Political Quotes

“Let's think about where America was prior to the enactment of the Affordable Care Act. There were 30 to 40 million of our citizens without insurance. People with preexisting conditions either couldn't get insurance or had to pay so much they couldn't afford their insurance. Women were being charged twice as much as men. People that had insurance had annual and lifetime caps. Did you ever wonder why when you would see families holding fundraisers to raise money for their kid's drugs when a kid has cancer? These are people who had insurance and came up against the annual caps or lifetime caps, and the insurance company didn't pay any more. Half the families in America are filing bankruptcy. People with insurance up against caps, no more payments, families losing everything. We put an end to that with the Affordable Care Act. How did we do that? We come up with a private system that required everybody to participate--young and old, rich and poor, healthy and sick. When you put everybody in that risk pool, healthy people help us enable the insurance industry to keep rates at an affordable rate for those people who have preexisting conditions and who have chronic diseases. That is how the system works. What my colleague, Mr. Upton, is proposing today unravels that system. Make no mistake about it.…”