Quotes & Sayings About Medical Insurance

To be without health insurance in this country means to be without access to medical care. But health is not a luxury, nor should it be the sole possession of a privileged few. We are all created b'tzelem elohim - in the image of God - and this makes each human life as precious as the next. By 'pricing out' a portion of this country's population from health care coverage, we mock the image of God and destroy the vessels of God's work. — Alexander Schindler

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

Nobody's safe. Health insurance? That didn't protect 1 million Americans who were financially ruined by illness or medical bills last year. — Elizabeth Warren

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

In 2009, UnitedHealth, a leading insurance company, paid $350 million to settle lawsuits brought by the American Medical Association and other physician groups for shortchanging consumers and physicians for medical services outside its preferred network. — Bernie Sanders

Regardless of whether we are required to purchase medical insurance, know that we can only buy real health insurance in the produce section of the local supermarket. — Joel Fuhrman

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

However, many skilled medical volunteers are turned away because community health centers cannot afford to cover their additional medical liability insurance. — Tim Murphy

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

According to a 2009 Harvard Medical School study, as many as 45,000 people die annually in the United States because they lack health insurance. As one of the study's coauthors pointed out, this works out to about one death every twelve minutes. It's — Naomi Klein

One of the biggest reasons for higher medical costs is that somebody else is paying those costs, whether an insurance company or the government. What is the politicians' answer? To have more costs paid by insurance companies and the government ... [H]aving someone else pay for medical care virtually guarantees that a lot more of it will be used. Nothing would lower costs more than having each patient pay those costs. And nothing is less likely to happen. — Thomas Sowell

Several years earlier, when Henson Associates' insurance provider had notified Jim that it would no longer be paying all of Christine's medical expenses, Jim had insisted that Henson Associates change insurance companies to ensure her costs would continue to be fully covered. Nelson had gone to Jim's office and tearfully thanked him in person, nearly choking on emotion. "Jerry," said Jim, smiling, "that's what insurance companies are for. — Brian Jay Jones

When I worked in a medical practice, our practice provided the insurance. When I retired the next day to run for public office to run for Congress, I had to pay first dollar. — Phil Roe

I think first and foremost everybody should understand that Canadians are strongly committed to the system of universal health insurance, to the principle that your ability to pay does not determine your access to critical medical service. — Stephen Harper

When you pay a hospital bill, you're really paying two hospital bills - one bill for you because you have a job and/or insurance and can pay the hospital. and another bill, which is tacked onto your bill, to cover the medical expenses of someone who doesn't have a job and/or insurance and can't pay the hospital. — P. J. O'Rourke

Many people are priced out of the medical and insurance markets for one reason: the politicians refusal to give up power. Allowing them to seize another 16 percent of the economy won't solve our problems. Freedom will. — John Stossel

The asbestos industry ... has for decades successfully suppressed and manipulated information on the carcinogenicity and other hazards of asbestos. Involved in this conspiracy network were senior industry executives, their medical staff, attorneys, insurance companies, trade associations, scientific consultants, and commercial labs. — Samuel Epstein

Every Cuban has a house to live in, no matter how meager. That house is provided by government. Every Cuban who gets sick can go to a doctor or a hospital and get medical attention while 45 million Americans don't have medical insurance. Every Cuban can get education from the kindergarten through college and they don't have to pay. What is Castro doing that we might benefit from-if we are not too arrogant and falsely proud to see what he is doing in a small nation and what we have not been able to do or not been willing to do in the greatest nation on the earth? — Louis Farrakhan

Congress also did something new, which is, they delayed for two years two new taxes - one on medical devices and one on high-end health insurance plans. Those taxes are supposed to help pay for President Obama's health care law, but they're really unpopular. — Susan Davis

One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient by taking a careful medical history. Ninety percent of the time, you can arrive at an uncannily accurate diagnosis by paying close attention, using physical examination and sophisticated lab test to confirm your hunch (and to increase the bill to the insurance company). — V.S. Ramachandran

No one wants to go back to a situation where, if you have a pre-existing medical condition, you, you can be deprived of coverage. No one wants to go back to a situation where, if you get seriously ill, you can get thrown off your insurance. Seniors don't want to go back to paying more for their prescription drugs. — David Axelrod

This program could destroy private initiative for our aged to protect themselves with insurance against the cost of illness ... Presently, over 60 percent of our older citizens purchase hospital and medical insurance without Government assistance. This private effort would cease if Government benefits were given to all our older citizens. — Milward L. Simpson

It is possible for the assembly-line worker consigned to tightening the bolts on the transmission and the office worker who processes medical insurance claims to work with pride and efficiency, but it's not easy to maintain that attitude. — Paul Hawken

He asked for national compulsory health insurance to be funded by payroll deductions. Under the system, all citizens would receive medical and hospital service irrespective of their ability to pay. And — David McCullough

Five thousand people every day lose their home because of a medical bankruptcy. Most of them had insurance. — Debbie Stabenow

You don't train someone for all of those years of medical school and residency, particularly people who want to help others optimize their physical and psychological health, and then have them run a claims-processing operation for insurance companies. — Malcolm Gladwell

