United States Capitol Police Administrative Technical Corrections Act Of 2009

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, as are many of us, I have been watching with great interest the bipartisan health care summit that is being broadcast on television. I am happy there is a bipartisan meeting at the White House to discuss health care reform. The practicalities are that only 38 of the 535 Members of Congress can participate directly in the summit, but I know that representatives of our political parties are there, along with the President. They are talking about something that is very near and dear to all of our hearts, and that is how to bring down the costs of health care which is priced out of the reach of many of the American people, including too many in my State of Texas.

Unfortunately, sometimes in Washington what happens is, you see what is happening on TV or what is happening on the floor of the Senate, and it looks like one thing. Then you find out that behind the scenes something very different is happening. What I am speaking about in particular is, in contrast to a bipartisan summit on health care, my understanding is there are efforts underway on the part of the staff of the majority party to consider the use of reconciliation to try to pass an unpopular health care bill with 51 votes on a party-line basis.

I think that contrast between what people are seeing on TV and what is actually happening behind the scenes is pretty telling. I would say it is disappointing because I think health care reform is too important. It affects one-sixth of our economy. It affects 300 million Americans. It is simply too significant a step to take to try to do so strictly along partisan party lines.

So while it is true that reconciliation has been used in the past, it has never been used for anything such as this. This would be unprecedented. I think it would be an act of defiance toward the American people who overwhelmingly disapprove of this legislation.

There is no doubt that we need health care reform. Premiums have more than doubled over the last decade. Medicare, which provides access to health care for our seniors, has a $38 trillion unfunded liability which translates into an IOU for every American family in the amount of $325,000.

If we heard anything out of the recent election in Massachusetts, I think it is that the American people think there is too much spending and too much borrowing taking place in Washington, DC; too many responsibilities, such as this unfunded Medicare liability, that are simply not being met.

We know Medicaid continues to be problematic in not providing access to enough low-income people who are ostensibly beneficiaries of Medicaid. In the Metroplex in Texas, Dallas-Fort Worth, only 38 percent of doctors will see a new Medicaid patient because reimbursement rates are so low. That is not keeping the promise of access. It is, unfortunately, too much like appearing to do one thing on the one hand and actually delivering something far different on the other hand.

I think everyone agrees we need to solve these important problems. But how we go about solving the problem is important to maintaining the confidence and trust of the American people. I think bipartisanship on this subject is absolutely crucial.

After Massachusetts sent our newest Senator, Scott Brown, to Washington, we know there was more talk about bipartisanship. But instead of working together to solve these problems, bipartisanship has so often translated into: Take it or leave it; if we can do this strictly with a majority party vote, we will.

That is what happened on Christmas Eve. I remember that 7 a.m. vote on Christmas Eve when 60 Senators on the other side voted to pass a health care bill that the American people have simply said in poll after poll they do not want. Of course, now we see the White House repackaging an unpopular House bill with an unpopular Senate bill and posting 11 pages on the White House Web site and claiming this is somehow a package that is sacrosanct and cannot be touched. But in no sense could it possibly be considered a bipartisan piece of legislation. To only let the majority party say: Well, this is the basic template, and you can tweak it around the edges but you cannot change any part of it--that is not bipartisanship.

So now after the election of Senator Scott Brown, who campaigned on the pledge that he would be the 41st vote to defeat the Senate health care bill because of its spending, its raising taxes, and its raising premiums on people with insurance, its taking $ 1/2 trillion from Medicare--already another fiscally unsustainable entitlement program, with $38 trillion in unfunded liabilities--to create yet another entitlement program, the people of Massachusetts sent Senator Scott Brown here to stop the health care bill that they don't want.

Now we find the majority party wanting to use reconciliation, a hyperpartisan tactic, to ram a bill through that the American people have rejected, most recently in Massachusetts. If we are talking about trying to regain the public's confidence, not only is bipartisanship important in terms of bringing solutions to health care but transparency is crucial when we are talking about something so big that affects so many.

You will remember in 2008 when President Obama was Senator Obama running for President of the United States, he promised to broadcast negotiations on C-SPAN for the American people to see who was arguing on their behalf and who was not.

In stark contrast, again, between what was said then and what was actually done, we saw the White House cutting deals with special interest groups, such as the pharmaceutical industry. We saw individual Senators demand and get special deals for their States as a condition to giving their votes to pass that bill.

