Children's Health Insurance
Floor Speech
CHILDREN'S HEALTH INSURANCE -- (House of Representatives - July 16, 2007)
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you, Representative Schwartz. I am thrilled to be here with Representative Pallone and Representative Allen, who have been advocating for this issue and many other issues regarding health care equity for a very long time.
I come from the State of Connecticut, where I served, as you mentioned, Representative Schwartz, in the State legislature for about 8 years, and I chaired the Health Committee there for the last 4 years. And what we figured out was what Pennsylvania figured out a little bit before us and what dozens of other State legislatures figured out over the past few years, which is that by expanding our SCHIP program, and we have got a cute name for that program in Connecticut, where we call it the Husky program after the mascot of our University of Connecticut sports teams, we figured out over time that not only was expanding children's health care, and we actually make some adults, some of their parents, eligible for that benefit as well, that not only was it
the right thing to do because, as you said and you are exactly right, in the high cost of living in a State of Connecticut, $40,000 doesn't go very far, and at a time we live in today where wages are remaining pretty much stagnant and flat, and when we celebrate a year in which the average health care premium increase stays at around 10 or 11 or 12 percent, you simply can't do much with an income hovering around $40,000, $45,000 or $50,000. In Connecticut certainly that becomes a problem. So what we figured out was that not only was it the right and fair thing to do to go out and insure these thousands of children who didn't have health care insurance before, but it was cost-effective thing to do it. We have referenced that on the floor here today.
I give some credit to the President in his remarks that he at least recognizes that we do have one single place that very ill children and adults can go, the emergency room. But what he neglects to mention in those remarks is that not only is it the most inhumane place to dump the sick and the ill but it is also the most expensive place for those patients to end up. We know that the care that children, and we are talking about children today, end up getting in the emergency room is amongst the most expensive care that you can get. And for just a few cents on the dollar in that preventative care that in Connecticut the Husky program provides and in Pennsylvania the CHIP program provides, you cannot only get care that is the right to do and the moral thing to do for those kids, but it, frankly, saves the health care system money in the end. The cost of insuring kids is actually pretty low compared to the cost of insuring you or me or other people out in the community. Kids are generally pretty healthy. They are cheap when they are healthy, but they are very expensive when they are sick. So if you don't get them that care upfront, and the reality is that a lot of illnesses that may not present themselves to be major that may not cause a parent, even without health care insurance, to drag that child down to the emergency room, it may end up being something very serious. And the barrier to getting that preventative care is often that $100 or $200 doctor visit that stands in the way.
The last thing to say is to just reinforce the notion that both of you have brought up here, which I am sure we will talk about, which is that bipartisan spirit in which this bill was brought into being. I wasn't here when the bill was passed, but my predecessor was. I was preceded in this House by Representative Nancy Johnson, a Republican who served here for a very long time. And she was very proud to come back here as a Republican and talk about her role in the passage of that bill. The problem was over time there were fewer and fewer people like her in the Republican caucus who were proud to talk about insuring children, standing up for kids. And you stand here now on the Republican side of the aisle that looks and sounds very different, unfortunately, than the group that stood up in 1995.
And, lastly, it is not just bipartisan within that House, but you also have a wide range of ideological and advocacy groups that are standing up for the reauthorization of SCHIP, and I will mention just one and that is the United States Chamber of Commerce. Not a fan of big government, if you have ever seen any of the propaganda coming from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. So when you listen to the President or Republicans talk about the Democrats and children's health care being yet another government program, listen to what their friends are saying. Their friends in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable and all of the groups that are traditionally the main cheerleaders against any minute expansion of government are standing up for children's health care, are cheering on the Democratic effort to reauthorize the SCHIP program, because they know what we know; that not only is it the right thing to do but it is the cost-effective thing to do. We figured that out in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Connecticut and Maine. And I hope that we will be able to return to that bipartisan spirit again.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Allen, if you would yield. I guess I come to the thinking, we wish we were in that position. I mean, wouldn't it be lovely, wouldn't it be wonderful if we were in the position in which the choice was between a government-sponsored program and an employer-sponsored program or a privately available sponsored program. It just isn't the reality. And anybody who spends time out in their communities, in their social halls, in their churches and synagogues listening to families will realize that, that there are just more and more families largely, as Mr. Allen noted, that work for small businesses and simply don't have the access to health care insurance that they once did.
And I want to hit one more point, and I mentioned it the other night when Mr. Pallone and I were down here talking about this. We also have to disabuse people of this notion that we all aren't paying for those kids and those parents who don't have health care insurance. If the employer doesn't provide it, and then the HUSKY program in Connecticut, the SCHIP programs go away, somebody is going to pay for that health care. And we pay for it largely in two ways: one, all of the premiums that we pay, as insured people, are higher because they are basically subsidizing the care of people that don't have health care insurance, because a doctor is going to have to treat, by law, someone that shows up in an emergency room, and the hospital has to be compensated for that.
So private insurance normally pays about 120 percent, 110 percent of what the average Medicare rate is. They are paying a 20 percent, 10 percent premium in order to subsidize the care of the uninsured. I don't know if this is the case in all States, but in Connecticut, we also have an uncompensated care pool, a taxpayer-funded pool, where tax dollars go directly to hospitals and health care providers to help them pay for the kids that walk in, 70,000 of them without health care insurance in Connecticut that have no insurance.
So the idea that we are going to be spending any more money on this, when really what you are doing is you are shifting money that we are all spending in our private rates and through these taxpayer-subsidized pools of money that go to hospitals, it is just shifting it to preventive care. We have to sort of remind people that we are paying every day for the uninsured that we have now. It is simply about building a more cost effective and more humane way of paying for it.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Just to add to that partnership, it is also a partnership of health care professionals as well, because, to tell the truth, in a lot of States, Connecticut being one of them, the rate that we pay physicians for participating in the program is a little bit below the level of sufficiency. So there are a lot of physicians who want to do the right thing, who want to get compensated, but are okay not getting compensated at the same levels that they do by private HMOs.
It really becomes in the end, it really becomes a partnership of not only the Federal Government and the State Government, but also the provider community as well who has agreed to say, listen, because we really care and we really want to take care of this constituency, we are willing to do it for a little bit less than we would do otherwise. That has been a great benefit to the Government, to be able to get away with paying a little bit less, at least in Connecticut, than private payers do. But it is a wonderful partnership of all constituency groups.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Let me just add some final thoughts to add to the theme of inconsistency here. This is a President who has presided over the largest expansion of a government paid for health care program in my generation at least with the addition of the prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program. But it was okay when it resulted in a massive giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry.
But when we are asking to expand health care for kids who don't have, as Mr. Pallone said, not only do they not vote, but they also don't have political action committees and they also don't have lobbyists patrolling the hallways here and within the administration. When it comes to helping the most vulnerable, the most voiceless group of individuals out there, this administration results in a deafening, deafening silence.
So I am so glad we are down here talking about this tonight. I came to Congress, gave up my seat working on a health care policy in the Connecticut legislature because I figured out that this really had to be a Federal fix, to try to do something for the millions of uninsured.
I frankly hope in a lot of places I think I am am going to depart from the legacy of the person I replaced, but on this I hope to be able to work with all of you to join back across the aisle and build that bipartisan consensus to stand up for those voiceless, lobbyist-less PAC-less constituents of ours, uninsured kids.
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