Political Quotes

“I have to say that to say this plan saves Medicare is in my view Orwellian. It does remind me of the phrase from many years ago that you have to destroy the village in order to save it. I have to say that if you look at what we're doing here, you're saying to seniors you've got to go into the private insurance market. Now, the chairman mentioned a couple other examples of the private market. But in this case we've already experimented, through Medicare Advantage, with that kind of private plan within Medicare. And you know what we discovered? That you had to subsidize them at 114 percent of the fee-for-service program. It cost us more for Medicare Advantage. In fact, one of the reforms that we made as part of the Affordable Care Act was to say we're not going to ask the taxpayers and folks who are on Medicare fee-for-service to subsidize those private plans that are running over cost. And you know what? In this budget our Republican colleagues kept that reform. If it was so great to have the Medicare Advantage plan, how come they took part of the savings from that plan? They did not. So it is a big mistake to say to seniors we're going to throw you into the private insurance market with an ever-declining voucher premium. The reason this isn't premium support, it doesn't support the premium. What Federal employees and Members of Congress have is a premium support system through a fair share formula.…”