Quotes & Sayings About Health Care System

America must deal once and for all with an utterly irrational health care financing system that allows private interests to make billions in profits from the pain and suffering of their fellow citizens. America is the only country in the industrialized world that does not provide tax-supported universal health care coverage in some form. — Suzanne Gordon

You can use the [Barack] Obama administration as a recent example. For seven years they've been unopposed. The Republican Party's not trying to stop 'em on a single thing. Much of Obama's agenda has been a success. He has been able to attack various traditions, institutions, and taken over the health care system in this country. They've taken over the student loan, they've taken over the education system, and everybody in it is miserable and unhappy. — Rush Limbaugh

Health care is a far more serious, immediate and destructive problem than social security ... The upfront investment needed to fund system wide [health care] reform ... would be far offset by the savings. — Henry Simmons

According to a recent report drafted by thirty-nine physicians from the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) and endorsed by some 2,500 medical doctors, a movement to "a single payer system would trim administration, reduce incentives to over-treat, lower drug prices, minimize wasteful investments in redundant facilities, and eliminate almost all marketing and investor profits. These measures would yield the substantial savings needed to fund universal care and new investments in currently under-funded services and public health activities - without any net increase in national health spending." In — Bernie Sanders

We have never seen health as a right. It has been conceived as a privilege, available only to those who can afford it. This is the real reason the American health care system is in such a scandalous state. — Shirley Chisholm

America's doctors, nurses and medical researchers are the best in the world, but our health care system is broken. — Mike Ferguson

From cell phones to computers, quality is improving and costs are shrinking as companies fight to offer the public the best product at the best price. But this philosophy is sadly missing from our health-care insurance system. — John Shadegg

In all this talk about giving birth, I never hear anyone mention that the last time the World Health Organization ranked national health-care systems, France's was first, while America's was thirty-seventh. Instead, we Anglos focus on how the French system is overmedicalized and hostile to the "natural." Pregnant Message members fret that French doctors will induce labor, force them to have epidurals, then secretly bottle-feed their newborns so they won't be able to breast-feed. — Pamela Druckerman

It is important to feel the anger without judging it, without attempting to find meaning in it. It may take many forms: anger at the health-care system, at life, at your loved one for leaving. Life is unfair. Death is unfair. Anger is a natural reaction to the unfairness of loss. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

It's time to look beyond the budget ax to assure access to health care for all. It's time to look for bipartisan solutions to the problems we can tackle today, and to work together for tomorrow - building a health care system that works for all Americans. — Ron Wyden

Let's face it, in America today we don't have a health care system, we have a sick care system. — Tom Harkin

The health care system in the United States, I'm sure you know, is a total international scandal. It's twice the per capita cost of comparable countries and one of the worst outcomes, with a huge number of people uninsured altogether. And it's going to get worse. — Noam Chomsky

Many facilities use a written request process, but some settings now use a verbal voicemail or a kiosk system for requests. Whatever system is used, it should be confidential and only accessible by health care staff. In the simple paper request system, a locked dropbox is often available on every housing unit. Inmates obtain request slips from the housing officer, complete the information and submit to the dropbox where health care staff pick up requests on daily rounds. Access — Lorry Schoenly

Canada needs to dismantle its public health-care system and allow private enterprise to get involved and turn a profit. — Sarah Palin

Our health care system squanders money because it is designed to react to emergencies. Homeless shelters, hospital emergency rooms, jails, prisons - these are expensive and ineffective ways to intervene and there are people who clearly profit from this cycle of continued suffering. — Pete Earley

I don't want to suggest that controlling pharmaceutical costs is the answer to what ails the U.S. health care system. It isn't. — John Kitzhaber

A modern health and social care system has to be completely focussed on the needs of its users. — Patricia Hewitt

The present system is unsustainable. The only question is whether we will master the change or it will master us. — Hillary Clinton

I say we put a choice card in every veteran's hands to say, 'You choose.' You control your health care. If you want to go to the VA, which most veterans like, go to the VA. But if you want to go outside of the system, here's your choice card. You go outside of the system. — David Jolly

The best a health care system can do is to equip itself to meet the needs of each individual woman and birth. Those needs run the gamut from undisturbed home birth to planned cesarean section. — Ina May Gaskin

