Political Quotes

“Let me speak briefly and then yield the floor to my colleagues on the other side from whom we welcome hearing on this issue. First, we have now had a number of speakers who have addressed the issues that have been discussed over the course of the last 2 days now, since our legislation was introduced. We pointed out--and I hope we will continue to point out throughout the course of this debate--that there are areas of agreement but there are areas of disagreement. There are important differences between the McCain-Edwards-Kennedy bill and the competing bill on the other side. Those areas of disagreement go from the beginning of the bill through the end, including such things as access to specialists outside the plan, access to clinical trials--particularly FDA-approved clinical trials, access to a truly independent review process so when the claim of a patient is denied by an insurance company that patient they can go to a group and get that decision reversed, knowing it is a totally impartial review panel, there being no question about the independence of that review panel; finally, as a matter of last resort, the case being able to go to court if in fact these other processes do not work. But what we now know from the Senator from Georgia, plus the experiences in Texas and California, is that when these appeal processes are in place, when a patient is wrongly denied care by an HMO, there are two places for that decision to be reversed before anybody goes to court.”