Richard Lamm

A nation has its first obligation to its own workers and its own poor.

Employers love cheap labor, but a country should train its own people.

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.

The Democratic Party is not the party of reform.

The New Deal, in my mind, has become a raw deal for my children.

We have been maintaining a standard of living by putting things on the debt of the next generation.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.