Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act

Floor Speech

SERVICE MEMBERS HOME OWNERSHIP TAX ACT -- (Senate - December 08, 2009)

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I wish to thank our colleague from Virginia, Senator Warner, for his extraordinary leadership throughout this process of the freshmen coming together to see what we can do to move this legislation forward to improve it. I think a lot has been said about how the bill that was drafted by the HELP Committee, by the Finance Committee, and now by the majority leader is directionally correct in its efforts to get a handle on these skyrocketing costs. I think this amendment package will move us much further in the right direction of trying to hold down costs for our working families and small businesses across the country.

Throughout this entire debate and going back to the very beginning, what I have said is, no matter where you are on many of the issues, there can't be any disagreement that the current system, with respect to costs, is completely insane. Our families in Colorado faced double-digit cost increases every year over the last decade. Their median family income has actually gone down by $300, and the cost of health care has gone up by 97 percent over that period of time. Our small businesses are paying 18 percent more for health insurance than large businesses just because they are small. As the Senator from Virginia was mentioning, we are spending, as a country, more than twice what almost any other industrialized country in the world is spending as a percentage of our gross domestic product on health care. We are spending roughly 18 percent, going to 20 percent in the blink of an eye. We can't hope to compete in this global economy if we are devoting a fifth of our economy to health care and everyone else in the world is devoting less than half that. Finally, as the Senator from Virginia also said, if you have any concern about these deficits we are facing in Washington becoming completely untenable, what you need to know is, the biggest driver of those is rising Medicare and Medicaid costs and the biggest driver of those is, of course, health care costs.

So my view has been, from the start, no matter what your entry point was into this debate, cost was the central question for our working families and for our small businesses. We have stressed the need over and over for health care reform to contain the rising costs that are plaguing our current system. That is why I think the Senate needs to adopt the freshman amendment package, which would cut costs, save taxpayers money, and in this bill it can make our health care system function more efficiently.

This package of amendments will help strengthen the reform proposal's ability to deliver affordable, quality health care to all Americans, whether they are in private plans or whether they are in public plans. These provisions will remove much of the redtape that, for so long, has slowed the delivery of care. Doctors from all over Colorado have told me, time and time again, their medical practices are mired in paperwork and their staffs spend far too much time and money jumping through administrative hoop after hoop. The time our doctors and nurses spend on unnecessary paperwork is time they can't spend becoming better professionals and, most importantly, providing quality care to their patients. This amendment will require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to adopt and regularly update a single national standard for some of the most basic electronic transactions that occur between insurers and providers, and meeting these standards will be enforceable by penalties if insurance providers don't take steps to comply. My provision will make sure that as we implement health care reform, we are consistently identifying and implementing new standards.

There are also terrible inefficiencies in the way we pay health care providers and allow them to deliver care to patients. This package helps eliminate bottlenecks so patients are cared for in a reasonable amount of time.

This package of amendments also expands the Senate bills reforms being made to Medicare and Medicaid. There is a provision that will allow accountable care organizations to work with private insurance companies to better craft strategies for Medicare and Medicaid and private sector plans to improve care. In the current system, doctors are forced into requesting a multitude of tests to confirm a diagnosis they have already made. This creates unnecessary work for doctors, their administrative staffs, lab technicians, and so on. It is time we create a system that empowers doctors to practice medicine and do their jobs efficiently.

Under the current broken system, doctors have to endure needless hurdles to even set up a practice. It is no wonder the number of primary care doctors has been steadily declining for some time now.

This package of amendments would create an environment that attracts doctors back to the field rather than make it more difficult for them to provide care. Along with the savings this bill already creates, these amendments will help doctors remove the redtape that has limited their ability to help patients in a timely manner.

We cannot go on allowing the middle class to absorb the rising costs of our Nation's health care system. We need health care reform that will control costs and put us back on a path toward fiscal responsibility. This package of amendments will help us do that.

I wish to, again, say thank you to my colleagues from the freshman class for their work. This sometimes has seemed tedious and sometimes hard to describe, but these amendments are very critical if we are going to get hold of costs as we go forward. That is the relief working families in this country need more than anything. In order to have stability in their lives, we have to get hold of our rising health care costs.

With that, I yield the floor.

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