Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act Of 2009 - Motion To Proceed - Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, continuing along this line--because both of us have practiced medicine--I took care of families in Wyoming as an orthopedic surgeon for the last 25 years; Dr. Coburn in Oklahoma for longer than that. We know there are things that need to be corrected. There are improvements that need to be made. We need to fix what is wrong with the system, and that is what I hear every weekend when I go home. It is what I have talked about in the surgeons' lounge in the hospital. That is what I have talked about in the office with my patients. So we need to fix what is wrong with the health care system. But whatever we do, we have to make sure we do not make matters worse. So I say to my friend from Oklahoma, absolutely, my concerns are that this absolutely is going to make matters worse. It is going to increase premiums for families who have insurance. It is going to take almost $500 billion away from our seniors who depend upon Medicare for their health care. It is going to raise taxes on everyone in America--not just on people above a certain income level, on everyone.

They all are going to be impacted when you look at all the taxes that are going to be thrown on this. It is going to be passed along. People in America understand that. People know exactly what is happening here. That is why when I had a telephone townhall meeting earlier this week and asked: ``Is this the right way or the wrong way? Do you think you are going to pay more?'' Everybody thinks they are going to pay more. When asked: Do you think your system is going to get better or worse? They think it is going to get worse. Americans do not want to pay more and get less. That is not the value we as Americans want. It is not what we expect.

People say: Don't cut my Medicare. Especially, if you are going to try to do anything with Medicare, do it to save Medicare, which is already going to go broke in the year 2017. Don't do it to start some whole new, big government program. They say: Don't raise my taxes. People want to know what is going to happen to them, what is going to happen to their family.

What happens if they get sick? Well, they look at this and they say: We want practical, commonsense health solutions, not higher insurance premiums, not higher taxes, not Medicare cuts, not more government control over health care decisions. We want to have lower costs, improved access to providers, more choices. That is the whole crux of why we are doing health care reform, at least that is what I was told 9 or 10 months ago. When they said: We need health care reform. I said: Yes, we do.

I served 5 years in the Wyoming State Senate. We did major pieces of legislation, always in a bipartisan manner, as the senior Senator from Maine has said. Now we are trying to find a way where somebody is trying to get just the minimum number of votes to pass this--not because they want to say, let's see what we have that will work for people.

As doctors, we try to find solutions that work for people. We do not say: What is the very minimum we can do? That is what we are seeing here. We are saying: What can we do to get it right? What this bill is saying is: What can we do to get 60 votes, the minimum we can do to get this, to drag it over the next step along the line--not to solve the health care issue that faces our country.

We know we need to deal with access to care, quality of care, and the cost of care. As my colleague from Oklahoma said earlier, it is the cost of care that needs the attention right now. Eighty-five percent of people like the care they have but they do not like the cost of that care. So what can we do to help get that cost down?

Everything I read and everything I know and everything I study and everything I believe from my years of practicing medicine and taking care of patients tells me this is going to drive the cost up for everyone in the country. And that is not just me.

The dean of Harvard Medical School said it just the other day. He gave the whole thing a failing grade. He said those ``people who favor the legislation are engaged in collective denial.'' And he went on to say that when you talk about the problems of cost and access and quality--with the cost, he said, this ``will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it'' and will ``do little or nothing to improve quality.''

Well, if you are going to spend much more money, you ought to get increased quality. But the problem is not that we are not spending enough money. We are spending enough money in the system. Half of all the money we spend in this country for health care goes for just 5 percent of the people--people who eat too much, exercise too little, and smoke. But there is nothing in this bill anywhere that gives an incentive to those individuals, to that one person to say: Hey, look, we want you to quit smoking. We want to help you lose weight. We want to help you get your cholesterol under control, through exercise get your diabetes under control, get your blood sugar down. There is nothing that gives an incentive to any one individual.

Now, there is a lot of money in here for roadways and streetlights and jungle gyms to encourage community health. But that does not work. What works better is an individual incentive to some person to say you are going to save this much money, get this much money, if you take responsibility for your own health. A lot of people try to do that on their own. But those are the 95 percent, not the 5 percent who are costing this country 50 percent of its health care dollars.

But I will ask my colleague from Oklahoma, do you see anything in here that focuses on that individual patient, a patient-centered approach, as opposed to a government-centered approach or an insurance company-centered approach? I see nothing here that is really focused on the individual patient, giving them incentives, giving them opportunities, giving that individual, American citizen more control, more freedom of choice, to help stay healthy and keep down the cost of their care.

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