Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act Of 2009--Continued

Floor Speech

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

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Mr. WARNER. Thank you, Mr. President.

I thank my colleague, the Senator from Delaware, for his comments and for his leadership on this issue. I also thank all of the freshmen. This is, I think, the seventh time the freshmen have come to the floor on this very important issue. Our colleagues have had to now endure 65 speeches from the freshmen on the subject of health care.

Before I get into my remarks, I want to personally thank Senator Baucus, Senator Dodd, the majority leader, and their staffs, for working with the 11 freshmen Members who have come together today to unveil a package of health care amendments focused on the issue of cost containment.

We have been working on this now for close to 3 months.

Let me say at the outset, I am proud of the enormous broad-based support we are receiving for this package of amendments. The Business Roundtable has endorsed the amendments. Companies such as Walmart, Intel, Target and Quad/Graphics endorse this package. Groups such as the AARP and the AFL, and important think tanks such as the New America Foundation have endorsed this package. We also have support from Mark McClellan, who was the head of CMS under President Bush. While the merged bill starts to move us in the right direction in addressing health care spending in this country, this package strengthens that movement. Our package further moves us away from a current system that makes no financial sense--one that rewards volume over quality and one that reimburses hospitals for higher, rather than lower, readmission rates.

We are taking the payment reform aspects of the health care bill--sections that increase accountability, and focus on data mining and administrative simplification--and accelerating them. We are giving the Secretary, as we move forward, the ability to take pilot programs and broaden their approach and appeal. And if it works, we'll bring that reform to our whole system.

While we anticipate a very good score from CBO in terms of lowering health care costs overall, another thing we focused on with this package is not just health care reform in the context of government-related programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, but also how we partner with those in the private sector.

One of the reasons the Business Roundtable is so supportive is the fact that our package recognizes that well over half of the American public still receives their health care through private insurance or in conjunction with their employers. With these amendments, we look at how we take the best of the private sector, and the lessons we've learned from them, and bring those into health care reform.

My friend, the Senator from Delaware, has raised this point. There are still issues to be resolved in this bill.

I still have some concerns, particularly with the public option portion. But I know that with a good-faith effort, we are going to get those issues resolved.

One thing that needs to be reaffirmed, time and time again, is what happens if we don't enact health care reform. Not acting is a policy choice; it is every bit as much of a policy choice as moving forward on this bill. What many don't realize is that the largest driver of our Federal deficit is not education funding, transportation funding, and not even TARP funds or the stimulus. The largest driver of our Federal deficit is health care spending.

If we fail to act now, Medicare, which provides health care to millions of senior citizens, will go bankrupt in the next 8 years. If we fail to act now, an average Virginia family will see their health care costs eat up 40 percent of their disposable income in the next decade.

One of the reasons we are seeing so much broad-based business support for our amendment package is business understands that if we can't drive down overall health care costs, the ability of the United States to come out of this recession and remain competitive in a global marketplace will be seriously undermined. As long as American business has to pay twice as much per person--as much as $3,000 to $4,000 more per employee--for their health care costs than any of our industrial competitors around the world, regardless of how productive the American workforce is, American businesses will be at a serious disadvantage.

Our amendment package is complex. It is a bit dense. There are some 30-odd different provisions that take very good parts of the merged bill and move them faster. It increases price transparency in health care pricing, and increases our ability to take programs and pilots that work and roll them out on a wider basis. My good friend, the Senator from Colorado, has been working hard on the administrative reform portion.

This is a good package of amendments. I was asked yesterday by somebody in the press how I would describe the package. I guess I would sum it up--because some of this stuff gets fairly dense--with two things that this package of amendments is trying to do.

I think we all remember, years back, in the travel industry, when you called up and tried to get an airline reservation and depending on whom you called and what time you called, you might get a totally different price on your airline ticket. Well, this package of amendments is trying to do for health care what Travelocity did for the airline business. And that is bring some true pricing transparency to the health care system.

Our package of amendments will move us--it will not get us all the way there--but it will move us further down the field. I say this modestly, again, to the originators of the bill--it is a very good bill, a very good framework. But humbly I might say, as some know, I was lucky enough in the old days to fall into the cell phone industry. I managed to eke out a small living in that industry. I like to think about the cell phone industry as a metaphor for this package of amendments. If we think of the original bill as creating the cell phone of the 20th century, our package of amendments is basically the iPhone version to your Motorola flip phone original version. We literally provide dozens of new applications on a good, basic framework that has been provided by this merged bill. And we take these applications a little bit further into the 21st century.

I am very proud of the work all these freshmen Senators and their staffs have done over the last 3 or 4 months. Again, I thank the chairman of the Finance Committee, the chairman of the HELP Committee, the majority leader and their staffs for helping us work through this package, and I look forward to its adoption.

With that, I yield the floor, and I believe the junior Senator from Colorado will speak next.

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Mr. WARNER. Madam President, I know our time is about to expire. I wish to close by thanking all my freshman colleagues and their staffs for the great work they have done on this legislation.

I see a number of my colleagues from the other side of the aisle. This is an amendment package that brings greater transparency, greater accountability, greater efficiency, and greater innovation, and is supported by the Business Roundtable, small businesses and health care systems around the country. I ask for their consideration.

I again thank the Chair, Senator Dodd, for allowing us to lay out this package of amendments. I think it will add an important component to this bill in trying to rein in costs not just on the government side but systemwide.

I yield the floor.

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