Richard Lamm Quotes

More than 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does nationally is preventive care - including cervical cancer screenings, breast cancer screenings, and family planning - mostly for women with low resources and income below the poverty line.

Unfortunately, in rich-world health, innovation is both your friend and your enemy. Innovation is inventing organ replacement, joint replacement. We're inventing ways of doing new things that cost $300,000 and take people in their 70s and, on average, give them an extra, say, two or three years of life. And then you have to say, given finite resources, should we fire two or three teachers to do this operation?

Medical science has proven time and again that when the resources are provided, great progress in the treatment, cure, and prevention of disease can occur.

Access to basic quality health care is one of the most important domestic issues facing our nation.

A few drugs - such as beta-blockers, statins and glycogen control medications - have proved very effective at managing hypertension, heart disease, diabetes and strokes. Most insurance plans charge something for them. Why not make drugs like these free? Not for everyone, but just the groups for whom they are provably effective.

Our goal is to make Maine the healthiest state in the nation and reduce our overall health care costs.

Modern medicine has presented us with a Faustian bargain: Our aging bodies can bankrupt our children and grandchildren. We have run into the 'law of diminishing returns' in health care, where we are often doing more and more, with higher and higher technology, at more and more cost, for less and less benefit.

Universal coverage, not medical technology, is the foundation of any caring health care system.

For just a few dollars a dose, vaccines save lives and help reduce poverty. Unlike medical treatment, they provide a lifetime of protection from deadly and debilitating disease. They are safe and effective. They cut healthcare and treatment costs, reduce the number of hospital visits, and ensure healthier children, families and communities.

Our health care system is terribly broken… Health comes from much more than health care and health care is much more than hospitals. We do a good job on treatment and a terrible job on prevention.

The costs of not doing these things dwarf the costs of doing them. The problem is that people don’t think about ‘Oh you saved my life’ and they don’t say thank you for that—and they don’t want to spend any money for the possibility of saving their life unless they are actually facing something. What government should be about is leading from the front and explaining … that people don’t want to spend any money, but … it costs more money to not do it... New York City’s average life expectancy is three years longer than any place else in America.

We are making health care a human right which, after all, is the purpose of Obamacare.

Everyone in this country has a right to quality, affordable health care.

What keeps me up at night is worrying about the moms who depend on ACA for all of the preventive care and not to mention prenatal care, the wellness visits, and the cost of delivery.

Health care is a human right, and single-payer health care will deliver quality, affordable care to every Illinoisan.

In a successful health system, the proportion of per-capita health dollars used for home care, outpatient primary care, and preventive services should actually increase, not decrease, relative to those for acute hospital care.

We must continue our work to improve and strengthen health care for Georgians, and we must defend the vital protections and programs that protect the health and wellbeing of families across our nation.

From prescription drug costs to reproductive care to COVID-19, I will fight to ensure that every Mainer receives the quality, affordable care they deserve.

I think health care is incredibly, incredibly important.

I think most Americans understand that we deserve to have universal health care, as enjoyed by most citizens in most developed countries.

Most of Planned Parenthood's work focuses on health care for low-income women: things like screenings for breast cancer and diabetes, and family planning.

We're not going to have you burdening the health system.

What Americans desperately need is a way to transition from the current system - which is fragmented and focuses on high-cost, high-tech interventions after illness strikes - to a modern system that delivers coordinated, high-touch, lower-cost, patient-centered care with an emphasis on primary care and prevention.

In the Affordable Care Act, Congress provided access to medical care for nearly 30 million uninsured Americans. Access is critically important, but offering access to an already broken system won't provide a lasting cure. We need to ask and answer the underlying question: Access to what?

If you're going to have a lifesaving treatment, a curing treatment, but unaffordable, what's the use in having that treatment?