Sylvia Mathews Burwell Quotes

We have health insurance companies playing a major role in the provision of healthcare, both to the employed whose employers provide health insurance, and to those who are working but on their own are not able to afford it and their employers either don't provide it, or don't provide it at an affordable price. We are still struggling. We've made a lot of progress. Ten million Americans now have insurance who didn't have it before the Affordable Care Act, and that is a great step forward.

Insure the uninsured. Effect of Obamacare to date: Uninsure the insured.

Remember what Obamacare gave you. Obamacare gave you insurance but not health care. A lot of folks who were technically insured either couldn't afford the premiums or couldn't afford the copay.

We think healthcare costs should be going down, not up. We think people should be able to keep insurance that they had.

Legislation is about three fundamental things - affordability, access, and quality. That's what the American people want.

We've got nearly 50 million people in America with no health insurance. That's a weapon of mass destruction.

Legislatively, the thing I'm most proud of is healthcare, and I will continue to be most proud of it because not only do we have 30 million people who are going to get healthcare, we've got six million young people who are able to stay on their parents' plan until they're 26.

Before Obamacare you had a lot of people that were very, very happy with their health care. And now those people in many cases don't even have health care. They don't even have anything that's acceptable to them.

There are a number of things that sound good, but frankly, we just can't afford them. And Obamacare doesn't sound good and it's not affordable.

The Affordable Care Act has clearly, as Secretary Clinton made the point, done a lot of good things, but, what it has not done is dealt with the fact we have 29 million people today who have zero health insurance, we have even more who are underinsured with large deductibles and copayments and prescription drug prices are off the wall.

What we want is for people to know that you can get affordable health care and most young Americans, they're not covered and the truth is they can get coverage all for what it costs to pay your cell phone bill.

It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.

People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary.

Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness.

We need young people to be involved, and we have to expect that young people are going to be impatient, they don't want to wait, and they've got new ideas and new ways of looking at problems.

People who have health insurance are benefiting in all sorts of ways that they may not be aware of, everything from no longer having lifetime limits on the claims that they can make to seniors getting prescription drug discounts under Medicare to free mammograms.

Every major country on earth, whether it's the U.K., whether it's France, whether it's Canada, has managed to provide healthcare to all people as a right and they are spending significantly less per capita on health care than we are. So I do not accept the belief that the United States of America can't do that.

I know a lot of people in Washington would say, well, you know, indigent people can't manage their health savings account. They're too stupid. But they're not too stupid. Somebody has a diabetic foot ulcer, they learn very quickly not to go the emergency room where it costs five times more to take care of it. They go to the clinic.

Those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions based on an assessment of their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little more like the uninsured.

You know what the economics are like in Red Lake County. There's no way a family can pay $15,000, $20,000 a year for health insurance and make it work. You just can't do it. It's got to change.

Full Medicare-for-all, free choice of doctor and hospital: that comes in sixty to seventy percent without even further explanation. And if you ever explained it, given all the trouble people are having qualifying and not qualifying for all these healthcare so-called insurance plans, it would go up even higher.

America is the only advanced industrial democracy where people can get sick and languish because they can't afford care. Or where people are blocked in access to the system because they don't have access to insurance, which is only available through certain narrow portals and under certain very restricted conditions. We're the only society that hasn't embraced this idea that no one should go without access to these services, regardless of their financial condition. And no one should be saddled with a lifetime of debt because they have the misfortune of falling ill.

For the present system to work, poor people must be excluded from the innovation, because if they could get access at an affordable price, then affluent people would find ways to buy it cheaply as well - and then the innovator would be poorly rewarded and introductions of new medicines would decline.

A lot of young people think they're invincible, but the truth is young people are knuckleheads... Now young people can get insurance for as little as $50 a month, less than the cost of gym shoes.

We can make sure that people who don't have health insurance can buy into an insurance pool that gives them better bargaining power.