Chris Murphy: “Now, as we are getting into this, what I want to make sure that we first look at here is that many talk about is the…”

“Now, as we are getting into this, what I want to make sure that we first look at here is that many talk about is the Federal Government doing much with regard to health care? And Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits, and other programs that the Federal Government pays for consume a massive amount of the Federal budget. And I wanted to point out, just to begin with, if we can look at this, that about 45 percent of all mandatory spending, all mandatory spending we spend, is on health care, and about 15 percent of all discretionary spending is spent on health care. If we look at mandatory spending here in health care, we see that the section here which is Medicare is $297 billion, or about 24 percent overall; Social Security disability is in this category here, too, about 6 percent; State Children's Health Insurance Programs, about $5 billion or 4 percent; and Medicaid is $176 billion, or about 14 percent of overall mandatory spending. So we see that for those seniors and disabled who receive the benefits of Medicare is a large part of the Federal budget and one that has a history of providing good benefits for our seniors; benefits we are proud of, benefits we are pleased to continue to offer them.”