Tom Coburn: “We heard some reasons we should support the Baucus doctor fix. I happen to have been practicing in 2004 when the Senate…”

“We heard some reasons we should support the Baucus doctor fix. I happen to have been practicing in 2004 when the Senate did exactly what they are doing right now. This bill is going to guarantee the doctor fix is not done by July 1. That is what is going to happen with this bill. Let me tell you, we are eventually going to fix the problem for the doctors for 18 months. There is no question. Everybody agrees to that. But what we are doing is, we are making sure we are going to add hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of cost in every State for every private physician that is practicing. And the reason is because the bill is not going to get changed by July 1, and they are going to be under the 10.9-percent cut. Then they are going to come back, whenever we finally get it done. They are going to have to refile all of that, and Medicare is going to have to repay all of this. So this exercise in political gamesmanship, of working only with one side of the aisle, not working with Senator Grassley, to truly get this done in a way that the President will not veto it and accomplish the purposes for which we all say we want, to eliminate the 10.9-percent cut for physicians, that is something we are going to lose grasp of, and we are going to create a hardship on every physician in this country because we are playing a political game with this rather than fixing the problem.”