Nancy Pelosi: I said to him, "We simply could not have done it without you."
I say to each and every one of you and to the American Public Health Association, we
simply could not have done it without you.
There was a time--now, this is still not part of my remarks, because I don't want this coming
out of my time, but I want to express my appreciation to you.
There was a time in the course of the debate on the legislation, say, when the election
was lost in Massachusetts and the rest, when the press came to me and said, "How are you
going to pass this bill, how on earth are you going--nobody believes you're going to
pass this bill."
And some of you have heard me say before, I said to them, "We are not going to miss
the opportunity of a generation to have health care for all Americans as a right, not just
a privilege for a few."
We believe we will stand there with Medicare, Social Security, now Affordable Health Care
as a pillar of health and economic security for our people and for our country.
So not wanting to miss this opportunity, we will go up to any fence that stands in our
way and push open the gate.
If the gate doesn't open, we will climb the fence; if the fence is too high, we'll pole
vault in; and if that doesn't work, we're going to parachute in, but we're not letting
anything stand in the way for affordable health care for all Americans.
So after it was over, the press came and said, "Which one did you do?"
So I said, "Well, actually, we pushed open the gate."
We 220 members strong went up to that gate and pushed it open, and we were successful
because we were not alone.
All of you were there with us--with your ideas, with Dr. Benjamin's participation at the table
with us, with your ideas, with your sense of urgency that this needed to be done, for
the work that you do on the front lines in public health for Americans--you were there
with us in helping to get the people to Congress who believed, as we believe, that this needed
to be done.
So when we pushed open that gate, you were there right with us.
We felt your strength, your urgency, your dedication, and I hope you take some sense
of satisfaction in your own participation in passing the bill.
As I said to President Obama, I say to you: We simply could not have done it without you.
Thank you, American Public Health Association.
I am pleased to be here and I know that you will shortly be hearing from Dr. Barbara Garcia,
our Director of Public Health in San Francisco, and we're very proud of her, we're proud of
our mayor, Mayor Lee, we're proud of our former mayor/now Lieutenant Governor, Gavin Newsom,
who are all part of our healthy San Francisco agenda.
In that spirit, we welcome you--to all the attendees of the 140th--140th, wow--Annual
Meeting.
It's a privilege to welcome you to San Francisco, a city committed to improving the health of
every patient, every family, where in healthcare innovation, economic progress, we take pride
in leading the way.
We believe here, that the health care for the most privileged person, the wealthiest,
most privileged person in America is better if every single person in America is in the
loop, has access to quality healthcare.
We're all in this together.
Of course, our interest is at that level.
The men and women of APHA, you all work every day to uphold the cornerstones of this organization's
mission: Protect, prevent, live well.
As doctors, nurses, academics, social workers and mental health professionals, you work
to protect patients from harm, prevent illness and disease, and provide care to Americans
so that they can live well.
Meeting these goals means focusing not only on one case at a time, it means addressing
the theme of today's gathering--prevention and wellness across the life span.
I understand that Dr. David Satcher is here, former head of the CDC, who has dedicated
his life to all of that.
Dr. Satcher, thank you for being with us.
Where's Dr. Satcher?
Dr. Satcher is a hero to so many of us.
Ensuring the well-being of Americans from childhood through their--what I'm in now--golden
years--golden years?--is a measure of your success and our country's success.
It is the core objective of two threads of our country's social compact: The Affordable
Care Act and Medicare/Medicaid.
When we enacted the Health Care Reform Bill with the partnership of the APHA--once again,
Dr. Benjamin, thank you--our aim was clear: To secure quality, affordable care for every
American.
That's a long goal for us to reach.
We put health decisions in the hands of patients and doctors and the community, not necessarily
insurance companies.
It was about following your passion for what you wanted to do in life--your passion, your
talent--not your insurance policy.
So ending people being job locked because a child had a preexisting medical condition,
or that any diagnosis, phone call, accident could determine the economic survival of a
family.
We heard your call, Dr. Benjamin wrote to us, and these were his words, "To move from
a system that focuses on treating the sick, to one that focuses on keeping people healthy."
And we acted to move from a disease-care system to a health-care system.
It was more about the health of America, healthy America, as we have healthy San Francisco,
than just health care, as important as that is.
Central to the effort was prevention and wellness across the life span, and I was very pleased
to hear Dr. Tucson say how important prevention was.
I was also pleased to hear him talk about the challenges we face with electronic medical
records, how important it is for that to work correctly.
That's why we passed in the Recovery Act, more than one year before the Affordable Care
Act, we passed billions of dollars of investment in electronic medical records and information
technology, so it would be ready when the health care bill passed; of course, more needs
to be done.
But that is very important, because if we were starting from scratch, if we had no health
care system, we would be starting with you, we'd be starting with community health centers.