Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I want to start tonight by just making a few remarks regarding what is ahead of us in the next few days, and that is the debate about a Supreme Court Justice. I won't be able to cover everything tonight that I want to cover, but I will just make some preliminary comments about healthcare, which has been the driving debate in this nomination or at least the issue that has dominated the debate so far. We made, in my judgment, great progress in 2010, when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed. Some refer to that statute as ObamaCare, which isn't really the name of the statute and doesn't adequately describe what it is about. The patient protection part of the act--or the name of the statute--is the part that I think involves most Americans, all the coverages that are provided, all the protections, I should say, that are provided. One example of that, of course, is the protection for preexisting conditions. The state of the law prior to that was if an insurance company did not want to cover someone because of a preexisting condition, they had the authority to do that or they could cover the person but charge them more. That is no longer permitted, and in a State like Pennsylvania, that number--the number of people who are protected by that provision of the law because they have a preexisting condition--that number is 5.5 million people. Nationally, it is as high as 135 million.…”