Companies understand that if their employees are sick, it's really expensive. So despite the rhetoric I hear, thank God employers are still in the health-care system. — Michael Porter

One result of this productive system is that the middle class has grown from being about 15 percent of the population in 1920 to being 86 percent of the population in 2011. While some of the population always seem to live at the poverty line, the vast majority of Americans today are affluent compared to their grandparents. They have the money to buy the products produced by American industry. In the process, the definition of poverty has changed. The majority of Americans who are classified by the government as living at the poverty level have indoor plumbing, color television sets, cell phones, air-conditioning, washers and dryers, microwaves, automobiles, and access to free health care. They are also a significant buying group. — Arthur Hughes

We have by far the most expensive health system in the world. We spend 50 percent more per person than the next most costly nation. Americans spend more on health care than housing or food. — Kathleen Sebelius

I have stood on the front lines of the health care system as a doctor, patient and concerned parent. Those experiences have served as my guideposts throughout the struggle to reform America's health care system. And it's those same experiences that tell me that fear and election hysteria should not overshadow the reality of reform. — Jim McDermott

What we have in the United States is not so much a health-care system as a disease-care system. — Edward Kennedy

The real cure for what ails our health care system today is less government and more freedom. — Steve Forbes

What would you do, sir, if terrorists were killing 45,000 people every year in this country? Well, the current health care system, the insurance companies, and those who support them are doing just that ... Because they die individually of disease and not disaster, [radio host] Neal Boortz and those who ape him in office and out, approve their deaths, all 45,000 of them - a year - in America. Remind me again, who are the terrorists? — Keith Olbermann

I think the first and principle objective is to repeal Obamacare before it does lasting, fundamental damage to our health care system, to our individual liberty, to the relationship each of us has with his or her doctor. — Ted Cruz

There is simply not enough money available to support a system in which the lion's share of expenditures is devoted to acute care, with virtually nothing being spent on preventive medicine, i.e. health care. — Joel Fuhrman

Our system of private health insurance that fails to provide coverage to so many of our citizens also contributes to the double-digit health care inflation that is making America less competitive in the global economy. — John Conyers

American healthcare faces a crisis in quality. There is a dangerous divide between the potential for the high level of quality care that our health system promises and the uneven quality that it actually delivers. — Risa Lavizzo-Mourey

As long as we decline to allow sick, uninsured people to just lie down and die on the side of the road, everybody has to have insurance for the health care system to work sanely. — Gail Collins

Other countries spend, on average, only about one-half of what the U.S. spends per capita on health care. Isn't it reasonable, therefore, for us to expect our system to rank above theirs? Unfortunately, among these twelve countries, the U.S. system is consistently among the worst performers. — T. Colin Campbell

I have young kids. The fiscal burden that will be imposed on them is going to depend primarily on whether we tackle this looming problem in our health care system - with rising costs that don't seem, by the way, to be necessarily associated with higher quality. That is the key burden that they will face. — Peter Orszag

Since 1994, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have considered it politically risky to offer a plan to fix America's broken health care system. The American public, though, has paid the price for this silence as health care costs skyrocketed, millions went uninsured, and millions more grappled with financial insecurity and hardship. — Ron Wyden

We are the only major country on earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all people as a right and yet we end up spending much more than they do, so I do believe that we have to move toward a Medicare for all, single-payer system. — Bernie Sanders

This Obamacare program has Obama's name on it. He lied to people for three years about this program. People trusted him. People believed what he told them. They believed that he was going to improve the health care system in this country, and it was going to get cheaper, more affordable, more plentiful. — Rush Limbaugh

Not even mentioned is the possibility, discussed by economist Dean Baker, that the deficit might be eliminated if the dysfunctional privatized health care system were replaced by one similar to those in other industrial societies, which have half the per capita costs and at least comparable health outcomes. — Noam Chomsky

Positive health means becoming whole-heartedly engaged with our own health care. It means not outsourcing our health to the health care system. It means getting rid of the fear and paralysis we too often feel, and instead cultivating a sense of agency. — Jane McGonigal

