Republican Health Care Solutions
Floor Speech
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Mr. THOMPSON. This is a health risk, a serious health risk, for those of us who are carrying it around and, frankly, for the country. This is the Nancy Pelosi health care bill, 1,990 pages, and that's just part one.
Part two, I am sure we will see within the next 24 to 48 hours; that will be the manager's amendment. That will be all the buyouts, the bribes, the deals that are being made right now by the Speaker and my Democratic colleagues to buy their votes to support this.
I don't know what to expect. I don't know if my colleagues have a guess. We do a guess here in terms of the number of pages, this manager's amendment, which, frankly, will be all of the deals that are made. How many pages do you think the manager's amendment might be when we see this in the next 24, 48 hours?
Mr. COFFMAN of Colorado. I think it's about a couple of inches thick, would be my guess. The manager's amendment to the cap-and-trade, I think, was several hundred pages. I am speculating, but this is double the size of cap-and-trade. So let's go for 600 pages.
Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Six hundred. Do I have another bid?
Mrs. LUMMIS. The rumor I heard was 800.
Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. The gentlewoman from Wyoming says 800 pages. How about my good friend from Minnesota?
Mr. PAULSEN. Well, I am going to just gander a guess. It is going to be several inches thick, which is too thick for us to read in a short period of time, unfortunately, and probably for the public to have that right to know.
Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Now, that was a rather safe guess; a rather safe guess.
Yes, that manager's amendment is coming. And there are lots of just flawed approaches to health care here. Speaking as someone who worked in that field for almost 30 years as a manager in rural hospitals and a skilled nursing facility and many different settings, I want to talk just briefly about some of those, because it has to do with one of the charts you had up there about the promise to not add a dime to the debt, not a dime to the deficit.
This bill was based on the premise of Medicare growth being held at 4 percent. Now, why is that important? Well, Medicare is a significant amount of money, so 4 percent of Medicare is a lot of money. But let's talk about reality here, and that is what this bill lacks is a good dose of reality.
Medicare growth rates have been steady at 7 to 8 percent a year. That is just the reality of it. If you think about it, those in the baby boomer generation who are now retiring, becoming qualified beneficiaries under Medicare, that is a significant number of people adding to the Medicare rolls from this point forward. So, 7 to 8 percent.
If we just look back a year to 2008, the Medicare growth last calendar year alone was 9 percent, 9 percent, and yet this bill was based on holding Medicare at 4 percent. I think that is pretty flawed math. That is not even fuzzy math. That is just wrong.
We know that this is built on half a trillion dollars in new taxes, and you talked about some of those. Small businesses. Taxes on individuals who choose not to buy in, to buy insurance, are penalized. Medical devices will be taxed as an excise tax.
The other part of the funding mechanism is a half a trillion dollars in Medicare cuts. We have talked about that during other forums here, when already Medicare systematically has been underfunded from almost the day it was created. Medicare only pays today about 80 to 90 cents on every dollar of health care costs that a hospital or doctor has. And to do another half a trillion dollars in Medicare cuts, that is just wrong. The people that are going to suffer from that are the providers and older adults. This will bankrupt hospitals.
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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Well, I thank the gentlelady from Wyoming.
I think innovation is one of the things that our health care system fosters in this country. When you look at the advancements that we have had, whether it be in medical devices or lifesaving technology, diagnostic, invasive, noninvasive, lifesaving interventions, that comes out of the type of health care system that we have today. It is the way it has been designed and the way it works. It provides those encouragements.
I have a number of similar small businesses that started very small, I don't know if they started in somebody's garage, but started as small operations, and they developed tremendous innovations, innovations in terms of prostheses for individuals who have lost limbs.
Actually, one of them is an incredible small company developing a limb that is not just a powered limb, which is the cutting edge for a prosthesis, an artificial leg, but this one actually self-charges. In the use of it, that friction builds up the power.
The application of it is just tremendous, starting with our wounded warriors who rehabilitate and return to the field. This is an artificial limb and you don't have to plug it in at the end of the day. It recharges while you use it. We wouldn't get that innovation.
Any time we tax something, we repress it. We hold it back. We destroy it. This tax on medical devices is just, well, I agree, it would be a nail in the coffin of innovation for health care in this country.
Mr. PAULSEN. If the gentleman would yield, he raises a good point, because having visited Pennsylvania and knowing there are some technology sectors right in your district in particular, and there are many States, and maybe that is because some States don't have these medical device technologies growing, they are not being incubated. It is Massachusetts, it is California, it is Tennessee and Minnesota, which surprises me, because the Speaker being from California is proposing this tax. It is actually going to hurt many of these devices.
Again, we talked about the nature of the economy, almost 10 percent unemployment. We are going to be making it tougher to have very well, high-paying jobs, tougher for those companies to keep those jobs. It just doesn't make any sense to me.
Mrs. LUMMIS. One of the math items in this bill that just doesn't add up is the fact that they are going to be paying for 6 years of benefits under this bill with 10 years of revenue collections. And yet when we get, then, to that magical 11th year where we need to be able to pay for it as we go, obviously we won't be able to just stop providing benefits and have the taxes run for 4 years where we don't tap into them before we involve ourselves in the benefit component of the program again.
So that is a one-time in the first 10 years type of financial balancing act or financial gimmick that is being used in this bill to make it sound like it is in some way financially balanced. It is not, and it will suck more out of this economy in the second and ensuing 10 years and in decades when once again our children are going to be paying for it.
So, this bill really does defer to our children and grandchildren huge financial obligations that the people in this room feel is not only unnecessary, but highly inappropriate.
Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. If the gentlelady will yield, you are going down a tremendously important road here in terms of what this legacy of costs that we are passing along to our children and our grandchildren and great-grandchildren at this point is, on top of all the other deficits that have been accumulated by this Democrat-led Congress since January.
I had the opportunity to spend some time this morning with a former Congressional Budget Office director. And going back to the point of the flawed math here, of saying that growth in Medicare will be held at 4 percent, when we know that it is an average of 7 to 8, 9 percent last year, his estimates are this cost will actually be at somewhere around $1.8 trillion in terms of math.
To give us some idea, I just want to point to a project that actually is literally under our noses. It was a project that did not occur on our watch. This was years past, and it is a beautiful place to visit and we take our constituents there, the Capitol Visitor Center.
I certainly encourage people to come to Washington to visit that, but there is a prime example of estimates that were made, and in the end it was 300 percent more expensive than what the original cost estimates were. So even if we're at a trillion or $1.2 trillion or $1.8 trillion, and we know that we cannot afford that, where could these costs go once this legislation passes? Just based on the example of a project that we should have pretty good oversight on because it was being constructed right under our noses.
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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.
I just want to build quickly on affordability. And our Democratic colleagues have recognized this with this bill, and I just call attention to page 25, section 101, which is the national high-risk pool. These are the folks we should be doing something for. They're high risk, preexisting conditions. They have a difficult time accessing health insurance. And the language that's built into this, our Democratic colleagues recognize this isn't going to be sustainable. We're not going to be able to fund this. Within the legislative language it says, given once the money is spent and goes beyond the premiums checked, it allows the Secretary of Health and Human Services, if all are exhausted, to do three things: cut benefits, increase premiums, and create waiting lists. Page 25, section 101.
I think that's a general acknowledgment early in this bill. And if we can do that type of rationing for folks who are most at risk, who we should be doing health insurance reform for, what does it mean for the rest of us?
I thank the gentlewoman for coordinating tonight.
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