Tom Carper

I am confident that you will work to protect the spirit of the letter of the Endangered Species Act.

It is not just fraud.

I am a big believer in oversight.

The second half of that question--anything you want to add about activities where CMS's performance might be wanting in this regard?

What I always say here, and Scott has heard this a million times already, everything I do, I know I can do better.

Those are the kind of answers that we give. You are not supposed to do that. You have to be more specific.

Well, might that work the other way for the private health insurance companies if they decide not to pay a claim under the Medigap----

I also would second the comment about enhanced information sharing and just to ensure that as that occurs, that we take into account privacy and security considerations.

One of the things that Senator Coburn and I had worked on for a number of years was the issue of improper payments.

I want to lower expectations. It is actually $20 billion over 10 years, but if you can do the $20 billion a year, we will take it.

Thanks for that testimony. I thought your testimony was just excellent and enjoyed reading it and hearing it in here today.

Would you suggest that the course we take would be to maybe start with the first State that ratified the Constitution, then the second State?

Everything I do, I know I can do better.

It has to be consistent, and it has to be a continuous-type effort from year to year.

What would be exciting is when it gets to be 2024 and we run out of money in the Medicare Trust Fund.

Well, sometimes, like on the beaches, we close our beaches down on Labor Day, so we will see.

Federal agencies, we want you to be mindful of improper payments and start writing them down, or at least noting what they are.

We do not want to do that.

We want you to go out and recover as much money as you can from those improper payments.

We are all in this together.

I think you deserve a lot of credit.

If we take out half of the fraud in Medicare, that is another $30 billion a year times 10 years is $300 billion.

The President says we are going to cut improper payments in Medicare by half by the end of next year

Thanks to the good work by folks on my staff and on Senator Coburn's staff, some good work has been done drilling down on Medicare and on Medicaid to find there are ways for us to be able to reduce outlays from those programs, but to do so…

What else can we be doing?