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

“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

“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

“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

“[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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Bernanke had told the Baucus panel, a key ingredient in fixing the American economy. Healthcare costs threatened both job growth and the deficit, they reminded Obama.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“Four days before, Emanuel had told the staff, according to the same staff member’s notes, “Never does a man stand so tall as when he is on all fours kissing a congressman’s ass.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“New York–Presbyterian’s marketing slogan is “Amazing Things Are Happening Here.” I’ll drink to that (although part of me did wonder why they need a marketing budget and how much it is).”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“But now I also understand, firsthand, the meaning of what the caregivers who work in that system do every day. They do achieve amazing things, and when it’s your life or your child’s life or your mother’s life on the receiving end of those amazing things, there is no such thing as a runaway cost. You’ll pay anything, and if you don’t have the money, you’ll borrow at any mortgage rate or from any payday lender to come up with the cash. Which is why 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

“Another favorite: We spend $85.9 billion trying to treat back pain, which is as much as we spend on all of the country’s state, city, county, and town police forces. And experts say that as much as half of that is unnecessary.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“I liked to point out that Medtronic, which makes all varieties of medical devices—from surgical tools to pacemakers—is so able to charge sky-high prices that it enjoys nearly double the gross profit margin of Apple, considered to be the jewel of American high-tech companies.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“When you’re staring up at someone from the gurney, you have no inclination to be a savvy consumer. You have no power. Only hope.”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System