Political Quotes

“What a nightmare this is. I spent 28 years managing a rural hospital, and what I see there, when I look at that chart is not the periodic table. I see bankruptcy for hospitals, physicians, health care providers. I mean, my health care career goes back to the beginning of the 1980s, and I am a proud survivor of the first prospective payment system, diagnostic related groups that were rolled into hospitals all across the Nation. I was there in the 1980s. I was there in the 1990s for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, HIPAA. HIPAA would just be one of those circles on that chart, but let me tell you the experience of health care, and it's health care everywhere, but it really hits hard in rural health care and underserved urban areas. The bureaucracy that was required to implement HIPAA in the 1990s was tremendous. It took dollars from actually providing what I thought was compassionate and cost-effective care, and you had to hire clerical staff, you had to hire compliance individuals, you had to hire people that never saw a patient, never did anything to directly touch that life of somebody that was facing life-changing disease and disability in the health care work that I was privileged to participate in for 30 years.”