Political Quotes

“I thank my colleague. Mr. President, I have one brief comment to wrap up. I see my colleague from Florida here. My colleagues have essentially spent close to an hour talking about these programs that are literally a lifeline to millions of Americans, Medicare and Medicaid. As highlighted tonight, it has always been that we have had to play a lot of defense to prevent big attacks on these programs--we even saw them in the President's budget as I went page by page--when what we really would like to do is play offense and think about the future. My colleague from Florida is here. He has a very large elderly population, as many Senators do. When I was director of the Gray Panthers, Medicare had two parts. There was Part A for hospitals and Part B for doctors. That was it. If you had a broken ankle and you went to the hospital, that was Part A. If you had a horrible case of the flu, you went to the doctor, and you were taken care of in an outpatient fashion. That is not Medicare today. Medicare today is chronic illnesses--diabetes, heart disease, chronic pulmonary diseases. Eighty percent of the Medicare Program is going to be consumed by chronic illnesses in the days ahead. Congress has just begun the effort to update the Medicare guarantee to incorporate those hugely important challenges--cancer, diabetes, heart disease. Those are chronic illnesses. I close by way of saying that this update means, again, that the guarantee reaches into every nook and cranny of our community.…”