On the recordMarch 4, 2010
I, along with Senator Barrasso, attended the summit with the President. If I recall his words, we were going to take 4 to 6 weeks to see if we couldn't work out some compromises to get a bill the American people would accept but we also would accept. Today marks a week since we had that summit. We had an announcement yesterday that it is time to quit talking, it is time to quit negotiating, and they are going to ram a bill through. I think there is a big contrast. The problem in health care in America is not quality, it is cost. Whatever we do is going to expand the amount of dollars we spend on health care if we add people to it. But if we attack the cost, what we can do is add more people with no increase in cost. The thing that denies somebody access to health care is not not having an insurance policy, it is having a cost of the system that is unaffordable, whether you have insurance or not. Malcolm Sparrow from Harvard said he believes 20 percent of all the billings in Medicare are fraudulent. That is over $100 billion a year.
