Health Reform Quotes

#1. I admit it: I had fun watching right-wingers go wild as health reform finally became law.

Paul Krugman

#2. With a host of proposals on the table and a President examining new ideas for health reform, we have an obligation to give real reform our best shot.

Ron Wyden

#3. Successful health reform must not just make health insurance affordable, affordable health insurance has to make health care affordable.

Elizabeth Edwards

#4. 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

#5. Ours is not the first generation to understand the dire need for health reform. And I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.

Barack Obama

#6. It's correct that I wanted health reform to do more to create choices and promote competition.

Ron Wyden

#7. When you have a 12-minute debate over whether lipstick on a pig refers to a demeaning comment about the vice presidential candidate, you know we're not talking about health reform, we're not talking about energy policy, we're not talking about balancing the budget. And you know, it's fairly stupid.

Newt Gingrich

#8. I agree with just about everyone in the reform debate when they say 'If you like what you have, you should be able to keep it.' But the truth is that none of the health reform bills making their way through Congress actually delivers on that promise.

Ron Wyden

#9. I'd never have guessed that, six years after Medicare introduced a drug benefit, it would still be forbidden to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies. Health reform might fix that, but it probably won't.

Timothy Noah

#10. Many of the received models of modern architecture and planning owe their ultimate origin to the building code and public health reform movements of the second half of the 19th century.

Kenneth Frampton

#11. It's not just the right-wing crazies who oppose health reform. In addition, there are many sane Americans who worry about committing a trillion dollars to it.

Marcia Angell

#12. Look, all this is about is utilizing the rules of the Senate, using a majority of the senators, to make sure that we get health reform done. We cannot wait another day.

Barbara Boxer

#13. 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

#14. It is hard to miss the irony in the fact that the very same week that Republicans were publicly heralding Congressman Paul Ryan's plan to inject market forces into the American health care system, they were crafting a budget deal to strip them from the health reform law.

Ron Wyden

#15. When it comes to the health of our families, Barack refused to listen to all those folks who told him to leave health reform for another day, another president. He didn't care whether it was the easy thing to do politically - that's not how he was raised - he cared that it was the right thing to do.

Michelle Obama

#16. Health reform is an essential part of restoring America's economy and maintaining our competitiveness.

Max Baucus

#17. Liberals are wrong to think that opposition to health reform is a rejection of big government. If health reform consisted of extending Medicare to everyone, people would be delighted. There are millions of 64-year-olds out there who can hardly wait to be 65.

Marcia Angell

#18. 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

#19. There are few tribes more loathsome than the American Right, and their vicious use of the shortcomings in the NHS to attack Barack Obama's attempts at health reform are a useful reminder.

Simon Hoggart

#20. Thanks to health reform, women across the country with private insurance can get birth control without paying out of pocket. This lets women make the health care decisions that are right for them and puts every one of us in charge of our own reproductive health.

Ann McLane Kuster

#21. Without Free Choice Vouchers, there is little in the health reform law that discourages employers from increasingly passing the burden of health care costs onto their employees.

Ron Wyden

#22. [Health reform] will destroy the country [because] in the next year or so [America will have to] dramatically cut the military because we can't pay for it.

Rick Santorum

#23. I have been absolutely clear where I'm coming from about health care reform. This is something this nation has to do and a robust public option has been the mantra of my campaign from the very outset.

John Garamendi

#24. We've got to have major health care reform because that is the 800-pound gorilla. That is the thing that can swamp the boat fiscally for the United States.

Kent Conrad

#25. Health is a human necessity; health is a human right

James Lenhart

#26. President Obama hosted lawmakers Thursday saying he wanted bipartisan input on health care reform. Nobody's mind was changed. At the summit's end he threatened to go with the nuclear option, showing he's tougher on Republicans than he is on Iran.

Argus Hamilton

#27. The national debate on health-care reform wildly misses the mark, with Democrats and Republicans alike arguing about who's going to pay rather than about what would actually make people healthy.

T. Colin Campbell

#28. During the summer of 2009, the debate on health care reform was emotional and intense. At its best, it represented the free exchange of ideas that makes this country great. At its worst, it generated death threats and acts of violence.

Chellie Pingree

#29. The U.S. government has been preoccupied with health care 'reform,' but this refers to improving access and insurance coverage and has little or nothing to do with innovation.

Eric Topol

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

Ronald Reagan

#31. Please be assured that as we move along through the implementation of health insurance reform, making sure that we find efficiencies within the existing system, is foremost on the President's mind.

Valerie Jarrett

#32. Over and over again, I hear from Oregonians that we need real health care reform that provides every American with access to quality, affordable care.

Jeff Merkley

#33. Liberal that I am, I support health-care reform on its merits alone. My liberal blood boils, for example, when I read that half of the personal bankruptcies in this country are brought on, in part, by medical expenses.

