Health Care And Education Reconciliation Act Of 2010
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I worked for years to pass what is called the Congressional Accountability Act, which was signed into law by President Clinton in 1995. I worked so hard to get that bill passed because I strongly believe that Congress should live under the same laws it passes for the rest of the country.
If you remember, prior to 1995 Congress had exempted itself from 12 different pieces of legislation, starting with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Now, of course, we in Congress, as employers, have to live by the same laws as the ABC Company of Des Moines, IA, as an example. So the same principle applies to some parts of this bill.
That is why I offered an amendment during Finance Committee markup to require that Members of Congress and congressional staff get their employer-based health insurance through the same exchanges as our constituents. Part of that original amendment that I got adopted back then is in the bill the President signed today. And that amendment was adopted without objection, let me say, so it had consensus support. I am hoping the majority will support a similar amendment for the President, the Vice President, senior White House staff, political appointees from the Cabinet and sub-Cabinet, but, of course, not civil servants within the executive branch of government.
Also, my amendment would close a loophole that was added behind closed doors--meaning the closed doors of the majority leader's office, Senator Reid, during the time that he was merging the Finance and HELP Committee bills. That loophole would exempt staff from committee and leadership offices from being required to use the exchanges even though individual offices of individual Senators and their staffs and the Senators would still be covered.
Now, you know, it takes a lot of chutzpa behind closed doors to say: Well, you know, it is okay for the Members' offices and the Members' staff and the individual Senator, but it is not okay for committee staff, it is not okay for leadership staff. Somehow, they are a heck of a lot better than the rest of us. So it would also bring that back to a level playing field for everybody here on Capitol Hill because most of our constituents would find it pretty unbelievable that the President, his closest advisers, and some staff remain untouched by the reforms they pushed for the rest of the country.
To put it simply, President Obama's health care reform will not apply to President Obama or other people, political appointees, within the executive branch. The message the White House, then, is sending to the grassroots of America is that it is good enough for everybody else but not for political appointees in the executive branch of government. So is it really any wonder, then, why most Americans oppose this effort?
Last December, I tried to correct the inequity that I talked about of leadership staff and committee staff, but the effort to apply any new law to the administration was objected to by the Senate majority leader at that particular time. In other words, I didn't get a chance to get a vote on it. But there is no justification for such a double standard. That is blatantly wrong. It is only fair and logical that top administration officials who fought so hard for passage of this overhaul of America's health care system experience it themselves. If it is as good as promised, they will know firsthand. If there are problems, they will be able to really understand those problems, as they should, just as the Congressional Accountability Act teaches each of us Senators, who have to live under the same laws as the rest of the country, that somehow we have to experience them, and then we know what it takes for small businesses to live by the civil rights laws, the wage and hour laws--I can't remember all 12 laws that we exempted ourselves from that we are not now exempted from.
We need to understand grassroots America. What is wrong with Washington is it is an island surrounded by reality, and we have to bring some of the common sense of the rest of the country inside here where we work all the time because the only business in Washington is government, and everybody in government is in the way. Everybody outside of Washington is pulling that way. And we have to make sure that the people in the wagon at least understand the problems of those pulling the wagon, and I think this will be one way to do it.
I ask unanimous consent request that the pending amendment be set aside so that can I offer amendment No. 3564, the amendment I just talked about.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. GRASSLEY. I thank the Chair.
Mr. President, I know many folks look at this week's debate as the end of the process. I know some people look at the conclusion of this week with relief. I look at it with regret, regret for the opportunity squandered and regret for problems that we must now address. Our health care system is in need of reform. Our health care system spends too much, leaves too many people without coverage, and doesn't provide quality care that it should. We had an opportunity to do something about it the right way. We could have passed a bill with broad support in Congress and among the American people. That opportunity was lost. This process started in a bipartisan fashion. In 2008, the Finance Committee held a health care summit. The committee brought in experts from all over the country and all over the health care spectrum. We held numerous hearings. In 2009, the Finance Committee put together bipartisan roundtables and walk-throughs of the critical issues in creating this health care legislation.
