Political Quotes

“I echo the comments of my friend from Connecticut, especially when instead of Gingrich Republicans cutting Medicare to pay for tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country, cutting it to the tune, originally they started out at $270 billion and finally reacted, when the public reacted so much against these major Medicare cuts in order to pay for tax breaks for the wealthy under the Gingrich Medicare plan, instead of letting the Gingrich Republicans make those cuts to do that, we should be going after fraud in Medicare, the whole balanced billing issue that Ms. DeLauro mentioned that will cause more waste in Medicare and will cause more Medicare beneficiaries to have less services at higher cost. What they tried in the Medicare and the Medicaid bills, what the Gingrich bills on Medicare and Medicaid said last year and this year, that to allow physicians to refer for any kind of services, diagnostic services, MRI's or others to facilities that those physicians own, we have in this body, long before any of the three of us were here, tried to go after some of those fraudulent aspects of Medicare anyway, to make sure that people really were getting their dollars' worth and doctors were paid properly, that hospitals were reimbursed properly and that patients had an opportunity to get good health care at the lowest cost possible.”