Commerce, Justice, Science, And Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010--Continued

Floor Speech

COMMERCE, JUSTICE, SCIENCE, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2010--Continued -- (Senate - October 08, 2009)

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I actually am here to talk about something else, but I was so inspired by what the Senator from Pennsylvania and the Senator from Ohio and the others have said, I want to spend a few minutes on this issue. Part of it is I just don't understand what Washington doesn't understand about what our working families and small businesses are going through.

In my State over the last 10 years, median family income has actually gone down by $800 in real dollars. The cost of health insurance premiums have gone up 97 percent during the same period of time.

There are people who want to leave the system just the way it is, but the result of having flat income for our working families and small businesses, and for those costs going up 97 percent--by the way, in my State the cost of higher education has gone up 50 percent at the same time. The cost of health insurance, up 97 percent; the cost of higher education up by 50 percent--this is tough on the middle class. It is tough on small business owners in my State.

The result is, if we keep the status quo--there is a great irony of the arguments to keep the status quo--by default, we are putting more and more people off private insurance and more and more people either on public insurance or having the benefit of uncompensated care.

We have seen in my State, you can see it on this chart--probably not all that well--small business spends 18 percent more for insurance than large business just because they are small, and fewer and fewer people in Colorado are able to get coverage at work. Before this recession started it had already dropped roughly 10 percentage points; the percentage of folks who were getting insurance from their employer, from our employer-based system. You can see, the Senator from Ohio certainly can see, the percentage of small businesses in my State able to offer health insurance has declined dramatically.

Where do these people go? They either end up on Medicaid or they end up showing up in the emergency room where they are treated with uncompensated care, the most expensive way we can deliver health care in the United States of America.

We have a wonderful public hospital in Denver called Denver Health, where they do an amazing job at a much lower cost than a lot of other hospitals.

I was told by the woman who runs the hospital--her name is Patty Gabow, a gifted administrator--that they had done a study and they discovered they had spent $180 million in 1 year on uncompensated care for people who were employed by small businesses. These were not unemployed people, these were not people who could have had access to Medicaid, but people employed by small businesses who could not afford health insurance.

So I think one of the ironic things about the debate we are having is the failure to recognize that the status quo is creating a situation where fewer and fewer people have private insurance and more and more people are moving into public insurance. But it is not being done in a thoughtful way. It has not been constructed that way. So I think that is one of the reasons it is very important that we are having this debate.

I tell the Senator from Ohio, I am sure he had this reaction when he was on recess. I certainly did. I had townhalls all over the State. What I kept hearing from people is this, and this is the reason I support a public option. They would say to me: MICHAEL, we paid every single year, year after year after year, into private insurance. Every year, we did what we were supposed to do, and then when we needed it, it was not there for whatever reason. Because somebody on the other end of the telephone told them: You are not covered, or the fine print did not cover you for that problem or your child for that problem. They deeply resented the fact, as I would, that someone earned a profit off that commercial transaction.

That is the thing about insurance. It is not like going to the store and buying a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk where you know what you are getting in return. Many people who buy private insurance year after year don't know what they have until they need it and they don't know what they have lost until they lose it.

Having a choice, just another option that is out there, not a government takeover of health care but a choice that empowers working families in my State to make the decisions that are in the best interests of their family or their children--as a father of three little girls under the age of 10, I can understand why people would want that choice. I am not scared by the choice. We have to design it properly, and the HELP Committee did a very good job designing it, in answering a number of the charges that have been made against it. We may be able to do a better job in the final legislation.

The final thing I am hearing from people in Colorado is: If you are going to mandate that we have insurance, if you are going to require that we have insurance, you better make it affordable. You better not tell me I have to have insurance and make it unaffordable. You better not tell me I have to have insurance and I have to change the plans I have for my family.

The public option provides one more choice for people, an affordable choice for people. We have to do a lot more to drive down costs, as I and others have talked about on this floor. But we need to do this right.

I understand, I come from a State where we have a lot of diversity of opinion on a lot of things, and there is a lot of concern about the way the system works today, and there is a lot of concern that we are going to make it even worse. I think we need to elevate the standard of the discussion we are having to the standard that we had, that the people of Colorado had in townhall after townhall, which, by the way, no one would ever have any interest in putting on TV, I am proud to say. We need to elevate the standard of the discussion in Washington so that we can produce a result that has something other than double-digit cost increases year after year for working families.

