He'll talk about legislation he's drafted that recognizes $10 billion in Medicaid savings in the budget reconciliation bill that will come up in October.

We'll make every attempt to facilitate that request in the appropriation bill that's currently in conference at this time.

This bill contains various options that were suggested by the National Governors Association to give states more flexibility (in how they spend their Medicaid dollars).

We asked for $4 billion in savings in 2005 and got only $300 million, but we dusted ourselves off and asked for the savings again, and more, and got $6.5 billion the next year. Persistence pays off if you're doing the right thing.

I don't know what Katrina is going to do to budget reconciliation overall, ... There's simply no way that we can carry out the agenda that we had in place at the end of July, that we thought we would be dealing with today, just because of Katrina.

Cost savings of $3.3 billion were achieved last year, which was more than our target,