Political Quotes

“I take this time because we are in the last, we hope, few days before we adjourn for the holidays. There are certain pieces of legislation we must get done before we leave town. We call these the must-pass bills that we have to make sure are enacted before Congress adjourns for the year. One, of course, is what President Obama has been talking about. We need to deal with the payroll tax issue. We don't want to see middle- income families finding that on January 1 their paychecks--the actual amount of money they take home--are reduced. During this economic time, we want to make sure the money remains constant, and we don't want to see additional burdens placed on middle-income families. We all know we have to deal with the Medicare extenders, including the physicians problem. We have a flawed system for reimbursing physicians that causes a substantial reduction in rates physicians receive--a 27-percent reduction. That would affect not only the fairness of our reimbursement system to our doctors, but it would also affect the access Medicare patients have to physicians. So we need to absolutely take care of that issue. We have the Omnibus appropriations bill. I certainly hope that is going to be an appropriations bill so we can give some predictability through the remainder of this fiscal year. We have to get that done before we adjourn for the holidays. We also need to pass the tax extenders.…”