and though there were lots of different feelings aboutther or not the rorm we've been pursuing is a good idea or not, every one of the conversations that we had was a substantive conversation, a seous conversation about what our working falies and small businesses are facing as a consequence of the status quo. and also, the fiscal problems we are facing and how health care reform done right is an important part to fixing our financl health. tonight what i want to do is go through some of the slides wit you, mr. president. i'll try to be pretty brief because the hour isate. but i wanted to give you a context of the kinds of conversations we had in our state. the overarching feeling people had, i think, when we were done, we do need to change the status quo. the status quo is intolerable for our working families and

small businesses but there's a deep concern that we have the capacity to make it even worse. i left every meeting saying i think that's too low a standard for the congress. we need to douc better than that and get health care reform done but w need to get it done right and we need to take the time that's required to get it right. the first slide i started with, just to explain to ople the difference between our deficit and our debt. our dicit, this slide shows is the annl gap betwe our revenues and our expenses and the debt, which we have far too much of in this country, is what ds up year after year after year. if we continue to have our deficits. the second slide shows that over the years we have actually continue a pretty good job of managing our deficit. anythi over 3% is a problem because it's not -- 3% of g.d.p. because it's not sustainable. our burring costs will outstrip our ability to catch up to our

deficits if we're above 3%. this slide shows that over the years, except in wartime, except in world war ii and more recently duringhe wars in iraq and afghanistan, we've gone far above the 3% of.d.p this slide just shows us how we've stacked up debt so quickly over the last decade or so. we had about $5 trillion of debt on the nation wn the last presiden assumed the presidency, and we're now at $12 trillion. as us can see there has been an enormous spike between 2000 and today. just a slide to show how much debt this really is. our entire economy, our entire g.d.p., gross domestic product is $14 trillion and our debt is $12 trillion. you can see that thesether countries all have a much smaller g.d.p. than we do.

that's good news. unfortunately, some of these folks, parcularly china, on an awful lot of -- own an awful lot our debt. we also took theime to say to people, how did this happen? how did we let this happeto the american people? and our kids and our grandkids? who is it possible that in a plichg of eye we went from having $5 trillion in this country to having $12 trillion of national debt? what you can see is both parties bear responsibility for where we are. the tax cuts in the early 2000 are responsible for $1.4 there will of the debt passed on to our kids and grandkids. $900 billion for the wars in iraq, which we department pay -- didn't pay for. the recovery act funding, rohl $780 billion, 40% in tax cuts and the rest in spending. the bank bailnut, half in the

last administration andalf i this admintration. $600 billion. and medicare part-d, the drug program for seniors which, again, may be a veby legitimate program, and it may be a program that people like to have but we didn't pay for it. we said to our kids and our grandkids, "you pay for it." these are just the c.b.o. numbers that show our steady state. if we don't do anything to change course, the mountain of debt will just continue to grow. and, then, finally, and this is going to take us into the health care discussion that we had in colorado over recess, finally if you look at thee biggest drivers of our future deficits what you see on thislide, here's our tax revenue line; you can see that's pretty fl@t over time, from 2008 to 2039. but the bigst drivers are interest o the debt that we're putting on the backs of our kids and our grandkids.

and the spiraling costs, or, maybe a better word is skyrocketing costs, given the direction of this line of medicaid and medicare. the president talkedbout this last night. the biggest driver other than interest are rising medicare and medicaid costs. obviously the biggest driver of medicaid and medicare costs are riding health care costs so no neart what one thinks of health care reform discussion if you take seriously thedea we have to get ahold of our deficit, we have to get ahold of the national debt before it so constrains thehoices of our kids and grandchildren, that we do not provide them the kind of opportunity they should have we have to do something about the medicaid and medicare lines and that means health care reform. this shows there's no way to cut yourself out of the problem with discretiary spending cuts and

is slideust shows if we don't do anythin differently, now, we're all binge to be talking about tax cuts in the future that none of us would ever reasonably support. so my vie is that we do face a very significant fiscal challenge in this country and that health re reform is not sufficient to solve that problem. but it is a important step and, in fact, the problem cannot be solved without addressing health ca. and as this slide says, we need to help solve, we need to urgeently address health care reform to help sour our nation's isis and also provide greater access to quality, affordable, health coverage. there's a lot o questions in my ste about whether orot we're up to making the tough choices that need to be made to be able to create a piece of legislation that can produce meaningful reform and can do it in a way that really changes the cost

