Ed Markey: “this Republican bill is a complete fraud. That is the bottom line. They have got hundreds of billions of dollars for tax…”

“this Republican bill is a complete fraud. That is the bottom line. They have got hundreds of billions of dollars for tax cuts, mostly for the rich, but not one penny to extend the Medicare trust fund, which is going bankrupt, by the way, in the year 2008. Let us go back to their balanced budget of 1997. The premise was that we would have to cut Medicare and home health care, those are visits made to people's homes who have Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and other chronic diseases, $115 billion to give a $90 billion tax break for mostly the wealthiest in America. Now we have this huge surplus. Now, what do the Republicans say? We are going to give that money back to the Medicare recipients; we are going to give that money back to the HMO health care recipients? No, they say, we do not have enough money for those people. Now, the problem, of course, is that the programs were cut fraudulently, using numbers that were not accurate in 1997 in terms of the problem with Medicare. It turns out today that the CBO says that in fact they have found miraculously $88 billion more of savings in Medicare for this 5-year period, and they found an additional hundreds of billions of dollars of revenues that they did not project. How much goes back to Medicare on the Republican side? They do not have a penny. If we kick them in the heart over here, we are going to break our toes. They just do not want to help these old people on Medicare.”