Transcript: Sen. Chris Dodd
The following is a transcript of Senator Chris Dodd's speech at the Presidential Forum.
KAREN TUMULTY: So our next candidate that we are going to hear from is Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut.
CHRISTOPHER DODD: Well, good morning, everybody. And thank you very, very much for inviting all of us to come by here this morning to be a part of this program. I thank you, Karen, for acting as the host. The Center for American Progress, I want to thank them as well. SEIU for their wonderful leadership. Andy Stern, I see Andy over here as well.
Let me also mention, by the way, I know he's already appeared here, I didn't get a chance to see him, but I think all of us across the country have incredible respect for Elizabeth Edwards and for John Edwards and what they're going through here today.
So I just want to begin these remarks about health care and not fail to mention them as well. I'm deeply proud of the invitation to be with you today. I'm proud of my relationship with the SEIU and its work over the eight decades of serving the interests of not only its membership but people across this country who are not members of SEIU who benefited from your leadership.
I've been through eight elections in the state of Connecticut and I'm proud to say that those eight elections I've had the support of SEIU, and I thank you for that support.
And for those 32 years that I've been in the Congress of the United States, I'm proud to say I have about a 95 percent voting record with organized labor in this country. I stand with union, I stand with labor, and I thank you as well for that relationship.
I mention that because I think it's important as we talk about where we want to go from here how we want to lead the country that we also have a good understanding of where you've been. And so over those 32 years of work I've been engaged in on behalf of working people, it's something I'm proud of, but it gives you some indication of what kind of leadership I offer as a Democratic nominee for the presidency of the United States and how I'd serve the country.
Again I'm preaching to the choir here in a sense we're talking about health care. We all know it's in a serious crisis. The numbers are startling. It is said that we rank something like 26 in the world in life expectancy, something like 28 in the world in infant mortality rates. We have third- and fourth-world countries that do far better than we do in protecting our youngest children here in this country.
We rank something like 37th in the world in terms of the overall fairness of our health care system, and we account for more than 50 percent of all the money spent worldwide on health care in the United States.
So anyone who tells you the health care system is working, those facts alone ought to be a source of collective shame in this country. The fact that we rank as poorly as we do, this is the United States of America, the most affluent country in the history of mankind, we need to be doing a far better job in serving the American people when it comes to health care. I stand firmly in my efforts to see that happen.
Let me say to you here as well what needs to be done. First of all, it's important when we talk about health care we don't limit the conversation of what needs to be done within the health care system itself. It was pointed out that in the 20th century we extended life expectancy in this country by 30 years. Only five of those 30 years can be accountable because of improved health care. About 25 of those years actually come from better nutrition, better housing, better jobs, better incomes for people in this country. That had more to do with increasing life expectancy than actually the health care system itself.
The reason I mention that to you is because it's very important as we examine this issue we also look at issues like income and equality, like the ability to have decent retirement, decent wages, decent working conditions. Those elements we know empirically today improve the quality of people's health. If you're better off financially, if you're better educated, then the likelihood is you're going to be in better health.
So we need to understand there is a direct relationship between people and people's ability to have good paying jobs with good retirement and good working conditions if you're truly interested in making a difference on health care in this country.
It's very important those concepts and ideas be included in this discussion. As for the health care proposals themselves, let me quickly mention the four principles which I think are absolutely essentially if we're going to deal with the health care system.
One is what you've heard already, I'm sure from the others as well, and that is universality here, that everyone participates, everyone benefits. That all the stakeholders, individuals, employers, the government are involved in coming up with a system here that would make it possible to reduce those numbers of 47 million of our fellow citizens who have no health care to make sure they'll be included.
Second is prevention alone. Minimum we try to do is see to it to reduce the cost by stopping people from getting ill in the first place. Around 70 percent of health care costs in this country are associated with chronic illness in America. We need to be doing everything we can to see to it that people get screening, get the proper management care to reduce those kinds of problems before they emerge.
The health care system today deals with these when you get sick. We ought to be doing a far better job of making it possible for people not to become ill because of the incentives we provide and the alternatives we offer for people. In fact, the Veterans Administrative, of all the problems they have today have been able to reduced hospitalizations by 60 percent in this country because of the work they've done of pre-screening and dealing with people before they become ill. So prevention has to be a major part of it.
