Barbara Boxer Quotes

When I hear about Mainers rationing their medication or losing their life-savings despite being insured, I know our health care system requires major reform.

It's a disgrace that we have millions of people who are uninsured.

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.

Today, because of President Obama's courage, kids can stay on their parent's plan until they are 26. Insurers cannot kick you off your policy because you have hit your limit. They will not be able to deny you because you have a pre-existing condition.

No doctor should ever have to call an insurance man to ask permission to treat a patient who is standing right there.

They call it managed care but it really is only managed costs.

People suffering from cancer, or diabetes, or asthma or any other preexisting condition shouldn't have to live in fear of losing their coverage or seeing their premiums go through the roof.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But we are not going to stand by and go back to allowing people with preexisting conditions to be discriminated against, go back to the situation where people can be thrown off their insurance simply because they become seriously ill or you can't get on your parents' insurance after the age of 20.

We're trying to take a leadership role in solving the nation's health-care crisis. We want everybody in this country to have health insurance.

We know that 10 million more people will lose insurance in the next 10 years if we don't act.

When I go back to Texas, I travel the state, and I see people all the time who come up to me, men and women across Texas, and they grab me by the shoulder, and they're afraid. They say, 'Ted, you know, I just lost my health insurance. I got a child with diabetes. I'm scared. Please stop this from happening.'

Look, I'm a cancer survivor, all right? So I have great personal empathy for people who have pre-existing conditions and can't get insurance.

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.

And I have to say, what motivates me every day and I know my Democratic colleagues is to remember that every day 14,000 people get up in the morning with insurance that go to bed at night without it and most of them because they lost their job.

We can all agree that no American should lose their life savings or their home because of illness or injury and that the rising cost of health care severely burdens individuals, families and businesses.

A transfer of money should never be involved in this profound situation. Although illness is profound, too, but medicine's a business today. It's a business.

I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety net. Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care ... it is another story altogether.

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.

Medical decisions ought to be made by medical doctors—not insurance companies.

Doctors no longer charge patients, patients no longer pay doctors, and neither determines what is medically necessary.

We ration health care now. We just don’t ration very rationally.