Health Care Quotes

[The GOP] must decide soon where they stand on the issue of socialized medicine. President Clinton threw down the gauntlet in his State of the Union address, when he proposed guaranteeing health insurance for at least half of the 10 million American children who have none.

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Tony Snow, columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey.

This health-care plan is all about the destruction of the creation of wealth in America and the socialization of this country, and it won't work -- never has anywhere else -- and we're going to go to the mat here to see to it that they don't succeed.

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Rush Limbaugh.

Price controls have never worked, rather, in countries where such controls have been imposed, patients endure waits of months or years for surgery, are denied access to specialists, and face other obstacles to care. Any health care system predicated predominantly on cost containment will contain perverse incentives that will undermine quality and the physician's duty to act in the best interest of his or her patients.

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Lonnie R. Bristow, MD Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the American Medical Association.
284802/01/1994 | Full Details | Law(s): Clinton Healthcare Initiative

I don't have time to beat around the bush. The health-care plan as proposed by Mrs. Clinton is socialism. There's no soft way to peddle it. There is not other way to describe it.

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Rush Limbaugh.

The most devastating indictment of the president’s proposal is that it threatens to destroy virtually everything about American health care that’s worth preserving. Under the plan’s layers of regulation and oversight, even seeing a doctor whenever you like will be no easy matter: access to physicians will be carefully regulated by gatekeepers; referrals to specialists will be strongly discouraged; second opinions will be almost unheard of; and the availability of new drugs will be limited.

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William Kristol, The Project for a Republican Future.
284612/02/1993 | Full Details | Law(s): Clinton Healthcare Initiative

We have arrived at socialized medicine in America. I do not report this as either a good or bad event but simply as something that has happened with hardly anyone realizing it. This is the first result -- and probably the most important -- of the national health care debate launched last week by President Clinton. Our politics and economy will never again be the same.

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Robert J. Samuelson, Washington Post.
284509/29/1993 | Full Details | Law(s): Clinton Healthcare Initiative

“This plan forces us to buy our insurance through new mandatory government health alliances…” (Louise) “Run by tens of thousands of bureaucrats…” (Harry) “Having choices we don’t like is no choice at all…” (Louise) “They choose, we lose” (Together).

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Health Insurance Association of America’s (HIAA) 1993 “Harry and Louise” TV ads.

What we don’t do is let the government run our health care system through mandatory and monopolistic insurance purchasing schemes. That approach would take away your freedom of choice about health care…

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The Coalition for Health Insurance Choices, started by HIAA, Advertisement in The New York Times.

[Candidate Bill Clinton's health-care proposal] resembles long-standing plans by congressional Democrats to impose a version of socialized medicine in America.

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Editorial, The Orange County Register.

There certainly is a segment of the employer population that has a philosophical opposition to Government’s role here. There are others who are concerned about return-to-work disincentives, or the incongruous nature of cutting Medicare and Medicaid while adding new programs. And there are others who would like to have problem world be [sic] resolved through a voluntary, charity-based approach. We believe that whatever is required of employers should not create disincentive for the growing number of voluntary and negotiated plans, and it certainly should not impose such a burden that the provisions of basic medical insurance will be reduced, be that for small employers, or that the unemployment figures themselves will be increased for larger employers.

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Willis B. Goldbeck, President, Washington Business Group on Health, Testimony, Senate Finance Committee.
04/21/1983 | Full Details | Law(s): COBRA

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