“This should not be something that is being rammed through the House and the Senate and force-fed to the American people.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, US Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) spoke on the Senate floor regarding health care reform.
Excerpts from Senator Barrasso’s speech:
Cost and Quality
“Mr. President, I practiced medicine for 25 years in Casper, Wyoming — was in Wyoming yesterday visiting with physicians, visiting with nurses, visiting with those who are patients as well as those who are providers and talking with them about what’s happening in this country — and in this body — with the discussion about health care in America and the legislation. And no matter who I talk with in Wyoming, when they look at this massive 2,000-page bill and they think about it and then they ask questions about it, they say how in the world is this actually going to get the cost of care down? How is this going to help them save money?
“Americans and certainly the people in Wyoming are very worried that if this bill becomes law, the cost of their care is going to go up, and the quality and availability of their care is going to go down. And that’s not what they want.”
The President’s Speech
“Now, I saw on the front page of one of the papers this morning that the President was in Philadelphia talking, and it said the President turns up the volume in bid for his health measure, and he says challenge to Democrats, ‘If not us, who?’
“Mr. President, I say it should be all of us.
“This should not be something that is being rammed through the House and the Senate and force-fed to the American people at a time when 75% of them want nothing to do with this bill. Three out of four Americans say ‘Stop, we don’t want this.’ They are worried about the cost of their own care and the availability and the quality of the care that they are receiving. So when the President gives his speech as he did yesterday, I would say involve all of us, involve all of us in the discussion — which is what we should have been doing for over a year.”