Political Quotes

“Over 14 years in private practice in medicine, I had the great privilege to treat many, many Medicare patients, thousands of Medicare patients. I did open heart surgery, complex open heart surgery, lung cancer surgery, in times of great need, great difficulty for these seniors who had paid many years of their payroll taxes into the Medicare program with the hope and the recognition that this program would be there for them, for their health care needs in their later years. And I'll tell you, in the '90s, when I was in the midst, at the peak of my practice, it was not unusual, and in fact quite often patients would come into the emergency room with a very difficult situation, without a primary care physician because they had not had previous health problems. And then what would happen is we would have to do emergency heart surgery on them, and once they got through all of this and got through the hospital stay, we could not find a primary care physician to take them on, to treat their everyday problems with hypertension, high blood pressure, diabetes, gout and things of that nature. I would get on the phone time and time again and I would call family doctors and internal medicine physicians and plead with them, Why can't you take this one more patient into your practice? And it's because the reimbursement situation for Medicare was so bad even back then in the nineties that if a physician took on too many Medicare patients, they couldn't meet their costs.…”