Quick quiz: when was the last time you heard President Obama trying to sell health reform?

It hasn't come up at a presidential event since he visited upstate New York more than a week ago, followed by some discussion on the David Letterman "Late Show" couch. Since then he, has been preoccupied with international affairs, at the United Nations, the G-20 Summit, and behind the scenes talks about Afghanistan.

Today the president visited the National Institutes of Health for an event that focused on money the facility will receive through the long-ago passed Recovery Act. He touted the job-creating potential of those funds for "conducting research in manufacturing and supplying medical equipment and building and modernizing laboratories and research facilities all across America." And yes, health reform did come up.

"Decades of research make no difference to the family that is dropped from an insurance policy when a child gets sick, and breakthroughs with the potential to save lives don't matter when your insurance doesn't cover a preexisting condition," he said. "As costs rise and rise, that leaves less and less for the kinds of investments in health care and in basic research that will actually improve our well- being. That's why we're working so hard to pass long-overdue reform."

Left unmentioned were yesterday's failed votes on the public option. The White House released just this statement. Obama did resist today the idea that reform would lead "to a takeover by the government of the health care sector."