TipsFocus.com

President-elect Barack Obama has promised broad changes to U.S. health care, pledging to bring health insurance to millions of Americans and to spend $50 billion to take American health records electronic, and he will struggle to find the money to do it.

Polls show more than 80 percent of Americans want health care reform. But even with a Democratic-controlled Congress, Obama, who won a solid victory in Tuesday’s U.S. election and takes power in January, has hard work ahead of him, health experts agree.

If jobs are the next thing to go in the current economic crisis, as many economists are predicting, the number of American’s without health insurance will quickly increase beyond projections.

The statistics bear this out:

45 million Americans have no health insurance.
25 million more have health plans but are considered underinsured because their policies offer only minimal coverage, according to the Commonwealth Fund.
42% of U.S. adults under age 65 are uninsured or underinsured, up from 33% in 2003.
Total spending on health care represented around 16% of the gross domestic product in 2007, and the Congressional Budget Office says spending will rise to a quarter of gross domestic product by 2025.

Obama wants to create a National Health Insurance Exchange to help individuals and small businesses buy private insurance.

He promised to require health care for all children, and expand Medicaid, the government-run health program for the poor, and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program or SCHIP.

Obama has said he would pay for his plan by rolling back President Bush’s tax cuts on people making more than $250,000 a year and keeping the estate tax at 2009 levels, but he has not been more specific. He has not provided a timetable for seeking his proposed reforms and has not said if he would present a comprehensive health care reform package or try for incremental change.