Progressive States Network Applauds Daschle Nomination (VIDEO)

Health and Human Services Nominee Daschle's 2008 remarks forecast crucial role for federal-state collaboration in health care reform effort.

Tom Daschle Courtesy minnesota.publicradio.org

(NEW YORK) - The Progressive States Network applauded Wednesday's announcement that Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle will be nominated as the Secretary of Health and Human Services in President-Elect Barack Obama's future cabinet.

The group says that as a luminary voice on the urgent issue of health care reform, "Daschle understands far more than most the key role progressive state leaders have played over the past decade in keeping the struggle for reform alive in the face of stiff opposition from entrenched conservative leadership in Washington D.C."

As Daschle said at Progressive States Network's Annual Gala this June, "Without the progressive movement in the states, the movement for health care in this country for all intents and purposes would be dead."

As early as June, Mr. Daschle also had the foresight to realize that collaboration between progressives at the federal and state level would be crucial to enacting reform, saying, "The next president of the United States is going to turn to the Progressive States Network and to states' leadership to find the kind of cutting edge agenda that we're going to need in this country to turn it around."

PSN says they are pleased that President-Elect Obama has tapped the expertise of a leader with such a nuanced understanding of the need for all levels of government to collaborate on the challenge of bringing affordable quality health care to all Americans and we look forward to facilitating that collaboration with the same kind of proactive vigor and timely vision that Mr. Daschle and our allies in statehouses across the country have shown over the difficult preceding years.

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Source: Progressive States Network