Health Care Reform Is Needed

Floor Speech

HEALTH CARE REFORM IS NEEDED -- (House of Representatives - March 23, 2009)

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Mr. CASSIDY. You're so bitter about that loss, you call me Patrick instead of CASSIDY.

I actually teach residents. I'm still on faculty with LSU Med School. It's not accidental that we end up having too few specialists.

For example, just to put the issue into focus, only about 2 percent of medical school grads in 2007 planned to go into a primary care career. That's 2 percent.

Now, it's not accidental why this is. As it turns out, the Federal Government gives more money to train specialists. It gives less to train a generalist and more to train a specialist.

When you're out, reimbursement is less for visits, but more for procedures. So the primary care physician that we don't have enough of gets paid less for the amount of effort he or she puts into their job.

So I say this to say that it's Federal policies that have gotten us here, and there are wise Federal policies that can get us out. But I want to just give a little bit of humility to the people who want to remake our system, assuming that a top-down approach will benefit.

I echo what Dr. Price said--it's better to have that patient in charge of the system. When it's top down, we end up with systems which end up skewing us towards more specialists and fewer generalists. I think if we take history as a guide, we will say that we will be much better if the patient have the power as opposed to CMS or another Federal bureaucracy having the power.

With that, I yield back.

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