Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I want to say to the Senator from Illinois that that was an excellent recitation of what the Affordable Care Act has done to ensure health insurance and provide health care for the people of our country. This Senator just wants to underscore one statistic that the Senator from Illinois cited. The Senator cited that 20 million people in the country have health insurance who did not have it before. If the Senator would recall, when we started this deliberation on cobbling together this new law, we were told that there were approximately 45 million people in the country who did not have health insurance. Now, when you break down that 45 million, 11 million of them are undocumented and, therefore, under the law are not eligible to have health insurance. So that leaves 34 million. When you take the 20 million that presently have health care that the Senator cited and add to that 4 million more that will be covered by Medicaid expansion in the 16 States that have refused to expand Medicaid to 138 percent of poverty, now we are talking about 24 million of an eligible population of 34 million. That is two-thirds. That is extraordinary. That has happened just in the last few years. Would the Senator from Illinois believe that?”