John Reid Quotes

The Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion.

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

There is just no reason why the richest nation in the world can't provide health care to all its people.

Those were the ideals that drove us to nationalization of the health service.

We will never privatise the National Health Service.

Access to basic quality health care is one of the most important domestic issues facing our nation.

Healthcare is the cornerstone of the socialist state. It is the crown jewel of the welfare state.

The issues that matter to me are the social safety nets for people, health care, middle-class concerns. We need to take care of the middle class and the poor in our country.

One of the jewels in the crown of Labour's time in office was the rescue of the National Health Service. As the Commonwealth Fund, the London School of Economics and the Nuffield Foundation have all shown, health reforms as well as additional investment were essential to improved outcomes, especially for poorer patients.

I think the British people are very, very attached to the idea that the health service is free at the point of use. But there is no reason why every doctor, nurse and teacher in this country has to be employed by the state.

Is Medicare socialism? You want to get rid of Medicare. And a lot of the people against health care do. I want to preserve it and grow it.

I am convinced that inside two or three years both the doctors who provide the service and the people who receive the survice will be so completely satisfied with it that no government would dare to take it way.

If the government didn't try to guarantee that everybody should have access to decent health care, it wouldn't happen.

It is not only a moral imperative that we cover everybody (with insured heath care), it has become an economic necessity.

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.

We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid Programs.

I love Scotland; I love the NHS. I was born into the NHS; I grew up in the NHS. My family grew up in the NHS.

Universal health care is, for me, the most sacred part, the most important pillar, of British citizenship.

When you're sick, you present your medicare card, not your credit card.

The problem of giving health care to everybody cannot be solved so long as we're spending huge sums of money for war. Already we have a very wasteful healthcare system, the most wasteful healthcare system in the world. I mean, we spend the most money and still have 40 million people without insurance. Compare us to Cuba. Cuba is our enemy, run by a dictator, Fidel Castro. But people in Cuba get health care at least equal to that of the United States - with very scarce resources. So I think this issue is the most important domestic issue.

The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it

One of the virtues of the NHS... it doesn't worry you about money at the moment when you're least capable of doing anything about it.

The market alone can't solve our health-care woes.

The NHS is something we should put above everything else.

We were rugged individualists in the Navy, but we all had health care.