Bernie Sanders: “let me thank Senator Wyden for his outstanding work as the former chairman of the Finance Committee and now as the…”

“let me thank Senator Wyden for his outstanding work as the former chairman of the Finance Committee and now as the ranking member. I get around Vermont a bit. I get around the country a bit. And, generally speaking, when I talk to a group of people, I ask them a simple question. I say: What do you think about the healthcare system? Is it working well or is it broken? Is it dysfunctional? And, overwhelmingly, the hands go up that the American healthcare system today is broken, it is dysfunctional, and it is cruel. And what people understand is the function of the American healthcare system, today, is not to provide quality healthcare to all of our people, which, in fact, goes on in every other major country on Earth. It is to make huge profits for the drug companies and the insurance companies. The current healthcare system is a system in which we spend twice as much per capita on healthcare as do the people of any other nation--an astronomical sum of money. And yet despite all that money, 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured, and the cost of healthcare keeps going up every single year. One out of four Americans cannot afford the costs of the drugs that their doctors prescribe. And, unbelievably, it is a system in which 60,000 Americans die each year because they can't get to a doctor on time. It is a system in which we don't have enough doctors, we don't have enough nurses, we don't have enough dentists, and we don't have enough pharmacists.…”