Political Quotes

“this is one of those proposals that is perhaps best considered very late in the evening when the cover of darkness can attempt to hide the shame of the proposal. This bill is about creating the appearance of doing something when it does nothing to improve the lot of our seniors. When we get right down to it, despite the charts, the Republicans have no plan. All they offer is a placebo based on privatization. I suppose we can call it a Swiss cheese plan, but seniors get all of the holes and no cheese. There is no guaranteed deductible, no guaranteed premium, no guaranteed benefit, and there is no insurance company that has ever offered a plan of this type; and most have said that they will not be able to provide a plan of this type. It all centers on the Republican ideological insistence that we must privatize Medicare, and that is not a prescription for reform; it is a prescription for disaster. This very day, one of their top leaders called the plan that Lyndon Johnson signed into law and upon which millions of Americans have relied, had the audacity to call it a Soviet-style plan. They did not like Medicare then. They have never accepted it, and they are determined to use this device to privatize it. Further, we find in the fine print of the plan in the paragraph called noninterference, a specific command that the administrator of this program cannot act to reduce costs.…”