Raleigh, N.C. -- Once again, President Barack Obama is taking his show on the road. As legislators on Capitol Hill grapple with how to come up with a health-care reform bill that will please all sides, Obama is taking his arguments in favor of a major and expensive overhaul of the health-care system directly to the voters.

People are worried and want answers. Reports indicate that every 30 seconds, someone files for bankruptcy resulting from health problems. Even worse, some 20,000 people die each year because they did not have health insurance; of those, 13,000 would otherwise have lived for decades. Last week in a town-hall meeting at Broughton High School in Raleigh, Obama warned the American people of the dangers of doing nothing.

I sat down with the president for an exclusive interview shortly after the event, and we began by talking about the most controversial aspect of the proposed health-care overhaul. I asked him who would pay for it, if not the taxpayer. “It would cost a trillion dollars over 10 years, but that's a hundred billion dollars a year, and about two-thirds of those costs we could actually take out of money that's currently being spent in the system -- it's just not being spent wisely. It is going to insurance companies and drug companies. We can take that money, help people, and overall the majority of this can pay for itself over a 10-year period,” he said.

The president recognizes that Latinos, by far, are the group most likely to not have health insurance. In fact, of the 45 million Americans without health insurance, more than one-third are Latinos, a disproportionate amount when you consider that we make up 17 percent of the population. Among children without insurance, 40 percent are Latino. On the other hand, health-care costs attributed to Hispanics are disproportionately lower than other groups, and more than half of uninsured Latinos pay out of pocket for their health-care expenses.

The National Council of La Raza believes there cannot be true health-care reform that does not include undocumented immigrants, legal residents and immigrant children. I asked the president how this issue is addressed in his proposal. “One of the achievements that I am most proud of in the first six months is not only expanding the children's health- 
insurance bill, but also making sure that legal immigrant children were able to access that. That meant that there were millions of children who otherwise wouldn't be qualified who are now getting health insurance,” he told me.

“When it comes to legal residents, we want to find ways that they can access the preventive services and the wellness services, getting regular treatments,” the president said; however, undocumented immigrants would not qualify for any health benefits. “Undocumented workers who are here illegally, we want to create comprehensive immigration reform so they can get on a pathway to citizenship, but until they do, we can't be rewarding them with some of the benefits that, frankly, cost significant money, and there'd be a lot of resistance when people who are U.S. citizens and legal residents aren't getting these services, to also provide them to undocumented workers.”

It is understandable that it would be politically risky to include undocumented immigrants in any health-care reform program. We have seen, in the past few years, the type of divisive debates that surround the issue of undocumented workers. However, if one of the main goals is to drive down the high cost of health care by providing better preventive medical services, then not including them will be counterproductive. Half of uninsured Latinos are undocumented immigrants; if they get sick and can't be treated, they end up in emergency rooms that cannot deny them service, and that is much more expensive than a doctor's visit. It's another case of politics prevailing over common sense.

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(Maria Elena Salinas is the author of “I AM MY FATHER'S DAUGHTER: LIVING A LIFE WITHOUT SECRETS.” Reach her at www .mariaesalinas.com)

© 2009 by Maria Elena Salinas

Distributed by King Features Syndicate