Top 450 Medicare Quotes & Sayings - Page 8

Politicians like to talk about the income tax when they talk about overtaxing the rich, but the income tax is just one part of the total tax system. There are sales taxes, Medicare taxes, social security taxes, unemployment taxes, gasoline taxes, excise taxes - and when you add up all of those taxes [many of which are quite regressive], and then you look at how they affect the rich and the poor, you essentially end up with a system in which the best off 20 percent of Americans pay one percentage point more of their income than the worst off 20 percent of Americans.

Secretary [Hillary ] Clinton is absolutely right, there are people, Koch brothers among others, who have a group called Concerned Veterans of America, funded by the Koch brothers. The Koch brothers, by the way, want to destroy Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, every governmental program passed since the 1930s. Yes, there are people out there who want to privatize it.

On issue after issue, the polls - and these are not snapshot polls; these are polls over a consistent period of time - show that most Americans share what one could call core liberal or progressive values: investment in health care and education over tax cuts; fair trade over free trade; corporate accountability over deregulation; environmental protection over laissez-faire policies; defending Social Security and Medicare over privatizing them; raising the minimum wage over eliminating it. The country prefers progressive alternatives to the failed policies of the conservative right.

I feel very strongly that the Democratic Party has, in the past, been the party of the future. I think when you look at Social Security and Medicare, when you look at the civil rights movement, the women's movement, I think the Democratic Party has always been in the forefront of change.

5: Social security will break small business, become a huge tax burden on our citizens, and bankrupt our country! 1944: The G.I. Bill will break small business, become a huge tax burden on our citizens, and bankrupt our country! 1965: Medicare will break small business, become a huge tax burden on our citizens, and bankrupt our country! 1994: Health care will break small business, become a huge tax burden on our citizens, and bankrupt our country!

The current U.S. and Eurozone depression isn't because of China. It's because of domestic debt deflation. Commodity prices and consumer spending are falling, mainly because consumers have to pay most of their wages to the FIRE sector for rent or mortgage payments, student loans, bank and credit card debt, plus over 15 percent FICA wage withholding for Social Security and Medicare actually, to enable the government to cut taxes on the higher income brackets, as well income and sales taxes.

The majority of Latinos in this country are 28 years old or younger. All of those people out there attacking the Latino community, when you see a Latino going down the street with a baby carriage and a couple of children walking beside them, they should say 'Hey, there goes my social security and my Medicare.' Those are the people that are going to contribute to keep our social security system funded and our medical system funded.

Reform immigration to make it easy for individuals to come over here, be documented, pay taxes - immigration reform is needed to state that its about work, its not about welfare... Set up a grace period where they can get a work permit... social security card so that they can pay income tax, social security, Medicare.

With the socialization of the health care system through institutions such as Medicaid and Medicare and the regulation of the insurance industry (by restricting an insurer’s right of refusal: to exclude any individual risk as uninsurable, and discriminate freely, according to actuarial methods, between different group risks) a monstrous machinery of wealth and income redistribution at the expense of responsible individuals and low-risk groups in favor of irresponsible actors and high-risk groups has been put in motion.

Entitlements is not sic the issue. And if so, cool heads can sit down and engage the American people and tell us how many seniors in nursing homes do we want to throw out in the street? ... And then who wants to make a fuss about Medicare when it's solvent until 2024? ... Who wants to make a fuss about Social Security when it's solvent - and it's about, 'You earned it'?

I would always argue to my students that Canada is not necessarily or inherently a left-wing country, and the United States is not necessarily the citadel of right-wing liberty. The obvious case there is Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which made the Americans much further left than the Canadians at the time, and Americans coming to Canada found us backward, conservative, and out of tune with the kind of free-spirited liberalism that there was in the States. Then things reversed, with medicare the prime example.

The real number of the US' obligations, unfunded obligations that we're passing on to our future generates is more like $70 trillion to $75 trillion. The vast majority of that is health entitlements - Medicare, Obamacare, Medicaid. There's also Social Security, interest on the debt. But fundamentally, health entitlements are the thing that will bankrupt our kids. We need to fix that for the long-term.

If we can get to that 3 percent grow, it is $2 trillion to $2.5 trillion worth of more government revenues. It's 12 million additional jobs. And those are 12 million jobs paying into Medicare, 12 million jobs paying into Social Security. Growth really is what's driving all of this and growth is what our focus is, which is why we're willing to accept increased short-term deficits in exchange for that long-term payoff.

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?

