Political Quotes

“I do have a bill that I've introduced in this Congress, whose number has escaped me, that provides full deductibility for health insurance purchased by individuals, and that's been slow in the coming. It's been lagging. It's rooted back in wage and price controls of World War II. When they froze those wages and prices, then employers figured out that if they couldn't give a raise, they could give a benefit. So health insurance became the benefit that got added on because wage dollars couldn't go up. When that happened, we built a foundation of employer-based health insurance in this country, and now it becomes the politics of holding on to that employer base. That's why there's not the flexibility that we need to have there. But an entrepreneur, an individual that starts up a business, a ma and pa store, they have to pay some of the highest premiums because they don't get into a group plan, and they can deduct 100 percent of the health insurance for their employees but not for themselves. There's something really wrong with that. That needs to be fixed.”