The U.S. has a so-called health care system that has nothing to do with the promotion of health. Those who run this system do not care about your health, and it's far from being a system. It's a fragmented patchwork of procedure-oriented services that are meshed in a voluminous trail of paper payments, with little relevance to community-based needs. This misdirected, disease-managed non-care system of symptom suppression demands more and more treatment at higher and higher costs. If they cared at all, you'd be treated like a human, not like a number resembling, quite frankly, the ear tags on a cattle herd. — Gary Tunsky

Besides taking jobs from American workers, illegal immigration creates huge economic burdens on our health care system, our education system, our criminal justice system, our environment, our infrastructure and our public safety. — Jan C. Ting

Capitalism is very far from a perfect system, but so far we have yet to find anything that clearly does a better job of meeting human needs than a regulated capitalist economy coupled with a welfare and health care system that meets the basic needs of those who do not thrive in the capitalist economy. If we ever do find a better system, I'll be happy to call myself an anti-capitalist. — Peter Singer

University, "The traditional Inuit diet is fats and proteins, no sugar at all. It is probably one of the healthiest diets you can have. The human body is built for that. "(2007). If this high-protein, high-fat diet is so healthy, why don't we hear more about its positive effects? Probably for a lot of reasons, some relating to our "for-profit" health care system, — Zach Laboube

We have really good data that show when you take patients and you really inform them about their choices, patients make more frugal choices. They pick more efficient choices than the health care system does. — Donald Berwick

If I'm serious about patients and their GPs being able to have more control of their health care, I can't have a top-down system that imposes restrictions on the services they need. — Andrew Lansley

We have to change our whole way, our health care system is a disaster. It's going to implode in 2017, just like you're sitting there. It doesn't work. Nothing works in our country. If I'm elected president, we will win again. — Donald Trump

What we're really trying to do is level out the health care system. It has gotten so one-sided as more and more people have been put into managed care; in fact, about 70 percent of the patients in the country. — Charlie Norwood

Exercise freaks ... are the ones putting stress on the health care system. — Rush Limbaugh

Mother Theresa said it is not how much we give that is important but how much love you put into doing it. So it is not just how many units of housing we create or how good our health care system is, it is that people have someone to eat dinner with and that people have someone to hold their hand when they die. That is what we are called to do and it is the love of Christ. It is relationships. — Shane Claiborne

Trusting your energy policy to the fossil fuel lobby is like trusting your health care system to the tobacco lobby. — William H. Calvin

Too many of my constituents, like many other hard working Americans across the country, are suffering unnecessarily due to our flawed health care system. — John Conyers

You can't afford to get sick, and you can't depend on the present health care system to keep you well. It's up to you to protect and maintain your body's innate capacity for health and healing by making the right choices in how you live. — Andrew Weil

I don't think the American people want unilateral government control over the entire health-care system. — Judd Gregg

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil. — Sarah Palin

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. — Barack Obama

When we play it safe, we sabotage our chance to make our mark in a memorable, authentic way. Health care organizations confront pressures to provide more responsive, personal care with cost efficiency, striving to provide the industry's "patient-centered care" goal. However, when every hospital system and specialty clinic cautiously claims to provide "patient-centered care" - because all of their competitors claim to provide "patient-centered care" - their claim becomes so safe that they disappear into the din of their competitors' identical claims. — Marian Deegan

Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties; the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains. — Thomas Frank

I'm a big believer in what's called personalized medicine, which refers to customizing your health care to your specific needs based on your physiology, genetics, value system and unique conditions. — David Agus

Almost every economist agrees that the American health care system is unsustainable. Medical care is so expensive that it is busting all of our budgets - government, business, and personal. Eventually, the medical price bubble will pop. What, then, are the alternatives? — Jim Cooper

For patients who are rarely hospitalized, who have little understanding of how the human body works, who lack money, or simply don't read or speak English very well, our high expectations of them as outpatients may make any outcome but failure unlikely. All of us who work in health care put our shoulder to that huge rock every day trying to get the system to work. But sometimes shift after shift it feels like the same damn rock. I'm — Theresa Brown

The fear of health care changing is beyond belief. Like there's a way to make the system worse. Really? — Lewis Black

Medical costs are soaring because our health-care system is totally screwed up. Doctors and hospitals have every incentive to spend on unnecessary tests, drugs, and procedures. — Robert Reich

Nursing may be the oldest art, but in the contemporary world, it is also one of the most invisible. One of the most invisible arts, sciences, and certainly one of the most invisible parts of our health care system. — Suzanne Gordon

