Obama names Daschle as health secretary

"It is a great honor to be nominated to work on an issue that is so close to my heart," Daschle said, adding that fixing health-care is the "largest domestic policy challenge."

"Growing health care costs are unsustainable and the plight of the uninsured is unconscionable," he said.

Daschle believed that reforming health-care and containing costs will help the economy.

The Department of Health and Human Services can "play a strong role" in tackling the challenge, he said.

The goal of the reform will be to make health care "as affordable and as available as it is innovative," said Daschle.

In the book "Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis," he pushed for universal health care coverage to reach 46 million uninsured Americans by expanding the federal employee health benefits program to include private employer plans together with Medicaid and Medicare.

Most Republicans oppose any such plan, saying it would give too much power to the government. They've also questioned Daschle's recent work for a Washington lobbying firm.

Even before his nomination, Daschle has been helping Obama to lay down the groundwork for health care reform.

His Internet site www.change.gov asks people to submit ideas for changing the costly and inefficient health care system that leaves tens of millions uninsured.

During the presidential campaign, Obama pledged to bring health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans and spend about 50 billion U.S. dollars to make U.S. health records electronic.

Surveys showed that U.S. voters took health care reform as their third biggest concern after the economy and the Iraq war.

The United States now spends more on health care than any other developed nation, yet it still has some 47 million people without health insurance.

U.S. health care costs now account for about 16 percent of the country's gross domestic product, or 2.3 trillion dollars, a proportion projected to grow to 20 percent or 4 trillion dollars by 2015.

Editor:Zhang Pengfei