Quotes About Health Care System

“[Norm said,] 'To all those who argue this war is a mistake, I'd like to point out that we've removed from power one of history's most ruthless and belligerent tyrants. A man who cold-bloodedly murdered thousands of his own people. Who built palaces for his personal pleasure while schools decayed and his country's health care system collapsed. Who maintained one of the world's most expensive armies while he allowed his nation's infrastructure to crumble. Who channeled resources to his cronies and political allies, allowing them to siphon off much of the country's wealth for their own personal gain.”

— Ben Fountain

“Common sense tells us that the government's attempts to solve large problems more often create new ones. Common sense also tells us that a top-down, one-size-fits-all plan will not improve the workings of a nationwide health-care system that accounts for one-sixth of our economy.”

— Sarah Palin

“America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.”

— Walter Cronkite

“I have stood on the front lines of the health care system as a doctor, patient and concerned parent. Those experiences have served as my guideposts throughout the struggle to reform America's health care system. And it's those same experiences that tell me that fear and election hysteria should not overshadow the reality of reform.”

— Jim McDermott

“I have young kids. The fiscal burden that will be imposed on them is going to depend primarily on whether we tackle this looming problem in our health care system - with rising costs that don't seem, by the way, to be necessarily associated with higher quality. That is the key burden that they will face.”

— Peter Orszag

“Cost is the spectre haunting health reform. For many decades, the great flaw in the American health-care system was its unconscionable gaps in coverage.”

— Atul Gawande

“Universal coverage, not medical technology, is the foundation of any caring health care system.”

— Richard Lamm

“I don't want to suggest that controlling pharmaceutical costs is the answer to what ails the U.S. health care system. It isn't.”

— John Kitzhaber

“While Free Choice Vouchers didn't fulfill my vision of a health care system in which every American would be empowered to hire and fire their insurance company, they were a foothold for choice and competition and a safety valve for Americans whose employers are already forcing them to bear more and more of their family's health insurance costs.”

— Ron Wyden

“As Congress debates overhauling the nation's health care system, it should not authorize a reform plan that would further our financial woes. We must avoid creating an unsustainable government program. There is no question that reform is needed, but health care can be made more affordable without massive and expensive new bureaucracies.”

— Erik Paulsen

“The real cure for what ails our health care system today is less government and more freedom.”

— Steve Forbes

“One thing governors feel, Democrats and Republicans alike, is that we have a health care system that, if you're on Medicaid, you have unlimited access to health care, at unlimited levels, at no cost. No wonder it's running away.”

— Mike Huckabee

“The health care system is really designed to reward you for being unhealthy. If you are a healthy person and work hard to be healthy, there are no benefits.”

— Mike Huckabee

“Joining forces with Cardinal Health supports Kinray's mission to help retail independent pharmacies serve as an integral provider of care for our evolving health care system.”

— Stewart Rahr

“The best a health care system can do is to equip itself to meet the needs of each individual woman and birth. Those needs run the gamut from undisturbed home birth to planned cesarean section.”

— Ina May Gaskin

“There are few in America that really know how to take advantage of the current health care system.”

— Matthew Lesko

“Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties; the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains.”

— Thomas Frank

“America's health care system is in crisis precisely because we systematically neglect wellness and prevention.”

— Tom Harkin

“Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), included a recent article by Barbara Starfield, M.D., stating that physician error, medication error and adverse events from drugs or surgery kill 225,400 people per year (Chart 1.5).11 That makes our health care system the third leading cause of death in the United States, behind only cancer and heart disease”

— T. Colin Campbell

“We need to make nutrition the central element of our health-care system. Furthermore,”

— T. Colin Campbell

“Obamacare is a perfect tool to crush free enterprise and force all Americans into a socialist health care system.”

— Marlin Stutzman

“Besides taking jobs from American workers, illegal immigration creates huge economic burdens on our health care system, our education system, our criminal justice system, our environment, our infrastructure and our public safety.”

— Jan C. Ting

“Almost every economist agrees that the American health care system is unsustainable. Medical care is so expensive that it is busting all of our budgets - government, business, and personal. Eventually, the medical price bubble will pop. What, then, are the alternatives?”

— Jim Cooper

“As a doctor who took care of patients for 25 years, I saw the problems with America's health care system every day.”

— John Barrasso

“Our health care system squanders money because it is designed to react to emergencies. Homeless shelters, hospital emergency rooms, jails, prisons - these are expensive and ineffective ways to intervene and there are people who clearly profit from this cycle of continued suffering.”

— Pete Earley

“I have argued for years that we do not have a health care system in America. We have a disease-management system - one that depends on ruinously expensive drugs and surgeries that treat health conditions after they manifest rather than giving our citizens simple diet, lifestyle and therapeutic tools to keep them healthy.”

— Andrew Weil

“The defeat of Obamacare will come from the realization that the very idea of a government-administered health care system is absurd ... and by people opting out of the system and developing workarounds.”

— Rand Paul

“Medical costs are soaring because our health-care system is totally screwed up. Doctors and hospitals have every incentive to spend on unnecessary tests, drugs, and procedures.”

— Robert Reich

“Not even mentioned is the possibility, discussed by economist Dean Baker, that the deficit might be eliminated if the dysfunctional privatized health care system were replaced by one similar to those in other industrial societies, which have half the per capita costs and at least comparable health outcomes.”