We need to make nutrition the central element of our health-care system. Furthermore, — T. Colin Campbell

People spending more of their own money on routine health care would make the system more competitive and transparent and restore the confidence between the patients and the doctors without government rationing. — Ben Carson

Homeopathy is the only non-violent health care system — Ron Harris

With the socialization of the health care system through institutions such as Medicaid and Medicare and the regulation of the insurance industry (by restricting an insurer's right of refusal: to exclude any individual risk as uninsurable, and discriminate freely, according to actuarial methods, between different group risks) a monstrous machinery of wealth and income redistribution at the expense of responsible individuals and low-risk groups in favor of irresponsible actors and high-risk groups has been put in motion. — Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Seeing modern health care from the other side, I can say that it is clearly not set up for the patient. It is frequently a poor arrangement for doctors as well, but that does not mitigate how little the system accounts for the patient's best interest. Just when you are at your weakest and least able to make all the phone calls, traverse the maze of insurance, and plead for health-care referrals is that one time when you have to - your life may depend on it. — Ross I. Donaldson

At Revolution Health Group we will put consumers back at the center of the system by giving them more choice, control and convenience.. while building the first comprehensive, consumer-driven health care company. — Steve Case

He pondered that a little while and then he asked, do Black people have to pay for their doctors, too? Because that's what TV programs had said. I smiled a little at this and told him it's not only Black people who have to pay for doctors and medical care; all people in America have to. Ah, he said. And suppose you don't have the money to pay? Well, I said, if you don't have the money to pay, sometimes you died. And there was no mistaking my gesture, even though he had to wait for the translator to translate it. We left him looking absolutely nonplussed, standing in the middle of the square with his mouth open and his hand under his chin staring after me, as in utter amazement that human beings could die from lack of medical care. It's things like that that keep me dreaming about Russia long after I've returned. — Audre Lorde

If you don't have to pay for everything you're providing, why in the world should you cut the cost of it, when it's gonna be covered? That's what's happened to the health care system. Why cut costs when somebody's gonna subsidize whatever you charge. But there's another reason why tuitions are never gonna come down on major American universities, and that's because they are the training ground of American liberalism and radicalism. And they have to make jobs there attractive to the professors and the teachers who are gonna indoctrinate these young skulls full of mush. — Rush Limbaugh

Universal coverage, not medical technology, is the foundation of any caring health care system. — Richard Lamm

In selling his scheme, Obama has been promoting the myth that our system is no better than those of other advanced nations. His recent statements have betrayed his openly contemptuous attitude toward American health care and out top-flight medical profession. His attitude is consistent with his revealed general attitude about America, which he denigrates every time he gets a chance, especially on foreign soil. — David Limbaugh

One thing governors feel, Democrats and Republicans alike, is that we have a health care system that, if you're on Medicaid, you have unlimited access to health care, at unlimited levels, at no cost. No wonder it's running away. — Mike Huckabee

The education system is where young skulls full of mush are programmed and propagandized into the system. They are highly valuable. That's why they're subsidized. You know, universities are approaching the same circumstance we have in health care. What it costs is not related at all to market forces. Meaning what it costs is not related to what people can afford. You get right down to it, how many Americans, how many families can afford 20,000, 30,000, $50,000 a year or semester to send their kids off to college? It has to be subsidized. — Rush Limbaugh

We currently have a system for taking care of sickness. We do not have a system for enhancing and promoting health. — Hillary Clinton

Nurses are an integral component of the health care system, and it is important that we recognize the over 2.7 million registered nurses for the significant work that they do. — Nathan Deal

I loved growing up in Canada. It's a great place to grow up, because - well, at least where I grew up - it's very multicultural. There's also good health care and a good education system. — Ryan Gosling

Look at other countries that have tried to have federally controlled health care. They have poor-quality health care. Our health-care system is the envy of the world because we believe in making sure that the decisions are made by doctors and patients, not by officials in the nation's capital. — George W. Bush

The reality is that the special interest groups that have lobbied against Free Choice Vouchers object to any measure that would empower employees to have a say in their health benefits because it begins to erode their power in the current health care system. — Ron Wyden

