Pete Stark: “I want to say on behalf of myself and many of the committee's Democrats that we would like to commend the gentleman from…”

“I want to say on behalf of myself and many of the committee's Democrats that we would like to commend the gentleman from California [Mr. Thomas], the full committee, and the Subcommittee on Health's staff director Chip Kahn for an open and consultative and bipartisan approach to the Medicare legislation. It is really a model, I suspect, of how the legislation should be written. I am not sure I can quite make myself say that it is a model of legislation, but it was done in a tradition of past Medicare bills. It extends the life of the Medicare trust fund to 2007, it makes reforms in the way we pay providers, and it indeed adds some beneficiary improvements. I do not intend to vote for the budget bill, but it is not because of the Medicare portion. If anybody was thinking of that, I would dissuade them otherwise. There are some things we should strongly oppose and do differently. We should oppose the Senate's provision to raise the age to 67, which causes more problems I think than it solves. I think we should oppose the Senate's copay provisions because we already charge Tiger Woods on $10 million, $300,000 a year for the same premium that somebody at $10,000 a year would pay $300 for and get the same benefit. Why punish Tiger Woods twice? The managed care provisions need consumer protections on emergency appeals, and there are some antifraud provisions that we should add.”