Political Quotes

On the recordJune 23, 2011
In situations where we found recently--and there was an article in a major paper, The New York Times, that reported that there were CT chest scans done two times over at many locations where they were recovering those dollars through Medicare and found that to cost some $25 million worth of waste, of fraud in the system. Now, that's just one small example of one small bit of opportunity and activity in the health care field. Think of it. If you have the agents, as you suggested, and if they are funded in a way that produces dollars of savings simply by having the infrastructure, the human infrastructure, to go out and chase this fraud down, we can then benefit. There are systems here that we developed that have the checks and balances, that have the bells and whistles, that have the preventative element. Even the efforts that we made in the Affordable Care Act to not require copayments or deductibles for any of the screenings and the annual checkups for our seniors--wonderful concepts to, again, contain the costs of health care within the Medicare model, which we thought was a wonderful thing to do. And you're right, there's no move here. When you end Medicare and make no adjustments and just hand it over to the private sector and say, Keep on your trend of being much more expensive than Medicare and go out there and sharpen the pencil, without changes that they want to induce into the program, nothing changes; but the cost increases for the seniors.
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Paul Tonko
Democratic · New York

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