Top 100 Quotes About Medicare
#1. 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
#2. I happen to believe that we should move to a Medicare-for-all single-payer system, similar to what other countries around the world have.
Bernie Sanders
#3. Workers organized and fought for worker rights and food safety, Social Security and Medicare - they fought to change government. And they won.
Sherrod Brown
#4. My votes against the education bill and my votes against the Medicare bill got huge play at home.
Mike Pence
#5. The specific trigger for me was when the President [Barack Obama] put Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block. Why I got into the race - it just seemed unconscionable that the Democrats were leading the charge.
Jill Stein
#6. I don't believe there's a red state in America where people believe you should cut Medicare, Social Security and veterans' benefits rather than doing away with corporate tax loopholes.
Bernie Sanders
#7. I will take my hands off Medicare when there is no Medicare, then I will come and see you sir.
Allen West
#8. When Medicare was created for senior citizens and America 's disabled in 1965, about half of a senior's health care spending was on doctors and the other half on hospitals.
Dennis Hastert
#9. I will seek to reverse the shift of benefits from Medicaid to Medicare and hold harmless our seniors and disabled.
Jeff Bingaman
#10. A Harris poll I've seen says only 12 percent of the electorate names taxes as one of the most important issues facing the nation. Voters put tax cuts dead last, behind education, Social Security, health care, Medicare and poverty.
Lane Evans
#11. In the United States, 25 percent of all Medicare spending is for the 5 percent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months that is of little apparent benefit.
Atul Gawande
#12. My neighbors aren't millionaires. They're retirees who depend on Social Security and Medicare.
Marco Rubio
#13. Ben Carson seems pretty proud that he knows how big the Medicare budget is. All that money goes to the private sector, but Carson seems to think the private sector would do a lot better if ... something. I'm not quite sure what.
Ted Cruz
#14. From routine hospital visits and prescription drugs, to emergencies and hospice care, Medicare covers the full range of health services that our nation's seniors rely on every single day.
Ann McLane Kuster
#15. Medicare's top officials said in 2006 that they had reduced the number of fraudulent and improper claims paid by the agency, keeping billions of dollars out of the hands of people trying to game the system.
Charles Duhigg
#16. The nominee is Mitt Romney. Paul Ryan joins Mitt Romney. The budget plan, the approach on Medicare and all of that is going to be the Romney plan. What he has is a man as his number two who understands the details of budgets, who has demonstrated a willingness to take on tough issues.
John Sununu
#17. Obamacare, without a single Republican vote, cut $700 billion out of Medicare.
Louie Gohmert
#18. No one can reasonably deny that Medicare is headed for insolvency, and that Medicare's insolvency, if not rectified, will lead to the federal government's insolvency.
David Limbaugh
#19. Don't let the politicians chip away at the New Deal and the Great Society programs like Social Security and Medicare, that puts a floor beyond which the elderly, the sick, the powerless do not starve or lack for medicine or shelter.
Helen Thomas
#20. The break for me was the Medicare drug benefit in 2003. It's just grossly expensive, bad policy. After that, I no longer gave them the benefit of the doubt and started seeing the glass as half-empty.
Bruce Bartlett
#21. I'm telling you, as a doctor who spent about half of his time in the office taking care of our seniors on Medicare, it is a program that intentions to work are much better than the way it's working today in terms of practicality.
John Barrasso
#22. Madoff's scam was small compared to Ponzi schemes the government itself runs: Social Security and Medicare.
John Stossel
#23. My mother-in-law, Nanny, spent her working years as a bookkeeper at a medical office in Columbus, Ohio. Like so many Americans, she worked hard and paid into Medicare, knowing that one day she could count on having high-quality health care when she needed it most.
Ann McLane Kuster
#25. Rather than squander the surplus on tax breaks for the rich, we should add a prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program, shore up Social Security, fortify our defense, provide a quality public education and offer economic assistance to rural areas.
Bennie Thompson
#26. The curious thing is Americans don't mind individual mandates when they come in the form of payroll taxes to buy mandatory public insurance. In fact, that's the system we call Social Security and Medicare, and both are so popular politicians dare not touch them.
