Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Private insurance companies in America are reaping huge profits.
The availability of private insurance provides tremendous insulation for millions of individuals.
A publicly run health care program could compete with private insurance companies, which have a record of overcharging and underperforming.
I think the federal flood insurance program is actuarially unsound and renders private insurance not viable, thereby needing an overhaul going forward.
All Democrats from Bernie to Biden will eliminate private insurance either outright or as a consequence of the public option crowding out private insurance.
If the private insurance market can survive in a context of a public option, good for them. But if they can't, then that will tell you something about the nature of the market.
I would not outlaw or eliminate private health insurance. But if we do a good enough job, with a robust public option, there really should not be as much of a need for private insurance in the market.
The single-payer Medicare for All proposal is not only bad policy, but it's bad politics. It's bad politics for a very simple reason: More than half the country has private insurance and most of them like it.
When Democrats are proposing things like a Green New Deal and Medicare for all and proposing that they take away your private insurance... it's very obvious to people that they've gone in a radical direction that will not work.
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.
What I am saying is, all health care has a problem with costs. Medicare is growing slower than the private insurance plans. Why? Because of their efficiency. They don't have to give money to shareholders. Why should be defending shareholders?
If we were to expand Medicaid, for every uninsured person we would cover, we'd kick more than one person out of private insurance or remove their opportunity to get private insurance. We're going to have too many people in the cart rather than pulling the cart.
I leave Medicare alone. I create a new system for everyone under 65 where they get health care as a right. It's a basic plan. We roll Medicaid into that, but then we allow people to have choices and get private insurance to supplement that basic government plan.
Thanks to health reform, women across the country with private insurance can get birth control without paying out of pocket. This lets women make the health care decisions that are right for them and puts every one of us in charge of our own reproductive health.
So overall in the entire economy, the issue is not that health care costs are growing dramatically. The issue is that the burden placed on families is. So just between 2010 and 2016, the cost burden of family private insurance premiums jumped 28%, whereas incomes rose less than 20%.
Do you know what the overhead is of the Medicare system? One-point-zero-five percent. Do you know what - private insurance is 30 percent in overhead and profits? Given a choice how I'm going to improve health care, I'm going to take it away from private insurance profits and overhead. Wouldn't you?