Political Quotes

“I think that anyone who picked up the Wall Street Journal over the last couple of weeks and read the stories about Indian health and what is happening, especially in our region of the world in the Great Plains--it shocked the conscience. It should have resulted in a prolonged level of outrage that would bring us all together. Unfortunately, we have seen this movie one too many times. Things happen where we see national stories about challenges in Indian Country, about the failure to fulfill commitments under treaty rights. We see despair. We see the incredible rates of poverty, the incredible rates of unemployment, even in a State like ours where unemployment rates are never the issue. We wonder, why isn't something being done? Guess who wasn't shocked. Those of us who serve on the Indian Affairs Committee. We on the committee spent a lot of time looking at this last year, trying to figure out how we could engage the bureaucracy to be more responsive and more responsible and how we could look at sourcing the dollars we needed to make sure that Indian health was supplemented and that the level of care we expect when we walk into our hospitals--that that is the level of care Native American people who go to the Indian Health Service on their reservations and who might go to an Indian run, a Tribal run facility, would expect.…”