Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I'm very pleased that on Thursday we're going to have this health care summit because I do think there's an opportunity for us to work together on a bipartisan basis to achieve health care reform.

I think we need to achieve three things. First of all, we need to lower prices, or at least prevent the type of price increases we've seen in insurance premiums. We're hearing 20, 30 percent increases in many parts of the country.

Secondly, we have to try to cover as many Americans as possible. There are at least 30, 40 million Americans that have no health insurance right now.

And lastly, we have to get rid of discriminatory practices where people pay more or can't even get health insurance because of preexisting conditions or because of gender differences.

If we can accomplish the goal of all three of these items on a bipartisan basis, we can come up with a bill that can pass here and go to the President.

I believe that all of us would like to see health care reform on both sides of the aisle. We just need to sit down and work on it and get it done this year because the American people need health care reform.

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