The Progressive Message--Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

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Mr. ELLISON. Madam Speaker, we are here again for another evening with the progressive message, the message that comes to the House floor Thursday night to talk about a vision of America not based on fear, not based on things that are not true, but a vision of an America where we stand up and we include everybody within this vision. No matter what color, what culture, or what faith you belong to, America is a place for you. We bring people from all parts of the world who bring and make up this great American vision that we're talking about, a progressive vision where middle-class and working-class people can actually have policies that help them, a progressive vision which says we can have health care for all. We can have true health care reform which allows Americans to partake of the great wealth of this country for the benefit of their health. A progressive vision says that America can live at peace. We don't have to be in war after war. We can have a policy of peace which develops our relationship with the rest of the world based on diplomacy, development and things of mutual benefit.

Today this is the progressive message, and we are glad to be here with the progressive message sponsored by the Progressive Caucus.

Tonight, what is the topic? Guess what, surprise, health care. Today we have two great advocates and leaders, and I am so honored to be on the House floor today with two good friends and leaders, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and also the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) of the Ways and Means Committee who is also a physician, both with us today. I want to invite both of them to offer some remarks as we get started on the Progressive message today, focusing on health care reform, patients before profits.

Congressman, Doctor, what are your thoughts?

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Ellison, it is a pleasure to be here today. In the caucus the other day we were talking about health care, and one thing that is very clear in this country is that the medical-industrial complex doesn't want to change. They want things as they are. They would be glad to take additional money to cover people, but they want to go through the private sector. Let's just keep grinding out the profits, never mind what happens to the patients.

This effort that is being made in the House, and I hope to have a bill out here in 10 days or so, is an effort to make sure that what you just suggested happens. That is, that everybody in this country has health care that is adequate, that takes care of the needs they have, no matter how much money they have, no matter what they look like, no matter where they live. They should have the same kind of health care in this country no matter what their circumstances are.

I told the story, I said one of the things that people tell me: Everybody in this country gets health care. What are you talking about?

What I said to my colleague when he said that to me, you know, the difference between Members of Congress and ordinary folks in this society is, we live a somewhat different life. If you call up and say, This is Dr. McDermott or Congressman McDermott, I have a pain in my stomach, they will tell me to come into the office tomorrow morning. Everybody else goes through this little drill. When you call the doctor's office and say, I have a pain in my stomach, the first question is, What kind of insurance do you have?

Now if you have private insurance, you will be in the office tomorrow morning. If you have Medicare, well some doctors don't take Medicare, so it may be a week before you get taken care of. God forbid if you have Medicaid, you will never get taken care of. Or it will be a month or a month and a half. And if you don't have health insurance, they have an offer for you: If you will come in and pay $25 or $30 upfront, we will have an appointment for you in 2 weeks.

People say that isn't true. Well, let me tell you, there are very well-documented studies, and they put people on two phones sitting right next to each other, they would call the same doctor's office, give the same story about a pain in their stomach, and find out what the relationship there was between what kind of insurance they had and when they got seen.

Now, it shouldn't be that way in this country. If you are sick and you have pain in your stomach, you ought to be able to get in and see a doctor.

What clearly happens in that case, for those people who have to wait 2 weeks or a month or whatever, they go along with that pain in their stomach waiting for their appointment, waiting for their appointment. When they can't stand it any longer, they go to the emergency room. That is why emergency rooms are flooded with things that ought to be seen in a doctor's office, but people can't find a way, they can't find a doctor that will accept them.

Well, I told this story, and one of my colleagues came up to me and said, You

know what, you are absolutely right. He said, I just had my knee replaced. He said, I got talking to the doctor about it, and the doctor and I were talking about how he would get paid. The doctor said, Oh, you're perfect. You've got private insurance. We all have Blue Cross-Blue Shield here in the Congress. He said that is good insurance and that pays for it and that is good.

My friend said what if I had Medicare?

The doctor said, I would have said, Why don't you wait for a couple of months?

And my friend asked, If I had Medicaid? The doctor said, I would never see you. I don't accept Medicaid patients for knee replacements.

So there is rationing in this society today, and it depends on what kind of plastic you have in your pocket. Now to simply pass out more plastic cards in the insurance industry today will not work, and that's why we have to have a good public option. We have to have an option that functions the same as it does if you have a private insurance card.

If you meet a Canadian some time, ask a Canadian to show you their provincial health care card. In Ontario, they are orange. In New Brunswick, they are blue-green. In Quebec, they are kind of a greenish color. They have a card no matter where they go in the province. In Canada, they hand in that card and they get taken care of. That's what ought to happen in this country, and the public option is the only way we are going to get people who don't have health insurance today the opportunity to access the health care system and actually have an opportunity to see a doctor.

