Political Quotes

“Madam President, I want to address my colleagues on a couple of different issues. One would be to speak in support of part of the Coburn amendment, and the second one would be to speak on the issue of taxes. I want to speak in favor of Senator Coburn's amendment that would repeal a special deal for California. As I have said before, Medicare's payment system for physicians is flawed in many ways. One of those flaws has resulted in unfairly low payments to physicians in my own State of Iowa and many other rural States over the course of many years. Medicare payments vary from one area to another based upon geographic adjustments made by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. These adjustments are supposed to reflect the differences in the cost of providing care in different areas and equalizing physician payment. But the geographic adjustors have been a dismal failure. They do not accurately represent the costs in rural States. Instead, they have created unfairly low Medicare rates and have, in fact, even discouraged physicians from practicing in rural areas such as Arkansas, New Mexico, Missouri, Iowa, North Dakota, and maybe, you could say, a lot of rural States. Last fall, I offered an amendment to reform the unfair formula that has caused these unduly low rural payments during the Finance Committee markup of the health care reform bill.…”