George Miller: “we have seen the Republicans do everything they can to divert the public's attention for what their plan would do to…”

“we have seen the Republicans do everything they can to divert the public's attention for what their plan would do to Medicare. In order to save Medicare, the Republicans tell us they have to take away senior citizens' choice of doctors; they have to force them into managed care, where they do not want to go, where they lose control of their health care for themselves and for their spouse. They want them to pay the overcharges for doctors who charge them too much for medical procedures. They want to take away their right to have a Medigap insurance policy so they will not have to pay out-of-pocket charges to those same doctors and hospitals, maybe now forcing them to pay as much as 40 percent in out-of-pocket charges. And they want to do all that for simply one reason, and that is to gather up the resources of Medicare and give a tax break to the wealthy, not gathering up the resources of Medicare to shore up the system, to bolster the system, to make it solvent, but to take away these resources, to take away the money of the senior citizens, to charge them more, to simply transfer that to a tax cut. There is another way. The other way is the way President Clinton proposed, which is to shore this system up for 10 years.”