#Healthcare Quotes

“There are so many groups making so much money in the medical care system that any major reorganization is going to make someone unhappy or anxious at the least, ... I don't know how you do it.”

“Even if her children or grandchildren are willing to spend their own money to keep grandma alive, when bureaucrats control the necessary technology or medication they may decide that it is not for sale.”

“Cheap medical care is one of the most expensive things there is. So long as politicians can create the illusion of something for nothing, that gets them votes, which is what it is all about, as far as they are concerned.”

“What does calling this medical care legislation "historic" mean? It means that previous administrations gave up the idea when it became clear that the voting public did not want government control of medical care. What is "historic" is that this will be the first administration to show that it doesn't care one bit what the public wants or doesn't want.”

“Virtually everything that the government does costs more than when the same thing is done in private industry - whether it is building housing, running prisons, collecting garbage, or innumerable other things. Why in the world would we imagine that health care would be the exception?”

“[Write to your congressional representative against the health care reform proposal or] we will awake to find that we have socialism.”

“We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients.”

“These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I'm not downplaying that.”

“One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine.”

“There you go again. When I opposed Medicare, there was another piece of legislation meeting the same problem before the Congress. I happened to favor the other piece of legislation and thought that it would be better for the senior citizens to provide better care than the one that was finally passed.”

“If you want to die, don't make a mistake and not quite kill yourself because the medical bills in America are hideous.”

“Is it not also true that no physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers or enjoins what is for the physician's interest, but that all seek the good of their patients? For we have agreed that a physician strictly so called, is a ruler of bodies, and not a maker of money, have we not?”

“Whatever your issue is, whether it's racism or homophobia or policy issues or taxes or urban decay or health care, you're not going to go anywhere with it if we don't focus on the concentration of power.”

“I love to hold people's hands when I visit hospitals, even though they are shocked because they haven't experienced anything like it before, but to me it is a normal thing to do.”

“If I am to care for people in hospital I really must know every aspect of their treatment and to understand their suffering.”

“I remember when I used to sit on hospital beds and hold people s hands, people used to be shocked because they d never seen this before. To me it was quite normal.”

“My doctor is a family physician. He treats my family and I support his.”

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

“The National Health Service is safe with us. The principle of adequate healthcare should be provided for all regardless of ability to pay must be the function of any arrangements for financing the NHS. We stand by that.”

“The bottom line on the Hyde Amendment is that it is directly, in effect, targeting poor women and women who don't have money.”

“I'm opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education, or public health, period.”

“We will stand up for what is right, for what is fair and what is just. Health care is a right and not a privilege.”

“He said that private practice in medicine ought to be put down by law. When I asked him why, he said that private doctors were ignorant licensed murders.”

“Nothing is more dangerous than a poor doctor: not even a poor employer or a poor landlord.”

“Surgery for early stage non-small cell lung cancer is standard treatment and is likely curative. Yet, fewer blacks than whites undergo surgery for the disease, leading to a higher mortality rate among blacks with lung cancer.”

“In a hospital they throw you out into the street before you are half cured, but in a nursing home they don't let you out till you are dead.”

“The test to which all methods of treatment are finally brought is whether they are lucrative to doctors or not.”

“I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there's a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don't treat left nostrils, it's not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there's a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril.”

“We've got to be able to have a conversation and recognize we're all Americans; we all want the best for this country. We may have some disagreements in terms of how to get there, but all of us want to make sure that our economy is strong, that jobs are growing. All of us want to make sure that people aren't bankrupt when they get sick. All of us want to make sure that young people can afford an education.”

“Insurance companies, drug companies are going to have to be ponying up, partly because right now they're receiving huge subsidies.”

“Every woman should be in control of the decisions that affect her own health.”

“Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.”

“For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of our economy calls for action: bold and swift. And we will act not only to create new jobs but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its costs.”

“Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors.”

“Having a delivery covered by Medicare just isn't going to fly. It's too risky for a woman to put a baby down and not remember where she left it.”

“Many people are intimidated by doctors. ... People also feel stupid when they don't understand what a doctor's talking about the first time around, so they don't ask again. And let's be honest here, people. English is not a doctor's first language.”

“I think that the risk to all the progress we've made was at stake in the election because not just the president-elect but a lot of members of Congress, including now the Speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader, have said that their principal agenda was to undo a lot of this progress. But as I've been talking about over the last several days when it comes to health care, the gains that we've made are there. Twenty million people have health insurance that didn't have it before. The uninsured rate is the lowest it's ever been.”

“In order to make the tough decisions we have to know what our values are and who we're fighting for and our priorities and if we are spending $300 billion on tax cuts for people who don't need them and weren't even asking for them, and we are leaving out health care which is crushing on people all across the country, then I think we have made a bad decision and I want to make sure we're not shortchanging our long term priorities.”

“It's a disgrace that we have millions of people who are uninsured.”

“Every woman should have access to the healthcare that she needs.”

“When at last we are sure, You've been properly pilled, Then a few paper forms, Must be properly filled. So that you and your heirs, May be properly billed.”

“Like Joe Biden and so many other Americans, I've lost people I love deeply to cancer. I've heard often from those whose loved ones are suffering from Alzheimer's, addiction, and other debilitating diseases. Their heartbreak is real, and so we have a responsibility to respond with real solutions.”

“If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”

“Bernie Sanders would say, "You still have millions of African Americans who aren't insured, and if we had a single-payer system, that wouldn't be the case." And that's true.”

“A central notion in the Affordable Care Act was we had an inefficient system with a lot of waste that didn't also deliver the kind of quality that was needed that often put health care providers in a box where they wanted to do better for their patients, but financial incentives were skewed the other way... We don't need to reinvent the wheel; you're already figuring out what works to reduce infections in hospitals or help patients with complicated needs.”

“I think we've set the bar with respect to the notion that it is possible to provide health care for people. Now I know that the incoming Congress and administration talks about repealing it. But we've set a bar that shows that this can be done. And that core principle is one that the majority of Americans, including supporters of Donald Trump believe in.”

“I want to be very clear: I will not sign on to any health plan that adds to our deficits over the next decade.”

“If you like your existing plan you get to keep it”

“In low-income countries, getting to a health post is hard. It's very expensive.”

“Most innovations, unfortunately, actually increase the net costs of the healthcare system. There's a few, particularly having to do with chronic diseases, that are an exception. If you could cure Alzheimer's, if you could avoid diabetes - those are gigantic in terms of saving money. But the incentive regime doesn't favor them.”