Political Quotes

“For the last 30 years, I have worked in a hospital for the uninsured. What I have learned is that unless you trust the families, unless you give power to the patient, you truly cannot make good medical decisions. This is an email I got from someone who is my age--mid-50s. She says that we just got a letter from our health care provider, we had a major medical with a $10,000 deductible. We have lost that. We were told the insurance was not acceptable as written, so now our new policy has a $7,000 deductible and it cost us $10,000 more a year. The deductible goes down by $3,000, their premium up by $10,000. This is not power to the family or to the patient. This is Washington saying, thou shalt spend thy money in the way that we direct you to spend it. Frankly, I don't know if we can reconstruct the private insurance market. It may have been decimated by the Affordable Care Act. The last chance probably was the Enzi resolution on the Senate side in which it was pointed out that as many as 80 percent of Americans will lose their individual policy, but every Democrat voted against that Enzi resolution. There is hope. It is the Keep Your Health Plan Act, which allows the policies to be resold, to occasionally be tweaked and, by the way, to be sold to others, preserving, if you will, the power of big numbers, which is key to the insurance industry.…”