As much as anything else in the bill, I think the way the bill was passed with the sweetheart deals, secret negotiations, and lack of transparency turned the American people off to these health care bills. I know the President said that after his election Washington would not be business as
usual. Unfortunately, it has been, and the American people don't like it.

This subject--health care reform--is too big and too important and too costly to do through sweetheart deals, backroom negotiations, and with utter disregard for transparency. The American people are smarter than I think many folks in Washington, DC, give them credit for because they know this health care proposal is not lasting reform, and it simply would not work as advertised.

The White House proposal will still increase premiums on American families; that is, if you have health insurance now, this White House proposal, an amalgam of the Senate and House bills, will raise your insurance premiums because of costly Federal Government mandates. But this White House bill does one thing the Senate bill did not. It actually spends $75 billion more than the Senate bill that passed this body on Christmas Eve, at 7 a.m.

The White House bill does share some common elements with the Senate proposal. It still cuts nearly $500 billion from Medicare to create a new entitlement program, including a program that is very popular in my State called Medicare Advantage, which gives seniors access to more choices and the quality care they like. Rather than allow them to continue to keep that Medicare benefit, this proposal, the White House bill--like the Senate bill--would cut $500 billion from Medicare, including Medicare Advantage.

The basic problem, again, is that we call this ``health care reform,'' but the health care bill offers no long-term plan for the Medicare Program's solvency--in other words, that $38 trillion I mentioned a moment ago. This actually makes it worse by taking another $ 1/2 trillion out of Medicare and makes things worse, not better, when it comes to the program's long-term solvency. I simply think the choice the President has made, and that the Senate and House health care bills have made, to force millions of low-income people onto Medicaid is simply not right, giving them no choices but a government-run program which, as I mentioned earlier, denies them access too many times to a doctor because they cannot find a doctor who will see patients and accept government rates for Medicaid reimbursements.

I mentioned the 38-percent figure in the Metroplex of Dallas-Fort Worth. Only 38 percent of the doctors there will see these patients because of the rates. Yet these health care bills force millions of people onto that program along with, in the process, promising them access to care but then not delivering as advertised.

Then there is this problem. As you know, the Medicaid Program--the cost of that is borne by the Federal Government and the State governments. In my State alone, the health and human services commission in Texas estimates that the expansion of Medicaid under the President's proposal will cost Texas taxpayers an additional $24.3 billion over the next 10 years. That $24.3 billion is an unfunded mandate that is contained in this bill.

Where does that money come from? Well, too often--I think some of our former Governors will tell you that what happens is, that is money that has to be used for an unfunded mandate from the Federal Government that comes from education, higher education budgets, law enforcement budgets, and other State priorities. It is simply irresponsible for Congress to force on State taxpayers this responsibility to pay for this unfunded mandate when there are other priorities the States have chosen that they think are important--things such as education, as I mentioned, and law enforcement.

The unfunded mandate in this bill is simply unacceptable. The Wall Street Journal summed up the President's proposal this way:

It manages to take the worst of both the House and Senate bills and combine them into something more destructive. .....

It includes more taxes, more subsidies, and even less cost control than the Senate bill.

And it purports to fix the special interest favors in the Senate bill not by eliminating them--but by expanding them to everyone.

We know the furor it caused across the country when some Senators were able to negotiate more favorable Medicaid reimbursements than the rest of the country and when everybody found out those who were not in those favored States would end up paying for those special favors that were necessary in order to get 60 votes. This bill doesn't repeal those; it simply expands them to everybody, vastly increasing the cost of this legislation and making it even worse, not better.

The President and his congressional allies who support this legislation seem to think the only reason the American people oppose these bills is ``misinformation.'' I suggest we simply look at the facts--in this case straight from the Congressional Budget Office--and see what they, the official scorekeeper for Congress, have to say about these pieces of legislation.

The CBO said premiums for those who have health insurance of some kind--85 percent of the American people--whether it is through government programs like Medicare, the VA, or the like, but those who have private insurance, their premiums will go up by 10 to 13 percent or an average of $2,100 for families buying policies on their own. That is in the individual market where most small businesses and individuals have to shop for their insurance. Their health insurance premiums will go up an average of $2,100 a family or 10 to 13 percent.

No wonder the more people learn about this legislation the less popular it becomes, and individuals who get health care through small businesses or larger employers, which is 83 percent of Americans, will see the status quo. They will see their premiums continue to increase by 5 to 6 percent a year.

