On the recordMarch 28, 2012
Mr. Chairman, a couple of points. The bipartisan bill that came over from the Senate would provide funding fully paid for, offset for 18 months. So you could avoid the big 46 percent cut next year that's in the Republican budget and make sure folks out there who are looking for jobs in the construction industry could get to work. Secondly, with respect to Medicare, you have two fundamentally different approaches. The approach we had in the Affordable Care Act was to say we need to modernize the Medicare system by changing incentives. So we reward and incentivize the quality of care, the value of care, not the volume of care which drove up costs. What we do not do is offload the risk of those rising health care costs onto seniors. Now the board, the IPAB the gentleman referred to, is specifically prohibited, and I have the language right here, from including any recommendations to ration health care, raise revenue or Medicare beneficiary premiums, whereas the Republican plan expressly works by offloading those risks and those costs onto seniors. A very different approach. With that, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan).
