using too many medical services -- overutilization. using too many medical services that aren't necessary and result in worse outcomes. we have to address the problem of overutilization of care. it creates unnecessary costs and adds hundreds of billions of dollars and can lead to harmful medical errors. now, medical economists at the dart moth at lass project and places like the commonwealth fund who have looked at this estimate that every year in our health care delivery system we lose between $500 billion and $700 billion every year due to year lootlyization. and they have also analyzed patient outcomes arising from that overutilization. and the figures are shocking. they estimate that every year 30,000 people die in this country because of too much medicine. that exposes them to risks and actually results in their death. there are hundreds of thousands more who are injured because of overutilization and it's not achieving the desired goal of medicine which is to cure patients who need help and to provide it in a meaningful fashion.

it's overutilized, which means then they have to ration the care. that is ultimately, even the proponents of this don't like to use the word rationing but that's what happening. i deal with eye disease. the most common form of blindness for elderly people is macular degeneration or scarring of the center of the retina. one of the treatments is a drug named avastin. in england for years they would not let you get the injection in unless you could first prove to them that you were blind in one eye from the disease, and then they would let you get the treatment at the second time. then there was a huge public uproar and they got it changed s that the way we want medicine to work that the public has to get so angry that finally we change the rules? also in england, there is a drug called herceptin that blocks es stroh jen receptors in breast cancer and allows women from getting breast cancer again and it's illegal in england because it is too expensive. that is what will happen when the government is in charge. the other thing i ask people frequently, y

those are golt-plated plans and end up with overutility utilization. i would hope we would go back to an issue like that and say, listen, that's the place we should address. on the drug side, i think you're going to see some initiatives in the drug areas which the drug companies aren't going to like. and it's inevitable because drugs is a large part of the cost factor here. in the end, what you need to do is set up a system which encourages proper purchasing by individuals of health care and proper delivery of health care delivering quality and value at lower cost. that's not necessarily industry specific, it's systemic. >> senator judd gregg, not only senior senator of new hampshire but winner of a powerball lottery. almost a million dollars. >> a long time ago and my wife spent it quickly. >> she spent it quickly. nice to have you with us. thanks for joining us. >> thank you. >> watch complete coverage of president obama's news conference tonight at 7:00 eastern with "hardball." the president speaks at 8:00 eastern with live postgame analysis immedia

to 20,000 let's say would not be deductible and first it creates revenue and second it reduces overutilization that and second thing he said had to be done is you have to change the way we reimburse for health care especially in the medicare arena, where you reward quality and not just simply people doing procedures. and said if you do those two things you can get significant out year restraints on costs, regrettably neither proposal now pending in the congress do either of those things. >> chris: also also, mr. orszag left wide open the possibility the public health plan will give taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions. that is going to create a lot of heartburn on continued hill, won't it? >> well, of course it does, the abortion issue always does and you know, i mean, no matter what your views are on abortion you shouldn't ask people to use tax dollars if they think it taking -- using their tax dollars for that purpose be and so, hopefully, that issue, can be addressed. and i would hate to see the health care debate go down over that issue. we do really need health care reform, and, it has t

when it was totally free it was overutilized.someone would come to me for a bad cold whereas someone else with private insurance would go buy and their own medicine. it was a plodgic decision me would make. for me and my patients, i worry about access to care, being able to give them the care that they need. and you see that if you look at some of the other single payer systems in the world. >> let me add. there's something even more die bolic. some may have seen just in the last week in "the wall street journal" an editorial, compared to the effectiveness board in the united kingdom, it was created in the early 1990's, again, to help control costs. it was to let better care, better forms of care, treatments, protocols, rise above and others fall. but what it's turned out to be is a committeor czar, if you will, that -- a committee or czar, if you will, and we're seeing tremendous disparities develop between survival rates for breast cancer and prosthetic cancer between the u.s. and u.k. specifically because, for instance, as i u

we can't do without them but they're overutilized for many reasons.one of which is medical liability. potential medical liability. there are other reasons, too. they can make a lot more money. they can pay for the machines. they can do a lot of things. but the fact of the matter is most of these doctors are trying to build that history, that record so they can show that if somebody has an unpleasant or bad result, they can at least argue that it wasn't because they failed to do something that should have been done. now in the process, i said 30 years ago that i believe that unnecessary -- unnecessary defense of medicine was in the neighborhood of $30 billion a year. that was 30 years ago. now the ama at that time, if i recall it correctly, admitted to at least $60 billion. you can imagine what it would really be when the american medical association actually acknowledged that there was probably at least $60 billion. it was many times that. and they know it, and i know it. and anybody who has ever tried these cases knows it. today it's far more than th

