Typically, the invited guests at the joint session of Congress help the president highlight a new initiative or show how administration policy is working.

Here are the biographies furnished by The White House:

1. Peter Hudson of Evergreen, CO:  Co-Founder and CEO, iTriage Hudson is a physician and entrepreneur with more than 15 years of experience founding and growing healthcare-related businesses. Using open government data, he launched iTriage in 2009 to help consumers engage in their own healthcare. Through an app, smartphone users can locate nearby providers based on their symptoms, make appointments, store their personal health records, save medication refill reminders, and learn about thousands of medications, diseases and procedures.
2. Gov. John Kitzhaber, D-Oregon: A former emergency room doctor, Kitzhaber has made major changes to Oregon’s Medicaid program. Now in his third term, he is working with the Obama administration to scale up innovative models that improve health outcomes and achieve greater efficiency.
3. Menchu Sanchez, Registered Nurse, NYU Langone Medical Center: When Hurricane Sandy cut the power at NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan, Sanchez devised a plan to transport 20 at-risk infants to intensive care units around the city.  She organized the nurses and doctors to carry the babies down eight flights of stairs with only cell phones to light the way.  Menchu was born, raised, and educated in the Philippines and she immigrated to the United States in the 1980s.  She has worked as a nurse in New York for more than 25 years and has been at NYU since 2010.
4. Abby Schanfield  of Minneapolis, MN: Prior to passage of the Affordable Care Act, Abby would have lost coverage upon turning 21 and would  have been unable to obtain insurance due to several pre-existing conditions.  She was born with toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that her mother unwittingly passed on during pregnancy and which set the stage for lifelong medical problems. Abby is a member of TakeAction Minnesota’s health care team, a grassroots organization that advocates for progressive policies ranging from health care to economic reform.
5. Haile Thomas of Tucson, AZ  Youth Advocate: Haile Thomas is a 12 year-old co-founder/director of the HAPPY Organization, an Arizona nonprofit dedicated to improving the health and wellness of youth through education, outreach, and advocacy about proper nutrition and healthy lifestyle choices. She hosts an annual H.E.A.L. (healthy eating, active lifestyle) Festival on Global Youth Service Day in Tucson. She created the Healthy Girl Adventures Club to inspire girls to embrace healthy habits, and produces online cooking videos aimed at kids.

From Kaiser Health News: In his State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama made just one explicit mention of the 2010 health law. Here is a transcript of the few parts of his speech that mentioned health care issues:

Innovation also demands basic research. Today, the discoveries taking place in our federally-financed labs and universities could lead to new treatments that kill cancer cells but leave healthy ones untouched. …

I will not go back to the days when health insurance companies had unchecked power to cancel your policy, deny your coverage, or charge women differently than men. …

Do we want to keep these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans? Or do we want to keep our investments in everything else – like education and medical research; a strong military and care for our veterans? Because if we’re serious about paying down our debt, we can’t do both. 

The American people know what the right choice is. So do I. As I told the Speaker this summer, I’m prepared to make more reforms that rein in the long term costs of Medicare and Medicaid, and strengthen Social Security, so long as those programs remain a guarantee of security for seniors. …

I recognize that people watching tonight have differing views about taxes and debt; energy and health care. But no matter what party they belong to, I bet most Americans are thinking the same thing right about now: Nothing will get done this year, or next year, or maybe even the year after that, because Washington is broken. …

I’m a Democrat. But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more. That’s … That’s why we’re getting rid of regulations that don’t work. That’s why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a government program. …

Above all, our freedom endures because of the men and women in uniform who defend it. As they come home, we must serve them as well as they served us. That includes giving them the care and benefits they have earned – which is why we’ve increased annual VA spending every year I’ve been president.

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Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels delivered the Republican response. Here are excerpts of his remarks:

[We] must unite to save the safety net. Medicare and Social Security have served us well, and that must continue. But after half and three quarters of a century respectively, it’s not surprising that they need some repairs. We can preserve them unchanged and untouched for those now in or near retirement, but we must fashion a new, affordable safety net so future Americans are protected, too.

Decades ago, for instance, we could afford to send millionaires pension checks and pay medical bills for even the wealthiest among us. Now, we can’t, so the dollars we have should be devoted to those who need them most.

The mortal enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who, in contempt of the plain arithmetic, continue to mislead Americans that we should change nothing. Listening to them much longer will mean that these proud programs implode, and take the American economy with them. …

It’s not fair and it’s not true for the President to attack Republicans in Congress as obstacles on these questions. They and they alone have passed bills to reduce borrowing, reform entitlements, and encourage new job creation, only to be shot down time and time again by the President and his Democratic Senate allies.

This year, it falls to Republicans to level with our fellow citizens about this reality: if we fail to act to grow the private sector and save the safety net, nothing else will matter much. …

In word and deed, the President and his allies tell us that we just cannot handle ourselves in this complex, perilous world without their benevolent protection. Left to ourselves, we might pick the wrong health insurance, the wrong mortgage, the wrong school for our kids; why, unless they stop us, we might pick the wrong light bulb!

This post has been updated with this additional coverage:

Read More– Kaiser Health News analysis of the President’s limited discussion of health care in the State of the Union address.