Green Bay hosts Obama leading up to convention

President Barack Obama rolled out his public campaign to reform health care at Southwest High School in Green Bay Thursday, explaining that although the plan would cost the government billions, "doing nothing will cost us far more in the coming years."

Obama, in Wisconsin for the first time since taking office, addressed a crowd of about 1,500 in the school gymnasium about his plan for a Health Insurance Exchange -- a "one-stop shop" for consumers to compare public and private health care plans and select their plan of choice.

Obama assured the audience that Americans would be able to keep their preferred doctors and insurance plans and said any reform plan must maintain the successes of places such as Green Bay, which pays comparatively less for health care than most national markets.

"But in order to preserve what's best about our health care system, we have to fix what doesn't work," Obama said. "For we have reached a point where doing nothing about the cost of health care is no longer an option. The status quo is unsustainable."

See complete WisPolitics coverage of Obama's visit here.

-- By Andy Szal