[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Pages 19210-19211]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                MEDICARE

  Mr. NELSON of Florida. I wish to thank the Senator from Tennessee for 
his graciousness to make a very few brief remarks.
  I wish to call to the attention of the Senate that there are some 
good things that are happening in Medicare. In the health care bill--
which was a very complicated piece of legislation--there are a lot of 
good things. There were some things that are implemented over time, 
that if mistakes had been made, we can correct those mistakes as they 
are starting to be implemented.
  I wish to point out some of the salutary things that are happening 
under the new health care reform bill with regard to Medicaid. It was 
just this week that the agency that runs Medicare, the Centers for 
Medicare and Medicaid Services, CMS, announced that more seniors and 
people with disabilities on Medicare are seeing significantly lower 
costs for important health care because of this new law.
  For example, what we are seeing for the first time is that millions 
of Americans on Medicare are now getting free physical exams as part of 
their preventive medicine. Because of the doughnut hole, which is that 
complicated black hole senior citizens would fall into when they were 
getting assistance for their prescription drugs, well, lo and behold, 
that doughnut hole is being filled by the Federal Government assisting 
them in paying for those drugs. Therefore, they are getting a lot more 
of their drugs without having to pay for them.
  For example, Nationwide has over 2.5 million people on Medicare who 
have saved more than $1.5 billion on their prescriptions. If we boil 
that down to my State of Florida, we have 172,000 Medicare recipients 
who save $96 million, which is an average for the senior citizen in 
Florida of $563 per person per year.
  In the case of physical exams, we have over 24 million people in the 
country who now have taken advantage of having one of these free 
physical exams in order to help with the preventive health care aspects 
that the bill was aimed at. In my State, where there are a lot of 
senior citizens, close to 2 million senior citizens have taken 
advantage of those physical exams.
  Remember how we were discussing the doom and gloom of Medicare 
Advantage? What has happened to Medicare Advantage? We had to change it 
because Medicare Advantage before, under the previous law, had a 14-
percent bump over and above Medicare fee-for-service. The Federal 
Government was going to go broke if we did not do something about that. 
Where was that money going? It was going to the insurance company 
because Medicare Advantage is a fancy term for Medicare given through 
an insurance company and HMO.
  What has happened? If we look all across the country at Medicare 
Advantage, enrollments are up and the premiums senior citizens pay are 
down. Look at the State of Florida in this last year. Enrollment was up 
by 6 percent, premiums decreased by about 10 percent. What is happening 
now in 2012? Enrollments are up almost 20 percent and the premiums are 
going down by a whopping 26 percent. That means more seniors are going 
to have access to higher quality care while paying less, and it is a 
win-win-win. It is clearly a win for the country that we are leveling 
out all of the excess bumps. It is clearly a win to the senior citizen 
and, in the process, the insurance companies are giving better quality 
care.
  I wanted to bring this to the attention of the Senate, and I do thank 
my colleague from Tennessee for his generosity in allowing me to make 
these comments prior to his.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.

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