Political Quotes

“I thank the chairman of the full committee for yielding time to me. I had a great career as a cardiac surgeon in treating thousands of Medicare patients in my career. And my career ended prematurely because of a disability. But I learned something a long time ago from my father, who's a family doctor, who went before me, who taught me about the art of medicine. And the most important thing he taught me, despite all the technology we have, is that trust in the doctor-patient relationship is the most important thing, the most important foundation of good health care, high quality health care. Look at this chart. What's wrong with this? Clearly, you could see all the bureaucratic entities. But where's the doctor, and where's the patient? The doctor is down here in the corner, and I think way off in the other corner are the patients. So all this stuff in the middle is what undermines the trust in the doctor-patient relationship. Now, we had Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in front of our committee recently, and we were asking about this Independent Payment Advisory Board. We asked the question about rationing, and what came out was, number one, there's no definition of rationing in the statute, so the Department will have to write rules. And she admitted in committee--very tacitly but effectively admitted--that they're not going to be able to write rules that can actually protect seniors from IPAB.…”