At a press conference in Chicago this morning, President-elect Barack Obama announced that former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD) will run the Department of Health and Human Services in his administration. Ezra Klein noted last month that the appointment of Daschle was a sign that Obama was very serious about health care reform. "You don't tap the former Senate Majority Leader to run your health care bureaucracy. That's not his skill set," Klein wrote. "You tap him to get your health care plan through Congress." 

Obama's language today -- he repeatedly referred to the need to address the issue "this year" and in "this administration" -- undergirds that point. So does the transition team's use of the internet.

A week after Obama was elected president, we highlighted a Washington Post story about the comprehensive and valuable internet fundraising database the Democratic nominee developed over the course of his historic run. The Post hinted that an Obama administration probably wasn't going to just sit on the list of ten million. Instead, he’d reach out interactively, summoning supporters “to push reluctant members of Congress to support legislation, to offer feedback on initiatives and to enlist in administration-supported causes in local communities.”

Two months before his inauguration, Obama has already chosen his first battle. You guessed it: comprehensive health care reform. The Post has more:

Barack Obama’s incoming administration has begun to draw on the high-tech organizational tools that helped get him elected to lay the groundwork for an attempt to restructure the U.S. health-care system.

Former senator Thomas A. Daschle, Obama’s point person on health care, launched an effort to create political momentum yesterday in a conference call with 1,000 invited supporters culled from 10,000 who had expressed interest in health issues, promising it would be the first of many opportunities for Americans to weigh in.

The health-care mobilization taking shape before Obama even takes office will include online videos, blogs and e-mail alerts as well as traditional public forums. Already, several thousand people have posted comments on health on the Obama transition Web site.

This is a pretty exciting development. It’s also an issue ideally suited for this type of outreach. Not only are a growing number of Americans losing coverage or paying exorbitant prices for health insurance, the failed system is draining the nation’s economy. Take the “State of State Health” study released in November by the New America Foundation. The cost for each uninsured Illinois resident is a staggering $4,728. And the state economy alone could lose $8.04 billion in value because of the poor health and shorter lifespan of the uninsured. With some targeted agitation from committed citizens and Obama volunteers, legislators will have a hard time ignoring the worsening crisis.