America's Bitter Pill Quotes

“This is the only industry where technology advances have increased costs instead of lowering them.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“It’s about money: Healthcare is America’s largest industry by far, employing a sixth of the country’s workforce.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“America’s total healthcare bill for 2014 is $3 trillion. That’s more than the next ten biggest spenders combined: Japan, Germany, France, China, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain, and Australia. All that extra money produces no better, and in many cases worse, results.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“People care about their health a lot more than they care about healthcare policies or economics.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“Medicare, which pays hospitals based on their costs, plus overhead and a small profit margin, for providing each service, would have paid about $825 for all three tests. Also”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“The cost spikes for the government programs that protected the elderly and the poor were even worse. Better medical care kept people alive longer, and that meant Medicare had to pay for more complicated and more expensive treatment during those prolonged lives.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“60 percent of the nearly one million personal bankruptcies filed in the United States last year resulted from medical bills.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“the healthcare industry spends four times as much on lobbying as the number two Beltway spender, the much-feared military-industrial complex?”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“Cutting healthcare costs means cutting someone’s income”—income that represented close to a sixth of the economy and, therefore, wielded unequaled power in terms of money and breadth. THE”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“We went for coverage, frankly, before we went for specific cost containment. Though there is broad agreement on the need for containment, any particular cost containment idea means reducing revenue flow to somebody, and there is always stronger opposition from even a smaller party than there is broad depth of broad support. So, I think that’s the right order.… So we’re now wrestling with cost containment.” In”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“If that hurdle could be overcome, Orszag added, the best ways to cut costs would be to use information technology to judge and act on the comparative effectiveness of drugs, medical devices, and other treatments. Moreover, the system had to be overhauled to pay doctors and hospitals based on their results, not on the fee-for-service basis of how many times a doctor saw a patient or how many tests the doctor ordered.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“The third leg of the stool addressed that. As with the old Nixon plan, there would be government subsidies for people below certain income levels so that they could buy policies.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“The mandate was the linchpin. In fact, in pushing for this plan beginning in 2005, Romney, citing the original Heritage Foundation article, would deride the “free riders” who refuse to buy insurance and call the mandate “the ultimate conservative idea” because it was rooted in the principle of individual responsibility. To”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“Harvard Business Review would later cite a 2007 study reporting that medical bills “had become a factor in 62 per cent of personal bankruptcies, an increase from just 8 per cent in 1981.” If”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“First, there was the galloping cost of advances in the science of medicine. While all that progress was good news—I’m glad they invented that MRI to pinpoint what was going on in my chest—it ballooned healthcare costs across the board. As”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“60 percent of the nearly one million personal bankruptcies filed in the United States last year resulted from medical bills. Even”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“the healthcare industry spends four times as much on lobbying as the number two Beltway spender, the much-feared military-industrial complex? It”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“Healthcare is America’s largest industry by far, employing a sixth of the country’s workforce. And it is the average American family’s largest single expense, whether paid out of their pockets or through taxes and insurance premiums. It”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“And because we don’t control the prices of prescription drugs the way every other developed country does, we typically spend 50 percent more on them than what people or governments everywhere else spend.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“America’s total healthcare bill for 2014 is $3 trillion. That’s more than the next ten biggest spenders combined: Japan, Germany, France, China, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain, and Australia. All that extra money produces no better, and in many cases worse, results. There”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“By 7:30 the next morning, October 2, kynect had had 88,119 unique visitors. One thousand eight hundred and thirty-three people had been enrolled—compared to six on the federal exchange covering thirty-six states.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“[Ted] Cruz railed against his fellow senators for not appreciating the risk that Obamacare would destroy healthcare for America’s families ... Cruz then lodged a more general complaint against his Senate colleagues who, he said, seemed more concerned with “cocktail parties in Washington, D.C.” than with their constituents. Referring to calls that he said were pouring in from around the country, begging legislators to resist and defund, Cruz noted, “It is apparently an imposition on some members of this body for their constituents to pick up the phone and ask for assistance.” As I heard him say that, I picked up the phone and called Cruz’s local constituent service office in Houston. “Could someone there give me information about how to enroll in Obamacare?” I asked, when I was put on the phone with one of the senator’s case workers. “No. We don’t support the bill, and think it’s a bad idea,” I was told.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“Medtronic’s overall cost of making its products was about 25 percent of what it sells them for, yielding an unusually high gross profit margin of about 75 percent.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“The numbers were huge. Over the first ten years of universal coverage, Clapsis estimated that the hospitals would enjoy an extra $200 billion to $250 billion, maybe more.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“The complaint summed up the charges this way: “Since the conspiracy’s formation in 2002 … UPMC and Highmark have enjoyed record profits—and an increasingly exploited Pittsburgh community has suffered skyrocketing health care costs.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“To Luntz, the bipartisan approach to healthcare being entertained by some Republicans was just talk—a show destined to have a short run before it got the hook.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“The politics, recalled Luntz, were “pretty clear.” It was about both stopping anything the new president championed and also stopping another big-government program. No one mentioned that Obama was talking about a healthcare plan like the one Romney, and Nixon before him, had espoused.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“Therefore, the president added, “There is a moral component to this that we can’t leave behind. Having said that,” he continued, “if we don’t address costs, we will not get this done. If people think we’re simply gonna take everyone who’s not insured and load them up into a system … the federal government will be bankrupt. State governments will be bankrupt. I’m talking to you liberal bleeding hearts out there,” he added. “Don’t think that we can solve this problem without tackling costs. And that may make some in the progressive community uncomfortable but it’s gotta be dealt with.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“not the 60 needed to override a filibuster. The November 2008 elections had just boosted the Senate Democratic vote tally to 58 (including the independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont). Still, 58 was not 60, and two Senate Democrats, Kennedy and Robert Byrd, were now so ill they soon might not be able to get to the floor for a vote.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“The U.S. is the only developed country that does not guarantee health coverage for all of its citizens.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System