Truth Telling with Math and Facts
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Then, we are going to actually do some actual math and facts. Honoring Commander Bruce ``Puppy'' Fecht
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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas. He always has some amazing stories.
Mr. Speaker, tonight is going to be a little tricky because I am going to try and weave three major subjects together. Some of it is going to be really technical. Some of it will be slightly sarcastic, but the math here is really important.
I am going to do it backwards from how I originally thought because I want to hit a couple of things that are remarkably important.
I have come behind this microphone, heaven knows how many times and shown the charts. We are borrowing $72,000 a second. We could borrow as much as $2.3 trillion this year. I am going to show some other things in here such as Moody's, and why they downgraded us, and show some of the things that are going on.
On occasion I get this: What are your solutions? Then we always try to come in and say: Here is the technology chute where you can disrupt the cost of healthcare. Here is the technology where you could change the price of delivering government services.
We started almost a year ago in my capacity on the Ways and Means Committee, chairing the Oversight Subcommittee.
I now chair the Joint Economic Committee, and I thank Mr. Speaker because he helped me actually have the capacity of hiring a Ph.D. in healthcare economics.
We have dropped last week--that is a term where we put in something called a ``hopper.'' That is actually where you file your piece of legislation--two pieces of legislation where the preliminary scores are almost $2 trillion in savings over 10 years.
As we are having this discussion of debt and deficits, can you extend the tax policy? Can you do other things? It is not going to come from traditional austerity. The fact of the matter is that math doesn't work. You are going to do it through policy. You are going to fix policy, and people just stare at you like you are an idiot when you try to explain these things.
Let's walk through our big one. This is an occasion where I promise you that there is so much money involved. There is a reason other Members of Congress have been unwilling to do what we knew was a problem.
A few weeks ago, I came here with the MedPAC reports. I don't know if anyone ever bothers to read them, but you go through there, and it should light your hair on fire. For the last year, The Wall Street Journal has done a series of articles basically showing hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, misallocation, just misalignment incentives in something we call Medicare Advantage.
Walk with me through. In the early 2000s, there was this concept of managed care that if we could help our brothers and sisters with their earned benefit in Medicare, saying that we have fee-for-service, but you have to pay all of these copays. What would happen if you could align the incentives saying that we want insurers to manage a portfolio of access to healthcare, but within that, those insurers will actually make their money by helping you be healthier?
The model, which started in 2005--many of you know it as Medicare Advantage. You see the ads, and that is actually part of the problem-- was supposed to come in at 95 percent of fee-for-service because this was a system where you were going to get better quality care, get taken care of, and the insurers would make their profit by helping their population become healthier.
Mr. Speaker, it turns out that if you actually read those MedPAC reports--these are the auditors who do the modeling, and we are talking something that is almost a trillion dollars in spending last year, so we are talking about something that is stunning amounts of money--last year, Medicare Advantage came in at 120 percent of fee-for-service.
Mr. Speaker, just that delta, 120 percent to the 95 percent that it was envisioned to be, that right there is $100 billion a year. The fact of the matter is if you have been following the series of articles--I think ProPublica--The Wall Street Journal has spent tremendous resources doing it--it will curl your hair.
Then you have been seeing the most recent stories about the potential criminal acts. I think last Thursday, a story broke of actual criminal--not civil; criminal--coming.
Is it time for us as Members of Congress to talk about something which is often dangerous because when you are taking on a system that has trillions of dollars flowing through it, you have to understand that there will be ads in my district that are going to beat the ever- living crap out of me. It is the job. You have to tell the truth, know the math, and come with actual solutions.
Mr. Speaker, we went back and said: How do you design a system where you make sure the benefits, the promises, are there for seniors because it is an earned benefit? How do you make sure that you are doing nothing--nothing--to cut that access to healthcare, to cut that access to quality healthcare, but you align the incentives to go back to the original vision where it is about helping those seniors who are on Medicare Advantage become healthier, and the morality of that.
We had to do a number of things in design, so we introduced legislation. This was the preliminary score from the Joint Economic Committee economists: $1.76 trillion of savings over the 10 years.
Mr. Speaker, the fact of the matter is it is only about 10 percent of the cost of the program over those 10 years, so you start to understand the scale of the cost of this. We believe--understand, this is only conversation between economists, and I was not on the call--that the preliminary score right now is $1.84 trillion coming from the people that will score the legislation.
That would make it probably, from everything we can guess, the single biggest reduction in spending in a single bill in probably U.S. history. Does that give you a sense? When you have people talking about waste and fraud and misalignment and bad acts, this is the ginormous granddaddy of it all.
It is not that big of a bill. It is a little complex. It is really scary because, as you know around here, we are not ever supposed to talk about these things, particularly Medicare, but this is not Medicare as you think about it. This is the insurers who are paid to actually manage your care and help you be healthier. Yet, you have this series of stories saying how they have been taking advantage of the system.
