Political Quotes

“I am here today to talk about the health care problem in the country, because I think the fixation of this body on the health care Web site has taken our eye off the fact we have a very significant and fundamental health care problem. This graph represents how much we spend on health care as a country. It begins back here in 1960. I was 5 years old in 1960. So this is a lifetime: 50-some years, $27.4 billion. That is what we spent on health care. Now here we are. This is up to 2011, and $2.7 trillion is what we spend on health care. It is 100 times as much in 50 years. Granted, there are more Americans but not 100 times as many. This has been an explosive cost growth curve. When we were trying to pass the health care bill, that is what we were looking at for costs. It is a big competitive problem for our country. This is a really interesting graph. I wish every time anybody talked about health care they would take 1 minute and look at this graph. I will explain briefly what it is. This column is the up access and measures life expectancy in years, country by country, 65 to 85, where countries fall in terms of their average life expectancy for their population, for their citizens. This along the bottom is the cost, the health spending per capita per person in that country. So if you measure it all out, what you see is a great raft of countries all through here: Japan, Great Britain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Italy, Greece.…”