Christina Romer Quotes

History has repeatedly shown that the costs of many government healthcare programs far exceed early projections.

Health care costs are eating the Defense Department alive.

I think we have to be very careful when we toss around terms like 'cut health care costs.' We would do very well to expect a cut in the rate of increase.

If you want to slow medical inflation in the private sector, it makes sense to expand the government's investment in private health care.

Healthcare is growing now at about 10 per cent per annum in the U.S. top line, versus 3 per cent for the economy. As someone with a sharp pencil and an eye for this kind of thing, this can't last.

What you see is when the government gets involved, you run out of money and health care gets rationed.

Health care is the Pac-Man of the budget.

In Florida, Medicaid is the fastest-growing part of our state budget - hands down. It is increasing at more than 3.5 times the rate of our general revenue.

The right way to reign in healthcare costs is not by applying more government and more controls and making it more like the post office, it's by making it more like a consumer-driven market.

Medicaid is essentially bankrupt, Medicare is essentially bankrupt, why the heck would we give the federal government another entitlement program to manage?

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.

I think it's important that people know what raising the debt ceiling is. It's Congress giving permission to the federal government to borrow more money that we don't have, and we borrow it for the purpose of spending it.

The government should not pick up every single bit of healthcare to where literally 60 percent of every dollar is just in your last 60 days of life. We should be more balanced than that and give people a chance to understand what the government should and should not pay for.

There is a very serious fiscal-policy question of, 'Are we running our overall fiscal policy such that we as a government can pay our bills?'

In economic terms, health care is a highly successful industry - profitable, growing, and virtually recession-proof - but it's a massive burden on the rest of the economy.

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

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.

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?

When it comes to serious cuts to major programs like Medicaid, the American people are not calling for leadership but magic. They want cuts with no pain.

For the amount of money that the country is going to spend this year on health care, you can go out and hire a doctor for every seven families in the US and pay the doctor almost $230,000 a year to cover them.

We are spending a little more than we are raising each year and you wonder how long it can go on. It is too easy for us to borrow.

Governments harangue about deficits to get more revenue so they can spend more.

Let us act with our eyes open. We are going to have a deficit next fiscal year and the year after that.

To get control of the deficit we have to do something about the cost of health care. That is the part of the government budget that is toltally out of control. There is NO WAY to control the budget unless we can bend the growing health care cost down. Nothing should be off the table, but no one has submitted a budget whtch tries to control health care cost.

Someone should put up a chart for Congress showing the difference between millions, billions, and trillions. Our problems are in trillions and Congress is arguing about millions.