[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 6]
[House]
[Page 7402]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         MEDICARE MODERNIZATION

  (Mrs. JOHNSON of Connecticut asked and was given permission to 
address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend her remarks.)
  Mrs. JOHNSON of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, since Medicare was founded, 
medicine has changed and seniors have changed. We all know how medicine 
has changed, MRIs, open heart surgery, all the dramatic procedures, all 
the new diagnostic tests; and Medicare has a cumbersome though slow way 
of accommodating its system to be able to deliver modern medicine.
  More importantly, seniors have changed. They are living longer. They 
are living with chronic diseases. And Medicare has not accommodated at 
all to that dramatic change in our seniors' lives.
  So I was delighted this week to announce with Secretary Tommy 
Thompson the implementation of those provisions of the Medicare 
Modernization Act which will for the first time enable Medicare to 
deliver to our seniors modern medical care to better support those with 
chronic illnesses.
  Twenty percent of our seniors have five or more chronic illnesses. 
They use two thirds of the Medicare dollars, and we have not been able 
to deliver what modern medical science knows about how to prevent the 
progress of chronic illness. We started today through the Medicare 
Modernization Act which we voted through in this House, to do just 
that.

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