"I spent six months in the hospital and five months in a Stryker frame—six months in all—when my back was broken, and I saw the dedication of the people. I knew it was costing a chunk of change for the insurance companies to cover my health insurance on it, but it didn’t present itself—the starkness, the compelling aspects—about the pocketbook. And that has never left me. That aspect of it I’ve been constantly exposed to in the time that I’ve been in the United States Senate, and I go back to it on many different occasions, on the different hearings or things that follow this. One very important set of hearings that I had in the Senate were the hearings in the—We’re getting ahead a little bit but it’s probably worthwhile pointing out because it’s close to this subject matter. In ’78, when we took the committee across the country, we tried to match up, in the hearing, the panel that we’d have. We’d have one panel and we’d have probably ten witnesses, but we’d group them so that there were five subject matters. We would have the way that the United States covered the particular illness, and the way the Canadians covered it, just to present to the American people the difference, you know, how the systems were in terms of real life circumstances. We’d have what were common experiences in the particular areas that families would be affected."