Quotes & Sayings About Health Insurance

Having no national system of catastrophic health insurance, we have, through the courts, managed to patch together pieces of a not very satisfactory one. — Andrew Tobias

Before it was called Hillarycare - I mean, before it was called ObamaCare it was called Hillarycare because we took them on, and we weren't successful, but we kept fighting and we got the children's health insurance program. Every step along the way I have stood up, and fought, and have the scars to prove it. — Hillary Clinton

The Obama administration has refused to back down on the insurance mandate that needlessly pits health care against the rights of the religious ... This administration simply doesn't get it. — Rob Portman

The worst thing about pills was that they worked. Without them, you might just adapt; medical optimism suspended you in a maintenance reality. He'd never known how sick he was until he'd gotten health insurance. The pill that really wanted inventing was the bitter one that cured you of optimism and made time go faster. — Tony Tulathimutte

Even families with health insurance are quite vulnerable to a severe economic reversal if someone gets sick. — Elizabeth Warren

We should allow people to purchase health insurance across state lines. That will create a true 50-state national marketplace which will drive down the cost of low-cost, catastrophic health insurance. — Ted Cruz

If I die this instant will you be more content with the morning news? Will your coffee taste better? I am not your fate. I am not your government ... I am not your mother, not your father or your nightmare or your health. I am not a fence, not a wall. I am not the law or actuarial tables of your insurance broker. I am a woman with my guts loose in my hands, howling and it's not because I committed hari-kiri. I suggest either you cook me or sew me back up. I suggest you walk into my pain as into the breaking waves of an ocean of blood, and either we will climb out together and walk away. — Marge Piercy

If Obama can force you to get health insurance just by calling it a tax, than there is nothing to stop him from making you gay marry an illegal immigrant wearing a condom on a hydroponic pot farm powered by solar energy. — Stephen Colbert

I intend to talk about race during this election in the South because the Republicans have been talking about it since 1968 in order to divide us. And I'm going to bring us together. Because you know what? You know what? White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back ought to be voting with us and not them, because their kids don't have health insurance either and their kids need better schools too. — Howard Dean

Medical professionals, not insurance company bureaucrats, should be making health care decisions. — Barbara Boxer

This is something the Democrats have talked about, and a goal we share, getting everyone insured, and solving the issue in a Republican way, which is applying a personal responsibility principle (individual mandate), reforming the market (more strictly regulating the insurance companies), and allowing people to buy private health care insurance that they can take with them from job to job that's entirely affordable. So it's a Republican way of solving a problem that we face as a nation. — Mitt Romney

Being able to save, make non-cash payments, send or receive remittances, get credit, or get insurance can be instrumental in raising living standards and helping businesses prosper. It helps people to invest more in education or health care. — Sri Mulyani Indrawati

The concern right now is that families are paying for insurance, or getting insurance from their employer and trusting that health care will be available for their families. In too many instances now, the care they need isn't available. — Debbie Stabenow

Here in Silicon Valley, I have taken part in hundreds of conversations trying to convince people to dive in and become entrepreneurs. All too often, innovators with good, safe, jobs are unwilling to put their family's access to health care at risk by walking away from company-backed medical insurance. — Eric Ries

Many political scientists used to assume that people vote selfishly, choosing the candidate or policy that will benefit them the most. But decades of research on public opinion have led to the conclusion that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences. Parents of children in public school are not more supportive of government aid to schools than other citizens; young men subject to the draft are not more opposed to military escalation than men too old to be drafted; and people who lack health insurance are not more likely to support government-issued health insurance than people covered by insurance.35 Rather, people care about their groups, whether those be racial, regional, religious, or political. The political scientist Don Kinder summarizes the findings like this: "In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not 'What's in it for me?' but rather 'What's in it for my group?' "36 Political opinions function as "badges of social membership."37 — Jonathan Haidt

