Virginia Bottemley Quotes

Too many of our senior citizens are being forced to choose between neglecting their illnesses or being impoverished by them.

Just 10 percent of the population—mainly the elderly—consumes about 80 percent of health care expenditures, primarily on expensive chronic illnesses and end-of-life costs. Historically, the longer lives that medical advances have given us have run exactly parallel to the increase in chronic illness and the explosion in costs. Can we afford to live longer—much less radically longer?

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.

We all understand that we are living longer, and we are more likely to spend more years as frail, elderly people who can't work. We also recognize that the wonderful advances in medicine also come with wonderful price tags. Those are things you can't budget around.

Health care has not so much slowed the ageing process as much as it has slowed the dying process.

As more people live longer, we can expect there to be additional costs for society.

Most people understand life expectancy has changed since Social Security started in 1937 when folks lived to be 59 years old. Today, they live to be 77 years old.

Demography is changing us as we are older societies, we're living longer. How the generations balance each other out, how that affects education and health care.

People use so much more health care when they live longer.

Advances in science and medical research and public health policies have meant that life expectancy for Australians is one of the highest in the world.

My home State of North Carolina ranks 12th in the United States for increased aging population and, according to a national report, 41st in overall health. According to this same report, individuals aged 50+ are the least healthy.

It is not enough for a great nation merely to have added new years of life—our objective must also be to add new life to those years.

Wish not so much to live long as to live well.

The proposed Health Care Reform bill will put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.

The baby boomer surge is forcing society to face decisions about costs - and particularly what is valuable. It's senseless for clinicians and governments to bear these choices alone; a sad effect of needless paternalism is that it places a false burden on responsible people.

A common misconception is that the costs of health care are cheaper in rural America, when in fact the reality is that they are more expensive and more difficult to access.

Health care in America, despite all you hear, still offers us citizens one of the most efficient and highest quality systems in the world. But it's expensive, and it's only getting worse.

Health care does not worry me a great deal. I've been impressed by some wonderful old people.

I'm no health care expert, but you've got technology that constantly advances the ability to extend life and maybe improve lifestyle. That puts constant upward pressure on health care costs.

Japan actually is an aging population, and so as the population has aged, they have had a lot more problems with health.

If there are healthy - and growing - numbers of people working and paying taxes, we are better able to pay the costs of people living longer.

The life expectancy is much longer today than it was when Social Security was created.

The elderly are all someone's flesh and blood and we cannot just shut them in a cupboard and hand over the responsibility for taking care of them to the state.

Today it has been estimated that the average 70 year old has four chronic conditions and consumes an average of 35 PBS scripts per year for those conditions.

The surest way to return to the people's business is to listen to the people themselves: We need to drop this whole scheme of federally controlled health care, start over, and work together on real reforms at the state level that will contain costs and won't leave America trillions of dollars deeper in debt.