— Noam Chomsky

“It is hard to miss the irony in the fact that the very same week that Republicans were publicly heralding Congressman Paul Ryan's plan to inject market forces into the American health care system, they were crafting a budget deal to strip them from the health reform law.”

— Ron Wyden

“The reality is that the special interest groups that have lobbied against Free Choice Vouchers object to any measure that would empower employees to have a say in their health benefits because it begins to erode their power in the current health care system.”

— Ron Wyden

“It's time to look beyond the budget ax to assure access to health care for all. It's time to look for bipartisan solutions to the problems we can tackle today, and to work together for tomorrow - building a health care system that works for all Americans.”

— Ron Wyden

“Ohioans, I think, in large numbers, have felt that the government has not been on their side in all of these issues: on pensions, on the cost of prescription drugs, on the health-care system generally, on jobs, on trade agreements.”

— Sherrod Brown

“The best way not to encounter America's health care system is not to have to encounter it.”

— Don Lemon

“As long as we decline to allow sick, uninsured people to just lie down and die on the side of the road, everybody has to have insurance for the health care system to work sanely.”

— Gail Collins

“It's not logical that we boast the most advanced and powerful internationally integrated economy in the world, then claim organizational incompetence and poverty when it comes to creating and funding a national health care system for all Americans.”

— Jesse Jackson, Jr.

“If you don't have to pay for everything you're providing, why in the world should you cut the cost of it, when it's gonna be covered? That's what's happened to the health care system. Why cut costs when somebody's gonna subsidize whatever you charge. But there's another reason why tuitions are never gonna come down on major American universities, and that's because they are the training ground of American liberalism and radicalism. And they have to make jobs there attractive to the professors and the teachers who are gonna indoctrinate these young skulls full of mush.”

— Rush Limbaugh

“[The healthcare bill is a] headlong rush into socialism ... we will not stand for the Obama-Pelosi-Reid hijacking of our freedom and democracy so they can impose their socialist 'utopia' of higher taxes, restricted access, inferior quality, and deadly inefficiency on the best health care system in the world ... You and the RNC are all that stand between the Democrats' scheme to take more of your hard-earned income to pay for this unsustainable, freedom destroying entitlement and an opportunity to work for real, truly bipartisan step-by-step solutions ...”

— Michael Steele

“With the socialization of the health care system through institutions such as Medicaid and Medicare and the regulation of the insurance industry (by restricting an insurer's right of refusal: to exclude any individual risk as uninsurable, and discriminate freely, according to actuarial methods, between different group risks) a monstrous machinery of wealth and income redistribution at the expense of responsible individuals and low-risk groups in favor of irresponsible actors and high-risk groups has been put in motion.”

— Hans-Hermann Hoppe

“We have never seen health as a right. It has been conceived as a privilege, available only to those who can afford it. This is the real reason the American health care system is in such a scandalous state.”

— Shirley Chisholm

“We also support the exploration of alternative ways to deliver health care. Moving toward alternatives, including those provided by the private sector, is a natural development of our health care system.”

— Stephen Harper

“What would you do, sir, if terrorists were killing 45,000 people every year in this country? Well, the current health care system, the insurance companies, and those who support them are doing just that ... Because they die individually of disease and not disaster, [radio host] Neal Boortz and those who ape him in office and out, approve their deaths, all 45,000 of them - a year - in America. Remind me again, who are the terrorists?”

— Keith Olbermann

“Exercise freaks ... are the ones putting stress on the health care system.”

— Rush Limbaugh

“Mother Theresa said it is not how much we give that is important but how much love you put into doing it. So it is not just how many units of housing we create or how good our health care system is, it is that people have someone to eat dinner with and that people have someone to hold their hand when they die. That is what we are called to do and it is the love of Christ. It is relationships.”

— Shane Claiborne

“The problem with the American health-care system that it is not working for the American family.”

— John F. Kerry

“Capitalism is very far from a perfect system, but so far we have yet to find anything that clearly does a better job of meeting human needs than a regulated capitalist economy coupled with a welfare and health care system that meets the basic needs of those who do not thrive in the capitalist economy. If we ever do find a better system, I'll be happy to call myself an anti-capitalist.”

— Peter Singer

“It is when physicians are bogged down by their incomplete technologies, by the innumerable things they are obliged to do in medicine when they lack a clear understanding of disease mechanisms, that the deficiencies of the health-care system are most conspicuous. If I were a policy-maker, interested in saving money for health care over the long haul, I would regard it as an act of high prudence to give high priority to a lot more basic research in biologic science.”

— Lewis Thomas

“For the gay and lesbian community, even though I'm not gay I think its really important to speak out for people that aren't necessarily dealing with the same circumstances you're dealing with and don't have the benefit of the health care system or the government that you do.”

— Chelsea Handler

“The United States remains the only major country on earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all of our people. And yet we are spending almost twice as much per capita. We have a massively dysfunctional health care system. And I do believe in a Medicare for all single-payer system, whether a small state like Vermont can lead the nation, which I certainly hope we will, or whether it's California or some other state.”

— Hillary Clinton

“We need a cost-effective, high-quality health care system, guaranteeing health care to all of our people as a right.”

— Hillary Clinton