Small Business Tax Relief Act of 2007--Continued

Floor Speech

SMALL BUSINESS TAX RELIEF ACT OF 2007--Continued -- (Senate - July 31, 2007)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, since the Senator from Iowa has been talking about the efforts of Senator Bennett and I and how it relates to the children's health program, I wish to take a few minutes to discuss that relationship.

First, I think Senator Baucus, Senator Rockefeller, Senator Grassley, and Senator Hatch--through the hours and hours of effort they have put into making the children's health proposal ready for floor action--have done a great service. They have done a great service, first and foremost, to the country's kids.

It seems to me every single Member of the Senate can say today we cannot afford, in a country as good and strong and rich as ours, to have so many kids go to bed at night without decent health care. As a result of the bipartisan work of four Members of the Senate--two Democrats and two Republicans--we have laid the foundation to take steps immediately to help youngsters who are falling between the cracks.

I have long felt the challenge with respect to health care today is twofold. First, you act immediately to help those who are the most vulnerable in our society. That is, in fact, what four members of the Senate Finance Committee have helped the Senate to promote today. Second, we ought to be taking steps on a broader basis to fix health care in our country.

We are spending enough money on health care today. We are not spending it in the right places. We are spending enough money today on American health care to be able to go out and hire a doctor for every seven families in the United States. That doctor would do nothing except take care of seven families. Pay the doctor $200,000 a year, and my guess is, the distinguished Presiding Officer would probably have physicians in the State of Delaware come to him and say, ``Where do you go to get your seven families?'' because they would all like to be practicing physicians again. So we are spending enough money on health care today. We are not spending it in the right places.

At a time when our population is growing so rapidly, when costs are skyrocketing out of control, we need to fix American health care. But in order to get to the broader health reform effort--an effort that is bipartisan, with Senator Bennett joining me in the first bipartisan health reform bill in 13 years--you have to take steps to meet the needs of youngsters today.

The Senate has already said that on multiple occasions. We said it first by passing the children's health program, and now, through the reauthorization effort, we say kids will come first. We also said it, in fact, through the budget resolution, where there was an effort to look at the relationship between broader health reform and care for kids, and the Senate, again, said children will come first.

So I am very hopeful. I believe consideration of the children's health program is, essentially, the opening bell of round one in the fight to fix health care. If we can tackle the issue of children's health in a bipartisan way--the way the Senate Finance Committee has done--it ought to be possible, even in this session of Congress, to move on to broader health reform.

Now, I am very hopeful the Administration will join in this bipartisan effort. We have all read about discussions about a possible veto message. I am very hopeful the Administration will join discussions in the Senate, join discussions in the other body, and help us to move quickly on the issue of children's health.

If we do that, it ought to be possible, as the distinguished Senator from Iowa has indicated, to move on to something the Administration feels strongly about, where I happen to think, by and large, they are correct. The Federal tax rules, as it relates to health care, are a mess. Essentially, they reward inefficiency. They disproportionately favor the most affluent. If you are a ``high flier'' in our country, you can go out and get every manner of deluxe kind of health service and write it off on your taxes; but if you are a hard-working woman in Delaware or Oregon or around the country and your company does not have a health plan, you get virtually nothing.

So I come to the floor today to say what Democratic economists have said, what Republican economists have said, what the administration officials have said: There ought to be an effort to fix the Tax Code as it relates to health care, and I and Senator Bennett and others want to; and we want to fix it in this session of the Congress. But to get at that issue you are going to, first, have to meet the needs of children.

I was asked today what the implications of the children's health program are for bipartisanship. I think if this body can pick up on the bipartisan work of the Senate Finance Committee, there are extraordinary opportunities for broader health reform in this session of Congress. I do not think the country wants to wait 3 or 4 or 5 more years to fix American health care.

I have heard the discussion about how there is a Presidential campaign coming up, and let's wait another 2, 3, 4 years to talk about a more comprehensive effort to fix American health care. I do not think any of us got sent here to tell businesses that are trying to compete in tough global markets, to tell those who cannot afford the skyrocketing premiums: Well, we are not going to work on broader health care reform for another 3 or 4 years. I think they want to hear how we are going to deal, in a bipartisan way, with the premier domestic issue of our time. Senators Baucus and Grassley and Hatch and Rockefeller have given us an initial dose of bipartisanship, an initial dose of bipartisanship in an area the country cares about, and cares about strongly, and that is meeting the needs of our children. But in the spirit that Senate Finance Committee quartet has worked, I and Senator Bennett and others would like to pick up on that kind of bipartisan theme and move aggressively to looking at the health care system as a whole and taking steps to transform it.

I will say, I am struck again by how every single day it seems to me opportunities for bipartisanship on health care abound. I was very pleased that the nominee to head CMS, the agency that deals with Medicare and Medicaid, reacted very positively to our ideas on preventive health care.

The fact is, in this country, we really don't have health care at all. We have sick care. We wait until somebody is flat on their back in a hospital--and the Medicare Program shows this clearly by paying those bills under Part A of Medicare. Part B of Medicare, on the other hand, the outpatient part of Medicare, pays virtually nothing for prevention, virtually nothing to keep people well.

We have known about the value of prevention for quite some time. The distinguished Senator from Iowa, Mr. Harkin, has been talking about the value of health care prevention for years and years. What I and Senator Bennett have proposed for the first time under Federal law is that Medicare would be given the legal authority to go out and lower premiums for seniors who reduce their blood pressure and reduce their cholesterol and take the kind of preventive steps that everyone understands makes sense and helps to prolong an individual's good health and also saves money for the Medicare Program. We were very pleased that the nominee to head the agency that deals with Medicare and Medicaid was supportive of those changes and indicated he wanted to work, if confirmed, in a bipartisan way.

So the fact is, there are great opportunities for bipartisanship on health care in this Congress if we can get past this initial effort at addressing American health care. The Senate has indicated, through the initial authorization of the children's health program and through the budget resolution, that this is the program with which it wants to begin the debate on health care.

In the discussions in the Finance Committee, I followed very closely all of the different alternatives. It was a big bipartisan lift to get a 17-to-4 vote in the Senate Finance Committee. A lot of colleagues wanted to spend more. A lot of colleagues thought the program ought to be available to other groups of citizens. Some felt there wasn't much of a role for Government at all and that even the existing children's health program was too expansive. But the committee came together on a 17-to-4 basis.

I see the distinguished Senator from Iowa has returned. If we can pass this legislation with the kind of bipartisan support that was initially demonstrated in the Senate Finance Committee, I think it is very possible, in spite of all of the popular wisdom to the contrary, this Senate can achieve broader health care reform in this session of Congress. I see one poll after another which indicates that health care is the premier domestic issue of our time; that it is the most important issue to our citizens--in many polls by something like a 2-to-1 margin. So I think in addressing this issue today--health care for children--the Senate can lay a bipartisan foundation for broader reforms.

I think Senator Bennett and I have provided some direction for the Senate to go from here, but we would be the first to acknowledge there are many Senators with ideas on these issues, and many of them are good. I have already indicated I think the Administration has a valid point with respect to these tax rules on health care. The distinguished chairman of the Finance Committee is back, and he and I have listened to one economist after another testify before the Finance Committee--Democrats and Republicans--talking about how the Tax Code on health care makes no sense and largely comes out of the 1940s.

So we have Senators of both political parties who would like to work on broader health care reform, but first we have to pass this legislation. I hope we will pass it with a resounding bipartisan majority vote so that we could truly lay the foundation for significant and comprehensive health reform to be considered by this body.

I yield the floor.

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