Barack Obama Quotes

Having started and owned two small businesses, I know what a challenge it is to keep up with the rising costs of your employees' healthcare premiums.

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.

We really do have to get at the underlying question of health-care costs.

Medical costs are of concern, both in developing and developed countries.

It is time that we take control and find a way to curtail the explosive costs of health care. Small businesses deserve a chance to channel these funds toward other needs, such as expanding and creating more jobs for the economy.

The Republicans want to turn Medicare into a voucher plan that will end guaranteed coverage of medical bills for the elderly.

Without Free Choice Vouchers, there is little in the health reform law that discourages employers from increasingly passing the burden of health care costs onto their employees.

There's no way we're going to have low cost health insurance in a world of high cost medicine.

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

I had, in my legal practice, often encountered really shocking examples of the devastating impact of the costs of long-term medical care on meager incomes. And, just before I was elected, I had my own personal experience in paying very considerable bills for my mother's terminal illness.

Governor Kasich and I won't agree on everything, but agree we've got to control the rise in health care costs on all levels.

Under Obamacare, it virtually is impossible to find out the price of anything. That's not the way to make health care affordable.

It wasn't until I was injured at the gym - resulting in an emergency room visit and bill of $4,000 - that I realized the cost of forgoing health insurance. I was fine, but it took me more than a year to pay off that bill. That hurt worse than the injury itself.

One of the criticism I had about the Affordable Care Act is it made insurance so expensive that people who had it didn't even use it because their premiums were high. Their deductibles were high. Their copays were high.

One quarter of Medicare beneficiaries have five or more chronic conditions, sees an average of 13 physicians each year, and fills 50 prescriptions per year.

If you're 54 or 55, you might want to listen because this will affect you. The idea, which was originally presented by Congressman Ryan, your running mate, is that we would give a voucher to seniors and they could go out in the private marketplace and buy their own health insurance.

Now with digital, we have much better projection, and if the theaters are charging higher prices but providing refreshments and a clean, well-lit theater, there's no reason why this cannot go on as a senior-citizen-driven business for years. Especially with movies for adults.

Obama's devastating America. The policies put in place and those that are gonna be put in place are gonna do even more damage. I mean, it's serious what he's doing. Did you see this? The IRS announced that the family health care premium, once Obamacare is implemented, is $20,000 a year. You were told your premium was gonna go down $2,500 a year! The average family premium is going to be $20,000 a year. I guarantee you, people didn't vote for that.

I think that when it comes to Social Security, all of us want to make sure that our senior citizens can retire with dignity and respect. And everybody has to be open-minded in thinking how do we firm up a system that, in fact, is going to be in difficulty in the coming years.

You hear it every four years, ... Scare the seniors, scare the seniors.

People ask me, How would you do as a contestant on the show? And I tell them I would do fairly well among senior citizens, but against a good thirty-year-old I would have trouble because I cannot recall information as quickly as I used to. You used to say something and I would go, boom, right away, very sharp. Now it's like, Oh, yes, but wait a minute, uh, uh.

Unfortunately, the (budget) does not . . . help Congress reform such programs as Medicaid and Medicare, which both grow at average rate of around 8 percent each year through 2015 and will continue to eat up more of the total federal budget.

[Several candidates talked of problems with the federal Medicare system, particularly concerns about whether it would cover prescription drug costs in the future.] We're asking senior citizens to make a choice between their health and their income, ... Medicare is probably the most difficult challenge we face in the next century, because it has a lot to do with other things besides money.

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?

Today, its expensive prescription medications burdening seniors on fixed incomes with thousands of dollars in yearly out-of-pocket costs.