An estimated 45.7 million Americans are uninsured, and for those with coverage, health care costs have been rising four times faster than their wages. The average cost of family health-care coverage more than doubled from 1999 to 2008, from $1,543 to $3,354, according to a report by the Institute on Medicine. We need to do better as a nation. President Obama’s recently enacted American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is a good start. Signed into law on February 17, 2009 provides $87 billion to cover state Medicaid programs and offers a 65 percent subsidy for nine months to help the unemployed pay for their COBRA coverage.

I am firmly committed to the enactment of comprehensive immigration reform. Until we bring out the twelve to eighteen million undocumented immigrants out of the shadows,