Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act Of 2009

Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. I rise in strong support of the SCHIP legislation. I find it amazing that we have spent so much time debating it. This SCHIP legislation would help more than 4 million children in this country get the health insurance they desperately need. But I should point out it leaves approximately 3 million kids still uninsured.

As you well know, the United States of America remains the only major country in the industrialized world where this debate would take place. We are spending weeks discussing an issue which every other country in the industrialized world has long resolved.

So if we pass this piece of legislation tomorrow, and I hope we will, 3 million kids still remain without health insurance. The common sense of insuring children is apparent to everybody because when kids are insured, when parents are allowed to bring their children to a doctor, when kids have access to medical care in a school, professionals can pick up the medical problems kids have so 10 years later they do not end up in a hospital with a serious illness and we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to cure a child whose problems could have been detected when they were little.

This really is a no-brainer. Clearly, what we must do as a nation is move to a national health care program guaranteeing health care to all of our people, but a step forward will be passing this SCHIP legislation.

I think the American people are more than aware that our health care system is substantially broken. They understand not only do 46 million Americans have no health insurance, they understand even more are underinsured. They understand the absurdity of tying health care to jobs because when we lose our jobs, then we lose our health care.

I hear some of my friends saying: Oh, the American people do not want government health care. Well, you know what. Read the polls.

The American people do believe the U.S. Government should take the responsibility of providing health care to every man, woman, and child, and I hope as soon as possible we, in fact, do that. But not only do we have 46 million Americans, including many children--and that issue we are trying to deal with right now--who have no health insurance, what we are also doing, because of the waste and inefficiency in our current system, is we end up spending far more per capita on health care than the people of any other country.

I know the Presiding Officer is more than aware that General Motors spends more, for example, on health care than they do on steel in building automobiles. What kind of sense is that? So I hope, at a certain point--and I hope soon--we as a nation end up finally saying health care is a right of all people. The absurdity that one child in this country does not have health insurance is an international embarrassment. Let's go forward, and let's develop the most cost-effective way we can provide health care to all our people.

Now, here is the irony: that even if tomorrow we guaranteed health care to all our children, even if the next day we guaranteed health care to all our people, do you know what. That does not mean people are going to be able to find doctors or dentists. Our infrastructure, especially in primary care, is in
such a bad condition that we need to revolutionize primary health care in America.

We just had a hearing, chaired by Senator Harkin, who has been very active in the whole issue of preventative care in the HELP Committee. This is unbelievable. We had a physician who is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, in a State where presumably they have universal health care, and she cannot find a primary health care physician. A professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School cannot find a primary health care physician. That is how absurd this situation is.

We have over 50 million Americans today who do not have regular access to a physician. We have many more who cannot find a dentist. Meanwhile, if we were not depleting the medical infrastructure of Third World countries, bringing in doctors and dentists from those countries, our entire primary health care system would be in even worse shape than it is right now.

COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTERS

Madam President, I do wish to say a word about legislation we will be introducing next week--I am proud to tell you we have 15 original cosponsors; I hope we will have more in the next few days--which essentially begins to address the crisis in primary health care by significantly expanding a program Senator Kennedy developed in the 1960s which has widespread support--not just from Democrats but from Republicans, not just from President Obama, who was a cosponsor of similar type legislation last year, but from Senator McCain, who talked about community health centers during his campaign; and President Bush was very supportive of the concept.

So we have widespread support, and now is the time to go forward and say we will have a federally qualified community health center in every underserved area in America. By expanding the number of FQCHCs from about 1,100 to 4,800, at the end of the day, by providing primary health care, dental care, mental health counseling, and low-cost prescription drugs, do you know what we do. We save money. We save substantial sums of money because we keep patients out of the emergency room, we keep patients out of the hospital because we are treating their illnesses at an early stage rather than allowing them to become ill and then spending huge sums of money when they end up in the hospital.

I am very proud we have Senator Kennedy as a cosponsor, and Senators Durbin, Harkin, Schumer, Kerry, Boxer, Inouye, Leahy, Mikulski, Casey, Cardin, Brown, Begich, Burris, and Wyden. I hope we will have more cosponsors.

This is legislation we can pass. This is legislation which has historically had bipartisan support because we all know primary health care--giving people access to doctors, dentists, low-cost prescription drugs--is the way to not only keep people healthy, it is the way to save billions and billions of dollars.

Let me conclude by saying I hope very much we support this SCHIP legislation. It will save us money by enabling kids to get to the doctor before their problems become much more acute. It is the right thing to do, and it is the beginning of the United States trying to join the rest of the industrialized world in saying health care must be a right of all people--all people--rather than a privilege of just the few.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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