Tim Ryan: “One of the issues, you know, the more you talk, the more you see how all this just really ties together. This is health…”

“One of the issues, you know, the more you talk, the more you see how all this just really ties together. This is health care costs and tying in a way to the minimum wage. The average family health care premium in 2005 was $10,880; and the salary of a full-time year-round minimum-wage worker was less than that, $10,700. So you will work as a minimum-wage worker 40 hours a week for an entire year and not even be able to pay for your full health care bill. Now, in the United States of America, there is something wrong with that. There is something wrong with the wage of the minimum-wage worker, and there is obviously something wrong with the cost of health care in the United States because of this kind of backward system that we now have that just basically treats diseases and is not focusing probably like it should in preventing a lot of these things from happening. And I think the more we reach out through the SCHIP program to make sure that these families who are qualified for children's health care know that they are qualified, to get them signed up, because at the end of the day it is the right thing to do, it is the compassionate thing to do, but at the end of the day it is going to save everybody a lot more money, too.”