[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 19]
[House]
[Page 25301]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




$10 BILLION FIX FOR MEDICARE REIMBURSEMENT NOT INCLUDED IN HOUSE BUDGET 
                             RECONCILIATION

  (Ms. BERKLEY asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend her remarks.)
  Ms. BERKLEY. Mr. Speaker, my community has the fastest growing senior 
population in the United States. I also have numbers of doctors that 
are telling me they can no longer afford to care for their Medicare 
patients because of the Medicare reimbursement being so bad. We know 
that we have to fix this Medicare reimbursement for our doctors so they 
will continue to be able to afford to treat our senior citizens.
  In the Senate reconciliation that they are introducing, they have a 
$10 billion fix so we could help the doctors, so they can continue to 
take care of our senior citizens. In the House version, they are saying 
they are not going to include the $10 billion, and the doctors are 
going to have to take care of themselves.
  But the misery about this and the hypocrisy is the Republican 
leadership is telling the doctors, Don't worry about it. We're not 
going to put it in the budget reconciliation so that you can continue 
taking care of senior patients. We're going to put it in Labor-HHS.
  Well, we have already passed Labor-HHS, and there is no $10 billion 
for the doctors.
  So that means that we are perpetrating a fraud on the doctors, the 
patients, and the seniors in this country, and we need not to do that.

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