Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act Of 2009
Floor Speech
SERVICE MEMBERS HOME OWNERSHIP TAX ACT OF 2009 -- (Senate - December 20, 2009)
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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I look forward to engaging with both the Senator from Georgia and the Senator from South Carolina, Mr. Graham. I have been in the Senate now for 7 years, which is not all that long compared to the length of service of a number of Senators. I was and have been proud to represent the 24 million citizens of the State of Texas here in the Senate and the seat that was first held by Sam Houston in 1846.
Sometimes the Senate is referred to as the world's greatest deliberative body. I think that description is a description that inspires schoolchildren and lovers of this great democracy of ours to admire and respect this body. But I have to tell you, I think the world's greatest deliberative body might not apply to this particular piece of legislation. It might, rather, be called the world's biggest railroad because of the railroading of the legislation that was revealed here only yesterday by Senator Reid, cooked up behind closed doors with a variety of interest groups negotiating deals on the side, deals that are unknown.
We know some of those pertain to hospitals, some to the pharmaceutical companies. Then I heard one of our other Senators from North Carolina yesterday say we should call this ``The Price Is Right'' because we know a number of Senators held out for various inducements, financial inducements, to encourage them to get to the 60 votes.
So we do not know what kind of deals have been cut behind closed doors, what kind of deals individual Senators may have made. But the American people need to know what is in this legislation and how it will affect them.
Unfortunately, notwithstanding the fact that the President of the United States said, You know what, when I am elected President, we are going to have negotiations around a big table and televise it on C-SPAN, good luck. So much for that broken promise.
We know other Senators who expressed the same concerns the Senator from Georgia did about having at least 72 hours by posting this on the Internet so the American people can read it and so we can consult with our constituents--the hospitals, the small businesses, the doctors--to say how does this affect you?
We had eight Democratic Senators on October 6, 2009, who said they wanted the CBO scores and they wanted them posted 72 hours ahead of time before the first vote. So much for that. We know that is going to be thrown out the door as well.
That demand, I suppose, was made more for public relations rather than any real desire to find out what is in the bill and share it with the American people because we know legislative language will be available only 40 hours before the first vote at 1 a.m. this morning, literally in the middle of the night. The Congressional Budget Office score is available only 37 hours before the first vote.
What we are talking about is this legislation. The Senator from Georgia said 2,700 pages, I believe, when you consider all of the legislation we are going to be asked to vote on the first time on a cloture vote at 1 in the morning, about 12 hours from now. We have been feverishly reviewing this language to find out what is in it. Frankly, what we find out is that it makes things worse rather than better in a number of key respects.
For example, we know that America spends near double what any other industrialized Nation does on health care. One of the stated goals, one which the Democrats and Republicans both agree on, is that this reform ought to control those costs rather than make it worse. I have an amendment, amendment No. 2806, designed to ensure that health care reform achieves the goal we all support.
We know that private insurance premiums have more than doubled in the last 10 years for American families. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that taxpayer spending on government health programs will rise to 12 percent of our economy by 2050. That will be a debt of $322,000 for the unfunded liabilities of Medicare alone. This bill does not make things better. It makes things worse, according to the Obama administration Chief Actuary.
I have an amendment which would apply the truth test to the Obama administration's own independent Actuary, based on the evidence the Reid bill would increase health care costs for the Nation, for American families, for American taxpayers. This amendment leaves it up to the Office of the Actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. If that office finds the Reid bill does lower health costs as advertised, the bill would then proceed to go into effect. But if, in fact, it does not, then it will not.
Advocates of the Reid health bill continue to promise it lowers health care costs, but this amendment will apply the truth test to the Obama administration's own independent Actuary.
I see the distinguished majority whip on the floor. I am glad he is here because he may have something to say about this.
I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and that I be allowed to call up amendment No. 2806.
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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I ask my colleagues to comment on some of the other broken promises. The President made a solemn pledge that he would sign a universal health care bill. This bill, as I understand it, still leaves 15 million people without insurance coverage. He says the costs will be cut by up to $2,500 a year. The reality is the average premiums would increase by $2,100.
I ask perhaps our distinguished colleagues from South Carolina and Georgia to comment on the promises that the President has made with regard to transparency, the promises he has made with regard to premiums going down rather than up, the promises he has made with regard to Medicare--promises it appears this bill will not allow him to keep.
