President-Elect Obama Announces Former Sen. Tom Daschle to HHS

I'd now like to turn to the topic of today's press conference. Over the past few weeks, Vice President Biden and I have announced key members of our economic team who are working as we speak to craft a recovery program that will save and create millions of jobs and grow our struggling economy.

OBAMA: Today I'm pleased to announce two leading members of my health care team whose work will be critical to those efforts. Senator Tom Daschle and Dr. Jeanne Lambrew.

I've asked Tom to serve not just as my secretary of health and human services but also as my director of White House -- of my White House office of health reform. As such, he will be responsible not just for implementing our health care plan, he will also be the lead architect of that plan.

Jeanne will serve as deputy director of this office working closing with Tom on these efforts.

It's hard to overstate the urgency of this work. Over the past eight years, premiums have nearly doubled and more families are facing more medical debt than ever before. Forty-five million fellow citizens have no health insurance at all. And day after day, we witness the disgrace of parents unable to take a sick child to the doctor, seniors unable to afford their medicines, people who wind up in emergency rooms because they have nowhere else to turn.

Year after year, our leaders offer up detailed health care plans with great fanfare and promise only to see them fail, derailed by Washington politics and influence peddling.