Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

HEALTH CARE REFORM -- (Senate - June 11, 2009)

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I wish to say I have great concern not just about the ownership interests the Federal Government already has in financial institutions and in auto companies and in insurance companies but also about what we are hearing might happen with health care.

My view is, having a government plan, a government takeover of health care would again be an intervention into the marketplace on a scale and on a level I don't think most Americans want to see. It is referred to around here as a public plan option, but let's call it what it is: It is a government plan. It is a government-run health care system. The more you have the government involved in the decisions with respect to health care, the more the government is going to dictate many of the decisions that are going to be made and traditionally are made between a patient and a physician, in consultation with each other, between a consumer and a health care provider. Those types of interactions occur today in the marketplace. If the government is imposed into that particular situation, it seems to me at least we are going to have the government making more and more decisions with respect to health care: Which treatments are going to be approved;
which ones are effective; which ones are cost-effective. And that critical, fundamental relationship between a physician and a patient, we could be creating barriers in that relationship that are not going to provide for the high quality, optimum level of health care and treatment we have experienced in this country for a long time.

Clearly, I think we all have to acknowledge there are things that need to improve in the health care system in this country. We need to reform our health care system. We need to bring the costs down. We need to figure out ways to make health care available and accessible to more Americans so that many of those who don't have health care have access to it and to get costs under control. But there are lots of ways that can be done by building upon the strengths we have in the current system; not throwing it completely away in exchange for a government-run system, which would ration health care, limit the amount of choices Americans would have, and cost the taxpayers an awful lot of money. Because I think, at the end of the day, most of the estimates that have been done--and it is hard to know because we don't have a specific proposal out there yet that has been costed or a revenue source that has been identified for it, but I think all the estimates we have seen so far suggest that this plan, the health care plan that is being proposed by the President and by the Democratic leadership in the Congress, is going to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 trillion to $2 trillion. We don't know exactly. I have heard $1.2 trillion, $1.5 trillion. I have heard up to $2 trillion, but we know that is an enormous amount of money, and that revenue has to come from somewhere. One-sixth of the American economy today, one-sixth of our economy, entire economy in this country is health care, headed toward one-fifth. So we are going to hand the keys over to the Federal Government and allow them to control an enormously large component of the American economy--one-sixth of it today and it will be one-fifth in just a few years. It seems to me that would be a bad precedent and something, again, that would lead us further and further down a path of greater control for the Federal Government in our private economy. I don't think that is good for health care for Americans. I don't think that is good again for American business, for the economy or for our ability to create jobs.

The bill I introduced, as I said, is designed to get at the TARP moneys that are going to be paid back in and hopefully getting the government out of the car business, the government out of the banking business, and the government out of the insurance business, but I also view those as almost what I would characterize as gateway drugs that are going to lead the way for the nationalization or the government takeover of health care. A government plan is not a good way to do business, and it is certainly not in the best interests of Americans, who, I think, even though there may be those who want to see the costs of our current health care system come down, those who have coverage today, most of them would argue we have a system that is pretty effective; that when you need to get seen by a doctor, when you need to get treated, when you need to use some of the modern equipment and technology we have available and that is there today--and I think that is very much in jeopardy if you allow the government to intervene and to impose itself into that decisionmaking process and begin to ration care.

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