The CBO report specifically confirms that the long-term effect of the President's plan will be to reduce the Federal deficit. While there are differe… - Ted Kennedy

As night follows day, some will of course say that we cannot afford to move America forward in all these ways. But it is clear that we can afford to do what is right if together we return to fiscal responsibility. Many fiscally responsible voices, including a number of leading members of the business community, have said we cannot now afford -- if we ever could -- the 1.7 trillion dollar cost of the tax cuts enacted last year. The doubts that many of us had before the nation was attacked about the affordability of those tax cuts have become certainties in the wake of September 11th. The spirit of this new time is placing major new demands on our national resources, and those demands must take priority. We cannot meet them while making all of the planned future tax cuts unless we raid Social Security and Medicare and cut health, education, and other vital goals. To me, that is not only unacceptable; it is a violation of fundamental pledges that both parties gave in the 2000 campaign.

So this aspect of health and the coverage and the rest of the policy issues are all rooted in a very early association and personal attachment. Finally, the policy issues come and attach themselves in different ways, and we can talk about that. You can talk about how people who have a preexisting condition—Even Teddy, who has had cancer—even though he’s 47 years old, he could not get an individual insurance policy today, because he’s had cancer, even though he’s as healthy and strong as can be. He could not go out and buy, in the United States, an individual policy. That’s the way it is. That’s the way the system works on this. Obviously, he’s in a group—but then, if he left that group, could he still carry on through? You didn’t used to be able to, but you’ve got the [Nancy] Kassebaum bill now that says that they can’t discriminate against—if he’s gotten into the system, they can’t knock him out. But that’s sort of a feature of the policy. We can go back now to a time when we got started in the health policy issues, but I think it’s at least of some importance and consequence how we got into it.

One of the most dramatic that I still remember so clearly was in Chicago. It was two families that had children who had spina bifida. In the U.S. family the mother was a schoolteacher and the husband was a construction worker, and they made a good chunk of change and had a very good life. There was one other child in the family. Then the mother had to stop teaching school to take care of the child because it got sicker and sicker. And then, because the mother got run down, the husband quit his job. They went through all their savings looking after this child, and the result was that the state was going to take away the child because the parents could no longer take care of this child. You had the mother and the father completely distraught about this. This was out in Chicago.