Health Care Reform
Floor Speech
HEALTH CARE REFORM -- (Senate - July 27, 2009)
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, over the last several months I had the exceptional honor of serving as a temporary member of our HELP Committee--Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions--where I joined a truly remarkable group of Senators as we wrote and fought through and refined and ultimately passed our part of legislation that will begin to fundamentally
transform our broken health care system. During that period, Senator Kennedy could not be with us, but we certainly felt his spirit and his presence and the tradition of service to this issue that he has embodied through that time. I think he would be proud of the Affordable Health Choices Act we brought out. I certainly am.
This bill, in combination with the work now being done in the Finance Committee, will guarantee quality, affordable health coverage for all Americans. It will protect Americans against back-breaking medical costs. It will expand access to vital preventive services. It will fight fraud and abuse in public and private health insurance plans. It will help retirees with the high cost of coverage. It will improve the quality of care through fundamental delivery system reforms. It will build a 21st century health care workforce. It will provide a new voluntary insurance plan, a different choice for long-term care. Most importantly, it will bend--maybe even break--the cost curve. In short, we stand at the dawn of the most significant improvement of our health care system that our country has ever seen. My only regret is how remarkably, staggeringly, embarrassingly late we are to this task. We often talk about the health care reform efforts of 1993 and 1994 and how startling it is that it has taken us 15 years to return to such a paramount issue for our people. But as we all know, the debate over reforming health care goes back decades and decades.
Let's take a quick trip back in time. From a 1992 New York Times article: ``Health Care Costs Dampen Hiring.'' This at a time when our national health care costs were $850 billion a year. Now they are $2.3 trillion a year; then, $850 billion a year.
This could be the first recovery crippled by medical costs. Employee benefits--health insurance in particular--have become so explosive that manufacturers are increasingly coping with weak demand by cutting payrolls, not overtime ..... Health care costs, increasing at more than twice the rate of wages, have made benefits so expensive it would be surprising if companies were not responding. As they find other ways to avoid paying benefits--the growing use of contract workers, for example--they often say instead that they are merely giving employees some flexibility.
That was 1992. We could have that same discussion today, only we would have to multiply the number by three.
Here we are back in 1988 when the New York Times reported: ``Soaring Health Care Costs.'' At this time, instead of $2.3 trillion a year in health care costs, we were spending $500 billion.
The article says:
Health care amounts to 11.1 percent of gross national product in the United States,--
Now, of course, we are over 18 percent.
--a bigger share than in any other advanced country.
That didn't change.
In 1987, Americans spent $500 billion on health care, 9.8 percent more than the year before.
Those trends have continued.
This year, spending on health care is expected to rise by 8.2 percent, more than double the inflation rate. And despite many efforts to slow health care spending, it is expected to grow by another 9.1 percent in 1989. .....The average jump in premiums could hit 30 percent in 1989. But at the same time, we're getting less for it.
Further back to 1979, 30 years ago when our annual expenditure was less than one-tenth of today. Today, $2.3 trillion; then, $200 billion. The article says:
HEW Secretary Patricia Roberts Harris said the quality of American health care does not justify its price tag of more than $200 billion a year. Harris said health costs represent nearly 10 percent of the gross national product, the total value of goods and services produced in this country each year. The federal share of health costs will exceed $50 billion next year, including $30 billion for Medicare and $12 billion for Medicaid, and will claim 12 percent of the Federal budget.
But for the passage of 30 years and for all of those numbers getting bigger, you could say the same today.
Finally, last, but not least, from a 1955 New York Times article. This article predates me. I was born in October of that year. Here is what it says:
As it does each year without fail, the government declared again this week that it is time to do something about the rising cost of medical care.
Let me repeat that:
As it does each year without fail, the government declared again this week that it is time to do something about the rising cost of medical care. Last year, the Nation's medical bill ran over $10 billion.
It is now 25 times as much, and you could say the same thing.
It was an increase of $3 billion since 1948. Of this sum, only about 25 percent was covered by some form of prepaid health insurance. In human terms, this meant that the American had to scrap his budget, dig into savings or go into debt, to pay some $7.5 billion for doctors, hospitals, dentists, nurses, and the myriad physical accessories of medical care.
These words, from February of 1955, when one-fifth of the Members of this body were not yet born, could not be truer today.
In human terms, the American had to scrap his budget, dig into savings or go into debt to pay for doctors, hospitals, dentists, nurses, and the myriad physical accessories of medical care.
How little we have changed.
