Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act Of 2009--Motion To Proceed
Floor Speech
SERVICE MEMBERS HOME OWNERSHIP TAX ACT OF 2009--MOTION TO PROCEED -- (Senate - November 21, 2009)
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Mr. CORNYN. I express my gratitude to the Senator from Tennessee for leading this important discussion on Medicaid. If I can pull back for a moment, I think it is important because this is such a complex subject, as we can see from this 2,074-page bill. We need to define our terms. Medicaid, obviously, is a program for low-income people, shared by our State and Federal Governments. Medicare is for seniors, paid for entirely by the Federal trust fund, $38 trillion in unfunded federal liabilities to two entitlement programs, both of which are in terrible financial shape. Rather than make this better, this bill makes it worse. I will describe very quickly how in my State of Texas. I have watched on C-SPAN and on the floor Senators come here and say tonight we are having merely a procedural vote on whether to proceed to the debate.
I thought we had been having a debate about health care reform for the last year or so. I point out that under the Senate rules, we will not be able to change one period, one comma, one sentence, one part of this bill unless we can get 60 votes to do so. So the increase in premiums, the taxes on small businesses and the middle class, the cuts in Medicare, this expansion of Medicaid--all of these are a fait accompli unless 60 Senators vote to change it. That is under the rules of the Senate.
It is not true, in my humble opinion, that people can come in here and say: We are going to vote yes to proceed tonight at 8 o'clock, but it doesn't make any difference, the debate is just beginning. Not so.
I again thank the Senator from Tennessee for raising this concern. Both of our Tennessee colleagues have been in the forefront of discussing this issue.
I think this is shameful. The expansion of Medicaid in this bill to cover 60 million Americans is shameful. It consigns people to a health care gulag which they cannot get out of, where they get bad outcomes in terms of their health care, where they cannot find doctors who will treat them at the low rates paid for by Medicaid, and it bankrupts our States.
The Medicaid officials in Texas have told me, after their preliminary review of this 2,074-page bill, it will cost Texas taxpayers, in addition to their Federal liability, $20 billion over the next 10 years.
Our friends who have been Governors have told us, as Governors and as State legislators, they have to make terribly hard choices. But when the Federal Government imposes an unfunded mandate on the States to pick up $20 billion over the next 10 years, what does that do to our ability to do other things, such as law enforcement, higher education, and the like? It shoves those to the side because the Federal Government is going to jam this down the States' throats--another unfunded mandate--and it disrupts those States, as the Senator says, that are operating on balanced budgets. They do not have the luxury of printing money like the Federal Government.
Mr. CORKER. Mr. President, did the Senator from Texas see this weekend where college students in California were having public protests about the huge increase in tuition out there? Yet here we are getting ready to pass something that is going to drive that up even more because the State of California will have to cover more Medicaid recipients without the money being provided. So this is going to exacerbate that situation. I don't know if the Senator saw it this weekend.
Mr. CORNYN. The Senator is correct. It is a 32-percent increase in fees and tuition, and that is in California alone, which is bankrupt already. This is the direct result of the irresponsibility coming out of Washington, DC, forcing more costs on them.
I know there are other colleagues who want to talk about this topic, and I want to have this continued conversation. I think this is a good format for parsing what is in this bill.
Let me mention one anecdote in Dallas, TX. If you are a Medicaid recipient, or a low-income child or beneficiary in Dallas, TX, only 38.6 percent of the doctors will see a new Medicaid patient--38.6 percent. In other words, 61 percent will have restricted access to Medicaid because, as the Senator from Tennessee and the Senator from Wyoming pointed out, it only pays about 72 percent of what a private insurance policy would cover.
Mr. President, 85 percent of Americans have private insurance, and they pretty much like what they have. They think it costs too much, and we agree. We want to help them bring down that cost. But we have these safety net programs which, frankly, do a lousy job. They promise coverage, but they deny access because of low reimbursement rates.
Let me give an anecdote of what this means to 6-year-old Ruth Guerra in Dallas, TX. I took this article from the Dallas Morning News, dated June 3. It says:
When Ruth Guerra, 6, tries to write, holding the pencil puts just enough pressure on her left pinky to make it bleed. With her condition, if she falls down while playing or a classmate accidentally brushes against her, she bleeds.
Last week [her mother] Sandra Ramirez ..... took time off from her hourly job at the Dollar General after another one of Ruth's bleeding episodes.
Unfortunately, because she qualifies for Medicaid--and while people in Washington say: Isn't it great; we are going to give 60 million people Medicaid--what it means for Ruth Guerra is that she has to wait 6 months to get an appointment with a doctor who will actually see her. That is what I mean when I say this bill consigns 60 million people to a health care gulag they cannot get out of.
I agree with the Senator from Tennessee. We need to provide the American people with choices that Members of Congress have, among an array of choices. What this does with the mandates, with the force-feeding Medicaid on people such as Ruth Guerra and on the States, along with the huge budget deficits that are going to come from it is shameful.
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