Quotes About Medicare

Under Medicare right now, I get paid to put a pacemaker in you, but I don't get paid to counsel you about end-of-life care.

For all their scare tactics, President Obama and Democrats have no plan whatsoever to preserve Medicare for future generations - or protect it for today's seniors and those nearing retirement. They did, however, cut Medicare by $700 billion to bankroll Obamacare.

Equipment sellers can pocket more than $2,500 every time they send a powered wheelchair to a patient and bill Medicare.

If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan get elected to the White House, Medicare will be bankrupt by the end of their first term.

Medicare should be allowed to negotiate with drug companies for lower prices on prescriptions.

As prime minister, I was conscious of walking in Whitlam's footsteps as our government set about creating a companion to Medicare, the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Health care should be a right; it should never be a privilege. We should have Medicare for all in this country.

All the experts agree Medicare is going to go broke.

The Congressional Budget Office tells us that Medicare spending has increased fivefold in the past 42 years, dramatically more than all other categories of federal spending.

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?

Enrolling in the Medicare Prescription Drug Program will be a great savings for most senior citizens.

Despite the administration's long public information campaign, for many months polls have consistently indicated only 37 percent of those eligible for Medicare say they only partially understand the program.

Medicaid is essentially bankrupt, Medicare is essentially bankrupt, why the heck would we give the federal government another entitlement program to manage?

Seniors vote, and that is why we have, you know, Medicare since the 1960s for seniors, and we didn't have a national healthcare program for children, even though it's a lot more cost-effective to deal with children than with seniors.

We believe that if you put in place the mechanisms that allow for personal choice as far as Medicare is concerned, as well as the programs in Medicaid, that we can actually get to a better result and do what most Americans are learning how to do, which is to do more with less.

Our country is the richest in the history of the world. We should be working to expand and improve successful programs like Medicare, and offer more to our citizens.

It is imperative that Democrats take a stand and embrace Medicare for All and other progressive policies that address the needs of millions of Americans.

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.

We have to end Medicare as we know it. We have to fix it.

Tens of billions of dollars could be saved in Medicare and Medicaid alone by eliminate fraud and improving patient care. Not only would this save money, but it will save lives.

But I will say, I think there are some Democrats that don't want to address pension reform. I have taken on the issue of seniority and tenure. I think we have to address entitlements and the president has done that in his budget. I think we have to extend Medicare and the president has done that. But also reinvest in that program.

And in terms of entitlement reforms, we have to save them from themselves, because if we don't reform social security and we don't reform Medicare, they're going to actually implode.

Fraudulent and improper payments have long bedeviled Medicare, a $466 billion program. In particular, payments for durable medical equipment, like power wheelchairs and diabetic test kits, are ripe for fraud.

We added Medicare Part D to a system facing bankruptcy and gave no thought to means testing it.