Charles W. Pickering Quotes

People don't trust the federal government as it relates to health care.

The federal government spends millions to run the Postal Service. I could lose your mail for half of that.

The only possible role that I can see for reconciliation would be to make modest changes in the major package to improve affordability, to deal with what share of Medicaid expansion the federal government pays, those kinds of issues, which is the traditional role for reconciliation in health care.

Tens of billions of dollars could be saved in Medicare and Medicaid alone by eliminate fraud and improving patient care. Not only would this save money, but it will save lives.

The fears are unanimous. ObamaCare is too expensive. It is a government takeover of our healthcare system. Services will be diminished. The patient-doctor relationship will be eliminated. It will not make healthcare more affordable. And it will bankrupt small businesses.

We have to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something absolutely much less expensive and something that works, where your plan can actually be tailored.

Hillary Clinton wants to put the government totally in charge of your health care despite the fact it's no good. It'll be much more expensive than even today.

The proposed Constitution, so far from implying an abolition of the State governments, makes them constituent parts of the national sovereignty, by allowing them a direct representation in the Senate, and leaves in their possession certain exclusive and very important portions of sovereign power. This fully corresponds, in every rational import of the terms, with the idea of a federal government.

Health care is too expensive, so the Clinton administration is putting a high-powered coporate lawyer - Hillary - in charge of making it cheaper. (This is what I always do when I want to spend less money - hire a lawyer from Yale.) If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.

Along with the GI Bill, which educated and housed Eisenhower's fellow veterans, the Interstate System has proved to be by far the most important economic-development strategy of the federal government.

In any civilized society the most important task is achieving a proper balance between freedom and order. In wartime, reason and history both suggest that this balance shifts in favor... of the government's ability to deal with conditions that threaten the national well-being.

With respect to our State and federal governments, I do not think their relations correctly understood by foreigners. They generally suppose the former subordinate to the latter. But this is not the case. They are co-ordinate departments of one simple and integral whole.

Obamacare is a total disaster. And not only are your rates going up by numbers that nobody’s ever believed, but your deductibles are going up, so that unless you get hit by a truck, you’re never going to be able to use it.

The quality of education today decides the tomorrow of Gujarat... Government may build schools, but the future can be built by the schools only. The key responsibility of building Gujarat's tomorrow thus lies with the schools.

Child support should do just that - support children, not the federal government.

The president-elect [Donald Trump] has set a very aggressive agenda, and I think that repealing and replacing Obamacare with the kind of health care reform that'll lower the cost of health insurance without growing the size of government will be job one.

Everyone in the top of their fields is pouring everything they have into this, which is why it was such a massive undertaking and why filming was extended. It's not because things are going badly. It's because they're so massive and it's so complicated and we want to get it right. We're not just phoning it in. We're taking our time with it because it's really important.

But ambitious encroachments of the federal government, on the authority of the State governments, would not excite the opposition of a single State, or of a few States only. They would be signals of general alarm . . . But what degree of madness could ever drive the federal government to such an extremity.

The federal government has the responsibility to protect the nation's public health, to protect us from foreign threats. And it [Zika] really is an illness that we are seeing arrive from abroad. So it is a threat to public health, and it is the federal government's job to cooperate in this.

I should say that Canada is one of the major criminals, not just the tar sands and so on, but even mining throughout the world, a lot of it is Canadian. It's extremely destructive, so an important thing for Canadians to do is curtail the predatory and destructive behavior of their own government and corporations. A carbon tax is one way of doing it.

I served 40 years in government, and I'm not looking forward to a position or an assignment. Of course, I have always said if a president asks you to do something, you have to consider it. But I am in no way interested in returning to government. But I, of course, would sit and talk to any president who wishes to talk to me.

Senator Jeff Sessions is reportedly on the [Donald] Trump shortlist to be either the next Secretary of Defense or the next Attorney General of the United States.

The government does not have some magic wand that can 'bring down the cost of health care.' It can buy a smaller quantity or lower quality of medical care, as other countries with government-run medical care do.

No subject was more important in the 2014 elections than healthcare, and Republicans in Congress should waste no time in taking decisive action in response to the voters'€™ demands. Obamacare has escalated costs, disrupted coverage, and introduced bad incentives throughout our healthcare system. Congress must repeal Obamacare and send the president a replacement package of reforms that protects freedom and focuses on the real problem with American healthcare -€” affordability.

And it's absolutely hypocritical for the political party that talks about states rights, to suddenly ignore states rights, that say that the federal government or federalism has no business in this kind of business.