Political Quotes

“Thank you very much, Congresswoman. As you recall, you and I have had a long, long history of dealing with health care issues. In the late 1970s, I was chairman of the California State senate health committee, and when I left that post, you took it over. And over those many, many years that you and I worked on health care, we are now approaching the final moment in which this Nation will take up an extraordinarily important task, and that is moving towards providing health insurance and health care for all of the citizens in this country. It's going to be a very, very busy week next week. Over the last hour or so, I've heard from our esteemed colleagues on the Republican side talk about a rush to judgment. It was not a rush to judgment if you consider the 30 years that you and I have been spending, trying to provide health care services for all the people in California, and now we have this opportunity to deal with this issue here for the entire Nation. It certainly wasn't a work to rush to judgment in the early part of the 20th century when, in California and across the Nation, men and women were being injured on the job, and to deal with that, the Workers' Compensation programs were created. Even Teddy Roosevelt back in those periods said that we needed to have a health care system for all. It didn't happen then. During the World War II period and before it, the Blue Cross-Blue Shield programs were developed by the medical community to provide services.…”