Christopher Shays: “I think that we could point out that there are times that we have big disagreements with the administration, but this…”

“I think that we could point out that there are times that we have big disagreements with the administration, but this dealing with the fraud area, that was one area where we had some cooperation and we wanted to build on the cooperation we had with the White House. In that bill that passed on health care reform which dealt with the whole issue of portability, in that bill that you make reference to, section 2 which dealt with fraud, we also made health care fraud a Federal offense for public and private sector, and the reason why we did that was that we found that those that wanted to cheat the system were sometimes going from one State to another, and if the public sector was being more aggressive, it went into the private sector. So we put it all in one package so they could not escape and we could follow them, and in some instances we are talking about some organizations cheating the system not $10 million but literally hundreds of millions of dollars. So we are proud of the fact that that is something we did and grateful that the President agreed that it was something that he could sign.”