There Is Nothing More Important Than Health Care

Floor Speech

There Is Nothing More Important Than Health Care

Mr. COHEN. Mr. Speaker, Daniel Webster reminds us on a daily basis in a plaque, a stone engraved above the Speaker's rostrum, that in our time here in Congress we're supposed to do something that's worth being remembered, something valuable. Forty-four years ago today Medicare was signed into law. That Congress did something worthwhile. The Congress that produced Medicaid did something worthwhile. Both those Congresses were vilified, and people said both of those programs were socialism.

Well, they were wrong; they were American. They were caring programs that have helped with people in sickness and getting them healthy in an affordable manner. This Congress can do something worthy of being remembered by passing national health care and taking care of people and extending Medicare and Medicaid to another group of Americans and making sure that we're no longer the only civilized industrialized country in the world that doesn't have health care for all of its citizens.

It's time that we act and we do what Daniel Webster charges us to, and that's to do something worthy of being remembered. Nothing is more important than health care.

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