Mr. BROWN. Will the Senator yield for a question? I heard what you said about buying a loaf of bread and how buying insurance is different. Before you were in the Senate, you were the superintendent of the Denver public schools and were very successful in business before that. When you talk about how insurance companies deny care and insurance executives get paid well, talk for a moment about the business plan. When you were an entrepreneur and you were a businessperson, you obviously had a business plan. Talk to us. Share with Senator Udall and me and others what the business plan of a health insurance company is in particular.

Mr. BENNET. I appreciate the question. I will say that I used to make my living buying bankrupt companies. So these were companies that were actually fairly well managed but capitalized really poorly, and our opportunity was to buy them, capitalize them properly, produce a business plan, as you are describing, and make sure the people who worked for them, the people who benefited from them continued to be able to do that.

You know, as a capitalist, I look at the state of our health insurance industry and our health delivery system and I can almost not believe what I see. We have 44 counties in Colorado. Every one of those counties has a convenience store, at least one, some many more than one but at least one. With the exception of the loose beef jerky that is on the counter, there isn't anything in there that doesn't have a barcode on it. It is 1970s technology that our small business owners in Colorado know is critical to managing their inventory, critical to allowing them to be competitive and giving their customers what they need.

Only 3 percent of hospitals in this country have that technology. One out of every 25 doctors has that technology, which is a really simple thing. And it is the reason why--as a parent of three little girls or if you are caring for a parent of your own, it is so frustrating when you go in and you have to explain over and over again what the last person just told you simply because we don't have a system of electronic medical records.

Then, on top of that is a business model where, unlike everything else in our society, every year the cost goes up and the quality to the customer goes down, which is what we see with insurance. We don't see that in other parts of our private marketplace. We don't see that in other parts of our private marketplace where people are incentivized to compete on price, on quality, on customer service. And it is why it is not just enough to have a public option. We need a public option, but we also need commonsense regulation of insurance so that we start driving a marketplace that actually makes sense.

Mr. UDALL of New Mexico. Senator Bennet, one of the things that is happening--and your chart there really explains it, and I wanted to get you to talk about this a little bit--your chart says: Rising health care costs are hitting small businesses the hardest and forcing all Colorado businesses to make tough choices.

That is exactly what is happening in New Mexico, exactly what is happening in Ohio. And really what we have going on here is very hard-working, good small businesspeople who want to give their employees insurance. I hear that. I know the Senator from Ohio said that a number of times when he read letters. They want to give that insurance, but they can't. They search around, they can't find policies they can afford, and so they are really stuck. And I can give you a list of examples in New Mexico.

One of the things you pointed out on your chart is that even before the recession--even before the recession--fewer Colorado small businesses could offer coverage. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the small business situation because most of these people are working without insurance.

Mr. BENNET. I appreciate the Senator from New Mexico raising that. I remember a florist I talked to, a family-owned business since 1972 in my State, and he is now down to no employees, just his wife and himself. They are running the shop. They had health insurance for many years, and they took it, as so many small businesses do, as an article of faith that part of their job was to offer insurance to their employees, to make sure their employees had the benefit of insurance. Now they are the only two employees. There is no one working for them. They do not have health insurance themselves.

Their daughter has been admitted to the University of Colorado. He said to me last week: MICHAEL, what was she supposed to do when she got to the box that said check the box if you have health insurance? If you don't, you have to pay this terrible fee.

So, first of all, people are having to make choices they should not have to make and they would not have to make in a rational private market that was working well. That is one of the issues.

The second thing is, as you know--I am sure it is true in New Mexico, and it is certainly true in Ohio--most of our jobs are created by small businesses. Depending on the numbers you look at, roughly 70 percent of our jobs are created by small businesses. And a higher percentage of those jobs are going to be responsible for the recovery that hopefully we are about to have in this country. It is harder and harder to do that if you are carrying the freight of double-digit cost increases in insurance every single year.

