Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010

Floor Speech

ENERGY AND WATER DEVELOPMENT AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2010 -- (Senate - July 28, 2009)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I think the American people are beginning to react in a negative way to what they perceive to be happening in Washington, DC, today with regard to the debate about health care, the debate about new energy taxes in the form of a cap-and-trade program. Of course, we know there are a lot of questions about whether there was any value in the trillion dollar stimulus bill that passed earlier this year, which was supposed to keep unemployment below 8 percent, and now in many States it is well into the double digits and continues to go north from there.

They have seen a lot of government spending with the stimulus, a takeover of many industries, whether it is auto manufacturing, financial services, or insurance companies in this country. They have seen the cap-and-trade bill, which passed the House of Representatives, which they know--there are debates about how much, but they know it will increase what they pay for energy in this country. And now we are having this discussion about the government taking over one-sixth of the American economy in the form of health care.

I think what we are starting to see is that the American people, as they engage in these issues, are becoming increasingly concerned about the level of government expansion and intervention in the marketplace, and the amount of new taxation and new borrowing and spending that is going on in Washington, DC, at a time when the American people are being, by virtue of the fact that they have to live within a balanced budget, required to make hard choices in their daily lives. They see a disconnect between what they are experiencing in their family lives and what is happening in Washington, DC, where there continues to be this pattern of new taxes, spending and borrowing.

Logic would dictate, I think, when you are in a recession, you should not raise taxes. The worst thing to do in a recession is raise taxes and actually crush any economic recovery that might occur because, as we all know, what helps create jobs is small business. If small businesses are faced with higher taxes, they have less to invest in new equipment and in hiring new employees.

The other thing I think logic dictates is that when you are running trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, you should not be piling more debt upon future generations. It seems as if everything we are talking about these days is an expansion of government in Washington, at greater additional costs to the American people, either in the form of higher taxes or increased borrowing from future generations, neither of which is something I think most Americans would acknowledge we ought to be doing when you have an economy in a recession and trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.

The current health care debate is a good example of something about which people have reservations and concerns, because they see the attempt by the Federal Government to take over one-sixth of the American economy, to essentially nationalize it--whatever you want to call it. In any event, it will mean greater government intervention and greater government involvement and an expansion of government in Washington, DC. I think they are starting to react in a negative way against that, and more and more members in Congress, in the House and Senate, are hearing that.

I think that is why it is becoming increasingly difficult now to move in the quick way in which the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate wanted to in order to enact some form of health care reform before the August break.

The way I view this issue is that we ought to look at starting over. Clearly, what has been proposed and rolled out so far is not working. It is not working in terms of winning the minds of the American people, in terms, in Washington, DC, of putting together what ought to be a bipartisan solution to probably one of the biggest challenges and crises facing the American people and our economy.

So far, we have seen a bill being debated at the committee level in the House of Representatives, and perhaps scheduled for the floor--if not this week, when we get back--and we have seen action by the HELP Committee in the Senate on a bill that, by CBO's estimate, is about a trillion dollars in new costs. Somehow, it will have to be paid for.

It seems as if we ought to push the reset button and figure out, OK, how can we do this in a way that achieves savings to the American people and the health care costs in this country, as opposed to actually adding new costs by increasing government spending in Washington, DC, expanding the size of government, and putting the government in the way of--I guess intervening in that fundamental relationship between physicians and patients.

There are a number of things that are, in my view, wrong with the current plan, the plan that passed the HELP Committee in the Senate, as well as the one currently being considered in the House of Representatives. The first fundamental test it flunks is that it doesn't do anything to reduce costs. To me, reform ought to be finding efficiencies, streamlining, looking at ways of doing things in a less costly way to achieve savings. We know that is not the case with the bill that passed the HELP Committee in the Senate, and we know the House of Representatives, in their bill, according to the most recent Congressional Budget Office estimates, also does nothing to find savings or achieve any sort of savings as a result of all these changes being proposed. So it flunks the first fundamental test of reform; that is, it does nothing to reduce costs.

Secondly, it does cut payments, reimbursements, under Medicare to providers, whether it is hospitals, whether it is the cost of pharmaceuticals. All of these things in this country that add to the overall cost of health care are obviously going to take a nick in this. We don't want to see the health care currently provided under Medicare to American senior citizens somehow be hurt by the fact that they are trying to find money to pay for this whole new expansion of government health care in this country. So you have the issue of cuts to reimbursements currently under Medicare, which very likely would impact the delivery of care, the quality of care for America's seniors.

The third thing, and another big problem, is that it adds new Medicaid costs to our States. States currently are participants. Medicaid is a shared program between the Federal and State governments, and there is talk about a significant expansion, the size of the Medicaid Program, which obviously costs the Federal taxpayers a lot more money. But it also passes on an incredible new and costly mandate to State governments. Many States are figuring that out and are starting to react to it.

My State of South Dakota is a good case in point. Our State legislature, Governor, and people who looked at this have concluded it would cost South Dakota an additional $45 million a year in Medicaid costs, which may not sound like a lot of money in Washington, DC, but in a State such as South Dakota, where there is a requirement to balance the budget every year, that represents a lot of money. Obviously, it will have to be paid for somehow. When you get to the larger States, the numbers increase in multiples.