We'll have a national dispute - debate about it, and the goal should be to bring in - to help respectfully appeal to those voters that can make the difference, the ones who are not going to be entrepreneurs, are never going to be - run a - be a CEO in some big business, and they know it, but they would like to have their Social Security, they would like to have Medicare as they paid for all their years, and they'd like rising wages rather than falling wages.

The Kochs have been activists since the 1970s. You can go back and look at the platform of the Libertarian Party in 1980 and see what they really believe in. They wanted to abolish huge swaths of the U.S. government, including the Internal Revenue Service. They want to get rid of Social Security. They'd like to get rid of Medicare. They'd like to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, which directly affects their business.

There is no reason why anyone in this country should be lacking health care when America has the resources right now. It would not cost much more than what we are paying right now. As a matter of fact, Americans are paying for a universal standard of care. They are just not getting it because it is all about corporations making a profit. It is not about people. Support Medicare for all.

This is what class warfare looks like: The Business Roundtable - representing Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and others - has called on Congress to raise the eligibility age of Social Security and Medicare to 70, cut Social Security and veterans' COLAs, raise taxes on working families and cut taxes for the largest corporations in America.

Right now, what my job is - pardon me? Those are just words. Right now, what my - my job is right now going beyond media conflicts and words is to say that Donald Trump, among other things, told the American people he would not cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and right now Republicans in the House and Senate are doing just that.

Ronald Reagan was an anti-government, union-busting, race baiting, anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-intellectual, who cut rich people's taxes in half, had a incurable case of the military-industrial complex, and said Medicare was socialism that would destroy our freedom. Both sides really should stop pretending he was something other than the man most responsible for our decline.

Cuba harbor fugitives of American justice. There are people living on the island of Cuba who have violated American law, including those who have stolen millions of dollars from Medicare fraud in South Florida and have fled to Cuba. Those are three reasons right there to care about what is happening on the island of Cuba, which happens to be 90 miles from our shores, basically a neighboring country.

What sensible people have got to do is not simply repeal the Affordable Care Act without any alternative, but you've got to sit down and say it's OK, what are the problems. How do we address it? How do we move to universal health care? How do we lower prescription drug costs? How do we make sure that people don't have outrageous deductibles? You just don't throw 20 million people off of health insurance. You don't privatize Medicare.

For Social Security to be financially sound, the federal government should have $100 trillion - a sum of money six-and-a-half times the size of our entire economy - in the bank and earning interest right now. But it doesn't. And while many believe that Social Security represents our greatest entitlement problem, Medicare is six times larger in terms of unfunded obligations.

What I think people should realize is that programs like Social Security, programs like Medicare, programs like the Veterans Administration, programs like your local park and your local library - those are, if you like, socialist programs; they're run by [and] for the public, not to make money. I think in many ways we should expand that concept so that the American people can enjoy the same benefits that people all over the world are currently enjoying.

We not only heard it before 20 years ago, before George Bush in 2001 passed his tax relief, before in 2003 the tax relief were past, we were told they were dead. Before we provided prescription drugs for Medicare, we were told it wasn't going to happen.

When you talk about raising that debt limit, the only way that I would ever support raising the debt limit if we also talk about budgetary controls on the federal government, capping its spending, how do we deal with the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid problems, because they cannot continue to run on auto-pilot.

At today's prices for medicines, doctors and hospitals-if the latter are available at any price-only millionaires can afford to be hurt or sick and pay for it. Very few people want socialized medicine in the U.S. But pressure for it is going to appear with the same hurricane force as the demand for pollution control if the medicine men and hospital operators don't take soon some Draconian measures... At the present rate of doctor fees and hospital costs under Medicare and Medicaid plans [taxpayers] are shovelling in billions with nothing but escalation in sight.

The United States remains the only major country on earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all of our people. And yet we are spending almost twice as much per capita. We have a massively dysfunctional health care system. And I do believe in a Medicare for all single-payer system, whether a small state like Vermont can lead the nation, which I certainly hope we will, or whether it's California or some other state.

The Affordable Care Act is a huge problem. [Repealing the ACA is] going to have huge implications. We have millennials that live in Boston that are on their parents' health insurance. The businesses have hired them and have been able to hire more people because they have been able to be on their own health insurance. We have seniors in our city who have preexisting conditions, or something called a "donut hole," which is a prescription drug [gap] in Medicare. Whatever changes they make could have detrimental effects on people's health care, but also on the economy.

It doesn't make sense. [Republicans are] not for us. You're not for my values. We're working class people mostly and blue collar. We're your cops, we're your firemen, we're your carpenters and the things we need - we need to protect our unions, we need to protect our Medicare, we need to protect the working class person.