Robert Reich
#27. Medicaid is essentially bankrupt, Medicare is essentially bankrupt, why the heck would we give the federal government another entitlement program to manage?
Tim Pawlenty
#28. No matter what federal program one selects - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the drug war, the income tax and the IRS, education, foreign interventions and wars - they are all a giant mess.
Jacob G. Hornberger
#29. The only way America can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich.
Robert Reich
#30. When Medicare was first enacted in 1965, it provided coverage for hospitalization, doctor visits and surgeries, but there was no coverage for prescription medications.
Michael Burgess
#31. Is Medicare socialism? You want to get rid of Medicare. And a lot of the people against health care do. I want to preserve it and grow it.
Anthony Weiner
#32. I think every program needs to stand the sunshine of righteous scrutiny. Whether it's Social Security, whether it's Medicaid, whether it's Medicare.
Rick Perry
#33. Medicare in particular will run out of money, and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up.
Barack Obama
#34. Today, Medicare provides health insurance to about 40 million seniors and disabled individuals each year. The number is only expected to grow as the baby boomers begin retiring.
Jim Bunning
#35. To be sure, debates will linger about whether Medicare is too large or too small. Debates remain about the allocation of Medicare dollars. But December 8, 2003, demonstrated that there is no debate about this most fundamental fact: Medicare must survive.
Michael Johns
#36. On the Medicare side, they limited their cuts to far in the future, and to providers.
Kevin Drum
#37. What Canada has to do is to have a government connected to the priorities of the people of which it is elected to serve. Those priorities include ensuring medicare is sustainable, support for the military, and tax and justice systems that work.
Peter MacKay
#38. Doctors cannot afford to provide care at the rate of reimbursement that Medicare insists that they accept.
Nan Hayworth
#39. To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.
Ben Bernanke
#40. However, the Medicare prescription drug benefit has changed, and if the nearly 3,000 seniors I have met through 12 town halls can represent a sample of opinion, many seniors do not yet understand the prescription drug program and do not plan to sign up for coverage.
Mike Fitzpatrick
#41. The economist John Maynard Keynes said that in the long run, we are all dead. If he were around today he might say that, in the long run, we are all on Social Security and Medicare.
Ben Bernanke
#42. I opposed the Medicare prescription drug entitlement. I opposed the Wall Street bailout. I opposed the stimulus bill.
Mike Pence
#43. If Congress wants to mess with the retirement program, why don't we let them start by changing their retirement program, and not have one, instead of talking about getting rid of Social Security and Medicare that was robbed $700 billion dollars to pay for Obamacare.
Mike Huckabee
#44. If every American automatically has health coverage, the age at which Medicare kicks in becomes a less fraught issue. We could gradually raise the age of Medicare eligibility a bit, according to income, and save money.
Joe Klein
#45. We have a serious structural deficit problem. And it needs to be addressed. The president is trying to address it through reforms of Social Security, but the problem is there with other entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
John W. Snow
#46. We can't get to the $4 trillion in savings that we need by just cutting the 12 percent of the budget that pays for things like medical research and education funding and food inspectors and the weather service. And we can't just do it by making seniors pay more for Medicare.
Barack Obama
#47. I feel very strongly that the Democratic Party has, in the past, been the party of the future. I think when you look at Social Security and Medicare, when you look at the civil rights movement, the women's movement, I think the Democratic Party has always been in the forefront of change.
Richard Lamm
#48. I hope you're appreciating the rich irony here: hospitals and doctors are using the Medicare subsidy (Medicare is the federal agency that doles out the HITECH dollars) to buy computer systems that allow them to bill Medicare more effectively.
Robert Wachter
#49. On January 1, 2006, Medicare will begin to offer a prescription drug benefit, and for the first time, it will place an emphasis on preventive care and early treatment of disease.
Michael Burgess
#50. There's a need to reform Medicare, but not a need to cut a half trillion dollars out of Medicare.
Charlie Dent
#51. On Medicare, I would suggest ridding the system of fraud and bulk purchasing of prescription drugs, to begin with.
Paul Tonko
#52. In America the scale of medical embezzlement is extraordinary. According to Donald Berwick, the ex-boss of Medicare and Medicaid (the public health schemes for the old and poor), America lost between $82 billion and $272 billion in 2011 to medical fraud and abuse.