Thirdly is building upon the good things we've done already: Forty years of Medicaid and Medicare. I would extend Medicaid to poorer families, hundred percent of poverty; the ones with children, 300 percent of poverty. Those programs have worked very, very well for people. Expanding them, extending them makes a lot of sense too.
And then last is the fourth principle, dealing with technology. I'm sure you've heard of this as well. Some $80 or $90 billion could be saved, not to mention the morbidity rates by doing a far better job and utilizing the technology that exists today to see to it that people have an opportunity to improve their health conditions.
Let me tell you what also is important in all of this. We're looking at those of us who seek your support for this nomination. What have you been able to do? During the 26 years I've been in the Senate, I've taken Democratic principles and made them national policies. I spent seven years through two presidential vetoes to pass the Family and Medical Leave Act. It's my piece of legislation. Fifty million Americans have enjoyed the benefits of that legislation.
I started the children caucus in the Senate. I authored the legislation here with improved Head Start along with other programs dealing with infant screening, premature births, dealing with prescription drugs for children. In every instance I've done it by reaching out to people on the other side of the political spectrum.
Whatever we talk about here today needs to be a plan and a program that can build us and bring us together. We're not going to survive much longer in this country, my friends, divided 51/49. The ability to just do what we want to do is going to be dependent upon whether or not we can reach out off this and bring them to that table and sit down and work out these things together.
We can't wait much longer. I've done it on every one of those pieces of legislation. That's what I do as a legislator. That's what I would do as the president of the United States, to bring stakeholders together, work together with a common goal we all have in mind, and that is to see this country have improved health care, improved economics as well for people in our nation.
So I ask you today as we talk about these issues to look not only at what we offer you here but also the proven ability to bring people together, where we've stood over the years and where we'll lead in the future.
I'm the father of two very young children. I have a two-year-old and a five-year-old. In fact, my house right now is sort of like a Petri dish.
I've got a five-year-old and a two-year-old and one has a strep throat and the other has an infection of some kind or other, adenoids. And so dealing with children and their problems, going to school and coming back. In fact, I'm the only candidate that actually gets mail from AARP and diaper services, I want you to know. I have a broad reach here as a candidate to talk about the needs of people across the country.
But it's important to know what families go through who have young children. I'm a United States Senator. I've got a wonderful health care program. I want every single American in this country to have as good a health care program as every member of the United States Congress. That ought to be something we're going to stand there and fight for.
Thank you for listening. I ask for your support on the upcoming nomination process, and I promise as your president we will deal with this health care issue, we'll pull the people together, we'll have a good sound health care program for all Americans. Thank you very, very much.
KAREN TUMULTY: Senator, at least one political commenter out here has suggested that you should win the caucus if only because you seem to be the only person in the field who doesn't mispronounce Nevada.
CHRISTOPHER DODD: That's correct. Nevada. You've got to pass at least that test it seems to me.
KAREN TUMULTY: You were one of the original co-sponsors of Hillary Clinton's health care bill in 1993, and it never got so far as a vote on the floor of either House. You suggested there's been a failure of leadership on this issue. But, in fact, you know, all the old opponents are still out there. Is there anything that has changed in the political climate in the, you know, in the nature of the problem that would suggest that things could be accomplished on health care that simply were not possible in 1994?
CHRISTOPHER DODD: Yeah, I do. I see a number of things. First of all, just the cost alone. Twelve or 14 years ago the overall cost was somewhere a little less than a trillion dollars.
Today we're looking at a cost figure of somewhere in excess of $2 trillion, closer to $2.3 trillion. You're watching business and industry beginning to reduce those health care plans for people. They're not doing it because they're evil, in most cases they're doing it because of a cost factor. There's a growing constituency that in the past was hostile to the idea of having a universal health care plan that I think didn't understand the economic impact today better than they did 14 years ago.
So those factors alone I think are making greater and greater possibilities for people to understand that this is hurting. We're consuming now 15 percent of our gross domestic product in health care costs. That number could very easily jump to 20 or 25 percent very, very quickly. That becomes almost an unstateable number, not to mention of course the fact that we're leaving people out of the system today with the numbers that are growing.
The irony here we've got health care costs that continue to rise and the number of insureds continue to rise. So now we have a million more people than we did six years ago under this administration that have no health care, and that cost continues to go up.
