Addressing the Massive Problem of Healthcare
Floor Speech
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Mr. McCORMICK. Madam Speaker, we have a massive problem. We just got done talking about the budget and the deficit, but there is no possible way to address that without addressing healthcare.
Healthcare is the biggest spending item for the government. Madam Speaker, $1 out of every $5 spent by the government is spent on healthcare, and it is the quickest growing inflationary cost to Americans.
Right now, if we consider Medicaid and Medicare, and we consider the amount of money we spend on private pay, which is about one-fifth of the economy also, in a GDP of roughly $24 trillion, we are spending $6 trillion on healthcare alone. If it were taken by itself, it would be the third largest GDP in the world. It would have twice the GDP size of India, which has 1.47 billion people. This is a massive problem.
What are we going to do? How do we take on something so complex? I think it is an underserved problem in the United States Congress. We have been kicking the can down the street for far too long, from the Clinton administration all the way to the Obama administration. The Affordable Care Act did nothing to make it affordable.
We have done nothing to curb the inflationary costs, and it is certainly not the doctors' problem because doctors took a 2.3 percent pay cut last year alone. If you are an ER doctor in Georgia, you probably took about an 18 percent pay decrease in 1 year, and that is after serving during COVID for 3 years on nights, weekends, and holidays. That is your congratulations.
How do we address this? Quite frankly, we are going to have to make some hard choices. America has to understand, first of all, how complex this issue is when you have PBMs, GPOs, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, Medicaid, Medicare, when you have the government involved, private pay, when you have hospital systems and healthcare providers. These are just some of the problems we have.
Right now, 90 percent of the ingredients that go into drugs are produced in China. You have almost all of the market for amoxicillin and Augmentin cornered by an adversarial nation.
We have admin costs that have grown in the hospital system from 25 percent to 40 percent in just the last 10 years. Take that into account. Forty percent of every dollar spent on healthcare is spent on administrative costs. That means too much regulatory burden, not enough competition.
We continue to talk about a single-payer system as the end-all, be- all to healthcare. Let's take that into account right now. Medicaid is done at a loss. It doesn't pay the bills. As a matter of fact, we have an act right now that talks about supplementing people with a tax break so they can actually see more Medicaid patients and afford it and stay open. It is not the answer.
If we go to a single-payer system, you are talking about adding $30 trillion of expense to the government in the next 10 years. That means $30 trillion more in either tax or debt.
We have pretty much lost our minds over the $32 trillion of debt we are already in. Imagine adding $30 trillion more to spending. It would be the largest increase in spending and government control there has ever been in American history. We have a massive problem.
On top of that, despite spending about $32 billion on electronic medical records and spending a lot of money on coders, in many cases, we still have 45 percent of claims not being reimbursed by insurance companies. This simply can't continue to happen.
People are using their insurance companies the wrong way. If we used car insurance the same way we use healthcare insurance, you would be spending your car insurance to actually change your car oil. It would probably cost about $500 per pop, and you wouldn't be able to afford car insurance.
We need to look at this in a different way. The problem is, if I talk about cutting administrative costs in medicine, people will immediately vilify me for trying to cut Medicaid and Medicare. This is why it has to be a bipartisan issue. We have to have a real conversation, and it can't be about calling people names but about actually solving a problem.
If we want to talk about a real solution, I think we have to start thinking about not just taking this as subcommittees, not just a subcommittee of Energy and Commerce, not just a subcommittee of Ways and Means, not just a subcommittee of VA or a subcommittee of Foreign Affairs. We actually have to have staff that are dedicated to a process that is so complex, so big, has so many lobbyists involved that it is impossible for a physician with an MBA to figure out how to handle it himself.
This is something we are going to have to take as a problem that all of us have to solve without vilifying each other. If we don't do it soon, we will increase government and increase spending, and we will have rationing simultaneously.
Final point: If you want a good example of a single-payer system, the VA is exactly what you are going to get, and it is not popular.
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