On the recordMay 6, 2025
I could almost hear the joy from my staff saying: Hey, it is only 30 minutes this time, not an hour. Mr. Speaker, I want to do just a handful of things. One of these days we are going to have not enough noise about the facts, the numbers, the data, the debt, those things that we can come in and sort of do our boards, our charts, on things that actually reduce spending and modernize. I do want to sort of start with this. We have spent time since last summer working on pieces of legislation. The Wall Street Journal series and the ProPublica series came out about the scale of bad acts that were happening in what we call Medicare part C, which is Medicare Advantage for most of us, which is now I think about 55 percent of the Medicare population. We have been working on that to sort of modernize it, and so for all the lobbyists who are making money trying to beat us up for trying to actually fix it, I will warn you that the legislation is almost done. We now have to work with the economists and others to score it. We have been stunned though that it continues. Even last Thursday, I think, there was another whole set of investigations or indictments announced. Let's get on to some of the math here. Mr. Speaker, I have come behind the microphone many times and talked about the scale of debt. We borrow about $72,000 per second. Our math next year, that goes up to about $82,000 borrowing per second.…
