Health Care
Floor Speech
HEALTH CARE -- (Senate - June 19, 2009)
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, we are now embarked in the Senate on one of the most important challenges that our country faces--we will begin to reform our tragically flawed and broken health care system to bring down its skyrocketing costs, to cover its tens of millions of Americans left uninsured, and to improve its way-below-average results so that high-quality health care comes within reach for every American family. The stakes are high.
This week, in a speech before the American Medical Association, President Obama said:
The cost of our health care is a threat to our economy. It is an escalating burden on our families and businesses. It is a ticking time bomb for the Federal budget. And it is unsustainable for the United States of America.
The President said:
Health care reform is the single most important thing we can do for America's long-term fiscal health.
Savings in waste, confusion, unnecessary or defective care, and illness prevention could eventually well exceed $700 billion a year. It is not going to happen instantly, but it is a goal we can shoot for.
I applaud President Obama's commitment and leadership, and I commend my Senate colleagues for their tireless efforts in the pursuit of meaningful, comprehensive reform. The new energy and focus we have seen in this debate isn't limited to us here in Washington. In recent months, doctors and hospitals, patients and insurance companies, labor unions and drug companies have all come together in support of the need for a restructure of our system.
Amidst all this, it has been my great honor to join the Presiding Officer, the Senator from Oregon, on the HELP Committee, where he serves with such distinction and where much of the legislation to repair our broken health care system is being debated, written, and refined. In that capacity, I was recently invited to the White House to meet with President Obama, his health care team, and all of our colleagues on the HELP and Finance Committees. We discussed our priorities for reform, and we reported on the progress each committee has made in the past several weeks.
In the coming weeks, we will hear a lot about the details of health care reform legislation, and those details are very important. But even more important are the hundreds of millions of American families in each of our States all over the country who have experienced real anguish--coverage lost or denied, hospital stays extended due to complications or errors, prescription drug bills rising and rising, with no end in sight, even losing everything because a loved one fell ill.
A few months ago, I launched a page on my Web site for Rhode Islanders to share their personal experiences with our broken health care system, and hundreds of people have written in from all over the State.
Anita is a social worker and mental health professional in Providence. She shared what she describes as the ``sad and rude awakening'' she experienced after opening her own practice last year. As a provider, like all providers, she takes great pride in the quality of care and attention she gives to her patients. Yet she often found herself burdened with an endless trail of paperwork and the time-consuming task of battling insurance companies and tracking down claims. Like so many of her colleagues, Anita is frustrated that she must spend so much time fighting administrative hurdles and navigating bureaucratic red tape. After years of training to become a health professional, Anita wishes she had more time to do just that--provide care to her patients. She writes:
I would much rather spend the time seeing clients than negotiating automated telephone systems and waiting to speak to a person several hours per week. It is a total waste of human time and talent.
I heard from Melissa, a self-employed writer from Newport, whose unpredictable income leaves her unable to afford health insurance. Without coverage, Melissa knows that she risks being one serious illness away from what she calls the ``brink of disaster.'' Through the stress and fear of not having insurance--through that brink of disaster that she lives on--Melissa waits and hopes that she doesn't get sick because that is the only option she has in this, our great country.
Rhonda is a mother in Coventry. She told me about her struggle to get health care coverage for her family. As if raising her two sons wasn't enough work, this single mother works two jobs to make ends meet. Although her employer offered health coverage at an affordable price, Rhonda's limited income could not be stretched to cover the additional cost of coverage for her children. So her sons went without insurance for 3 years. Rhonda, like so many hard-working Americans, was caught between a rock and a hard place--making slightly more than the eligible income to qualify for health coverage through State assistance plans, but not making enough money to afford health care coverage on her own. She prayed every day her children would be spared from sickness or injury.
I also received a story from Richard, in Providence, who told me about his father--a hard-working man who left work for 6 months to concentrate on fighting a battle against cancer. Sadly, just when Richard's father needed the support the most, his company dropped him from their health plan. Without coverage and unable to pay the costs out of pocket, his father was forced off his chemotherapy treatment. Richard's father was very lucky. The doctors cleared him of cancer. However, the medical bills were so high that Richard's parents lost their home.
