Political Quotes

“the final version of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act includes the provision that you just heard about that Congressman Sawyer and I wrote to modernize the way health care financial transactions are conducted, and we have worked for a number of years in a bipartisan fashion through a couple of Congresses to achieve this. Americans have the most advanced health care services in the world largely because of the technological advances that have been made. It is time we make the same technology apply to the way our health care system is run. The same high-speed electronic networks that modernized banking can be applied to our health care system so that bills can be filed easier, payments paid faster, and efficiency improved. In addition, the reductions in paperwork and improvement in speed, security and efficiency in billing helps get at one of the biggest problems currently facing the health care industry: fraud. Today we try to fight fraud with rooms full of clerks checking bills after they are paid, but billions of dollars of fraud simply slips by. Fraud will be easier to fight if every transaction can be coordinated electronically. Again, my thanks and congratulations to everyone who worked on this project. It has been a model of cooperation between the private and public sectors and between congressional Republicans and Democrats.”