David Weldon: “I just want to amplify on a point that the gentleman from California just made, which I think is an extremely important…”

“I just want to amplify on a point that the gentleman from California just made, which I think is an extremely important point. In developing our plan, we met with a variety of different groups, both consumer groups and senior groups, as well as provider groups. And we, frankly, were shocked to discover that in many of the private groups that do health care, they are actually seeing their costs go down. So here we have on this one side this government-run program with all its bureaucracy, with all its fraud and waste, and it is increasing at 10.5 percent. Then you go to these civilian-run, private programs, where they are actually reducing the premium. It is not growing at 3 percent, it is not growing at 5 percent, it is not growing at 6 percent. They are actually lowering the premiums to the employers, and that helps those employers be more competitive. It helps them to be more competitive on the international market, where so much of the competition is going on right now. So what we did is we said, how are you doing that? How have you been able not only to lower the rate of increase of health care costs, but to actually see some real dollar reductions in your costs in health care? And we have taken some of those principles that they have adopted, many of which--actually what they accomplish is they root out fraud and abuse. And we have adopted some of those into our Medicare Plus program.”