[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 14]
[House]
[Page 18844]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




     THE TIME IS NOW TO ENACT A HEALTH CARE PLAN FOR ALL AMERICANS

  (Mr. ELLISON asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. ELLISON. Madam Speaker, Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke of the 
fierce urgency of now. He talked about the fact that you cannot set a 
deadline or timeline on somebody else's freedom. Well, there's another 
civil rights movement going on today in America, and that is the right 
for health care.
  Health care is what we need now, and we cannot delay. I urge my 
colleagues to come together and pass a health care reform bill before 
we go out for the August recess because people absolutely need it, 
people who are fearing being dropped or put off for preexisting 
conditions, people being subject to discrimination because of their age 
or their gender.
  We've got to stop this. We have got to make sure that a caring Nation 
cares for the health of its people. The time is now. We cannot delay. 
We've had enough time, Madam Speaker.
  Six decades America has debated about what to fix about our broken 
health care system. We've done 45 hours of markups, 79 House hearings, 
215 pages of bills and work to make sure that we have every input and 
every point of view shared.
  The time is now, Madam Speaker.

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