Greg Ganske: “I am going to speak tonight on managed care reform, HMO reform. About a week or so ago, the Senate had a short debate…”

“I am going to speak tonight on managed care reform, HMO reform. About a week or so ago, the Senate had a short debate and voted on the Nickles amendment, which was the GOP Senate version of patient protection. Now, that amendment was given to Members with very short notice during that debate. I have the full text here. As one can see, it is quite dense. It consists of 80-some pages of legislative language, and so it was not easy to read through this so-called patient protection bill to understand exactly what was in the bill. Mr. Speaker, I advised several of my Republican Senate colleagues to be very careful about voting for that bill, unless they had had a chance to review the specific language, because, as Members of both sides of the aisle know, the devil is always in the details in terms of whether a bill is a good bill or bad bill. Over the last several days, I have had the opportunity to start reading the Nickles bill from the Senate, and it sadly is deficient in several areas. I would liken this more as an HMO protection bill rather than a patient protection bill.”