But you say, does it represent change? The change is that we are fighting an insurance industry that has killed health reform for generations. They're spending tens of millions of dollars right now to defeat this bill, and we're on the doorstep of winning a great victory for the American people. — David Axelrod

You don't want to move in with someone and find out that they don't have auto or health insurance. That's a rude awakening. — Laura Wasser

It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label. — Barack Obama

Today we have a health insurance industry where the first and foremost goal is to maximize profits for shareholders and CEOs, not to cover patients who have fallen ill or to compensate doctors and hospitals for their services. It is an industry that is increasingly concentrated and where Americans are paying more to receive less. — Dianne Feinstein

First of all, we have seen now in six years of Obamacare that it has been a disaster. It is the biggest job-killer in this country. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, have been forced into part-time work, have lost their health insurance, have lost their doctors, have seen their premiums skyrocket. — Ted Cruz

People being forced to get health care and the insurance companies making millions. — Lizz Winstead

I've declined every congressional benefit I could decline, federal health insurance, the retirement program, the 403(b) program, which I think is overly generous. I've got self-imposed term limits of six terms if I have the privilege to serve that long. — Scott Rigell

Too many Americans who are uninsured or under-insured do not receive regular checkups because they can't afford coverage or their insurance doesn't cover enough of the costs. The lack of preventive care results in countless emergency room visits and health care disasters for families. — Jeff Merkley

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

Let's drive the message home: we need health insurance reform, we need a strong public option, and we won't settle for less. — Jerrold Nadler

For many years I didn't have health insurance. — Chad Harbach

We've also seen another future we could choose. First of all, we'd have the right to choose. It's an America in which no one can charge us more than men for the exact same health insurance; in which no one can deny us affordable access to the cancer screenings that could save our lives; in which we decide when to start our families. — Sandra Fluke

If there is one thing I'd learned about hospitals, it's that they aren't interested in healing you. They are interested in stabilizing you, and then everyone is supposed to move on. They go to stabilize some more people, and you go off to do whatever you do. Healing, if it happens at all, is done on your own, long after the hospital has submitted your final insurance paperwork. — Eric Nuzum

Many kids come out of college, they have a credit card and a diploma. They don't know how to buy a house or a car or health insurance or life insurance. They do not know basic microeconomics. — Jesse Jackson

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

Does the U.S. Constitution stand for anything in an era of government excess? Can that founding document, which is supposed to restrain the power and reach of a centralized federal government, slow down the juggernaut of czars, health insurance overhaul and anything else this administration and Congress wish to do that is not in the Constitution? — Cal Thomas

This was the Mecca of the American Dream, the world that everyone wanted. A world of sleek young women (allied with Slenderella to be so) in shorts and halters, driving 400-horsepower station wagons to air-conditioned, music-serenaded supermarkets of baby-sitter corporations and culture condensed into Great Books discussion groups. A life of barbecues by the swimming pool and drive in movies open all year. It did't appeal to me. Fuck health insurance plans and life insurance. They wanted to live without leaving the womb. It made me more alive to play a game without rules against society, and I was prepared to play it to the end. A tremor almost sexual passed through me as I anticipated the comming robbery. — Edward Bunker

But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It's about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It's about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it. The problems that I saw at the tile warehouse run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy. too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time. And a young man [one of Vance's co-workers] with every reason to work - a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way - carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. There is a lack of agency here - a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America. — J.D. Vance

Thanks to President Barack Obama, under the Affordable Care Act, millions more people will be eligible for health insurance, including many people with HIV. — Alex Newell

Americans want and deserve a broad array of health insurance choices so they can identify those that best fit their own individual or family needs. These choices expand when we allow free enterprise to foster innovation, not smother it with taxes and one-size fits all ideology. — Fred Upton

Those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions based on an assessment of
their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little more like the uninsured. — Malcolm Gladwell

