Michael Burgess: “I come to the House tonight to talk about something that isn't number one or number two or perhaps even number three on…”

“I come to the House tonight to talk about something that isn't number one or number two or perhaps even number three on the list of things that people are concerned about, it is number four, it is health care, health care in our country that is provided by the private sector, that is provided by the public or the government sector. It is a debate that we will be hearing a lot more about as we get deeper into a year that's going to be consumed by presidential politics. Right now in our country we have an amalgam, if you will, of health care, part paid by the government, part paid by the private sector. I am oversimplifying for the purposes of debate, but the public or government sector, in pure dollar amounts, accounts for about 50 percent of the health care expenditures in this country. The private is sector insures about 160 million Americans, and that is roughly 50 percent of the lives covered by private insurance in this country. And we will have the debate, as the presidential year unfolds, more government, more private sector. But tonight, what I really want to do is focus on the physician workforce, the physician workforce that we have now and the physician workforce that we might expect to have in the future.”