Health Care Reform
Floor Speech
HEALTH CARE REFORM -- (Senate - October 15, 2009)
Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am pleased to be here today, as we were last week and the week before that, with other freshman colleagues to talk about the need for health care reform in this Congress. Today, what we want to focus on is the effect of health care reform on small business.
When I am in Colorado, what we always start with is a conversation about what problem is it we are trying to solve. When it comes to small businesses, they are the biggest losers in the current health care system we have today and, by extension, the people who work for small businesses.
Today in my State, small business pays 18 percent more to cover their employees than large business does. Some people say to me: Michael, that is obviously because they have a smaller pool of people; it is harder to spread the risk. And that is true, but from a business perspective, that is ridiculous. From a small business perspective, if you are going to spend 18 percent more on something, you ought to expect to get 18 percent more productivity out of your company or you ought to at least expect to get 18 percent better coverage for your employees. Of course, every small business owner in this country knows the reverse is true--coverage is worse, deductibles are higher. It is just an illustration of how challenging the status quo is for small businesses that, after all, employ most of the people in our economy and are going to be responsible for carrying us out of this recession.
One can see on this chart the extraordinary effect this has had on my State. Even before this current recession, we saw a huge drop in the number of people who were getting coverage at work and many fewer small businesses. Now we are almost at 40 percent--I guarantee that number is well below 40 percent today after this recession has occurred. Even fewer smaller businesses are able to offer their employees coverage, which is heartbreaking for small business owners all over my State and all over the other States represented here today. Many of these businesses are family-owned businesses. The businesses feel like a family. People feel responsibility and care for one another and take responsibility for, among other things, health care. But they are not able to do it anymore. They are making very tough choices as a result.
By the way, one of the choices they are making is to not raise wages. Median family income in Colorado went down by $800 over the last 10 years, and in the country it went down over $300 in the same period, while in my State health insurance premiums went up by 90 percent. Small businesspeople say to me that those things are directly related to each other. In other words, people have to make a choice between covering their employees and paying them a living wage, and more often than not they are having to choose to compress wages just because of the skyrocketing costs of health insurance.
Health care reform done right is going to make an enormous difference for small businesses and for the people employed by small businesses. It will lower premiums and the cost of health insurance coverage; provide tax credits for small businesses that provide health insurance--that do the right thing; exempt most small businesses from employer responsibility requirements; subsidize health insurance for employees in small businesses that do not provide health insurance; increase entrepreneurship to expand the pool of workers available to small businesses; and eliminate job lock. Job lock means having to stay in a job because you are so scared of losing your insurance.
The estimate is that the administrative costs for small businesses, when it comes to health care insurance, will drop by over 50 percent. Most small businesspeople I know, who are skeptical sometimes of the reform we are talking about, will tell me this administrative burden is extraordinary for them today. Today, it is a paper-and-pencil system of trying to root out and sort out the health insurance market for their employees. Tomorrow, what we are going to have is an exchange where people can easily compare prices, compare coverage, and get the best deal for their employees, not to mention the fact they are going to be able to pool their purchasing power and drive down cost as a result.
The estimates are, small business will save billions of dollars over the course of this reform--$432 billion by 2013, $855 billion just 9 years from now. That is money that can be put into wages. In fact, the estimates are that of those savings, what we will see is small businesses being able to increase wages for their employees by almost $300 billion by the end of this period of time.
So today we are here to talk about why reform is important for small business. We are at a very perilous moment in our economy for small businesses that do not have access to the credit they need to help get us where we need to be. They are facing an incredible credit crunch out there, which is making it hard for them to hire again, which is driving up our unemployment rate. Over the medium and long term, what is critical to the success of our small businesses is that we reform our health care system, we make it more transparent, we make it more efficient, we make coverage more available to small businesses and to the millions of Americans who are employed by small businesses in their communities.
We are going to go through a series of colleagues today from the freshman class, as we did last week and the week before, and I will now yield the floor for the Senator from Alaska to give his perspective on why, as a former small bus i ness per son himself, health care reform is so critical to keeping our small businesses competitive.
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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Alaska, and I think he raises such an important point because so much of the debate has been about dividing one set of Americans from another set of Americans. Health care reform is something that needs to be of concern to 300 million Americans--if you are concerned about the double-digit increases every year of your premiums; if you are concerned about spending almost 20 percent of our GDP on health care, when every other industrialized country in the world is spending less than half that; concerned, as the other side is and this side is, with the fiscal condition of our government, when we know the biggest drivers of our medium-term deficits are rising Medicare and Medicaid costs, and the biggest drivers of those are health care costs. We are all in this together.
It is a great pleasure for me to turn now to the Senator from Oregon, who will talk about the fact that this isn't just about trying to cover one small group of Americans, it is about all 300 million Americans in this country.
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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wish to thank the Senator from Oregon for pointing out the incredible lack of stability that exists in the system today.
The bankruptcy numbers are unbelievable. In my State, I think roughly 62 percent of all bankruptcies are caused by health care issues. Of those health-care-related bankruptcies, 78 percent, nearly 80 percent of them, are bankruptcies involving people who actually were covered by insurance. We are not getting done the job that needs to get done. That is why we are here today to talk about these issues.
