Pelosi: Mass. Election Won’t Stop Health Bill. “We will have health care one way or another.”

[jefferson_dem]

Pelosi: Mass. Election Won’t Stop Health Bill
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

With Democrats increasingly anxious about the special election in Massachusetts on Tuesday and what it will mean for their big health care legislation, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, told reporters in California Monday that the legislation would move forward not matter what.

“Let’s remove all doubt,” Ms. Pelosi said. “We will have health care one way or another.”

Ms. Pelosi acknowledged that the path forward could change if the Democrat in the Massachusetts race, Martha Coakley, loses.

“Certainly the dynamic will change depending on what happens in Massachusetts,” Ms. Pelosi said. “Just the question of how we would proceed. But it doesn’t mean we won’t have a health care bill.”

The speaker also slammed the Republican in the Massachusetts race, Scott Brown, and indeed all Congressional Republicans, for trying to block the legislation.

“I heard the candidate in Massachusetts, the Republican candidate, say ‘Let’s go back to the drawing board,’” Ms. Pelosi said.

She continued at length:

The drawing board for the Republican party on health care is to tear it up and throw it away and shred it and never revisit it. This is the opportunity of a generation. If this opportunity is not realized, there won’t be health care for all Americans.

There is no back to the drawing board. The Republicans in Congress have said we will kill health care reform. They weren’t for Social Security. They weren’t for Medicare. And they aren’t for health care for all Americans. They are the handmaidens of the insurance companies and the American people need to understand that. But rather than focus on them we’d rather focus on what is in our bill. We will have legislation that removes all doubt that health care is a right not a privilege, that we will no longer be operating on the playing field of the insurance companies but they will be on the playing field of the American people.

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http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/pelosi-mass-election-wont-stop-health-bill/#more-19173