Chapter[ Speech - Remarks on American Health Choices Plan
Section[ Closing
Announcing my plan today is just one step in a larger process. In the coming months, I will continue to reach out to people all across America and ask for their ideas and their reactions. Because, to truly reform health care in America, we need more than a plan. We need a movement -- a movement of people determined to change the system who will not rest until we succeed. Lisa Scott from Greenville, Iowa, whom I met back in May, is one of those people.
Six years ago, Lisa's daughter, Janelle, began having chest pains and black outs. She was sick for almost a year. Janelle requested a chest x-ray, but she never received it, because while she was working two jobs, she didn't have health insurance, and she couldn't afford to pay for it out of her own pocket,
One week after being denied the chest x-ray, at the age of 18, Janelle died. Her death certificate listed the cause of death as unknown, because Janelle was never able to afford a proper diagnosis, a diagnosis that with care might have saved her life.
It's too late to help her daughter, but Lisa Scott hasn't stopped speaking out and calling on us to come together and fix our health care system. She is determined to help other families, to spare them the loss and pain that her family felt.
Now that is who we are at our best. We are a nation where people help those they've never even met. Where we do understand we are all in this together, that when a child is sick and can't see a doctor, the family loses everything because someone had an accident, when a mother or a father lies awake at night worrying about how they possibly care for the people they love. That diminishes all of us. Now after 1994, when people asked me if I was going to give up on health care reform, I always had the same answer. Why would I give up on America and the American people? For so many years I have listened to their stories. I carry these stories with me everyday.
And perhaps more than anyone else, I know just how hard this fight will be. But that is why I'm running for President, because I'm ready with you to help write a new story. The story about how we finally put aside our differences to face up to one of our greatest challenges. The story of how people of good faith and good will came together and worked out a solution because they cared too much about our country and their fellow citizens to let this crisis continue.
The story of how everyone took responsibility, we all did our part, and we became a healthier, stronger, more prosperous nation because of it. We owe that to the Rose family. We owe that to the memory of Janelle and to her family. We owe that to every family in America. Today, we have an opportunity to make history together. As President, I will seize that opportunity and I hope all of you will join me.
Thank you and God bless you.
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