She had moved to Los Angeles from the Midwest, lured by a job with a publisher. But the publisher was bought by another soon after, and she was left without a job. Turning to freelance writing, an erratic marketplace, she found herself either swamped with work or unable to pay her rent. She often had to ration phone calls, and for the first time was without health insurance. This lack of coverage was particularly distressing: she found herself catastrophizing about her health, sure every headache signaled a brain tumor, picturing herself in an accident whenever she had to drive somewhere. She often found herself lost in a long reverie of worry, a medley of distress. But, she said, she found her worries almost addictive. Borkovec — Daniel Goleman

Since 2000, no important technology innovation in the United States has been scaled up to create millions of manufacturing, marketing, and engineering jobs here, as personal computers and related industries did. While selling online and social networking are clearly transformational movements that have created entrepreneurial opportunities, fewer than fifty thousand traditional jobs - those with full-time hours, benefits, and health insurance - have been created. — Doug Menuez

I grew up in a working class family where there was no health insurance. I saw first hand the fracturing of the American dream and the bitterness that comes when there is no hope and a lot of despair. So I wanted to build the company, in a sense, that my father never got a chance to work for. — Howard Schultz

Everyone should have health insurance? I say everyone should have health care. I'm not selling insurance. — Dennis Kucinich

Our God is sovereign. That means there's no such thing as luck. Anything that happens to you, good or bad, must pass through His fingers first. There are no accidents with God. I like the story of the cowboy who applied for health insurance. The agent routinely asked him, 'Have you ever had any accidents?' The cowboy replied, 'Well no, I've not had any accidents. I was bitten by a rattlesnake once, and a horse did kick me in the ribs. That laid me up for a while, but I haven't had any accidents.' The agent said, 'Wait a minute. I'm confused. A rattlesnake bit you, and a horse kicked you, Weren't those accidents?' 'No, they did that on purpose. — Tony Evans

I don't think healthcare's a right. The only right you have is the ability to go out on an even playing field and work, and then purchase health insurance, or whatever it is. — Adam Carolla

Health care's not about insurance! Health care's about getting treatment. — P. J. O'Rourke

One of the major goals of health insurance reform is to bring down the cost. — Valerie Jarrett

This is just a wacky idea I had, but maybe it's not a coincidence that, in a country where half the population's normal reproductive functions are stigmatized, American uterus- and vagina-havers are still fighting tooth and nail to have those same reproductive systems fully covered by the health insurance that we pay for. — Lindy West

There are so many choices I made simply for health insurance. Is it the ideal role I wanted to play, or the TV show I wanted to be a part of? No, but it let me afford to go to the doctor. — Amy Ryan

If there ever is government-run health care, the first ones to sign up should be the president and every member of Congress, including myself. You should be able to keep the insurance you've got today, if you like it, and always choose your own doctor. — Mike Ross

I don't think losing 3 million jobs, having deficits as far as the eye can go, having 2 million people lose their health insurance, turning your back on kids in schools and not funding No Child Left Behind represents a vision. — John F. Kerry

There should be no private health insurance companies operating for profit. — Michael Moore

Taking care of your body is insurance for your soul. — Toni Sorenson

With the loss of Free Choice Vouchers, hundreds of thousands of workers will now be forced to choose between their employers' unaffordable insurance or going without health care. — Ron Wyden

The Blunt Amendment would have allowed any employer who provided health insurance, or any insurance company, the right to deny coverage for contraception or any other kind of procedure if the employer had a 'moral' objection to it. — Bernie Sanders

The place I feel most at home is when I have health insurance. I really don't care how I get it, whether it's on film, or television or waiting tables, you know? — Benjamin Walker

If nuclear power plants are safe, let the commerical insurance industry insure them. Until these most expert judges of risk are willing to gamble with their money, I'm not willing to gamble with the health and safety of my family. — Donna Reed

Fewer and fewer large and medium-sized companies offer their workers full health-care coverage - 74 percent did in 1980, under 10 percent do today. As a result, health insurance premiums, co-payments, and deductibles are soaring. — Robert B. Reich

