Leadership Quote by Chris Chocola

“Ownership” and “control” are doing a lot of ideological heavy lifting here. Chris Chocola frames health insurance not as a shared social risk but as a personal asset you should hold in your own hands, like a mortgage or a retirement account. The intent is clear: make market language feel like moral language. If patients “own” coverage, then any intermediary - employers, insurers, government - becomes a suspect middleman. The patient is recast as consumer, and “return control” implies something was taken away by bureaucracy or mandates.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of employer-based insurance and public programs without naming them. It borrows the emotional power of autonomy while sidestepping the messy reality that health care is one of the least “controllable” markets: you don’t shop well when you’re sick, prices are opaque, and risk pooling is the whole reason insurance exists. “Ownership” also suggests portability (you keep it when you change jobs) and discipline (you’ll spend wisely if it’s “yours”), classic conservative touchstones that translate policy architecture into character.

Context matters: this kind of line is tailored for an era of backlash against government expansion in health care and for audiences primed to hear “patient-centered” as “less regulation.” It’s rhetorically effective because it makes reform feel like restoration. But it also smuggles in a trade-off: more individual control often means more individual exposure - to higher costs, thinner coverage, and the blunt fact that the market’s freedom cuts both ways.