Democratic Response

almost all of them from working families -- have no health insurance. That's over 3.8 million more than when President Bush took office. Those Americans lucky enough to have health insurance have seen their premiums go up each of the last three years. The increase in premiums that middle- income families have seen over the past three years is larger than the four-year tax cut they've been promised. This is an invisible tax increase on middle class families.

Tonight, three years into his Administration, the President acknowledged that the rapidly rising cost of health care, and the increasing number of Americans with no health coverage, are problems. But the solutions he proposed -- more tax cuts -- are not the right ones. More tax cuts will do little to make health care more affordable or reduce the number of people without insurance, and they will weaken health coverage for those who now have it.

When I was driving around South Dakota this summer, I met a nurse in Sioux Falls who has cancer. She told me that she couldn't afford the $1,500 a month her drugs cost. She told me that she was going to die -- that she was a lost cause. But, she said, we must solve this problem; don't turn more people into lost causes.

We believe that the federal government should use the power of 40 million Americans to lower prescription drug prices and to allow us to get more affordable drugs from Canada -- instead of forbidding both. Drug companies and insurance companies are the only ones who benefit from that restriction -- not the American people -- and that's why we want to change it.

Retirement

And in our vision of an "opportunity society," promises made to those who have worked a lifetime will be honored in retirement. That's why we believe that America's pension system needs to be strengthened, and that Social Security's benefit should a guarantee, not a gamble.

Only when every American who wants to work, can, when every child goes to a good school and has the opportunity to go further, only when health care is available and affordable for every American, when a lifetime of work guarantees a retirement with dignity and when America is secure at home and our strength abroad is respected and not resented -- only then will we have a union as strong as the American people. That's the America we want to build, because that's the union the American people deserve.

Thank you for listening, good night, and God bless America.