Leadership Quote by Patrick J. Kennedy

The line lands like a calm technical observation, but it’s really a political pressure point disguised as actuarial common sense. Patrick J. Kennedy is pointing at the engine inside private insurance: not care, not solidarity, but sorting. “Facts are” is a classic legislative throat-clearer, a claim to neutrality that dares you to argue with arithmetic. Then comes the quiet indictment: ratings “depend” on labeling human beings as “higher risk.” The word choice makes the practice sound inevitable, almost natural law, even as it invites the listener to ask whether inevitability should get to decide morality.

Kennedy’s intent is less to explain insurance than to frame a debate about fairness and stigma, especially in the realm of health. In the late-1990s and 2000s, his signature issues centered on mental health parity and addiction treatment - areas where “risk” can be both medically real and socially weaponized. The subtext is that risk isn’t just discovered; it’s constructed through categories that mirror power: illness, disability, poverty, past treatment, even geography. Once a person is tagged “high risk,” the market can price them out, turning vulnerability into revenue.

Context matters because insurance is one of the few industries where discrimination can be rebranded as prudence. Kennedy’s sentence works by stripping away the euphemisms. “Ratings” sounds bureaucratic; “some people are higher risk than others” makes the human cost legible. It’s a reminder that the technical language of premiums and actuarial tables is also a language of who gets protected - and who gets managed.