In 2008, I was one of millions united for hope and change. As 2010 dawns, change looks to me like more of the same. Instead of peace, we got more war. Instead of health care reform, we have an industry win that requires Americans to buy health insurance without any real cost controls.

Investing in girls and women is the smartest thing we can do, and will help us to improve opportunities for all people. With equal access to education, health care, employment, and representation in political and economic decision-making, girls and women are force to be reckoned with.

I think Barack Obama and his team believe that the federal government is best prepared to handle virtually everything in our lives. I mean, they're socialists in every respect of the word and I think they'd like to take over everything in our lives if they could, including health care.

Swedes are such a civilised, perfect society - at least on the surface. There's a great safety net, a huge middle class, free education, free health care. People are very polite, they wait their turn. They're not too loud, they're not too quiet, but sometimes it's a little too perfect.

It's part of the American experience: We deal with mosquitoes in August, airport delays around Thanksgiving, expensive health care and the potential of being shot, at any time, by a semiautomatic weapon as we try to go about the most boring, precious, asinine aspects of our daily lives.

Workers want to be paid an honest, fair wage for the work they do. They want to be able to provide for their families by being justly compensated for their part in helping grow the U.S. economy. They deserve to be able to put food on the table and receive health care and other benefits.

I admired the way McCain worked on campaign finance reform. I admired the way Nancy Pelosi stiffened the Democrats' spine during the health care debate. I admire the way Barack Obama has raised a dog in the White House without ever putting it on the roof of the car for a vacation drive.

I truly enjoy hearing from our community about the issues that matter most. It's conversations like these that shape our community and drive my work to pursue common-sense solutions that protect our families, lower health care costs, uplift our veterans, and support our local businesses.

Giving governors more leeway in administering health care could represent a small, positive development in the ongoing saga of Obamacare. Unfortunately, instead of choosing flexibility, President Obama and his left-leaning advisers always default to rigid 'Washington knows best' answers.

Social services, not wealth per se, seem to be the key to lower birth rates. The Chinese, although among the poorest peoples of the world, have brought their fertility rate down to 2.4, partly by social coercion, but mostly by broadly available education, health care and family planning.

You should be able to afford health care for your family. You should be able to retire with dignity and respect. And you should be able to give your children the kind of education that allows them to dream even bigger, go even farther and accomplish even more than you could ever imagine.

The reason I ran in 2006 was to make my district one of the fifteen that at the time it would have taken to switch the control of the House and stop the Bush agenda. The second priority I had was to provide health care for everybody. And the third was to do public financing of campaigns.

When I became president with a commitment to reform health care, Hillary was a natural to head the health care task force. You all know we failed because we couldn't break a Senate filibuster. Hillary immediately went to work on solving the problems the bill sought to address one by one.

Clearly, some of the reason people embrace alternatives and reject vaccines is that they are angry and mistrustful of government and of pharmaceutical conglomerates. More than that, we pay too much for health care, it's not good enough, and the system is too complex. We need alternatives.

We don't have universal health care. Education is so expensive. We have these massive problems, you know? So it makes me really happy to think that somebody could have all the music in the world for free. But at the same time, if you have enough money to pay for it, you should pay for it.

I see all kinds of people work hard all over the world, and some of them are barely making it. I don't just mean subsistence farmers. I mean people in the developed world who work multiple jobs, and because the cost of health care and child care eats up almost all of the living they make.

One can only presume, despite unequivocal polling to the contrary, that Republicans believe relentlessly attacking womens' abilities to make their own health care decisions is popular and will help them win elections. I believe it is at their peril that they pursue this anti-women agenda.

The health care law's individual mandate forces nearly all individuals to buy health insurance or pay a penalty. The mandate cannot be severed from the rest of the law because it is the primary mechanism through which the law's changes are supported. Without the mandate, the law collapses.

We have over 500,000 illegal immigrants living in Arizona. And we simply cannot sustain it. It costs us a tremendous amount of money of course in health care, in education, and then, on top of it all, in incarceration. And the federal government doesn't reimburse us on any of these things.

I've spent a great deal of time over the past decade as a caregiver for various family members. It gives me a perspective on the struggles that many New Yorkers face with illness, disability, health care, insurance difficulties, and trying to work with and also take care of family members.

One thing you have to be very careful on when you work in health care is this: when you make a sweeping change, you can't wait to see what falls through the cracks. What could fall through the cracks is somebody's life. You need to move thoughtfully and carefully with a plan incrementally.

See, that's why Barack's running: to end the war in Iraq responsibly - to build an economy that lifts every family, to make sure health care is available for every American - and to make sure that every child in this nation has a world-class education all the way from preschool to college.

I think the important thing to understand about the free pony program is, of course, it is an absolutely free pony program, uh, there may be some incidental costs involved with pony social security or universal pony health care or the haystamp program so ponies won't starve in the streets.

If you take your kid in for the sniffles, you pay $20, but the full cost is $200. And so we need to get back to the price system where you see the full cost of health care, and then people will make smarter decisions. That will reduce health care costs, and it's a huge part of our economy.

When bureaucrats talk about increasing our 'access' to x, y or z, what they're really talking about is increasing exponentially their control over our lives. As it is with the government health care takeover, so it is with the newly approved government plan to 'increase' Internet 'access.'

