Political Quotes

“I was in the House of Representatives for 16 years, and I have been in the Senate now for 8 years. During all of that time, this country faced and still faces a major health care crisis. As the Presiding Officer knows, the United States is the only major country on Earth that does not guarantee health care to all of our people. Today, despite the modest gains of the Affordable Care Act, which I will discuss in a moment, we still have about 40 million Americans without any health insurance. By the way, despite so many uninsured and so many underinsured, we end up paying, by far, per capita the highest costs of any country. How does it happen? Millions of people are uninsured, millions more are underinsured, and we end up paying per capita almost double what any other Nation faces. Now, I was in the Congress during the years of the Bush administration, and I waited eagerly to hear what my Republican colleagues had to say about tens of millions of people without any health insurance and about the cost of health care being so expensive. I waited and I waited, and my Republican colleagues had nothing to say. Apparently, the private insurance companies were doing just great under that system. Drug companies were charging our people the highest prices in the world under that system. What is there to complain about? What is there to worry about?…”