Political Quotes

“a good friend once wisely said to me that it is only a very short road that has no turns. The road that health care reform has traveled to get to the Senate has been very long and has had many turns. Its path to us might well be described as tortuous, with all that word has come to mean. As I said when I explained in December why I was voting for the Senate health care reform bill, any piece of legislation this big, this complicated, and this transformational is unlikely to be perfectly pleasing to anyone. That is true for me. In the end, each of us has to ask ourselves, do the positives in this legislation outweigh the negatives? Does what pleases us in it outweigh what worries us? Let me begin with the measure before us now. The reconciliation act that is before us preserves most but not all of the health care reform the Senate adopted and I voted for in December. I concluded then and repeat now that together these measures achieve real change in the three big areas in which our health care system needs to be changed: reforming health care delivery to put a brake on the skyrocketing costs of care for individuals, families, businesses, and our government; better regulating health insurance companies to protect consumers, including those with preexisting conditions; and helping millions of middle-income Americans who cannot afford health insurance now to buy it.”