We have waited a long time for major health care reform in this country, and we should be so thankful that it is here at last. Throughout my professional life, I have worked with public servants dedicated to moving our nation forward. I have worked for people who understand that health care should be treated as a basic human right -- we aren't there yet, but we are making progress. And we all benefit from broad-based affordable health care.
I remember a conversation from one day in the first weeks of working for Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1988, when I served as Policy Director on his re-election campaign. I had been working on Capitol Hill for a couple of years following graduation from college, and I was full of youthful wide-eyed idealism. I had been working on health care reform, and I went to Kennedy and vented about the disgrace that I saw: over 25 million Americans without health insurance. I told him I couldn't understand how we could be in this situation and that I thought we had to push hard on our message of health care reform.
With that little rant behind me, I waited for the Senator's reaction. "What do you think I've been working on for the last 25 years?" he replied as a warm and friendly smile spread across his face. He spent his career pushing to improve access to health care for all Americans -- it was the cause of his life.
A dozen years later, I was Policy Director for Bill Bradley on his presidential campaign, and we placed the issue front-and-center. This time we were looking at around 40 million uninsured. I remember as he told the story of a woman named Cathy Perry, who he met in New Hampshire. At the time, her husband was working two jobs, and she was working one, to support their four growing children. But still they had no health insurance. One day Cathy took their young son to the doctor, for a sore throat. As she paid the receptionist at the end of the visit, her son said "I'm sorry, Mom."
For what?" she asked back.
He replied, "For getting sick."
Every time that Bill Bradley told the story, he would finish with the basic truth that no child in America should ever have to apologize for getting sick.
But in our country, we have not lived in a reality where health care is uniformly available and affordable.
So when I became Policy Director for Barack Obama, at the beginning of his presidential campaign, the problem was still there. The same problem that Ted Kennedy had been fighting since he went to Washington in the early 1960s. The same problem that Kennedy and I talked about in his office in 1988. The same problem that Bill Bradley and I pressed in the 2000 campaign. The only thing that had changed was the numbers -- millions more every year were uninsured and under-insured.
So we set out to draw up a good plan for health care reform. But beyond the details, the top priority was to push for a new politics where we could actually get something done.
This legislation will do a lot in the area of costs, accessibility, pre-existing conditions, and more. But is not perfect -- legislation rarely is perfect. But it is a huge, positive step forward for our country. We have a long road ahead, but we are today declaring that we are a nation where all of us will have the opportunity to obtain basic, affordable quality health care. In this, the greatest country on earth, we owe ourselves nothing less.
The time has finally come.