"I welcome the President and working with him to try to get some of that medical malpractice reform so we can get the cost of health care to come down"
About this Quote
The line is a small masterclass in Washington bilingualism: friendly on the surface, transactional underneath. “I welcome the President” signals bipartisan civility, but it’s also a preemptive shield against the charge of obstruction. Quayle isn’t praising the President’s agenda so much as claiming the moral high ground of “willingness,” then narrowing the playing field to his preferred policy lane.
The real payload sits in the causal promise: malpractice reform “so we can get the cost of health care to come down.” That “so” does heavy rhetorical labor. It compresses a contested, technically messy debate into a clean chain of cause and effect, swapping the complexity of health-care pricing for a villain voters already recognize: lawsuits, trial lawyers, a system allegedly gamed by opportunists. The phrasing sidesteps tradeoffs - patient protections, accountability, the uneven evidence on whether caps significantly reduce overall spending - and instead offers malpractice reform as a commonsense cost-cutting lever.
“Some of that” is telling, too. It’s vague enough to accommodate whatever is politically feasible while still telegraphing allegiance to a conservative priority. The syntax (“I welcome... working with him to try to get...”) keeps agency diffuse, making the aim sound pragmatic rather than ideological, even as the target is specific.
Contextually, this fits the post-ACA era when Republicans hunted for digestible alternatives to “Obamacare.” Malpractice reform functioned as a portable talking point: it sounded pro-doctor, anti-waste, and fiscally responsible - even if the savings, in practice, were never likely to match the size of the promise.
The real payload sits in the causal promise: malpractice reform “so we can get the cost of health care to come down.” That “so” does heavy rhetorical labor. It compresses a contested, technically messy debate into a clean chain of cause and effect, swapping the complexity of health-care pricing for a villain voters already recognize: lawsuits, trial lawyers, a system allegedly gamed by opportunists. The phrasing sidesteps tradeoffs - patient protections, accountability, the uneven evidence on whether caps significantly reduce overall spending - and instead offers malpractice reform as a commonsense cost-cutting lever.
“Some of that” is telling, too. It’s vague enough to accommodate whatever is politically feasible while still telegraphing allegiance to a conservative priority. The syntax (“I welcome... working with him to try to get...”) keeps agency diffuse, making the aim sound pragmatic rather than ideological, even as the target is specific.
Contextually, this fits the post-ACA era when Republicans hunted for digestible alternatives to “Obamacare.” Malpractice reform functioned as a portable talking point: it sounded pro-doctor, anti-waste, and fiscally responsible - even if the savings, in practice, were never likely to match the size of the promise.
Quote Details
| Topic | Health |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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