Sheldon Whitehouse

There is a reimbursement paradox that you experience or your fiscal people experience.

I think it might help to put a nice, bright light over that doorway so that everybody knows where it is.

I think everybody who either has, or has a loved one who has multiple conditions is keenly aware of the sense of confusion and loneliness.

We already have proposals to basically wipe out Medicare a decade from now.

Thank you, Chairman and thank you gentlemen for being here.

It is time to be bold and have this Administration assert what its goal is here, and do that specifically.

I would strongly urge you to push up into the administration, to invite them to set a goal for you to achieve.

We reward, systemically, the worst performers and we punish the best performers.

There is a terrible cost to real Rhode Islanders and to real Americans if we degrade Social Security and Medicare

If we are going to go back to privatizing that as was tried a few years ago, hand that over to Wall Street

It is a little bit out of the traditional order for an official Senate hearing. But this is Rhode Island.

My goal in buying health insurance for my employees is never to pay for an MRI twice in one day.

The Affordable Care Act provided very significant tools to States to improve the quality of care and to save money.

I commend you for your leadership as a member of the Senate Special Committee on Aging.

Let me be very clear. Social Security has paid out every dime owed to all eligible Americans without contributing a thing to the Federal deficit or debt.

The attack on Medicare also overlooks the most basic fact of healthcare, which is that all healthcare costs are skyrocketing, irrespective of who the insurer is.

The House of Representatives recently passed a Republican budget which proposes privatizing Medicare and requiring seniors to pay the majority of their health expenses with their own money.

If changes are desired to strengthen Social Security, those changes should be considered independently from work to reduce the deficit.

We will protect our promises to our seniors.

Under the Republican budget, seniors would lose the new benefits provided by the healthcare reform law.

So the role of States and particularly of State officials like Lieutenant Governor Roberts and Director Taylor and Commissioner Koller in working together to have a coordinated strategy on this is really central to the success of this…

If there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it adjourn under the previous order. There being no objection, the Senate, at 6:41 p.m., adjourned until Thursday, April 14, 2011, at 9:30 a.m.

I am informed that we will debate the long-term CR tomorrow morning and vote as soon as we receive the papers from the House. There will be three votes which will be in relation to the two correcting resolutions regarding health care…

I complimented you on the intensity of the effort you put into getting the Recovery Act funding out into Rhode Island.

One of the solutions that we have proposed in Rhode Island is to put tolls on I-95 to generate some of our own funding since the Federal funding is insufficient for these purposes.