(APPLAUSE)
We also need to address some other issues. We need to make absolutely certain the regulatory burden is minimal so that we don't load unnecessary regulations -- whether it's on small business or farmers and ranchers, it's a lot easier if people have the opportunity to focus on doing what they set out to do economically, rather than having to spend time filling out useless paperwork that goes back to Washington, gets filed in a bureaucracy, and nobody ever reads.
We also need to deal with some other issues like health care, for example, and a key cost of doing business in this country and one of the major problems that everybody is faced with is the rising cost of health care. The President has put forward a series of proposals, and we'll be pursuing those, as well, in our second term to deal with that. Some of it, we've already done. We've established health savings accounts, for example, that allow people to set aside money tax-exempt for their own health costs. He's got a proposal now for a refundable tax credit that will allow folks at the lower of the scale to be able to use that system in order to pay for catastrophic insurance premiums. We've got a package of proposals with respect to Medicare that were enacted. Again, Senator Grassley had a major role to play in all of that, as we reformed the Medicare system, the most significant reforms that will provide prescription drug benefits in the years ahead for senior citizens, a series of those steps that have been taken that are crucial.
And one of the areas that badly needs work is this whole question of medical liability. And what has happened in so many places around the country -- I know it's true in my home state of Wyoming, it has been true in a great many other states, as well, too, is the medical liability system is broken. And it has resulted in rapid increases in the cost of malpractice insurance to the point now where many physicians simply cannot afford the malpractice insurance to be able to stay in business. It has been especially true in the OB/GYN specialties. My home state of Wyoming, our hometown of Casper, the cost of premiums for a GP -- a general practitioner has more than doubled in the last three years. They now pay $100,000 a year for an insurance policy just to be able to do business. A new doc fresh out of medical school has to come up with about $80,000 up front to be able to go into practice in my home state of Wyoming.
Now, that's true -- this is problem that's hit, I know, in Ohio. It's hit in Pennsylvania. It has been a problem across the country, and we have to find ways to deal with that. And there are ways to do it. Some states have done it successfully -- been able to cap non- economic damages in the medical liability area. You need a system that will, in fact, respond to legitimate concerns, where people need to be able to go to court and redress those grievances, and get compensation when there have been serious problems and malpractice. But there has to be limits. Or if we don't have limits, we end up in the kind of situation where we drive up the cost of health care, and we find ourselves with a significant number of people unable to acquire health care.
And it turns out that about 60 percent of all the uninsured in America are either owners of, or employees of small businesses. So part of what we have to do here is find ways to make it possible for small businesses to acquire health insurance at reasonable cost. And one of the President's proposals that we'll pursue again in the future is this notion of association health plans, of allowing small businesses to come together and pool their interest, and be able to negotiate the same kind of discounts that a big corporation can. We think that's a major idea that needs to be adopted, that would help significantly in this area.
(APPLAUSE)
But there are a lot of areas we can talk about -- the whole education field. I know Iowa has been one of the leaders in education nationally. That's a vital area of interest. The President, I think, deserves a lot of credit for what he did when he first came to office. His first priority was the No Child Left Behind Act. And we can talk about that some more if you would like, as well.
But let me take just a few minutes, before we open it up to questions, and talk a little bit about the national security situation -- what has come to be called the war on terror, and the set of circumstances that we're faced with today and what we've tried to do over the course of the last three-and-a-half years now.
Again, 9/11 changed everything in the sense that it forced us to deal with, and face the brand new threat of the terrorists -- in this case the al Qaeda organization -- that had struck the United States several times before, going back probably to the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993; but certainly, when they hit our embassies in East Africa in '98; or the USS Cole, in Yemen in 1990 -- excuse me, in 2000.
And the attack that they launched on us on 9/11 was one that had been in the works for about five years. They first started talking about it in 1996. And of course, that morning we lost 3,000 Americans -- more than we lost at Pearl Harbor. And subsequent to that, it became necessary for us to figure out how we could best respond to this dramatic new threat that had never before faced the United States, at least not in that form.
Added to that was that we learned shortly after 9/11, as a result of people that we captured and interrogated, or documents we found when we went into Afghanistan, that the organization, the terrorists were trying to acquire deadlier weapons than anything they had ever had before, that they were trying to get their hands on chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons to use against us.
And they know no restraint. There's no reason in the world why they would hold back and not use something like that if they could get their hands on it. So the biggest threat we face today is the possibility of a terrorist cell setting up shop inside one of our own cities, with one of those truly deadly weapons -- a biological agent of some kind, say, or even a nuclear weapon that cost perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives, not just 3,000, if they were to launch such an attack.
It's a whole different scale of threat, a different kind of problem than we've had to deal with in the past. The President did a number of things by way of starting us on the course that I think has been absolutely essential in safeguarding the nation. We've been successful now for about three years at avoiding any attacks, but they're still out there. They're doing everything they can to try to find another way to launch further attacks against the United States. And we must not let our guard down.