With health care, despite the fact that we as a nation have already chosen to provide health care in one form or another to everyone, we have, until Obamacare, chosen to pick the least cost-effective means, a mix of private and public offerings, of providing that care. That makes no sense.

Competition makes things come out right. Well, what does that mean in health care? More hospitals so they compete with each other. More doctors compete with each other. More pharmaceutical companies. We set up war. Wait a minute, let's talk about the patient. The patient doesn't need a war.

You wouldn't expect ABC or any of the mainstream networks to take a position on immigration, health care, anything. But at Univision, it's different. We are pro-immigrant. That's our audience, and people depend on us. When we are better represented politically, that role for us will recede.

Somehow, the greater the public opposition to the health care bill, the more determined they seem to force it on us anyway. Their attitude shows Washington at its very worst - the presumption that they know best, and they're going to get their way whether the American people like it or not.

I grew up in one of the most socially conservative neighborhoods in Ohio, and my parents were traditional Catholics. But in her old age, my mother got her home health care from a guy who was gay, who was wonderful to her. Before she died, she rode a float in the Cincinnati Gay Pride Parade.

In my case, I played sports my whole life. I got out of college, and I didn't bother to get health care coverage because I just figured I didn't need it. But you know that if you blow out your knee on a basketball court or you get in a car accident, and you're uninsured, it can bankrupt you.

In certain states, if a woman makes $12,000 a year, and lives with her quarter-of-a million dollar boyfriend and they don't get married, as long as they don't get married, she gets maybe 20 or 30 thousand dollars in pre-tax benefits in terms of food stamps, health care and housing allowance.

What do we have for veterans? Government-run health care. I understand that. Congressmen and senators... they get five choices of government-run health care. Why should a congressman and senator get anything more than a regular citizen does? Why are they privileged and the rest of us aren't?

The 'People's Budget' rewards hard work and invests in our country. It ensures that everyone has an opportunity to get a good education, find a good job, live in a safe and secure home, put food on the table, have affordable health care, save for retirement, and maybe have a little left over.

And I believe that if we can care about whether or not our neighbor has a good job or access to affordable health care for their children, and we move to implement the policies that can improve these situations, we will unleash vast amounts of human potential and recapture the American spirit.

The fierce battles between New Democrat centrists and old-style liberals that defined the Democratic Party in the 1990s are long gone, with the party unified behind Barack Obama's economic agenda of universal health care, expensive federal programs and more regulation of the financial markets.

We are all representatives of the American people. We all do town hall meetings. We all talk to our constituents. And I've got to tell you, the American people are engaged. And if you think they want a government takeover of health care, I would respectfully submit you're not listening to them.

The Democratic party, respective to health care, is like a person who was sent into the store to purchase a gallon of milk and some butter for the evening's meal and instead walked out with a 'Gladiator' DVD, a can of Easy Cheese, and some Homer Simpson house slippers because how funny are they?

When it came to dire warnings about Obamacare, the Republicans were the kings of 'swing and a miss.' People would flee the health care industry to avoid Obamacare? Nope - according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, health care gained about 1 million new jobs in preparation for increased demand.

Economists specialize in pointing out unpleasant trade-offs - a skill that is on full display in the health care debate. We want patients to receive the best care available. We also want consumers to pay less. And we don't want to bankrupt the government or private insurers. Something must give.

I always am a firm believer in you compensate people for their job, and so I did give them bonuses. We accomplished a lot in Congress, we passed health care reform. There were threats against their lives; they had a tough two years. They'd forgone any cost-of-living increase or any bonus before.

In the case of maternal health care, you look at, well naturally, it's the mother who's the customer, who makes the decisions. But in truth, the mother in many areas, in certain parts of India, the mother has very little decision-making power at all. The real decision-maker is the mother-in-law.

I think the U.S. is conflicted. When it comes to our own health care, we all want the best - access to the latest and most important technology. At the same time, health care is typically purchased in an institutional setting. So we purchase it in the aggregate, but we consume it as individuals.

Two decades of experience as an entrepreneur and CEO has informed my view that our priorities must stress improving educational outcomes, rebuilding America's infrastructure, lowering health care costs, addressing climate change, reforming immigration, and ushering in an advanced energy economy.

Do any of us actually want to live in a world where your boss can decide that he or she is morally opposed to mental health care? What if your employer was morally opposed to getting x-rays or antibiotics? How about just being forced to disclose your private medical information to your employer?

I took on pension reform, health care reform, and leave reform - all of those tough issues that so many elected officials prefer to kick down the road to the next generation. But that's not who I am. I am not persuaded by what is politically popular but what is best for the citizens of Baltimore.

It takes a tough, stand-up governor to stand up to the president of the United States - speaking out against the president, speaking out against his policies and, more than that, having actual policies that will help expand health care while... Trump is trying to diminish it for Illinois families.

The only possible role that I can see for reconciliation would be to make modest changes in the major package to improve affordability, to deal with what share of Medicaid expansion the federal government pays, those kinds of issues, which is the traditional role for reconciliation in health care.

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?

It is unfortunately true that our generation and that of your parents have left you with a big mess that will now be yours to clean up: wars, budget challenges, pollution, global warming, battles of health care, natural disasters. They're all there for you. We're willing those to you. Are you ready?

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