There is a way to make this work. Even the MedPAC report says that we support Medicare Advantage and want it to stay, but we are going to have to fix these misalignments. The economists have been modeling the savings.
Mr. Speaker, what happens if you have a moment here where these sorts of dollars in savings--and this is going to tie in, Mr. Speaker, to talking about what Moody's did last week, talking about how this and our talent-based immigration bill, those two bills together, probably score at $2 trillion of savings, and they would be good for the economy. They would be good for healthcare. They would be good for people to be healthier. They would help grow the economy.
This is an example of getting policy right to actually take on a small sliver of the debt because, remember, our baseline debt for the next 10 years, we are going to borrow another $22 trillion. Even though this number is massive, it is still just a fraction of what is coming at us.
Mr. Speaker, I am trying to make the point again. Our legislation, which we call Better Medicare, has been introduced. It is in the process of being scored. Yet, when you start to see these sorts of dollars--and, yes, it would change the current spending projection by about 10 percent to 10.7 percent according to the Joint Economic Committee economists. Yet, you already had the MedPAC saying it is already 25 percent more expensive than was the original model.
It gives you a sense of we are making reforms, but we are just trying to align the incentives. We have done some things to actually help the insurers be able to have sort of automatic enrollment, but you can choose to opt out for a longer period of time so that the investment for that senior who chooses that Medicare Advantage plan to be given the services to be healthier. Yet, also with that healthier, the provider benefits by having a healthier population.
We have been trying to just think like economists instead of so often what you hear behind these microphones because something I have teased about--I actually talked about this a couple of weeks ago--in Nature Human Behaviour, there was an academic article. This is one of those geeky ones that is peer reviewed, all of those things: ``Computational analysis of U.S. congressional speeches reveals a shift from evidence to intuition.''
They basically took 240 years of House floor speeches, ran AI across them, and said: Guess what has happened? These speeches around here no longer talk about facts, about data, or about math. We now tell our feelings.
The problem is, if you have complex problems, your feelings aren't going to help us fix complex problems. It turns out that math does.
This is what we have been trying to do on this reform of Medicare Advantage. We want the system to work, but we can't allow $1.76 trillion over 10 years of fraud and bad acts.
If you don't believe me, get in front of your computer right now and look up some of the articles of the potential indictments, the criminal activities that are coming. Also, look up The Wall Street Journal series that actually talks about people being scored as sicker, and they don't have the diseases. They don't receive services. They are not on those medications. Yet, you and I as taxpayers are paying for it, and we are borrowing the money to do it.
Please, if you are a staffer watching this, if you are an American that actually cares about us getting our act together and doing things better, if you are a Member of Congress, I know doing big things around here is terrifying. We don't have a choice anymore.
If anyone actually read the Moody's report that was put out last Thursday, they make a couple points that should scare the crap out of us.
In 9 budget years, they believe about 9 percent of the entire economy in that year will be borrowed by the Federal Government. That $3.8 trillion will be the borrowing amount in 2035, and that is just a baseline.
The reason we often don't tell the truth, the reason we avoid it is because almost all this growth of this borrowing is interest and Medicare. It turns out it is really not Republican or Democrat; it is demographics. We are so busy trying to get elected next time, we need something to blame them, and they want to blame us.
If you stand up here and try to actually fix problems, you will get the crap kicked out of you, but at least you are trying to do the right thing. This is what you are hired to do on this job. It is not pander to your voters, but tell them the truth and try to fix things.
I can't tell you how many speeches I hear behind these microphones where people will tell you the problem over and over. They will never spend a year writing a bill, putting about 100 hours in to it with academics, with Ph.D.'s, and healthcare. Experts from the industry put together a bill that says: This will work. This will make things better.
Mr. Speaker, here is a philosophical thought I want everyone to think about. The United States just got downgraded by the third major credit rating agency. Did you know there are 18 States that have a higher credit rating than the United States Government right now? Eighteen States have a higher credit rating, yet every dime a Member of Congress will vote on, every dime of discretionary, nondefense discretionary, as we call it, is borrowed money. Every dime of defense is borrowed money.
About $400 billion, I believe, last year of what we call mandatory spending, the formulaic earned benefits, things of that nature, is borrowed money. Last year, for every dollar we took in in tax receipts, we spent $1.39, and much of that money we are sending to States.
My State of Arizona, we do some things actually really well. Our Medicaid system called AHCCCS is actually remarkably well run, except for some of the fraud. I am going to touch on that. We haven't built the models to catch it faster because we are not actually incentivized.
Now, we also play incredible games where we use a provider tax. We actually make money for the general fund more than is actually spent on healthcare. One of the great scams we are trying to fix right now is what happens when the washing machine is actually where you are padding State budgets instead of taking care of healthcare, but that will get protests.
