Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

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Thank you very much.

I agree. That sounds good in the sense of taking an additional role by the Federal Government paying for these things. The problem is, we've got a proposed budget by the administration of $3.8 trillion. Almost half of that money is borrowed from people like Saudi Arabia, China--people that don't like us very much. And the American public knows it just doesn't work. These things sound good but at some point, you have got to pay your bills, and we've got to start paying our bills.

The President outlined his plan, and the reality is he's not hearing the concerns of the American people. He is not hearing the concerns of the people of Arkansas. What he is doing is he is telling us what health care coverage we can have as opposed to what the American people want.

The American people now in overwhelming majority have said, ``No. This is not the bill we want.'' Right now, we're spending more than any other country in the world by far with our health care system. The proposal that we have will spend almost another trillion dollars and yet costs will continue to rise.

So, again, instead of trying to do something in the free market way to lower costs, what the bill actually does is basically say we're going to do that by setting price controls. And price controls don't work. What we're going to do is have rationing, and we will have decreased quality of care.

Another real concern I've got is the abortion coverage. The Hyde amendment has always said that we're not going to pay for abortions with taxpayer funding, and yet this bill leaves that wide open.

The Medicare payroll tax. The administration is talking about putting a 2.9 percent tax on non-wage income, and I don't think the American public understands yet that that is in there or being talked about, the ramifications about that. But when you start taxing dividends, when you start taxing interest, capital gains, things like that, those are the kinds of things that are creating jobs.

My frustration is instead of coming out with things that are job creators in this economy, we continue to have these things thrust upon us that are really job killers.

The group that he is not talking about--and we were discussing this earlier, and I will yield to my colleague here--are the health care providers.

Tomorrow, Thursday, there is going to be the meeting, and there is probably 17, 18, 19, 20 Members of Congress that are health care providers, and none of those are over there actually talking about what's going on.

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Again, and this is not a Republican or Democrat thing. I am just saying health care providers amongst all of us. When you add the experience up, the years of practice and things, you would think that this is the group that you would call on first to get over and give you good advice.

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Well, again, I would add that I was a health care provider, but I was also a small business person in the sense that we had about 85 employees that we had to meet payroll with. And always our biggest cost of doing business, our biggest expense was health care insurance for our employees. Every year the guys would come along and they would say, well, your premium is going up 10, 15, 20 percent, whatever it is. The major problem that we have going on right now is increased cost. And as was discussed earlier by my colleague, you know, things like health savings accounts, those are free market reforms. It is a free market reform that lowers cost. Associated health plans, allowing my barber with his two or three employees to team with maybe thousands of barbers to get a much lower rate. And then lastly, controlling the nuisance lawsuits. Those are free market reforms that would lower costs, which we desperately need. The problem is--and again, I don't know who the President is listening to--but those types of things are not included in the bill that we see.

The only thing I would say though is, instead, there is no control of cost, and what we have is in the fine-print wage and price controls that they're just saying, well, we are going to dictate the cost. And again, as my colleague said earlier, that just doesn't work. That has been proven with several administrations in the past that it is going to lead to rationing and decreased quality of care.

I yield to you.

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