Sherrod Brown: “I have heard my friends on the other side of the aisle talk about, particularly the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr.…”

“I have heard my friends on the other side of the aisle talk about, particularly the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Ferguson) talk about that privatized HMOs are so efficient. And I hear that over and over and over. Just because they are private business, that they must be extraordinarily efficient, that they must do such better work than the government could do. But my friend from New Jersey also knows that, in fact, Medicare, traditional fee-for-service Medicare has one-fifth the administrative costs as a privatized HMO, as an insurance company, as a health care plan that he is talking about. In the year 2000, the Inspector General documented that in a survey of Medicare+Choice, privatized Medicare, plans, that they tried to bill taxpayers for $116 million in inappropriate administrative costs. Now, this is one of the reasons that private insurance is so much more administratively cumbersome and wasteful than is traditional Medicare.”