[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 19]
[Senate]
[Page 25384]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           HEALTH CARE REFORM

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I also remind everyone that we are in the 
process of coming up with a bill we will send from the Senate to the 
Congressional Budget Office. It is so important that we move forward on 
this legislation. Health care is vitally important to this country.
  Every Thursday when we are in session, Senator Ensign and I have a 
Welcome to Washington Breakfast, and it is very good. We have been 
doing this for 9 years. Today we had the Principal of the Year, from 
Frank Lamping Elementary School, grades 1 through 5. Principal of the 
Year--that is really significant. We have well more than 400,000 
students in Nevada, and to think they selected that man as the 
Principal of the Year is quite an honor. The principal is Michael 
O'Dowd. We had a longtime retired judge with whom I practiced law in 
the same community for a number of years, Gerry Hardcastle.
  But the reason I mention this, there was a man there who introduced 
me to his son--a good-looking young man. His father was there to tell 
me about a new treatment they have developed for congenital clubfoot. 
In years past, the only way to handle that situation was with surgery. 
Now they have a new method. He had his boy there. His boy plays 
basketball. His boy can do anything he wants. And they have done this 
with no surgery. They now have new treatment for this. It is not 
surgical. In other countries, people spend the rest of their lives with 
their feet upside down unless there is surgery, and it is so difficult 
to do. So that is why health care is important.
  This is one minor example of how we are advancing in health care, and 
we have to make sure health care is affordable to the American people. 
Our health care costs are more than 2\1/2\ times that of Japan. Yet the 
health care is not as good here as in Japan.
  I look forward to sending that bill on to the Congressional Budget 
Office. I had spoken to the Republican leader yesterday. We are going 
to make sure Senators have plenty of opportunity to look at this bill 
once we get it back. We are concerned about quality, not quantity--
well, we are interested in quality, not how fast we can move this. We 
want to move it as quickly as we can, as expeditiously as we can, but 
we want to do it as well as we can. So I look forward to working with 
the Republican leader to have a good debate on this matter and have 
health care for all Americans.

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