Debbie Wasserman Schultz Quotes
We actually have not required in this law that you carry health insurance.
Wasserman Schultz, Debbie. Interview by Megyn Kelly. America Live, Fox News, 28 Mar. 2012.
This quotation is interesting for two reasons: First, President Donald Trump had campagned on teh promise of Universal Health Insurance and in the early days of the Tramp Administration, Trump's Manager of the Office of Management and Budget effectivly repudiated Trum's campaign promise. Second, it ilustrates the narrownss to the thinking of soem of the very conservative politicians of the era. Virtually every industiral democracy in the world had universial health or health insurance coverage. Mulvaney's thinking was limited to teh classic U. S. model of health insurance premiums being paid by individuals and companies to privat insurance companies. Yet most other countries had teh government coelect the money and pay the health providers (the single payer system) of simply funded universal ehalth care through the general tax revenues, and had no specific act of buying a policy so there was no way for people to refuse.
This statement, along with {633805}, was made by the President dozens of times. It is a quotation that had more influence on the political status of the nation than most others. Why Obama made such an absolute statement has been a mystery since, but the statement could not possibly have been literally true as long as the insurance companies had the right to cancel existing plans. When they did, they often laid the blame on the Obamacare rules, when the rules had grandfathered them in, but these were policies that the insurance companies saw as not sufficiently profitable in the new health insurance environment. The Republicans and many Democrats castigated Obama as millions of American lost their health insurance despite the President’s oft stated promise.
While ObamaCare prohibited insurers from discriminating against individuals, they were allowed to discriminate against regions if the State Insurance Regulators would allow this. In Tennessee they did under the theory that “one size does not fit all”. However what the insurers did was set up separate insurance corporations to service the rural areas which were very poor in Tennessee, and very poorly educated and malnourished as typically goes along with poverty. So the insurers tailored insurance policies which while affordable, for low income workers, would not protect the insured very much for any serious disease and therefore, did not protect the families from medically caused bankruptcy. When Obama Care set minimum basic coverage requirements on all insurance policies, these insurance companies preferred to close down rather than comply, and the State Insurance Regulators had not required all companies serving the wealthier communities to cover all communities as existed in most other states or where those other State Regulators set strong minimum standards of coverage. Tennessee did neither, so the insurance companies could cherry pick the best communities and avoid pockets where there were more health problems.
Deborah Wasserman Schultz is an American politician serving as the U.S. Representative from Florida's 23rd congressional district, first elected to Congress in 2004. A member of the Democratic Party, she is a former Chair of the Democratic National Committee.
