Pete Stark: “I was raised so poor that I never slept alone until I was married. I want to go on and suggest that I am not going to…”

“I was raised so poor that I never slept alone until I was married. I want to go on and suggest that I am not going to let you have that field all to yourself. We have introduced a substitute. Unlike your bill, ours has specific benefits. Your bill, I would remind the gentlewoman from Connecticut, has no benefit in it. It is all estimates. It is all examples. There is no benefit in your bill, and indeed in our substitute there is. You have heard it. It is simple. It is $25 a month, 20 percent coinsurance, no gaps; and we pay out of pocket after $2,000. Yes, you will say it costs a lot of money. The gentlewoman from Connecticut forgets about the $5.6 trillion surplus that Bush had when he came into office and which he squandered on tax cuts in the meantime. But we do have an income transfer as we have been accused of. It is very simple. You can look at it this way. You have given $800 billion to 10,000 of the richest families each year when you did away with the inheritance tax. No question about it. That is what it costs. Those are the beneficiaries. We would take that money as an alternative and give it to what will be in a short 10 years 100 million seniors.”