Political Quotes

“Thank you for the privilege. And thank you, to my colleagues in the Republican Doctors Caucus, for a most interesting but factually incorrect 45 minutes of debate here. We really were going to spend this evening talking about jobs and about the American Jobs Act and one of the great ``woulda, coulda, shoulda's'' of our time. But we're going to hold that for just a few moments, though, because there are a few things that really need to be discussed from the last half-hour. First of all, most of the discussion was about Medicaid. That's a national program in which the Federal Government pays about 50 percent--it varies State to State, but roughly 50 percent of the cost of providing medical services to the poor, women, and children in the States. Now the debate was most interesting in that the argument was that there would be a lack of access and simultaneously an argument that there were no cost controls. Yet if you were listening to our esteemed colleagues, you would have heard them say, The doctors are not paid enough. I think if they're not paid enough, and the doctors want to get paid more in order to provide services, then the costs are going to go up. So the cost control argument here doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If you want to keep the costs down, you need to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the system. Certainly certain services within the Medicaid and Medi-Cal, as we call it in California, are not paid sufficiently.…”