Former US president Barack Obama has shared a letter that he sent to Nevada senator and Democrat leader Harry Reid in his final weeks. His wife Landra Reid had asked some people to write to the senator while he was battling cancer.

       Mr Obama wrote in an Instagram post on Tuesday that he was sharing the letter he wrote to Reid in lieu of a formal statement.

       “As different as we are, I think we both saw something of ourselves in each other — a couple of outsiders who had defied the odds and knew how to take a punch and cared about the little guy. And you know what, we made for a pretty good team,” Obama said in his letter to Reid.

       Reid, who died at his home in Henderson, Nevada, on Tuesday at the age of 82 had helped shepherd Obama’s landmark health care law through Congress. The Democratic Senate leader had battled pancreatic cancer and left the Senate in 2016 after suffering an injury that left him without much of his sight in one eye.

       He was an early supporter of Obama’s successful 2008 bid for the presidency. He had said earlier when Obama was in power that he supported Obamacare because he had spent his childhood without health or dental care in Searchlight, Nevada.

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       Reid also said that he worked at a service station when he was in high school and used his wages to buy his mother new teeth. Due to the lack of a hospital nearby, Reid and his brother were also born at home. And the late senator added that it wasn’t until he was 14 that he went to a dentist.

       During his 2016 farewell speech to the Senate, he had said: “Health care. The Affordable Care Act. I have talked about that a little bit. It would have been wonderful if we had something like that around to help my family when we were growing up.”

       Meanwhile, Mr Obama’s letter to Reid — that the former president shared on his social media page — had many admirers.

       The letter read:

       “Harry,

       I got the news that the health situation has taken a rough turn, and that it’s hard to talk on the phone. Which, let’s face it, is not that big of a change cause you never liked to talk on the phone anyway!

       Here’s what I want you to know. You were a great leader in the Senate, and early on you were more generous to me than I had any right to expect. I wouldn’t have been president had it not been for your encouragement and support, and I wouldn’t have got most of what I got done without your skill and determination.

       Most of all, you’ve been a good friend. As different as we are, I think we both saw something of ourselves in each other - a couple of outsiders who had defied the odds and knew how to take a punch and cared about the little guy. And you know what, we made for a pretty good team.

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       Enjoy your family, and know you are loved by a lot of people, including me. The world is better cause of what you’ve done. Not bad for a skinny, poor kid from Searchlight.

       Barack”