30-Something Working Group

Floor Speech

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, I am glad to join my colleagues on the floor this afternoon to talk about the final stages of our push to complete what has been a very long journey to bring health care to the millions of Americans that don't have it, to lower the cost of care for the millions of small businesses and families that can't afford it, and to start finally doing something about the great burden to taxpayers in this entire economy of the cost of a system that outpaces all of our competitive neighbors across the globe by a two-fold margin. We will hopefully be joined here on the floor by some other Members who are just as interested in reform this afternoon.

Let me start out by saying that this really should be a bipartisan issue. Health care reform, which touches individuals no matter whether they are a Republican or a Democrat, whether they are a liberal or a conservative, should be a bipartisan issue. We should be sitting here working together to try to pass reform. Because when it comes down to it, there is, I think, broad bipartisan agreement, both in this House and out in the public, about what the problems are out there.

We have too many people that are playing by the rules, doing everything we ask, getting the job, being employed, putting food on their table for their family and their kids but they can't get health care insurance. Five out of six of the uninsured in this country are part of a family that have at least one full-time worker.

We agree that it doesn't make sense that there are so many people who are doing everything we ask and simply can't afford to have health care insurance. We also agree that it doesn't make too much sense that doctors have seen a lot of the joy be taken out of the practice of medicine as they spend more and more of their time filling out paperwork, hiring claims managers and fighting with insurance companies.

We need to get physicians back to the practice of medicine and get the practice of medicine away from the practice of arguing over reimbursement.

We agree that the cost of our current system cannot be sustained, whether it is for an individual business that has seen its health care insurance premiums increase by 120 percent over the past 10 years or whether it is for the employees, the families that make up that small business or that large business who have seen their share of health care insurance costs increase by a similar percentage.

We all should agree that the current trajectory of costs for this government is unsustainable as well. The reason that Medicare is on a path towards bankruptcy is not just because you have an enormous amount of individuals, the baby boomer generation, entering Medicare age. It is also because we have constructed a system which pays far too often for volume of care that has nothing to do with quality of care, and we are paying for a lot of medicine out there, billions of dollars worth of medicine, that isn't adding any actual value to the health care that people get.

I bet you if we got together a random sample of Republican and Democrat Members of Congress or Republican and Democratic voters or liberal and conservative voters, I bet you there wouldn't be too much disagreement that we as a society and as a government should step up to the plate and do something about the fact that we have got too many people playing by the rules who don't have insurance, that we have too many businesses that are bearing the cost of an unsustainably high system, that we have too many physicians that are spending too much time arguing for reimbursement and not on providing care, and this government is spending too much money on medicine that doesn't add value.

The difference, though, comes in our commitment to doing something about the problem. That is where the rubber hits the road. It is one thing to go out into the public as an elected official and say that you understand people's problems, that you feel their pain when it comes to health care. It is another thing to have the courage to come down to this House floor and put your vote and put your advocacy where your mouth is.

That is the problem that we have in the House of Representatives right now, that it is only one side of the aisle that is proposing real, sustainable, transformational reform to our health care system which provides answers to those businesses, those families and those taxpayers who know in their hearts that the status quo is unsustainable. It is unfortunately the Republican minority here in the House of Representatives and in the Senate which has decided to be the Party of No, which has decided to stand in the way of health care reform.

Now, I want to take my Republican friends at their word. I want to believe them when they say that they are for reform as well. But it has been about 135 days since the Republican leadership announced that they were going to put a plan with real words and text and ideas behind it so that the people out there could compare the proposal for health care reform that has been proposed by President Obama and the proposal put before the American people by the Republican minority. Well, it is 133 days later, over 4 months later since this declaration was made, and we are still waiting. We are still waiting.

Now, I don't know why that is. There are some out there that will say that the objective of the Republicans is to stop reform from happening for political reasons; that they think they can do damage to the Speaker or to the Senate President or to the President by stopping health care reform from happening. And those critics look back to the years when President Clinton tried to address this issue, and it was widely understood that then-Minority Leader Gingrich decided that his path to the speakership laid in destroying the President's plans to try to reform our health care system.

I hope that is not the case. I hope that our Republican colleagues here are not opposing health care just because they see political gain in it.

There are some out there that say that the opponents of health care reform are allied with the status quo, are allied with the insurance companies and drug companies and other industries that may not have an interest in reform. That is certainly the emerging case, that the major health care industries that certainly have a lot to lose from a system that transfers the profits they are making and turns it into help for middle class families are going to try to stop reform from happening.

I will say I think a lot of people have been pleasantly surprised that there has not been as much opposition to this debate as maybe one would have expected from the insurance and drug industries. Frankly, I congratulate them on making an honest attempt to be part of this process. But, as we have seen over the last few weeks, those industries are starting to inch away from the table, potentially starting to prepare to bring the full weight of their money and influence down on stopping health care reform.