I think the climate, Karen, is a lot better for us today, and again it comes back to bringing people together. I'm not engaging in something inconceivable here. On January 21st, the day after I might be inaugurated as president of the United States, I could invite literally Chuck Grassley, Ted Kennedy, Max Baucus, Ted Stevens. I'm talking about now people in the Congress who are responsible for the committee to deal with health care.
I've known every one of them for 30 years. I'm not going to spend a year or two getting to know them. They know me. I know them. We've fought against each other. We've worked together on issues. And I believe by bringing people together you know you've worked with to say let's sit down and get this done, the American people expect nothing less of us. We need to stop talking and achieve results I think we can have.
KAREN TUMULTY: Thank you. Since 1994 when efforts have -- oh, here it is, help with the issues we're having.
CHRISTOPHER DODD: I'm fading or something.
KAREN TUMULTY: Since 1994 when health care reform crashed and burned, Congress has sort of limited itself to incremental steps. And you've been involved in a lot of those. And so right now I would like to call on Pat Moore, who's an RN at UMC, to ask you about an issue that you've been very active in, which is expanding coverage of children. Pat, are you here?
PAT MOORE: Hi, I'm Pat Moore. In the state of Nevada we have an exceptionally high number of uninsured children. It's really discouraging to me because I've been a pediatric IC nurse at UMC. It's the only public owned county hospital in Southern Nevada, and I've worked there 25 years.
So I see the results of what happens when parents cannot provide or seek ancillary health care assistance for their children until it's too late, and oftentimes the result is the death of a child. So I would ask you what is your proposal, what is your platform for insuring every child in the United States?
CHRISTOPHER DODD: Well, first of all, Pat, thank you for what you do as a nurse. And let me take advantage of your question to point out as well that on this Tuesday I'll be introducing something called a Respect Act, which takes these Kentucky river cases, for those who follow these questions understand them, the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board last year declared that anyone who was occasionally a supervisory, had a supervisory function as a nurse, would be prohibited from engaging in collective bargaining agreements.
My legislation overturned that. I think nurses ought to be organized collectively. And then I want to thank your leadership, Andy Stern, the AFL-CIO, and others who are already endorsing the legislation. Senator Kennedy [and] Senator Derby are already co-sponsors of the bill, but I want you to know the nurse shortage issue, how nurses get treated, health care providers is something that has a direct relationship again with the overall health care system in the country.
And again I appreciate your bringing up the children's issue. I mentioned I started the children's caucus in the senate with Arlen Specter some 26 years ago. Twelve million of that 47 million of uninsured are children in our country. The SCHIP 15 program is something I was a strong backer of, supporter of, early author of that legislation to provide those kind of benefits.
I'll be quite honest with you, when that first came up I had some hesitancy, in fact all of us did in talking about those, Karen, because we had the feeling that if we just took care of children that it would make it harder to deal with the broader population.
But frankly things were moving so slowly that we decided we had to do something to directly reach out to see to it that children were getting a far better start in all of this. So in addition to making sure that families with children would get 300 percent. Three hundred percent of poverty would be included under Medicare. You immediately pick up an awful lot of our kids that you're talking about in your hospital.
The Family and Medical Leave Act makes a difference. I don't know if you know, C. Everett Koop, by the way, I voted against when he was nominated the attorney general because I disagreed with a lot of his view[s], and then he turned out to be my best witness when I was trying to pass the Family and Medical Leave Act. That was that radical idea that you ought to be able to spend time with your child without having to lose your job.
By the way, we're going to introduce in the next couple of weeks we're going to introduce the Family and Medical Leave Act with paid leave for people, by the way, so you don't have to -- but that relationship between parents and children during these periods of illness make a huge difference.
Again I see you nodding. You understand this better than others as a pediatric nurse. And, by the way, I thank pediatric nurses and the American Academy of Pediatrics. They've been fabulous when it comes to dealing with some of these children's issues.
And then getting into some of this stuff early on, I want to see school-based clinics in our country. I want to see a Head Start program that isn't just a literacy program but deals with the whole child so we end up dealing with proper nutrition, good beginning food, issues, all of these basic things. These are the kind of investments we ought to be making. I'm proud to have been chosen by the Head Start Association as the “Senator of the Decade” when it comes to Head Start issues. I wear that badge very, very proudly. I care deeply about early childhood education, what happens with the Head Start program.