Anonymous
#53. And because of these programs like Medicare, Medicare prescription drugs, Social Security, we now have the healthiest and wealthiest group of senior citizens that the world has ever seen. This is a continuing commitment to that.
James T. Walsh
#54. They're all tied together: taxes, Medicare, Social Security, and the debt. We've got to have a setting of priorities, and looking at it - at each of them as disconnected, I think, doesn't properly address these major challenges.
John McCain
#55. You're going to hear a lot from President Obama and yes, from Joe Biden, you're hearing a little bit about Medicare these days. What they will not tell you is they turned Medicare into a piggybank to fund 'Obamacare.' They took $716 billion dollars to pay for the 'Obamacare' program.
Paul Ryan
#56. Tea Party members go to meetings on Medicare scooters.
Ishmael Reed
#57. The Republican promise is for policies that create economic growth. Republicans believe lower taxes, less regulation, balanced budgets, a solvent Social Security and Medicare will stimulate economic growth.
Rand Paul
#58. When I was young, many people worked for a company with a pension plan that covered them for as long as they lived. If they didn't have a pension plan, they could count on Social Security and Medicare.
Robert Kiyosaki
#59. There is a lot of waste in government-run programs generally, and a lot of waste and fraud and misuse of money in Medicare and Medicaid that can be saved.
Chuck Grassley
#60. What I am saying is, all health care has a problem with costs. Medicare is growing slower than the private insurance plans. Why? Because of their efficiency. They don't have to give money to shareholders. Why should be defending shareholders?
Anthony Weiner
#61. The Congressional Budget Office tells us that Medicare spending has increased fivefold in the past 42 years, dramatically more than all other categories of federal spending.
David Limbaugh
#62. I believe we ought to subsidize some health care for the poor, but Medicare subsidizes everyone's health care.
James Q. Wilson
#63. In Pennsylvania, 38 percent of Pennsylvania seniors chose to get their Medicare from a plan called Medicare Advantage. It's their choice. Forty-seven percent of them are going to lose it under 'Obamacare' according to Medicare by 2017.
Paul Ryan
#64. Like my colleagues, I did about 10 to 15 town hall meetings on this issue; and what I found is people came with a sincere interest to learn, a sincere interest to cut through the rhetoric and understand how this Medicare bill impacts them in their daily lives.
Chris Chocola
#65. Medicare is immune from the competitive pressures that force private insurers to pay attention to what patients and doctors want.
Virginia Postrel
#66. The Ryan budget gets rid of Medicare in 10 years and turns it into a voucher program,
Sheldon Whitehouse
#67. In fact, entitlement spending on programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security make up 54% of federal spending, and spending is projected to double within the next decade. Medicare is growing by 9% annually, and Medicaid by 8% annually.
Jim Ryun
#68. Fraudulent and improper payments have long bedeviled Medicare, a $466 billion program. In particular, payments for durable medical equipment, like power wheelchairs and diabetic test kits, are ripe for fraud.
Charles Duhigg
#69. When you're sick, you present your medicare card, not your credit card ...
Jack Layton
#70. According to The New York Times, the mob has now gotten into Medicare fraud. But the good news is, when they do break your legs there's a good chance you're covered.
Jay Leno
#71. At the beginning of his administration, Obama homed right in on Medicare, which he wanted to fix by reducing the overall cost of health care in this country. He risked everything - some would claim he lost everything - by being so single-minded.
Gail Collins
#72. Congress would make it mandatory, absolutely require, that, every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner
Betsy McCaughey
#73. I look forward to standing up and holding George Bush accountable for pushing seniors off of Medicare into HMOs.
John F. Kerry
#74. The fair (ph) transforms the process by which we fund Social Security and Medicare because the money paid in consumption is paid by everybody, including illegals, prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, all the people that are freeloading off the system now.
Mike Huckabee
#75. One line I'd draw would be on raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare. It sounds fair, since people are living longer. But it isn't. Lower income workers are the ones who find it hardest to keep working after 65. And they'll get penalized with lower benefits.
