Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I wish to address an important investigation that has produced significant results for low-income people and that the Republican majority in the Senate helped bring about. In late December 2014, news reports indicated that a nonprofit hospital chain in Missouri and Kansas, Mosaic Life Care, had been aggressively suing low-income patients. These news reports further indicated that many of these patients qualified for financial assistance and were wrongly placed in collection. Let me be clear. Nonprofit hospitals should not be in the business of aggressively suing their patients. As recipients of a tax-exempt status, these hospitals have a heightened duty to assist patients in qualifying for financial assistance. That means these hospitals must implement a financial-assistance policy where low-income persons receive free- or reduced-cost care. Further, these types of hospitals must assist low-income persons in ensuring that the proper paperwork for government assistance or private insurance is properly filed. In essence, because of the favorable tax treatment these hospitals receive, they have a duty to help our Nation's most vulnerable. For these reasons, I began my investigation into Mosaic to determine what, if anything, went wrong. On January 16 of last year, I sent a letter to Mosaic to begin my inquiry.…”