President Barack Obama meets with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, left, in the Oval Office, Wednesday, July 22, 2009.

President Barack Obama on Wednesday, told a primetime news conference that ordinary Americans are skeptical of his plan to overhaul the nation’s health care system. He endorsed a surtax on families earning $1 million a year.

"To me, that meets my principle,"that the cost of overhauling health care is "not being shouldered by families who are already having a tough time," he said in the East Room of the White House.

"This is not just about the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance.  Reform is about every American who has ever feared that they may lose their coverage if they become too sick, or lose their job, or change their job,"the President said. "It’s about every small business that has been forced to lay off employees or cut back on their coverage because it became too expensive.  And it’s about the fact that the biggest driving force behind our federal deficit is the skyrocketing cost of Medicare and Medicaid."

Obama pushed the case for giving independent experts greater power over Medicare (the publicly funded scheme for the elderly) cost-cutting, to win the support of conservative House Democrats worried that the health legislation doesn't do enough to control health-care spending. However, other Democrats on Capitol Hill who expressed opposition to the idea earlier Wednesday.

The proposal is strongly resisted by the lobbyists who have influence through campaign contributions.

The New York Times' David Leonhardt  wrote on Wednesday: "The United States now devotes one-sixth of its economy to medicine. Divvy that up, and health care will cost the typical household roughly $15,000 this year, including the often-invisible contributions by employers. That is almost twice as much as two decades ago (adjusting for inflation). It’s about $6,500 more than in other rich countries, on average.

We may not be aware of this stealth $6,500 health care tax, but if you take a moment to think, it makes sense. Over the last 20 years, health costs have soared, and incomes have grown painfully slowly. The two trends are directly connected: employers had to spend more money on benefits, leaving less for raises.

In exchange for the $6,500 tax, we receive many things. We get cutting-edge research and heroic surgeries. But we also get fabulous amounts of waste — bureaucratic and medical.

One thing we don’t get is better health than other rich countries, whether it’s Canada, France, Japan or many others. In some categories, like emergency room care, this country seems to do better. In others, like chronic-disease care, it seems to do worse. “The fact that we spend all this money and don’t have better outcomes than other countries is a sign of how poorly we’re doing,” says Dr. Alan Garber of Stanford University.“We should be doing way better.”"

The US Council on Foreign Relations says researchers at Johns Hopkins Medical School estimate the United States spends 44 percent more per capita than Switzerland, the country with the second highest expenditures, and 134 percent more than the median for member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The United States spent 16 percent of its GDP in 2007 on health care, higher than any other developed nation. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that number will rise to 25 percent by 2025 without changes to federal law.

Employer-funded coverage is the structural mainstay of the US health insurance system. According the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 71 percent of private employees in the United States had access to employer-sponsored health plans in 2006. A November 2008 Kaiser Foundation report notes that access to employer-sponsored health insurance has been on the decline among low-income workers, and health premiums for workers have risen 114 percent in the last decade. Small businesses are less likely than large employers to be able to provide health insurance as a benefit. At 12 percent, health care is the most expensive benefit paid by US employers, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Some 27% of Americans are obese. The national Medicare program that kicks in at the age of 65 today is benefiting 44 million.

By 2030 that figure will rise to 79 million and the system will be bankrupt.

Professor Peter Morici of the University of Maryland, commented on Wednesday: "On health care and other critical issues, President Obama continues to purposefully confuse the debate. He presents choices as either his way or the failed ways of the past—no other solutions are possible. That is silly.

He frames pending votes in Congress on health care as a choice between his program and the status quo and catastrophe. To listen to Mr. Obama’s rhetoric, no other solutions are possible if the Congress denies him his program now. That is folly.

Liberals do not have a monopoly on wisdom, the moral high ground or workable solutions; however, more pragmatic and less ideological views are not given much voice or hearing in the Obama Administration.

Many of the economic issues the President wants to address require radical changes from past policies but his solutions are too anchored in dreamy academic theories and liberal ideology, as opposed to realistic assessments of what is broke, the obstacles to progress, and a clear and honest acknowledgement of the powerful interests that would have to be upset. Consider for example, tort reform and health care costs.

President Obama appears not to accept the most basic truth of statecraft—we must address the world as they find it, not as we think it should be.

In defense of the President, he is badly advised and his allies in the House appear too anchored in a 1970s liberal thinking. To both groups, all too much of what is wrong can be fixed with more money harvested by taxing the richest five, or three or one percent. No one else need sacrifice much.

If Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner are the second coming of the best and the brightest, then America’s universities have been dumbed down much more that their critics claim.

If President Obama continues to rely on solutions crafted by Nancy Pelosi’s allies in the House, either Americans, with their centrist inclinations, will deliver Mr. Obama a stunning string of defeats, or they will suffer buyers’ remorse in an economy that grows too slowly and is saddled with double digit unemployment.

The President fails, and we all fail with him."