DES MOINES — Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, spoke in a cramped room in the Primary Health Care Outreach Clinic on Tuesday about America’s health care and her inherited wealth. It was her first visit to Iowa since the caucuses in January.

Heinz Kerry stopped in Des Moines to participate in a roundtable discussion about health care along with members of the clinic and Iowa’s first lady, Christie Vilsack. Heinz Kerry said she recognized the need for health care, something she learned while living in Mozambique.

“The idea of healing, the idea of being alive or dead was very immediate in those places,” she said.

Her focus, she said, was providing preventive medicine to people. She said she also wants to bring what’s called “the benefit of doing right” back into policy decisions about health care.

“Policy makers make decisions; they never look beyond the externalities; no one looks at the benefit of doing right,” she said. “I think it’s time we have a discussion about what we value.”

Looking back to her time in Africa, she said the role of the Des Moines clinic was important because it provided access to many people in the area who couldn’t afford health care or some of the other services the clinic provides, such as day care. Heinz Kerry said her main concern was to get a system in place that would allow as many people as possible to get quality health care.

“How much goodness and wellness [would there be] if this type of institution existed?” she said.

In quoting Democratic hopeful Dennis Kucinich, she blasted the current U.S. health care system.

“There is no reason whatsoever [for this],” she said. “We are already paying for medicine, we just aren’t getting it.”

One of the problems with the current health care system, she said, is that people are paying too much for medicine.

According to plans laid out by her husband, people would be able to pay into a “catastrophic” account that would allow each person to pay up to a set limit.

Once that limit is breached, she said, the money paid into the account would pay for any extra costs that are incurred.

Besides her views on health care, Heinz Kerry also spoke about recent speculations about her inherited wealth.

Heinz Kerry inherited her fortune after the untimely death of her first husband, Sen. John Heinz III, R-Pa.

Heinz was killed in a plane crash in 1991 and was the heir to the his family’s fortune, which is now believed to be worth as much as $1 billion.

“You measure people by what they do with their lives,” she said.

“It was a very sad day — I’d rather have my husband alive than that money.”

She said accusations that her wealth would cause her to be out of touch with voters were “so ludicrous that it makes you laugh.”