On the recordMarch 19, 2010
I have only been in the Senate about 3 years, but you don't have to be too quick around here to figure out that it is pretty easy to attack and to oppose and to try to stop things. I am fairly amazed at the number of people I see--and I will share some letters of people from Ohio, from my home State, about this health care bill and about what this means personally to them. I will do that in a second, but just putting aside ideological arguments and political attacks, these attacks that there is nothing good in this bill, it is a government takeover, it is socialism, it is putting a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor--the same argument the John Birch Society used against Medicare we are hearing again. I hear those things, but I really never hear anything constructive. They talk about the deals, forgetting about the deals they made when they were in the majority, which were huge giveaways to the drug companies and to the insurance companies and giveaways to the oil companies and to these big companies that outsource jobs to China. Whoever had their hand out, whoever the special interests were, they got what they wanted. Now I see my colleagues just shrink back and say how horrible all this is. Well, they have nothing to offer. They say: Let's stop; let's work together; let's start with a blank sheet of paper and do this over. Well, they have no intention of doing that.
