Political Quotes

“we have spent more than a week debating this version of a Patients' Bill of Rights which would affect the health care coverage of more than 160 million working families who are currently provided insurance by employers on a voluntary basis. We have specifically debated the matter of protecting employers from the new liability in the bill. To that end, Senators Gramm and Hutchison offered an amendment that mirrored the employer protection provision of Texas law by completely carving it out. That amendment was unfortunately defeated. So we are still in the same predicament. We have employers that are providing health care coverage that may think twice about doing so if this bill passes as it currently reads. Now everyone, including the sponsors of the bill, acknowledges that this bill's stab at an employer protection from frivolous lawsuits needs to be fixed. The Senators are now talking about how we protect the good actors. Those are employers that are doing right by their employees, offering health coverage but not playing a role in denying medical care to which their employees are entitled under the insurance contract. My hope is that in the course of these discussions everyone will settle on a comprehensive liability fix that includes the designated decisionmaker model presented in the Frist-Breaux-Jeffords bill. As many of my colleagues have said, that certainly seems to do the job. I agree it certainly seems to.”