Q Thank you, Mr. President. You've been pushing Congress to pass health care reform by August. Why the rush? Are you worried that if you don't -- there's a delay until the fall, the whole effort will collapse?

THE PRESIDENT: A couple of points. Number one, I'm rushed because I get letters every day from families that are being clobbered by health care costs. And they ask me, can you help? So I've got a middle-aged couple that will write me and they say, our daughter just found out she's got leukemia and if I don't do something soon we just either are going to go bankrupt or we're not going to be able to provide our daughter with the care that she needs. And in a country like ours, that's not right. So that's part of my rush.

The second thing is the fact that if you don't set deadlines in this town; things don't happen. THE DEFAULT POSITION IS INERTIA. Because doing something always creates some people who are unhappy. There's always going to be some interest out there that decides; you know what, the status quo is working for me a little bit better. And the fact that we have made so much progress where we've got doctors, nurses, hospitals, even the pharmaceutical industry, AARP, saying that this makes sense to do, I think means that the stars are aligned and we need to take advantage of that.