Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I thank our colleague from North Carolina for organizing this discussion this morning and for the other freshmen here yet again, week after week, to talk about the urgent need for health care reform in this country.

My colleague, Senator Udall from Colorado, did a wonderful job talking about the models we have of transitional care in Colorado, where we see some providers able to have merely a 3-percent readmission rate just because of the way they manage patients, patient-centered care, unlike the way we do it all across the country, which is the reason we are at a 20-percent readmission hospital rate in the United States.

If we would put in some of these commonsense practices and worry about outcomes more and worry less about how many tests were given, in this case we could reduce the expenditure by $18 billion annually and provide better quality care. It is just one of the many ideas that is bubbling up from States all across the country.

I wish to spend a couple minutes today talking about the absurd waste of time that is caused by our current system of insurance in the United States. We have two examples in Colorado that have recently been covered by the newspapers out there. The first is a story about gender discrimination when it comes to insurance. It is about a woman in my state, Peggy Robertson of Golden, CO, who was denied coverage because she had what was called a preexisting condition, which was the C-section that she had when she gave birth to her son. The insurance company said they would not cover her unless she became sterilized.

Peggy came and testified about this in the committee, and her story has been repeated by many people across the State of Colorado. But it got the attention of another person in our State named Matt Temme of Castle Rock, CO, who wrote a letter to the editor that I almost could not believe when I read it.

We followed up with Matt, and it turned out that it was true. Matt was denied coverage because his wife, who is insured--she has her own insurance--was pregnant. Matt is a 40-year-old commercial pilot from Castle Rock. He was furloughed from his job at the end of June. His wife Wendy is a paralegal, and she is covered through her employer. They have a 6-year-old son.

As I mentioned a minute ago, Wendy is pregnant. It was too expensive for Matt and his son to join his wife's plan. Because he was furloughed, he went out shopping for a new plan on the individual market, which he thought would be easy. He first checked with his previous company's health insurance. He filled out all the paperwork for himself and his son. He is healthy, he is 40 years old, and he is not eligible for coverage because his wife found out she was pregnant. He told the insurance companies: My wife is already covered by another insurer.

They said to him: That is true, but if she suffers a fatality while giving birth to her child, that child is going to become a dependent of yours and therefore will be on the insurance you buy and therefore we are not going to sell it to you.

So now Matt had to go out to the market again. They have three plans. They have the plan his wife is on, already covered; they have another plan for his 6-year-old son; and now Matt is on a version of a public option that we have in Colorado called Cover Colorado.

When I read this letter, when we heard this story, when we talked with Matt, it reminded me again of all the stories that I have heard--that all of us have heard--over these many months when we have been discussing health care about all the wasted evenings and conversations and fights that people have over their telephone just to get basic insurance for their families so they can have the kind of stability all of us want to have for our kids, for our grandkids, and for our families.

That is what this insurance reform is about. It is time for us to set aside the usual politics, the special interests that always have prevented us from getting something done, and deliver reform that creates stability for working families all across our country, deliver reform that allows us to consume a smaller portion of our gross domestic product than we are today, deliver reform that allows us to begin to put this Federal Government back on a path of fiscal stability. It is high time to put this politics aside.

I know in this country we can do better than that. In the end, we will do better. Our working families and small businesses will be real beneficiaries of the reform that we pass.

I thank the Senator from North Carolina for giving me the opportunity to be here this morning. I appreciate her very important leadership on this critical issue.

I yield the floor.

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