Mr. GRAHAM. Everything the 2008 campaign was about has basically been discredited and discarded in this whole health care debate. I thought it was change we could believe in. I thought there was going to be a new way of doing business in Washington, and God knows there needs to be. I thought we were going to negotiate the health care bill on C-SPAN and everybody would have a seat at the table, including the drug companies. I thought we were going to allow reimportation of prescription drugs to allow American consumers to purchase drugs dramatically cheaper.
Not only have we not had any negotiations on C-SPAN, you couldn't find the room where the negotiations were going on. The old way of doing business looks good compared to this process. There was a negotiation going on on the biggest proposal we will probably ever vote on, one-sixth of the economy, between two people: the Senate majority leader and the Senator from Nebraska.
The second in command on the Democratic side told Senator McCain: I am just as in the dark as you are. We have gone to a promise of being on C-SPAN to everybody was in the dark. I don't know how that plays. I hope it plays poorly because at the end of the day, what we are doing here is absolutely unconscionable. When you thought it couldn't get any worse in Washington, when you thought your government had reached a low point, well, it has gotten worse. I will be talking about the 60th vote here soon, how they got that 60th vote. And if that is OK with the American people, which I do not believe it will be, if that is OK with our body, then our best days are behind us as a country.
Mr. CORNYN. May I ask the Senator from South Carolina about this other promise? Does he recall the President saying in July of 2009, if you like what you have, you can keep it? Is the Senator aware of the fact that according to the Congressional Budget Office, between 8 and 9 million people who would have been covered by employment-based plans under the current law would not have an offer of such coverage under this bill if passed, and seniors, because of the cuts to Medicare, particularly Medicare Advantage, will actually have their benefits cut? How do you reconcile those promises with what we see in this monstrosity of a bill?
Mr. GRAHAM. They cannot be reconciled. I hope American seniors are paying attention. We are going to take $470 billion out of Medicare in the next decade and use that money to create new government programs. If you are senior citizens out there, the doctors and hospitals you go to--and it is hard to find Medicare doctors right now; a lot of doctors are reluctant to take Medicare patients because the reimbursement rates are so low. Rural hospitals are on their knees because the Medicare rates are so low. Take $470 billion out of the system and see what happens to the provider community.
What does it mean to seniors? It means your chance of finding the doctor or hospital to take care of you as a Medicare patient is going down, not up. What does it mean to Medicare? It is due to go bankrupt by 2017. By taking money out of the system, not reforming Medicare, but using it as another purpose has accelerated the problems of Medicare. Not only has that promise been broken, we have done something no other Congress has ever done to Medicare--take money out of it and give it to somebody else. That is not right. We were within inches of expanding Medicare to people from 55 to 64 which would put the system at risk.
My point is simply this. We started this debate as a way to reform health care, and a lot of us agree on many things. It wound up being what does the Democratic Party need to do to pass a bill. Nobody cares what is in this bill anymore. All the objections about the CLASS Act and about fiscal responsibility and about the public options being in or out have given way to get this thing done before Christmas.
This is not about health care reform. It is about one political party feeling as though they have to pass a bill no matter what is in it. And that is sad.
Mr. CORNYN. I wonder if my colleagues will comment. I have one last chart I want to share with them and anybody who might be watching on this Sunday afternoon shortly before Christmas.
Every public opinion poll I have seen says the American people do not want us to pass this bill. So one has to wonder: All of us have to run for election in our States. Obviously, to win an election, you have to get a majority of voters. But 56 percent of U.S. voters in the country say they do not want this bill to pass. And yet this thing seems as though it is on an unstoppable path toward passage because 60 Senators, apparently defying the will of their constituents, seem determined to pass the bill.
Can my colleagues explain to me what they think is going on here?
Mr. CHAMBLISS. I think it is obvious it is pure arrogance on the part of the folks on the other side of the aisle. The American people do not want it, but they are saying Washington knows better than the people back home know. That is pretty clear.
I know my colleague from Georgia is like me, when we go back home, we get stopped in the airport, in the grocery store, on the streets, all around different parts of Georgia. People are not happy about what is going on up here with respect to this bill. I wish to ask him about his comments with respect to where we are.