Ultimately, the law will collapse under its own weight. Until then, we have to start building a better health care system in its place. And we need to start with a new principle: Put the patient in the driver's seat. That's how we can build a healthy economy. — Paul Ryan

America's belated embrace of government health care is going to be far more expensive and disastrous than the Euro-Canadian models. Whatever one's philosophical objection to the Canadian health system, it is, broadly, fair: Unless you're a cabinet minister or a big time hockey player, you'll enjoy the same equality of crappiness and universal lack of access that everybody else does. But, even before it's up-and-running, Pelosi-Reid-Obamacare is an impenetrable thicket of contradictory boondoggles, shameless payoffs and arbitrary shakedowns. — Mark Steyn

[The healthcare bill is a] headlong rush into socialism ... we will not stand for the Obama-Pelosi-Reid hijacking of our freedom and democracy so they can impose their socialist 'utopia' of higher taxes, restricted access, inferior quality, and deadly inefficiency on the best health care system in the world ... You and the RNC are all that stand between the Democrats' scheme to take more of your hard-earned income to pay for this unsustainable, freedom destroying entitlement and an opportunity to work for real, truly bipartisan step-by-step solutions ... — Michael Steele

A truly moral health care system should start out by covering all of its citizens with basic health care. It would not be seduced by its technology and fancy buildings. — Richard Lamm

Our health care system is the finest in the world, but we still have too many uninsured Americans, too high prices for prescription drugs, and too many frivolous lawsuits driving our physicians out of state or out of business. — Judy Biggert

The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more. — Michelle Obama

I have worked to expand the health care debate beyond the current for-profit system, to include a public option and an amendment to free the states to pursue single payer. — Dennis Kucinich

Cost is the spectre haunting health reform. For many decades, the great flaw in the American health-care system was its unconscionable gaps in coverage. — Atul Gawande

Skyrocketing insurance premiums are debilitating our Nation's health care delivery system and liability insurers are either leaving the market or raising rates to excessive levels. — Jim Ryun

The U.S. has become the most egregious war-monger and terrorist nation in the world, as well as the long-time leading purveyor of weapons of war throughout the world, and because here at home, we have 50 million of our citizens living in poverty, one in four children surviving on Food Stamps, a collapsing education system, poor health care, and many other disasters, none of which can be addressed as long as the country keeps pouring trillions of dollars into war and militarism. This madness and criminality must end! — Dave Lindorff

Americans oppose Obamacare because they understand that it is inconsistent with our liberties and our idea of limited government and that it will destroy the best health care system in the world. — David Limbaugh

A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners- calling for less violent conditions, an end to state sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing- and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of prison in our future? — Angela Y. Davis

The death toll from health care screwups adds up to at least 500,000 Americans annually. That is the equivalent of more than three jumbo jets crashing every day of the year (or over 1,000 jets annually). Because these individuals are dying at home, in hospitals, or in nursing homes, no one is counting the bodies. There is no outrage, no plan to change a system that allows too many to die unnecessarily. The medical profession seems largely immune to the consequences of its errors. — Joe Graedon

As a doctor who took care of patients for 25 years, I saw the problems with America's health care system every day. — John Barrasso

If you take your kid in for the sniffles, you pay $20, but the full cost is $200. And so we need to get back to the price system where you see the full cost of health care, and then people will make smarter decisions. That will reduce health care costs, and it's a huge part of our economy. — Dave Brat

As a nation, we are on a path of rapid and deep systemic change to our health system, and it's going to unfold for some time to come. It is already transforming the fundamental nature of the U.S. medical care delivery system. — John E. McDonough

While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. — John Mackey

We have a country that wants to believe it is the best in everything, but until all of us embrace the idea that health care should be a right, not a privilege, our system cannot be glibly described as, quote, 'the best in the world.' — Tim Johnson

While Free Choice Vouchers didn't fulfill my vision of a health care system in which every American would be empowered to hire and fire their insurance company, they were a foothold for choice and competition and a safety valve for Americans whose employers are already forcing them to bear more and more of their family's health insurance costs. — Ron Wyden

We ought to follow through on an idea that was first proposed by President Clinton to allow people over the age of 55 who are not eligible for Medicare into the Medicare system, at cost, and below cost for those who can't afford it. That takes care of a significant number of the people who don't have health insurance. — John Edwards