Ed Markey: “Thank you, Mr. President. I just want to follow up on the statements made by the Senator from Connecticut, Mr.…”

“Thank you, Mr. President. I just want to follow up on the statements made by the Senator from Connecticut, Mr. Blumenthal, and the Senator from Hawaii, Mr. Schatz. They have laid out in eye-watering detail the problems that the Republicans are creating by their attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. What Senator Schatz and Senator Blumenthal did was just get to the heart of this matter. What the United States did for 100 years was to not run a health care system but to run a sick care system--a system that spent 97 cents on what happens after people got sick and only 3 cents of every dollar on trying to prevent people from getting sick. For the first time in American history, that changed in the Affordable Care Act. What President Obama did, what America did was to create a Prevention and Public Health Fund, and that fund in the Affordable Care Act is spent on prevention programs. It is spent on looking at people who could get asthma, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, high blood pressure, stroke, or die from too much smoking and just say for the first time, in a comprehensive way, that the United States was going to put programs in place that would prevent people from getting the diseases that every preceding generation of Americans have suffered from. That is what the prevention fund is all about.…”