curve for medicaid and medicare. i don't think we have a choice. i don't think we have a choice because our working families and small businses cannot endure another decade like the last one. these numbers apply to my state but they're very similar in states all across the united states. in colorado, if you look over the last 10 years, our median famine come is actually down in our state by about $800. and, by theay, that's before we entered the worst recession since the great depression. so that number is probably even worse today. it most certainly is worse and this, byhe way is an important issue for our worng families, our families in our state, because it implies something about how well ur economy is working or not working for middle-class families. it's ver worrisome to see that our income is down $800 and the national number, i believe, over the same period isown $300. bu at the same time, o families revenues were flat the

health care cost premiums in colorado went up by 97%, almost double. mr. president, i can tell you this, i've now visited every one of the 64 counties in colorado. i have had a conversation in every place. and i can find people that disagree on everything. but mr. president, i can also tell thrgh is not a single person i a single one of those conducts who have said to me my health care insurance is7% better today than at the beginning of the decade or my health care coverage is 97% better than at the beginning of the decade, thank you, michael bennet for making sure my costs went up 97%. no one is saying that. the reverse is true, the quality is going down. in my state also, over the same period of time, the cost of higher education has gone up 50%. so we are saying to our working families: you are going to have

to make do with less; your income is going to be lower at the end of the decade in real dollars than it was at the beginning of the decade and at the same time you are going to have to assume dramatically increased health care premium costs and a dramatically increased cost for sending your child to one of our institutions of higher education. it positive no wonder that given the circumstances where household revenue is flat, tse costs of things tt are not nice to have, they're essential to have for the stability of our working families and our small businesses, that as our revenues have been flat the costsave yrocketed absolutely out-of-control. and it's no wonder why in my statnd in states all across the united states states that the last decade saw a time when families were saving not what they usually save which is 7% of their n income but zero. and going into debt with credit

cards a home equity loans in order to try t bridge this extraordinary gap between their revenues and their costs. this is a second slide shod on this subject in my state and that, this just makes the point that todayn the united stes we're spending roughly 18% of our gross domestic product on health care and thas going to 20% in the blink of an eye if we don't do something different. and what i believe and what i said out there is that we can't hope to compete in this global economy if we're spending a fifth of our economy on health care and every other industrialized country in the world is spending less than half that. or at least if we can find a way to spend less than that on health care, we should, so that we can compete. mr. president, it's no different than if you had two small businesses and you are a small business owner, two small businesses across the street from each other thaid the

exact same thing and one was spding a fifth of their revenue on their light bill and the small business across the street was spending less than half that. you don't need an m.b.a. to know which of those two companies is going to being able invest in its business plan and grow for the future so ife are going to compete inhe way that i know this country can compete, we've get to do better than spending more than twice what all of our competition is spending on health care. this is another slide that shows just how tough this has become for our middle-class families in colorado. what you see here is that, this is between 2000 and 2020. again, this is before we entered the worst recession since the great depression. the numbers would be worse, today but this shows the rate of increase of insurance premiums. that's the red line. and t re of increase of

wages. that's the blue line. and i was asked when i was in the meetings, are there any small business people here. they would say "yes." and i would say i this related? are the two curves related to each other? and they said, michael, of course they're related to each other, of course. because we're doing everything we can to try to continue to offer health insurance to our employees but one of the things that's -- one of the effects that is having, we cannot pay people the salary increases they're entitled to so there is a direct relationship between the cost of insurance and the wage compression that's happening in our state and, by the way, i would hazard a gets that one of the reasons why a median family income is down is that small businesses are struggling, mightiy, to keep insuring their workforce. this slide shows if we don't change anything, if we hang on

to the status quo, by 2016 a lot of our families are going to be spending 40 cents of every one of their household dollars on health care. on health insurance. the country system is bankrupting a lot of our families. 62% of a bankruptcies are health care-related but the amazing thing to me on this slide is that of those health care-related bankruptcies, nearly 80% of them were folks that hadoverage. these are peoe that bought coverage, they paid into the system to create security, to create stability, and when they need that protection it wasn't there. and as a rult their families went bankrupt. by the way, this could happen to anybody. as the president said last night,ou could be anybody. nobody can predict within they're going to get sick or when a tire of theirs is going to get sick. and that's an important point, too, mr. president.

