As grateful as we are for all the work the community health centers do it is also important that we recognize that they cannot solve the health care crisis facing our Nation by themselves.

Community health centers do a great deal with limited resources. They provide critical medical care services to many who would otherwise have no other place to go or would end up in an emergency room.

In Illinois community migrant homeless and public housing health centers operate 268 primary care sites and serve close to 1 million patients every year.

We need a vibrant Medicaid program and strategies to expand affordable access to health care for all especially for the specialty care services that community health centers do not provide.

It is important for women to have a choice to have an opportunity to plan their families because if they don't the Republicans have said this is an ownership society. You are on your own and they're going to begrudge that child everything from WIC to a Pell Grant to health insurance.

To do what we are doing in this budget to our children cutting their health care funds decreasing opportunity simply so we can pay for tax cuts and a war in Iraq is beyond belief and we need to reverse it.

That's why I wrote this book: to show how these people can imbue us with hope. I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It's like a tonic.

Look if you have somebody who doesn't have health insurance who doesn't have a doctor or dentist and in order to deal with their cold or flu or dental problem they go to an emergency room - in general that visit will cost ten times more than walking into a community health center.

When the Nobel award came my way it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions including literacy basic health care and gender equity aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh.

We know that there are significant health benefits from consuming more fruits and vegetables and that's an opportunity for us to sort of move away from some of the meals that we've been preparing in the past.