Senate Finance Committee Room Breaks Out Into Laughter Over Chuck Grassley Remarks To Dr. Oz

3/14/2025

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) spoke to Dr. Oz about his priorities for CMS and then gave the nominee time to respond.

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Transcript

00:00Grassley I've got six issues. No questions at the end of my issues

00:05You can either agree or disagree or not say anything. Whatever you want to do

00:11I've been working to hold pharmacy benefit managers accountable to lower prescription drug costs

00:17I expect you to work with us to hold these powerful drug middlemen

00:22accountable and support rural pharmacists last year there were at least three bills introduced on

00:29Pharmacy benefit managers with a total of about 65 senators

00:33So this is a big issue in the United States Senate on rural health care

00:38I expect you to protect and support access to rural health care to help achieve this

00:43I believe CMS should take the following actions right away fill the open slots in the rural community hospital

00:50demonstration program

00:52Distribute the new physician residency slots to rural hospitals as the law requires

00:58Ensure that rural emergency hospital program, which is a program

01:02I got passed five years ago is working for rural communities

01:06I've had a big interest in kids with exceptional needs

01:10I expect you to take action to improve care and reduce red tape for kids with complex medical needs

01:16This includes working with states so that they can establish

01:20Health homes for these kids as my bipartisan ACE kids law enabled

01:28Transitional health plans is the fourth one since 2013

01:33CMS under President Obama

01:35Trump and Biden have issued what's called non-enforcement memos to allow

01:41Transitional health plans to be maintained about

01:4535,000 Iowa farmers and small business owners have maintained these health insurance coverage with these plans over

01:53For over a decade. This is a health insurance has purchased after Obamacare became law, but before was a

02:01Implemented and I would expect you to keep access to these health programs

02:07on the subject of waste fraud and abuse

02:11improper payments

02:12In our major health care programs have averaged a hundred twenty two billion dollars annually over the past five years

02:20I'm the author of a major and more recent updates to the federal government's most powerful tool in fighting

02:28Fraud, that's the false claims act since it's an axiom

02:33It's enactment. It's brought seventy eight billion dollars of

02:38taxpayers money lost to fraud back to the federal treasury

02:42CMS with the Justice Department must

02:46Aggressively go after waste fraud and abuse and empower whistleblowers

02:51Which brings this to the attention of most of the people that are following up on the enforcement of the law?

02:58My last one is oversight

03:02In other words the congressional

03:05Responsibility of oversight to see that the president faithfully executes the laws

03:09Allows us to hold bureaucrats accountable to the rule of law and helps keep faith with taxpayers

03:16I expect CMS to provide timely and complete responses to congressional

03:22Oversights and you've answered that question for the chairman of the committee when you were in my office

03:27I said you should have said maybe instead of yes

03:29Because then you don't turn out to be a liar

03:32Like we found over the last 20 or 30 years with the people that have answered that question

03:38So I want you to list of whistleblowers

03:41You don't know what's going on down in the bowels of that big bureaucracy

03:45You have and you need a culture because you can't keep track of every whistleblower

03:50You need a culture that will make sure that middle management

03:54Will pay attention to things that are brought to their attention by whistleblowers and get things corrected

04:00Then they don't have to come to me to get correction made now

04:04You can either answer any way you want to you got 58 seconds

04:09I'll use all 15 seconds. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes

04:13yes, and maybe only because you said to say maybe when you asked me about responding to your

04:18Your notes because the reality is we may not get to every note

04:21But every single member of the committee has brought up the fact that CMS has not been responsive

04:27So directionally we want to make sure you hear back from us and not just the committee

04:32My hope and I believe this is a firmly held

04:36Reality by many folks on the outside. They don't think they can speak to CMS

04:40They don't know where we're going the private sector can't the American people can't our beneficiaries don't know what's going on

04:46We mail pieces of paper to people it costs us 350 million dollars a year to do that

04:50I don't has anyone ever read their Medicare mail. It's just not riveting reading

04:53I

04:54Believe we can do a much better job by telling the American people what we're going to do

04:59To the point that you actually could imagine us having what most industries do which is a developer conference where you go out and tell

05:06Industry what you need tell the American people what you can offer communicate with them in a frequent and consistent fashion using digital tools