Hospital Inpatient Services Modernization Act

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I am really happy to see the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and I am certainly happy to support this 5-year extension of the hospital at home program, which, of course, includes a critical study to ensure additional information about the program. I am also happy to hear about the success of this program as people experience it.

Mr. Speaker, the provisions, as the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee has pointed out, get extended every single year. Sometimes they get extended in short increments. Sometimes they move as a kind of tax package. As a matter of fact, this was just extended in the continuing resolution that we just passed and in previous funding bills before that. I am so delighted to be here this evening to see that my Republican colleagues are in the mood to extend current law.

I will offer them the opportunity to maybe extend the Affordable Care Act to the 24 million Americans who are facing unprecedented enormous health insurance premium hikes since we are extending healthcare stuff today.

In my own State of Wisconsin, Mr. Speaker, 279,000 people receive credits to help make insurance coverage affordable. In my State, for a 60-year-old couple not yet eligible for Medicare, earning $85,000 a year, they will see their premiums increase by $23,281 a year. A family of four earning $133,000 a year would see their premiums increase by $14,000 next year.

Families are going to be asked to pay 20, 30, 40 percent of their income for health insurance premiums, and the majority just wants to ignore it. My constituents and your constituents, Mr. Speaker, Americans from coast to coast are going to be staring down these massive amounts of medical debt, massive insurance premiums, or the inability to access healthcare. If they are unable to afford it, they will just drop it.

We have to act. It is December 1. We have to act.

I am reminded, Mr. Speaker, of how fast the Ways and Means Committee and the majority moved to give tax breaks to the wealthy, but when it comes to regular families, we just don't seem to have the time. We could be doing that here on the floor now. This is a marvelous bill we are passing today, but I would much rather be securing the time for that purpose.

Those hikes in healthcare premiums are not isolated, Mr. Speaker. They come on the heels of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that slashed more than 10 million Americans out of healthcare through the Medicaid program, cut over a trillion dollars in Medicare, and a half-trillion dollar liability in the Medicare fund. Hospitals will close, patients will suffer, and millions of American families will become uninsured all because the majority is refusing to act.

Mr. Speaker, the majority was more than happy to make a whole host of tax breaks permanent for the billionaire business class, but not for these entrepreneurs and families who are facing these tremendous hikes in their premiums. This is part of a Republican economy, I think. Help the billionaires. It will all trickle down. We are going to heap the costs onto middle-class families from every angle. Rising numbers of Americans are falling behind on their utility bills. There is a recent uptick in mortgage delinquencies and a rise in serious delinquency rates for the first time in years. Consumer bankruptcies are on the rise, up 15 percent since last year.

What are we doing? We just passed a $4.3 trillion tax break overwhelmingly for the wealthy.

What else did the majority do, Mr. Speaker?

They found $40 billion for certain people in Argentina, but no healthcare for American families. They found $300 million for a new gilded ballroom where the East Wing of the White House used to be. The ballroom keeps getting bigger and bigger, so I can't describe the dimensions of it, but it is going to have a marble bathroom in it and a fancy new patio, but no healthcare for families.

We have higher electric prices, grocery prices, and housing prices. Half the people in my State who are renting are paying more than a third of their income for housing.

These prices are going through the roof. American families, unless they are billionaires, are struggling to stay afloat in this economy. While President Trump and his family use the White House to haul in billions of dollars to line their own pockets, people will not be able to access healthcare.

I congratulate Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Evans on bringing forth this bill. I certainly agree with them that people do better at home in many instances and ought to have this as an option.

I look forward to the study that is involved in this iteration of the bill that will inform us about ways to improve the bill.

As we look at healthcare as a whole, it is one of those sort of broken markets that we have. We have 60 percent of folks who get healthcare through their employer or government or labor unions. We have another group of people who are disabled who get healthcare. We have another group of people who are elderly, thank God they get Medicare, but then there is the rest of us out there.

In a broken system of healthcare, we have got to be concerned about those people. We have talked a lot about children with cancer. What if you are 27 and you have cancer, and you are not getting healthcare through an employer? You don't have one of them good government jobs. You are not elected to anything. What do you do?

While we are passing legislation, I hope that before we adjourn, we will not ignore the thousand-pound elephant in the room, and that is the Republican Party standing in the way of doing it.

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