Nancy L. Johnson: “since Medicare was founded, medicine has changed and seniors have changed. We all know how medicine has changed, MRIs…”

“since Medicare was founded, medicine has changed and seniors have changed. We all know how medicine has changed, MRIs, open heart surgery, all the dramatic procedures, all the new diagnostic tests; and Medicare has a cumbersome though slow way of accommodating its system to be able to deliver modern medicine. More importantly, seniors have changed. They are living longer. They are living with chronic diseases. And Medicare has not accommodated at all to that dramatic change in our seniors' lives. So I was delighted this week to announce with Secretary Tommy Thompson the implementation of those provisions of the Medicare Modernization Act which will for the first time enable Medicare to deliver to our seniors modern medical care to better support those with chronic illnesses. Twenty percent of our seniors have five or more chronic illnesses. They use two thirds of the Medicare dollars, and we have not been able to deliver what modern medical science knows about how to prevent the progress of chronic illness. We started today through the Medicare Modernization Act which we voted through in this House, to do just that.”