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Mr. CORNYN. If I can respond to the senior and junior Senators from Georgia on this point, my State population is 24 million. Over a 10-year period of time, this is a $20 billion unfunded mandate--$20 billion. Of course, we know--or at least we read and hear from some in the press--that not all States are going to be treated the same. That was, in fact, an inducement on the part of some Senators to vote for the bill--to be one of the 60 votes--because they were either going to get a sweetener, in terms of being held harmless for at least a portion of that, or in the case of Nebraska, I guess all of it.
That strikes me as fundamentally unfair, but it also demonstrates the flaw in the way this bill has been negotiated. In order to try to get to the 60 votes, there has basically been a pay-to-play sort of approach to this, and it is just repulsive to me, frankly. Certainly, a lot of my constituents would wonder: What kind of games are going on there?
I know the Senator from South Carolina has some thoughts about that.
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Mr. CORNYN. Will my friend yield for a question?
Mr. CHAMBLISS. Absolutely.
Mr. CORNYN. I ask the senior Senator from Georgia, does he remember this statement by President Obama? He said he will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits, either now or in the future, period. Yet David Broder, perhaps one of the most respected journalists here in Washington, DC, who has been around a long time, said he has talked to all the experts and everybody he has talked to said these bills as they stand are ``budget-busters.'' Of course, I am sure the Senator also remembers a Washington Post-ABC poll that said 66 percent of those who responded to the poll think this bill will make the deficit worse, not better.
In other words, we have a credibility problem between what is being promised here by the President and presumably by the proponents of this bill and the American people because they simply do not buy it. They do not believe it. Maybe that is why that earlier number from the Rasmussen poll said a majority of Americans do not want us to pass this bill but, rather, want us to start over and take a step-by-step or incremental approach.
Mr. CHAMBLISS. There is just no question but that the American people understand this. They get it. When we talk about cutting Medicare by $450 billion, do they really not think the quality of care under Medicare is going
to be diminished? Of course it is. Do the American people really think we are not going to have an increase in the deficit when we are going to have almost a trillion-dollar bill in real, live dollars that is going to be passed by this body in the next couple of days, in all probability? Surely the American people get that. They know this is going to increase the cost of health care and it is going to increase the deficit. That is why they are opposed to this.
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Mr. CORNYN. I am wondering if the Senator would yield for a question since we have a unanimous consent for a colloquy.
The Senator was talking about this a little earlier, but one of the things that has not been adequately discussed and because of the way this bill has been railroaded and we have been denied an opportunity to offer amendments and we will be voting on the bill on Christmas Eve, as it is currently scheduled, I want to ask about the impact on businesses. You were in the real estate business and employed a number of people in your company. You had to meet a payroll and make sure you ended up in the black and not in the red.
One of the things the National Federation of Independent Business said was that this bill will actually increase health care costs for businesses and the cost of doing business. I can't imagine anything worse that we could be doing during a recession, during a time when unemployment is at 10 percent, than making it more expensive to do business and thus keep people on your payroll. Won't that be the impact of this, with higher taxes, with increased health care costs going to employers, that it is actually going to make the unemployment problem worse rather than better?
Mr. ISAKSON. I think the Senator from Texas is exactly right. I will be the first to tell you, I am in the process of reading the 400-some-odd page managers' amendment. I haven't read all of it yet. It does take out the public option, which, by the way, that was originally in. It still may reappear at some date in the future. That was a real killer. That raised tremendous costs. In fact, it made it more beneficial for a company not to provide insurance and pay the fine and put people in the government option. That is not in the bill now, I understand that.
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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Wyoming for his important leadership. He is absolutely right. As much as we would all like to be home with our families, especially at this time of year, this battle to inform the American people about what is about to happen to them is too important for us to simply give up or acquiesce to what the Senator from Iowa seems to think is inevitable.
There is nothing inevitable about this. The only thing I think inevitable about it is, in light of the unpopularity of what is being jammed down the throats of the American people, there will be a day of accounting. We do not know when that day of accounting will be. Perhaps one of the first days of accounting will be election day 2010. I do not understand how people who are elected to represent their constituents can try to impose something that is so obviously unpopular with their constituents and expect somehow to be patted on the back and told: Well, you are right, you are smarter than we are. You do know better than we do what is better for our families and what we ought to be limited to when it comes to health care choices.