You are talking about new taxes on States, in addition to the new taxes being talked about in Washington, DC, to pay for all this. You have new Federal and State taxes, again, at a time when already many State governments and budgets are strapped and they are trying to figure out how to balance their budgets currently.

Another reason why the current plan is such a big problem, and why we need to start over and hit the reset button, is because you are going to have a lot of people who are going to lose employer-provided insurance. Most of the studies conclude--and the House bill is a good example--that about 83 million people would lose their private health insurance under the bill that is under consideration in the House of Representatives. There are other studies that have been done. This was a Congressional Budget Office estimate. Other studies suggest that the number of people who could lose insurance on some of these plans under consideration in Congress could be in the 120 million range.

If you consider that we have 177 million people today who get their insurance through their employer, that is a significant number of people who are going to lose their privately provided health insurance and be pushed into a government plan.

That brings me to the next point of why the current health care plan being debated is the wrong direction in which to head and creates problems; that is, you are going to have more people going into the government-run plan--literally millions of people, the ones who are going to lose their insurance in the private marketplace. They are going to be pushed into a government-run plan. Obviously, there are a lot of people who would like to see that. I don't happen to be one of them. We ought to preserve what is best about the market and competition we have and allow people to have more choices. We don't want to, by default, shove more and more people into a government-run plan, when there are opportunities out there available to them today where they can get their health care coverage and insurance in the private marketplace. That is a much better model and has worked very well for a long time.

That isn't to say there are not things we can do better. I don't know of any Senator on either side of the aisle who doesn't acknowledge that there are things we need to do to reform health care in this country, to get costs under control, provide access to more people. But certainly taking away private coverage and pushing people into a government-run plan is not a reform of the health care system that makes sense to me or, I argue, most Americans, especially when it will cost trillions of dollars to do it.

As I said, I think most people look at reform as something that would actually reduce or somehow eliminate costs or create greater efficiencies and savings in the health care system in this country. You have a lot of people who will lose private insurance, and millions of Americans would be pushed into a government-run program.

As I said before, another big problem with this idea is that for employers, during a recession, it imposes new taxes and fines, both of which would be very costly, and both of which would deprive them of the opportunity, as the economy hopefully starts to recover, to hire new people, create new jobs, which is what small businesses do best. They are the economic engine of this country. We are talking about imposing new taxes and fines on them, at great cost, and so that takes away a lot of the resources, as they generate revenue that they can be able to devote or allocate toward capital investment or hiring more people. They are going to be paying fines and taxes to the Federal Government to underwrite this new expansion of government in Washington, DC.

Logic would dictate, and history would suggest, that the worst thing you can do in the middle of an economic recession is to raise taxes on the job creators in the economy. Raising taxes on small businesses is a bad idea. In fact, the House bill that is under consideration, with the surcharges and increased taxes, would actually increase marginal income tax rates from the top rate today of about 35 percent to about 37 percent. Think about that. The size of the increase in marginal income tax rates that would occur in
State and Federal marginal tax rates, under the plan under consideration in the House of Representatives, and how that would impact the economy, would be the largest tax increase we have seen since the end of World War II.

Frankly, if you think about most Americans and most small businesses, when you start paying half, or 50 cents out of every dollar, in taxes, you are getting to a point where it is going to be very difficult for these businesses which might say: Why should I continue to try to create jobs and provide health care coverage for my employees, when the government takes more and more of the profits I make in this business? I think that is the risk we run with the job creators, the small businesses, which are the economic engine and create as many as two-thirds to three-quarters of all of the jobs in our economy, in a recession. When you put new taxes and fines on them, you are layering them and burdening them with more costs that will make it very difficult for them to lead us out of the recession and start to expand the economy and create jobs.

Intuitively it makes no sense for us to head in this direction.

Finally, I think the last problem--and, as I said, there are many with the current health care proposals--is we will have to start dealing with the lines and the rationing that so often occurs when we see a system such as they have in Europe or the Canadian system. Some here actually believe that is the best way to do this. They believe in a single-payer system. They believe we ought to nationalize our health care system in this country. Inevitably, what we will end up with is people ending up in lines. We will have government making decisions about what procedures will be covered, what the reimbursement will be for this procedure, that procedure. It is a disaster and a train wreck in the making, and it is a direction I don't think we ought to go.

These are all issues that I think point to the need for us to hit that reset button and to sit down and actually figure out what can we agree upon that will be a bipartisan solution to the challenge of increasing costs and a lack of access for millions of Americans.

That being said, we have a large number of proposals out there which, I submit, we ought to be able to debate. As the HELP Committee and the Finance Committee go through their deliberations, there are many things that have bipartisan support in the Congress for which we could get big majorities and which would address the fundamental issues of access to health care and cost of health care but none of which are being considered because right now the only plan out there is the one that has been written by the Democratic leadership, which consists of this government plan or this government takeover of the health care system.

We believe the principles in this debate ought to continue to maintain: People ought to be able to keep their health care; it ought to be health care they can afford; it ought to provide choices; and it ought to be patient centered.

I yield the floor.

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