30- Something Working Group
30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP -- (House of Representatives - July 22, 2009)
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Well, congratulations, Mr. Ryan of Youngstown, on a very well-deserved accolade, and you know, in some way it's a good segue to what we're going to talk about tonight, which is the need for this Congress to pass health care reform that revitalizes our economy, that cuts the cost of providing health care to employees for the thousands of businesses in Youngstown, Ohio; in Connecticut; in Maryland that are right now struggling to match revenue with expenditures to cut the cost of health care for the millions of Americans who don't have it today and desperately need it, you know, cut the cost of health care for the Federal Government that right now is about to bankrupt itself through major increases every year in the amount of money that we have to put out for health care.
So, listen, families in my district, they didn't figure out that this economy was in trouble when the banks did and the investment houses did last October, November. You know, they knew this economy was in crisis long before that when they saw their wages stay flat over the last 10 years while their employer heaped more and more of the cost of health care on their backs.
They figured out that this economy was in trouble when they showed up to get an MRI and they were charged a $200 deductible. They found out this economy was in trouble when they went to get health insurance in the new town, new State that they moved into and found out because their daughter had a complicated preexisting condition that they were uninsurable and that they were going to bear the full cost of care for their family.
Health care costs in this country, whether it be for individuals or businesses, have been weighing this economy down for way too long, and this health care conversation that we're having today, this bill that we hope to pass that we're going to talk a little bit about over the course of the next hour, is certainly about getting health care out to the people that don't have it in a country that is the richest and claims to be the most powerful in the world. There's just no reason why some little kid goes to bed at night sick just because his mom can't afford to get him to a doctor. That's just not right.
But this is just as much beyond the moral considerations of conscience for a country that doesn't provide health care to those kids. This is about economic revitalization of this country, realizing that we are going to be forever at a competitive disadvantage, vis-a-vis the rest of the world, so long as we have a health care system that costs twice as much as every other country health care system.
And what we need to talk about is, yes, the cost of the bill that we're proposing and the cuts that are in the bill to providers and what that means, but we're also going to talk about the cost of doing nothing. We're also going to talk about the cost of the Republican proposal which is to sit on our hands for another 10 years and let this health care system spiral out of control for families and businesses.
We cannot afford as an economy to continue to allow health care costs to strangle us. It is a tough issue to take on.
There's a reason why this Congress has gone 30 years without passing major structural health care reform. It's tough. There are a lot of special interests involved in this thing, but for families and for businesses in Youngstown, in New York, in Connecticut, in Maryland this is the right thing to do and the right time to do it.
So I hope that over the course of the next hour we're going to talk about the need for health care reform, and we're going to talk a little bit about the specifics, and we're going to push back on not the myths that have been created from the other side, but frankly the outright fabrications that have come from our colleagues on the other side of the aisle and the pundits who talk on the air waves and radio waves at night and try to clear the record as to what this means for our constituents.
So, with that, let me welcome my friend from Maryland, Representative Edwards, for joining us here this evening for this Special Order hour.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you, Representative Edwards. I think you're exactly right. There are just a lot of forces of ``no'' here. Frankly, it's not the first time we've seen it. When we tried to free this country of dependence on foreign oil, there were a whole bunch of people in this House of Representatives who said ``no.''
When we tried just 2 years ago--I mean, forget health care reform in the way we're talking about today. A couple of years ago in this House we just tried to extend health care coverage to 4 million more kids. Just 4 million more poor kids out there who just deserve a chance to get up healthy, on two feet, and learn every morning. We couldn't even get it to them. So there are a lot of people in this House who are against any change.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Tonko, I think that if the Democrats had introduced a one-page bill that was a nice, pretty picture of a flower, the Republicans would have claimed that it was socialist medicine. It just didn't matter, right? It doesn't matter what is in the bill.