I think that is an upside down way of looking at the world. Maybe that is the reason why we have such disparate views of what we are engaged in here. Clearly, on the other side of the aisle, they believe that government is the answer. They believe government can do a lot better than the private sector in providing choices and providing cost controls. Well, the only way government can do that, of course, is by price controls, which we have seen happen in Medicare and Medicaid, which have not worked very well. Here we are 5 days before Christmas, and we are going to be having a vote tonight at 1 a.m. on a 2,733-page health care bill that we got yesterday morning. We do not know what is in the bill. We are still reading, and apparently the Congressional Budget Office is still trying to figure out the impact of the bill. They have already had to correct one mistake because they are being asked to rush to judgment on this bill that will affect one-sixth of our economy and all 300 million Americans.
But we do know this: We do know it will cut Medicare by $470 billion. Medicare is paid for by employers and the workers into a trust fund, and that trust fund is going to be pilfered, robbed, in order to create a brandnew entitlement program that the beneficiaries of that entitlement program never paid for as did the beneficiaries of Medicare. That is one part of this. We also know it is going to increase taxes by $518 billion.
We already know President Obama's promise as to people making less than $250,000 a year will not be kept under this bill, and that this bill, according to the National Federation of Independent Business, will impact small businesses and their ability to create jobs and retain workers during one of the worst recessions we have had in this country.
Then, of course, we know this bill--without the phony accounting gimmicks, such as implementing a bill 4 years into a 10-year budget window--will actually fail in universal coverage. It will leave 23 million people uninsured, and it will cost roughly $2.5 trillion, and it will increase the cost of premiums for people who already have insurance.
What is so disgusting about this process is, this exactly confirms the most cynical view that the American people have about Congress and Washington, DC. Rather than a change in that process--one that is more transparent, one in which everybody's views are considered, and where we try to come together in a bipartisan consensus for a solution--this is going to be passed strictly along party lines by a political party and by their leadership who apparently care more about chalking up a victory, albeit a Pyrrhic victory, rather than listening to their constituents. The American people want Washington to start over again. Fifty-six percent of voters in this most recent poll said they want us to stop this bill and start over.
We know this process is a product of deals struck behind closed doors with special interest groups and their lobbyists. The pharmaceutical industry got 24 Democrats to switch their votes on reimportation. What is that all about? To preserve a special deal cut behind closed doors? The insurance industry will get $476 billion of tax money from this bill. Then other parts of the health care community are going to be exempted from cuts by the payment advisory board because they cut their deal behind closed doors. We know this bill is being attempted to be jammed through when most people are spending time with their families because of the Christmas season.
Even the distinguished majority whip, last week, said: I am in the dark almost as much as other Senators are. He said: I am in leadership. So this bill has been written with a small group of people behind closed doors, including the Senator from Nebraska, who spent 13 hours--13 hours--on Friday behind closed doors with Democratic leadership and White House officials. In the meantime, we are left completely in the dark as to what is in this bill other than what we could glean in the limited time we have been given.
After the ill-fated stimulus bill passed in the first part of the year, I remember we got that bill about late Thursday night, and then we were asked to vote on it less than 24 hours later--less than 24 hours later. We--like that--spent $1.1 trillion, including the interest, in this stimulus bill that was supposed to keep unemployment below 8 percent. Well, we know how well that worked with unemployment going as high as 10.2 percent and now at 10 percent. One thing the American people told us after that is, they want us--well, I almost hate to say it, it seems so simple and straightforward--they want us to read the bill. They want us to understand the bill. They want to be able to read it and understand it before they give their consent to our voting for it. They want to know what the impact is going to be on their coverage. Is it going to raise their taxes? Is it going to raise their premiums? Is it going to cut into their Medicare benefits? If you are a Medicare Advantage beneficiary, we know it will for 11 million Americans, including half a million in Texas.
Then there was this discussion, and I guess this is all for show too. This was not, obviously, a sincere effort where we had eight Democrats who wrote a letter on October 6 to the majority leader and said they want the bill 72 hours before the first vote. Well, guess what. This historic vote we are going to have at 1 in the morning will occur 40 hours, roughly, after we got the bill. So much for 72 hours. We know the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, score, the cost, their estimate, even with the phony assumptions that are included in this bill, will only be available for 37 hours.
