Karen Thurman: “As we are in an era of when we are talking about surpluses and times of when things are fairly good, things may not…”

“As we are in an era of when we are talking about surpluses and times of when things are fairly good, things may not always be this good. One of the things that we have to remember is that it is our job to protect Medicare and the solvency of that trust fund. Quite frankly, one of the things that I see in this debate that gets forgotten is that under Medicare today, we pay for prescription drugs as they are needed in the hospitals. When we bring somebody in to stabilize them, we provide them with those medicines. But when we let them out of the hospital and they walk into that pharmacy and all of a sudden they are told that what they had to have in the hospital now just costs them $400 a month and they cannot pay that and they have to make that decision of what drug they take that month or that week or that day as versus whatever other expenses they might have, we are also costing this system millions of dollars every day because we let them out of the hospital after we have stabilized them and then we, 2 months later, find them back in the same situation as we left them before. And we are thinking to ourselves, we want to make the solvency of the Medicare program, we want to continue the program. The only thing we can do, contrary to whatever anybody else says is, this has got to be a Medicare program. It has got to be done under the Medicare program. It is good for the solvency and it is good for the patient. I think we really have to take all of these things into account.”