Max Baucus: “I would like to speak a few moments about the need for health care assistance to Katrina-related victims. When I finish…”

“I would like to speak a few moments about the need for health care assistance to Katrina-related victims. When I finish, I am then going to join with Senator Grassley, the chairman of the Finance Committee, in a unanimous consent request, and that is bring up and pass the bill. Tina Eagerton fled Louisiana for Clearwater, FL, to escape Hurricane Katrina. As Tampa Bay's 10 News reported, Tina is 7 months pregnant. She has a high-risk pregnancy. Plainly she needs a doctor's care, but Tina could not find a Florida doctor who would accept her Louisiana Medicaid card. She said, ``I've called some doctors, [but they say] `We don't know what to do.' I guess nobody has gotten the memo.'' Congress needs to get the memo. We need to pass S. 1716, the Emergency Health Care Relief Act, and we need to do it today. The last 4 weeks, we have seen terrible destruction, destruction that Katrina wrought as well as Rita has wrought; more than 1,000 people are dead, a million people displaced, hundreds of billions of dollars of damage. I went down there to the gulf to see it myself, and I must say it is worse than the pictures. Katrina has exposed deep problems that plague American society: chronic poverty, stark inequality, strained race relations. We could not solve all of these problems today, but some are so pervasive, so severe, that a single bill cannot remedy them. It requires a sustained national debate and reexamination of what we as a nation hold dear.…”