Political Quotes

“Mr. Tonko, I am really pleased that you brought that up. You have reminded me of a rather lengthy article from The Sacramento Bee. I am from California. Sacramento has one of the hometown papers, and the Bee was writing a major article on the exchange. In the Affordable Care Act, there is an insurance exchange, and California was the first State in the Nation to follow up on the Affordable Care Act's exchange portion and to put in place a law to build an exchange. Now, at least our Republican friends think that's an awful situation. Governor Schwarzenegger, who was a Republican and is a Republican, signed that legislation before he left office almost 2 years ago now. So this article is very effusive and upbeat about the establishment of an exchange in that they expect to have it online. What they talked about, a lot of it, was of individuals who could get insurance in a large pool and have the same opportunities for reasonably priced policies as occurs in a big business. They also spent a lot of time talking about small businesses. How correct you are that the Affordable Care Act really offers small businesses an extremely important and heretofore unavailable opportunity to get insurance for the employer as well as for the employees, and a very big subsidy is available for those small companies that choose to buy insurance. Up to 50 percent of the cost of the insurance could be subsidized and costs reduced to the employer. Now, that's a lot of money.…”