Thomas Frank

#34. Let's run the experiment.

Chris Hayes

#35. 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

#36. I ran for Congress in 1996 to help Ted Kennedy pass a comprehensive health insurance reform bill.

Jim McGovern

#37. Many of us believe that we need health care reform. That being said - Americans felt like they weren't being listened to. There were a lot of people across the political spectrum who said we don't want a one-size-fits-all healthcare plan.

Timothy Griffin

#38. To speak or do anything that shall concern mankind, one must speak and act as if well, or from that grain of health which he has left.

Henry David Thoreau

#39. Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly "reforming" their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact they're always busy "reforming" is an implicit admission that they didn't get it right the first 50 times.

Lawrence W. Reed

#40. The words, 'penalty,' 'restrict' and 'violate' appeared more times in President Clinton's health care reform bill than in his crime bill.

Steve Forbes

#41. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace.

C.S. Lewis

#42. 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

#43. In 2008, I was one of millions united for hope and change. As 2010 dawns, change looks to me like more of the same. Instead of peace, we got more war. Instead of health care reform, we have an industry win that requires Americans to buy health insurance without any real cost controls.

Jodie Evans

#44. Only in America does 'health' 'care' 'reform' begin with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy merits a fine.

Mark Steyn

#45. I'm not saying we don't need health care reform. We do need health care reform.

Jim Renacci

#46. 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

#47. While the ACA's insurance expansions and reforms represent a great leap forward for the U.S., it is also true that when fully implemented by 2018, the U.S. will still have the most inefficient, wasteful, and unfair health insurance system of any advanced nation, even with the ACA reforms.

John E. McDonough

#48. 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

#49. When we didn't succeed at healthcare reform back in 1993, 1994, I went to work with Democrats and Republicans and we created the Children's Health Insurance Program.

Hillary Clinton

#50. When I became president with a commitment to reform health care, Hillary was a natural to head the health care task force. You all know we failed because we couldn't break a Senate filibuster. Hillary immediately went to work on solving the problems the bill sought to address one by one.

William J. Clinton

#51. The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.

Abraham Verghese

#52. If we're able to stop Obama on [health care reform], it will be his Waterloo. It will break him and we will show that we can, along with the American people, begin to push those freedom solutions that work in every area of our society.

Jim DeMint

#53. Every time I hear a Republican talking about health care reform, they say the American people don't want it. They say it so much that I think they're beginning to try to convince themselves that it's true.

John Yarmuth

#54. It is critical that we pass legislation to dramatically reform our health insurance system, and this reform should include a genuine public option, universal coverage, an end to insurance policy rescissions, and no restrictions against covering people with pre-existing conditions.

Jerrold Nadler

#55. Got good news and bad news for you, Mr. President. The good news is that Chief Justice John Roberts just saved your legacy and, perhaps, your presidency by writing for the Supreme Court majority to rule health care reform constitutional.

Ron Fournier

#56. A lot of people say, 'Why do health-care reform when the deficits are so big?' But that is when we've got to do it.

Mike Ross

#57. The health care bill is nothing about health care- it's about controlling the people.

David Lincoln

#58. One of the best aspects of health care reform is it starts to emphasize prevention.

Anne Wojcicki

#59. What we clearly need is experimentation with market reforms and private delivery options [in health care].

Stephen Harper

#60. Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.

Tariq Ali

#61. Reconciliation cannot be used to pass comprehensive health care reform. It won't work because it was never designed for that kind of significant legislation; it was designed for deficit reduction.

Kent Conrad

#62. If the goal of health-care reform is to provide comprehensive, universal health care in a cost-effective way, the only honest approach is a single-payer approach.

Bernie Sanders

#63. We will have health care reform in America.

Dick Durbin

#64. I always am a firm believer in you compensate people for their job, and so I did give them bonuses. We accomplished a lot in Congress, we passed health care reform. There were threats against their lives; they had a tough two years. They'd forgone any cost-of-living increase or any bonus before.

John Salazar

#65. As Congress focuses on comprehensive health care reform, one thing needs to be clear: We cannot fix health care if we do not address America's nursing shortage.

Kirsten Gillibrand

#66. 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

#67. [Barack Obama failed to sell a health care reform plan to American voters] because the utter implausibility of its central promise - expanded coverage at lower cost - led voters to conclude that it would lead ultimately to more government, more taxes and more debt.

Charles Krauthammer

#68. We will push through health care reform regardless of the views of the American people.

Jay Rockefeller

#69. When are we going to stop being afraid to push for change and begin putting into action the things we have discussed for centuries? Mental health cannot wait any longer. Lets get to work!

Tamara Hill

#70. It's not health care reform to dump more money into Medicaid.

