On the recordMarch 19, 2013
Let's be very clear. If you give States one-third of the amount of money that they are currently getting from Medicaid and ask them to do the same job, which is what this budget would do just 10 years from now, and increasingly down that path, you will, as the nonpartisan, independent Congressional Budget Office said ``reduce access to care.'' That's the bottom line. With respect to the voucher program, premium support, again, I don't really care what label you attach to it; the impact is the same. If you want to achieve the out-year budget savings that our colleagues claim to achieve, you've got to put a cap on that amount, which is what their plan would do and which makes it entirely different than the plan we have for Members of Congress and Federal employees, and the plan that most people in the private sector have as well. As this red line shows, the amount of support you would get would drop dramatically relative to rising health care costs, and that's why we don't call it premium support because it doesn't provide support. I now yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlelady from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee), a member of the Judiciary Committee.
