Tom Price: “Thank you ever so much for your comments and, once again, succinctly pointing out the rationale for why it doesn't make…”

“Thank you ever so much for your comments and, once again, succinctly pointing out the rationale for why it doesn't make sense for Washington to be controlling health care. And sometimes I get the question as a physician, what does it mean specifically? What kind of issues would the government insert themselves into? If I think back on personal experience that I have, there are a number of issues where Washington and governments insert themselves into health care. The reason that it sometimes isn't easy to see is because patients don't often see it. I worked for a period of time in a veterans hospital in Atlanta, and every quarter there were a certain number of joint replacements that were allowed to be done at the hospital. When we got to the end of that number, even though it wasn't the end of the quarter, there were more patients that needed joint replacements, we couldn't do them. We weren't able to do them because the resources weren't there to be able to fund them. Now, the patients that didn't get their joint replacement in May or June because they were rescheduled to July didn't know that the reason they didn't get their joint replacement in May or June wasn't because there wasn't anybody to do it, or there weren't any prostheses to implant, or the nurses weren't there, or the operating rooms weren't functioning, no. They didn't know that the reason they weren't getting it is because the Federal Government wouldn't pay for it. That was the reason.…”