Monday, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Barack Obama’s nominee as health and human services secretary and director of a new White House office on health reform, was present for a meeting at the Dublin Fire Department, 50 miles east of Indianapolis, to hear the locals’ problems concerning health care.

At the gathering, a woman described to Daschle the trouble she had gone through in order to get health insurance, since she had suffered from three cancers, while another woman told him that she had had to give up taking a $35,000-a-year cancer medication because she could not afford it.

Moreover, a doctor revealed to Daschle that he was compelled to prescribe treatment for a patient based on what the latter’s insurance covered for, leaving aside what he actually deemed perfectly fit for the person’s condition.

The meeting in Dublin, Ind was one of the many that president-elect Barack Obama’s transition team have attended across the nation within this month, in an attempt to gather information from people so as to be able to reform the United States health care system in a way that would benefit all-if possible-citizens.

During one of these meetings that took place in Cambridge City, a woman said that her son had been born with a heart condition that had required until then several surgeries and other kinds of treatment, for which her health plan at the Visteon auto parts plant in Connersville had paid. Still, with the plant having been shut down and her working as a substitute teacher, the woman said she feared that her son would not be granted health insurance when he would get a job because of his condition.