A sad reminder of why we are in this

Ted Kennedy has a brain tumor.

Even with the a health care plan that equals what every American would get under an Obama or Clinton administration, he has a brain tumor. Even with the world's best health care, most patients with this kind of cancer are expected to lose this battle within one to five years. He may lose this battle, but his tireless work on our behalf should inspire us to win this war.

Not only must we provide health care for all Americans -- and let us meet Ted Kennedy's goal of having this in place by 2010 -- but let us also return our focus to spending money in a manner that makes us safer.

Barack Obama says that the Iraq far has made us less safe. But that is hardly the whole story. The cost of the Iraq war is at least one trillion dollars. The total cost of the Bush tax cuts is around three and a half trillion dollars. With a little over three hundred million people in the United States, that amounts to $1,500 per person. Every family of four has spent $6,000 financing the war in Iraq and tax cuts for the wealthy.

Total spending on all health research conducted world-wide was $129 billion in 2003, and was estimated to be rising at $10 billion per year. By this estimate, spending in 2008 will be $179 billion in 2008.

Quick math: We have spent, in tax cuts for the wealthy and the Iraq war, more than 25 times the total global annual investment in basic human health research. Imagine the progress we could have made, the lives we could have saved, had that money gone to seeking a cure for cancer and AIDS. How much safer our children would be if we had used the money to tackle the looming disaster of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Would a decision to spend this money on research instead of war and tax cuts have resulted in a cure that would could today use to resolve Ted Kennedy's malignant glioma? Maybe not. But it has absolutely cost millions of people world-wide their health and in many cases their lives. Imagine if we had accomplished in the seven years since the tax cuts and war efforts had taken place what we will not, under today's spending scenarios, accomplish for decades? What if the state of the art of medicine in 2008 was equal to what, with today's spending, it will not be until 2033?

We will never know. And saddled with debt and war, it will be difficult to move toward progress. But move we will. There is hope. We are a strong nation. And we will find the strength to redefine our priorities in a way that makes us all safer -- not just from real or imagined military threats, but from all things that threaten our health or welfare.

Ted Kennedy, you have fought for the health of this nation for decades, and we thank you. We hope your unmatched determination keeps you by our side far into the future. But we will have learned nothing from your example if we do not pause and ask: If America had heeded Ted Kennedy's voice on health policy, tax policy, and the war, how many families would have been spared the sorrow that his family now feels? What diseases that now ravage our lives would be relegated to easily cured annoyances?

We stand on the edge of a sea change in American politics. It is fitting that Ted Kennedy, an icon of the future that could have been, stands today beside Barack Obama to seek the future that we deserve. It is easy to say "yes, we can". It is easy to say "change", or "hope". But today, in the most grim manner possible, we are reminded that those words have meaning.