Charles Norwood: “I do not know if once and for all is correct. A crook is a crook and is going to continue to be a crook. But in general…”

“I do not know if once and for all is correct. A crook is a crook and is going to continue to be a crook. But in general, we are tightening that up tremendously. It was very interesting to me in the markup yesterday that we were talking about that in the Medicare program, 10 percent of that goes to waste, fraud and abuse, and the number is debatable about how much money is lost every year, but is between $18 billion and $20 billion a year, and to me it appears that the operators of HCFA are incompetent. It just set the other side on fire for us to say how dare we call them incompetent. They have for years let waste, fraud and abuse go ahead at about a 10 percent level. And when asking the director of HCFA, 'Well, when are you going to solve this problem,' he said, 'Well, maybe in another year to two we will come up with a plan.' Well, we have come up with a pretty darn good plan now. The gentleman and I will do this together, but we have got a task force being set up that is basically funded by those who abuse the system, and the penalties go back into the system to fund this task force. I think probably most of all, we are going to involve the patient with their bill. We do not even do that very well. A lot of times they may be charged for that second lab test, but the poor patient does not know it. They do not receive the bill. We are going to insist that HCFA and that crowd send patients a copy of their bill as they pay them. Can you imagine?...”