We know there are no weapons of mass destruction. But there are weapons of misdirection. Millions without health insurance, poverty abounds. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor. — Joseph Lowery

People who are in a position of finding out that they're at risk for some illness, whether it's breast cancer, or heart disease, are afraid to get that information - even though it might be useful to them - because of fears that they'll lose their health insurance or their job. — Francis Collins

The result was, of course, that today, tragically, more than 40 million Americans don't have health insurance, and for many, not having health insurance means they don't have access to good health care. — George J. Mitchell

Obamacare is not about improved health care or cheaper insurance or better treatment or insuring the uninsured, and it never has been about that. It's about statism. It's about expanding the government. It's about control over the population. It is about everything but health care. — Rush Limbaugh

Women tend to need the healthcare system more because we bear children. Insurance companies - not all of them, but many of them - 'gender-rate.' Women may pay 40% more for their health insurance than men do. — Gloria Steinem

Great physicians and nurses, skilled, caring and unparalleled in their training, intervened in my life and probably saved it. I was lucky but other Americans are not. It is time to speak again and stand again for the ideal that in the richest nation ever on this planet, it is wrong for 41 million Americans, most of them in working families, to worry at night and wake up in the morning without the basic protection of health insurance. — John F. Kerry

Residents of my district continue to stress to me that they want health care decisions to be made by patients and doctors, not by the government and insurance companies. — Tim Walberg

Yes, Democrats can prove that America pays more for health care than other countries; yes, they have won the dispute that private health insurance is needlessly expensive. But what they've lost is the argument that we are a society. — Thomas Frank

If you like the health insurance that you have you should be able to keep it, but if you don't like the health insurance you have, you should be able to choose something else. — Ron Wyden

We can have the best health insurance options in the world, and people still won't get needed care if we don't increase our supply of primary care physicians and nurses. — Jeff Merkley

The Patients' Bill of Rights is necessary to guarantee that health care will be available for those who are paying for insurance. It's a part of the overall health care picture. — Debbie Stabenow

I got sick, hospitalized, had no insurance. And the money I had saved for our honeymoon went to pay medical bills. So I had been in the position of not having insurance when I needed health care. — Dick Cheney

I've spent a great deal of time over the past decade as a caregiver for various family members. It gives me a perspective on the struggles that many New Yorkers face with illness, disability, health care, insurance difficulties, and trying to work with and also take care of family members. — Wendy E. Long

We know there is real interest from the American public in having easy access to the new, affordable choices in the Health Insurance Marketplace. — Todd Park

[The GOP] must decide soon where they stand on the issue of socialized medicine. President Clinton threw down the gauntlet in his State of the Union address, when he proposed guaranteeing health insurance for at least half of the 10 million American children who have none. — Tony Snow

Personal responsibility extends to the purchase of health insurance. Citizens should not be able to cheat their neighbors by not buying insurance, particularly when they can afford it, and expect others to pay for their care when they need it. — Newt Gingrich

When we're done with employer-based health insurance, it will have as much life in it as Jimmy Hoffa. — Jonathan Gruber

The Affordable Care Act has clearly, as Secretary Clinton made the point, done a lot of good things, but, what it has not done is dealt with the fact we have 29 million people today who have zero health insurance, we have even more who are underinsured with large deductibles and copayments and prescription drug prices are off the wall. — Bernie Sanders

In our experience at Safeway, we're confident that we can actually improve the quality of health care while taking costs down and using the savings to help finance coverage of low-income people who are clearly going to need help to pay for insurance. — Steven Burd

We need to reform the health code so that people are incentivized to buy their own health insurance rather than have to get it through an employer. — Monica Crowley

If my colleagues stop eating donuts and are more active, it saves me money on next year's insurance premium, and I get to work with people who have more energy and creativity each day. Yet most organizations fail to make health a cultural priority. Instead, they treat healthcare like any other expense. — Tom Rath

