Judd Gregg: “Essentially, this amendment deals with reconciliation. Reconciliation is a fairly arcane exercise, but it has…”

“Essentially, this amendment deals with reconciliation. Reconciliation is a fairly arcane exercise, but it has significant impact around here. Reconciliation is the tool the Budget Committee has, to put some teeth into our efforts to try to control spending. There are no reconciliation instructions in the majority proposal. I wish there were. I wish there were reconciliation instructions on entitlements, and I wish those reconciliation instructions had followed the suggestions of the President, as I said in my opening statement, where he made recommendations that were very reasonable and would not have affected beneficiaries but would have saved $8 trillion over the 75-year life of Medicare and would have helped move them toward balance by getting the providers paid correctly and by having very high-income individuals contributing to the cost of their insurance, especially drug insurance. But there is also another side to reconciliation, and that is, as committees are given reconciliation instructions which save money, sometimes they take that money and they spend it, which is not the purpose of reconciliation.”