Paul Tonko: “Well, if I might ask the gentleman from California if he would yield. I believe there's a whole lot of political…”

“Well, if I might ask the gentleman from California if he would yield. I believe there's a whole lot of political posturing going on with the Medicaid decision by States. We are hearing a lot of talk about, well, we are not going to pay for that portion because, while it may be 100 percent in the near future, it may go to 90 percent into the long- distance future, and they don't want to pay anything for the new installments of the Medicaid plan. Well, today we are paying. It's not like it's against an absolute that costs nothing. If you have the poor uninsured, underinsured in any given State, there's indigent care. There is bad debt and charity that is addressed in ratepayer dollars for insurance coverage's sake because that is going to be incorporated into the overall actuarial plan, or you're paying it through taxpayer dollars and for a much more inefficient system. To have the poor, uninsured, and underinsured go to emergency rooms visiting a different doctor team every time they visit that emergency room, or perhaps a different emergency room, to not provide the stable, standardized care, acceptable notions of how to provide a predictable outcome, you're going to pay needlessly and wastefully. This is about networking people to a system that provides a stability, a standard that will enable them to have a clinic, have a contract that will cover them and make certain that all of us are strengthened by it. And guess what.…”