Fifty-four years later, astoundingly, despite all of this time and all of this trouble and all of this tragedy, this is still a game to some people, a political game. Fifty-four years later, health reform still faces opponents who will do whatever they can to delay or derail the reform process, turning what is our most desperate domestic political crisis into political theater.
Last Friday, one of our colleagues on the Republican side told a group of conservative activists:
If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.
Think about that for a minute. One hundred thousand Americans die every year because of avoidable medical errors, and the response from the other side is ``let's find a way to break the President of the United States.'' More families now go into bankruptcy because of health care costs than for any other reason; families across this country who lose everything. And the response: ``Let's find a way to break the President of the United States.'' We watched Detroit crumbling under the weight of its health care costs, and General Motors, one of our fabled companies, fail. And what is the response? ``Let's not fix it. Let's find a way to break the President of the United States over this.''
We have a health care costs tsunami bearing down on us, one that truly could break the fiscal back of this country, but do they want to deal with it? No. They want to play politics to break the President of the United States. We have an insurance industry that turns on you when you have the nerve to get sick, denying you care and denying you coverage. They call it medical loss when they have to pay for you. Across this country people suffer. When they are sick, when they are down, when they are hurt, when they are at their weakest, their own insurers turn on them and try to interfere with their health care and try to deny them payment and coverage. What is the response from the other side? ``Let's try to find a way to break President Obama.''
This is not President Obama's Waterloo. This is not one man's battle. This is a war in which millions and millions of Americans are casualties every day: the child whose insurance policy carves out from her coverage the asthma care she desperately needs; the doctor whose office spends more time fighting the insurer over claims and authorizations than delivering health care; the small business owner whose employees are like family for her and who can no longer afford to cover their health care; the elderly retiree who falls into the Medicare prescription drug doughnut hole; the diabetic who cannot obtain a policy at all from anyone because he or she has a preexisting condition.
This should not be a political battle of right versus left. It is truly a battle of right versus wrong. I have come to the floor countless times now to share Rhode Islanders' personal and family tragedies, their sorrows, and their frustrations with our present health care system. My constituents share their stories with me at community dinners across Rhode Island, in our senior centers, at coffees, and as I walk the main streets of towns across our State.
Earlier this year, I launched a health care storyboard on my Web site where Rhode Islanders can share their experiences and ideas for health care reform. In just a few short months, literally hundreds of Rhode Islanders have written to me to share their ideas and experiences. Those stories are fraught with anguish, pain, frustration and, too often, tragedy. They break your heart. They break your heart to read. Rhode Island is a small State. If we have it happening hundreds and hundreds of times, in the Presiding Officer's State of New Hampshire and across this country, it has to be happening thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, hundreds of thousands of times every day.
With all that suffering going on, with all the risks to our country of the perils of the costs coming at us from our health care system, if the other side can't care about the merits and substance of health care reform--if you cannot care about the merits and substance of health care reform, if, for you, it is just political theater, if all it is, is a way to ``break'' the President of the United States of America, in a time of domestic and international crisis, if your goal is to break the President rather than do something about health care, if that is how little you care about health care, then you can't care about the merits or substance of anything else because there is nothing domestically that is as important to our country as health care reform. If you cannot care about that and deal with us on the merits on that, then you can't care about anything.
What is really frustrating about this is for these Rhode Islanders, tormented by our health care system, and for their millions of fellow Americans across the country, who have those same experiences, there is a better way. We are working toward it. We can find it, and we can make it happen.
We have to do better, we can do better, and we will do better with this legislation than 47 million uninsured and millions more teetering on the brink, one paycheck away from losing their insurance, one illness away from losing their insurance. We can and we have to and we will do better under this legislation than 100,000 Americans dying every year because of avoidable medical errors and because, among other reasons, we have the worst health care infrastructure, information infrastructure, in health care than in any other American industry except the mining industry. We can make this better. We can do better and we have to do better and we will do better than health care outcomes for Americans that are at the bottom of all of our industrialized competitors--at the bottom; with all of our capabilities as Americans, our ingenuity and our entrepreneurship, we are at the bottom of developed nations in health care outcomes for our people, and we pay twice as much as they do to get there.
America can do better than this. Beginning with the work of the HELP Committee, we are on our way. Let's not squander the opportunity and the responsibility this day presents. Let's not be distracted by calls for delay or appeals to the pettiest political instincts this Chamber could express.
As I see it, we are about 55 years late already. We don't need further delay; we need to get this done. Year after year, Americans have had the same complaints about their health care system. We have it within our power, under the leadership of this President, to make it happen, and we will.
I thank the Chair and yield the floor.
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