Health Care Spending Quotes

In the future we may have to ration health care, but we're not there now.

Americans spend more money on Botox, face lifts and tummy tucks than on the age-old scourges of polio, small pox and malaria.

Republicans should embrace the possibility that Obamacare could pave the way toward lower health care entitlement spending overall. That won't be easy. But it's not unthinkable, either.

When insurance covers everything, no one cares what the their health costs are. Consumers must have some skin in the game.

Prescription drugs today represent 60¢ on every dollar spent for health care. Ten years ago it was only 10¢.

We do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount and, on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs.

I know the exploding cost of health care is at the root of our long-term fiscal challenges.

We need to work together to fairly assess and improve the long-term economic and health value - and affordability - of all components of the healthcare system, including hospitalizations, drugs, devices, and other interventions, to optimize our health investment decisions.

You think the military-industrial complex is powerful in Washington? The Health Care complex spends 4 times as much on lobbying.

The growth of medical expenditures in the U.S. is not caused by administrative costs but by increases in the technical intensity of care over time - a.k.a. medical progress.

I think in 'Escape Fire,' we really look at the military as a microcosm for the rest of America.

We are the richest country in the world. We spend more on health care than any other country. Yet we have the worst health care in the Western world. Come on. We can do better than this.

I think we have to be very careful when we toss around terms like 'cut health care costs.' We would do very well to expect a cut in the rate of increase.

Our system of private health insurance that fails to provide coverage to so many of our citizens also contributes to the double-digit health care inflation that is making America less competitive in the global economy.

As indicated by the increase in maternal mortality in 2010, right now it's more dangerous to give birth in California than in Kuwait or Bosnia. Amnesty International reports that women in [the United States] have a higher risk of dying due to pregnancy complications than women in forty-nine other countries (black women are almost four times as likely to die as white women). The United States spends more than any other country on maternal health care, yet our risk of dying or coming close to death during pregnancy or in childbirth remains unreasonably high.

There's this fascination in America that more is better: we want that procedure. And more is not necessarily better when it comes to health care. We as consumers really need to understand that.

We need to be careful when we talk about cutting health care costs. They are not going to be reduced - what we really want to do is do is slow the rate of increase.

Reducing health care costs for families requires increased competition in health insurance.

The decision is not whether or not we will ration care. The decision will be whether we ration care with our eyes open.

Health care costs generally have gone up at a significantly slower rate since ObamaCare was passed than they did before, which has saved the federal Treasury hundreds of billions of dollars.

I don't want to suggest that controlling pharmaceutical costs is the answer to what ails the U.S. health care system. It isn't.

In terms of Medicare, I'm in favor of sitting down and having a serious discussion about the likely impact of the Affordable Care Act, health-care reform, on the cost issue and changing the fee-for-service structure.

Now, decisions with a major impact on health care are made in conjunction with budgetary decisions. Before we debated health policy. Now we debate fiscal policy.

And it was back in the mid-1980s, and as I point out in a piece, that was when we are spending about eight percent of our gross domestic product on health care. And even then, we had the impression that so much of the excessive, aggressive medical treatment that took place at the end of life was not only unnecessary but it was cruel.

It is inevitable that we are going to have to ration health care in the United States.