I just call him "Sir"

Average annual premiums for family coverage rose 4 percent and individual premiums rose an average of 3 percent in 2012, increasing faster than employee wages and overall inflation for the 13th straight year, according to a nationwide survey of businesses released Tuesday from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust.

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[W]hen the health care wars were heating up in August of 2009, and centrist Dems were dragging their feet, Rahm mounted an aggressive push to get Obama to shelve ambitious reform.

"For the better part of a week in August Rahm made the case aggressively," the book says.

Rahm urged the president instead to pursue a sharply reduced plan that would have insured more than 10 million Americans because it could get bipartisan support. Rahm's idea was to expand on previous Congressional plans to expand coverage for children, and boost the number of single mothers eligible for Medicaid -- hence "the Titanic plan."

But the book paints Obama as resolute about moving forward, contradicting impressions at the time that Obama hadn't exercised enough leadership on the issue. "I feel lucky," he told advisers at the time, according to the book. "I think we can get it done."

At a subsequent meeting in the Oval Office on September 1st, the book reports, Robert Gibbs cracked a joke about bad poll numbers on health care.

"This is about whether we're going to get big things done," Obama said. "I wasn't sent here to do school uniforms."

Rahm then asked Obama if he still felt lucky

"My name is Barack Hussein Obama and I'm sitting here," Obama answered. "So yeah, I'm feeling pretty lucky."

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