Leadership Quote by Paul Gillmor

Gillmor’s line is built like a patriotic compliment with a trapdoor. He starts by invoking two things Americans are trained to feel proud of: elite expertise (“some of the finest doctors”) and abundance (“more access to vital medications”). It’s an argument designed to disarm the reflexive fear that reform equals rationing. Then he flips it with “And yet,” the pivot that turns national bragging into an indictment: excellence exists, but it’s being priced out of reach.

The intent is legislative and strategic. As a politician speaking into a long, grinding debate over U.S. health care, Gillmor isn’t trying to win the moral high ground; he’s trying to make reform sound like maintenance. The system, he implies, is a high-performance machine that’s “faltering,” not a failed experiment. That framing matters: it invites incremental fixes, cost controls, and market adjustments rather than a wholesale reinvention. “Faltering” is also carefully vague - it avoids naming villains (insurers, pharmaceutical pricing, employer-based coverage, administrative overhead) while still validating public frustration.

The subtext is that American exceptionalism has become an expensive hobby. We can produce world-class medicine and still deliver a worse bargain than peer nations, because the payoff is uneven and the bill is relentless. Coming from a Republican congressman in the pre-ACA era, the quote sits in a moment when “cost” was becoming the politically safe doorway into health policy: you could acknowledge dysfunction without endorsing a single-payer revolution. It’s a sober warning wrapped in a compliment, engineered for a country that wants the best and hates the receipt.