Angie Craig: “I just heard the Democrat leader come to the floor to demand a vote on Miguel Estrada so we could move on to other…”

“I just heard the Democrat leader come to the floor to demand a vote on Miguel Estrada so we could move on to other important issues. He had the opportunity to have that vote, and he objected. He wants to raise the issue of moving judges to a supermajority vote, denying this man, Miguel Estrada, a vote on the floor of the Senate under the constitutional clause of advice and consent to the President. Let me talk about that for a few moments. Before I talk about that, as the chairman of the Aging Committee who has spent countless hours, as has the Senator from Massachusetts, on the issue of Medicare, he and I would both agree that when Medicare was passed in 1965, some 33 years ago, medicine was practiced much differently than it is now. Yet he is saying we want Medicare just like it was, and we want to add a new program to it. As the Senator from Massachusetts well knows, when he voted for Medicare in 1965, it was expected to be about a 10, 20-billion-dollar- plus program. Today it is verging on a quarter of a trillion dollars, at least by the end of the decade, and it will potentially, by 2030, consume a quarter of the U.S. Government's budget. I know the Senator from Massachusetts knows as well as I that the world has changed and health care delivery has changed and that we are not going to practice 33-year-old medicine on 2003 seniors. They don't expect it. They don't want it. They demand change.”