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(Washington, DC) Congresswoman Betty McCollum (MN-04) - a lead negotiator of the agreement with House Leadership to address the Medicare geographic variation and promote high quality care - today hosted a press conference with the Quality Care Coalition to announce final legislative language to be included in the House health care reform legislation that the House will take up in November.

The agreement will move the nation to a system that will reward high quality, cost-effective care, rather than the current system that has focused on the volume of care. It will end the unfair treatment for Minnesota and will cover both physician and hospital payments. The agreement also calls for a study of geographic variations and quality metrics which will be used as recommendations to be implemented for a system based on quality and value that will be implemented by the Secretary of Health and Human Services into the Medicare system. This will provide an historic transformation of the Medicare payment system to ensure better care for patients and reduce health care costs over the long-term.

Congresswoman McCollum delivered the following Statement:

We are here today to celebrate a monumental step in health care reform. 

And I am so proud to stand here with my colleagues who have worked together to improve healthcare for every American.

The Members here today are representative of a cross-section of the Democratic Caucus – both geographically and politically. 

As different as we are, we all share a commitment to transform the outdated and unfair Medicare reimbursement system.

For too long, Medicare has rewarded the quantity of medicine performed rather than the quality of medicine provided.

That system has penalized our states because they deliver high quality care at low cost.

And here’s the bottom-line: a Medicare program that fails to reward quality hurts patients and it wastes hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.

Five months ago, we formed the Quality Care Coalition to fix the broken Medicare reimbursement system.

Today, after hundreds of hours of effort and over 20 coalition meetings,  we have a package of reforms that will be included in the House health care reform bill.

Once implemented, this legislative language will:

• Modernize Medicare Payments
• Deliver better quality
• And save billions of dollars

Millions of Americans will benefit from these changes. For that – we thank Speaker Pelosi for her commitment to working with us to achieve these reforms – and for her commitment to the entire health care reform effort. We also thank Majority Leader Hoyer, Chairman Larson, Majority Whip Clyburn, Chairman Waxman, Chairman Rangel and Chairman Miller for their support and cooperation.

Congresswoman Betty McCollum (MN-4) serves on the House Appropriations & Budget Committees.

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