Eighteen States have higher credit ratings than we do. It is just an interesting thought experiment. How about if I told you that, I think it is as of yesterday, either 12 or 13 countries can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States. Greece today can sell a 10-year bond cheaper than the United States.
If any of you are paying attention, remember there is this concept of interest fragility. One of our greatest threats to this country is our ability to finance this debt. Today, both the 20-year and 30-year bond went over a touch 5 percent. We showed actually a couple months ago that a single point of interest on U.S. debt over 10 years came in at like $3.3 trillion of additional interest.
Just a small movement of interest rate is bigger than everything we are debating here, but we are not going to tell you that. A, because it would require math; B, it would require facts; and C, it might actually mean someone has to do something.
There is an economist at Bloomberg, Anna Wong, who is truly freaky smart. I have had the opportunity and the honor. She came and spent part of a day with my Joint Economic Committee economists. She has been at the Federal Reserve. She has been at the White House. She is one of those people that is just intimidating on how she is able to calculate the world. She actually was looking at our reconciliation budget. She says that if we will do just a couple policy things, it is neutral in cost. It balances out. That is the point I am standing here for.
We cannot allow the taxes to go up on working people in this country. Well, right there that is $3.1 trillion. How are we going to offset it?
It turns out if you take a look at--and this is just from Anna Wong's analysis. If you are a really geeky, you can get this on your Bloomberg terminal, all six people in Washington that have a Bloomberg terminal. They are really expensive, but I actually need it for what we do.
If the tariffs what they are producing, some of the DOGE offsets, it turns out if we will incorporate some of this policy, we can make this budget neutral. That is actually often part of my request for the leadership, for the committee chairs, for those of us in Ways and Means, we need to start actually pulling out our calculators and thinking this through. How do we do these things so we can stabilize the economy, maximize economic growth, but not be adding to the debt? There is math that does it. Will anyone actually read the documents?
We actually start to walk through this. We are actually trying to build models right now on trying to see what is coming in in custom duties. That is the tariffs. What is that offsetting? You will see me over the coming weeks with a couple of charts and start saying: Okay, here is what we have to plug into our models. For everyone who has been whining around here, here is your math problem. I wish they would start the whining with telling the truth on math and facts before telling anecdotes and stories. Remember, I just pointed out to you the 140 years analysts of the speeches here in Congress, how they have become now about feelings instead of facts because we can manipulate you with telling anecdotal stories.
This simple chart here--see the nice coins? We stole this from someone else. Baseline is we are going to spend $86 trillion over the next 10 years. All we are talking about trying to save is $2 trillion out of that $86 trillion. Are you telling me we can't get $2 trillion out of $86 trillion over 10 years?
This is what is causing the emotional meltdown here because this place only cares about one thing, and that is the money. Spend it, spend it, spend it, and basically screw over people's retirement and my kids. I have a 2\1/2\-year-old and 9-year-old. When my 2\1/2\-year- old--yes, I know. My wife and I adopted some kids. It is the greatest thing we ever did. When my 2\1/2\-year-old is basically 23, 24, every single tax in America has to be doubled to maintain baseline spending.
I have done presentation after presentation where I have come here with the actual charts using Democrat economists showing that every tax hike the Democrats have proposed on the wealthy--capital gains, income--the entire plethora produces about 1.5 percent of GDP. All the austerity, the cuts on our side, accounts for 1 percent of GDP. That is a big 2.5 percent.
Mr. Speaker, we are going to borrow about 7.3 percent of the economy this year. I showed you a chart a little while ago that Moody's has us in 9 budget years borrowing 9 percent of the economy.
Does anyone see a math problem? The rhetoric here, the moving of the mouth, doesn't match what is on the calculator. We make crap up. This is the baseline fact. Baseline, we are set to spend $86 trillion over the next 10 years, and all we are trying to do is reduce $2 trillion.
I think we should reduce dramatically more, but I think you can do it through policy, the adoption of technology, and the alignment of incentives, and we can make the delivery of government services work.
When only 31 percent of the phone calls at the IRS get answered, are we doing our job? You do realize there is technology that would fix that, but that would anger the union of the government employees there. There are these barriers where you have armies of lobbyists walking up and down these hallways, and the inefficiency, that waste and fraud, is their profit model.
Mr. Speaker, 80 percent of the spending growth--we are not supposed to tell people this, but it is the math. You can't do policy unless you are willing to tell the truth about the math. Eighty percent of the spending growth over the next decade is Social Security, Medicare, and interest. The interest is now scaring the crap out of us because there is this concept called term premium.
As the Ray Dalios and these people who are the billionaire experts are saying: China is in the market. Germany is in the market. The United States is bingeing on debt. There is almost not enough savings in the world to finance the scale of borrowing, and much of that borrowing is driven because of demographics. The entire industrialized world got old. We have a shortage of young people. I think the math is, in 9 budget years, 23 percent of America is 65 and up.
