Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I thank Senator Begich.

My colleagues have been pointing out the importance of innovation. Senator Burris addressed how competition and the public option would increase innovation. Senator Shaheen just noted some of the models and efforts in her State. We need to share the insights of that throughout this Nation so we can take the best practices to produce the best quality results in every corner of our Nation.

I rise to speak about a different aspect of innovation; specifically, that in order for our citizens to benefit from this innovation, health care needs to be affordable. Currently, health care is on a road to unaffordability and inaccessibility. If we do not pass health care reform, costs will eat up a bigger and bigger share of the gross domestic product and our families' budgets.

More families will lose their insurance because they simply cannot afford it. Many other families will be forced into personal bankruptcy as medical bills spiral out of control. And, much worse, some Americans will die because of inadequate or delayed care. We cannot continue on this path.

First, health care has become increasingly unaffordable and will only get worse. This is true whether we look at it through a macroeconomic perspective, the family perspective, or the small business perspective. Looking at the economy as a whole, in 2008, health care spending in the United States reached $2.4 trillion. It is projected to reach $3.1 trillion by 2012, and if it continues in that fashion, it will reach $4.3 trillion by 2016. Add up those 10 years and what we find is we will be spending $30 trillion to $40 trillion for health care in just a 10-year period.

If we frame this through the family perspective, the cost increases are felt all over the Nation through double-digit annual increases in premiums. Workers are paying $1,600 more in premiums annually for family coverage now than they did 10 years ago. To put it differently, for many families, the cost has doubled over the last 8 years, and the cost will double again over the next 8 or 10 years. The result is that families who could afford health care a few years ago cannot afford it today, and many who can barely afford it today will not be able to afford it tomorrow.

Our small businesses feel the pain as well. At the Hawthorne Auto Clinic in Portland, the cost of premiums has gone from 9 percent of the payroll to 18 percent of the payroll in the last 5 years. That is a huge amount of money diverted from hiring more staff or increasing wages for the staff or from investing in more capital equipment. These costs are hurting our families and damaging our small businesses.

Second, as costs go up, more and more Americans will lose coverage. We are used to hearing there are 45 million Americans uninsured. But a recent study from the University of North Carolina estimates that 6 million Americans have been added to the ranks of the uninsured since 2007--6 million more uninsured since 2007--putting the number of Americans uninsured at 51 million to 52 million.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, more than 80 percent of the uninsured are from working families. Members of the family have jobs.

Take Karen Jeffrey from Ashland, OR. When she moved to Oregon from Hawaii, she tried to buy new insurance. Because

she had suffered from a broken hip and a bout of cancer 15 years earlier, she could not find affordable coverage. So Karen is simply waiting until she can qualify for Medicare at age 65. If a medical emergency strikes before that arrives, that medical incident will be devastating. If we do not act now, rising health care costs will cause financial ruin for millions of families.

A recent study in the American Journal of Medicine found that 62 percent of all bankruptcies filed in 2007 were from medical expenses. Of those who filed for bankruptcy due to medical problems, about three-fourths had health insurance. Even with insurance, many Americans are underinsured and devastated by a medical emergency. The impact of these bankruptcies reverberates throughout our families, throughout our economy. Every year 1.5 million families lose their home to foreclosure as a result of unaffordable medical costs.

We also know families pay with their lives. In September, a Harvard Medical School study showed that 45,000 people die in the United States each year, 1 every 12 minutes, because of a lack of health insurance and cannot get good care--45,000 Americans each year. That is more than the number of Americans who died in the Revolutionary War. It is roughly equal to the number of our soldiers who died in combat in Vietnam over a 16-year period. It is the equivalent of 30 Titanics sinking every year--Americans dying because of unaffordable health care.

We need health care reform that drives innovation. We have a tremendous number of models around the States to promote and improve, but we need to make health care affordable in order to get that innovation into the hands and benefits of our citizens. That is why we must proceed with health care reform now. There is no time to waste.

Mr. President, I thank Senator Begich for moderating this discussion and putting in the spotlight the role and importance of innovation.

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