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. THUNE. Mr. President, I appreciate the comments of my colleague from Texas, and my colleague from Wyoming prior to that. Many have come down here, as our colleagues on our side have, day after day, time after time, and continue to point out what we believe is wrong with the approach that is being taken by the majority, and also pointing out where we would do things differently.
Remember, this is the first bill: 2,100 pages long; $1.2 billion per page; $6.8 million actually per word. Then yesterday, we got the managers' amendment: another 400 pages. You add yet another amendment that is going to go on this stack, and you are talking about 2,700 pages of bill language.
What I think is interesting--and I see a pattern emerging here almost every single day--it is like deja vu all over again. The other side comes down here and talks about the need for health care reform, which we all concede. We all believe we need to reform health care in this country. We all hear from our small businesses. We all hear from individuals and families who are having a difficult time keeping up with the high cost of health care.
So that is something on which there is broad agreement on both sides. Yet that seems to be sort of the MO for the other side, to come down here and talk about how we need to do health care reform. We agree with that.
The other strategy is to come down here and attack Republicans for not having their own ideas. We have been trying to offer amendments to this bill forever. We had several amendments offered today. We asked consent to bring up amendments, to get them pending, to get them voted on. They were blocked by the other side. We have full alternatives to the current bill. Senator Burr and Senator Coburn have an alternative, a comprehensive alternative they would like to offer, being blocked by the other side.
So the recurring pattern that has emerged day after day in the debate in the Senate is Democrats come down here and talk about how bad the current system is and point out examples of those who are falling through the cracks in the current system. Exactly. We agree with that. We have acknowledged there is a problem. They come down here and attack Republicans for not having alternatives. In fact, the Senator from Rhode Island this afternoon essentially said that Republicans have been coming down here and telling lies.
What the Republicans have been doing day after day after day is coming down and talking about the bill and the impact the bill would have on health care delivery, the impact the bill would have on the economy, the impact the bill would have on small businesses and their ability to create jobs. We have been talking about the Congressional Budget Office report that describes the cost of the bill and goes into great detail about how it will impact individual families as well as the overall cost of health care in this country. We have come down here day after day to talk about the CMS Actuary's report, the Center for Medicare Services, about the cost of the bill and how it would impact the cost of health care in this country. So we continue to come down here and talk about the bill.
The other side--the one thing they don't do is they don't come down here and talk about the bill. I don't hear Democrats coming down here and offering full-throated defenses for this bill, because the bill is indefensible. It is 2,700 pages, and it doesn't do anything to lower the cost of health care, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
So we come down here day after day and talk about the Congressional Budget Office report, come down here and talk about the CMS Actuary's report. They come down and talk about how bad the current system is, say this is going to fix it, but then when they are challenged on the CMS Actuary's report and the Congressional Budget Office report, they can't defend that.
What they should be doing instead of accusing the Republicans of telling lies and attacking Republicans is accusing the CMS Actuary and the Congressional Budget Office. They ought to be coming down and attacking them because all we are doing is pointing out the facts as they pertain to the current bill that is before the Senate, this 2,700 pages right here.
What I would like to point out are some of the promises that have been made by the President and by Democrats with regard to this bill.
The President made it very clear, when he was running for President:
I can make a firm pledge: Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase--not your income taxes, not your payroll taxes, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.
Yet the Joint Committee on Taxation analysis--by the way, that is another report, and maybe they ought to be coming down here and attacking that report rather than attacking Republicans who are quoting from the report. The Joint Committee on Taxation analysis shows those people earning less than $200,000 a year will see a tax increase under the Reid bill. Even after you account for taxpayers who are going to receive the premium tax credit, 24 percent of tax returns under $200,000 will, on average, see their taxes go up. There are 42 million Americans who are going to see higher taxes who make less than 200,000 a year. So the no tax increase for the middle class we would have to say is a broken promise.
The second thing they say is that it will lower health care costs. We all know--and the President said this as recently as June 23:
And I've said very clearly: If any bill arrives from Congress that is not controlling costs, that's not a bill I can support. It's going to have to control costs. It's going to have to be paid for.
So the Democrats have shifted the benchmarks about what that means and what impact it is going to have on America's health care premiums.
