Richard Gephardt: “I want to thank the Republican leadership for their help in bringing this debate about, and I want to thank all of my…”

“I want to thank the Republican leadership for their help in bringing this debate about, and I want to thank all of my colleagues who have worked so hard to make this evening happen. I hope this is the first of many Oxford-style debates. I want to start tonight by saying that this debate is not about charts, it is not about statistics, and it is not about graphs. It is not even about philosophy. It really is simply about people. It is about the elderly women in my district that I saw the other night whose husband died soon after he retired, leaving her without health insurance. She wound up with a very serious form of cancer, and now she needs an operation, and she has no idea how she is going to pay for it, because she does not yet qualify for Medicare. It is about the truck driver who came to one of my town hall meetings and finally stood in frustration in the middle of the meeting and shook his hand at me and said: Congressman, I have to go to work, but you have to do something about health care costs. I cannot afford to pay for my family's policy, and I'm worried I'm going to lose it. It is about small business people that we have all met who want to be able to give their people health insurance as part of their compensation, but they simply can't figure out how to afford to do it. The truth is, in doing health care, as I hope we will later this year, we have to listen to these people. This is about them.”