Political Quotes

“I asked my colleague from Rhode Island to stay on the floor for a couple of minutes because I wanted to thank him for the erudite and eloquent explanation he has just given for why our focus should be so aggressively and unrelentingly on the tremendous opportunities for saving health care costs and raising health care quality at the same time. I am very proud to have joined him and other colleagues in a task force that is seeking commonsense solutions to lower the costs of health care and at the same time increase its efficiency and quality. The two go together. The phenomenon he just discussed of reducing readmissions to hospitals once patients are discharged also means that the quality of those discharges, the rehabilitation plans and hand-offs to primary physicians, and the suffering and pain for those patients is reduced, and that is just a microcosm of one example of how this goal can be accomplished. We are late in this year, and we have no real time remaining before the end of this year to do the kinds of reforms legislatively that will help advance this ball. But the attention we need to devote to this issue is clearly beyond this year and beyond the next year. We are making progress, and the graphs show it, but there is so much progress to be made in extending lifespans and quality of life as well as reducing the cost of health care.…”