Richard Lamm Quotes

To me, the failure of liberalism - the tradition I come from - was not recognizing there has to be justice across the generations.

~ 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

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

Medical need is an infinitely expandable concept. There is always one more marginal procedure that can be done. There is no end to the medical and surgical treatments that a technologically sophisticated and advanced society can give to aging bodies.

~ Richard Lamm

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

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

A truly moral health care system should start out by covering all of its citizens with basic health care. It would not be seduced by its technology and fancy buildings.

~ Richard Lamm

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

~ Richard Lamm

God is not an American. Nature did not design Americans to be prosperous forever.

~ Richard Lamm

Politics is a love-hate relationship. I sure know that.

~ 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

History shows, in my opinion, that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual.

~ Richard Lamm