There is an old saying that if you fail to plan, then you should plan to fail.

He was Twittering while I was asking questions. He is pretty good.

I think Canada uses the Internet for its census. I am told so far it has worked fairly well.

Some of these ideas can be seen in the new Recovery.gov website that was recently set up and will be tracking stimulus funds down to the local level.

Let me just interrupt. I just thought that was a great example.

I applaud the President's early commitment, including during his time in this body, to use technology to make government more transparent and more effective.

We do not want the government to make rash decisions without first thinking things through.

There has to be a price to pay for that, not just paying back the money, but a greater price than that.

If we amend our law so that it allows some portion of the recoveries to be used to strengthen those kinds of systems, does that make sense?

I think one of the things we did in Sarbanes-Oxley is literally the CEO of the company, when a company verifies or certifies that they have scrubbed their books, they have done the right thing. The CEO has to sign his or her name on the…

Unfortunately, until we put market discipline into the health care system, waste and fraud will continue to be a reality in Medicare and Medicaid.

If we change our audit plan and look at the most vulnerable but also the most problematic, we are going to end up eating that on the State budget side.

I think one of the better initiatives that came out of the George W. Bush Administration was the idea of the Improper Payments Information Act.

We need to work even harder.

We need to find ways to have them actually come forward and tell us they found a problem.

I don't believe they are allowed to keep a portion of the recoveries to pay for their recovery activities.

We advocate strengthening enrollment standards and making participation in the Federal health care programs a privilege, not a right.

What can we do at the Congressional level, this Subcommittee, this Committee, the Senate, the House, to address some of those vulnerabilities?

I think in your case in New York, what has happened under your leadership could be an example for the rest of us.

Those three estimates, as Senator Carper pointed out, are roughly about 50 percent of that $72 billion in improper payments.

I am especially interested to see if the first State that ratified the Constitution, might be on that list.

We are going to run out of money in the Medicare Trust Fund.

All too often, however, agencies are failing to meet their responsibilities in this regard.

I think there is a real opportunity here for us and for the IG and CMS to say, here is what a compliance program looks like at a managed care entity.

I think it will take such a sustained commitment for there to be real progress in this area.