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  • 5 months ago
During a House Ways and Means Committee hearing prior to the congressional recess, Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) spoke about the Medicare Part A Trust Fund.
Transcript
00:00Thank you Mr. Chairman. Look I care passionately about this subject. I want
00:07to put a couple things out. I'm actually a fan of managed care. As long as the
00:13incentives are designed for those of us who sort of grew up in the early
00:18literature from the late 70s early 80s that managed care was going to be a model
00:23where the incentive is as an organization we benefit by helping
00:28people become healthier. In an age of technology, miracle drugs, the ability
00:34now to help people with their BMIs and other things, I will argue that if we
00:40read through the MedPAC reports from the last decade the incentives are
00:44misaligned. That's all in many ways my legislation, this, help us. And there's
00:52some points I want to make. This is one of the reports we often call it the
00:57beneficiary to worker ratios. Please understand from a global standpoint, this
01:03is more for all the members sitting here on this committee. In seven years the
01:08Medicare Part A trust fund is empty. We actually have an issue where in just a
01:14few years I have two and a half, less than two and a half workers per Medicare
01:20beneficiary. We have its demographics, its math. It has also become public that
01:27oversight has actually been doing inquiries for months. I want to thank for
01:34particularly if there's representatives here, a number of the MA companies have
01:39been remarkably open in helping us understand their distribution models, how
01:46they work, how they score. A couple have been a little crankier, but we have maybe
01:53tens of thousands of pages that we're running through our data systems and those
01:58things trying to document. And Mr. Chairman, when it hits the right moment I am
02:04going to submit a whole series of articles from the Wall Street Journal
02:08series to I think there's a ProPublica article, some others in here, which document where
02:14maybe they weren't the MA provider itself and a contractor, but individuals who have
02:20been risk scored with diseases they don't have. And if the MedPAC report is
02:29correct, and I know there's some controversy in the scoring, but even when
02:33we've done distributional, taking just those in fee-for-service, stripping out
02:38those who just choose to just take the hospital portion and adjust for cost, if you look at
02:45the last decade of MA reports or see it at MedPAC reports, you have 15 to 20 and some reports that
02:55may be in slightly higher. Just multiply that cost over fee-for-service and then the fact that our
03:04promise, particularly those of us as Republicans, who are substantially
03:08responsible for this design, when this came into effect in 2005, Medicare Part C,
03:13it was going to come in at 95% of fee-for-service. If our culture really is
03:20the moment where we understand the power to society, of having a healthier society, can
03:27we work with the insurers, work with CMS, work with MedPAC, work with my
03:33Democrat brothers and sisters, my Republican brothers and sisters, get the
03:37incentives aligned. As I mentioned before, our baseline obligation looks like
03:44it's $16 trillion over the next 10 years. This isn't a game. This is one of the
03:50biggest things in our government. Let's get this right. And with that I yield back,
03:56Mr. Chairman.
03:57Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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