althese slides, everything up here, are not abut the folks in our -- about the folks in our country that are or are not insured, this is about 300 million americans. everything we have talked about should be of concern to much in our country. this slide shows what this seems means for small business. a family-owned bits, small businesses have struggled mighti to keep insuring the workforce. our small businesses pay 18% more to coverage their employees than large businesses do. somebody said well, michael don't you know the reason for that is that they're small and their pool is smaller and it is harder to spread the insurance risk across a small group of people. and of course that's true but from a business perspective it's absolutely ridiculous. because no small business owner i know would invest 18% more for

something unless they were making their business 18% more productive. of course, the reverse is here truce because they're buying the same thing that the large company is except they're in the buying the same thing. it is not as though they are getting 18% better cerage for their employees than the larger ployers: the deductibles are higher and lack of predictability is gre and it's a huge problem for small businesses and it is no surprise between to 2002 and 2007 you can see the drop of the percentage of folks insured at work. most folks in my state and your state, mr. president, are employed bsmall businesses. and they just cannot keep up with the increases. and the proof is in the pudding: here we see over 50%f small businesses in 2000 were insuring their workforce and now we're at about 40% and that number is

dropping. so in myiew, no matter where you are on the questions like a blic option, which i have supported and have supported, or not a pubc objection, that the thing that should bind us all together is driving costs down in our system. and i won't bother tonight to go through all these but -- but i ll say that in my judgment, a lot of this is pretty commonsense reform that we all ought to be able to support, changingur incentive structure so we reimburse people based on quality of care, not the quantity of car, coordinating patient care. we've got an incredible example of this in colorado, at rocky motain health plans on our western slope, and grand junction, mesa county, alsoat the university of colorado at denver, ao at denver health, the public hospital in @enver. but there are examples all over this country, like the mayo clinic, a place that any one of

us would be proud to send our ki or send our parents for care that's delivering a higher-quality care at a lower price. that's something that we should all be able to support. more focus on money on preventive care, increased competitn so that our families and small businesses have a broader poo to choose fm. 53% of people in my state, the state of colorado, are insured by just two insurers. this is an important pnt that we haven't talked about enough and this is the investmen in health care i.t. when i traveled through those 64 counties, there was not a county that i we want t went to where e wasn't a convenience store, and apart from the loose beef jerky that sits on the counter, everything in tt store had a bar code on it. that's 1970's technology that people have used to manage the inventory of their local convenience store, the business owner has used to manage their

inventory. only 3% of hospils in this country use that sort of technology. one out of 25 doctors in this country uses that technology. i'the parent of three little girls. they're 10, 8 and 5, and i can't tell you the number of times i've had to take them to the doctor or take them to an emergency room and have to explain again the whole story of why we were there. you know? and what the last doctor told us orhat the last nurse told us. an that's nod the flt of the doctors or nses, but it i the fault of having a system of insurance and a medical system that has not invested in technology. mr. president, you know i've spent roughly half my career in the private sto and when i look at the -- the complete lack of investment in technology when it comes to health care and when it comes t electronic medical records, i find it breathtaking, staggering that we could have that kind of inefficiency. so this is an important

investment as w. and then bundling payments to include medical professionals to work together to -- for the benefit of paients. the final slide i wanted to share, mr. president, is just a reminder that there is a lot of insurance reform that's part of the proposals that are floating around the congrs. this is thehole iss about having people no longer denied insurance because they have a peexisting condition or dosing their insurance because they fac a lifetime cap of some kind that many people don't even know they have inir picy, or because their child gets sick and nobody predicted that and they get thrown off the policy, or because they lose their job. i think all of us can agree tt that's a good idea. and so, mr. president, as we leave this week and we go home again this weekend, as i get to go back to colorado and continue to have the conversations with people in my state, what i'm going to be fused on are the ars of agreement, that are areas of agreement that working

families, small businesses, democrats, repubcans, independents can all aee upon. and i think that if we could focus our energyhere, focus our attention there, what we're going to find is that the areas of disagreement are actually smaller than we imagined them to be. and, finally, in my view, we have waited far too long to do these commonsense reforms. i know there's a lot of concern about our rushing into something, and ion't thinke should rush, but wink i think we need to get -- but i think we need to get this done and i think we need to get it done right. the american people need us to because they c't endure another ten years of graphs that look like the ones that i just showed you. i don't want to have to go back to colorado and explain why now only 25% of people are covered at work. i don't want to have to go back and explain why there's been another 97% incree in their premiums. i don't want to have to go back and explain why when people buy

insurance, there's no pric predictability to that insurance. and i have great hope, great optimism that working together we're going to get the kind of heal care reform done in a smart way, in a wise way, in a measured way, in a way that's going to require implementation over a period of time. but there's no doubt in my mind that we're goingo be able to get this done. and with that, mr. president, i say thank you to you for listening to my remarks, and i would ask unanimous consent that the senate adjourn under the evious order. the priding officer: without objection, the senate stands adjourned until september 11, friday, at 9:30 a.m.

