National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008

Floor Speech

NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2008 -- (Senate - July 16, 2007)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

HEALTH CARE

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President and colleagues, there are two truly critical issues for our country. You hear it every time you have a town meeting, every time a Senator is home. One of those issues is changing course in Iraq. The second issue is fixing health care in America.

The Senate is going to spend long hours on the floor of the Senate this week, hopefully, changing course in Iraq, making a fundamental shift of the policy, where the Senate would come together on a bipartisan basis. I wish to spend a bit of time this afternoon talking about the long hours that are ahead for members of the Senate Finance Committee in a critical part of the effort to fix American health care.

Over the last several months, four members, a bipartisan group in the Senate Finance Committee--Senators BAUCUS and GRASSLEY and ROCKEFELLER and HATCH--have toiled hard to better meet the health care needs of this country's youngsters.

It is a moral blot on our Nation that millions and millions of our kids go to bed at night without decent health care. This legislation is part of an effort to erase that moral blot--an unconscionable fact of American life that so many kids are scarred by the inability to get decent, good-quality, affordable health care.

In recent days, the Bush Administration has indicated they are considering vetoing this legislation. As one who has worked very extensively with the Bush Administration on health care issues, it is my hope they will join the effort, the bipartisan effort in the Senate, to try to work this legislation out and to do it in a bipartisan way. In fact, I think it is absolutely critical that it be done if there is to be another bipartisan effort in this Congress that would attack health care needs in this country on a broader basis.

Senator Bennett and I, as the distinguished Presiding Officer, the Senator from Colorado, is aware, have brought to the Senate the first bipartisan health care overhaul bill in more than 13 years. It has brought together business organizations and labor organizations. It has put us in a position, for the first time in more than a decade, to look on a bipartisan basis at overhauling American health care. But to do it, we are first going to have to address the immediate needs of this country's kids. In fact, as part of the budget process, I was able to add legislation to indicate that those critical needs of this country's children would be added first.

Now, I would be the first to acknowledge there is a connection between the children's health care program and the broader health needs of our citizens. The fact is, most kids in America get health care through private coverage through their parents. Those who are on the CHIP program--the Children's Health Insurance Program--many of them get coverage through the private sector as well, through private policies.

But we are going to have to find common ground if we are to fix American health care. Democrats and Republicans on the Finance Committee have tried to do that on the CHIP legislation. As the Presiding Officer, the distinguished Senator from Colorado, knows, there are a great many Democrats who would like to spend more than this compromise effort would allow. We would like to look at allocating $50 billion for the needs of America's youngsters. The bipartisan compromise--as part of the cooperative effort of Senator Baucus and Senator Grassley and Senator Rockefeller and Senator Hatch--is talking about $35 billion. That is pretty hard for some on our side of the aisle to swallow.

Also, with respect to the extent of coverage, a number of Members on this side of the aisle had been concerned about other groups of citizens who have not been able to get good-quality, affordable coverage, and they have been able to get benefits under existing services offered by the children's health program because the Bush administration allowed for special waivers. So what the compromise is seeking to do is to say: All right, if it has been allowed under a waiver program, let's not point the finger at anybody. Let's say those waivers, in effect, would be grandfathered. They would be protected. But then we will move on, and we would move on in a bipartisan kind of way.

I will tell my colleague, the Presiding Officer--because he and I have spoken about health care often--we know what needs to be done in American health care. We are spending enough money, certainly. This year, we will spend $2.3 trillion. There are 300 million of us. If you divide 300 million into $2.3 trillion, you could go out and hire a doctor for every seven families in the United States. We are spending enough money on health care; we are just not spending it in the right places.

We also know--because Senator Bennett and I have talked to a great many on both sides of the aisle--there is a real prospect for an ideological truce here on the health care issue in the Senate.

A great many Republicans, to their credit, are acknowledging now, for the first time, that to fix American health care you have to cover everybody because if you do not cover everybody, those who are uninsured shift their bills to the insured. A great many Democrats, also to their credit, have been willing to acknowledge that just turning all this over to Government--having a Government-run health care program--is not going to work politically either, that it is going to be essential to have a private sector in American health care that works. It would be a reformed one. Private insurance companies could not cherry-pick any longer, they could not take just healthy people and send sick people over to Government programs more fragile than they are, but that there would be a real private sector.

So in addition to spending enough money and in addition to something of an ideological truce now on health care between Democrats and Republicans, for the first time--I particularly want to credit my colleague from Utah, Senator Bennett, for working closely with me on this part of the effort--I think we can show people who have coverage why it is in their interest to be for reform. Certainly, here in the Senate we know that past efforts--particularly in 1993, during the debate about the Clinton plan, the single biggest barrier was convincing people who had coverage why it would be in their interest to support reform.

What we have been able to do, on a bipartisan basis--Senator Bennett and I working together is to come up with an approach that will show people who have coverage--workers and employers--why it will work for them with the very first paychecks that are issued under our legislation, the Healthy Americans Act. Not in 5 years, not in 8 years, not sometime down the road, but it will work for those who have coverage--workers and employers--with the very first paychecks that are issued when this legislation becomes law. The reason it would benefit those workers and employers is they would have more cash in their pocket. The workers would have more choices for the health care that was available to them. They would certainly have more security--health care that could never ever be taken away.

My hope is that we can have a cooperative, bipartisan effort on the CHIP legislation, starting tomorrow night. As my friend from Colorado, the Presiding Officer, knows, we will have a late markup. Democrats and Republicans on the committee want to work together. We want to work with the Administration. I hope the Administration will join us in that effort.

I would also suggest that if that happens, we can go on to the broader health care issue, where there are a number of areas where the Administration seeks reform. I want to assure them I am interested in working with them. For example, the President has made the point--it is one that I share--that the Federal Tax Code as it relates to health care disproportionally favors the most wealthy and rewards inefficiency. Today, in America, if you are a high-flying CEO and you want to go out and get a designer smile plastered on your face, you can do it and write off the cost of that operation on your taxes--every dime. But if you are a hard-working woman in a furniture store in Colorado or Illinois or Oregon and your company has no plan, you get nothing out of the Tax Code. You get nothing.

So what Senator Bennett and I seek to do is redirect those several hundred billion dollars in tax expenditures for health care to people in the middle-income brackets, the lower middle-income brackets. The Bush Administration has a different approach with respect to the Tax Code and health, but as I have said to the President personally, I think he is still onto the basic concept. This is an area where Democrats and Republicans can find common ground.

But if we are going to get, in this session, to the broader issue of health care reform--of course, a lot of people think it cannot be done; they think it will be 2009 and we will have another Presidential election before there is real reform--if we are going to deal with it in this session--and Senator Bennett and I are pulling out all the stops to try to get broader health care reform out there this session in order to get to that broader debate--Democrats and Republicans have to come together on this crucial issue of meeting the health care needs of this country, of wiping out this moral blot on our Nation that millions of kids do not have decent health care.

That effort will start tomorrow night. This is a key time for those of us who want to reform American health care. If we can come together in this Senate--starting tomorrow night under Senators BAUCUS and GRASSLEY and HATCH and ROCKEFELLER--my hope is we can keep that coalition together and then segue over to the broader reform where Senator Bennett and I have brought, for the first time in more than 13 years, colleagues, a bipartisan proposal to overall American health care. It has the support of business and labor. Consumer groups have been involved in the development of it.

I am very hopeful that under the leadership of Senator Reid--and I see the distinguished leader from Illinois in the Chamber--we can change course with respect to the war in Iraq but we can also change course with respect to the most pressing domestic issue of our time; that is, fixing American health care. The effort starts tomorrow night.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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