Steven Brill > 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

“When it comes to arrogance, power, and lack of accountability, journalists are probably the only people on the planet who make lawyers look good.”
― Steven Brill

“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

“A contest was then held for their kids, and they won, too”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“President Trump took office, the clawback rule, which was supposed to be co-drafted by six agencies, had still not been written,”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“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

“He has spread all these termites throughout the departments and agencies”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“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

“Americans all became gamblers. A house was not a home. It was a bet.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“The elites have become so skilled and so hardworking that they are able to protect each other better than ever before.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“the spectacular collapse of Trump’s flimflam act”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“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

“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

“George W. Bush asked Americans to shop.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“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

“the traders’ favorite phrase: IBGYBG—“I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“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

“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

“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 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

“applications on their way to the hospital. The mandate”
― Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

“moats have been dug even around America’s treasured courthouses to protect those with power.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“they accumulate IOUs that they cash in when they go after leadership spots”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“the Trump administration featured the ultimate in moat fortification.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It

“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

“Nationally, about a third of American adults have college degrees.”
― Steven Brill, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It