Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

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

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Mr. BENNET. I thank the Senator from Oregon.

It is good to be here this morning with all my colleagues to talk about health care reform. There is a lot of disagreement about what the right answer is.

What I would like to spend my time on this morning is why the status quo is not an answer. I think that if we can get agreement on that, we can solve the issues that confront the working families in my State and all across the country.

The median family income in Colorado has actually declined by $800 over the last 10 years. At the same time, the cost of health insurance has gone up by 97 percent. It has doubled during that time. That has happened all over the country. This slide shows the difference between the rate of increase in wages in my State, from 2000 to 2007, versus the rate of the increase in insurance.

I have talked to small businesspeople all over the State of Colorado who have said they are trying to continue to insure their employees just as they have for generations in family-owned businesses, but they are finding they are having to make a tradeoff between people's wages because the cost of insurance is getting so large.

By 2016 in my State, working families in Colorado are going to be spending roughly 40 percent of their income on health care if we do not change the status quo. It is also having a profound effect on the finances of the Federal Government. The biggest drivers of our deficit, as the red line shows, are rising Medicare and Medicaid costs. If we can change that, we can begin to restore our Government to fiscal health. If we do not change it, we are going to continue to pile mountains of debt onto our kids and our grandkids, something that no one in my State wants us to do.

Finally, the last slide shows we are consuming almost 20 percent of our gross domestic product on health care, devoting almost one-fifth of our economy to health care, when all our competitors across the globe are devoting less than half that to health care. It is no different than if you had two small businesses across the street from each other, one spending one-fifth of their revenue on their light bill, the other is spending less than half of that on their light bill. You do not need an MBA to know which of those two companies is going to be able to invest and grow their business.

The Senator from New Hampshire talked about a very important cost control measure in this bill that has to do with the transition of care. Right now in this country, one out of five Medicare patients is readmitted to the hospital within the first month that they leave. That is because nobody is following up to make sure they are getting the care they need to stay well. Nobody is checking to see whether they fill their prescriptions or whether they are taking it.

In Colorado, we have a great model in Mesa County and Grand Junction, where the hospital readmission rate is not 20 percent but 2 percent. This alone is costing us $17 billion a year.

If we can do it smarter, more cheaply, and provide the kind of quality we see in Grand Junction, the Mayo Clinic, and other places across the country, we should. That is what this reform is about. It is time for us to put politics aside and come to an agreement that will create a much improved situation for working families and small businesses. The status quo is eating people alive. We ought to be able to do better than that.

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