New memoir reveals long battle with health reform

“Each time I met a parent struggling to come up with the money to get treatment for a sick child, I thought back to the night Michelle and I had to take three-month-old Sasha to the emergency room for what turned out to be viral meningitis,” former President Barack Obama recalled in an excerpt from “A Promised Land,” the forthcoming first volume of his memoirs of his time in the White House. The excerpt was published on October 26 in the New Yorker.

“I remembered the terror and the helplessness we felt as the nurses whisked her away for a spinal tap, and the realization that we might never have caught the infection in time had the girls not had a regular pediatrician we felt comfortable calling in the middle of the night,” he continued. “Most of all, I thought about my mom, who had died in 1995, of uterine cancer.”