Dennis Kucinich Quotes
Many years ago doctors would bleed sick patients with leeches. Today, the insurance companies do that.
Dennis Kucinich, U. S. Congressman (Democrat, OH), Democratic Presidential Candidate Debate, De Moines, Iowa, January 4, 2004
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
At the time in America, the insurance companies only paid out less than 80 percent of all the money they took in for health insurance. More than 20 percent went into their high overhead and profits. In contrast, to the 20 percent or more that it costs with insurance companies to administer health insurance payments, the agency that performs the same function for Medicare doe so with only a 6 percent cost Sanders argued that by getting rid of the insurance companies, the nation could save about 14 percent of the entire insured medical bills for the nation—many billions of dollars which would reduce average health insurance premiums by 14 percent. Opponents argue that the would be a socialist system and give too much potential control of individual health matters to a government operated or government controlled organizations. Politicians, in order to look good with the voters, would lower premiums and also pay out less either shortchanging doctors and hospitals or rating medial care somehow.
Unlike most forms of insurance virtually everyone will have one or more claims and collect in his or her lifetime. Many of use will never have an automobile crash and collect on our insurance policy, but health is different in that we all change health status from well to ill at times and if we are fortunate we return to a state of wellness. But as Eigen observes, most of us who are tell are only temporarily well, With time our state will change to ill and if we are not very fortunate we will never use our health insurance as we will be dead. There is almost no way to age in a modern society without needing health care or funeral services, That is the consequence of the normal process of aging. So with health insurance schemes we, in effect, pass money from the living well to the living ill. So if health care costs increase fastr than inflation, which it has almost always done in the last half century, the temporarily well will be paying more and more. The only way to break that cycle is to somehow limit the cost increases of health care to that of the inflationary increase. Eigen has argued that most of us focus on the wrong problem--the details of the way the well pay for the ill, when the only soltuion is to reduce the rate of increases of health care costs. And there are only 2 ways to do that: Reduce the compensation for all the health care actors--physicians, nurses, other staff, hospitals, and manufacturers of medical equipment, supplies and expecially pharmaceuticals which have been increasing at the fastest rate of all or wer privide more and more effective prevention.
Dennis John Kucinich is an American politician. A U.S. Representative from Ohio from 1997 to 2013, he was also a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States in 2004 and 2008. He ran for governor of Ohio in the 2018 election, losing in the primary to Richard Cordray.
