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President Obama is focusing all of his efforts on health care reform these days with nearly daily remarks to the press and the public. Today he will hold a press-conference on the subject followed by a townhall meeting in Cleveland, Ohio tomorrow. But the President is losing the support of members of his own party. A Washington Post article yesterday exposed the unfair access that top health insurance executives and lobbyists have of certain members of Congress including several Democrats like the centrist Montana Senator Max Baucus, a leading figure in the health care reform debate. Meanwhile Republicans have joined the insurance industry in wooing conservative Democrats to derail party unity on the issue, saying that the reform efforts need to slow down, and that the President was conducting a dangerous experiment. A major new GOP strategy seems to be to link the on-going recession to the failure of the President economic stimulus package and in turn use that to try to discredit health care reform efforts. But proponents of health care reform, particularly the single-payer variety are cautiously celebrating one small victory: an amendment to a leading version of a health care reform bill just survived a vote by the House Education and Labor Committee, which would make it easier for individual states to enact single-payer health care if they want.

GUEST: Alan Segar, a professor of health policy and management at Boston University