On the recordMarch 2, 2016
I thank the gentleman for his comments. It is true that when you find common ground and work together, good things happen, and this is one of those instances. I think there are a lot of areas in health care. I was a healthcare provider before I was a heart surgeon. I took care of Medicaid and Medicare patients, private insurance patients, and patients that did not have the ability to pay. I think that we need to continue to look for ways to improve our safety net healthcare programs, mainly continue to look for ways to make sure that people have access to health care in the United States regardless of their ability to pay, regardless of their ZIP Code. That said, we need to make sure that people have access to quality health care, and that is why bills like this are so important. It weeds out providers that are fraudulent and have other quality-related problems. As a physician--and I will speak for some of my physician friends-- this is the type of thing that we all want in our specialties. We want to make sure that the patients that we serve have access to physicians who are providing quality health care and are not defrauding the system. I reserve the balance of my time.
