Politics & Power Quote by Herb Kohl

Impatience is doing the rhetorical heavy lifting here. Herb Kohl isn’t offering a nuanced seminar on pharmaceutical policy; he’s drawing a bright moral line between action and obstruction, and daring the listener to pick a side. The phrase “stop defending a system” frames the status quo not as imperfect but as actively protected by someone with power - lawmakers, lobbyists, regulators, or all three. “Clearly in dire need of reform” is a deliberate escalation: if the need is “clear,” then delay starts to look less like caution and more like complicity.

Kohl’s most pointed move is the pairing of “issuing reports” with “setting up new roadblocks.” Reports are usually marketed as diligence, roadblocks as safety. By stacking them together, he suggests the bureaucracy of concern has become a substitute for results - paper shields that allow politicians to claim seriousness while nothing changes at the pharmacy counter. It’s a classic legislative critique: process as performance.

The closing promise - “safe and affordable” - is also a political tightrope. In drug policy, safety is the argument used to justify slow approvals and strict controls; affordability is the argument used to justify market intervention, price negotiation, or importation. Kohl insists Americans shouldn’t have to trade one for the other. The subtext is consumer anger: people are paying too much, waiting too long, or both, while institutions insist the gears are turning. Kohl’s intent is to reframe prescription access as a basic deliverable of governance, not an endless debate topic.