- Fix medicare & medicaid before you try to fix health care
- combined budgets are $700 B - bigger then defense budget
- Insurance companies made 2.2% profit across entire system
- Medicare & Medicaid have lost $60 B in fraud
- no head of Medicare or Medicaid program - pres Obama hasn't done this yet - why?
- how will you evaluate how bad the situation is
- Kevin Williamson - deputy managing efitor, national review
- CMS: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
- Medicare & Medicaid & Social Security are about half of federal budget
- amount of fraud, waste, abuse, crime, outright theft is unreal
- CMS oversees federally funded health programs
- all sorts of stuff going on that are not strictly illegal; but improper;
- Joe Wilson wasn't lieing, already covering illegal aliens
- CMS is part of the department of health and human services
- the administrator of CMS oversees about $700B in annual spending
- federal govt: medicare fraud costs american taxpayer $60B per year
- Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann was on Glen's radio show today and invited people to come to the capitol and meet her at noon on Thursday to hear John Voit speak and walk the halls of congress
- lawyers have been very quite about health insurance: lawyers. why? they are getting bought off (Kevin says) - they are going to make a lot of money off of this; no one will do as well as the lawyers
- they will get the govt stopping states from enacting any sort of tort reform that will put any sort of limits on their earnings from medical liability claims
- tort reform puts caps on non economic damages
- CBO: medical malpractice reforms could save up to $54 B
- house health bill cuts uncentives to states that cap attorney fees
- establishing grants in Pelosi's version of the bill; they will provide money for alternatives to liability lawsuites, but if you take the money you can't enact any actual tort reform (Kevin)
- While we've been focused on/distracted by/with health care reform, they've been sneaking all sorts of legislation through; you have to watch the other hand
- increased the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) by a third; several billion dollars
- we've set aside $5.5B for community organizing and neighborhood stability groups (i.e. ACORN)
- money set aside for veteranarians; dogs health care
- hate crimes bill in military defense policy (hate crimes legislation was added to $680B defense authorization bill)
- set aside couple million acres of land that you can't develop oil or energy resources on in the land use bill
- net neutrality rule stuck in the stimulus bill
- 2/4/09: pres obama signs schip bill into law
- 2/17/09: obama signs $787B stimulus program into law
- 10/28/09: obama signs hate crimes bill into law
- they were supposed to put stuff online to make it available for debate
- they were supposed to put health care debates up on CSPAN
- Reid will use nuclear option (reconciliation process, done outside of normal legislation process); they will pack in all sorts of other stuff into the bill (student loans, energy policy, number of other things)
- friday special show with one of the most underrepresentated groups in America
