Richard Lamm Quotes

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Richard Lamm

Profession : Politician

Birth : September 12, 1935

We need to start training more primary health providers and fewer specialists. We will never be able to control health care costs unless we challenge the over-emphasis on medical research, specialists and technology and put more emphasis on delivering good, everyday basic medicine to those who now have none.

Richard Lamm

Universal coverage, not medical technology, is the foundation of any caring health care system.

Richard Lamm

Everything we do in public policy prevents us from doing something else. To govern is to choose.

Richard Lamm

America does not need another political campaign based on denial and avoidance of some of our real problems. It needs a crusade to reform and renew our country, its institutions and political system.

Richard Lamm

Aging bodies are fiscal black holes into which you can pour endless amounts of money.

Richard Lamm

It is my passionate belief that we can all have better health care through rationing.

Richard Lamm

Our globe is under new dramatic environmental pressure: our globe is warming, our ice caps melting, our glaciers receding, our coral is dying, our soils are eroding, our water tables falling, our fisheries are being depleted, our remaining rainforests shrinking. Something is very, very wrong with our eco-system.

Richard Lamm

Christmas is the time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell government what they want and their kids pay for it.

Richard Lamm

Many seniors understand that Social Security is social insurance as opposed to a program where we put money aside for our own retirement. But most elderly individuals think they're getting their money back. So it isn't selfishness as much as a misunderstanding.

Richard Lamm

I believe for some high-technology medicine, like transplants and kidney dialysis, age should be a consideration in the delivery of that technology. In a world of limited resources, we have a larger duty to a 10-year-old than to a 90-year-old.

Richard Lamm

America has to ask itself not what it wants, but what it can afford... The New Deal, in my mind, has become a raw deal for my children.

Richard Lamm

Roads are necessary, but the fact that we don't fully recognize that when you build a road you're doing more than building a road - you're building the future development of your city. And, that's what's never dawned on people. It still doesn't, in a way.

Richard Lamm

Politics, like theater, is one of those things where you've got to be wise enough to know when to leave.

Richard Lamm

Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want - and their kids pay for it.

Richard Lamm

Amnesty is a big billboard, a flashing billboard, to the rest of the world that we don't really mean our immigration law.

Richard Lamm

He didn't work for money. He worked because he loved kids and education.

Richard Lamm

I think we're rapidly approaching the day where medical science can keep people alive in hospitals, hooked up to tubes and things, far beyond when any kind of quality of life is left at all.

Richard Lamm

We've got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.

Richard Lamm

I believe we all must face the fact of death. It is both gift and curse.

Richard Lamm

American public policy is run on a myth.

Richard Lamm