On the recordJune 13, 2016
There is no doubt how much I appreciate the Congressional Black Caucus and Congresswoman Beatty and Congressman Jeffries for always being timely in allowing us to give a message to our colleagues. We hope maybe the American people will hear us, but we accept that this body is the body to which and to whom we speak. So I am thankful for that. I want to pay tribute, overall, to the Congressional Black Caucus because we are actually here speaking of health disparities, because it was the caucus that triggered this debate through the years that we have been trying to get universal access to health care and was the moving force in the 2009, 2008, and 2010 passage, ultimately, of the Affordable Care Act, where the work that we did, joining Congresswoman Donna Christian-Christiansen, at that time, and Frank Pallone on the Congressional Health Caucus, but on the CBC we had the health disparities task to ensure that the language in the Affordable Care Act addressed the issue of health disparities. There was a large section on that that built on some of the work that some of us had already done creating the Office of Minority Health that I had worked on in years past. So it was the lightning bolt of the caucus, and then working with the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus and then the Congressional Hispanic Caucus that we raised the issue that no one was talking about.…
