Big Think

Question: Can we afford to rescue the health care system after bailing out Wall Street?

Tommy Thompson: You can’t, you can’t do it all. I mean, I mean, let’s face it. We’re a debtor nation and the Chinese government owns trillions of dollars of our debt and they have about probably trillion dollars of our cash, and Saudi Arabia was, you know, when the oil prices were as high as they were this past summer, you know, it was just a complete drain of dollars and resources from America. And, what we have to do is we have to get back and start, you know, looking at America. We got an infrastructure that is, that is collapsing around us, we got military equipment that is collapsing because it’s been overseas for so long and fight in two wars and we’ve got a healthcare system which every single American, I think, not every single American but a good share of America, you know depends upon. And I think it’s worth saving, and we’ve got to start addressing it in 2009 or [else] it’s going to, if every year we don’t address it, it exacerbates itself and gets worse.

Recorded On: 10/30/08