Now it is clear that the President has said not only does he want to have access, but he wants to have a plan that controls cost. The fight now in here is the fight between--giving people access is going to cost more money in some ways, although there is lots of money to be saved in the present system, but the providers and the drug companies and the insurance companies and all the other people who are involved in the medical industrial complex don't want to have anybody put any control on their costs. That's what the fight is that is going on right now as this bill comes to the floor.

John Conyers has worked as long as I have trying to get what we know would be the best system, which is the single-payer system. Now the President said we are not going to go that route, we are going to go a little different route. We are helping him to get there. It is not the perfect system, but it will get people the access and the cost control that is necessary.

I listened to my colleague from Minnesota just a moment ago telling us this story about this clinic and what is in the bill. I believe that bill has been out on the floor and up on the Web site. Anybody who can read could have read it in the last 30 days, in the last 60 days, and there are no such clinics in that bill.

Mr. ELLISON. Are there death panels? I yield back.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Absolutely not.

Mr. ELLISON. Are there school sex clinics?

Mr. McDERMOTT. No; that is scare tactics. You know better than that, Keith. Why are you asking those questions?

Mr. ELLISON. It is part of what has been going on. You saw August. You try to have a civil conversation, and them some people would show up and try to disrupt the meeting. Why would they want to disrupt the meeting when all we are trying to do is have a civil dialogue about the future of our country and the future of health care.

Why are we hearing about death panels? To scare seniors.

Why are we hearing about sex clinics? To scare

parents.

Why all this stuff?

Let's get Chairman Conyers in the conversation. He looks like he is digging out some facts. I just want to pose the question to you gentlemen: Why, why, why are we hearing about all of this fanciful, made-up stuff that is on the Web and anybody can look up the bill and say, that ain't so? Why are we hearing all this stuff?

Mr. McDERMOTT. You know, there is sort of a political axiom that if you can make people afraid, you can get them to do exactly what you want them to do. In this case, they want people to say no, we don't want the government to take over our health care.

Now the government pays for military health care. The government pays for veterans' health care. The government pays for seniors' health care in this country and poor people's health care in this country. And they want government to go away? Come on.

Sixty cents out of every health care dollar in this country is coming from the government through all of those programs. And the people are saying that they don't want the government. I have had older folks come to me and say, I don't want the government to get into my Medicare. Folks, Medicare is a government program. They simply are scaring people to the point where they are not thinking clearly about what is going on in this country.

Mr. ELLISON. Scare tactics.

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Mr. ELLISON. If the gentleman would yield, can I just point out that I have a chart here that I think does shed some light on the situation. Because a lot of the dialogue we've been having, quite frankly, is focused on the uninsured.

But let's take a moment to talk about the insured, the folks who actually have insurance, the people who have anxiety about what could happen to them if they lose it, if they get sick. Because you know, if you get sick, that's when they don't want you on their insurance anymore, right? Cumulative change in single and family health insurance premiums, that's what you pay, what comes out of your check every 2 weeks or every month--and the Federal poverty level.

We've been seeing that the level of poverty has been rising, but look at this dramatic increase in the family premium. This family premium has jumped up 130 percent from 1996. This is real money coming out of the paychecks of real families all the time. People say we don't need reform and say that we're trying to scare people with fake death panels and fake school sex clinics and all this kind of stuff. The fact is that this is what the average family is living through, and this is impacting people who pay premiums, which means they have employer-based health insurance. What are people to do about this dramatic situation as they're facing trying to make ends meet in their family budget?

I yield to either one of the gentlemen.

Mr. CONYERS. Well, when you say 130 percent increase, that's more than double, isn't it?

Mr. ELLISON. Oh, yes.

Mr. CONYERS. A 100 percent increase would be double. A 130 percent increase is one and a third more than what they're paying. Is this an annual increase rate?

Mr. ELLISON. This is from 1996 to 2006.

Mr. CONYERS. Oh, I see. It's a period of over 10 years. What it's saying to me is that these folks don't have any option of changing insurances or doing anything. What are their alternatives? If you don't pay, where are you going? Is there some private insurance company offering a lower premium? Can we call up insurance

companies and say, My insurance has more than doubled over the last 10 years, and I want out. What happens then?

Mr. McDERMOTT. You're tough out of luck. If you go into the individual market, you'll pay even more. So if you're in a big group, you know, working for Ford Motor Company or for Delco Battery or something, that way you get the risk spread over everybody. But if they're just looking at you or me or the next guy, they're going to charge you a much higher premium for anything that you have, any kind of preexisting condition.

