[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 11495]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      HELPING AMERICANS FIGHT BACK

  (Mr. KENNEDY asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. KENNEDY. Madam Speaker, I met Ted a few weeks ago. He is a 
bricklayer from Fall River, Massachusetts. It is hard, proud work, the 
kind that comes with frequent physical injury. Ted is no exception.
  Then came the opioid prescriptions. Then came a long and painful road 
to addiction.
  But Ted fought back. By force of will, faith, he pulled himself up, 
he got treatment, and he got clean. But his most recent injury cost him 
his job and his health insurance, and a new diagnosis just came in: 
liver cancer.
  Madam Speaker, this is where a system proves what it is made of. When 
our people are sick, when they are tired, when they are terrified, and 
when they have given everything that they have got, do we abandon them? 
No. We pull them up. We bet on their resilience because there is 
nothing more fundamentally American than the belief that our people 
survive, they endure, and they rise to fight again.
  They deserve a government that will jump into the ring by their side. 
Today is that test of what is good and decent for our people.

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