Judd Gregg: “I rise to raise my concerns about the procedure and about the substance. We all know there has to be a fix relative to…”

“I rise to raise my concerns about the procedure and about the substance. We all know there has to be a fix relative to the doctors. We all know we cannot have this sort of reduction in payments to physicians. That is just a fact. My own personal preference is that we fix this permanently. It is going to cost a lot of money, but that is the way it should be done. We should not be fixing this every year. And, in fact, it is becoming a geometric progression which is spiraling downward, with every year becoming a much more difficult effort. We should basically do Medicare reform. But short of that, we should do a permanent doctor fix so that the physicians in this country know they are going to get a reasonable upgrade of their reimbursement every year. We should not have to go through this. However, this bill does not accomplish that. In fact, this bill aggravates the problem significantly. I genuinely wish the bipartisanship effort which Senator Baucus and Senator Grassley had been pursuing had been the effort that had come to floor, but it did not. What has come to the floor is a partisan effort; regrettably, it is not a very good one. It has a couple of practical problems, and then it has a very substantive problem. The substantive problem is that it spends $2 trillion that we do not have, not to fix the doctor problem but to add new benefits in certain elements for certain recipients under Medicare Part D.”