i am going to just go across as i indicated, starting with the woman who was the former female chief of staff. under which administration, ma am? you richwere chief of staff undr which administration? the clinton administration. go ahead. my testimony is based on my 23-year career, culminating during the clinton administration, and also drawing on the past eight years when i aboard with communities and nonprofits in disaster management. erautt the 1990 s, we were to respond and recover from over 300 presidential disasters. although we had many significant disasters, none of them became catastrophes. the scope could have made them to tass disease. for example, there was more infrastructure damage in an earthquake than there was during katrina the scope could have made them catastrophes. floyd could have been a catastrophe. because we build a strong partnership with state and local managers and that we have a federal response plan that was agreed to buy a federal agency
socialized medicine in government was taking over. now the senior citizens are very satisfied with medicare except for one exception. that is prescription drugs. they are still a doughnut hole. i will talk about that later. you could say why do not include everybody under medicare? the problem we have is the majority of people still get health care through private insurers and if all we did was take the uninsured and put them in medicare the cost would be so high that you cannot pay for it because medicare is a pretty expensive program. part of what you want to try to do is actually change how the delivery system in medicare works to make it a little bit more efficient. we want to squeeze out some of the ways. . . [applause] id may be that over time, what we look at is, who is eligible for medicare, and are there ways to weekend where we can include people who do not currently qualified? but right now, what we have proposed is, instead of using medicare as the model, use