Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Jackson Lee for her eloquent words. There is a distinction between misfortune and injustice. I know this because I am somebody who is a cancer survivor. If you wake up one day and a doctor tells you that you are suffering from stage III colon cancer, and you have not one but two jobs that you love, and constituents that you love, and work that you are engaged with, and a great family, and you are told that you have this terrible diagnosis, it can happen to anybody, and that is a misfortune in life. It happens to people in every State, in every city, and in every country all over the world every day. But, if you get a diagnosis like that and you can't get healthcare because you are too poor, or because you lost your job, or because, as it used to be, you loved the wrong person, that is not just a misfortune in life, that is an injustice because we can do something about that. We know how to organize society in such a way that everybody gets healthcare, that everybody gets the attention they need in the event of a catastrophic diagnosis like that. Life is hard enough with all of the sicknesses, the illnesses, the misfortunes, and the accidents that we don't need to compound the misfortunes of life with governmentally imposed injustice on people. The role of government has to be to liberate people from injustice and to alleviate the misfortunes of life.…”