Political Quotes

“My problem with the bill that is under consideration tonight is in the theory behind it. My family has been in the insurance business in Tennessee for over a hundred years, and the reason we have Medicare in this country is because in the private world of insurance, there is no way that a senior citizen 80 years old with heart trouble and diabetes can buy health insurance. That is why Medicare came into being. They still could not buy it if we did not have Medicare. So what we are trying to do here is put a square peg in a round hole in that this bill tries to make an insurable product out of a benefit for which there is no risk pool for the concept, the theory of insurance to work. Insurance does not work when every policyholder is also making a claim against their policy. By the very inception of this kind of protocol, every policyholder will be making a claim. It is simply not an insurable product. What we are going to wind up with, I am afraid, and we will be back here in a year if this passes and passes the Senate, is we are going to have a patchwork across the country of differing coverages, differing plans, differing copays, differing premiums, differing in every respect. Nobody will know for sure what they have got.”