we will replace it saturday at 7:00 p.m. eastern on c-span's america and the courts. the session also marked the first appearance on the bench for justice sia sotomayor fata furies former juice sandra day

o'connor on what it is like to be a woman on the court. >> if i am sure that future will show that we half other women serving on the court. it is hard to be the only woman on the court, which i experienced for about ten years or so. and in a population which these days produces at least 60% of law school graduates ing women, it is realistic to think in terms of a number of women on the court, not jusone. >> hear from other justices duri supreme court week as c-span looks at the home to america's highest court starting october 4th. >> the supreme court heard arguments this week in a case involving campaign spending and freepeech. we spoke with reporters about the significce of the case.

>> asmundson jester the westy unusual we are dealing of the case in the supreme crt's. alsoarked the debut for the solicitor general and also the first oral argument in which the new justice sotomayor participated. in fact here is your very first question asked in her oral argument. >> are you giving up on your earlier arguments that there are ways to avoid the constitutional question to resolve ts case? i know that we ask for further briefing on this particular issue of overturning two of our cots precedence mud are you giving up on yo earlier arguments that yr statutory interpretations would avoid the constitutional question? >> on your screen right now is the lonime observer and reporter of the supreme court for the "los angeles times" and tribune papers. he wasn the courtroom yesterday. listening to this and the press box and there is so much and want to ask you but let me start with asking you about the

atmospherics atoll of the unusual aspects to yesterday's oral argument. >> guest: it was quite unusual, a new justice and the first case of a turn to be such a bigeal. this is a case that has been carried over from the spring. look like a minor case involving, sort of a fine case involving hillary's movie made by a small conservative group. had a little bit of corporate funding. the federal election laws unfortunately as complicated as the health care laws. it is a very complicated statutory arrangement that basically says if you get some corporate money you can be regulated the fec. if the disclosure donors. it has been tied up to a case and the supreme court decided to reherkey the cason focus o the question of should we overturn all our past decisions and ruled that corporations have a free-speech right to advertise, and sort of seek to elect or

feat vedra cdidates. for 100 years federal laws basically said corporations can't get too involved in the politics, and suddenly this has become a very big deal on whether the court is going to erturn a series of decisions and basically allow corporations to get into politics big time. >> host: i will give the phone number so you can join in this conversation (202)737-0002 for democrats and (202)628-0205. it seems in all the reporti inuding yours, everyone is looking at two justices in this case, the chief and samuel polito. i will play another clip of one question the chief justice maid and how do you explain how everyone is looking to what they might be thinking. >> i mean, i thought our

doctrine and the first amendment was th you write it to broadly, we are not going to pare it back to e point where it is constitutional. if it is overbroad isnvalid. >> i don think it would be substantially overbroad justice scalia if i tell you the fec has never applied this statute. to say it does not apply is to take on essentially nothing. >> way don't put tir first amendment rights in the handsf fec bureacrats and if you say you are not going to apply it to a book, tn what about the pamphlet? >> i thank a pamphlet would be different. a pamphlet is pretty classics though. there is no attempt to sayhat for 41b only applies to video and not to print. >> host: that particular question was widely quoted. why? >> gst: it is sort of a busy line but roberts is sort of frustrated like a lot of the conservatives are that this law is so complicated that you can't

tell people in advance, if i am a corporation can we put out a video? can we put out a movie? is michael moore's movie potentially illegal because the lambasted george bush in 2004? there was part of the argument that said what about the corpate funded book? suppose a corporation funded a book and it said there is an attackn a particular candidate or an attack on barack obama could the government regulate that with? this gun into a heated debate in march and then again yesterday on sure the principle is no corporate mone in politics but how does that play out in a series of cases, and so roberts st series of questions yesterday that he is skeptical of the whole notion of whether the government in can regulate rporate speech and politic >>ost: i willlay one more clip and then we will get your calls. this is senator mccain. i understand the senator

mccain and russ feingold for listening to the-- and afterwards they approached reporters in the supreme court plaza. >> it is apparent to me that the questioning shows a strong disconnect, a great disconnect between what the justices and the reality of politics when corporate and union leaders were able to call up, were able to take calls from powful committee chairmen and who would say, i want a check in six figures in soft money and by the way your legislation is up before my committee. we saw the corruption of soft money. resod in the telecommunications reform act. we syeth in other legislative activity. as the influence of special-interest and corporate and union money in wng