Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

HEALTH CARE REFORM -- (Senate - October 15, 2009)

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Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, first of all, I thank my colleague, the Senator from Colorado, for organizing this effort today and leading freshmen Senators this week as we, once again, come down to the floor, as some of the folks who are newest to the Senate, most recently hired in most cases, to talk about the need for health care reform. I particularly thank my colleague, the Senator from Colorado, for raising the very important issue of the cost of health care to small businesses.

The remarkable thing about small businesses is they are basically the only people who pay retail for their health care costs in America today. Those who have Medicare, those who have Medicaid, large employers--they all can leverage their purchasing power. But small businesses are the folks who take it on the chin, and I am grateful for my colleague's comments today, describing how health care reform can benefit small businesses.

My colleagues, the Senator from Alaska and the Senator from Oregon, have also pointed out some other myths, as the Senator from Colorado indicated. The one I am going to take on today, because we hear a lot from our friends on the other side of the aisle about the problems with reform, and sometimes they do actually dispel some of these myths--but one of the myths I have dealt with for 18 years, as somebody who founded the Virginia Health Care Foundation in the early 1990s, is, how do we deal with the uninsured? Yes, part of our health care reform is about extending coverage to the uninsured. There will be some additional cost to do that, but I think it is very important to recognize that under our current system, right now we pay for the uninsured. We pay for the uninsured through uncompensated care, as my colleague from Colorado mentioned. We pay for the uninsured in higher health insurance premiums for all of us who buy private insurance. We pay for the uninsured, candidly, in higher costs to our Medicare and Medicaid system.

Our uninsured end up on the emergency room doorsteps, oftentimes receiving care in the most inefficient way possible and oftentimes without good quality care.

We have seen, on average, 8 percent of families' 2009 health care premiums--about $1,000 a year for all of us who purchase private health insurance--we pay in effect a $1,000-a-year tax to compensate and pay for the cost of the uninsured.

As my colleague mentioned, and I know from my experience in Virginia 18 years ago, we started this Virginia Health Care Foundation to deal with how we could provide health care coverage for the uninsured. We saw folks ending up, as I mentioned, on hospital doorsteps. We saw folks waiting too
long before they could access the health care system. Oftentimes, if they had a chronic disease and then waited to get that health care coverage, the cost of covering that person was not only much higher--obviously, the person has to deal with a much more serious illness--but they too ended up in the emergency room, which is an inefficient delivery mechanism.

If we are going to truly start to bring down the cost of insurance, if we are going to do the right thing in giving the uninsured in this country a chance to receive a medical home and make sure they access health care through a more affordable and more long term, healthier way, we must pass health care reform this year.

A lot of numbers have been bandied about concerning what kind of extended coverage we are talking about in this health care reform. There have been arguments that we are talking about covering 30 million additional people. I believe the Senate Finance bill covers 25, 26 million. One of the things that is often absent from this debate is that while these are the numbers we are trying to deal with right now, literally triple that number, about 87 million Americans during a year, at one point or another, through either being unemployed for a while or moving off one plan to another, go through some period of being uninsured and uncovered.

On top of that 87 million, we also have the problem of literally tens of millions of people who are stuck in dead-end jobs, who want to change jobs, who want to become more productive, but they are afraid to make that change because of concerns over losing their health care coverage. If we can provide the kind of health care reform we are talking about, if we can provide the kind of coverage we are talking about, those kinds of problems will go away. We will become a more effective and cost-effective society.

I know we have other colleagues who want to speak, and I want to come back to where we started, at least the freshmen did a few weeks back, and why some of our colleagues on the other side who seem to be this ``caucus of no,'' who seem to say: Let's take more time, let's put it off, let's wait a little bit longer before we take on health care reform--why that policy choice is so wrong.

If we do nothing, if we choose not to act this year, our current health care system is financially unsustainable. If we do nothing, Medicare, under the current projections, will go bankrupt in 2017. Many of us on this side of the aisle share the concerns of some of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle about the exploding deficit our Nation faces. The largest single driver of our Federal deficit is not the stimulus program, it is not the TARP program, it is not some of the other things we debate back and forth, it is the rising cost of health care that we pay for with Federal dollars in Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA.

If we do nothing, our deficit and those health care costs will continue to explode, undermining the dollar, undermining our ability for economic recovery. If we do nothing, an average family in Virginia--and I would argue probably an average family in the State of Colorado--will see literally 40 percent of their disposable income go to paying their health insurance premiums within the next decade. Those costs are unaffordable and unsustainable.

Finally, as a former business guy and somebody who believes, as my colleague from Denver does, that the heart of what keeps our economy growing is the business community, and particularly the small business community, if we can't lower our health care costs, then American business will not be competitive in the global economy. No matter how productive American workers are, America builds into our cost structure, for almost every business, about $3,000 to $4,000 more per employee because we have so much higher health care costs than any of our competitors around the rest of the world. We cannot maintain that competitive disadvantage in a global economy.

The time is now. There are ways we can continue to improve these bills. We are looking forward to the melding of the Finance bill and HELP bill, and I know myself and some of my fellow freshmen colleagues will have some ideas about how we can improve programs even in that package.

I thank my colleague from Colorado for his leadership on this issue, and I look forward to working with not only my freshmen colleagues but all colleagues on this side of the aisle, and hopefully those on the other side, to make sure we do get health care reform this year.

I yield my time.

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