Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I thank Senator Dodd for his kind words and extraordinary efforts over the last several months to lead the fight in health care reform.

Let me pick up on one issue Senator Dodd raised. Most Americans do not understand this, but in the midst of a disintegrated health care system, we have 60 million Americans who do not on a regular basis have access to a physician--60 million. What happens when those people get sick? If you are in Vermont and you are kind of stubborn, you delay going to the doctor when you should go, and you wait and you wait. And 6 months after you first were feeling badly, you go crawling into the doctor's office, and the doctor says: Why weren't you in here 6 months ago?

And the person says: Well, I felt awkward. I didn't have any health insurance. I was embarrassed.

The doctor says: I am getting you to the hospital because you are really sick.

So instead of treating people when they are initially ill, what we end up doing for people who do not have access to a doctor on a regular basis or do not have any health insurance is we wait until they become very ill and then we send them to the hospital and spend tens of thousands of dollars, in some instances, when we could have treated them with much less suffering and at much less cost.

There is another point that is not widely known, and that is, according to the Institute of Medicine, in this country today, we lose about 18,000 Americans every single year who die because they do not go to a doctor when they should go to the doctor. That is six times the number of people who were killed on 9/11 every single year.

What Senator Dodd is talking about and what many of us have worked on is significantly expanding the federally qualified health center program, started by Senator Kennedy four decades ago, widely supported in a bipartisan manner.

What studies tell us is, if, in fact, we can do what is in this legislation and provide a community health center with physicians, with dentists, with low-cost prescription drugs, with mental health counseling, do you know what we would end up doing, amazingly enough? We save money. We save money. We invest over a 5-year period about $8 billion, and we end up saving money because we keep people out of the emergency rooms, we keep people out of hospitals, we keep people alive. If that is not a good investment, I don't know what is.

So the fight to make sure that every American has access to a doctor, to a dentist, to low-cost prescription drugs is certainly, in my mind, one of the crowning achievements of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee piece of health care reform.

A month ago, I asked people on my e-mail list, which is not only Vermont, but all across the country, to write to me and tell me their relationship, how they are dealing with private health insurance companies. Within a week, we had over 4,000 responses. The booklet is available on my Web site, sanders.senate.gov. I urge people to take a look at it. If you want to know what is wrong with health care in America, this booklet will tell you.

People are writing from their hearts, from their own suffering, describing the health care crisis. I want to read and comment on a few of the statements sent to my office. This is from a fellow in Swanton, VT, a small town in the northern part of Vermont:

My younger brother, a combat decorated veteran of the Vietnam conflict, died three weeks after being diagnosed with colon cancer. He was laid off from his job and could not afford COBRA coverage. When he was in enough pain to see a doctor, it was too late. He left a wife and two teenage sons in the prime of his life at 50 years old. The attending doctor said that if he had only sought treatment earlier, he would still be alive.

People talk about waiting lines in Canada or in Great Britain. Let's talk about over 18,000 Americans dying every year because either they do not have any health insurance or, if they do, they cannot get access to a doctor.

When we talk about the health care crisis in America, it is not just the pain that millions of Americans are experiencing, the fear, or the tens of millions of people who stay at their job today. Do you know why they are staying at their job? Not because they particularly want to stay at their job, but because they have good health insurance and their wife has an illness that needs to be covered. Talk about economic nonsense, absurdity--millions of people staying at work because they do not want to give up their health insurance. What President Obama says, because of the economic crisis, we have to address health care, is absolutely right.

Some of our friends on the other side say what they have always said: Let's do nothing. You want to do nothing? Within 10 years, the amount of money you are paying for health care today will double. If you are a small business person today in Vermont or around the country and having a hard time providing health care to your workers or maybe your family, think about what happens when the cost of health care doubles. Think about large corporations that have to compete with European, Scandinavian countries, and companies where health care becomes a right of all people and not something placed on the employer.

In this year, amazingly enough, when we talk about health care and economics--and Senator Whitehouse was alluding to this a moment ago--there are 1 million people this year, it is estimated, who will go bankrupt because of medically related illnesses. Most of those people have health insurance--1 million Americans. And our friends say: We can't go forward; now is not the time to go forward on health care reform. Tell that to 1 million American families who have suffered bankruptcy.

In my view, the evidence is overwhelming that our current system is extraordinarily wasteful and bureaucratic; that in a very significant way,
the function of our current health care system is not to provide quality health care to every man, woman, and child, but, in fact, to allow people within the industry--the private insurance companies, the drug companies, the medical device suppliers--to make as much money as they possibly can.

Amazingly enough, according to the papers in the last few days, the health care industry has spent over $130 million in the last quarter on lobbying. There are 100 Members in the Senate and 435 Members of the House--to spend $130 million?

Where do they get that money? They get that money, if they are a drug company, by charging the American people the highest prices in the entire world. I was the first Member of Congress to take Americans over the Canadian border a number of years ago where women with breast cancer who were fighting for their lives were able to pick up breast cancer medicine at one-tenth the price. The drug companies cannot lower prices in this country--they have to charge us the highest prices in the world--but somehow they do manage to come up with tens and tens of millions of dollars to try to buy Members of the Congress.

While more and more people are losing their health insurance, we are seeing many of these private insurance companies seeing huge increases in their profits. We are seeing the insurance companies, the drug companies paying, in some cases, tens of millions of dollars in compensation packages to their CEOs.

For anybody to suggest that this country does not need health care reform is simply not to understand what is going on from one end of this country to the other. We are a great nation. There is no reason in the world why we should end up spending almost twice as much per person on health care as any other nation and yet have inferior health care outcomes in terms of infant mortality, in terms of life expectancy, in terms of preventable deaths.

We can do better. And right now, despite all of the lobbying money coming in from the health care industry, the moral imperative is for Members of Congress to think about the folks back home, the people who have no health insurance, the people who are underinsured, the people who are going bankrupt, the people who are staying at their work, not because they want to but because they have a decent health insurance program or the small business people who cannot invest in their company because they are busy spending all of their money on health care. We can do better than that. We must do better than that. Now is the time.

I hope the American people work with us in standing up to very powerful special interests and moving us toward real health care reform.

I yield the floor.

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