Shelley Berkley: “The time has come for this Congress to come to grips with the serious crisis in our health care system, the…”

“The time has come for this Congress to come to grips with the serious crisis in our health care system, the reimbursement of our doctors for treating our Medicare patients. Unless we act, there will be a 21 percent cut in Medicare reimbursement to those doctors that treat our senior citizens. We are in danger of creating a situation that may very well cause the collapse of our Medicare system. I favor a permanent fix; that's what we promised the doctors. We are now considering a 19-month fix. I'm not happy with it; I'm going to support it. Let everybody in this House vote for that Medicare reimbursement fix for the doctors so they can continue to treat senior citizens until we figure out a way of permanently fixing this discrepancy. Unless we're prepared to go to medical school and go back home to our districts to treat our senior citizens, we better make sure that our doctors get adequately reimbursed so this system will continue.”