Political Quotes

“I had a conversation with an orthopedic surgeon a couple of months ago. He said to me, I have a small practice. He said 95 percent of the MRIs that he orders are completely unnecessary except he has to cover everything because someone might try to hit the jackpot. So he has to order those tests. Everybody in the business orders all of those tests. If you cut out that 95 percent, his number is that it costs patient's insurance companies, taxpayers, a million dollars a year just to fund the unnecessary tests in one that he calls a small practice. That gives you an implication. You can multiply that $1 million across the whole country, and what you come up with is $203 billion in additional costs. We can't get them all out of there. There is a bill that we have introduced that finds about $54 billion over 10 years. I think it ought to be tougher than that. I think we ought to tighten this thing down more. The argument again that has been made out of the White House and out of the majority party and from the Speaker's office itself, too, is that Republicans don't have any solutions. Well, they must have sat up some night in one of those formerly smoke-filled rooms to come up with an idea like that. It is completely and utterly false, Mr. Speaker. Republicans have introduced at least 42 separate bills in this 111th Congress that reform health care.”