Representative Heather Wilson: “Sometimes I feel here like we are looking through the looking glass, like in the Alice in Wonderland book. Sometimes…”

“Sometimes I feel here like we are looking through the looking glass, like in the Alice in Wonderland book. Sometimes things people say do not make any sense to me at all. I do not understand how can people say we have underfunded, when we are just about to add $400 billion in new benefits to Medicare. When Medicare was started back in 1965, medicine was only 1 percent of the cost of health care. We did not have the miracle medicines that we have today. Cancer, the diagnosis of cancer in 1965, was a death sentence. Today, people survive it because of medicine. And yet we have a system under Medicare that will pay for a diabetic to go into the hospital and have their foot amputated but will not pay $29.95 a month for the Glucophage to control blood sugar. That is why so many seniors in New Mexico have opted for something called Medicare+Choice, because that is the only thing in Medicare that has given them something of a prescription drug benefit.”