Dennis Hastert Quotes

I don't have a problem talking about Medicare or Medicaid or some other very important issue.

As I travel around Idaho and visit with seniors, I hear almost universal concern about the rising cost of health care, particularly the cost of prescription drugs.

Since the 1960s, there has been a tremendous expansion of the resources available to pay for health care.

My mother-in-law, Nanny, spent her working years as a bookkeeper at a medical office in Columbus, Ohio. Like so many Americans, she worked hard and paid into Medicare, knowing that one day she could count on having high-quality health care when she needed it most.

From routine hospital visits and prescription drugs, to emergencies and hospice care, Medicare covers the full range of health services that our nation's seniors rely on every single day.

If we do nothing, as the Republicans suggest, we're going to see health care costs reach a point where small businesses can't afford it and families can't afford it. We're going to see people turned down from pre-existing conditions. We're going to find the Medicare doughnut hole - a gap in coverage that's going to hurt a lot of seniors.

Today, Medicare provides health insurance to about 40 million seniors and disabled individuals each year. The number is only expected to grow as the baby boomers begin retiring.

Americans count on the guaranteed benefits they paid for under Medicare.

In Pennsylvania, 38 percent of Pennsylvania seniors chose to get their Medicare from a plan called Medicare Advantage. It's their choice. Forty-seven percent of them are going to lose it under 'Obamacare' according to Medicare by 2017.

But if you - if what - the reports are true, what they're saying is, is that as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that's going to increase our costs, we knew that.

Medicare is a promise we made to seniors more than four decades ago. When President Johnson signed Medicare into law, one in three seniors lived in poverty. Half of seniors had no health coverage at all.

I will continue to support legislation that provides American families and Seniors affordable health care.

Well, my view is that the insurance companies have done awfully well and spent a lot of money on a lot of things that don't have anything to do with health care.

Long gone are the days when hospital stays and surgeries made up the bulk of seniors' annual medical expenses.

For the amount of money that the country is going to spend this year on health care, you can go out and hire a doctor for every seven families in the US and pay the doctor almost $230,000 a year to cover them.

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

No American should ever have to spend his golden years at the mercy of insurance companies.

They call it managed care but it really is only managed costs.

Obama achieved something in his first year with health care that successive presidents have been unable to achieve.

General Motors spends more on health care than steel.

Health care should be affordable for everyone.

I told them I would work to strengthen and secure Medicare for generations to come, and I told them I would fight for a new prescription drug benefit under Medicare.

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

We must solve the problem in health care by curbing out-of-control costs that erode paychecks for working families and push quality coverage out of reach for millions of Americans.

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.