Rob Andrews: “The gentleman has just very eloquently described what in sports we call the home field advantage. Imagine if the home…”

“The gentleman has just very eloquently described what in sports we call the home field advantage. Imagine if the home football team got to pick the referees for every game at its stadium without any consultation with the visitors or with the conference in which they play. The home team would win a lot of the games. If you were an external reviewer, external reviewer A has a track record of favoring the HMO three-quarters of the time and external reviewer B has a track record of favoring the HMOs one-quarter of the time, and the reviewers get paid according to the number of reviews that they do and the HMO gets to pick the reviewer, you can imagine which reviewer is going to get more work and what message is going to be sent out to the reviewers. That is a home field advantage if I have ever heard of one and it renders the Senate external review procedures to be farcical in my opinion.”