Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to follow up on a point that Leader Pelosi just made regarding the OCO account, the Overseas Contingency Operations account, which, at Armed Services, we are dealing with actually right now.

The President came over with his OCO request for this year of $80 billion. This funds the troops over in Afghanistan, the 34,000 that are still fighting courageously to defend our country.

At the end of this year, the projection is that that troop level will be brought down to, at the highest level of 10,000, possibly even lower, and combat missions, for all intents and purposes, are going to come to an end.

As the Congressional Budget Office has demonstrated over and over again, they will score savings with the OCO drawdown that is going to happen at the end of this year. Indeed, the Ryan budget has used those OCO savings to help balance its own priorities, so this is not funny money. This is not hypothetical.

Anyone who has been on a CODEL over to Afghanistan knows we are spending money over there, and starting next year, we are going to spend a lot less money because of the change in our deployments over in Afghanistan.

The cost of the permanent fix to SGR is $135 billion over the next 10 years. You only need a portion of the OCO account to permanently fix SGR, and everybody who has even come close to discussing this issue knows that in this building.

Hopefully, the Senate, when they take this up next week, are going to move forward with a permanent fix using totally valid, verified savings by the Congressional Budget Office in the OCO account.

It is a peace dividend, in terms of drawing down from Afghanistan, that we can finally stabilize the Medicare system by making sure that fees are not going to be subjected to this annual cliff that, again, denies access in far too many cases in doctors' offices all across the country.

So, again, I just want to emphasize the point that it is not like we are powerless here to come up with an SGR fix for which there is bipartisan support, using verifiable, valid savings by the Congressional Budget Office in the OCO account.

Our brave soldiers are going to be drawing down closer to the end of this year to zero. We can use those savings to fix America's health care system.

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