Pete Stark

I strongly agree with that and yet, here we are where repealing the ACA without a replacement as the Republicans have already begun to do, would cost roughly $350 billion through 2027.

Those 43,000 people are not just anecdotes. They are people too, who will lose their care if this is repealed.

Two leading doctors at Harvard Medical School have concluded that 43,000 people will be killed annually if the ACA is repealed without a replacement.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that repealing the major coverage provisions of the Affordable Care Act will terminate coverage for--sorry, not 30, but 32 million people.

It gave every shyster and promoter a loophole. . . . We now have to keep rewriting the laws like the tax code.

Turning a physician's decision to refer a patient into a marketable commodity.

I think we have to ask ourselves, how do we do more good than harm in eliminating the compensation arrangements.

In 2007 Pete Stark wrote that he believed that, on balance, the law may have done more harm than good.

It gave every shyster and promoter a loophole. We now have to keep rewriting the laws like the tax code.

But these projections have turned out to be incorrect. And since the passage of the ACA, Medicare Advantage enrollment has increased, and the premiums have decreased.

I would first of all like to try to make it the protocol in this committee--I am not succeeding too well--that we strike from our lexicon the word 'disability.'

$8.6 trillion. Do you have any idea what the two wars we are fighting and not paying for costs over the same period of time?

Without the Affordable Care Act, the health insurance trust fund would expire eight years earlier, in 2016.

The Republicans want to kill Social Security and Medicare and turn them into voucher systems.

Thank you for holding this hearing and thank our witnesses for their service.

We are not being asked to contribute anything to pay for that war. Lower income people maybe are.

I strongly oppose these budget cuts which are kind of like the cable company starting to bill you for a service while you are at home waiting for them to show up and connect it.

Social Security has been there for Americans for 77 years. I hope we can continue to work to make it strong for another 77 years.

I dislike the notion that we need to increase costs for beneficiaries in order to fix the physician payment system.

The home health copayment, for instance, I think is largely ascribed to be used by old, sick, poor widows, and raising the price that they have to pay is just one more Republican effort to deny equal rights to women.

I am concerned about the proposals or any proposals that would shift costs to beneficiaries. Doing so I think would devastate them.

Medicare is one of our Nation's best programs, but it has always been a work in progress, and it needs ongoing fine-tuning and changing to keep it relevant.

Because it is the law, and it takes enforcement.

The 75-year target doesn't bother me much, but I will come back and ask Mr. Herger, he will find out what it is like.