Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I just want to go into a little bit more detail and focus on how it is that we are here today and why there is an urgency to this. The gentlewoman just mentioned some staggering statistics: 9,000 pills per individual over a decade in a particular town. It tells you that the system has gotten entirely out of balance. There are a lot of explanations and there are not a lot of clean hands: We know that there have been government policies that have driven, in part, the opioid crisis by evaluating providers on whether or not pain satisfaction has been completed on the patient side of things; We know that in some cases there have been healthcare providers that have not gone into the detail of getting to the root of a problem; We know that we, as a culture, put extraordinary pressure on healthcare providers when we tell them we want them to help us get out of pain; and when we do that, sometimes, Mr. Speaker, unfortunately, we put ourselves at risk, and we know that pharma has a lot to answer for. All of those things we know are true, and I think what is encouraging to me is this idea of people coming together on both sides and recognizing we don't have to live this way anymore. We don't have to have a system that drives people in this direction.…”