Political Quotes

“Madam President, I am going to defer to my colleague from Connecticut, since at 5 p.m. we will be discussing the nominees which I will speak to. But before we do, I just want to point out two things to the Senate. First of all, the lead story of ``60 Minutes'' last night was about the death master file which is put out by Social Security. Interestingly, the story was from the extraordinary standpoint that a number of people are told they are dead when in fact they are very much alive and all of the horror they go through in trying to correct somebody's having made a mistake--a clerical error--that in fact they were dead by the alteration of one number or a name or just sheer overlook. But there is another problem with the death master file, and we have tried and tried to get that from Social Security. Unless you have an immediate use--a legitimate use for the death master file to be made public, such as a life insurance company--they would have a legitimate use to know who had died so they could stop the payments. Something else the ``60 Minutes'' program pointed out was that Medicare did not catch a lot of payments going out. But unless you have a legitimate use, by suddenly putting on line the death master file, it opens up all of these Social Security numbers for criminals to come in and create a new identity, file a tax return, and get a refund on a fictitious tax return. I want to continue to encourage the Social Security Administration.…”