Bob Corker

I'm just wondering why there aren't mechanisms like that that are employed in many other areas to keep that kind of thing from occurring.

Five percent is by people who are familiar with the----

I think punishment for these types of crimes has to be more severe.

Elder financial abuse is a growing problem that we cannot ignore.

Thank you so much for your tremendous leadership and for being such a pleasure for me and our staff to work with.

Most of those sentencing laws, are they state or are they Federal?

I actually think it is a novel idea that you guys have come up with this countercyclical buffer.

This makes no sense and we are not going to be a part of this.

It just makes no sense to me. And it is my understanding it was the Europeans that pressed us hard to move into this regime, and I am just wondering why we did not push back.

I guess as people are looking at capital and they are trying to create a way of having return, and they know they can buy Spanish debt or some other debt of a sovereign and get a much greater yield, and you guys are not going to ping them…

I am fascinated that sovereigns have a zero weighting, period, unless they are in default and it goes from zero to 150.

I wish to thank the great Senator from South Carolina, the State where I was born. I do want to say the committee makes those decisions. I don't want anybody to be jumping the gun with the kind of statements made earlier about future…

this year we will spend over $3.5 trillion, 60 percent of which is taxpayer money, 40 percent is borrowed. Over the next 10 years we will spend $45 trillion. We have not had a budget in this body for 1,240 days. Not only is this…

So when people talk about hundreds of billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse existing in Medicare, just this one example would lead people to believe that that really might well be the case.

80 percent is a huge number.

And we're all trying to figure out a way to stave off a fiscal crisis in this nation, the world is looking to us.

I think we'll go ahead and get started, and thank you very much for being here, and all of you who have come to this hearing.

I certainly would like to see it down to the single digits.

I mean, it seems like any American that would see one of these commercials on television, they would realize that something probably really bad is happening here, and you guys have evidence that 80 percent of the claims shouldn't be there…

I hope the pilot goes well and hope we get down in the single digits, as you mentioned, Dr. Hughes.

CMS, which spends billions of dollars each year on durable medical equipment, doesn't have the staff or the resources actually to look at these authorizations in advance in most cases.

I see many power mobility devices sitting in the front yard, sitting in the backyard, sitting out on the porch because they can't get through the door.

I can assure you the Scooter Store is not pre-filling any paperwork.

Is it your view the pilot program is starting too large and should start in a smaller way?

So we've set up a program to deal with an 80 percent error rate, one that any American with any kind of ability to comprehend can watch on television and understand that there's probably a tremendous amount of abuse taking place in this…