On the recordNovember 17, 2011
Thank you, Congresswoman Buerkle, for holding this Special Order tonight, along with my colleagues on the Doctors Caucus. And thank you, Mr. Speaker, for being here. We are all here because we are health professionals. We know the real world of health care, and we know the real world solutions. It's the reason I'm here in Washington now, that and the fact that I'm concerned about where the future of the country is going for our children. Many times in our health care practice as a nurse and in my husband's surgery practice as small business owners, over time we have always looked at these issues, whether we're talking about Medicare, whether we're talking about the possibility of having real, good, concrete tort reform, all of these different issues that we've said if we could put these in place, health care could have a much more solid foundation moving forward. We already know that we have the best health care in the world. But being in the industry, having that small business and understanding where Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements--which were down--were going, you have to ask yourself, how can this continue? How can we provide health care into the future? Well, of course we know that the health care bill was passed in the 111th Congress, and now we are seeing the effects of it. One of the effects, as you've pointed out, are to our hospitals. You know, it's important that we are able to articulate this to the American people, connecting the dots.…
