will pass reform that lowers cost, promotes choice and provides coverage that every American can count on, and we will do it this year.'

--'I'm rushed because I get letters every day from families that are being clobbered by health care costs. And they ask me, Can you help? So I've got a middle-aged couple that will write me and they say, 'Our daughter just found out she's got leukemia and, if I don't do something soon, we just either are going to go bankrupt or we're not going to be able to provide our daughter with the care that she needs.' And in a country like ours, that's not right.'

--'[I]f you don't set deadlines in this town, things don't happen. The default position is inertia, because doing something always creates some people who are unhappy. There's always going to be some interest out there that decides; you know what, the status quo is working for me a little bit better.'

--[T]he fact that we have made so much progress, where we've got doctors, nurses, hospitals, even the pharmaceutical industry, AARP saying that this makes sense to do, I think, means that the stars are aligned and we need to take advantage of that. Now, I do think it's important to get this right. And if, at the end of the day, I do not yet see that we have it right, then I'm not going to sign a bill that, for example, adds to our deficit. I won't sign a bill that doesn't reduce health care inflation so that families as well as government are saving money. I'm not going to sign a bill that I don't think will work.'

--'[T]o raise a broader issue that I think has colored how we look at health care reform, let me just talk about deficit and debt, because part of what's been happening in this debate is the American people are understandably queasy about the huge deficits and debt that we're facing right now.'