Why would we have to worry about people's quote of children here? Families are smaller now then previous generation's.

By CHARLES BABINGTON, Associated Press Writer Charles Babington, Associated Press Writer – 13 mins ago

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Calling health insurance reform a "defining struggle of this generation," President Barack Obama told thousands of college students Thursday that Congress must resist scare tactics and false accusations to do a makeover.

The fight will be difficult, Obama said, but an "unprecedented coalition" of hospitals, doctors, nurses and drug makers support the effort. Some of the most enthusiastic backers, he told loudly cheering students at the University of Maryland, "are the very medical professionals who have firsthand knowledge" of how badly the current system operates.

"When I sign this bill, it will be against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage when you get sick," the president said.

Obama again called for a public insurance option, which most congressional Republicans, and some Democrats, oppose. It would not amount to "a government takeover of health care," he said. Obama stopped short of insisting on such a plan.

Eliminating "waste and abuse" in the Medicare and Medicaid programs will help the government find money to cover most of the Americans now without insurance, he said.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., has introduced a bill that would rein in spiraling medical costs and require nearly everyone to carry health insurance. A vote in his committee could occur as early as next week, but many hurdles remain in both the House and Senate.

Scrap the bill and start over.

I just wrote the whitehouse about it, now that I have the basics on the damn thing.

For the price tag we are not getting very much change. And the public option needs to be at least a back up plan in the bill in case the other options tried do not work.

A lot of people pushing the public option just are not going to be satisfied until the insurance companies lose enough money like the banks that they need a bailout. What they really want and intend to achieve eventually is a single payer system run by the government.

Last year it was the oil companies that these same people hated, now it's the health insurance companies.

That doesn't mean reform is not needed badly. The debate over the public option had KILLED any real achievable reform. The whole debate has been centered around the public option and not what we can do to reform healthcare and how to get people covered and reduce costs.