Political Quotes

“there were two headlines in most of the major newspapers across the United States this morning. I saw it in Financial Times as well as the Wall Street Journal. The headlines noted: ``Americans flock to insurance exchanges.'' It was the first day when we had the rollout of the Web site where uninsured Americans had an opportunity to shop--real competition, a variety of plans. Illinois has 54 choices for uninsured people. This is a dream come true. Most of these people have lived their entire lives either without health insurance or with no choice, a take-it-or-leave- it policy that may be worthless when they need it. These are situations where many of them never once in their lives were able to be insured when it came to health insurance. There were a lot of reasons for it. Some of them had jobs that paid so little, offered no benefits, and they couldn't afford to buy health insurance. Some of them had preexisting conditions or perhaps a history of asthma in their family, diabetes, cancer survivors. They couldn't buy health insurance if they wanted to. It wasn't even offered. Yesterday was different. October 1 was different as 2.8 million Americans came on the first day to this Web site to go shopping for health insurance. What a relief it must have been. The Chicago papers told the story of a man who had just about given up hope because he had a child with a mental illness and because of that he could never buy health insurance. He was shopping yesterday.…”