Throughout the summer of 2009, six of us worked together in a bipartisan fashion to try to reach an agreement that could achieve broad-based support, because we felt that is traditional of social change in America, to be bipartisan. This was a restructuring of one-sixth of the economy. Doing that ought to be done not on a partisan basis, not on a slight bipartisan basis, but on the basis of a broad consensus. Somewhere along the line, though, getting it done quickly became more important than getting it done right. Was it when the HELP Committee produced a partisan draft that would have cost more than $2 trillion? Was it when the House slammed bills that were outright government takeovers through committee? Every year I hold 99 townhall meetings, one for each county in Iowa. When I went home last July and August, I found anger back home in my State. People were mad. People were fearful. They saw a government that took over General Motors, took over banks, spent us into mind-boggling debt. My people were worried about the direction of this country. Nothing has happened since August that has improved that situation.
While Americans get up every morning worried that the struggling economy may cost them their jobs, Congress has been hyperfocused on health care reform. This hyperfocus has led Congress to abandon bipartisanship and make some very questionable deals in the name of just getting it done. Congress had an opportunity to enact something the American people could support, but congressional Democrats and the White House seemed so focused on making history, they stopped actually listening to the American people. All the backroom deals, the budget gimmicks, and broken promises made it clear they are willing to go to any length to pass any bill, just any bill.
Health care reform will raise taxes by a half a trillion dollars. It will cut Medicare by more than a half a trillion dollars and not strengthen Medicare, but doing it solely to create a new and unsustainable entitlement program. Of course, it will cause health insurance premiums to go up even more than they are already going up. Rather than bringing the country together around some commonsense reform, it has driven the country farther apart at the very time we need to come together, especially for economic recovery efforts and the creation of jobs.
Health care reform legislation should have been done with broad-based support. Now, of course, this excessive bill is law. An opportunity has been lost. This legislation will raise taxes by a trillion dollars.
This is not the end, not by a long shot. Now the process of cleaning up the mess begins. Hopefully we can get some of these changes started this week in this very bill before the Senate. Because Congress will be back to fix challenges created by this bill. The Medicare physician payment problem, for one, is still out there. It will cost more than $300 billion to fix. Neither the bill the House passed Sunday nor this reconciliation bill addresses that very major problem. Congress will have to come back and fix it.
Another problem: Medicare is still going bankrupt. Hundreds of billions of dollars were taken out of the Medicare Program and were not used to improve the solvency of that program. Even the President has now acknowledged that you can't count the savings to pay for the new entitlement and to improve Medicare solvency, something I tried to tell this body many a time. Now the President says it. I hope people who avoided this last time are listening to the President. Congress will have to come back and fix it.
There are billions of dollars of cuts to Medicare providers in the health care reform bill that are totally unsustainable. Providers will not be able to survive if these cuts go into effect. A cynical person might suggest some providers supported the bill knowing there would be an influx of dollars to pay for new coverage, knowing that they would have years to stave off the corresponding payment cuts. So as I have said before, Congress will have to come back to this 2,700-page law the President just signed and fix it.
The bill gets half of the new coverage through the Medicaid Program. Everybody knows that Medicaid is threadbare to begin with. Adding 16 million people to Medicaid with tens of billions of dollars of unfunded liability for States is not going to improve that program. The reconciliation bill has a farcical 2-year payment increase for physicians in Medicaid that ends with a 50-percent cliff. No one has yet explained to me how that is supposed to improve the program. Congress will have to come back and fix it.
The bill prohibits health plans from denying coverage of preexisting conditions for kids under 19, starting 6 months after enactment. Sounds very positive; right? But in the rush to get things done, the majority failed to notice that prohibiting preexisting condition exclusions but allowing insurance companies to still deny kids entirely will end up in more kids being denied coverage.
Finally, the health care reform bill included a long-term care entitlement called by the acronym the CLASS Act. The CLASS Act is a fiscal disaster waiting to happen. When it starts to run out of money, when the insurance death spiral hits the program, the taxpayers will be on the hook to fix it. Congress will have to come back and fix it. Congress will have hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of problems to come back and fix.
I yield the floor.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source