Political Quotes

“it is said that information is the most valuable commodity. In politics you probably know that information is power. The bigger government gets, the more valuable government information becomes to financial markets. This is especially true of information from agencies such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. It is that agency that my remarks are about. CMS controls $748 billion in government spending per year. That is billions with a B. Today, there are questions surrounding CMS's ability to safeguard nonpublic information. This is not about secrecy in government, it is about government secrets having an impact on the stock market. This is not the first time I have raised similar questions with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. In 2011 I received information from a whistleblower that CMS employees were spending large amounts of time in meetings with Wall Street executives. I wrote to CMS with these concerns. The response I received was very troubling. CMS could not tell us how many meetings were taking place with these Wall Street executives. CMS could not tell us who from Wall Street was in these meetings. CMS could not tell us how much time they spent with these executives. In fact, the only thing CMS could tell us was that it did not track any of this information.…”