Jay Rockefeller: “this week there is plenty of drama unfolding at the Supreme Court, the stately building across the street from where we…”

“this week there is plenty of drama unfolding at the Supreme Court, the stately building across the street from where we now stand. The Justices are deliberating inside the building. There is a lot of shouting and clamoring outside. That is to be expected. But I am here today to encourage all of us to pause for a minute and to step back from the hype and think about what the broader health care reform means to so many Americans, not just the citizens the Presiding Officer and I represent but Americans across this country. I do think, because I believe strongly that the rhetoric surrounding the issues has become so polarizing, many people routinely overlook the profound ways the law has already made life better to so many Americans. Let's remember why we started down this path of health reform at all. Let me say for the record this is a path that has been well trodden over the years by both Democrats and Republicans--in fact, over the last century--but we had never managed to enact meaningful reform in our system. Yes, we added on some extraordinary things such as Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, but reform of the system we had not done. So we rejoiced in what happened in the mid-1960s, but that doesn't help us in terms of the overall disposition of the system. When we renewed this debate about how to fairly make sure everyone in the country could get the health care they needed, we actually, at the time as we started, had 46 million uninsured Americans.…”