I'm still very connected to my family to the world I grew up in. I understand what it means to be afraid that you can't pay a doctor's bill. Or to have to make the choice between buying a band uniform for a seventh-grader and making the insurance payment on time. That will never leave me. It was how I lived until I was well into my adult years.

In the richest country in the history of the world this Obama economy has crushed the middle class. Family income has fallen by $4 0 but health insurance premiums are higher food prices are higher utility bills are higher and gasoline prices have doubled. Today more Americans wake up in poverty than ever before.

It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week the minimum wage family leave health insurance Social Security Medicare retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.

The public has lost faith in the ability of Social Security and Medicare to provide for old age. They've lost faith in the banking system and in conventional medical insurance.

Pharmaceutical companies are enjoying unprecedented profits and access with this Administration. Yet the Republicans' prescription drug plan for seniors has been a colossal failure and over 43 million Americans wake up every morning without health insurance.

Fully 57 percent of American college students are women. Life insurance companies sell more policies to women than to men. As women continue to draw on experience and education they're accelerating their numbers in upper management too.

Furthermore we believe that health care reform again I said at the beginning of my remarks that we sent the three pillars that the President's economic stabilization and job creation initiatives were education and innovation - innovation begins in the classroom - clean energy and climate addressing the climate issues in an innovative way to keep us number one and competitive in the world with the new technology and the third first among equals I may say is health care health insurance reform.

Those outside of autism need to understand this is an epidemic and we need more government funding insurance coverage and education reform.

Opportunity expands when there is excellence and choice in education when taxes are lowered when every citizen has affordable portable health insurance and when constitutional freedoms are preserved.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?