So it's worse when you leave one of those groups. People stay in, and they scramble to try to make it. But every company in the country has been shifting more and more cost onto the individual. They used to pay in some companies 100 percent. Now they pay 60 percent, and 40 percent has to be paid by the employee. Their deductibles are going up, and the copays are going up. That's why the President has said we have to find a way to control costs. We can't let this go on.

Mr. ELLISON. If the gentleman would yield, if you look back at this chart, ``National Health Expenditures Per Capita.'' That means that we take all the health care expenditures and divide them by the number of people. So the average amount of health care expenditure for the average person--look at these numbers. This is what actually happened, and this is what is projected to happen.

If we look at 1990, going back to 1990, what we saw was about $2,814 per capita, per health care expenditure per person. This is 1990, the year I graduated from law school. If you go to this one, 2009, it's $8,160. Look at how this has more than doubled since 1990. As a matter of fact, this has nearly tripled.

The fact is these expenditures are galloping higher. If you look at the projected rate, we're up here. By the year 2018, it will be $13,000 per person. This is ridiculous.

Now, there is another chart I want to show you, and this chart is a chart that looks at different countries. So you look at this blue here. The blue is the United States; and then we have the red, France; the green, Canada; the purple, Germany; and then this aqua color, the United Kingdom. Back in the year 2000, we were up here at $4,570, way above everybody else. If you look at Germany, they were second, but everybody else was in the low 2,000s or higher 1,000s. This is the industrialized world.

Now, if you flash forward to here, in 2006 we're up around $6,714. We're still way above everybody else, but look at how we are compared to ourselves over time. The American family can't sustain this. Why do we cost so much more than everybody else? It's time for a change. It's absolutely time for a change.

I yield back to the gentleman from Washington State.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Well, I think that is what is really troublesome about this debate, is that people on the other side who argue that there doesn't need to be change--you say to them, Well, what are you offering? They say, Well, let's give tax credits to people so they can buy their own health insurance.

Now, let's just think about that for a minute. The average income in this country is about $45,000. So you're making a little less than $4,000 a month. You can easily spend $1,000 a month on a premium. So each month you've got to take $1,000 of your $4,000 out and go down and buy your health insurance. Now, the Republican solution to that is, Give them a tax credit. Let them wait a whole year to the end of the year, and then you give them back their money at the end of the year.

Most people don't have that kind of ability to wait for 12 months to get their money back. Rich people can. I mean, they can wait for a tax credit someplace down the road. But ordinary people who are living from paycheck to paycheck to paycheck do not have the ability to spend a thousand dollars a month on a health care premium and wait 12 months to get credit for it on their income tax.

So their proposals sound like they have something in mind. Yes, they have something in mind, but it simply won't work.

Mr. ELLISON. Reclaiming my time, I'll cite another example of that.

We hear a lot of people saying the solution to the problem is that we should just let people buy and sell insurance across State lines, and they offer this as something that's supposed to fix everything. But what they don't tell you is that 34 markets around the country have markets where one to five insurance companies are offering products and that's about all there is. Like in Alabama, as the President mentioned, one company dominates 90 percent of the market.

So basically they want to say, well, if you can go from Ohio to Minnesota, then the fact is that they think that's going to solve the problem. But if you have a monopolized market here and a monopolized market there, you still don't have a whole lot of choice. You still don't have a whole lot of people willing to offer you very much.

And how come these markets are so monopolized? Because it's extremely difficult to break into a market and build up a provider network, a doctor network in order to be able to compete that way. So they're saying you can compete with this monopoly and that monopoly and it's not going to solve anybody's problem, it might be a small part of some solution somewhere. But the real solution is single payer, which is why I'm on the bill, but a good medium solution is a strong public option, and we have got to have people fighting for it.

Mr. CONYERS. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. ELLISON. I yield to the gentleman.

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Mr. ELLISON. Well, Mr. Chairman, if I could cut in. I just want to read very quickly before I hand it over to the gentlelady from Texas, Sheila Jackson-Lee, that I have somebody from Minneapolis who wants to tell me that their family--it says actually this, ``We are in foreclosure, housing foreclosure, health insurance is $600 a month for a family of five. We applied for a loan modification and were denied.''

You know, this is a big deal. This family is dealing with this situation. ``Even with a loan modification, we still would not be able to afford our mortgage because of the cost of our health care insurance.''

This is what a young lady trying to put food on the table is dealing with in my district right now. And I just think that her voice deserves to be heard as well.

So with that, let me yield to the gentlelady from Texas and note that we have about 12 minutes left of our time, and it has been a wonderful hour.

And the gentlelady from Texas, let me welcome you to the floor, and I yield to you for your remarks.

And by the way, thank you for bringing people together next week to let the people be heard.

I yield to the gentlelady.

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