Remarkably, after all his family has been through, Richard feels fortunate that at least his father was covered for part of his treatment, but he urged us to fix ``this old and broken system.''
For these Rhode Islanders and for millions of more Americans silently suffering through their own personal catastrophes all over the country, we now have to be a voice. We must improve the quality of our health care, we must develop our Nation's health information infrastructure, and we must invest in preventing disease.
We must protect existing coverage where it is good and improve it when it is not. As the President said, if you like your health plan, you get to keep it. We must dial down the paperwork wars, and dial up better information for American health care consumers. We must speak for the 46 million Americans, 9 million of whom are children, who right now as I stand here on the Senate floor have no health insurance at all.
As Families USA reports, 47 million actually understates the problem because during the course of this year nearly 90 million Americans will, at one point or another, go without health insurance.
We look around at dark and tumultuous economic times. Yet looking beyond the immediate economic perils we face, a $35 trillion unfunded liability for Medicare--not a penny set against it--is bearing down on us. As the President told the AMA earlier this week:
..... if we fail to act, Federal spending on Medicaid and Medicare will grow, over the coming decades, by an amount almost equal to the amount our government currently spends on our Nation's defense. In fact, it will eventually grow larger than what our government spends on anything else today. It's a scenario that will swamp our Federal and State budgets and impose a vicious choice of either unprecedented tax hikes, overwhelming deficits, or drastic cuts in our Federal and State budgets.
We can only avoid that vicious choice by reforming the health care system. We are committed to making sure every American has health insurance coverage, but meaningful reform will take more than that. Think of it this way. If you had a boat out in the ocean and people overboard around it in danger of drowning, surely you would try to bring them all into the boat. But if the boat itself was sinking, if the boat itself was on fire, you would have to do more than just bring them on board. You have to repair the boat. You have to get it floating and moving forward.
That is what we have to do with our health care system. It is not enough just to provide coverage for all Americans, we also have to right this ship. This means improving the quality of health care and investing in prevention, especially in those areas where improved quality of care and investment in prevention means lower cost so that, for instance, 100,000 Americans will no longer die each and every year because of entirely avoidable medical errors. This also means reforming how we pay for health care so what we pay for is what we want from health care.
Government must act. At last, government must act. The problems of health care in America are rooted in market failures. We cannot wait for the market to cure a problem rooted in market failure. It is nonsense. We have to change the rules of the game.
We also can't pay for one thing and expect another. We have to change the incentives. We do not expect Americans to go out and build our highway infrastructure for us. We do that through government. We can't sit around and wait for our health information infrastructure to build itself either. We cannot expect quality improvement and prevention of illness to flourish when we make it a money-losing proposition for the people who have to make it work. We have to change those incentives too.
Opponents of reform are arguing that this process is going too quickly, that we need to slow down, wait, pause. They are loading down this bill with hundreds of amendments--170 amendments alone on the section that deals with preventive care. But haven't we waited long enough? Slow is what we have done for years, even decades. When I hear from Rhode Islanders with the stories I reported here, such as Richard and Rhonda and Melissa and Anita, I think not that we are going too fast, I think we are irresponsibly, even frighteningly late in getting after this problem and taking up this charge.
If we wait much longer, we may be too late to avoid that tidal wave of costs that threatens to swamp our ship of state. To those who say slow down, I say keep up.
Opponents of reform want people to believe that a system that costs too much, that lets insurance company bureaucrats make decisions about our health care; that is riddled with error, duplication, and waste; that leaves nearly 50 million Americans without any health insurance, is acceptable.
Everyone says they want reform, but unless we get moving, all we will end up with is more of the same. As President Obama said this week: The status quo is unsustainable.
Some opponents want to slow this down because they know if they slow it down they can kill it. We cannot let that happen. The stakes are way too high.
The anguish out there, as you know in Oregon, as I see in Rhode Island, as all our colleagues see across the country, is real and it is everywhere. At last we can do something about it. Now is the time. This is the moment. Let us make this work. Let us, together, find a way to make this work.
I yield the floor.
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