Unemployment Compensation Extension Act Of 2009--Motion To Proceed

Floor Speech

UNEMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION EXTENSION ACT OF 2009--MOTION TO PROCEED -- (Senate - October 28, 2009)

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Alaska for organizing this presentation this morning. It is a pleasure to be here with my freshman colleagues to talk about health care reform in this country, something that is long overdue if we are going to end the double-digit cost increases our working families face every year and if we are to see small businesses continue to grow and thrive in this country and lead us out of the recession we are in.

As the Presiding Officer knows, in our State we have suffered a lot from a health care system that doesn't work. We see more and more of our families losing their insurance and fewer and fewer of our employers able to offer insurance, which is something they want to do for their employees. So it is high time for us to get these costs under control, and that will take innovation. In our State, we haven't waited on Washington. There are great examples of Coloradans who have pulled together to deliver high-quality health care at a lower cost.

A great example of what I am talking about is in Mesa County where Grand Junction is located. They have instituted what they call transitional care, where they have reduced the readmission rates at the hospital to about 2 percent. The national average is roughly 20 percent. One out of every five Medicare patients who is released from the hospital winds up in the hospital in the same month they were released. There are a lot of reasons for that. Those of us who have small children or are caring for parents know how many times we have to tell the same story over and over as we make our way from one doctor's office to the next. Many people forget to fill out their prescriptions or they do not have the kind of instructions they need to be able to take responsibility for their own care. In Mesa County they have solved that problem by creating a transitional model that makes sure when patients leave the hospital they do so with a coach--a coach who helps them go from the emergency room to their primary care physician and their mental health provider to get the care they need over a period of time.

I was very pleased that Chairman Baucus included in the Finance Committee version of this health care reform legislation the piece I wrote based on the work in Grand Junction that will compensate--reimburse--providers who set up a model such as the one in Mesa County that actually saves money. That is truly what this is all about--this tortuous path we have been on to try to get health care reform done--to have a very excellent end point which makes sure we are reducing the cost to our working families and, at the same time, increasing quality; that we are making sure we are not devoting a fifth of our gross domestic product to health care when every other industrialized country in the world, with whom we are competing, is devoting less than half that to health care.

There are probably a lot of details in this legislation that still need to be worked out, and I am sure there is room for improvement--there is always room for improvement--but the American people cannot go through one more decade like the last decade of having poorer and poorer coverage at a higher and higher cost. That is not the way our system should work. We can do better than that as Americans. We have shown we can do better than that in Colorado, in our State, and I am so pleased there are going to be communities all over the country that will have the opportunity to learn from each other and provide better transitional care for patients and more patient-centered care as we move through this health care debate.

I thank the Senator from Alaska for organizing this, and I yield the floor to him.

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