I sit on the budget committee and I can tell you, I mean the good news out there, is that if we had a sensible set of priorities in this country we could do extraordinary things. Because you can co a lot of things for relatively small amounts of money. I mean right now, you have a president who is spending 10 Billion dollars every single month of the war in Iraq.
Do you know that by simply quadrupling the number of community health centers in this country, federally qualified community health centers, you can provide primary health care to every man woman and child, low cost prescription drugs and dental care for less than eight billion dollars a year? You could do that for eight billion dollars a year; we're spending ten billion—
Kall: So for eight billion dollars we could be providing health care to every person—
Sanders: Primary health care; I'm not talking about hospital care, I'm not talking abut surgery, but every American would be able to go to see a doctor, or a dentist, regardless of their income and low cost insurance.
Kall: So there's all this leverage; right now, Congress has incredible leverage to get these cessions, why doesn't somebody throw that in there so that at least we make a major step toward taking care of Americans the way we morally should.
Sanders: But what we're trying to do now is to bring forth a major stimulus package. Remember: the fight right now and a lot of people do not understand it, they don't understand it, is that in the last two years, the Republicans have mounted 95 filibusters; did you know that?
Kall: When I went to the Progressive Summit meeting in February, it was up around 60—
Sanders: It's now over 90; it's 95, I believe. Which is an all-time
World's record for one session of Congress. So it's hard to do good things. You've got a president who will veto serious legislation. But what we are trying to do right now is to get a stimulus package which will begin trying to rebuild America; this one doesn't go anywhere near as far as I would like, but it would put money into infrastructure, there's a continuing resolution that was passed in the House today that will be probably passed in the Senate tomorrow-- I hope it will be passed. Which, among other things, doubles the amount of money that we spend for fuel assistance to help people from going cold in the wintertime; that's legislation that I helped write.
Kall: Be about even with the previous year, then.
Sanders: Well, we'll double the amount of funding; so it's going to be doubled in funding from the Lackey Program, which is significant; so to answer your question, when you need 60 votes to get anything done in the senate, and on a good day we have 51, that's hard. When you have a President that will veto anything, it's hard.
I hope very much that this election will give us a new president; I hope that we will have gains in the House and the Senate and most importantly, I hope that we will have mass, grass roots movement that which says to the congress, you've got to be bold, these are tough times. We can have a national health care program for all people we can make college education free or at least affordable. Are these things expensive? Yes they are. But they are a hell of a lot less expensive than the war in Iraq; they are much less expensive that huge tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country. They are much less expensive than spending 540 Billion dollars or whatever on the military. So we need to change our national priorities and I hope that we can move into that direction.
Kall: Amen. One thing I wrote about today is that the amount we're spending on health care is so much more than any other country, even though we're not getting great quality...
Sanders: Yes, certainly.
Kall: But the system that we have is a quarter (25%) of our national budget, and it's getting worse. It seems like we're just looking around the corner for that to become another crisis were going to face and I wonder if it doesn't make sense to look at that at the same time we're looking at this one.
Sanders: Well, look; you can look at anything you want; George Bush is the president. Remember George Bush is the guy who vetoed legislation to expand health care to a few million low income kids; you're talking about transforming the entire healthcare system and it isn't going to happen.
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