Today, all patients accepted for treatment at St. Jude's are treated without regard for the family's ability to pay. Everything beyond what is covered by insurance is taken care of, and for those without insurance, all of the medical costs are absorbed by the hospital. — Marlo Thomas

Artists, writers and people in creative fields are entrepreneurs by necessity. Nobody gives them a paycheck or picks up their medical insurance. The ones who succeed learn to think and act like 'independent operators.' I think people who are technically 'employees' have to think this way as well. The company is not looking out for you. — Steven Pressfield

supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile? Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair? Am I the only person who's sure that the growing number of cases in which totally average-looking people suddenly open up with automatic weapons in shopping malls and insurance offices and medical complexes and McDonald'ses is somehow causally related to the fact that these venues are well-known dissemination-loci of the Professional Smile? — David Foster Wallace

Three-quarters of Americans who went bankrupt due to medical costs actually had insurance; it's just that the insurance they had didn't actually protect them from catastrophe. — Jonathan Chait

The public has lost faith in the ability of Social Security and Medicare to provide for old age. They've lost faith in the banking system and in conventional medical insurance. — Ron Chernow

Nathanael hadn't delivered any specific message; the angel's parting words, which had boomed out across the entire visitation site, were the typical Behold the power of the Lord. Of the eight casualties that day, three souls were accepted into Heaven and five were not, a closer ratio than the average for deaths by all causes. Sixty-two people received medical treatment for injuries ranging from slight concussions to ruptured eardrums to burns requiring skin grafts. Total property damage was estimated at $8.1 million, all of it excluded by private insurance companies due to the cause. Scores of people became devout worshipers in the wake of the visitation, either out of gratitude or terror. Alas, — Ted Chiang

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

Every sixty seconds, thirty acres of rain forest are destroyed in order to raise beef for fast-food restaurants that sell it to people, giving them strokes and heart attacks, which raise medical costs and insurance rates, providing insurance companies with more money to invest in large corporations that branch out further into the Third World so they can destroy more rain forests. — George Carlin

If companies want to benefit from the advantages of social norms, they need to do a better job of cultivating those norms. Medical benefits, and in particular comprehensive medical coverage, are among the best ways a company can express its side of the social exchange. But what are many companies doing? They are demanding high deductibles in their insurance plans, and at the same time are reducing the scope of benefits. Simply put, they are undermining the social contract between the company and the employees and replacing it with market norms. As companies tilt the board, and employees slide from social norms to the realm of market norms, can we blame them for jumping ship when a better offer appears? It's really no surprise that "corporate loyalty," in terms of the loyalty of employees to their companies, has become an oxymoron. — Dan Ariely

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

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

People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary. — William Gibson

The fact is that a bill allowing any employer to deny insurance coverage based on a moral objection - along with giving an employer permission to ask for medical records showing why a woman is taking birth control - opens up a set of problems that I'm sure its sponsors have not fully considered. — Richard Carmona

Listen, you don't know any better so I'll just tell you. You can't try to save money by not having the right beer. You know, you can skip having medical insurance, you can buy everything you own at a swap meet but the right beer is what makes living like this possible. — Drew Carey

In 1963 and later papers, I pointed out that the special market characteristics of medical care and medical insurance could be explained by reference to differences in information among the parties involved. — Kenneth Joseph Arrow

No one chooses to become a banker. It just happens, like cancer, and then you try to live with it for as long as you can. After thirteen years in the industry, I was damn near terminal. With each step up the corporate ladder I received a slightly smaller laptop, a slightly-harder-to-adjust office chair. To compensate they offered free donuts and coffee cards. Weekends off. 401K vesting. Medical insurance that I had to have because they were turning me into a half-blind hunchback with diabetes. The — Jeremy Robert Johnson

American Medical Association [AMA] was strongly opposed to any scheme for group practice and to health insurance ... because they are un-American. — Morris Fishbein

When it comes to our most precious commodity, our own health, many of us are like sheep following whatever our doctors and insurance companies and other medical care providers tell us to do and not to do.
about our health. — Archelle Georgiou

I was proud to share the stories of my friends at Georgetown Law who have suffered dire medical consequences because our student insurance does not cover contraception for the purpose of preventing pregnancy. — Sandra Fluke

You can tell if people are following Jesus, because they are feeding the poor, sharing their wealth, and trying to get everyone medical insurance. — Anne Lamott

I would like to promote the concept of a partnership of insurance companies, physicians and hospitals in deploying a basic framework for an electronic medical records system that is affordable. — Samuel Wilson

As a physician and a U.S. senator, I have warned since the very beginning about many troubling aspects of Mr. Obama's unprecedented health-insurance mandate. Not only does he believe he can order you to buy insurance, the president also incorrectly equates health insurance coverage with medical care. — John Barrasso

[Karen Lundegaard] was quite frail, debilitated by metastatic breast cancer, which she had long known she had but for which she had been unable to get adequate treatment because she lacked medical insurance. ("If you mention anything about me," she said, "tell people that.") — Amy Tan