Political Quotes

“I thank the gentlelady for joining me tonight in this Special Order. You have heard, Mr. Speaker, my enthusiasm to put an end to this socialized medicine bill. You haven't heard what has been refreshed, at least, although I am confident you have heard, the things that the Republicans would like to do. Republicans have introduced at least 42 different health care bills here in this Congress. We have passed good pieces of legislation in the past when we were in the majority and sent them over to the Senate, where the trial lawyers blocked any reform. And one of those is to reform lawsuit abuse in medical malpractice. The number that I get from the health insurance underwriters is 8.5 percent of all our health care costs is wrapped up in lawsuit abuse-- the litigation, the defensive medicine, and the premiums that are unnecessary because of the lawsuit abuse. That 8.5 percent represents $203 billion a year going out unnecessarily wasted out of health care. This 4,000-page bill. And we don't know how many pages it is now. I don't know if they are back there now writing more pages, or if they are burning up pages trying to balance out their carbon footprint. But in this 4,000-some page bill, there is not anything in there that does one single thing to reduce one penny in unnecessary health care costs that has to do with lawsuit abuse. So that is number one. We want to fix that. We have introduced legislation on it.”