Frank Pallone: “I just wanted to give two examples, if I could, following up on what the gentleman mentioned. I do not have the specific…”

“I just wanted to give two examples, if I could, following up on what the gentleman mentioned. I do not have the specific physician, but there was something on TV that I watched one night, and I do not even remember what channel now, but the gentleman was talking about in Pittsburgh how so many medical breakthroughs took place, polio and some of the other things a few years ago. In many cases, what is happening now with managed care and the way that it is operating is that those physicians who are on the front line and who are coming up with new ways and new techniques of doing things are almost penalized. We had the example with the physician, and I do not have his name in front of me, unfortunately, who had grown up with a deformed ear or deformed ears, and he had gone to medical school and made it his life's ambition that he was going to develop a way of cosmetic surgery to do cosmetic surgery to make particularly children's ears so that they would look normal, so to speak, again. He had developed this surgical method, and was doing a great job and handling these specialty cases, and all of a sudden found that the HMOs would not pay for it.”