Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

Mr. POLIS. A key part of the historic health care reforms that this Congress has now passed is the way that it empowers people to rise from poverty and reduce their reliance on government for providing their health care. Medicaid provides health care as an entitlement to the very poorest Americans. For a family of four, the Federal poverty line is about $22,000. For an individual, it's just under $11,000. So your earnings have to be below that to qualify for Medicaid. Now one thing that our health care reform package does is it increases that dollar amount to 130 percent of poverty, but the other thing it does is it provides a way out of poverty, a way to earn more money without losing your health care.

Currently, many people who hover just around the poverty line can't accept a raise, can't take a second job. If they take a raise of 10 cents an hour from $8.50 to $8.60, if they work 50 or 60 hours a week instead of 40, they lose their eligibility. Their income puts them slightly above the poverty line. And what they lose in health care benefits is far more than the money that they earn if they earn an additional $500 or $800, which could make all the difference in their lives.

With health care reform, we're replacing that with a sliding scale. No more does all that aid cut off right when you hit poverty or 130 percent of the poverty level. You have an incentive to get out and earn that extra dollar to better yourself, to work that extra hour because the Federal assistance for your health care will decrease on a sliding scale. This will provide an incentive and help lead people off of government health care.

It's rather ironic. I've heard people on the other side of the aisle talk about a government takeover of health care. Of course the government isn't taking over any part of health care with this bill. Not only that, we finally will help people get off of government assistance for health care by giving them the incentive to work more and have individual responsibility to pay their own premiums for their own policy with their own money. No more will people lose all of their health care benefits as a perverse incentive not to work that existed prior to this historic law being signed by President Obama. I am confident that over time, this law will lead to less people relying on government for their health care, more individual responsibility. People will have an incentive to get themselves and their families out of a life of poverty, to break the vicious cycle of poverty that has held too many families and too many generations in chains.

The government needs to encourage people to better themselves, and with this historic health care, we are doing that by allowing a sliding sale of subsidies all the way up to a couple hundred percent of the poverty level. So as that family earns $25,000, $30,000 a year, is working their way up, climbing on up the ladder of opportunity that this country offers, so too will their aid decline that they are given to afford health care, but it will decline on a sliding scale so that when they earn that extra dollar, they may lose 40, 50, 60 cents of Federal Government assistance. But there is an incentive to earn that extra dollar because, by golly, they get to keep part of it and spend it for themselves and their family. And that can make all the difference in lifting Americans out of poverty and encouraging the American value of individual responsibility for all American families.

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