Steve Buyer: “I thank the chairman for the leadership that he has given me as I put this together and also worked with the gentleman…”

“I thank the chairman for the leadership that he has given me as I put this together and also worked with the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Abercrombie). I needed to address several points earlier when I talked about making sure our advocacy is very correct. Let me address, number one, with regard to the comments of the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Jones) that this will only cost $250 million. The actual scoring from CBO is that it is $285 million. I just want to be very accurate. The other is that what worries me is that if we are at six sites and it is costing DOD $100 million when, in fact, it was supposed to be cost neutral, and then we are going to expand nationwide, over 40 sites nationwide, it boggles my mind the impact that is going have upon DOD that has not even been budgeted. With regard to my colleague, who I have great respect for and have been in Oklahoma with him in saying that whether it is cost effective or not does not matter, I believe that being cost effective in the efficiencies of governmental operations does matter. In this bill, for example, we even said, for every claim that TRICARE files, we have learned that it costs $78 per claim. For Medicare, I say to the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn), when he goes back to Oklahoma and does his Medicare, it costs 85 cents to a dollar to file it. So we are forcing TRICARE to do best business practices and on-line billing. We are going to save over $500 million over 5 years.”