Political Quotes

“Medicaid cuts across a broad section of people. It is poor children. It is also the elderly in nursing homes and it is also hospitals similar to the one I visited in Cleveland some months ago called Health Hill Hospital. It is a hospital where young people typically from under 18, not young children, who have been in a car accident or had some major traumatic injury, often head injuries, and their medical bills are $5,000 or $10,000 a month. They are often from middle-class families, but no middle-class family can pay that kind of medical cost, nor does their insurance very often cover that for more than a few months or a year or so. It is things like that that can happen to all kinds of middle-class families and those major cuts in the Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for so many others are so troublesome. But it is not just the dollars with Medicaid, it is also from the Gingrich plan last year in Medicaid. It took away the standards for nursing homes that President Reagan and the Congress in the mid-1980s enacted in response to oversedation of nursing home patients, in response to problems of safety in nursing homes where some older people were either, as I said, oversedated or restrained in their beds, and it took away these standards that both parties agreed to in the 1980s. And that is what is so troublesome. There is consensus that Medicare and Medicaid makes sense for almost all of the American people.”