Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I thank very much Senator Baldwin and thank the State of Wisconsin for, in a lot of ways, leading the way and showing us what is possible when it comes to delivery system reform. It is pretty amazing some of those statistics Senator Baldwin used when she talked about how much waste there is in the system today. The estimates are from the Council of Economic Advisers, $700 billion; from the New England Healthcare Institute, $850 billion. To put that in context, even if the median of the two is right--somewhere in the high $700 billion range--that is $100 billion more than we spend every year on the military. That is enough money to provide coverage for 150 million more Americans. That is enough to pay the salaries of every single first responder personnel in the country, including firefighters, police officers, and EMTs for over a decade. It is an enormous amount of money that we are wasting today because we have a reimbursement system, as Senator Whitehouse said as well, that essentially rewards providers and hospitals and health care systems for providing volume rather than providing quality. We understand there is not a single health care provider in the country that does not get into this if not for their desire to provide quality health care. There is no malevolent motive involved here.…”