On the recordMarch 18, 2010
my colleague from Tennessee is exactly correct. Just that one item alone--of course it is part of Medicare; you have to pay doctors to take care of you in Medicare--and if you do not include the cost of that, then obviously you are not identifying the true costs of the legislation, and just that item alone would be enough to knock it out of balance. I did not even get into all the double counting and the other ways in which they try to game the system so it makes it look like you have saved money, but you have not. One of our friends, Stephen Moore, I heard, had this analogy. He said: This is a great deal: Gee, you cover an additional 30 million people and you save money. Gee, at that rate, we should cover everybody in China. We could really reduce the deficit. Well, I think it makes the point. The American people have broken the code here. We are not going to save money by adding more people to the rolls. That may be a good idea. It may be that we should subsidize people, but let's acknowledge the true cost, and that gets back to the amendment of our colleague from Alabama, the amendment that is pending on the floor. He says we have to stop spending so much, so let's do something very modest. Let's put a cap using last year's budget. We are not talking about cutting way back. We are not cutting into muscle or bone or anything like that; we are just saying: OK, if it was good enough for 2010, let's stop there.