Phil Bredesen

#71. In the first two years this is a man [Clinton] who tried his best to balance the budget, to reform health care, to fight for gay rights, to support personal freedoms. Couldn't those be considered doing the right things, evidence of true character?

Bryant Gumbel

#72. Times are tough but they are tough because the government is trying to do the right thing, whether on public service reform, education, health, anti-social behaviour and welfare, or in counter-terrorism

Tony Blair

#73. On the most recent battles on health insurance reform, the women led the battle to end gender discrimination by the insurance companies [where] women paid more and got less of a benefit, and also the whole issue of prevention.

Barbara Mikulski

#74. The myopic obsession of the Tea Party with destroying health care reform and wounding the president has led Republicans astray.

Hank Johnson

#75. I'm intending to work on juvenile justice reform, sentencing reform, reentry, drug treatment, access to mental health care.

Cory Booker

#76. Obama is capable - as evidenced by his first-term success with health care reform. But mandate-building requires humility, a trait not easily associated with him.

Ron Fournier

#77. Nancy Pelosi says the angry opposition to health care reform is like the angry opposition to gay rights that led to Harvey Milk being shot.

P. J. O'Rourke

#78. True health care reform cannot happen in Washington. It has to happen in our kitchens, in our homes, in our communities. All health care is personal.

Mehmet Oz

#79. Opponents of health care reform would take away consumer protections - siding with the insurance industry instead of the middle class. We can't afford that.

Sander Levin

#80. Health care reform, the marquee legislative accomplishment of the Obama administration's first term, was passed before we entered the world of divided government.

Eliot Spitzer

#81. Take Hispanic voters. They favor Democrats because they like the party's programs, from health care reform to government spending on education. It's not because the Republicans don't have a big enough Office of Hispanic Outreach.

Gail Collins

#82. Whatever we do, it is definitely time that we reboot the health care reform attempt. It's time to completely start over.

Jaime Herrera Beutler

#83. The forces that have worked hard to stoke populist anger against reform are the very ones that benefit from a health system which puts profits ahead of quality care for its patients.

Jerrold Nadler

#84. This is the opposite of the free market.

Bill Maher

#85. This [health care reform] cannot pass. What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass.

Michele Bachmann

#86. I welcome the President and working with him to try to get some of that medical malpractice reform so we can get the cost of health care to come down.

Ben Quayle

#87. After a century of striving, after a year of debate, after a historic vote, health care reform is no longer an unmet promise. It is the law of the land.

Barack Obama

#88. When you stop and look at so much of the kind of activism that has been triggered, the Tea Party and the like, as a result of Obama's efforts - TARP, the stimulus package, and now the health care reform - there is a lot of sense this government is changing.

Juan Williams

#89. I support health care reform in this country, but the current bills we have before us are too big, too costly, and the people who send me to Washington to be their voice are opposed to them and this process.

Mike Ross

#90. Reversing the escalation of health care costs is going to need more than legislation, yet it can be done without imposing rationing, as critics of reform fear.

Mitch Kapor

#91. Yes, I do agree we need health care reform; however, this bill badly misses the mark. Congress can and must do better for the American people.

John Mica

#92. Halloween Costume I Hate: kids dressed as their parent's poltical beliefs. Oooh! Aren't you a scary health care reform bill!

Dana Gould

#93. The health care reform legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last night clearly violates the U.S. Constitution and infringes on each state's sovereignty.

Bill McCollum

#94. What I was saying back then was that we have a lot of public health costs that taxpayers end up paying for through Medicaid, Medicare, through uncompensated care, because that was in the context of the push for health care reform and that we needed some way to try to defray those costs.

Hillary Clinton

#95. One of the major goals of health insurance reform is to bring down the cost.

Valerie Jarrett

#96. We are the ones who work every day with people who are suffering because they don't have health care. We cannot turn our backs on them, so for us, health care reform is a faith-based response to human need.

Simone Campbell

#97. Well, first let me say that I think health care reform is important. It has to be a priority. And our system is broken. The Finance Committee bill is the best effort yet, due in large measure to the efforts of my colleague, Olympia Snowe, but it's not there yet. It falls short.

Susan Collins

#98. Both referred to the Affordable Care Act, which is the accurate title of the health care reform law, as 'Obamacare.' That is a disparaging reference to the President of the United States, it is meant as a disparaging reference to the President of the United States.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz

#99. If, in fact, the GOP doesn't like any form of health care reform, what do we do with those 40 to 60 million uninsured? ... When they show up in the emergency room, just shoot 'em! Kill them! ... Do we have enough body bags? I don't know.

Montel Williams

#100. In terms of Medicare, I'm in favor of sitting down and having a serious discussion about the likely impact of the Affordable Care Act, health-care reform, on the cost issue and changing the fee-for-service structure.

Sander Levin