Barack Obama Quotes
These are not small reforms; these are big reforms. If passed, this will be the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act passed in the 1930s and the most important reform of our health care system since Medicare passed in the 1960s.
Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States (Democrat, IL), United States Senator (Democrat, IL), Statement when the Senate Passed Obamacare, December 24, 2009
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
He was prophetic. It was the start of the Canadian health system as we know it today. precursor of the New Democratic Party.
Cruz, a freshman senator with little political experience was elected with extensive Tea Party support in the Texas Republican primary where the Texas real contest is. He was so fanatical that when he could not get his fellow Republican Senators to shut down the government unless President Obama would not implement Obamacare which was enacted by the Congress and declared Constitutional by the Supreme Court. He then turned to the House of Representatives where there were a number of Tea Party Republicans. He helped lead a shutdown of the government, naively expecting the President to give up on his signature legislation. When he did not, the American public was angry at the Republicans for shutting down the government and costing the taxpayers over $80 billion dollars and inconveniencing many Americans. Finally, the House Speaker allowed an open vote and the Reasonable Republicans and the Democrats easily passed a continuing resolution to get the Government open again. However, another debt ceiling extension was coming up for a vote, and even after alienating most of his senior Republican Senate Colleagues and a large part of the American public, he gave this response to a journalist who asked if after the last fiasco, he would try to shut down the government again.
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.
Barack Hussein Obama II is an American politician and attorney who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the United States. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004.
