Executive Calendar--Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, last week, the junior Senator from Vermont and a group of other Democrats unveiled a proposal to have Washington take over healthcare for everyone in America. Some refer to it as BernieCare. They intend to do this on the backs of American seniors, which is of grave concern to me as a doctor who has taken care of many senior citizens--many people on Medicaid--as part of my practice as an orthopedic surgeon. Their idea is to put everyone in this country on a new program that operates like Medicare. That is about 250 million Americans who would be added on to the Medicare Program, which is already being strained.

One-third of the Democrats in the Senate have signed on to this plan. It seems to be the litmus test for the liberal left. Several of them came to the floor last night to criticize efforts by the Republican Party to save America's failing healthcare system. Problems with the American healthcare system, as a result of ObamaCare, continue to get worse, and the impacts, such as those that I hear every weekend in Wyoming, including this past weekend.
From what I heard from the Democrats, they seem to want to let the system collapse in a way that they can then impose a complete Washington takeover of healthcare in America. To me, this plan they are proposing is going to be devastating to people currently on Medicare.

These are the seniors who rely on Medicare today. What the Democrats are proposing is going to, in my opinion, undermine the stability, the integrity, and the certainty of the Medicare Program on which our seniors rely, and for them, it is truly their lives that depend upon it.

Remember when President Obama promised that if people liked their insurance, they could keep their insurance, and that if they liked their plan, they could keep their plan? Well, people realize that is not exactly what happened. Many people lost their plan. They lost their insurance. It got more expensive, harder to afford, and millions ended up paying a fine, a fee, or a tax--whatever you want to call it-- because they weren't able to afford the premiums for the plan that President Obama said they had to buy, and they lost their own plans.

Well, now it seems that if Democrats have their way, millions of seniors will find out that they are not going to be able to keep the insurance that they have right now that they depend upon and that they use on a daily basis.
The Sanders plan will get rid of Medicare Advantage plans. We have 17 million seniors in this country who are on a Medicare Advantage plan.

The reason they sign up for Medicare Advantage is that for them personally, when they study it, there are advantages to Medicare Advantage for them in terms of preventive care and coordinated care.
That would all go away under BernieCare. It is interesting to watch this whole process unfold because one in three people who are currently on Medicare have chosen to go outside the system the Democrats want to put them into. They want to put everyone into it, but a third of the people on Medicare have chosen a different way.

What happens to these 17 million Americans who are currently on Medicare Advantage with the scheme that Senator Sanders and other Democrats have come up with? They don't say. Did the Democrats who came to the floor last night have anything to say about these 17 million seniors who would lose their Medicare, seniors who are on Medicare today? What is going to happen to them? They are going to lose what they have today.

A lot of seniors are probably going to lose access to their doctors as well because when their plans change, their doctors change. That is because there are going to be doctors who won't be able to take care of these new Medicare patients whom ObamaCare has caused to have problems, but it is made worse with what is being proposed by Senator Sanders.

Right now, it can be tough for a senior to find a doctor. These are seniors on Medicare. That is because today about one in four doctors doesn't take new Medicare patients or take any Medicare patients. But certainly as more and more people--and 10,000 baby boomers a day are turning 65 and going on Medicare. There are more and more people on Medicare without an expansion of the number of doctors to take care of them.

Since the reimbursement is lower, what doctors and hospitals are paid to take care of Medicare patients is lower than what those doctors or hospitals get paid for patients with private insurance. Their priority, when they are already crowded and loaded in their office and very busy taking care of patients, with waiting rooms full--their choice, of course, is to choose patients who pay them more than what they get from the government.

You say: Why is that? Is that right? Well, having practiced medicine for 24 years and having run an office, there are issues related to paying nurses, healthcare personnel, rent, electricity--all the costs of running an office, let alone the high cost of medical malpractice insurance. We know the huge cost of that. A physician who wants to be able to pay his or her bills needs to take all those things into consideration. And with Medicare paying less than the current going rate for care at hospitals and with doctors, the concern is, Will Medicare patients be able to find a doctor in the first place?

The Democrats' solution is to cram more people onto Medicare when we already have 10,000 people a day joining the ranks of Medicare and Social Security. If a doctor has a lot of Medicare patients, he or she has to make sure they have enough other patients who have insurance to make up for the lower rates Washington pays. Well, under the Democratic plan, doctors won't have the backup of private insurance companies because that is all going to go away.
All those things will be lost to people who want to buy private insurance. Under the plan the Democrats are now--and it is not just Democrats in the Senate; a majority of the Democrats in the House of Representatives have cosponsored legislation by Representative Conyers that does exactly the same thing: puts everyone on a Medicare Program-- a government takeover of healthcare.

When the Democrats came to the floor last night, I didn't hear them say anything about that. How are they going to guarantee that seniors will keep their doctors? Seniors are not going to be able to keep their doctors under the Sanders liberal-left plan that is being proposed and cosponsored by over half of the Democrats who are in the House of Representatives.

We are already facing a shortage of doctors in this country. The Association of American Medical Colleges, which helps oversee the training of doctors, says that the shortfall could be as many as 100,000 doctors across the country within the next decade. If we have fewer doctors and more people trying to get appointments, that means less access for seniors.

It is not even clear if Washington can afford to add every man, woman, and child on to a government program like Medicare because Washington has done a terrible job in running Medicare as it is. The Medicare trust fund is supposed to be exhausted at the end of the 2020s. That is what the Medicare trustees are telling us. In 12 years, they say, there will only be enough money coming in to fund about 8 or 9 cents on the dollar of what the benefits for Medicare are supposed to be paying out. The program is going to have to start doing something-- either raising taxes or cutting benefits. From what I have seen proposed by Senator Sanders, it would be raising taxes a lot. The Medicare trustees say the program needs significant reform. They say it is already unsustainable. The Democrats' plan does nothing to change any of that. It does nothing to reform the program. All it does is crowd more people into a system that is already struggling financially.

My concern is that the Democrats' plan is going to undermine the stability of the Medicare Program that our seniors desperately need. We should be taking steps now to shore up, to strengthen Medicare so that it is able to keep the promises that we made to our seniors. My goal is to save, to strengthen, and to simplify Medicare. That is not what we are seeing here.

A few years ago, we knew the Medicaid Program needed help. Democrats just threw more people into the system with ObamaCare. That is what they did. With the expansion of ObamaCare, the majority of people who have new coverage under ObamaCare didn't get it through private insurance; they were put in to the Medicaid Program, which has significantly strained Medicaid and made it much harder for people on Medicaid, the people for whom it was originally designed--low-income, women, children, people with disabilities. It was designed to help them. It made it harder for them to get care because all these individuals who were working-age adults were put on in addition.
Now it looks as though the Democrats want to do the same thing they did to hurt Medicaid--make it harder for our patients on Medicare. It won't work. An insurance card does not equal accessible, available access to care. The people who suffer the most are going to be the seniors who have no other options. These are seniors who are relying on Medicare today. They were promised that Medicare would be there for them. We need to keep that promise.
Instead of protecting seniors today, however, Democrats are trying to give Medicare to everyone else. So 17 million seniors are going to lose access to the plans that they have chosen, that work for them, and that they want to keep.

Seniors are going to lose access to the doctors that Democrats push out of the system as they continue to put more and more people on Medicare. Democrats should not be building their takeover of the American healthcare system on the backs of our seniors.

Thank you.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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