Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, first of all, my experience with the Affordable Care Act actually comes from the State legislature, where, in a bipartisan manner, the Republican governor joined with the minority Democrats and a handful of Republicans in the Senate State House to pass Medicaid expansion. Why did we do that? If you looked at what was happening in Arizona, it was some of the Trump areas, as I like to call them, these rural districts where the rural hospitals, which are not only the medically necessary infrastructure of the area but also the economic drivers, the only high-wage employers in the area, they were about to shut down. There was so much uncompensated cost, because people were using the emergency room as their primary care doctor, that these hospitals were starting to have to charge more and insurance companies were starting to refuse to pay more for their premiums, that they needed to respond to that. In the end, what we started hearing from these hospitals is that we are going to have to shut down the emergency room, and if you have an emergency, we are going to have to helicopter you either to Tucson or Phoenix. Now, for many of you guys who are not Southwesterners like us in the Southwest, we have a lot of territory and a lot of land. For you to just drive to Phoenix for emergency care would be pretty insane, let alone the expense of helicoptering into Phoenix was even more so than that.…”