Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015- Resumed

Floor Speech

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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Oregon for his leadership on this legislation and on health care in general. I will always think of him as a Senator who has been an advocate for reforming our health care system and oftentimes wanting to move faster than everybody here.

I am with him and the Northwest is with him, and that is why tonight is really a very proud moment for him as the ranking member of this committee to see the monumental shift in the way we have been dealing with the payment system and the Medicare access system and the children's health care program. So tonight, hopefully, we will put behind us a long-debated issue of how physicians are paid, but it will also start us on a new path to make sure people in America are guaranteed better outcomes and a process by which we will help reduce the costs of health care by focusing on both the cost of health care and the outcomes. So my colleague entered into the Record tonight--and I want to thank him for that--a colloquy that addresses the issue of how those who are part of accountable care organizations who will be given the resources to focus on high-performing health care systems will be able to under this study equate exactly how well they can do and how well they should be rewarded in reducing costs and giving better outcomes.

My colleague from Oregon speaks of this because he and I come from a part of the country that literally delivers better outcomes in health care at lower costs than many other States in the United States of America. Our residents want to know why the rest of the country can't practice medicine the same way. We want those savings that you get from the health care system to be plugged in or used for other purposes. They could be part of tax reform even. But we also want the citizens of our State to get better health care. We want them to have better outcomes, and we think that moving off a fee-for-service system and onto a system that focuses on the outcome of patients is the best way for our country to move forward.

So this legislation before us today builds on that process we started in the Affordable Care Act, something that is called the value-based modifier that basically takes the fee-for-service system--when you think about it, fee for service is about volume, about ordering more tests--and we are saying we want physicians to be rewarded for the outcome and the good performance and the focus on whether the patient actually gets well or is given the best health care delivery.

In essence, the value modifier seeks to emulate the success Washington and Oregon have had and give us better, healthy outcomes for patients and lower costs. This year the value-based modifier is the beginning which physicians for the first time will see an adjustment. And building on that progress, Cynthia Burwell, the Secretary of Health and Human Services recently announced that Medicare would aim to tie 90 percent of their Medicare fee-for-service payments to quality or value initiatives by 2018. So this is tying half of all Medicare fee-for-service payments to an alternative payment model and helping us move forward on, again, focusing on outcomes.

I thank my colleague for entering into the colloquy the ongoing analysis that we need to do to continue to make changes on the health care system and congratulate him on the significant success of getting this bill done. It means we can spend more time focusing on efficiency, on quality, on the best way to compensate physicians but also keeping the focus on the patients and making sure they get better outcomes.

I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield the floor.

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