Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

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Mr. CRAPO. Madam President, I also rise to speak about the health care legislation the Senate is preparing to consider on the Senate floor. I will begin my remarks, as my colleague from Georgia has done, by referring to the bill which the Finance Committee has put out. This is it. It is 1,502 pages which, interestingly, we did not have before us when we considered it in the Finance Committee.

I think most people in the country realize right now that as the Finance Committee proceeded through 2 full weeks of markup on this legislation, the legislation had not actually been written. Even though the very first amendment, which we brought, was an amendment to say that before we would be forced to vote on a bill, we should see the bill for 72 hours and have the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, score on the bill for 72 hours so that we and the American public could understand what was in it, that was not allowed. We cast our final votes in the Finance Committee on the Finance Committee's bill--well, the Finance Committee's concept paper. This bill didn't yet exist. We did have an idea about what concepts were intended to be in it, but the bill itself didn't exist.

The reason I bring that up right now is because this is actually not going to be the bill we consider on the Senate floor. As soon as the Senate Finance Committee finished with this bill, the majority leader and the chairmen of a couple of the relevant committees--I presume with some personnel from the White House--got together behind closed doors in the Capitol Building and began drafting a new bill to merge this bill with a previous bill that had come out of the HELP Committee bill in the Senate. That new bill has now been sent to CBO for a score, but we don't know what is in it either.

In fact, we are told it is concepts and options that are being submitted to CBO. I am not even sure if that new bill has yet been written, but I do know no one, except those who have submitted it to CBO, know what is in it.

Well, we have a good idea of what is in the health care bill the Senate Finance Committee put out, and I expect a lot of what was in this Senate Finance Committee bill will make it into this new bill that someday maybe the American public and the rest of the Members of this Chamber will be able to see. As we approach the health care issue, I think it is important for us to understand exactly what it is we are expected to do by the American people and what it is we are doing with the health care legislation.

Most Americans want health care reform. But when they say that, the vast majority of them mean they want Congress to take swift and decisive action to bring under control the spiraling costs of health care and the spiraling costs of health care insurance. As a part of that, they want to see increased access for those who are uninsured, whose burden of coverage and health care falls on the taxpayers. That is the core focus, the purpose behind the drive in America for health care reform.

Well, what does the legislation we passed out of the Finance Committee do? With regard to the cost of insurance, it will not cause the cost of insurance to go down. It will, in fact, drive up the cost of insurance at even faster rates of growth than would have occurred without the legislation. What does it do for coverage of those who are uninsured? It establishes an extremely expensive new government program that would provide tax credits--or what are called renewable tax credits--for those at certain income levels to provide the ability for them to obtain coverage. But of the 47 million who are uninsured in the United States today, the bill still leaves approximately 25 million of them uninsured.

What it does put into place for these two outcomes on the major reasons for reform--increased cost of insurance and only about 50 percent reduction of the uninsured--is a massive new amount of Federal control over the health care industry, a massive new entitlement program that will cost, according to CBO, approximately $829 billion of new spending, and then offsets that try to address the growing costs of the Federal Government that it represents by about $404 billion worth of cuts in Medicare and $506-or-so billion of new taxes, fees, and penalties.

Remember the discussion I started with about the fact that the American people wanted to see the cost curve on health care bend down? We will hear it said that this bill bends down the cost curve. Well, it doesn't bend down the health care cost curve, and it doesn't bend down the health care insurance cost curve. All it does is try to address the impact of the phenomenal amount of new spending--$829 billion--by raising taxes and cutting Medicare in amounts that are greater than the amount of the cost in the bill.

Well, what kind of impact will these increases in taxes have? First and foremost, I want to return to what my colleague, Senator Grassley, recently pointed out. In the discussion of this issue, President Obama made it clear as a candidate, and he has repeatedly made it clear as President, that he will not sign legislation that imposes a tax increase on people making less than $250,000 in the United States. These are his remarks on September 12 during the campaign in New Hampshire, which, again, he has repeated consistently:

And I can make a firm pledge: No family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase--not your income taxes, not your payroll taxes, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.

Well, what does this bill do? This bill squarely increases the taxes on the middle class in the United States. The full tax burden of this bill, including all of the taxes and fees and penalties that are included in it, is over $ 1/2 trillion. Experts have now told us that the majority, in fact the significant majority of those taxes and those increased fees and penalties, will fall on the backs of those who make less than $250,000. We don't have the data yet, but, in fact, the impact on people who make less than $120,000 will be a huge portion of these new taxes and fees. Yet how can that be allowed to happen with the President making this pledge?

I think the American people need to pay attention. In essence, what we have represented is a huge increase in spending in the Federal Treasury--$829 billion under the Finance Committee plan. It is expected to be closer to $900 billion under the plan that was devised recently and submitted to CBO. Nonetheless, it is a massive increase in Federal spending, matched by equally massive cuts and tax increases--cuts in Medicare and tax increases--to make it appear that the impact on the deficit is marginal. But don't be fooled. When those who support this approach defend it, they will tell us it bends the cost curve. The cost curve they are talking about is the cost to the Federal Government. They are not telling us the cost of the Federal Government--the expenditures of the Federal Government--will be going down. What they are telling us is the expenditures will not be going up faster than the taxes and the cuts in Medicare are going up.

It is important for the American public to recognize that this legislation represents yet again one huge step of the Federal Government into management and control of the health care economy, and that huge new step of the Federal Government into management of the economy will be financed squarely on the backs of the middle class with a huge tax increase. That is not what America was asking for.

So to summarize, Madam President, what do we have? We have a proposal that will not bend the cost curve; it will, in fact, cause the cost curve on which everyone in America is focusing--the cost of health care and the cost of insurance--to go up. It will not achieve universal coverage for those who do not have access to insurance today, but it will put the Federal Government much more in charge and control of our health care economy and will grow the Federal Government by nearly $1 trillion of new spending at the expense of $ 1/2 trillion of tax increases and $400 billion of Medicare cuts.

That is not the kind of health care reform our Nation needs. It is not the kind of health care reform the American people have asked for. We should change the debate, and we should begin focusing on those kinds of common ground areas that we know how to identify where we can bend the cost curve--the true cost curve--down, where we can do so without raising taxes on the American people, and we can do so without devastating the Medicare programs of our country.

With that, Madam President, I yield the floor.

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