Are we doing the things to maximize automation and growth so we can have productivity and continue to afford and provide the very services we promised? No, that would require math, thinking, and policy. It is not good storytelling, is it, Mr. Speaker?
Look, it is also one of the reasons I was so enraged about the intellectual laziness, I thought, of the Senate. Look, this is where I am being a bit sarcastic, if not mean. The House is not perfect. There are a number of things I am unhappy with. Leadership still doesn't have my vote on it until I get some agreements that we are able to move policy to start changing some of these numbers, but I have shown up with the policy. I am not just moving my mouth. We put it on paper, and we introduced them as bills. Now, look at the charts of the Senate's unwillingness to actually put policy into their budget reconciliation.
The reason we have to demonstrate a level of fiscal discipline--if you care about poor people, if you care about economic growth, if you care about my kids, if you care about your retirement, and if you care about what this government provides to society--we have to figure out how to pay for it.
CBO says that when we finish this fiscal year, U.S. debt will be at $37.2 trillion. We have to take to market this year in just refinancing--and I am not counting the short roll on the short end of the curve if you want to geek out. I think we are going to bring $9 trillion to market. We are probably going to bring another $2 trillion, $2.3 trillion of new issuances, and will start to see where the United States is interest rate-wise.
We start seeing Greece and other countries having substantially lower interest rates than us. That should set off an alarm. Do you want the money to go to the world's bond markets? You do realize that convincing the world debt markets that we are creditworthy, that we are being disciplined, that we are doing things--just that differential is more money than everything that is being debated here.
When just 1 point of interest, 1 point differential here, is over $3 trillion, that would solve a lot of this debate, wouldn't it? We can actually get those types of bond rates if we demonstrate to the world that we are creditworthy, disciplined, sensible, seeing long term, and actually understanding the honesty of our demographics.
Instead, a bunch of the brain trusts here in Washington spend their time attacking Moody's for downgrading us and telling the truth. The problem is, if you actually read their document, it is the truth.
For everyone out there who thinks balancing the budget and doing those things is simple, if you actually listen to folks from the last administration, this administration, the fantasy goal is to get to 3 percent of debt to GDP, not 7, not, heaven forbid, in 9 budget years being at 9 percent. If you have 3 percent, you are more sustainable.
You have to stop the fantasy of saying that we are going to cut it all with nondefense discretionary. Nondefense discretionary is 12 percent of our spending. Almost everything you think of as government-- the Park Service, the FBI, the White House, our salaries here--that is in this 12 percent.
Interest on the debt is every bit as big as all the nondefense discretionary. Actually, real interest on the debt, if you add up everything, is about $1.2 trillion this year. Remember, when we borrow money from the trust funds, we have to pay interest and pay it back.
For those who are willing to run around here and are interested in having discussions on Medicaid--remember, Medicaid is the program that was designed for indigent populations, for women, children, infants. Yet, you hear almost protests from the left. Here is a $2.5 billion fraud in Medicaid in Arizona, where they exploited Tribal members, abused them, recruited them from our Tribal communities, put them in sober living homes, and bled the system for money. It took years because in a system that has the incentive where you are doing provider taxes and more of that money, raising the cost, it ends up in the general fund of your State. We should be ashamed that these types of scams were allowed to bleed money that should have been going to people who needed the help.
Look, if we don't get an alignment of policy, the cost, and how these things can actually work, Mr. Speaker, I think we are going to continue to live in this world where our debates mean nothing here. They are just based on feelings, exploitation of our voters, telling them things that are actually mathematically not true. It is great politics, and right now, this place seems to care so much more about winning the next election than the survival of this Republic and its economy, people, and prosperity.
Is prosperity moral? There is a path where we can meet our obligations, help our brothers and sisters who need the help, and not scare the hell out of the very people who we turn to every single day because this government borrows $9 billion a day, $72,000 a second. Next year, it is going to be close to $82,000 a second. In 9 years, it is approaching $100,000 a second.
Often, the discussion behind these microphones are things that set off your anger and the mathematical fantasies. If I get one more person who says: I saw on cable news this, so why don't you fix it? I say that I would be happy to fix it, but realize that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting--I think that calculated to paying for 2 hours, 15 minutes of borrowing in an entire year.
Mr. Speaker, it is the lack of understanding of the scale of this math. There is hope. There is a way you can make this work but not until the calculators are pulled out. The morality and the prosperity are the goals, and it is the moral thing to do.
Mr. Speaker, I apologize to anyone if I hurt their feelings. Send me a note. I will write you an apology note. I seem to write a lot of apology notes. I continue to be mad at both parties and almost everyone around here because we are not willing to do the math. There is a way we can make this work.
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