Political Quotes

“Yes, that is exactly right. It should be an easy process. We know how to do it at the Veterans Administration. The cost is 40 or 50 percent of what typically is the cost a patient pays. The other thing we could do--and we were this close to getting it in the Affordable Care Act, is giving people the option, at age 50 or 55, to buy into Medicare because, as Senator Wyden knows, we all have in our States--whether it is Utah or Oregon or Ohio, we have 58-year-olds that lose their jobs or 62-year-olds that lose their jobs, and they cannot really often find insurance, or it is not affordable if they can. If they had the option to buy in--rather in a neutral way we built it into the Affordable Care Act, but lost in the end. We fell one vote short. But it would have made a huge difference in people being able to get through that. I will never forget, I had a townhall in Youngstown some years ago. A woman stood up and said, ``I'm 62 years old. I hold two jobs. I never had health insurance. I just want to stay alive until I'm 65.'' She did not say I want to stay alive to raise my grandkids or to take a trip. It was to stay alive so I can get on Medicare and get insurance, and that just should not be in this country.”