Then we find out there are other sweetheart deals which makes this begin to stink to high heaven--things such as special legislative language saying the State of Nebraska--the State of Nebraska--gets a special pass from new Medicaid mandates. Vermont and Massachusetts have special deals. Then there is a $100 million earmark for an unknown hospital. Boy, I cannot wait to find out what that is about. Those are just some of the sweetheart deals we know are in these bills, and I am sure there are more we will find out about.
This process has gone too fast and gone too far off track. It reminds me of what Rahm Emanuel, the President's Chief of Staff, said when they jammed through the stimulus bill earlier this year. He said: A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
It is one thing if we were acting in response to a crisis in a responsible manner, but what this is going to do is make it even worse, as the Senator from Wyoming pointed out.
I think people listening--the 56 percent and growing number of Americans who are concerned about this deal--are wondering: Are the politicians in Washington more interested in jamming this through or getting it right?
Senator Olympia Snowe from Maine, a member of the Finance Committee--the one Republican to vote for the Finance Committee bill--said she will not vote for cloture on this bill at 1 this morning because this is simply an arbitrary deadline. Oh--and guess what--most of the provisions do not kick in for 4 years. So why are we doing this literally in the dead of night on a phony timetable?
We know according to experts, such as the dean of the Harvard Medical School--he said:
In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it.
You do not have to go to Harvard to figure that out. Just go to Houston, TX. A small business owner in Houston wrote to me and said:
The proposed Health Care bill is going to have a negative impact on my business because the cost of employee health insurance will go up.
..... I don't believe what some are saying that costs will go down. ..... This bill does not make economic common sense.
Those are true words from a small business owner in Houston, TX, who I suspect has a greater understanding of what this bill will be than some of the so-called experts here inside the Beltway.
We know from the Congressional Budget Office, though, that the premiums for an average American family under this bill will go up $2,100 a year for those purchasing insurance on their own in the so-called individual market.
An independent study talked about premiums in Texas specifically and said premiums in Texas, for those who purchase insurance on their own, will go up for 61 percent--61 percent--of Texans purchasing insurance on their own, that their premiums will go up under this bill. What in the world are we doing? Under the Reid bill, a family of four in Houston would see their premiums more than double to $1,352 a month.
I find it supremely ironic that perhaps the next vote we will have here on the Senate floor, after this health care bill, is going to be a vote to increase the statutory debt limit because Congress has maxed out its credit card. Currently our credit limit is $12 trillion, and now that is not enough because of unwise and reckless spending such as that reflected here in this bill. I find that supremely ironic. But I suspect there are a lot of Americans who find it very sad and even scary.
We know in a time when people are struggling to keep their job, when businesses are struggling to keep their employees rather than have to lay them off and make the unemployment statistics even worse, when people are losing their home because they no longer have a job, this bill will be a job killer.
The only way this is going to be paid for--the pay-or-play mandates put on businesses--is for businesses to take some of the money they would have used to hire new employees and pay this new punitive tax being imposed by the Federal Government.
Businesses in Texas know this is true. The Lubbock Chamber of Commerce said:
An employer mandate would be a ``job killer'', raising the costs of maintaining a workforce. .....small businesses and our consumers will be the ones who suffer. .....
Then there is this Medicaid expansion that Senator Enzi from Wyoming talked about. There is an unfunded mandate here because Texas did not get the sweetheart deal that Louisiana or Nebraska or Vermont or Massachusetts got--an unfunded mandate of $21 billion over 10 years. So not only are people's Federal taxes going to go up, they are going to wreck the State budget too by pushing aside other priorities such as public education and the like--totally irresponsible.
Then there is a so-called Nelson amendment on abortion that was supposed to strike a ``compromise.'' Well, one of my other constituents, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, who leads Texas' largest archdiocese and is chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Pro-Life Activities, said this:
[T]he legislation will be morally unacceptable ``unless and until'' it complies with longstanding current laws on abortion funding such as the Hyde amendment. .....
. .....This legislation should not move forward in its current form. It should be opposed unless and until such serious concerns have been addressed.
I am staggered at what we are about to witness here, at the sheer irresponsibility of the way this is being done, with artificial deadlines, votes in the dead of night, bills cooked up behind closed doors as special deals jammed down the throats of the American people who do not want it.
I yield the floor.
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