Maurice Hinchey: “Obviously, what would happen to the families of those people if Medicare were changed in the way that they are proposing…”

“Obviously, what would happen to the families of those people if Medicare were changed in the way that they are proposing to change it, to block grant it, reduce the amounts of money that is available, send what is left in the form of block grants to the States, the States then would have to add on administrative costs or take out of that administrative costs because now they will have to run the program and be responsible for parts of it. They would have to hire people to do that. They would have to have office space and most of the things that would be associated with making additional costs, which would take money out of the Medicaid program. As the gentleman mentioned earlier, there is always the temptation for State governments, when they have access to Federal funds, to use them in what might be called creative ways and to spend that money out of the Medicaid system to help balance a budget or to do something else for some other kind of expenditure in some way. The result of all of that would be far less money available for Medicaid recipients, elderly people in nursing homes, people with multiple disabilities in nursing homes. I ask myself, what would the families of those people do? How would they cope with that? How would they manage under those circumstances?”