Ron Kind: “I thank my friend for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this veto override. Listen, I…”

“I thank my friend for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this veto override. Listen, I understand people's objections and concerns about the healthcare reform that we have embarked upon as a nation, but, clearly, now is not the time to take us back to the status quo, which was going to leave us in a very bad place in this Nation. Before the Affordable Care Act was passed, the numbers of uninsured were going up. The expense for individuals and businesses was going up. Healthcare costs, budgetwise, were going up. Too many people were being denied coverage based on preexisting conditions. Young people--younger than 26--were being dropped from health insurance plans. All of that now is being corrected. Not that this is a perfect response to the complexity of the healthcare system, but there is a lot of good that is being done, including in two areas. One is delivery system reform so that we move to a more integrated, coordinated, patient-centered healthcare delivery system based on models that do work. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, we are changing, under the Affordable Care Act, how we pay for health care so that it is based on the quality or on the outcome or on the value of care that is given and no longer on the numbers of procedures and how much is done to us rather than how well it's done. We are demanding better quality at a better price, and the numbers are showing that we are heading in this direction.…”