Political Quotes

“What got me to the floor was not to talk about FEMA, but when the gentleman brought out a chart about the economy and jobs, that is what I wanted to talk about. The gentleman mentioned preexisting conditions. What I said was this may or may not be good public policy to deal with that. I think it is, but we ought to deal with it in a responsible way. The Republican plan was to assist jobs in having high-risk pools for those with preexisting conditions to go into. And that way you simply don't even pretend you are suspending the laws of economics and telling the insurance companies you can't raise your rates because we have suspended the laws of economics. You recognize that is a cost and that is a subsidy that will have to be borne, but you do it honestly, not this way, not the way we did it by saying, hey, we are just going to pass a law, have everybody covered, and assume we have suspended the laws of economics and insurance rates will not go up. The gentleman mentioned that insurance rates have been rising over the years; you bet they have. And part of the reason for which is we have shielded insurance companies from competition. We don't allow them to sell insurance across State lines. And nowhere in this legislation do we allow them to do that. We also don't allow individuals to have the same purchasing power that companies have so you can't as an individual with pretax dollars go out and shop for health insurance.”