Tom Carper

It appears to me that roughly one out of every seven or eight dollars that is being spent in Medicare is being spent wastefully or fraudulently.

This might be an obvious question, but are there some simple things that we could do to really perform checks on the identifiers?

I am going to ask you to answer that for the record.

I would just urge you and your colleagues to give this everything you have.

There is a huge upside there in reducing fraud.

I am asking you to respond on the record what you are going to do with that new authority.

Several reports outside of the government's reports estimated Medicare and Medicaid fraud at $80 to $100 billion.

Goals have to really reflect both qualitative and quantitative pieces.

If we do not have a timeline, if we do not have a date that we are trying to get something done... then these kinds of things just stretch out forever.

I want it to be aggressive.

My father used to say that the work expands to fill the amount of time we allocate to do a particular job.

We do not want to lose sight of the other 35. They represent cumulatively about almost a quarter of a billion dollars in annual overpayments.

We are be ready to take on additional work with the Medicaid and the Part D plans absolutely quickly.

We value the work that you and your colleagues do for our country.

There is real money to be saved here. We have a Medicare Trust Fund that has somewhere between--I do not know--10, 15 years of life left in it, and we need every dollar--it needs every dollar that we can save.

I think we need to set some goals here, and I think we need to set some timelines.

A minimum threshold should be, in rolling it out to the rest of the country, should be to achieve what was achieved during that program.

I was encouraged by what I heard on Parts C and D, not so encouraged on what I heard about the States.

OK. We are well into our vote. I am going to just take about 2 more minutes, and then I am going to run and vote.

I suspect that this is not all fraudulent or improper payments, but my guess is some of it might be.

If 2 weeks goes by and you do not hear any questions, you are free and clear.

All right. Thank you.

Everything would be on the table, the entitlements and the expiring tax cuts.

When you say C-5Ms, do you mean C-5Bs or--

We do not need more C-17s. We have studied this repeatedly.