The president’s message to young people, he said, is to “remember and remind your friends and your peers — imagine what happens if you get sick, what happens with the massive bills.”
It’s not clear whether the president had health coverage as a young man. He made no mention of it in his memoir Dreams From My Father, which covered his college years, his brief stint in business after graduation, his decision at 24 to become a community organizer, and his decision at 27 to attend Harvard Law School. The question is also absent from David Maraniss’s biography of Obama, which covers his life through the community organizing years.
Obama did discuss health insurance and health care in several places in his campaign tract The Audacity of Hope, including one personal episode from 2001 in which he and wife Michelle feared that their younger daughter Sasha, then just three months old, might have had meningitis. They took her to an emergency room for evaluation, where it turned out she did not have the potentially fatal disease. “Unlike millions of Americans who’ve gone through a similar ordeal, I had a job and insurance at the time,” Obama wrote. At that point, Obama was 40 years old and established in his career.
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