I thought health care reform was about bringing down the cost and making it more affordable, ``bending the cost curve,'' to use the jargon that has been used here time after time over the last year and a half. But we find out that for those in the individual market, premiums will go up 10 to 13 percent. For those in the larger employer market, it will go up 5 to 6 percent. It will not bend the cost curve down. It will either be ineffective at all and keep premiums basically where they would have been anyway or it will make it worse.

Then there is the gamesmanship in how it deals with the budget deficit. Here is what CBO said about the bill's impact on the budget deficit:

Washington budget gimmicks allow the White House to pretend the bills reduce the deficit by $132 billion, which is a fraction of Washington's $1.3 trillion budget deficit.

Americans don't believe ``reducing the deficit'' is possible at the same time we are spending $2.5 trillion over the next 10 years, and they are right. It is easy to pretend we are reducing the deficit when we are raising taxes by $500 billion and taking another $500 billion from Medicare in order to pay for this program.

The Obama administration's own actuaries have worried that future Congresses would not let the $500 billion in Medicare cuts happen. In other words, the bills spend now but would not pay later.

I assume the majority leader will bring up the doc fix sometime soon because he needs to. The 23-percent cut in reimbursement rates for doctors who don't take Medicare patients is not taken care of in this bill, and it should be. If this is really about health care reform, shouldn't it be making sure that our seniors on Medicare have access to doctors and that they can actually find a doctor who will see them? If you cut 23 percent in the doctor reimbursement rates, which is where we are headed now, they are not going to have access to doctors.

Here is what the Obama administration's own experts say about the cost curve. The Senate bill, they say, will increase overall American health care expenditures by $222 billion.

It will not bend the cost curve down. It will actually bend it up, making things worse, not better.

The American people have been pretty smart about this. They have been more engaged, better informed on this subject than I have seen in a long time. Of course, health care reform is a very complicated area. But they have gotten very well informed about it. They want lasting reform that will lower costs.

Here is what we know works to lower costs, but this is not something that is in the President's bill and, apparently, not something the majority party is even willing to consider. If they did, I submit this would be a big step forward to bending the cost curve down, making health care more affordable, and
yield a bipartisan product the American people could support.

I believe we need to give control over health care dollars to patients, not to Washington bureaucrats or to insurance company bureaucrats either. The American Academy of Actuaries found that consumer-driven health care plans have saved as much as 12 to 20 percent in health care premiums--12 to 20 percent. That is a lot.

Then, of course, there is a practice of defensive medicine, ending lawsuit abuse which would save $54 billion over the next 10 years, according to the CBO.

We also support allowing small businesses to pool together such as big companies do to pool their risks to help bring down premium costs. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this would lower premiums for small businesses by 2 to 3 percent--that is not a huge amount, but I am sure they will tell you every little bit helps--and in conjunction with these other reforms would have a real, meaningful impact in terms of bringing down health care costs.

I also support and our side of the aisle supports allowing Americans to purchase health insurance from any State they want to, and that would create national competition. It would allow people to buy policies they can afford that suited their family's needs rather than those loaded with State government mandates with no choices, which would result in higher costs.

If Congress would allow Americans to purchase their health insurance in any State they choose and thereby increasing competition, the Congressional Budget Office says the cost of their health care premiums would go down by 5 percent.

Clearly, competition, transparency, keeping the power in the hands of the consumer not in government are some of the things that would lower the costs, not cause them to go up. Are these part of the bipartisan health summit at the White House? Unfortunately, apparently not.

I would also support--and I think there would be a lot of support on a bipartisan basis--giving Medicaid patients, the ones who cannot find doctors because of low reimbursement rates, premium assistance; that is, to supplement what they can pay so they can buy private sector coverage which pays doctors at more of a level they would accept in terms of seeing those Medicaid patients. Providing Medicaid premium assistance rather than forcing people onto a Medicaid Program that is dysfunctional and does not work would be an improvement, and you could do it cheaper. According to CBO, this would reduce Federal spending by $12 billion over 10 years.

My conclusion from all this is, the American people want us to start over. We need lasting health care reform. I have offered some concrete suggestions on how we could lower the costs and make it more affordable. I believe that if Republicans and Democrats can work together, we can achieve it. On something as big and important and as costly as this, we need to do it on a bipartisan basis. It needs to be transparent. It needs to be devoid of special interest deals and secret negotiations and done out in the open where people can see it and trust it for what it is.

We have to reject purported solutions that will do nothing but increase spending, increase taxes, and increase premiums. We need to start over and implement commonsense steps that will lower costs.

I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source