Timothy Roemer: “I wish for once Members of Congress would put themselves in the shoes of hard-working Americans, whether those shoes are…”

“I wish for once Members of Congress would put themselves in the shoes of hard-working Americans, whether those shoes are loafers or construction boots, and then Americans would work together to reform in a simplistic and bipartisan commonsense way our health care system. Now, we have two choices tonight: We can either support H.R. 3103, a convoluted measure that is highly controversial, with all kinds of special-interest provisions that will never become law, or we can support a bipartisan provision from Senator Kennedy, Senator Kassebaum, and the gentlewoman from New Jersey [Mrs. Roukema]. There is a bipartisan approach, a commonsense approach to provide portability, to provide health care for workers who lose their jobs. Let me give an example of why this is important. IBM has laid off 40,000 people; AT&T 40,000 people. These people are hard workers. They have children that may have diabetes or leukemia. And now health insurance companies can say, ``We don't want to cover you anymore.'' If you vote for the Roukema Bill, the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill, you will allow these hard-working Americans to take their insurance with them and to not let the insurance companies be prejudiced against these people. Vote for our children. Vote for our hard-working people in America, and vote for commonsense bipartisanship.”