[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 17]
[House]
[Page 25446]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                REIMBURSEMENTS TO HMO'S AND MANAGED CARE

  (Mr. HILL of Montana asked and was given permission to address the 
House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. HILL of Montana. Mr. Speaker, I want to bring some clarity to the 
issue that we just debated and voted on, and that is this issue of 
reimbursements to HMOs and managed care.
  I no longer have a managed care institution in Montana. The one that 
was there was forced to close down a year ago. I sat down with HCFA, 
the Clinton administration, and that HMO to try to keep it alive a year 
ago. And one of the things that I discovered is that when the Clinton 
administration forced the closure of that HMO, it knew that it was 
going to cost more to provide health care to those seniors under the 
fee-for-service Medicare than it would under the HMO. And this was a 
provider-based HMO.
  I thought to myself, why in the world would they do that, would they 
force people into poor coverage, no prescription drug coverage, and 
higher deductibles when they knew it was going to cost more? Then it 
dawned on me. The Clinton administration wants to destroy managed care, 
Medicare+Choice.
  What we have here is Democrats coming to this floor pretending that 
they want to keep those seniors who have that program covered, when the 
reality is they want to destroy that program because they do not want 
seniors to have a choice, but they want to blame Republicans for doing 
it. And it is wrong, and they are wrong for doing it. We did the right 
thing by voting that resolution down.

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