Political Quotes

“and colleagues, we have so many waiting to speak about our friend Chairman Hatch that I am going to be very brief. If you are to talk about the Chairman's record over the last 42 years, we would be here for months and months on end. I wish to say, if you had told this body or the country in the winter of 2017 that you would pass in this Congress a bipartisan 10-year reauthorization of the Children's Health Insurance Program--we have plenty of Finance members here--you would have been charged with hallucinating. People would have said: No way; it couldn't possibly happen. If you had said in the winter of 2017 that you were going to pass a major set of reforms on foster care--reforms that Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund has been dreaming about for decades-- they would simply have said: That is impossible. It couldn't possibly happen. You are hallucinating. Colleagues, listen to this. If you had said in the winter of 2017 that you were going to start a transformation of Medicare with over 50 million seniors--a transformation from a program that traditionally used to be about acute illness and now is largely about chronic illness: cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke--if you had said in 2017 that you were going to transform Medicare to update the Medicare guarantee to help seniors, once again, they would have said: Impossible.…”