Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague, Mr. Waxman, for his leadership and for his gracious comments. And I want to thank and praise our Speaker, our majority leader, and the leader in the Senate for the great leadership that they have given us in this great undertaking. Today is a day that is going to rank with the day we passed the civil rights bill in 1964. Today we are doing something that ranks with what we did on Social Security or Medicare. This is the day on which we can all be proud if we vote for that legislation. Facts are an intransigent hard thing. And let's look at this from the standpoint of the facts of what it does. Thirty-two more million Americans are going to have health care. They don't now. America, which has health care of the best character in the world, does not make it available to 32 million people because they can't afford it, and Americans every day are losing their health care. Eighteen thousand Americans every year die for want of health care, and 44,000 Americans also go bankrupt because of it. What does this bill do? It gives Americans the same health care that we here in the Congress have. It preserves their choice, and it sees that if those Americans want to change, they can do so. It also fixes the insurance company. And as the President has said, this bill is the patient's bill of rights on steroids.…”