Political Quotes

“The gentleman is correct on that. I was just looking at some statistics here a moment ago about the shifting of cost. Under the Affordable Care Act, there are many, many benefits for Medicare. Leaving aside the Medicaid population for a moment, the Medicare population, available to every individual 65 and older, there have been significant improvements. You mentioned the doughnut hole earlier, the drug benefit. If you run up heavy expenditures on your drugs, you would come to a point where you had to pay 100 percent. Medicare didn't cover it. Well, that doughnut hole is collapsing, and in another 2 years, the Medicare program will cover all of the drug costs without limitation. Also, there is the free annual checkup that is available to everybody that is on Medicare. The result of these kinds of things, where drugs are available, blood pressure drugs, diabetes and the like, has led to--together with the additional taxes that the superwealthy are paying--has increased the solvency of Medicare by 11 years. Now, the fiddling that is going on with the proposal that our Republicans have put through, it is not clear exactly what the result would be; but we do know that one of the major tax cuts is the elimination of this Medicare tax that the superwealthy have been paying, and that is over--together with one other tax is almost $340 billion. So the support for Medicare and the solvency of Medicare becomes a question mark as a result of the proposals.…”