Amy Klobuchar: Affordable Care Act Was the Beginning, We Need to Build on It

EXCERPT:

KLOBUCHAR: "The Affordable Care Act was the beginning, not an end. And certainly the last thing you want to do is to create more chaos, as was just pointed out on your show, by throwing everything out and throwing people off their insurance if they have preexisting condition. I went to the floor and read a hundred letters from people and basically closed the Senate down two nights ago about what would happen to them if they didn’t have those protections. So you build on it. You immediately put in cost sharing reinsurance, some bipartisan bills that would bring premiums down. Then you go to a public option, something we wanted to do to begin with, it could be done with Medicare or Medicaid. And the one glaring omission over the last decade where Congress has done nothing is bring down the cost of pharmaceuticals. And that means everything from negotiation with Medicare to bring down cost for us seniors, to bringing in less expensive drugs from Canada, a bill that I have with Senator Grassley. In Minnesota we can see Canada from our porch and we see those cheaper prices and we want them in our country."