[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 3]
[Senate]
[Page 4028]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          UNINSURED AMERICANS

  Mr. SMITH. Madam President, as I rise today to speak before my 
colleagues in the 108th session of the US Congress, I have a sense of 
deja vu. While I have only been a member of the Senate since 1997, I 
have already seen the issues of prescription drugs for seniors and 
health care for the uninsured come and go--unresolved--a number of 
times. And while we continue to discuss the issues to death, people are 
dying.
  According to a recent report by the Institute of Medicine, an 
estimated 18,000 people die every year because they don't have health 
insurance, and don't get the care they need in a timely fashion. 
Eighteen thousand deaths a year. And millions more people suffer 
unnecessarily due to delays in care, or lack of access to care. We need 
to do something substantial, and we need to do it now.
  We have all heard the numbers, but they are so staggering that I have 
to mention them again. Today--right now as I speak--41 million 
Americans are living, working, and going to school without health 
insurance. That's one in every six Americans or 17 percent of our hard-
working citizens who do not have health insurance. They are our 
friends, our neighbors, our children, our parents.
  Many--more than 35 million of these uninsured Americans -are in low-
income working families. Many people who work in small businesses are 
not offered health insurance, and those who are often cannot afford the 
skyrocketing premiums. My family owns a business, and I know what small 
businesses go through.
  We want to provide health care to our hard working employees as much 
as they want us to offer it, but it is becoming so expensive and so 
bureaucratic, it grows more difficult every year. This Congress has its 
work cut out--strengthening the economy, fighting a war, creating a 
prescription drug benefit for our Nation's seniors. These are just a 
few of the important pieces of business before us this year. But the 
problem of the uninsured will not go away--to the contrary, the ranks 
of the uninsured are growing by millions every year.
  A crisis of this magnitude is going to require fundamental change, 
either through a series of incremental steps, such as helping lower 
income Americans buy insurance or by spreading insurance risk, or by 
adopting a bold new approach, such as that advocated by Senator Breaux.
  We in Congress should consider it a moral imperative to help everyone 
get access to affordable health coverage.
  The number of uninsured people in America is an outrage, and every 
unnecessary death is a tragedy. If 18,000 Americans died in terrorist 
incidents each year, there would be widespread outrage.
  Yet tens of thousands of uninsured Americans are at risk of dying 
each year from cancers diagnosed too late, or stroke from uncontrolled 
high blood pressure. These can be slow, painful deaths.
  They are preventable deaths. We can help prevent these deaths. We 
should help prevent these deaths. With the help of my colleagues, we 
will help prevent these deaths by committing ourselves to substantial 
reform this congress.

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