Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. I wanted to make one point on this new Congressional Budget Office score that was provided today. And I know some people are looking at that and saying the cost for the program, for the Affordable Care Act over the next 10 years, was only scored I think at $1.16 trillion--if I can use the words ``only'' and ``trillion'' together in a sentence. But what many people overlook is that the Congressional Budget Office must score under existing law. And one of the things that existing law does is it cuts physician reimbursement in Medicare by 35 percent on December 31 of this year. So add another $300 billion to $400 billion to that cost just for the so-called sustainable growth rate formula, which has not yet been repealed. Now we will fix that before the end of the year for at least 1 more year. But the Congressional Budget Office has no way of scoring that. They must go with existing law. And, of course, with the Independent Payment Advisory Board, the same thing applies. They have to think that those cuts that the Independent Payment Advisory Board is programmed to produce, that they are going to continue occur. The other thing the Congressional Budget Office cannot easily estimate is the number of people who will be moved off employer- sponsored insurance onto the State exchanges or the Federal exchange. And that is a difficult number to know. The MacKenzie Corporation said it was going to be 30 percent.…”