Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, we have an opportunity to do something together on a bipartisan basis that can bring a level of confidence to a program that all of us cherish and all of us want to defend, and that is Medicare. Medicare is an incredibly popular program. It is a necessary program, and it is a program that needs all of us to defend it, particularly on the integrity side. If Medicare were to ask CMS today what their fraudulent or erroneous payment rate is, those two numbers together, they would come back and they would tell them it is about 10 percent. So, in other words, about $40 billion a year, Mr. Speaker, is going out the door not to benefit seniors, but it is going out the door either fraudulently or erroneously. I thank Mr. Blumenauer from Oregon because, together, we have been working on this concept which would apply the same type of technology that we see in so many other parts of the economy right now, and that is smart card technology, and use it in a Medicare setting. The proposal is this: Let's try it. Let's see how it works. Let's have a pilot program. Toward that end, what we are hoping and the expectation is that the same types of savings that we have seen in the private sector we will see in this sector to make sure that seniors are protected, not only the funds that seniors have come to rely on, but their identities and so forth. This is a concept, again, that Mr. Blumenauer and I have worked on.…”