Pete Stark: “for over a year now, there has been a small group of us who have been fighting to change the home health care provisions…”

“for over a year now, there has been a small group of us who have been fighting to change the home health care provisions in the Balanced Budget Act; and I want to thank my colleague, the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Weygand), the gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Stabenow), the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pappas), and the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) for their diligence and their determination to try to help fix this problem. What we have today on the floor amounts, in my opinion, to a very important achievement. I want to publicly thank the gentleman from California (Chairman Thomas) for bringing this bill to the floor. This bill could most certainly be improved, but I commend my colleagues for bringing us this far in the process. I hope that we can work quickly with the Senate in these last few days and pass this bill out of Congress in a form that the President can sign. I urge all my colleagues to support this legislation. While there are many people that I would like to thank and recognize, I want to thank the people of Massachusetts who have educated me on this issue, the nurses, the doctors, the home health care agency owners and, most important, our Nation's seniors and the critically ill. I was invited into their homes and their workplaces and shown how important this Medicare benefit is in the lives of everyday people.”