A majority of Americans support Social Security and Medicare, a progressive tax system and a government that regulates business in the public interest, but most share deep skepticism about the government's ability to do all this well.
Adam Davidson
If Republicans eliminate Medicare, America will become a country in which you can never retire - and once you physically can no longer work, you are desperately poor until you die.
Al Franken
The Medicare Part D prescription drug bill, which might be the most corrupt piece of legislation in history, was a huge giveaway of taxpayer funds to the big pharmaceutical companies.
Part of the middle class promise is that, after a lifetime of hard work, you'll be able to retire and enjoy the fruits of that labor. Medicare was established to secure that promise.
I'm willing to fight for Social Security, Medicare, student loans, U.S. jobs, equal pay, progressive taxation and full employment.
Alan Grayson
The Medicare program is a great promise we've made to our seniors. But if you start expanding that out to everybody else, you're going to undermine the employer insurance market.
Alex Azar
Medicare is expensive because we spend a lot on healthcare. We spend a lot on healthcare basically just because we want to, and doing so has been very good to a lot of people who work in healthcare fields.
Alex Pareene
Programs aimed strictly at the poorest Americans are always and forever under assault from a Republican Party that still has not dared to cut spending on programs - like Medicare and crop insurance - that also benefit the rich.
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.
Alexandra Robbins
What the Bronx and Queens needs is Medicare for all, tuition-free public college, a federal jobs guarantee, and criminal-justice reform.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Before we even consider expanding Medicare, or another program based on its rates, we must reform our Medicare payment system so that it rewards value, not volume, and doesn't disadvantage states like Minnesota that provide high-quality care in an efficient way.
Amy Klobuchar
We need a senator who fights for things like affordable health care, college and technical school, not tax cuts for wealthy donors. That doesn't mean free college or Medicare for All, I'm against that.
Amy McGrath
I've endorsed 'Medicare for All' at the federal level. I do not believe a state can accomplish that on its own.
Andrew Gillum
I am a Medicare-for-all public option proponent.
Andrew Yang
Everyone doesn't need Medicare. The people who can afford to pay for their healthcare should pay.
Angela Stanton-King
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.
Ann Kirkpatrick
My mother-in-law, Nanny, spent her working years as a bookkeeper at a medical office in Columbus, Ohio. Like so many Americans, she worked hard and paid into Medicare, knowing that one day she could count on having high-quality health care when she needed it most.
Ann McLane Kuster
From routine hospital visits and prescription drugs, to emergencies and hospice care, Medicare covers the full range of health services that our nation's seniors rely on every single day.
We shouldn't be undermining Medicare for those who need it most in order to give more tax cuts to those who need them least.
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?
Anthony Weiner
What I am saying is, all health care has a problem with costs. Medicare is growing slower than the private insurance plans. Why? Because of their efficiency. They don't have to give money to shareholders. Why should be defending shareholders?
Is Medicare socialism? You want to get rid of Medicare. And a lot of the people against health care do. I want to preserve it and grow it.
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.
The Democrats and Republicans need to come together. I've criticized Democrats for their unwillingness to address entitlement reform and Social Security and Medicare. Republicans, on the other hand, never saw a tax that they liked, even when it meant closing tax loopholes. They don't want to in any way support any revenue enhancements.
I favor the abolition of all Social Security, Medicare and estate taxes. In their place, we should create a simple income tax system that has no deductions or credits at all.
Being in the hospice didn't work out exactly the way I had expected. By all rights, I should have finished my time here in mid-March 2006 - at least, that's when Medicare stopped paying.
It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.
I will never turn Medicare into a voucher. No American should ever have to spend their golden years at the mercy of insurance companies. They should retire with the care and dignity they have earned.
We can't get to the $4 trillion in savings that we need by just cutting the 12 percent of the budget that pays for things like medical research and education funding and food inspectors and the weather service. And we can't just do it by making seniors pay more for Medicare.
I believe honor thy mother and father is not just a good commandment to live by, it is good public policy to govern by. That is why I feel so strongly about Medicare.
The economist John Maynard Keynes said that in the long run, we are all dead. If he were around today he might say that, in the long run, we are all on Social Security and Medicare.
I would hope that we could have this in an adult fashion and stop demagogueing the issue anytime you talk about any substantive reforms that will actually save social security and save Medicare and save the system from imploding on itself.
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.
History suggests that attempts to privatize Medicare by relying on private companies to offer Medicare benefits in rural America simply will not work.
Medicare provided guaranteed equal coverage, something that the private sector could not.
Medicare debates in Congress should result in better Medicare benefits for all our nation's seniors. We're not asking for special treatment for rural America, just a fair deal.
Rather than squander the surplus on tax breaks for the rich, we should add a prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program, shore up Social Security, fortify our defense, provide a quality public education and offer economic assistance to rural areas.
When I talk about democratic socialist, I am talking about Medicare, a single payer health care system for the elderly. And in my view, we should expand that concept to all people. I believe that everybody in this country should be entitled to health care as a right.
Progressive activists are angry that a Medicare-for-all single-payer approach was totally ignored during the health care debate.
I don't believe there's a red state in America where people believe you should cut Medicare, Social Security and veterans' benefits rather than doing away with corporate tax loopholes.
In 2005, Republicans passed a 360-page reconciliation bill without a single Democratic vote that provided deep cuts to Medicaid and raised premiums on Medicare beneficiaries.
There are very powerful and wealthy special interests who want to privatize or dismember virtually every function that government now performs, whether it is Social Security, Medicare, public education or the Postal Service.
When I turn 55, I'm going to be on Medicare. I can call up and tell them I don't want to be on Medicare, but otherwise, I'll be on Medicare. So they use this kind of automatic enrollment. We give states the option of automatically enrolling those who are eligible.
As we face tough decisions in Washington, we must never forget our responsibility to protect Medicare and preserve it for future generations.
America should meet its obligations in the form of Social Security, Medicare, our ability to pay our military, legally binding legislation that allows unemployment compensation, the judiciary, the federal court system, the federal prison system, all those kinds of things have to be paid for.
So often, generalizations don't apply to Catholic voters. Catholics are concerned about the war, the economy, about issues like abortion, issues pertaining to the budget and funding Medicaid and Medicare and what happens to the environment.
We added Medicare Part D to a system facing bankruptcy and gave no thought to means testing it.
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 first year of the Bush administration we used up all of the surplus and ended up just with the Social Security and Medicare surplus, and each year worse than the year before.
'Democratic socialism' is awful as a slogan and catastrophic as a policy. And 'social democracy' - a term that better fits the belief of more ordinary liberals who want, say, Medicare for all - is a politically dying force. Democrats who aren't yet sick of all their losing should feel free to embrace them both.
