Political Quotes

“we are embarked on a significant budget agreement that has as one of its components adjustments to America's health care costs. In the case of this particular agreement, I support the adjustments that have been proposed--things such as preventing drug manufacturers from raising their costs higher than the rate of inflation. We have seen people come in and buy companies and jack up the costs 10 times because they can. They haven't added any value to the products; they have just raised the costs. I support that. Paying hospitals the rate for physician practices that the physician practices were paid before the hospital bought them--nothing changed in the physician practices; just ownership changed, and that shouldn't allow a windfall to the buyer. I think we have done well with what we have done to reduce health care spending in this particular bill, but I recall that in the sequester we did an across-the-board haircut right across Medicare. Whatever you were being paid before, you got paid 98 percent of that afterward if you were a Medicare provider. I want to come today to offer a thought that I hope can percolate a bit, and if we go back and look at those costs again I would like to get this thought into the conversation. The backdrop of this is the extraordinary increase of health care costs that we have seen more or less in my lifetime. This chart shows 1960, and it is a $27 billion American expenditure on total health care.…”