Political Quotes

“I rise tonight to talk about yet another healthcare debate we are having here in the Senate. As many people know and have been following this over the last number of months, we had a long debate and then a vote here at the end of July. At that point, despite all of the conflict and all of the debate and arguing about healthcare for not just months but for years, we moved to a new chapter, and that new chapter for a number of weeks has been very positive. When I went home to Pennsylvania, I went to 32 counties in the month of August, and in a lot of those counties, I tried to give a bit of good news on healthcare despite all of the conflict about it. I was able to say that since July 28, when the vote was held, we have had very positive bipartisan discussions. I was part of several of them. The chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee--the so-called HELP Committee--Senator Lamar Alexander from Tennessee, announced, in agreement with Senator Patty Murray of Washington, that they were going to preside over bipartisan healthcare hearings in that committee--probably the first bipartisan hearings in a long time. What that meant was that we were going to finally have hearings and a thorough examination of a few issues, not a sweeping bill that would repeal the Affordable Care Act and decimate Medicaid the way the prior bills would have but take elements or pieces of some of the challenges we have before us and try to fix those problems.…”