 What could be more important to the average person and the average family than having access to quality affordable health care? And here in Massachusetts, we've had a long history of developing a very, very effective health care delivery system because we are home to some of the most prestigious and successful world-class hospitals, research institutes and medical schools. As a result of that, high quality health care is available to people here in Massachusetts. But generally, only if you have health insurance. And in the mid-1990s, we were like the rest of America. We had about 15% or so of our people without health insurance. And most of those people had one, two, even three jobs, went to work every day, earned a living, but did not have enough money to buy health insurance. And in those cases, their employer was not providing health insurance and they couldn't afford it. And so basically we had low, middle working, income working people working hard, but not having health insurance for themselves or their families. And that was just fundamentally unfair. Really, health care and health access to health care really is a right. It's not a privilege. And so I was very happy as chair of the Senate Ways and Means Committee to work with my colleagues on a piece of legislation that was signed into law that was designed to cut the number of uninsured in Massachusetts in half. And we set a goal of trying to do it over about a five-year period. And we created tax credits for employers. We created tax credits for employees so that we could help subsidize through the tax system the premiums for those who didn't make enough money to be able to afford to offer it in the case of a business person or for the employee in the case of the workers who didn't make enough money to afford the health insurance premiums. We also made a major change and were the first in the country to get permission from the federal government to put working poor people on our Medicaid program. These again are people who were working poor. They were people who were going out to work every day, but could not afford to buy health insurance. We petitioned the Medicaid program in Washington and we got a waiver and that allowed us to add hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts workers and their family members onto public assistance, publicly subsidized health insurance, thereby reaching the goal of reducing and cutting in half the number of uninsured here in Massachusetts. And by the way this follows about a decade after then Governor Michael S. Dukakis in 1988 and the legislature put through the first state legislation in the country to have universal health insurance. When Governor Weld came into office after Mr. Dukakis left office he convinced the legislature that it was too big a burden during that recession for employers to have to take on that new policy and so it was repealed. And so that basically put us back to where the rest of the country was and some 10 years or so later we did the piece of legislation that I just described. So this is very important for all of us and I have to say as a person who's almost never been without health insurance and as a person who's now had four major health related incidents over about a six-year period, I know just how valuable it is to have the peace of mind of having quality health insurance and knowing that I'm going to be able to get to see the doctors and get the treatments that I need for whatever situation I face. And I don't think that it should just be the wealthy and I don't think it should just be people in government. I think everybody should have health insurance and I'm glad that the federal government has now joined Massachusetts and a few other states by passing federal legislation. It will take some time for it to ramp up and we are now in the position here in Massachusetts as a result of the legislation we did 10 years ago and the legislation we did just a few years ago. We're now at 98% of all Massachusetts residents having health insurance. For most of them it's affordable. Some people are still struggling to meet those premiums but at least they have access to health insurance and we're going to keep trying to find ways of controlling the costs of health care so that premiums will not go up as fast as they have in recent years and so that people will not find themselves in a situation of having to choose whether to buy food or pay their health insurance premium or pay for another tank of fuel or their health insurance. A fundamental right and I'm proud that Massachusetts over these last 25 years has really moved dramatically from having a substantial number of people uninsured to now having 98% of all Massachusetts people insured and having access to the highest quality care anywhere in the country in fact anywhere in the world.