Martin Hoke

OK; so clearly this is not something that has been trumped up by the Republican Party to create some kind of a phony crisis.

we have had more than 2 dozen congressional hearings, thousands and thousands of pages of testimony, dozens of town meetings and open forums. Every Member on this side of the aisle has solicited the advice, the consent, the input of their…

You are absolutely right. I will give you two examples where the insurance industry has not really taken over payment of bills that are medically related, so you do not have third party payment, you actually have the consumer directly…

Well, I would like to suggest an answer to the question that I asked I suppose rhetorically earlier, and that is why is this being portrayed the way it is by the other side of the aisle? I believe that it is because for some reason, the…

I think it is worth explaining why specifically this trust fund or why specifically whether or not the budget was balanced today does not affect this, and I think it is fairly easy to understand once you understand where the money comes…

Well, let us boil it down so that the senior citizens that, Mr. Speaker, may be watching these proceedings could get a specific example, and I just want to give one. That is so that people can have a sense of exactly what will be…

So, if there is a partisan issue, I suppose you could argue that these are all Democrats and that there are not Republicans.

This is what I am sort of driving at. You know, it seems to me that the responsible thing to do here is look at the problem, and then posit solutions for the problem itself, ask the American people what they think, seek their advice, seek…

I rise today to review some of the areas that we have been involved in the past couple of weeks that we have gotten back since the break, and particularly to look forward to what we are going to be doing during the next 2 months, because…

I am glad to speak on this today in favor of it. I think that the reason that this came about is the same reason that it was first brought to our attention... we found out about halfway through that first year that a cut is not a cut at…

I hope the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Doggett], my colleague and good friend, the previous speaker, had a chance to read the Washington Post editorial yesterday on the Medicare or Medi- scare debate. The liberal paper of record applauds…

I rise in support of the Clinger-Spence procurement reform initiative to untangle the current mass of requirements that make up the Federal procurement system. These requirements lead simply to too much money being spent for too little…

I think that you are aware that as the Chairman of the Committee on the Budget Working Group on National Security, I have spent a great deal of time with respect to the Department of Energy and examining the needs and missions of the…

we have done a lot, we have gone a long way to reform this Congress. But one of the things that we have not done is, we have not really tackled a systemic problem that needs systemic and systematic reform. One of the problems we have got…

we passed another appropriations bill last night, the VA-HUD bill. It saved $10.5 billion. I am going to put the line here and we will fill it in with green later. What we can see so far is that we have now saved $24 billion…

I was appalled this weekend when, having thought that perhaps we were going to bring a lowered style of rhetoric to the debate on Medicare, in fact, what happened is that the administration brought out, along with some of the liberal…

this is a summary of the report by the trustees. It is like an annual report to the American people on the Medicare trust fund, Social Security trust fund and other trust funds, but Medicare trust fund. The President said it is going…

What is unfortunate about this is that this was shared with me by a top official in the Department, and now they are scrambling like crazy. They are probably watching this very broadcast and saying, ``Oh, my goodness, what will we do…

I do not want to delay the gentleman's special order, but I think the American people deserve to read this report themselves and make their own decision. I would urge every American to call 202-225-3121, ask your Representative at…

Republicans have a simple three-step plan to give Medicare recipients the right to the same quality and choice that their own children and grandchildren have. First, all senior citizens currently on Medicare must be allowed to remain on…

I have a chart here that I think goes to exactly what the gentleman is talking about. This is a quotation from the trustees of the Medicare trust fund. These are five people, men and women appointed by the President of the United States…

Reclaiming my time, what I have heard on television and I have seen it in some news reports is that the Republicans are slashing spending on Medicare.

It seems to me, here is what we have got to realize, is that there is a genuine problem here. It is very easy, with any of these problems in Congress, to subject them to demagoguery, to subject them to hyperbole, to subject them to…

The health care component of inflation in the private sector right now is about 4.4 percent. But in fact there are other models in the private sector of specific companies or industries that have been able to flatten their health care…

We ought to be looking at those kinds of models to in fact improve Medicare for the senior citizens of America.