The last point I want to make--every small business owner understands this--as small business owners try to hang on to insurance for their employees and the price of that goes up and up, what that leads to is a choice between holding on to the insurance and compressing the wages of the employees because you can't do both. You can't give people the increases they deserve in their compensation and at the same time hold on to health insurance. So that is a reason we have seen all across this country, actually, a decline in median family income. It has gone down by $300 over the last decade in the country, $800 in my State, while the cost of insurance has gone up by 97 percent. That wage compression is directly linked to the problems people have holding on to insurance.

I appreciate the question. I yield.

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, as you could hear from the remarks of the Senator from North Carolina and the Senator from Oklahoma, there is agreement on some issues. We know the status quo is not going to work when it comes to health care. We know our families cannot endure another decade of double-digit cost increases every single year in their health insurance premiums.

We know we can do better than devoting a fifth of our GDP to health care, when every other industrialized country in the world devotes less than half that to health care. We know the biggest drivers of our outyear budget and debt--which we do need to be enormously concerned about--are rising Medicare and Medicaid costs, and the biggest drivers of those are rising health care costs.

I would say, again, as I have said before, I hope we can start on where the areas of agreement are and try to work from there. Because our small businesses and working families all across this country, including in my State of Colorado, cannot endure another 10 years like the 10 years they have endured. We will not be able to compete effectively in this global economy, where we are devoting more than twice what any other industrialized country in the world is devoting to just one sector of our economy--health care--and we are not going to keep the kind of commitment the Senator from Oklahoma was talking about to the young girl in the photograph or, for that matter, to my three daughters at home, who are 10, 8, and 5. I am deeply concerned about where we are with respect to our deficits and our debt.

So while we are disagreeing about the outcomes, I think there is a growing understanding that the current system just will not do.

AFGHANISTAN

Mr. President, I am here to talk a little bit about Afghanistan, and just for a few minutes because yesterday we reached the 8-year anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. On this occasion, we should remember how unified our entire country was over our mission there when it began. The Nation came together after 9/11 to support our military as it bravely took the fight to the Taliban and the terrorists in Afghanistan. We had one ultimate goal: Removing al-Qaida's safe haven.

Our military succeeded in toppling the Taliban government, which had allowed al-Qaida to use Afghanistan as a staging ground and a hiding place. Once the Taliban was removed from power, an international coalition, led by U.S. forces, went about the long and difficult task of defeating al-Qaida for good.

Yet now, 8 years later and with a new administration trying to determine America's best way forward, many Americans are understandably concerned and frustrated. Afghanistan is not where any of us want it to be, and our ultimate goal has not yet been met. Al-Qaida is still there and in Pakistan as well. Afghanistan's Government has not been able to take centralized control of the country. Elections there have not added to the legitimacy of the Karzai government. We have been left to reassess our position, and we must do this reassessment together.

Policymakers are asking the important and right question: What are the proper goals for our military effort in Afghanistan? How best can we accomplish them? Are these goals purely military goals? Can they be better solved with more troops or fewer? Do we need a more complex new mission in our future, which the military aspect is only one small part?

Unless we are sure, unless all of us are sure that more troops can help us meet our goals, we should not send them. Our soldiers already have sacrificed much. This time, in particular, is a difficult one for servicemembers and their families, and it is also proving to be a difficult one for those of us making policy.

As we decide what our direction will be in Afghanistan, the fallen brave soldiers we lost from Fort Carson this week are solemn reminders of how consequential our decisions have been and will be. Those of us who opposed going to war in Iraq, including President Obama, believed then it was the wrong war at the wrong time. We believed that Washington's focus on Iraq was diverting precious resources from our efforts in Afghanistan. We are still dealing with the consequences of the decision to focus on Iraq, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

Recalling recent history is so important because now we have to find new wisdom on Afghanistan. At the same time, all 100 Members of this body know we must take great care as we make decisions that will affect the lives of our men and women in uniform and their families. For every soldier who answers our Nation's call to serve in combat, a new deployment is akin to a new decision to go to war. That is why our national purpose and their mission must be absolutely clear.

That is also why, as Members of this body, we must be willing to ask hard questions. The country will be counting on the Senate to scrutinize and understand the purpose of any decision to deploy additional troops. As we, together, debate a new approach to Afghanistan, I will be motivated by the memory of the Fort Carson soldiers who died this past week, as well as all those who have fallen in rank and Afghanistan. I know all of us feel the same way. They served honorably. So must we.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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