Quotes of the Day

“By waging a fraudulent, decades-long marketing campaign to profit from the suffering of thousands of Oklahomans, these companies have made in excess of $10 billion a year, while creating a generation of Oklahomans who have become addicts, convicts or have met their deaths from opioid overdoses.”

-Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter, who is suing more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies, accusing them of greatly understating the addictive risks of opioid painkillers while overstating the treatment benefits (Source).

“These numbers should be alarming to all Oklahomans and serve as a reminder to the Oklahoma Legislature to adequately fund the Oklahoma Department of Transportation.”

-Chuck Mai, vice president of Oklahoma AAA, on a report that showed that the state’s rural roads and bridges are among the worst in the nation. According to the report, 16 percent of Oklahoma’s rural bridges are structurally deficient (Source)

“If my aid gets taken away, I would be forced into a nursing home and just die.”

– Lori Taylor of Norman, one of nine disability advocates who met with Sen. Lankford’s office on Wednesday to voice their opposition to the Senate Republican health bill, which would deeply cut the Medicaid-funded care many people with disabilities rely on (Source)

“In the end, the fact of the matter remains that we have a structural problem in how we budget our state money. We have to fix the structural problems we have and look at our revenue streams.”

–  Gov. Fallin, speaking at a Tulsa Regional Chamber luncheon on Tuesday (Source)

“If you ask any family with a (developmentally disabled) child, we’re just doing what we have to do to make life good. We do everything we can, but we can’t do it all. I could not work if (my daughter) didn’t have support. Families will do their part, but they can’t do it all.”

-Wanda Felty, an advocate and parent of a 28-year-old developmentally disabled daughter on the more than 7,500 Oklahomans on a decade-long waiting list for home- and community-based servicess (Source)

“Teachers say the reason they leave the profession is that they don’t feel supported. We wouldn’t expect to go to a physician who has no training and no experience and say, ‘You know, here’s somebody who just loves people.’ We’d know that wasn’t best practice, and we wouldn’t stand for that.”

– Oklahoma Superintendent for Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister speaking to the state board of education before they vote on a record number of emergency teacher certifications (Source)

“Put me down as a solid undecided.”

– Oklahoma Senator James Lankford on the Senate Republican health care bill unveiled on Thursday. The bill would scale back financial help and consumer protections in the Affordable Care Act while fundamentally restructuring and deeply cutting Medicaid (Source)

“When I was a provost at UCO in 2002, about 60 percent of our budget came from state appropriations. This year, it’s at 22 percent. The burden, the responsibility, has been shifted to the student. If they’re young, the student’s family.”

– Don Betz, president of the University of Central Oklahoma (Source)

“There are costs and there are trade-offs when we face such a budgetary situation. My concern is that we are risking the future of our state when we underinvest in the education of the next generation, underinvest to the point that we are the very bottom state in both common education and higher education.”

– OU President David Boren, announcing a 5 percent tuition increase as the university deals with further budget cuts (Source)

“That is a huge jump. I think that part of it is because we had students that rolled over from last year that were already homeless [and] hopefully, better identification within the schools.”

Kathy Brown, the homeless education coordinator for the Oklahoma City public schools, where the number of identified homeless students jumped from 3,600 in 2016 to more than 5,400 this past year (Source)