Tom Coburn: “I want to comment on the tone that we heard from the gentleman from Connecticut. I am a physician. I still practice.…”

“I want to comment on the tone that we heard from the gentleman from Connecticut. I am a physician. I still practice. What we were supposed to have received from Mr. Gejdenson was that the problems in the health care field today have come about because of this Congress. They have come about because of a law called ERISA that this Congress a number of years ago passed. And the thing that strikes me rather peculiarly is what we hear as HMO attacks instead of attacks on physicians who are not doing their job. The number one job of a physician is to do no harm. I want to tell my colleagues, if I do an outpatient surgery, which I do almost every weekend, and my patient is not ready to go home, I fight and fight and fight, but I do not give up. My patient stays there until they are ready to go home. Do you know what? I win those battles with HMOs. I do not lose those battles. What we are really hearing is the inability of physicians to have backbone to stand up. The law that created the situation that we have today was created several years ago, not by a conservative Republican Congress, but by a rather liberal Democrat Congress. I do not usually say anything partisan on this floor, but the tone of the speech is inappropriate for this august body. To not challenge that tone will do more to destroy this institution than anything I know. We passed a bill, it is called the Patient Protection Act.…”