Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

HEALTH CARE REFORM -- (Senate - October 01, 2009)

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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Madam President, I wish to begin by thanking Senator Merkley for coordinating this effort today. I am pleased to be able to, once again, join my fellow freshmen Senators discussing how critical it is for the Senate to act on health care reform.

As the Senate moves to reform our broken health care system, we must address the skyrocketing cost of health care. We must ensure quality in our health care system. Over the past several months, I have heard from many individuals and families from New Hampshire who are dealing with the rising costs of health care. The stories they tell me are the most poignant reminders of why we must reform our health care system.

Recently, I heard from a man named Jeff, who is from Loudon, a small community close to the capital city of Concord. Jeff had recently lost his job and with it his health insurance. So when he experienced swelling of his right leg and shortness of breath, he was afraid to go to the doctor because he was afraid he could not afford the cost.

So he ignored the symptoms until they got so bad he had to call 911. He was taken to a local hospital. Doctors realized he had a blood clot in his leg which had migrated to his lung. This was a life-threatening condition called a pulmonary embolism. Since treatment, his condition has improved dramatically.

However, the final bill from the hospital was over $200,000. To this day, Jeff remains in debt. Think how much we could have saved if he could have gone to the doctor when he first felt those symptoms. Stories such as these are unacceptable. They can happen to anybody. The truth is, similar to Jeff, we may all be one medical condition away from financial disasters because of the high cost of health care. So we must work to protect hard-working individuals and families as we put forward a bill.

I am proud to come from New Hampshire for so many reasons but one of them is because of the great work that is done by the Dartmouth Institute of Health Policy. For more than 20 years, Dartmouth has been a leader in comparative effectiveness research and has revolutionized our understanding of our health care system. Because of the Dartmouth Atlas Project, we now know there are huge variations in the way health care resources are used and how money is spent depending on where we live.

This chart shows the difference in spending among different regions per
Medicare patient. It is amazing to me that Medicare costs can range from the lowest spending referral region, which as you can see is just over $5,000, to the highest spending referral region, where in some parts of the country Medicare pays over $14,000 to provide the same kind of treatment that in other parts of the country is provided for only a little over $5,000.

Unfortunately, the research also shows that just because someone is in a higher spending area, it does not mean they are going to live longer or have better health outcomes. Simply put, more costly care does not mean better care. There is a fundamental problem with our health care system, and this is something we have to work on.

Things do not have to be this way. We can find savings in our system and still provide high-quality care. As I mentioned last week, we can save significantly on Medicare costs by reducing hospital readmissions. I have introduced bipartisan legislation with Senator Collins to do that. We have the opportunity to fix a problem that has been around for generations. We need to work together to achieve this goal.

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