Political Quotes

“Thank you very much, Representative Tonko. Thank you for bringing this issue alive this evening and for giving us this time to discuss this. Many, many thoughts went through my mind today as this vote and the debate went along. As it was debated by our Republican colleagues, I just couldn't understand where they were coming from. What would motivate them to want to destroy Medicare? And Medicaid? Why would they do that? The thoughts just reeled through my mind, and I'm going, I guess maybe they had had a different experience than I did. I was a young boy in the 1950s, and there was no Medicare, and there was no Medicaid. My father was a rancher. We grew up in a ranching area up in the foothills of California, in the Mother Lode Gold Country. He took me one day to the county hospital. It was one of the most horrible moments I can remember as a child, because the wards, there was just a ward, maybe 20 or 30 very elderly men, and then on the other side elderly women, who were dying. Their medical care wasn't available to them. Sometime later, maybe another month after that, we were out chasing cattle that had gotten loose--I was just a young man--and one of our neighbors, we came upon the neighbor and asked where the cattle might be, and he said they were down that way. He had this huge growth on his mouth, and my dad asked about that, and he said, it's cancer. He had no insurance. He had no care. He was probably 70, 75, 80 years old. He died shortly thereafter.…”