Michael Bennet: “I thank my colleagues from New Mexico, my neighbors, for being here. I thank the Presiding Officer for his statement. As…”

“I thank my colleagues from New Mexico, my neighbors, for being here. I thank the Presiding Officer for his statement. As usual, he is pointing the Senate in a direction that we should be headed. Whether people in my State support the Affordable Care Act or whether they don't, they are dissatisfied with the way our healthcare system works. The Affordable Care Act--or ObamaCare or whatever you want to call it--is just part of our healthcare system. We have Medicare. We have Medicaid. We have hospitals. We have doctors. We have nurses. It all adds up, in America in the 21st century, to a system that is really hard on people and makes it very hard for them to predict their future. It creates situations where they have to make choices that no other people in the industrialized world have to make, about raising their family, about staying in a job--as the Presiding Officer was talking about--that they might not want to stay in for fear they would lose their health insurance. I thought the Presiding Officer made an excellent point when he said that you don't lose your car insurance when you leave your place of business for another job. Why should you lose your health insurance? Why should you? Why should you have to put up with things in this country that nobody else in the industrialized world has to put up with? It may be that the debate we are going to have is as binary as the Presiding Officer was saying.…”