Political Quotes

“Thank you, Mr. Ryan, Mr. Altmire. And let's just talk about health care during that 6-year period in which the Republicans controlled every piece of the apparatus down here in Washington. By allowing them to set a health care agenda for this country which made a really good deal with the insurance companies and the drug companies and a lot of the for-profit health care entities, what we saw over that decade of time, where the Republicans were driving the agenda here in Washington, was for businesses in my district and in your district, 120 percent increase in the amount of money that they were paying for health care. Now, it would have been nice if revenues for those same companies were going up by the same percentage, but they weren't. Revenues couldn't keep pace with the health care inflation that businesses, many of them small mom and pop shops, manufacturers that maybe employed only 10 or 20 people, it couldn't keep up with the rising costs of health care. And so businesses went under. We lost manufacturing and industrial capacity to countries overseas that spend half as much as we do on health care, and approach it in a very different way. Workers during that same period of time saw their wages remain largely flat because every bit of extra money that the company that they worked for made went straight into health care costs. For small businesses it was even worse.…”