Jay Rockefeller: “I strongly agree with the words our Democratic leader has offered, and I congratulate him for mobilizing this effort…”

“I strongly agree with the words our Democratic leader has offered, and I congratulate him for mobilizing this effort, but it is a mobilization not so much of Democrats as it is of Senators in general. Hospitals and patients and skilled nursing facilities and home health agencies are not Republican or Democrat. The shortages, the closings, the health care denied is not Republican or Democrat. It has to do with the people of our States and of our country. This is a bipartisan matter. I know, without even having talked to but five or six of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, when they went back to their homes during the August recess and when they have been back since, this has been the subject with which we have all been, in a sense, lobbied in the best sense; that is, lobbied by our own constituents, by our own voters, by people who are patients, by people who have had these problems. It is right; we should be fixing this because Congress, in 1997, when we passed the Balanced Budget Act, made changes that were larger in Medicare than any in the history of the program, and we made mistakes. This is actually one of the reasons our colleagues on the other side of the aisle often criticize congressional action because we are trying to play doctor. We often try, but we often do not do it very well. In this case, we did not. We made mistakes.”