Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. There's lots of things I could say. Let me say this on the physician fix in Medicare, because that has been something that has been left out of the equation. The Democrats do say that they passed a bill last fall that the Republicans tried to block and the Senate won't take up, but the fact of the matter is they haven't got it done. What does it really cost to repeal the sustainable growth rate formula? I have some familiarity because this is something I have worked on ever since I first got here. Three years ago, the Congressional Budget Office score to repeal the sustainable growth rate formula was in the neighborhood of $290 billion over 10 years. But what happens, as we all know, every year that we don't fix the SGR, that dollar figure that should have been saved gets added on to the cost of the fix. There is no way that the cost of fixing the sustainable growth rate formula is 1 dollar less than $300 billion. It is likely $350 billion or more. What many of us conveniently choose to ignore is that there will have to be something done to protect seniors who are part B participants, because the premium paid by the seniors in part B is, by law, fixed at 25 percent of the cost of the part B program the previous year. Well, if you add that much money to the cost of the part B program, guess what's going to happen to that senior's 25 percent of their premium? It's going to go up significantly.…”