Arlen Specter: “I am pleased to support the Health Insurance Reform Act of 1995 and want to commend my colleagues, Senator Kassebaum and…”

“I am pleased to support the Health Insurance Reform Act of 1995 and want to commend my colleagues, Senator Kassebaum and Senator Kennedy, for their excellent work on this important subject. As a cosponsor of this bill, I believe that enactment of legislation improving health insurance coverage is long overdue. We owe it to the American people to pass this bill. The Health Insurance Reform Act represents the type of incremental health care reform which I have long supported. It targets the problems with our current health care system while leaving in place a system that works well for most Americans. Mr. President, in June 1993, I had my own health problem when a magnetic resonance imaging machine discovered an intercranial lesion in my head. I was the beneficiary of the greatest health care delivery system in the world--the American health care system. That experience made me ever more aware, knowledgeable of, and sensitive to the subject than I had been in the past. There are some who believed health care reform was dead and declared as much in the fall of 1994 when Congress failed to enact comprehensive health care reform legislation. I am hopeful that they will be proven wrong by the enactment of this bill. President Clinton was in error when he proposed health care by Government mandate and massive bureaucracy. But anyone who read the repudiation of the Clinton bill as an excuse to do nothing is equally in error.”