America doesn't have health insurance. — Joe Biden

Democrats fought to get health insurance for more Americans. Democrats fought for a strong consumer agency so big banks can't cheat people. We fought, we won, and we improved the lives of millions of people - thank you, President Obama! — Elizabeth Warren

I basically believe the medical insurance industry should be nonprofit, not profit-making. There is no way a health reform plan will work when it is implemented by an industry that seeks to return money to shareholders instead of using that money to provide health care. — Dianne Feinstein

I've tried open-ended jobs and found myself incredibly unhappy. I don't like the monomania of showing up every day and doing the same thing. I don't know where my next cheque is coming from, I don't know where my next job is coming from, I have really sketchy health insurance, but I need variety in my life. — Julie Klausner

In recent years, we have seen technology advance at lightning speed, allowing us to accomplish lifesaving feats never imagined before. It is our responsibility to ensure that these advances are used for positive medical breakthroughs, and not allowed to restrict rights or limit access to health insurance or job opportunities. — Evan Bayh

It is not good not to have health insurance; that leaves the family very vulnerable. — Elizabeth Warren

Well, my view is that the insurance companies have done awfully well and spent a lot of money on a lot of things that don't have anything to do with health care. — Russ Feingold

Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance. — Nancy Pelosi

There's definitely evidence that capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior. When you look at the worst corners of the American health insurance industry or the sub-prime banking market, it really feels like the more psychopathically someone behaves, the more it's rewarded. — Jon Ronson

The Health and Human Services preventive services mandate forces businesses to provide the morning-after and the week-after pills in our health insurance plans. — David Green

The reason Gov. Romney passed Romneycare as governor of Massachusetts in 2006 was because many Republicans viewed health care reform, mandates and all, as a way to inoculate against Democratic charges that Republicans didn't care about people who lacked health insurance. — Ari Fleischer

Contemporary American politics also revolve around this contradiction. Democrats want a more equitable society, even if it means raising taxes to fund programmes to help the poor, elderly and infirm. But that infringes on the freedom of individuals to spend their money as they wish. Why should the government force me to buy health insurance if I prefer using the money to put my kids through college? Republicans, on the other hand, want to maximise individual freedom, even if it means that the income gap between rich and poor will grow wider and that many Americans will not be able to afford health care. — Yuval Noah Harari

I was born on the other side of the tracks, in public housing in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year, and I grew up in a family that lost health insurance. So I was scarred at a young age with understanding what it was like to watch my parents lose access to the American dream. — Howard Schultz

President Obama, through health care reform, strengthened Medicare. How did he do that? Well, he found savings by cutting subsidies to insurance companies, ensuring we were rooting out waste and fraud, and he used those savings to put it back into Medicare. — Stephanie Cutter

I am every single day talking with and working with people in my district who are seeing their health care insurance costs go up five times, 105 percent, 300 percent, that are getting pay cuts, that are losing 40-hour workweeks, that are having to work two and three jobs. — Marsha Blackburn

Washington is broken. Bailing out Wall Street with no strings attached while leaving middle class Arkansas taxpayers with the bill. Protecting insurance company profits instead of patients and lowering health costs. — Bill Halter

My name is Wendell Potter and for 20 years I worked as a senior executive at health insurance companies, and I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick
all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors. — Wendell Potter

I understand that in these difficult economic times, the potential for any additional expense is not welcomed by American businesses. But in the long run, the health insurance reform law promises to cut health-care costs for U.S. businesses, not expand them. — Gary Locke

Even prostitutes, alcoholics, embezzlers - I won't rehearse the whole catalogue - need health insurance. — William Levada

A tremendous amount of needless pain and suffering can be eliminated by ensuring that health insurance is universally available. — Daniel Akaka

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

Costs for liability insurance are higher than costs for many procedures. There is a need to reform liability laws to stop out-of-control health care costs. — Temple Grandin