Paul Tonko: “Right. And when you look at the statistics, the median household salary for our seniors is $19,000; the average…”

“Right. And when you look at the statistics, the median household salary for our seniors is $19,000; the average individual salary is $19,000. When you look at the onerous outcome of having to reach for thousands more dollars out of your pocket on a base of a median of $19,000, when we are looking at millionaires and billionaires getting even more assistance, that is spending. So let's not get off track here. It is spending. Where are we going to invest? Investing in health care, a basic core need, when premiums in the last decade have risen over 130 percent and where the administrative costs of the private sector and insurance are higher, where they are much lower in Medicare, where the advertising costs aren't there, where we know we have had coverage. And now we are going: here is your voucher payment. It is not going to be indexed appropriately so that with time it becomes less and less valuable. This is the kind of un-American behavior that we are witnessing here and that people get upset about saying they are lies, they are fear tactics. This is what is happening. It ends Medicare. Once you remove the risk that falls with government and transfer it over to our Nation's seniors, you have ended the core principle. When you deny a given bit of certainty and stability to our seniors, you have ended Medicare. When you are going to inflate the cost of health care, you have ended Medicare. And we have now taken that money and transferred it over to the big oil companies.…”