Gail Collins
#76. When Department of Health and Human Services administrators decided to base 30 percent of hospitals' Medicare reimbursement on patient satisfaction survey scores, they likely figured that transparency and accountability would improve healthcare.
Alexandra Robbins
#77. We not only heard it before 20 years ago, before George Bush in 2001 passed his tax relief, before in 2003 the tax relief were past, we were told they were dead. Before we provided prescription drugs for Medicare, we were told it wasn't going to happen.
Ken Mehlman
#78. Medicare is expensive because we spend a lot on healthcare. We spend a lot on healthcare basically just because we want to, and doing so has been very good to a lot of people who work in healthcare fields.
Alex Pareene
#79. In the wake of the Supreme Court of Canada decision (Chaoulli-Zeliotis), the Canadian Medicare system is about to be redesigned. Physicians must not just sit at the table, but must position themselves at the head, where they can lead and direct the nature of that design.
Brian Day
#80. The American people say, 'Don't touch Social Security, don't touch Medicare, don't cut defense.' That's 84 percent of the federal budget.
Kent Conrad
#81. Mom's reaction to this chaos isn't a surprise. No matter how high the bill that she is paying or that Medicare is paying for her, she will say to me or herself: "What happens to all the people who can't afford this? It's just not fair." Universal
Will Schwalbe
#82. 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
#83. I'm gonna keep Social Security without change, except I'm going to get rid of the waste, fraud, and abuse; same thing with Medicare.
Donald Trump
#84. There's an issue with the Medicare doctor reimbursement rates where at the end of the year every doctor that folks in this country use that provide Medicare services is going to get a 30 percent salary cut.
Kevin Yoder
#85. I'm on Medicare now. If I go and have a big operation, it costs me nothing. It should cost me a little. I'm not rich, but I can afford a few grand if I have to have my appendix taken out. I can pitch in a little bit.
P. J. O'Rourke
#86. We know that Medicare's going broke in seven years, but we need to start over. That's what the American people want us to do.
John McCain
#87. The Romney-Ryan plan would replace the guarantee of Medicare with a voucher that wouldn't keep up with costs. Congressman Ryan says that he wants Medicare to be around for his grandkids. Well, if that's the case, he had better vote for Barack Obama!
Debbie Wasserman Schultz
#88. 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
#89. The fundamental reason why Medicare is failing is why the Soviet Union failed
socialism doesn't work,
Rand Paul
#90. Medicare is paid for by the American taxpayer. Medicare belongs to you. Medicare is for seniors, who many of them are on fixed income, to lift them out of poverty.
John F. Kerry
#91. Seniors vote, and that is why we have, you know, Medicare since the 1960s for seniors, and we didn't have a national healthcare program for children, even though it's a lot more cost-effective to deal with children than with seniors.
Nicholas Kristof
#92. Equipment sellers can pocket more than $2,500 every time they send a powered wheelchair to a patient and bill Medicare.
Charles Duhigg
#93. How we continue to fund Medicare and Medicaid into the future is a pressing issue of national concern.
James T. Walsh
#94. If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan get elected to the White House, Medicare will be bankrupt by the end of their first term.
Stephanie Cutter
#95. Open the borders to willing workers from any and all nations. They will create businesses that pay taxes, especially payroll taxes to fund Medicare and Social Security benefits of retiring baby boomers.
Louis Navellier
#96. A major driver of the cost of healthcare in the United States is a compromise that was reached with the American Medical Association in the 1960s when Medicare was first established.
Clayton Christensen
#97. It's critical - that the people that are benefiting today from Medicare and Social Security that they not see benefit reductions. It's awfully hard to tell someone who might be 82, that they've gotta go back to work, because their benefits are gonna be chopped. That's not gonna happen.
Fred Upton
#98. The real problem with big issues like Medicare is that both parties have to be brave at the same time. Every pollster will tell you not to do that to get partisan advantage. Too many people here are willing to deliberately harm the country for partisan gain. That is borderline treason.
Jim Cooper
#99. There are very powerful and wealthy special interests who want to privatize or dismember virtually every function that government now performs, whether it is Social Security, Medicare, public education or the Postal Service.
Bernie Sanders
#100. The true enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who defend an imploding status quo.
Mitch Daniels
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