The President's first promise, going back to the campaign, was that the typical family's premiums would go down by $2,500 per year--a $2,500-per-year reduction, according to the President when he was campaigning--and that everybody would be covered. Well, we all know that even this bill, which is touted as expanding coverage--well, it does expand coverage. It puts 15 million more people on Medicaid; that is one way it expands coverage. But under this bill, there are still 23 million Americans who don't get health insurance coverage. So the President's promise that he was going to cover everybody, that he was going to lower health care costs, again, you would have to say it is a broken promise.
I want to show my colleagues how this would impact a typical family's insurance costs. If you are a family who is paying $13,300 today and you are getting your insurance in the large employer market--in other words, if you work for a large employer, you get it in the large group market--and you are looking at the year 2016, you are going to be paying over $20,000 a year for insurance. That doesn't lower health care costs; that increases health care costs.
What they will say is: Well, this is better than it would have been if we had done nothing. The honest truth is that if we do nothing, we still would have 5 percent to 6 percent increases year over year in the cost of health insurance for most Americans whether you get your insurance in the large group market or the small group market. You are still going to have a 5- to 6-percent increase in the cost of your health insurance if this bill is passed. You don't see any improvement. The best you can hope for is the status quo, which is year-over-year increases that are twice the rate of inflation. That is the impact on an average family. So the whole notion that this is going to lower health care costs just doesn't pass the truth test, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The next promise that was made is that it would bend the cost curve down. What is interesting about that--and, of course, this was the President in the joint session of Congress on September 9 of this year:
The plan I am announcing tonight ..... will slow the growth of health care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government.
Well, according to the Congressional Budget Office, again--and if my colleagues want to attack us, let's have them attack the Congressional Budget Office, the CMS Actuary, the Joint Tax Committee, because everything I am saying tonight I am quoting from those reports. According to the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Reid amendment, the cost curve bends up, not down. In fact, in the first 10 years, the net increase would be about $200 billion a year in overall health care costs.
This is an outdated chart, I have to say, because this is the chart we used before this amendment was added. This is the managers' amendment, the 400-page amendment I alluded to earlier that was just added to the 2,100 page bill. In the 2,100 page bill, the Congressional Budget Office said the cost of health care in this country is going to go up, not down, by $160 billion.
So what is the cost of doing nothing? The blue line represents the cost of doing nothing. That is Federal health care spending today and what it is projected to be into the future if we do nothing. The red line, according to the Congressional Budget Office, represents what health care costs would do if the Reid bill passes. The ironic thing is that with the 400-page amendment that was added yesterday, this number gets bigger, not smaller.
I said this is an outdated chart. This only represents a $160 billion increase in the cost of health care. According to CBO's analysis on the amendment, it increases the cost of health care by $200 billion. The CMS Actuary came to a slightly different conclusion. They said health care costs would go up in the next 10 years by $234 billion. So you have all the experts--the Congressional Budget Office, the CMS Actuary--all coming to the same conclusion; that is, health care costs go up, not down. So we would have to say that is yet another broken promise.
The other thing that has been said throughout the course of this debate is that you could keep the insurance you have. In his joint session of Congress address on September 9, the President said:
Nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.
Well, interestingly enough, according, again, to the Congressional Budget Office, between 9 million and 10 million people who would be covered by an employment-based plan under current law would not have an offer of such coverage under the proposal, the Reid proposal. So we have 10 million people, according to CBO, who are going to lose their employer-based coverage, and you also have the 11 million people who get Medicare Advantage which is being cut. They aren't going to be able to keep what they have. You can argue that maybe their benefits are too rich today. That has been the argument made by the other side. But you can't say they are going to be able to keep what they have. If you are going to cut $118 billion out of Medicare Advantage, the 11 million people in this country who get Medicare Advantage are going to see their benefits cut. They are not going to be able to keep what they have.
In fact, the Senator from Pennsylvania, Mr. Casey, said recently on these Medicare Advantage cuts:
We are not going to be able to say if you like what you have you can keep it, and that basic commitment that a lot of us around here have made will be called into question.
