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Thank you for inviting AARP to participate in today's hearing.

The whole point of Medicare Advantage plans was to be proactive and preventative, right, and you said that in your opening remarks.

Would you say then your evaluation of this, your assessment is we actually have not met that goal, that we are not being as preventative and we are not actually saving costs in this program?

A thousand dollars a day.

That all requires preauthorization, so there could be delays with regard to that?

If you have seen one MA plan, you have seen one.

That would have to be done at the Federal level, and CMS would have that.

Great. I also want to get back to something that both of you talked about with regard to the Medicare Advantage plans and this delay.

Is that written in the rules, though, that two-week timeframe?

Yes. Somebody said back to you, 'We have 10 days to make that decision.' Where do they get that 10 days?

How could you even anticipate that?

Is that with traditional Medicare? Is that less of a problem?

I don't think it was the goal that we were going to have 50 percent of people on these plans.

We need to reevaluate the rules on this program... that is a really bad place for our consumers to be.

Would you say that the complexity of the system is disadvantaging people on lower incomes?

I know that there are even people you can hire to help you, right.

I think there is a common thing in marketing that you have to get a message out seven times before people start remembering it.

I do think that we need to have more official information coming from CMS.