Kathy Castor: “access to the highest quality health care for our seniors under Medicare is one of the most important issues facing this…”

“access to the highest quality health care for our seniors under Medicare is one of the most important issues facing this Congress. Unfortunately, the Bush White House has sought to undermine the great Medicare safety net by privatizing a great deal of health care under the Medicare system, turning it over to HMOs. Just last week the former director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from 2001 to 2003 spoke at a conference in Tampa and a reporter caught him on record saying that this privatization effort ``was done to prime the pump and to get people to go back to HMOs. But it's a much bigger subsidy than we intended.'' You see, these private plans receive about 11 percent more per beneficiary than the government spends in original Medicare. And this director said that he had meant for the subsidy to be about half that. Mr. Speaker, we have a lot of work to do to stand up for our seniors and ensure the Medicare safety net works for everyone.”