Jim McDermott

The Majority has been crafting a scandal narrative to support their truly relentless agenda to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

This is not a hearing. This is a battle, and it is a typical political battle where one side is throwing up dust and trying to confuse everybody all over the country about what is happening.

Let me just put in here one fact that people are not paying any attention to today on poor people.

This hearing is surreal. It ought to be about jobs not about poverty because if everybody had a job there would not be any poverty.

Nobody here has to make a decision whether you feed your kids or not.

This committee does a lot of things here, but most of them are irrelevant. But it seems to me that we ought to be dealing with GSP if we are serious about our relationship with the rest of the world.

The issue of access to medicines has been central to some of our concerns, and it seems like the language you have put in is really a step back.

If you are going to cover everybody in this room, you have to have everybody in here paying into the program, on some level.

In fact, the figures showed that they actually increased their coverage during that period of time.

It seems they have discovered in themselves a repressed populism they reserve for special occasions when it serves their no tax/no regulation agenda.

They have decided to use this delay, which will not hinder the rest of implementation, to target a much more important provision of the Affordable Care Act, that is the individual mandate.

To say the employer mandate is connected to that really is a ruse to get us into a big argument about bringing the whole program down.

That probably explains why Governor Romney, a noted conservative Republican, put the individual mandate into the program in Massachusetts.

Confusion is the greatest way to kill something. My distinguished Chairman tries to confuse.

Repeal and replace is a great way to tell voters what they want to hear.

My Republican colleagues appear very upset by this decision despite its support by the business community.

It strikes me that the issue here is basically not about the delay because the businesses asked for the delay and the Government gave it to them.

Thank you for being willing to be the Director of the IRS.

You do not want to work with this federal government. This Congress has tried to repeal EPA about two dozen times.

I would be glad to help with the cost control.

It seems to me that what you are really saying is that some of the things that are being put in place and have been put in place both in the ACA and in Medicare Advantage in the past are you can't expect them to go in and instantly have a…

The long-term 75-year deficit has also improved, dropping from 3.88 percent in 2099 to 1.11 percent in 2013, that is a 72 percent decline.

Every generation has been subjected to that since I've been in Congress; it is not going to be here by the year X.

If we do nothing, you are saying if we do nothing but what is here in the law.

The latest trustees report projects two initial years of solvency to 2026, and that is pretty healthy by historical standards.