America spent $2.5 trillion on health care in 2008. That amount will increase by an average of $170 billion a year for the next ten years without health care insurance reform. Universal coverage would cost $150 billion a year more if we adopted it tomorrow, assuming the currently uninsured did not pay a dime toward their new insurance. Ten years from now, without health care insurance reform, you will pay $25,000 a year for your insurance, one way or another. If you can get it.
If Obama can’t sell hope on this issue, maybe he should try selling fear. As the faux-vampire character used to say on Second City TV "You know what’s scary, kids? Bankruptcy’s scary". Paint the future with reform and compare it, back-to-the-future wise and paycheck wise, without it.
Everybody relates to money. Today the average family pays $4,000 out of pocket for health care insurance, and that will increase to $8,000 per year without reform. Health insurance operates on cost-plus-based pricing. The insurance companies add 16% or so to what they pay medical service providers and this pricing system is provably, fundamentally incapable of holding down costs without reform. Worse, of course, perverse incentives are built into the system to cherry pick customers, find pre-existing conditions and find other reasons to refuse to pay for expensive care.
Reform can cure all these ills through public-option competition and regulation: no health insurance policy can be sold anywhere in the United States unless it is portable between employers, permanent, affordable (cost capped), accessible to any applicant, with minimum uniform benefits and priced without regard to the health of the applicant.
Compare this to the "trillion-dollar-reform debacle" that the right conjures up. $1.5 trillion increase in heath care spending if we adopt the worst-case health care insurance reform (no money from the uninsured and no cost savings) but near-universal coverage, and permanent affordable coverage. $1.7 trillion increase in health care spending, if we do nothing, along with 50 million uninsured, and your insurance subject to cancellation or denied coverage. Why isn’t that an easy sell?