What the President did, among other things, obviously, we moved aggressively here at home to strengthen our defenses. We've created the Department of Homeland Security, the biggest reorganization of the federal government in 50 years. We passed the Patriot Act, that gives law enforcement the tools they need to be able to prosecute and put terrorists in jail. We passed a thing called Project BioShield that spends a lot of money investing in new technologies to be able to defend ourselves against attack with biological weapons in the future. We've strengthened our intelligence capabilities. We're in the business now of reorganizing the intelligence community to improve our capabilities there -- a whole series of things that are defensive, that are sound policies that need to be done.
But a good defense is not enough. And the lesson the President has driven home to all of us is to remind us that it's absolutely that if we, in fact, are going to succeed in this conflict with these terrorists, we have to go on offense, as well.
(APPLAUSE)
If you think about it, if we're successful 99.9 percent of the time on defense, if they get through one-tenth of 1 percent of the time, that's enough to do enormous damage -- given the scale of the threat that we're forced to deal with here. So going on offense has meant using U.S. military force to go after the terrorists wherever they plan and train and organize. It also has meant going after those who support terror. This is a new departure. For a long time, the civilized world had sort of ignored those who were sponsoring terror out there. We'd go after terrorists, but states that sponsored terror were able to get away with sort of turning the other cheek and acting like they hadn't had any involvement in these enterprises. The President said no more. He said, henceforth, what we're going to have a key component of our policy is that we will go after those who sponsor terror or support terror or provide sanctuary and safe harbor for terrorists.
And the first place we went, of course, was Afghanistan. And we told the Taliban, either give up the al Qaeda or else. They said, no, they wouldn't give up the al Qaeda. So the Taliban is out of business. The al Qaeda is shut down.
(APPLAUSE)
The al Qaeda camps that they had operated in the last half of the '90s have been closed. We've got a new government stood up in Afghanistan. President Karzai in charge now. They'll hold free elections next month in October -- the first elections in Afghanistan, I guess, probably in history. And they're on their way to getting a new Afghan national army stood up so they can take over responsibility for their own national security, which is a key part of the strategy. And we're moving forward in Afghanistan.
In Iraq, we were faced with a situation where we had in Saddam Hussein a man who had started two wars, a man who had previously produced and used weapons of mass destruction. He used chemical weapons on his own people, and on the Iranians -- a man who had been a sponsor of terror. He was paying $25,000 a pop to the families of suicide bombers. He had previously provided sanctuary in Iraq for the Abu Nidal organization, other terrorists organizations, had a relationship with al Qaeda. And we went into Iraq, obviously, and Saddam Hussein today is in jail, which is in fact where he belongs.
(APPLAUSE)
We've got a new government stood up in Iraq, an interim government with Mr. Allawi in charge as the Prime Minister. The Iraqis now control all of their ministries. They're involved in making a lot of the key decisions with respect to their government. We're working very aggressively, as well, to train Iraqi forces, and to stand up their own security forces so they can take on the responsibility that our guys are having to bear now. And that's going to be vital in the future. We can only take the process like this so far, and then ultimately they've got to be willing to take on responsibility for their own governance, their own political system, and for their own security system. And that's the direction we're headed in there, as well, too.
I don't want to underestimate for anybody how difficult these tasks are. These are tough, challenging places to operate. We're up against some very tough and murderous types, if you will, when we see what is happening in various places in terms of the conflict that's going there. But it is absolutely essential we get it right -- because what we have to do here, the ultimate solution isn't just to kill terrorists. You can do that all day long. The ultimate solution here is to make certain that we change the circumstances on the ground in places like Iraq and Afghanistan so they never again become breeding grounds for the terrorists that launched those deadly attacks not only against the United States, but obviously, for the kinds of terrorist attacks that we've seen around the world.
This is not just a U.S. problem. There was a bit of a tendency, I think there, perhaps, at the outset to think, well, they hit the United States, the United States is the bogie man here, and they're going to come after us. Well, they'll probably come after us more than anybody else just because of who we are and what we believe, but just look at what has transpired around the world since 9/11 with the attacks in Madrid, in Casablanca, in Mombassa, in Istanbul, in Riyadh, in Bali, in Jakarta, and most recently, of course, in Baslan, in Russia, this week where they slaughtered hundreds of school children. We don't yet know exactly what the relationship is between the groups that launched that attack and whether or not al Qaeda is involved. That jury is still out on all of that. The Russians seem to think there may be some connections there. But obviously, it's another example of the kind of problem we've got with those who resort to terror to try achieve their political objectives as happened in that case.
It's vitally important that the decision we make going forward this year -- get it right. Because there are fundamental differences between the way the President wants to proceed and the way we've operated now for the last three years, and the way Senator Kerry would approach these problems. I think the record is pretty clear.
I have previously said, and I will say again today, all of us want to thank Senator Kerry for his service in Vietnam. He talked about it a lot at his convention. And it deserves praise. And we want to honor his service. We do that for all of our veterans, regardless of what their political views might be. And certainly, Senator Kerry is entitled to same treatment, judgment. The problem I have with Senator Kerry's record is what happened after he got to the United States Senate, and what he did for 20 years in the Senate.
