The Majority Makers and Health Care

THE MAJORITY MAKERS AND HEALTH CARE -- (House of Representatives - July 14, 2009)

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you very much, Mr. Yarmuth. So good to see my friend, TIM RYAN, back wearing a path in a familiar spot on the House floor speaking truth to the American people.

Listen, what you are talking about is this invisible cost, Mr. Ryan, to the health care system that we kind of pretend doesn't exist. We didn't get to 17 percent of our gross domestic product by accident. We did that by ignoring some fundamental problems in our health care system. And the fact is that we kind of just, you know, boxed our ears and shut our eyes and tried to sort of wish this problem away.

Well, you know, every employee has started to feel this crunch, right? The percentage of their income that is devoted to health care has inched up and inched up every single year. But a lot of the costs they don't see because employers out there are eating it and are paying these 10 or 12 or 15 percent increases in health care premiums that they're getting every year; and instead of passing the cost of that in its entirety over to the employee, they just don't give as big a wage increase as they might have that year, or maybe they don't give any wage increase. Maybe they actually furlough folks 1 day a month.

These health care costs that companies are taking on are causing wages to remain flat. That's what we've seen over the last 10 years. The GDP in this country is growing. I mean, we're making more stuff if you look at the 10-year window. Obviously in the last 2 years that has not been the case. But in the last 10 years, GDP is growing, but wages are staying right here. There are a lot of reasons for that. Some people up at the real high end of the income spectrum are pretty fat and happy, but a lot of that is because all of the extra money that companies are making is going to pay health care rather than going to their employees.

So that's one way in which the costs of our health care system are sometimes invisible, because employees just assume that they don't get wage increases because their company didn't make as many widgets that year or didn't sell as many pieces of product line. No. A lot of the reason is that they sold more this year; they just took all of that extra profit and paid for health care.

The second thing is what you guys, I'm sure, have been talking about already. It's that we've got a system of universal health care in this country. It's just the worst, most backwards, most inhumane, most inefficient, most unconscionable system of universal health care system in the world because we basically say to people, We will guarantee you health care--our Federal law guarantees you health care but only when you get so disastrously sick that you show up to the emergency room.

A woman in Connecticut came and testified before one of our State legislative committees, and she told a real simple story. And I've told it on the floor before. Had a pain in her foot. Had no insurance. Worked for a living. Did everything she was supposed to. Just didn't have insurance. She knew that she had some sort of infection so she knew what she was going to have to pay for it. She was going to have to go to the doctor, she was going to have to pay probably $100 for that visit, and she was going to get an antibiotic or she was going to get some medication to make it go away. That was going to be a couple hundred more dollars. She didn't have it. She knew she didn't have it. So she decided to just live with the pain.

Well, finally, one night it was just unbearable. She had to go to the emergency room. So she showed up to the emergency room, and it was too late. That foot was infected so badly it had to be amputated. And that's a terrible, terrible outcome for that woman.

Changes her life for the rest of her time. But it cost the system the thousands of dollars that that surgery and all of that follow-up care required versus the couple hundred bucks we could have gotten in preventative care up front.

We're paying for that. You don't see it because you never met that woman and you never see the thousands like her who end up showing up in the emergency room with crisis care that could have been prevented. That's more invisible costs, but it's all there.

One last point, Mr. Ryan and Mr. Yarmuth.

People are going to hear the cost of these bills when they come out. They're going to see that the cost of the bill from the House is X billion dollars; the cost of the bill of the Senate is X-plus-Y billion dollars. Here's what you have to do. You have to look at that cost versus the cost of doing nothing. And every credible survey, every credible examination is going to tell you this: that the cost of the bill that we produce is going to be half of the cost of sitting and accepting the status quo. That's why we have to pass health care reform here.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. If I can just add something, Mr. Kagen brings in energy policy, and we just got through a long, hard struggle of passing an energy bill on this floor, and we're right now engaged in the muck of trying to change this health care system.

I think it's just worth reminding everybody out there how hard this is going to be, right, how hard it's going to be to try to reform a health care system where, as Mr. Ryan said, a lot of money is being wasted. But that money that is being wasted, it's not like you're wasting heat in your house and it just sort of escapes into the atmosphere.

When we talk about wasting money, we talk about money that actually ends up in people's pockets, right, that makes them rich and creates their fortune. So when we talk about saving money within the health care system, that involves taking on some pretty powerful institutions around this city of Washington, D.C., and around this country that are going to have to live with a little bit less in order to get average Americans a little bit more.

And I think people are going to read all these stories in the paper about, boy, how long it's taken to pass health care reform and how tough it is to get the Senate and the House to agree. Listen, when you are taking on one-seventh of the economy, when you're taking on the industry which by years of Republican neglect has allowed for some big players in the health care industry to make their fortunes off of the fact that some people can't afford it, then it's going to take some time, going to take some heavy lifting to fix a problem that has festered for a long time.

Now, the same thing is going to go for energy. That's why energy is going to be so hard to do. It's taking on a lot of similar interests, but health care reform is not just a nice, practical policy discussion amongst intellectual peers. This is about taking on some vested interests.

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