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And one of the things I'm proudest of, our plan automatically, immediately will cover all children in America, day one. You go to school, you're covered. You go to day care, you're covered. You go to child care, you're covered.
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I'll tell you, I am determined that when I am president, America will stop being the only industrial nation on this planet that doesn't yet accept that health care is not a privilege for the elected or the selected or the wealthy or the connected.
KERRY: Health care is a right for all Americans, and we're going to make it available to all Americans.
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Because of George W. Bush's wrong choices, we're spending $200 billion in Iraq while we're running up the biggest deficits in American history, the biggest deficits announced yesterday and the biggest debt.
We've added more debt under George Bush, more debt to the national debt of our nation, than we added from George Washington to Ronald Reagan. And that threatens Social Security, and that's what Alan Greenspan told us the other day.
In fact, they're raiding the Social Security trust fund in order to pay for their mistakes in Iraq.
And at that convention in New York last week, guess what? George Bush said he actually had a new idea. And you know what it is? Do you know what his new idea is? It's actually the bad old idea of privatizing Social Security and cutting your benefits.
That's the wrong choice, wrong direction, wrong leadership for America.
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So as president, I will not privatize Social Security. I will not cut benefits. And I will not raise the retirement age, because when you've worked for a lifetime in America, America owes you what you've earned.
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And because of this president's wrong choices in Iraq, we're spending $200 billion there instead of investing in making America energy independent.
George W. Bush's energy policy is to trust the big oil companies and the Saudis. In fact, a national news magazine just reported that a senior member of the Saudi royal family said that as far as they're concerned in the U.S. presidential election, it's Bush all the way.
Well, I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity, on our own intervention, not the Saudi royal family. And that's what we need.
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KERRY: Now, let me tell you what we're going to do. We're going to do what we could have been doing four years ago and three years ago and two years ago and all of last year and all of this year. We're going to invest in technology and in the vehicles of the future. We're going to invest so that no young American in uniform will ever be held hostage to America's dependence on oil from the Middle East.
That's the right choice, that's the right direction, that's the right leadership for America.
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And because of this president's wrong choices, we're spending $200 billion in Iraq, while we're told that we can't afford to do everything that we should be doing for homeland security. I believe it's wrong to be opening fire houses in Baghdad and closing them down in the United States of America.
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It's wrong to cut money for our first responders. It's wrong to let 95 percent of the cargo that comes into this country get by without ever being physically inspected.
That's the wrong choice, that's the wrong direction, that's the wrong leadership for America.
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So my friends, we're going to set a new direction for this country. We're going to defend this country here at home and we're going to do all we can possibly do in order to protect it from another terrorist attack. And we are going to make homeland security the kind of priority that it ought to be, not a political slogan.