I hope that my Republican colleagues aren't stopping health care reform from happening because of their alliance with some of those industries. But if it is not because they have something to gain politically, if it is not because the Republicans have an alliance with the status quo industries, then we are sort of left at a loss to figure out why, if we agree on the problem, if we agree that something has to be done, why we can't come together on trying to fix it. We are now entering the final stages of this debate, but it is not too late for us to be able to come together here and get behind some common solutions to what is undeniably a common problem.

So we are going to continue to come down to this floor and call out our Republican colleagues who seem to be out there saying they are for reform, but when it comes to the actual process of coming up with a bill are nowhere to be found, and when they say they are going to come up with their own bill, leave us waiting for over 4 months to find it.

We are going to continue then, in absence of real alternate solutions or cooperation from the Republicans, to press our ideas forward, to talk about how we can bring together this Nation around some basic principles of fairness; that insurance companies shouldn't be able to kick you off your insurance when you get sick; that insurance should actually go back to being insurance so you don't have to be charged 5 times, 10 times as much just because you have cancer; that we should be able to pool together the purchasing power of individuals and small businesses so that they no longer are negotiating with the insurance companies just based on behalf of their one family or their 10 employees; that we can still base reform off of the free market, but we can try to structure the free market in a way to give a little leg up to all the people getting the short end of the stick in the existing market, small businesses and individuals.

We can reach out a helping hand to those people that I mentioned at the outset who are playing by the rules, who are doing everything we asked them to do, and help them buy insurance. Not by buying it for them, not by handing them a government-run insurance program, but by helping individuals with tax credits that will partner with their own money to try to buy insurance for themselves and giving them the option to buy into the same type of plan that every Member of Congress, every veteran, every soldier, every Medicare beneficiary has, a

government-sponsored health care insurance plan.

We are going to talk about those ideas, because those are unifying ideas that bring together businesses, individuals, families and taxpayers, to try to get insurance to people that don't have it, to try to lower the cost of insurance for businesses that are being crippled by our current system, and to try to put back some fairness into the insurance markets for American families.

I hope we are in the final stages. I hope it is not too late to get bipartisan cooperation on this. But we can't wait any longer.

I am so glad to be joined on the floor by my good friend from Ohio, Mr. Tim Ryan.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Ryan, what comes with that is a defense of the current system, and whether it is part of their 1-minute remarks when they come down to the floor or not, for the party who had control of this House for 12 years, who for eight of those years had the White House at their disposal as well, they had plenty of time when they had control of the House, the Senate and the presidency to do something about health care, and they didn't do it. So you combine that inaction along with their opposition to this reform effort and you get a party which is the party now that is defending the existing health care system as it stands today.

Listen, we don't govern by polls here, but I think some polls give you a little idea on where the American people are coming down on this fight. All the polls that I have seen that ask this question, if health care reform fails, who will you blame, make it pretty clear that they know that if health care reform falls apart, which I don't think it will, that it will be the Republicans who sent it down.

That is not what people want, because they know the status quo doesn't work. They understand that this mythology of competition just isn't for real; that in half the States in this country there is one insurer that controls 50 percent or more of the business, and in three-quarters of the States there are two insurers that control almost two-thirds of the business. If you are a small businessman right now, because you are only bargaining on behalf of a few of your employees, you are paying about 120 percent or more than what some of your bigger competitors are paying.

The competition just doesn't work today.

So, listen, if you want to talk about what to be scared of, the real thing to be scared of is doing nothing, is allowing for the cost of this system to continue to explode for families and for small businesses to get the short end of the stick when it comes to their inability to bargain with insurance companies. What we really should be scared about is for politics to drive a wedge into the heart of doing what's right for this economy and our families, Mr. Ryan.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Reclaiming my time, I think, Mr. Altmire, that our Republican friends know that, because there's a reason they didn't do the 80 percent while they were here and in control of the House and in control of the Presidency, because it does necessitate the other 20 percent being done at the same time.

We all agree that preexisting conditions shouldn't be a reason for exclusion from health care, but as you said, you have to make a tough decision to get there, and that's that we have to ask all individuals to participate in health care. And then you have to be prepared to do the things necessary for those that don't have the means to be able to comply with that mandate. Those are the hard things that have prevented health care reform from happening.

But you know what? If this job was just about the easy things, there would be a lot more people that would want to be Members of Congress. But this job is about doing the hard stuff. This job is about making some decisions that aren't easy regarding how you get to universal coverage, regarding how you expand the life expectancy of Medicare.

I mean it's worth talking about that for a moment, Mr. Ryan. We get all sorts of Republican Members coming down here decrying the fact that this bill starts to slow the rate of growth of Medicare, but they're the same exact people who come down here and talk about how Medicare is so broken and how it's going to go bankrupt and how Congress has to come and do something about it. Well, guess what? There are only two ways that you can fix Medicare. You've either got to send less money out of Medicare or you've got to bring more money in.

So our solution is, before we ask workers and employers to pay more in Medicare taxes, let's make Medicare efficient first. Let's get rid of the waste and the fraud and the abuse that's in Medicare today so that we don't have to ask more people to pay into the system or that we don't have to raise the age of eligibility.