this is one of the things that you need to do to bend the cost curve in the right way to reduce overutilizationruling out the idea and even raised it unsolicited in an interview with the "news hour." >> haven't seen the details of this yet but it may be an approach that doesn't put additional burdens on middle class families. >> reporter: but some sources at labor unions helping block the idea of taxing employee-based benefits tell cnn they also oppose a tax on insurance companies, even if it is strictly targeting the most expensive health plans. and despite the bipartisan negotiations, which again, wolf, are going on as we speak behind these closed doors, there does seem to be a sense right now that health care is stymied. the president's top pry or sit stymied. the house majority leader, democratic leader in house, senator hower, admitted today they are very unlikely to pass health care over there by the time they leave for august break. i can tell that you one senior democratic source told me something that is very interesting. he said that despite the fact that the president is coming to ou

but at the same time, i think there are fewer prices of stock picking overutilization.so we look to pick the best stocks. when we get into this period of summer of volatility, we're going to look for that volatility as opportunities to add to the best names, to add to the themes that we think are strongest heading into next year. >> you're talking about buying in when there are fullbacks and trying to find unidentified guides? some of the themes that you talk about are undervalued. what are some of those companies >> sure. when we look at broad trends, a couple of the broad trends that we see are mobile commuting and that's a shift towards 3g, new devices, handhelds, apple is a big position in the fund and we think apple will continue to take share in local commuting. light emitting d inting diodes. that is a driver. so a company like axtron in germany who makes depp sigz equipment to make l.e.d.s, that's a large pog in the pond and we're looking for pullbacks like that going forward. palm, i think it's called now, is another big position in the fund and we look at that

have real success in drawing down the costs of had heck part o of heat is getting away from the overutilization of the health care that we have. let me mention some of the things they're doing at the five or six entities i mentioned, the nonprofits. among the things they did, they coordinate care. i use my mom as an example. my mom is deceased and she live indianaed iedin florida the lasf her life with dementia and arthritis and she had five doctors -- five doctors. the last years of her life she was down there my sister and i would visit my mom every other month or so, take turns, and we would go with our mom to visit her doctors and these five doctors my mom had never talked to each other. i don't think they knew the other doctors existed. and they prescribed something like 15 different kinds of prescription medicines. we kept them in her home in what looked like my dad's old fishing tackle box medicine to take before breakfast, after breakfast, before lunch, after lunch, throughout the day. but some of the medicines my i monthly -- she didn't need to take all those medicines. the doctors, if

a program to study this ongoing problem of people who seek to overutilize prescription drugs. that is to work with doctors, nurses, clinics, hospitals, and other health professionals to educate us about the issue of using prescription drugs. so i'm hoping that as we make our way through and as we continue to work with the congressional black caucus on these spre importantish -- very important issues of a public option of ending health disparities, of ensuring we have universal health care as americans seemingly have come together to rally around, i believe we will have a better product by listening to the members who have some constructive thoughts and proposals that don't undermine the basic structure of the bill. not undermining the public health option. not taking away large sums of resources so that we can not do it in the right way and give quality plans, but various small , if you will, various proposals that would enhance the bill is the way i think we should go and keep the basic structure of what we all are committed to, the public option, and a complete health care r

economists will tell you the most effective way to take this head on is to address the problem of overutilization in geographic parts of the country which wastes money and result in poor patient outcomes. unless we incorporate those incentives into this public option and address this problem in medicare, we'll never have meaningful reform and yield back. the speaker pro tempore: the gentleman yields back the balance of his time. for what purpose does the gentleman from indiana rise? >> unanimous consent to address the house for one minute, revise and extend. the speaker pro tempore: without objection. mr. pence: will rogers once said the opposite of progress is congress. watching the debate on the floor today, i start to get a better idea about what he meant. at a time when our country is facing the worst recession in a quarter of a century, the democrat majority here just got done passing a national energy tax that will raise the cost of utilities for every american household and now they're down here talking about raising taxes for a government takeover of health insurance. all the while millio