Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes. This should be a moment of bipartisanship where we finally fix this sustainable growth rate in Medicare physician reimbursement. None of us think it is supportable. Doctors are always facing the peril of a deep cut if we don't patch it up or fix it permanently. It is time to fix it permanently. We worked together on a bipartisan basis on our committee and came up with a policy to replace the SGR. The Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee followed us, and they did their approach, and we all worked out one uniform approach with the idea that we are finally going to end this nonsense of threatening the doctors that take care of Medicare patients. This is an issue of patient access to medical care that has been promised under Medicare; yet the Republicans are now insisting we pay for the permanent fix. Well, this has come up many, many times. Sometimes, we paid for it, but sometimes, we didn't pay for it; but we always made sure that there was a fix on a bipartisan basis. Instead, today, the Republicans, without talking to us--they wanted to talk to us about the policy, but without talking to us--are trying to pay for this by hurting the Affordable Care Act. What they are doing is putting a partisan poison pill offset, an offset that would cause 13 million people to lose insurance coverage and would raise premiums by 10 to 20 percent for everybody else in the exchange.…”