Healthcare Spending Quotes

One of the biggest reasons for higher medical costs is that somebody else is paying those costs, whether an insurance company or the government. What is the politicians' answer? To have more costs paid by insurance companies and the government. ... [H]aving someone else pay for medical care virtually guarantees that a lot more of it will be used. Nothing would lower costs more than having each patient pay those costs. And nothing is less likely to happen.

Unfortunately, in rich-world health, innovation is both your friend and your enemy. Innovation is inventing organ replacement, joint replacement. We're inventing ways of doing new things that cost $300,000 and take people in their 70s and, on average, give them an extra, say, two or three years of life. And then you have to say, given finite resources, should we fire two or three teachers to do this operation?

Medicare is expensive because we spend a lot on healthcare. We spend a lot on healthcare basically just because we want to, and doing so has been very good to a lot of people who work in healthcare fields.

Every country in the world is battling the rising cost of health care. No community anywhere has demonstrably lowered its health-care costs (not just slowed their rate of increase) by improving medical services. They've lowered costs only by cutting or rationing them.

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

We are the only major country on earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all people as a right and yet we end up spending much more than they do, so I do believe that we have to move toward a Medicare for all, single-payer system.

I believe a nation does not maximize its health care until it starts to ask the hard question: How can we prioritize our expenditures to buy the most health care for the most people? We should not apologize for rationing; we should promote it and advance it.

It's not health care reform to dump more money into Medicaid.

There is simply not enough money available to support a system in which the lion's share of expenditures is devoted to acute care, with virtually nothing being spent on preventive medicine, i.e. health care.

We need to make sure that people can save all the money they spend on medical care by getting it back from their taxes, by reducing their tax burden.

Replacing your family's current health care with government-run health care is not the answer. In fact, it'll make health care much more expensive.

In addition, California spends nearly $1 billion a year in Medi-Cal services for an average of 780,000 illegal immigrants a month, over and above emergency health services.

If we don't reform how healthcare is delivered in this country, then we are not going to be able to get a handle on that escalating healthcare costs.

Health insurance costs in the United States are on an unsustainable path. I've heard from hundreds of Montanans who are paying thousands of dollars every year for their health insurance coverage and thousands more for deductibles before their insurance provides any benefit.

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

Today, nearly 40 percent of a senior's healthcare spending is on pharmaceutical medications.

Most other rich countries not only spend less than the United States on health care; they also achieve better outcomes in both coverage and quality.

Obviously the first thing we need to do is repeal “Obamacare.” That's one entitlement that we can get rid of. And that's a couple trillion dollars in spending over the next 10 years.

The central question is whether Medicare and Medicaid should remain entitlement programs guaranteeing a certain amount of care, as Democrats believe, or become defined contribution programs in which federal spending is capped, as Republicans suggest.

Human beings tend not to spend money on health preventionally. We tend to spend it on top treatment.

The federal investment in finding cures for cancer - $3 billion annually [as of 1999] - is less than ... zero ... point ... zero ... zero ... zero ... four ... percent of our gross domestic product, or about one-seventh of what Americans spend on beauty products.

You can look at that by comparing Medicare's growth rates to the private insurance world, to the other Federal programs that we run, by looking at the billions of dollars, not millions but billions of dollars, we waste every year.

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

...There's a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them.

America spends a fortune on drugs: more per person than any other nation on earth, even though Americans are no healthier than the citizens of other advanced nations.