Amy Klobuchar Quotes

Rather than redistribute physician income as a way to subsidize an expansion of government control, Mr. Obama should fix the payment system to align incentives with improved care.

The 2 million people who work in the NHS and social care are also themselves patients and users. I know they all want to treat patients and users the way they and their families would want to be treated and that is the purpose of our reforms.

Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama. An obligation we have to our parents and grandparents is being sacrificed, all to pay for a new entitlement we didn't even ask for. The greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare, and we're going to stop it.

Health care in America, despite all you hear, still offers us citizens one of the most efficient and highest quality systems in the world. But it's expensive, and it's only getting worse.

We see healthcare shifting from a procedure reimbursement, where in this country doctors are reimbursed for how many procedures they conduct, to a world where people will be reimbursed for the outcomes - did the patient actually get better, and what was the total cost of the cycle of care.

I told them I would work to strengthen and secure Medicare for generations to come, and I told them I would fight for a new prescription drug benefit under Medicare.

I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act. What I love about it is its impulse. It attempts to deal with this intractable problem in American health care life, which is that a significant portion of the population does not have access to quality medical care.

You can look at that by comparing Medicare's growth rates to the private insurance world, to the other Federal programs that we run, by looking at the billions of dollars, not millions but billions of dollars, we waste every year.

The national debate on health care once centered on improving access to quality care, yet the effect of Obamacare will be the exact opposite, resulting in the shameful degradation of care for the neediest individuals.

Some said he couldn't take on the insurance companies that were ripping us off. But President Obama made the tough and right call to save lives, save Medicare and ensure no one goes broke just because they get sick.

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.

I have young kids. The fiscal burden that will be imposed on them is going to depend primarily on whether we tackle this looming problem in our health care system - with rising costs that don't seem, by the way, to be necessarily associated with higher quality. That is the key burden that they will face.

I believe we must protect Medicare's guaranteed benefit, and I will oppose any effort to dismantle Medicare and turn it into a voucher system.

When Department of Health and Human Services administrators decided to base 30 percent of hospitals' Medicare reimbursement on patient satisfaction survey scores, they likely figured that transparency and accountability would improve healthcare.

It worries me about our unwillingness to really address reforms and modernization in Medicare. This thing was designed 37 years ago. It has not evolved to keep pace with current medical technology.

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.

While I support initiatives to improve quality and efficiency in Medicare, I do not believe that these efficiencies should come at the cost of patient well being.

Pay-for-procedure or fee-for-service reimbursement rewards doctors and hospitals for volume - not keeping patients healthy or being efficiency. Pay-for-Performance is clearly one tool that can change the incentives to reward quality.

To be sure, debates will linger about whether Medicare is too large or too small. Debates remain about the allocation of Medicare dollars. But December 8, 2003, demonstrated that there is no debate on this most fundamental fact: Medicare must survive!

We’ve got to have some kind of universal medical coverage and we have to have a more efficient system.

We need to transform our system so people know what they are paying for health care, so they know whether they are getting good quality health care, and so they have a reason and ability to care.

Competition in our health system is a powerful force of cost-containment.

Caring for our nation's veterans must be our top priority as we work to create a more efficient and effective healthcare system at the VA.

Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change... Savings will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others.

A central notion in the Affordable Care Act was we had an inefficient system with a lot of waste that didn't also deliver the kind of quality that was needed that often put health care providers in a box where they wanted to do better for their patients, but financial incentives were skewed the other way... We don't need to reinvent the wheel; you're already figuring out what works to reduce infections in hospitals or help patients with complicated needs.