Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I heard that some of my colleagues on the other side were here earlier engaged in a colloquy of condemnation of the appointment of Dr. Berwick to run CMS. I wanted to come back and respond because I think this body is making a mistake and is taking a very wrong path by attacking and criticizing this particular nominee. To provide just a moment of context to his appointment, when I was here yesterday I had a graph that showed that in 1955, the year that I was born, we spent about $12 billion on health care as a nation. Last year we spent $2.5 trillion, 200 times as much. The graph showed not only the steep curve that took us from $12 billion to $2.5 trillion a year, but also the fact that curve was accelerating. It was getting steeper. In the last year the year-to-year increase was $134 billion in health care expenditures. That is the biggest year-to-year increase in the history of the Republic. If we kept at it, by 2016 a family of four in Rhode Island would be paying $26,000 in premiums for a basic health care policy. Medicare Advantage plans jumped 14 percent last year nationally, on average. We are in both an unsustainable and an accelerating health care cost increase environment. Something absolutely has to be done about it. I suspect almost everybody in this Chamber would agree with that. That is the backdrop--unsustainable, accelerating health care costs that now gobble up more than 17 percent of our gross domestic product.…”