On the recordMarch 18, 2010
I thank the gentleman. Great comments. And my experience, Dr. Gingrey, is the same as yours. The teletown halls that I have done on this subject in the last 6 months started out that 85 percent of my constituents were against this. Now it's up to 92 percent. Unbelievable. Let me just touch again on economics, and then I'm going to pitch this back. We have been joined by Congressman Broun also from Georgia. But first let me mention, let us talk about Medicare just for a moment. We hear the other side of the aisle continuing to complain that you're seeing this catastrophic increase in insurance rates, private insurance, and it has been going on for years. And, yes, it has been. It has been faster than inflation. No question about it. But if you look within that, what you find is that because Medicare pays well below break-even for a physician or a hospital and Medicaid pays even half of that, that you have tremendous cost shifting. So you have to raise something; something is going to have to go up to offset the costs that are not being paid. So, Mr. Speaker, in light of all of that, what we have in this bill is we're going to have a dramatic increase in Medicare and especially in Medicaid which is going to make those rates go up, that is, private insurance, even faster.
