Political Quotes

“Mr. President, the Affordable Care Act is working. It is working better, frankly, than many of us who were there at its inception believed it would at this early stage in its implementation. The numbers are pretty hard to argue with. You have got now upwards of 10 million people who are on either private insurance with tax credits to help them get that coverage, or are on Medicaid through different State plans. That is a big deal, because in just about 1 year, we have reduced the number of people without insurance by 25 percent in this country. In my State of Connecticut, which probably has the best-run exchange in the country, we have actually reduced the number of people without insurance by 50 percent. Better news is the quality is getting better. Some of the measurements we most closely watch to decide whether people are getting better care--things such as hospital-acquired infections and readmission rates after surgery--are going down. That is really good news. Of course, maybe the best news of all is the taxpayers are saving money, an extraordinary leveling off of health care inflation. Health care spending never goes down from year to year. We used to have 7-percent to 8-percent increases in spending on an annual basis. We are now seeing 2-percent or 3-percent increases. In fact, the lowest rate of increase since we started tracking health care spending happened in this last year.…”