A lot of our friends--not all of our friends, but a lot of our friends on the other side are going to scream, ``Government-run medicine and socialism'' because their pollsters have told them--and we got a 28-page memo from the top Republican pollster, Frank Luntz, who's laid it all out for them that if you want to kill health care reform, all you've got to do is go out there and shout, ``Government-run. Government takeover.''
And so there are friends on the other side of the aisle and those outside this House who want to stop health care reform who've never read the bill, who have just decided to shout some slogans to try to stop it.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. It's amazing to me how we can all represent districts as different as they may be who are all struggling with the same problem. There are uninsured folks in every single one of our districts, whether they be affluent districts or poor districts, African American districts, Caucasian districts, whatever it may be. And the fact that some of the Members of this House come with no solution at all, no answer for their thousands, if not tens of thousands, of constituents who don't have health care, whose families who are amongst the 50 percent of bankruptcies that are caused by health care costs. We can have a constructive debate as to what the best solution is. But the debate right now, which is between something and nothing, Mr. Ryan, is just unbelievable to a lot of us that are hearing these stories back home.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I want to talk about choice. In half the States in this country, there is one insurer that controls 50 percent or more of the market. In about 75 percent of the States, there are two insurers that control about 75 percent of the market. As Representative Edwards pointed out, for a lot of employees, they only have one option to begin with, even if their employer offers them insurance. I mean, this mythology that we've got a really competitive marketplace out there is just that, mythology.
I think about my small employers in Connecticut. They just got notice about 2 weeks ago that the big gorilla in the room in our State, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, is going to increase their rates this year--get this--by 32 percent, a 1-year increase for individuals and small employers of 32 percent.
Well, those small employers are going to look at Medicare, which this year will increase its costs by about 3 percent. They'll look at the health care plan that we're all on, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which is going to raise its rates by 3 or 4 percent. Some of the plans in our network are actually lowering costs this year. And they're going to scratch their heads when they hear the Republicans saying that they shouldn't have the option to buy into a publicly sponsored plan. They're going to say to themselves, What kind of choice is that for me if all I can do is stay on a plan that's going to raise my rates 30 percent, and these Members of Congress are on a plan whose rate of increase is 10 times lower? I want that choice. I want to be able to buy into that.
And that's what it is, choice. Listen, we can talk about a lot of myths, a lot of fabrications that come from the Republican side. But one of them is this notion that anyone is going to be forced on to a particular health care plan by the Democrats' plan--that we hope will get some Republican votes in the end--just isn't true. We are simply saying to people that you get to keep the coverage you want, but if you want to go on to a cheaper plan that might be sponsored by the government, you have the option to do that. There is absolutely nothing in this bill that forces one single person in this country to make that choice.
I'm going to tell you, faced with a 30 percent increase in Connecticut, there are going to be tens if not hundreds of thousands of people in my State who are going to be clamoring to get access to the same kind of health care that Members of Congress have, if it can save them some money.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I just wanted to add a statistic here. You mentioned about how a public option is going to provide competition. There have been those critics of the bill, those proponents of the ``do nothing'' strategy, who have said, Well, you know, if you have this public option, it's going to mean all of these people are going to lose their private insurance, and the private insurers are going to go out of business.
Well, you know, we have this thing here in Congress called the Congressional Budget Office. Do you know what? Sometimes we like them and sometimes we don't because they play it pretty straight. They're nonpartisan. They provide analysis of the bills that we do, and they've said it pretty clearly on this issue of whether or not people are going to lose their private health care insurance.
They actually show, over the course of this bill, over the 10 years that this bill will be in implementation, that more people will be insured through their employers at the end of this 10-year period than when we started and that 2 million more people will be insured through their employers than when this bill started. They also show that the price of insurance is going to come down over time.
So, yes, there are going to be some people who will choose the public option, but what will really happen is that everybody's insurance is going to get less costly and that more employers are going to be able to provide it and will provide it to their employees because their costs will have been brought down.
With that, I am so glad that our good friend from New Mexico has joined us on the floor. He is another new Member who has been a great champion in his district for affordable health care.
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