Politics & Power Quote by George J. Mitchell

The sentence works like a politician’s velvet hammer: it lands a hard moral claim while sounding almost procedural. “The result was, of course” smuggles in inevitability. Mitchell isn’t just describing an outcome; he’s framing the uninsured crisis as the predictable product of choices already made, a quiet indictment of whoever designed - or defended - the status quo. The “of course” is doing heavy rhetorical labor, daring the listener to treat this as surprising when it has been visible for years.

Then he pivots to “tragically,” a word that converts policy into human consequence. It’s a classic move from legislative abstraction to civic grief, but not sentimental. “More than 40 million” gives scale without faces; “for many” narrows it back to lived experience, implying the unseen plurality behind that number. He avoids declaring health care a right outright, yet the structure nudges you there: if insurance is the gatekeeper to “good health care,” then a market-based credential is effectively deciding who gets treated early, adequately, or at all.

The subtext is strategic restraint. Mitchell doesn’t attack insurers, employers, or ideology by name. He presents a causal chain - lack of insurance -> lack of access - that sounds self-evident, almost nonpartisan. That’s the point: he’s building consensus for reform by making the moral argument seem like common sense rather than a partisan manifesto, positioning inaction as the radical choice.