John Garamendi: “Tomorrow is an extremely important day here in Washington, D.C., and across the Nation. Tomorrow's a day in which the…”

“Tomorrow is an extremely important day here in Washington, D.C., and across the Nation. Tomorrow's a day in which the President will hold a summit on health care. The outcome of that meeting is of extraordinary importance to individuals, to families, and to millions upon millions of Americans, indeed, the entire Nation. A successful outcome would be one in which we have bipartisan consensus on the critical issues of health care, on how we're going to provide coverage for all Americans, how we deal with the pernicious and all too common insurance company practice of terminating policies when a person becomes ill or denying coverage because of some preexisting condition. Tomorrow's summit is extraordinarily important in that the outcome of that summit may very well give us insight into how we control the extraordinary increase of cost in health care, a cost that is not sustainable either for individuals or for this economy. We're currently spending somewhere in the range of 17 percent of our current GDP on health care. Compared to the rest of the industrialized nations, that's nearly 60 to 70 percent more than they spend of their wealth. Most every other industrialized nation spends 10 percent or less. We're giving away an extraordinary advantage to our competitors. Now, if our health care system actually produced extraordinary outcomes for all the population, we might say it was worth it, but the fact of the matter is that our health care system does not.”