FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Improvement Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARRASSO. Madam President, I come to support Senator McConnell's amendment to repeal this health care law. I listen very carefully. I listen to the people in Wyoming. The University of Wyoming conducted a survey. Sixty-eight percent of people in my home State want this law repealed. The people of Wyoming have great concerns about the unfairness of the law. Our seniors who rely on Medicare are concerned with the unfairness of a law that takes over $500 billion from them, from our seniors on Medicare, not to help Medicare, not to save Medicare, not to secure Medicare, but to start a whole new government entitlement program for someone else.

Let's look at the specific cuts to Medicare: $155 billion from hospitals; $202 billion from the 11 million seniors on Medicare Advantage, and there is an advantage to Medicare Advantage. That is why so many seniors have signed up for it. Nearly $15 billion from nursing homes; another $40 billion from home health agencies; and $7 billion from hospice.

The President the other night, in his State of the Union Address, said: If you have some ideas on ways to get down the cost of care and improve care, I want to listen. Republicans have been bringing ideas to the floor during the entire year-long debate, and those ideas have been ignored and rejected. I suggest the President listen to his own Debt Commission. He appointed the Commission. They had a lengthy discussion. What the members of the Debt Commission said is that if you cut Medicare, a program designed for seniors, do not do what you did, do not do what you suggested, Mr. President, do not do what the Democrats in the Senate have suggested, do not do what Nancy Pelosi wanted. If you cut that kind of money from Medicare, the Commission says, you should use that to help and save Medicare, not start a new government entitlement.

The Commission also said that we should repeal the CLASS Act. That is a part of this health care law. It is called the CLASS Act. It has been described by Democrats as a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud because of the fact they use trickery, gimmicks to say: We will bring in money now and the big costs will not show up until 10 years from now.

I heard my distinguished colleague from West Virginia talking about small business and the tax credits. The small business owners in Wyoming looked to that. What they found is if they want to hire an additional worker, if they are at 10 or 11 workers and want to go to 12, they lose part of the credits. Do you know how much low-paying jobs have to be to get the tax credits? The average income has to be $25,000. It cannot be higher than $25,000 a year. If you want to give someone a raise, you are going to lose your tax credits.

Small business owners across the country who looked closely at this issue have said this does not help me at all. They are saying we need to make it cheaper and easier to create private sector jobs, and this health care law, with its expensive mandates and obligations, makes it more expensive and tougher to create private-sector jobs. We want this law repealed.

Just yesterday, a court in Florida ruled that this entire health care law was unconstitutional. There has been a separate ruling in Virginia prior to the beginning of this year. I will tell you that ruling in Florida yesterday is a second stake in the heart of this health care law.

This government, this Senate, the House does not have a right to go into the homes of the people of my State of Wyoming or anywhere around the country and say to them: You must buy a product. You must purchase something. If the government can tell people they have to buy health insurance, where does it stop? That is why I am encouraged, as are Americans all across this country, when I see the ruling coming out of Florida. People inherently understand this is unconstitutional.

The health care law even fails to meet the President's own promise. In Wyoming, we have a code of the West that says: If you give your word, keep it. The President promised this health care law would actually bring down the cost of care, he said by $2,500 a family. What are we seeing with insurance costs? The costs continue to go up and up and up. The President said: If you like what you have, you can keep it. That hasn't been true either. In terms of the insurance people have, they are losing what they have, if they like it. And even though several pages of the health care law may have implied that, when the Secretary of Health and Human Services came out with over 100 pages of regulations, it was clear that if you get your insurance through work--big company, small company--the majority of Americans will not be able to keep the health insurance they have and that they like.

A recent poll, released today, said that 58 percent of Americans would like to have this health care law repealed. The interesting thing about this was that this recent polling went further to say that when you poll people who have actually talked to a nurse or talked to a doctor or talked to a physician's assistant or an EMT or people involved in the health care area, even more of those people who have talked to a health care provider want this health care law repealed.

As Nancy Pelosi said, first you have to pass it to find out what is in it. And as more and more people become aware of what is in it, more and more people want this health care law repealed. The mandates are excessive and they are expensive, and States--with Governors of both parties--are being impacted by these huge expenses.

It is interesting. There was an article in Saturday's New York Times entitled: ``For Governors, Medicaid Looks Ripe for Slashing.'' That is Governors of both parties. Well, what is Medicaid? They are going to slash Medicaid. The article states:

Hamstrung by Federal prohibitions against lowering Medicaid eligibility, governors from both parties are exercising their remaining options in proposing bone-deep cuts to the program.

I have just heard other colleagues on the Senate floor talk about this huge expansion of Medicaid. That is the solution; that is the President's solution; that is the Democrats' solution; to cram more people onto Medicaid, a program initially designed for the poor, with low reimbursements rates and where over half of the doctors in the country won't see Medicaid patients. That is their solution.

I listened to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle talk about coverage and talk about care and they use the words interchangeably. That is misleading to the American people. You can get a Medicaid card but that doesn't mean you can get in to see a doctor in the way that you might think. Half of the doctors don't want to see patients. Why? Because the reimbursement is so low.

The New York Times article of Saturday speaks to U.S. aid running dry and States proposing Medicaid cuts, and the first person they cite is Governor Jerry Brown of California, a Democrat, and under him, Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat of New York. What does it say? It says:

The shrinking of Medicaid programs, if approved by the state legislatures, would come at a tenuous moment for the Obama administration. Starting in 2014, the health care law calls for an enormous expansion of Medicaid eligibility that is expected to add 16 million beneficiaries by 2019.

