Political Quotes

“Today, like every day in America, 788 babies will be born at a low birthweight. They will start life at risk. We rank 18th in the industrialized world in the percentage of babies born at dangerously low birth weight. Let me put it another way: No industrialized country in the world does worse. Our infant mortality rate is 8.4 per 1,000 live births. We rank 18th in the industrialized world in infant mortality. Sometimes it takes a poet to put our feelings into words when we hear such statistics. Gwendolyn Brooks, poet laureate of Illinois, penned this question: 'What shall I give my children who are poor, who are judged the least wise of the land?' Mr. Speaker, we keep asking the question, 'What shall we give our children?' We are the only advanced Nation in the world that does not provide health care for all of its people. According to the GAO, some 10 million children, 1 in 7 in the United States, are uninsured, the highest level since 1987, before Medicaid expansions for children and pregnant women. One child in four in the United States is now covered by Medicaid. The percentage of children with private insurance reached the lowest level in 8 years: 65.6 percent. How do we describe the emotion of seeing a child suffering a severe asthma attack; turning blue while their chest and stomach attempts to breathe? Yet more than half of the uninsured children with asthma will not see a doctor this year. Some of them will die from asthma, a preventable disease.”