Yet we have people out there trying to scare seniors, telling them Medicare is going to be cut without telling them that all that's being cut are the payments to insurance companies and the drug companies and the money that goes to health care systems that are performing a lot of extra treatments and procedures without any extra value and that their benefits actually get better, Mr. Ryan.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Ms. Wasserman Schultz, the awe and esteem you were already held in before the announcement that over the last year and a half you have been battling with this has only increased knowing that you were able to keep up the pace of your work schedule while going through that ordeal.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Thank you.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. You also know there are a lot of people out there who when they get sick can't continue working.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Right.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I have told the story on this floor at least once or twice before about a gentleman who I met not more than a few weeks ago who contracted gallbladder cancer. He was an hourly worker at a factory in New Briton, and he was going to have to miss a number of weeks of work to get the initial treatment. That wasn't okay by his employer and his employer let him go because of the work that he was going to miss and might miss in the future. He is now unemployed because of his illness, and he is collecting unemployment benefits, but almost every dime of his unemployment is going to pay for the health care costs that he still has to bear.

And so everyone I think out there, now more than ever, as this economy puts more people in economic peril, realize that they are not just one paycheck away from potentially losing health care, but they are one diagnosis away from losing their job and the health care that comes with it.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. And Mr. Sarbanes, we've got to remember, health insurance is a business, it's a for-profit business. There used to be a lot of nonprofit insurers out there, including in Connecticut, but they're disappearing. In Connecticut, I'm not sure that we have a nonprofit health care insurer that's a viable alternative for folks in our State.

And so as a business, I guess you can understand that what we perceive as payments for necessary health care insurance companies term ``medical loss''; that's what they call the money that they pay out for health insurance claims, ``medical loss.'' Because to them it's a loss; any money that they pay out to pay claims is less money that they can keep for profit or as a return on their investment to shareholders.

Now, it's a business, so I'm not going to begrudge them the fact that in the end their motivation is often profit investment return, but it speaks to the fact that the interests of the insurance industry are not always perfectly aligned with the interests of their beneficiaries and of patients out there, and it is up to a fair-minded, commonsense government to try to even out that playing field. That is why this health care reform bill has to have all of those provisions that you talked about.

Now I want to just talk for one second about the debate here that we're having because we would like to think that there is consensus around these issues. We talked a little already about the fact that the tough decisions are the ones that Republicans were unwilling to make for a very long time. But there was a 27, 28-page memo that was going around Washington about 6 months back written by Frank Luntz, the sort of pollster-in-vogue for the Republican Party. It was a 28-page memo on how you kill health care reform. It wasn't an analysis of what the bill actually was, it wasn't a summary of the proposals the Democrats had put forth and a critique of those proposals, it just said, Here are the words and the phrases that you need to use in order to kill health care reform without evaluating whether it was a good or bad thing to kill health care reform. The supposition from the beginning was of course we're going to try to kill health care reform.

It is no coincidence that the phrases in that memo are the phrases that you will hear over and over again uttered on the House floor by Republicans, by many of their allies in talk radio, ``government-run health care,'' ``socialist takeover of health care.'' The same phrases that polled well to people who were willing to stop health care reform are the same phrases that are used on this House floor--no connection to the bill we are actually debating, the bill that the Congressional Budget Office actually says over a 10-year period will expand the number of people who have private health care insurance, not contract it, but will expand the number of people that are insured by private insurance companies.

But this debate doesn't seem for one side of the aisle to be about really the merits here; this debate seems to be about certain catch phrases and sound bites that will stop reform from happening.

Ms. Wasserman Schultz, as you mention, every day, as we sort of emerge from the heat of August, it seems that more and more people, whether it be in the public opinion polls or in the calls to our office, are getting behind the idea of health care reform happening. I think that is due to the simple uncovering of these distortions and sound bites. People are realizing that the phrases they hear on TV--it's not all from Republican Members of Congress, a lot of it is from the folks who are in the news entertainment industry--they're figuring out that there is a very big difference between rhetoric and reality.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. And the consequences of standing in the way of reform, as we've talked a little bit earlier in this hour, is defending the status quo. I think that there has been an awakening out there that that is just unsustainable. Mr. Sarbanes talked about 20 percent, 30 percent increases in insurance in Maryland, the same thing in Connecticut. Our main insurer that covers more than half of the individuals in our State announced just this year a 30 percent increase in premiums.

People have woken up to the fact that the status quo cannot work. Whatever the objective is of people who are trying to stand in the way of reform, if the result of that is another year of double-digit increases of premiums, if the result of that is another year of millions of Americans being denied care simply because they're sick, if the result of that is another year of the Medicare program being on a trajectory to bankruptcy, that just doesn't work for people.

So I think we have seen this momentum towards reform, in part because people have discovered that the catch phrases and the slogans out there from the opponents of reform don't have much grounding in the text of the bill. And the consequence of going with the people who say, do nothing, preserve the existing system, is disastrous for families and potentially ruinous for this government.

Mr. Sarbanes

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