Transportation, Housing And Urban Development, And Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010 - Conference Report - Resumed

Floor Speech

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Ms. CANTWELL. Madam President, I have been on the floor now for about an hour listening to my colleagues on the health care debate. Certainly I want to express the opinion from many people in the Northwest. We know that doing nothing about health care certainly will guarantee that premiums will go up. We know it happened in the last 10 years; they have gone up 100 percent. We know that doing nothing now means they will go up 8 to 10 percent a year. We also know there is about $700 billion in waste in the system.

This is about what we can do to reform the system so we can stop the rise, the increase we are seeing in our premiums. There are many things in this legislation, changing fee-for-service systems so we are driving down the quantity of health care that is delivered instead of making sure that it is quality; making sure we make reforms in long-term care; making sure we give the power to States to negotiate and drive down the costs. I know my colleague Senator Collins was on the floor with some of my other colleagues, the Senators from Oregon and Indiana, to discuss their ideas about how we improve cost containment.

I hope my colleagues in the next days will join us in the discussion about how we continually improve the bill to drive down costs, because doing nothing will not get us to that point.

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