Those are some of the things that we need to be doing. As I mentioned earlier, the infant screening legislation that I've authored, the prescription drugs for children, to get better testing for them, the premature birth legislation dealing with efforts in that regard. We just did a major bill on autism in the country for children as well. I've spent an awful lot of my time working on these issues.
When I got to the Senate, I discovered there was a caucus for every imaginable constituency in the country except that one out of four Americans were kids. That's the reason I put so much time on it and I will as president of the United States as well. I care deeply about it.
KAREN TUMULTY: Senator, you've talked a lot about in the past about health care involves hard choices. Sara in Minnesota has sent a question in by email saying what do you see as the most serious problem with our health care system: Cost, quality, or coverage? And you can't say all.
CHRISTOPHER DODD: Well, I'll begin with cost, because I think if you can deal with cost then these other matters can be dealt with. And so the cost of it is what stuns me. And out of all the incentives in our health care system today, our incentives are driving up cost. We need to reserve this and really turn the whole system on its head. If all we're talking about here is sort of tinkering with the status quo, all we're going to do is probably raise costs, maybe marginally deal with some of these questions. But today, unless you fundamentally alter how the system is going to work, then I'm fearful we'll be back here again four, eight years from now talking about the same subject all over again.
All these incentives today in health care are cost-driven. We don't provide the incentives within the system to do just the opposite way, and that is to encourage the incentives to have better lifestyles, to do things that are less harmful to you, to encourage businesses to provide environments for people to stay.
I come back to the point I tried to make earlier as well here. The incentive to have a cleaner environment, a better energy policy in the country, seeing to it that we insist on schools, for instance, that you don't have to market fast food or junk food.
Forty-nine percent of the schools in the United States of America have contracts with soft drink companies and junk food companies. Forty-nine percent. And then we wonder why kids have obesity problems. Then we wonder why they have diabetes problems.
So the cost issue, they do that because the money comes into a poor school district. They're struggling to make ends meet so that exclusive contract that allows that soft drink company to have a contract with them is very appealing to them to save some money. We need to deal with those underlying issues in my view as well here. The cost I would think is a major issue.
KAREN TUMULTY: And given this problem is what it is and the urgency that people feel about it, what's your sense of what is a realistic time frame for getting to universal coverage? Barack Obama says it's four years. Hillary Clinton says it's eight years.
CHRISTOPHER DODD: Well, you know, I'm impatient. I didn't jump into the presidential politics because I woke up when I was five or ten and decided this is my life's ambition. I've been relatively content and happy working in the United States Senate. I've got these two kids. A late bloomer in the father business obviously.
KAREN TUMULTY: What were you thinking?
CHRISTOPHER DODD: My daughter Grace was born 48 hours after 9/11 in Arlington, Virginia. I'm watching the Pentagon burning from the hospital she was born. I could watch her literally being born and see the Pentagon burn. And I thought ever since that moment, as all of you as parents or grandparents have, what kind of life is she going to have growing up watching those events? What kind of world is she going to grow up in?
And so I feel a certain amount of impatience in all of this. I think with the right relationship in the country, they insist upon issuing a priority. And I would tell you today I wouldn't put a time frame on it, but I make this the first order of business in a Dodd administration. This goes to the heart of our economics. It goes to the heart of who we are as people. It goes far beyond the issue of sort of one set of issues. The danger in forums like this is because we have a tendency to stovepipe the issue. We're here talking about health care. What I tried to say early on to you is that what happens in the workplace in terms of job possibilities, income, salaries, retirement benefits all contribute to the health care issues as well. Energy policy, environmental issues contribute to the health care policy. So when I understand the importance of having this discussion, it's important to realize it's far-reaching in its implications. So to me I would want to see us have a universal program begin, far sooner than, with all due respect, four or eight years.
I think with leadership in the country that makes this important, that makes this important. If you can have, if you get rid of these permanent tax cuts to the top one percent of income earners, get the war ended in Iraq that we're spending $2 million a week, $8 million a month, we can provide the resources to really move in this direction. So I would make it a top priority in my administration. I wouldn't want to put a time frame on it because I think it's too important but for us to get there as soon as possible.
KAREN TUMULTY: Great. Thank you very much.
CHRISTOPHER DODD: Thank you all very, very much.