Michael Bennet: “What the health care bill was intended to do--and again, it may not have done it perfectly, and there may be other ideas…”

“What the health care bill was intended to do--and again, it may not have done it perfectly, and there may be other ideas we ought to be legislating around--what it was intended to do is solve a problem that confronted not 1 percent of the American people, not 4 million people, but a problem that conservatively--extremely conservatively--affects 50 percent of the American people and is a $58.5 billion problem, not a $4 billion problem, because it is 50 percent of the people who are covered today by their employers who have to pay $1,100 a year in additional premiums to subsidize the uninsured in the United States of America. That was one of the big objectives of dealing with this health care issue. And I say it is conservative because this number does not even include the people who are buying insurance on their own. So maybe if you add those numbers together, you get to about 70 percent of the American people. So we spent a week on cable television, on the floor of the Senate, occupied completely with this 1 percent number over here, with no theory at all about what we are doing for 50 percent of Americans. That is how comical this conversation has become. I should not say comical. That is how detached this conversation has become from what is actually going on in the real lives of the people whom I represent and others in this Chamber represent.…”