Now I studied the arguments and the evidence for and against a minimum-wage increase. I believe the weight of the evidence is that a modest increase does not cost jobs and may even lure people back into the job market. But the most important thing is you can’t make a living on $ 4.25 an hour. Now —especially if you have children, even with the working families tax cut we passed last year.
In the past, the minimum wage has been a bipartisan issue and I think it should be again. So I want to challenge you to have honest hearings on this, to get together to find a way to make the minimum wage a living wage.
Members of Congress have been here less than a month but by the end of the week—28 days into the new year—every member of Congress will have earned as much in congressional salary as a minimum-wage worker makes all year long.
Everybody else here, including the President, has something else that too many Americans do without and that’s health care.
Health Care
Now, last year we almost came to blows over health care, but we didn’t do anything. And the cold, hard fact is that since last year—since I was here—another 1.1 million Americans in working families have lost their health care. And the cold, hard fact is that many millions more—most of them farmers and small business people and self-employed people—have seen their premiums skyrocket, their co-pays and deductibles go up.
There’s a whole bunch of people in this country that in the statistics have health insurance but really what they’ve got is a piece of paper that says they won’t lose their home if they get sick.
Now I still believe our country has got to move toward providing health security for every American family, but—but I know that last year, as the evidence indicates, we bit off more than we could chew.
So I’m asking you that we work together. Let’s do it step by step. Let’s do whatever we have to do to get something done. Let’s at least pass meaningful insurance reform so that no American risks losing coverage for facing skyrocketing prices but that nobody loses their coverage because they face high prices or unavailable insurance when they change jobs or lose a job or a family member gets sick.
I want to work together with all of you who have an interest in this: with the Democrats who worked on it last time, with the Republican leaders like Senator Dole who has a longtime commitment to health care reform and made some constructive proposals in this area last year. We ought to make sure that self-employed people in small businesses can buy insurance at more affordable rates through voluntary purchasing pools. We ought to help families provide long-term care for a sick parent to a disabled child. We can work to help workers who lose their jobs at least keep their health insurance coverage for a year while they look for work, and we can find a way—it may take some time, but we can find a way—to make sure that our children have health care.