Ron Wyden

Since 1994, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have considered it politically risky to offer a plan to fix America's broken health care system. The American public, though, has paid the price for this silence as health care costs skyrocketed, millions went uninsured, and millions more grappled with financial insecurity and hardship.

It took a little over a decade to build a coalition strong enough to beat the insurance companies, but in 1990, then Senator Tom Daschle and I passed a law regulating the private market for supplemental Medicare insurance policies.

I want to tell mayors, county chiefs and heads of big companies: don't just chase GDP growth; don't chase the biggest profits at the expense of our children and grandchildren and at the cost of sacrificing our ecological environment.

Nonetheless, to the extent that terrorists have come into our country or suspected or known terrorists have entered our country across a border, it's been across the Canadian border. There are real issues there.