I am going to call on the Senator from Virginia to talk a little bit about how, under the current system, we pay for the uninsured in our country today, but we do it in the most inefficient way possible. Just one fact from my State: We have a public hospital in Denver called Denver Health. It is an incredibly well-run hospital, run by a person named Dr. Patty Gabow. She told me they did a study a couple of years ago that showed they spent, in 1 year, $180 million for uncompensated care for people employed by small businesses who could not get insurance at work.
I will yield for the Senator from Virginia.
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Mr. BENNET. I thank the Senator from Virginia. I particularly, on behalf of all the colleagues here today, thank him for his leadership over the last couple of months on the question of personal responsibility: how do we incentivize people to make sure they are doing a better job to take care of themselves; how do we work with some of the corporations in this country that have done an extraordinary job of lowering health care costs by incentivizing folks to take personal responsibility for their health care. I have enjoyed working on those issues with him and look forward to continuing to work on it.
Next, we have the Senator from New Mexico who is here to talk about another myth, which is the idea that our health care system always works well for everybody.
We have great things in our health care system. We have some of the best health care technology in the world. We have some of the greatest treatments in the world. If you are going to get sick, a place you want to get sick, depending on what you have, is the United States. But we are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and the Senator from New Mexico is going to comment on that.
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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from New Mexico, and I am reminded of the trips I made around my State during recess when everybody settled down and we could actually get into a conversation about how well the status quo was working for people. It took about 40 minutes into the meeting before people would stand up and start to say: Let me tell you my story about how I was laid off from a company or lost my insurance, had a preexisting condition, couldn't get new insurance and, therefore, can't get the health care I need.
That is the kind of conversation we need to have about what we are facing. I was left with the impression from people in Colorado that while they don't like the status quo, they are worried that we are going to make it worse. We can't blame people for thinking that, as they watch what is on TV every night or on the Internet. Our obligation is to make sure as we go through this legislative process, we deliver something that builds on our strengths, as the Senator said, but also fills in gaps that are clearly present and disrupting the lives of working families.
I turn now to the Senator from Illinois to talk about the public option and choice. It is apparent to me, as people have begun to see there might be a requirement that they have insurance, what I am hearing from people is they want more choices, not fewer. They don't want to necessarily be forced into a private insurance plan. They want their family to have choices. Today the Senator from Illinois will talk about the public option.
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Mr. BENNET. I thank the Senator from Illinois for his eloquent discussion about trying to provide more choice rather than less to our working families. A lot of what we are trying to do with health care reform--and I hope the bills will improve over the coming weeks--is give people more control over choices with respect to their doctors and their medical care, to make sure that it is doctors and patients making decisions about treatment and not insurance company bureaucrats or a government bureaucrat.
Next I will yield for the Senator from Delaware to talk about why this is such an urgent problem and why we need to address it now and not wait, as we have over the last 20 years. As the President said, the first President to call for health care reform was Teddy Roosevelt. Here we sit in 2009, confronted by the same sorts of arguments about why today is the wrong time to do this and why we ought to kick the can down the road for another generation of Americans.
I turn the floor over to the Senator from Delaware.
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Mr. BENNET. I thank the Senator from Delaware for pointing out that maintaining the status quo, being unwilling to act, in fact, is making a choice.
It is making a choice about having another decade of double-digit cost increases every year. It is making a choice about devoting a fifth of our economy to health care when every other industrialized country in the world is devoting less than half of that. It is making a choice about having increasing and mounting and rising deficits in the outyears.
I thank the Senator from Delaware for pointing out that we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity right now to try to address a number of these issues at the same time.
Mr. President, our closer today is the Senator from New Hampshire, who is here to talk about what this reform is about versus what some have claimed it is about. I welcome her here this morning.
Let me turn the floor over to the Senator from New Hampshire.
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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wish to thank the Senator from New Hampshire for closing in such a perfect way today. I agree with her that for far too long Washington special interest politics has gotten in the way of fixing this system, and the result has been enormously unfortunate for working families all across the United States of America.
When your median family income is going down by $300 over a decade, and the cost of health insurance is doubling over the same period of time--by the way, in my State, it has gone down by $800--and the cost of insurance has gone up 97 percent, the cost of higher education has gone up by 50 percent over the same period of time, essentially what we are saying to working families is: You are going to take home less, but you have to pay more for, not ``nice to haves'' but things that are critical to move your family ahead to have the kind of stability that is essential for everybody to have a shot at the American dream, and for some reason we in Washington cannot figure out how to make some changes that would help working families and small businesses all across the United States.
That moment has come now, and we are here. We have the next few weeks to figure this out. I believe we will. I am enormously optimistic we can pass a bill in this Senate and in the Congress that the President can sign that will make a material impact, an improvement in the lives of working families and those employed by small businesses all over this country. In fact, anything less than that should be unacceptable to all of us.
I hope we can do that in a bipartisan way. I hope we can have cooperation across the aisle and the best ideas from both parties as we design it. But, to me, the most important thing is to make sure people who live in my State do not need to endure another decade of double-digit cost increases every single year, do not need to endure another decade where they lose their health insurance because they lose a job or because they have a preexisting condition or because, as happened in my State last week, a baby was born who was deemed to be too heavy to insure--fortunately, the insurance company did the right thing in the end--to not have another decade where people are wrestling with their insurers to get paid, so that doctors and people providing health care do not have to spend 30 percent of their overhead or more trying to get reimbursed for services they provided to their patients.
I am optimistic in part because of all my wonderful colleagues who were here this morning. I thank them for joining me today.
Mr. President, with that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
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