JOHN LINDER: “I am entertained by the crocodile tears that I hear about the length of time not to read the bill when everybody knows…”

“I am entertained by the crocodile tears that I hear about the length of time not to read the bill when everybody knows they would not have read it anyway. I believe it was in 1984 when Speaker Wright brought a $1.3 trillion budget to the floor with 1 hour notice and even the Committee on Rules did not see it. Let me tell my colleagues what is in this bill. A significant part of the problem with large Government programs has been the Soviet-style administration of them, the central command economy that decides on high what a doctor should earn, what a hospital visit should pay for. And over time, these all become absolutely rife with fraud. We just learned 2 weeks ago that an audit of the Health Care Financing Administration shows that about $23 billion a year is wasted in fraud, overpayment, and misuse. The records are in such disarray that we do not even know at the Federal level who is overpaid and how to recover it, and indeed we discovered in that audit that many people were writing checks or signing checks for the Health Care Financing Administration of the Federal Government without the legal authority to do so. This bill begins to crack down on that fraud. That $23 billion per year over 5 years is exactly how much we are reducing the rate of growth in the increase in spending of Medicare and it is taken out by just fraud and abuse.”