Eleven million people who get Medicare Advantage aren't going to be able
to keep what they have, nor are the 10 million people, according to the CBO, who are going to lose their employer-based coverage if this plan passes--another broken promise.
No cuts to Medicare--we all know about that. We talked about that for about a week here and offered amendments to get rid of the Medicare cuts.
The President said when he was running for office:
I want to assure [you] we're not talking about cutting Medicare benefits.
He reiterated that in his State of the Union Address.
This bill, as we know, cuts $470 billion out of Medicare in the first 10 years, and when it is fully implemented, it cuts over $1 trillion out of Medicare. In the first 10 years, $135 billion out of hospitals; $120 billion, as I said earlier, out of Medicare Advantage; $15 billion out of nursing homes; $40 billion out of home health care; and $7 billion out of hospice care--these are all Medicare cuts. These are all going to affect people in a very real way whether you get Medicare Advantage or whether you are a provider.
These are just the facts of this legislation. I am talking about the bill. I am talking about the bill, and I am talking about what the experts have said about the bill. So we would have to say, another broken promise.
The first of the last two here: open and transparent process.
We all know that when the President campaigned, he said:
We'll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents and who is making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies. And so that approach I think is what is going to allow people to stay involved in this process.
That was what the President said when he was campaigning.
We all know this bill, almost in its entirety, has been written behind closed doors. We just saw this 400-page amendment yesterday. It was interesting; earlier--it was last week, I guess--in a discussion on the floor between Senator McCain and Senator Durbin, Senator Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the leadership on the Democratic side, said:
I would say to the Senator from Arizona that I am in the dark almost as much as he is and I am in the leadership.
Even some of the leaders on the other side--there are only three people, four people sitting in a room writing this bill, and what is the most offensive thing about this came out yesterday when we found out that the Senator from Nebraska had carved out a special sweetheart deal with a goody for his State that all the rest of the States get to pay for. He gets his Medicaid for his State paid for entirely by the Federal taxpayers, and no other State gets that particular arrangement. So the Federal taxpayers in every other State, in my State of South Dakota--Nebraska borders South Dakota. I think the people in our part of the country are going to say this really smells. This is the way they are doing business in Washington, DC? This is business as usual.
The final thing I will say is this: The argument was that it won't add a dime to the deficit. Well, here I give the Democrats a little bit of credit because they did raise taxes enough and cut Medicare enough that they could actually raise quite a bit of revenue. But saying it won't add a dime to the deficit assumes there isn't going to be any payment to physicians. The physicians' fee fix, which takes about $250 billion, was completely cut out of here. They are going to have to fix that at some point. So we are not counting that.
We are counting $72 billion from a program called the CLASS Act which the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, the Democrat from North Dakota, Kent Conrad, called a ``Ponzi scheme of the first order,'' something Bernie Madoff would be proud of. The CBO says of the CLASS Act:
The program would add to future budget deficits in large and growing fashion.
Even the Washington Post has editorialized about this, and they came to the same conclusion:
The CLASS Act is a gimmick designed to pretend that health care is fully paid for.
It goes on to say:
The money that flows in during the 10-year budget window will flow back out again. These are not savings that can honestly be counted on the budget sheet of reform.
Then we all know we have 10 years of revenue coming in, with only 6 years of spending in the first 10 years. Phony budgeting, gimmicks--all of these things are used to mask the true size of the cost of this program: $2.5 trillion over 10 years when it is fully implemented.
So if you do not use the gimmicks, if you do not use the CLASS Act, if you discount the doc fix and don't count that in there, sure, you can make it look like it doesn't add to the deficit, but the American people know better, and they have come to the conclusion this is going to add to the deficit. Even David Broder, who is the Pulitzer Prize winner for his commentary, said:
While the CBO said that both the House-passed bill and the one Reid has drafted meet the test by being budget-neutral, every expert I have talked to says that the public has it right. These bills, as they stand, are budget-busters.
This is going to add to the deficit. These are all broken promises. That is why this bill needs to be voted down. We need to vote it down tonight. I am hoping there is a courageous Democrat or two who will join us and defeat this bad legislation and move forward to something we can pass that will meaningfully lower health care costs for the American people.
I yield the floor.
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