Jeff Merkley On Bush’s Veto

As a resident of Virginia, a lot of my posts either focus on issues related to Virginia or discuss the reaction a politician from Virginia has to national issues. Nonetheless, I do receive updates from various campaigns/organizations from throughout the country that I believe are worth watching. It is as a result of these updates coming in and the fact that I have already covered the reaction of several Virginians to debate surrounding SCHIP that I wanted to point out what someone from another part of the country has to say about President Bush’s decision to veto the legislation.

In addition to calling upon Congress to come together in a bipartisan manner to override the veto, Jeff Merkley, who is the Oregon House Speaker and is a Democratic candidate for US Senate, issued a statement which stated that Bush put the special interests before millions of American children.

“Expanding CHIP would move America forward. It would guarantee that low-income kids get the preventive care they need to grow up healthy. And it would begin to address the problems of a broken health care system built on making profit and denying claims. With his swipe of the veto pen, President Bush has shown the American people that he fundamentally does not understand the health care crisis our country is facing.

I continue to be amazed at just how disconnected from reality President Bush actually is. The fact that he believes covering more kids will move health care in the wrong direction is tragic.”

Of course I could probably go on about how Merkley’s statement shows that people from all across the country are frustrated with the way the Bush Administration is running our country, but I believe there is another issue at hand here. One that members of both parties can probably agree upon. Our health care system needs improvement because there are far too many people suffering as a result of the enormous costs of health care. While I am pleased to see that many of the presidential candidates have come up with various health care plans, we cannot wait until 2009 to begin addressing this issue.

Like Merkley said, Congress should come together in a bipartisan manner to tell President Bush that he cannot put his own politican agenda and his favorite special interest groups before the needs of American children. Once that is accomplished, I believe that Congress should continue working together in order to address the problems in the entire health care system. If that is done now, then a more productive solution will be formed once our next president takes office in January of 2009.