On the recordJuly 11, 2012
I urge people to read this because what Mr. Klein does in this article is chart the political course of this mandate from about 1989 to the present. The red shown on the chart is the years in which this was a Republican idea, advanced by Republican Members of Congress and by think tanks like the Heritage Foundation that actually came up with the idea to begin with to deal with the fact that there were people in this country who were not buying health insurance and whom we were all subsidizing, and then when it became a Democratic idea in more recent times. It strikes me as one person watching all of this that this might have more to do with the party that is in the White House or not in the White House than it does with respect to the merits of the idea. But it is, of course, the merits of these ideas that we should be debating and talking about. But we should not be telling the American people that something that affects 1 percent of the American people is a broad- based assault on the middle class, and we should be bringing to this floor the ideas we have for improving what 50 percent of the American people or 70 percent of the American people are already facing. That is what people in our States believe. Here is part of an editorial from the Greeley Tribune, which I think was published yesterday, where they wrote: In 2010, the North Colorado Medical Center provided more than $71 million in services to indigent patients who didn't have health insurance.…
