JOAN: I was wondering if Whoopi had anything to say about health insurance, in this country.

WHOOPI: Well, you know, I will never understand why everybody in this country doesn’t have it. I don’t understand what happened to the health stations that I grew up with.

JOAN: What’s a health station?

WHOOPI: A health station … they were situated all through the city. And you had a health card, which you took in there; it was where you got all of your inoculations and vaccinations.

LIZ: Was this in New York or San Francisco?

WHOOPI: No, this was here. And it’s still there; the building is still there on Ninth Avenue and 27th Street. And if you needed your dentist stuff done, you had dental work done — you got it all done there. And, really, it was very inexpensive for my mom, you know, as a single parent. I just don’t understand why, when we’re paying — and I have to marry the two together — if we’re paying 50 percent of my income and you’re paying 50 percent of your income, and Oprah’s paying 50 percent of her income, and Bill Gates is paying 50 percent of his income, how come —

LIZ: Well, all of that money’s going to Iraq, I guess.

WHOOPI: It’s not like I’m going to get any of that money back. You know, people get money back on their taxes. You know, in 25 years I’ve never gotten a penny back. So I don’t understand why — if you’re getting 50 percent of all these people making this dough — why it’s impossible for us to toss some of that dough towards a health plan. I mean, we bail out banks that set up certain situations that are cheesy and really bad, but we bail them out. We bail out everybody …

JOAN: Exactly.

LESLEY: I was remembering a story that I did, gosh, more than ten years ago, about a family on the west coast. Their son was a hemophiliac who got AIDS from a transfusion. This was before they really understood where AIDS came from. So they had these stunning bills for the medications that the son needed. And even though the father was earning a decent salary, they couldn’t keep up with the medical costs. In order to take care of their son – this family had other kids – they had to get divorced because the father earned too much money to go on Medicaid. They were happily married. They were raising kids. They needed the father in the household. But they had to get divorced, because the health care benefits had run out, and the only way to take care of their son was if they went on Medicaid. So this family was broken apart. It was a story that stayed with me. It weighs on my heart all these years later.

JOAN: It’s medieval.

LESLEY: It’s evil and it’s … did you say medieval or evil?

JOAN: I said medieval. But evil is just as good.

LESLEY: This story is something you could hear about in any place in the country.

JOAN: I have a friend who just came in from Paris, a guy who’s 48 years old who had a brain tumor last year. He spent three months in the hospital. It cost him nothing. With his work medical insurance, it cost him nothing, just the way the French thing is set up. It cost him nothing at all. I have friends here in America — an actor and his producer wife. The actor has brain cancer. The producer told me the other day that if he hadn’t been in SAG it would have cost them $800,000.

WHOOPI: Oh, my God. Yeah.

LIZ: Well, can I just inject one little practical note here? Nobody has a better health plan than Hillary Clinton. Hers is superior, I think, to Barack Obama’s. This is one thing that’s in her favor. But, once she became the president, could she really ever get that through the Congress? I mean, as long as we’re so evenly divided between liberals and conservatives, we’re never going to get any of these things through. And my friend, Pete Peterson, the great sage of Medicare, social security and health care, he just feels that all of these entitlement programs — the government is now in no position to put any of them into effect. You know, we haven’t even paid for the Iraq war yet. Isn’t it trillions of dollars, like three trillion?

JOAN: Yes.