Political Quotes

“They do not feel any qualms about telling us where to go and how to get there. That is good. That is how we learn. But let me say this about the Medicare situation. We are the individuals in the majority party that said, look, we think seniors are very important. We want to roll back that unfair 1993 tax on Social Security. We passed a bill to that effect. We are the ones who said, look, we want to raise the income eligibility from $11,280 without deductions from Social Security for those under 70 to $30,000 a year. We passed that. We are the same ones who are saying, look, we love our seniors, want to make sure they live long and well, as long as possible, but what we want to make sure of is we take out the waste, fraud, and abuse in the system, $30 million a year, and make sure we keep those savings for health care only, not to go somewhere else in the budget. We also want to take the medical education, now part of Medicare, for direct and indirect costs for interns and residents, a very valuable program but it should be a separate line item in the government. We should make sure that those dollars also go to Medicare for seniors. We want to see paperwork reduction from 12 percent of Medicare costs to 2 percent while still offering Medisave accounts and managed care for Medicare. Doing all that together, we are talking about a 7.5-percent increase a year for Medicare, double the rate of inflation.”