Health Care

HEALTH CARE

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Ms. CASTOR. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the distinguished gentleman from New Jersey, who has been a leader in this Congress on health care, and, yes, you are joined by a number of new Members tonight that were elected because of our desire to work on health care solutions for the American people.

So like my colleague from Wisconsin and my colleague from Pennsylvania, I also listened intently last week to what President Bush had to say on health care, and, unfortunately, I did not hear anything that will help one person go to the doctor's office and get health care. Instead, what he said is, you go to your accountant's office, not your doctor's office. You go to your accountant's office and you get a tax deduction and you work that out on your tax forms.

Well, that does not make sense for the vast majority of people, especially in the Tampa Bay area, 20 percent without health insurance today, having to go to the emergency room for their primary care, rather than going to a doctor's office for their primary care.

He says take a tax deduction. The problem is that so many people are just getting by. They are right there at the poverty level. That is $9,000 for an individual, about $20,000 for a family of four. Imagine trying to live off $20,000 for a family of four. They do not pay taxes. They do not pay income taxes. They pay sales tax, but that tax deduction that President Bush wants you to get to get your health care is not going to do anything for those hardworking families.

The second part of his plan is equally troubling because he wants to sock it to the hospitals in this country that are providing charity care. In Tampa, Tampa General Hospital provides millions of dollars in charity care, and they are able through Federal law to send up some money, match it and bring home some dollars, especially in Hillsboro County, a county of about 1.3 million people. We have an award-winning health care program where the citizens of the county and a lot of our tourists pay a sales tax, and we devote that to a system of clinics throughout our community. We also send up that money to the Federal Government, and they say you are doing such a good job on the local level, taking care of your citizens in a network of clinics and not in the ER, that we will give you further incentives through ``disproportionate share money' they call it.

What the President would do is take those incentives away from local governments like mine, like in Hillsboro County, this network of doctors and hospitals that we have built up, and say, you know what we are going to do with that stream of money, we are going to probably turn it over to the HMOs and privatize the system.

This, I think, is another attempt by the Bush administration to embark on a privatization scheme which sounds awfully similar to what he proposed for Social Security.

My locals, my hospitals, doctors and, most importantly, the hardworking families in my district are not going to be well-served by the President's health care proposals. What do you think this will do to hospitals in your area?

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Ms. CASTOR. You are right. Add the Medicare part D privatization, all of those moneys going to HMO profits and pharmaceutical companies' profits, to Social Security privatization attempted by the Bush administration, why are hospitals' charity care next? Why the foundation of the last resort for so many families? Why do they want to take away resources from the hardworking doctors and our charity hospitals?

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Ms. CASTOR. I thank the gentleman.

There is good news now that we have the new Democratic Congress, and this year we are going to reauthorize that children's health insurance program. The gentleman from New Jersey has been a true leader in this effort, and I look forward to working with you in that effort.

But here is a real success story over the years where, under President Clinton, out of a program that grew out of the State of Florida, so I have a bit of pride in that, children of working families, and we are not talking about the low-income, impoverished, we are talking middle-class families that don't have any other way to take their son or daughter to the doctor in an affordable way.

Well, this year is our opportunity to look at what has worked across the country. There are programs in many States. Many States have been very aggressive, and they understand how important it is for children to be immunized, for them to make sure that a cold doesn't turn into pneumonia, because ultimately we will pay those higher costs on the back end if we don't treat them on the front end.

Unfortunately, in the State of Florida, we are not living up to the initiation of the program and the grant, the pride that comes from that originating in Florida. I am going to have to get one of these nice fancy charts one day. But I have got one here that shows what a success it was in Florida when we started, but because of bureaucratic barriers created under another Bush, under former Governor Bush, we have lost hundreds of thousands of children off the rolls, which doesn't mean that all children in Florida are healthier, we are still a growing State, but they have created such a costly bureaucracy for parents and for doctors and for all health care providers that we are not able to serve kids like we should.

So that is one of the critical solutions that I think we have got to work on.

Let us cut out this bureaucracy. What is wrong with allowing parents to take their child to the doctor's office, just take them to the doctor's office and get the health care they need without creating all of this paperwork and bean counters in Tallahassee and bean counters in Washington that are having to spend a lot of time and a lot of our resources that could be going into the health care for our kids?

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Ms. CASTOR. Well, under the new Democratic Congress, I think we now can show some leadership when it comes to health care solutions. We have such expertise out in our country in the various universities and the medical schools and with the researchers, and it is time for a little leadership on wellness care and preventive medicine.

I was listening very intently to President Bush last week, hoping that he would be true to his conservative principles and say we need to conserve energy and you need to be conservative in how you take care of yourself.

I think now is the time for Democrats to provide this kind of leadership on diabetes, obesity prevention that is running rampant among our children.

How do you prevent heart disease? Show how important it is to exercise, eat well and sleep. These are simple things that if we commit as a country to wellness and preventive care, we are sure to save millions of dollars later when it comes to funding Medicare and those types of programs.

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