The health care law puts in place a program that will hire IRS agents to make sure people buy health insurance, but it doesn't pay to train the doctors and the nurses needed to take care of those patients. As the article goes on, it says:

States have already cut payments to health care providers and scaled back benefits over the last few years, so these new proposed cuts are much more painful.

I will tell you, the people of Wyoming want this law repealed. The chairman of our health committee in our State Senate--and I served under him for 5 years when I was a member of the Wyoming State Senate--whose name is Charles Scott, has been in the State Senate over two decades and has studied this extensively. He had an article in the Caspar Star Tribune on January 30 speaking to this.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record this article.

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:

Repeal of "Obamacare'' Would Help Wyoming

Contrary to the assertions made in Barb Rea's and Jan Drury's Jan. 22 Star-Tribune guest column, ``Repealing health care law doesn't help Wyoming,'' repeal of Obamacare would help Wyoming because that law is a disaster for our country and especially for Wyoming.

We need health care reform. Our American health care system costs too much. There are too many uninsured. On average, Americans die earlier than citizens of any other developed country. Unfortunately the Obama reform makes these problems worse. The Obama strategy for controlling costs is to attack the health insurance companies. There is much to dislike about insurance companies. Too often their strategy's to make money by not insuring anyone who might get sick and not paying for it when they do. However what they are telling us with their high prices is that our health care system is out of control. We pay for too many medical tests and procedures that do us little good. The Obamacare strategy amounts to shooting the messenger and doesn't solve the underlying cost problem.

The Centerpiece of the Obama effort to insure the uninsured is to expand the Medicaid program, the existing program for poor people. This is the most expensive way available to insure the uninsured. The Medicaid program is designed to be a high-cost program. The federal government has required a set of Medicaid benefits that are richer than any insurance the rest of us can buy. The feds forbid most of the effective cost controls the rest of us face. One consequence is that Medicaid clients are free to use the hospital emergency room for things most of us take care of at home. The health care costs for an adult in Medicaid are one and a half times larger than for a comparable adult insurance by our largest private insurer and a child costs two and a half times as much. The federal government cannot afford the Medicaid expansion without a massive tax increase and neither can the state government once the law is changed so we have to pay our normal share.

So what is the Legislature doing to deal with the problem?

Last year, three weeks before Obamacare passed, we passed the Healthy Frontiers pilot project. It is an effort to insure the working uninsured using incentives for cost control. It has an expanded prevention package and a health savings account. The individual pays part of the cost on a sliding scale according to income. The strategy is to spend more up-front on everyone to save by reducing the need for very expensive care later. Right now it is funded for only about 200 people and only through June 30. We have legislation this time to expand the numbers to 3,000 so we can find out if it really will save money. Our computer models say it will, but there is no substitute for trying it with real people. If Obamacare is not repealed this will give us an alternative to the expensive Medicaid expansion. If it is repealed, then Healthy Frontiers is an alternative way to solve the problem of the uninsured and could be imitated by private insurance to reduce costs for everyone.

Obamacare will make our existing shortage of doctors, particularly primary care doctors, even worse. To help solve this problem my committee is proposing expanding the community health centers. They can recruit doctors better than anyone else in the state because they are not subject to our tort liability system. They are under the federal tort claims act so their doctors are not bothered by our malpractice problems. Our failure to reform our tort liability system makes it too hard to recruit enough doctors to the state otherwise.

Obamacare mandates organizations called insurance exchanges which can either be ways to improve competition among private insurance companies (the Utah model) or pass out government subsidies (the Massachusetts model). To work effectively these may require more people to spread the costs of running the exchanges than Wyoming has. We are examining this concept and the federal requirements to see if they can work in Wyoming.

Obamacare requires federal agencies to write several hundred sets of new federal regulations. We fully expect some of these rules to be impractical for a small state like Wyoming or to go beyond what the federal law allows in very expensive ways. My committee has proposed a litigation fund so we can fight these regulations in court when need to. I have also proposed a constitutional amendment to keep the state from participating an any attempts to explicitly ration care which I expect to eventually be part of the effort to have the government take over our health care system.

Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, the headline of the article is: ``Repeal of `Obamacare' Would Help Wyoming.'' I want to cite a few excerpts:

Repeal of Obamacare would help Wyoming because that law is a disaster for our country. Our American health care system costs too much. There are too many uninsured. Obama reform makes these problems worse. The centerpiece of the Obama effort to insure the uninsured is to expand the Medicaid program, the existing program for poor people. This is the most expensive way available to insure the uninsured.

This is from someone who has studied this for 20 years. He goes on to say:

The Medicaid program is designed to be a high-cost program. The Federal Government has required a set of Medicaid benefits that are richer than any insurance the rest of us can buy. The Feds forbid most of the effective cost controls the rest of us face. One consequence is that Medicaid clients are free to use the hospital emergency room for things most of us take care of at home. The health care costs for an adult in Medicaid are one and a half times larger than for a comparable adult insurance by our largest private insurer and a child costs two and a half times as much.

Those are the things we are dealing with. That is the solution the Democrats have presented to the country. That is what has been passed. This solution is not a solution. What we need to do is repeal and replace this health care law.

The American people notice when month after month the Secretary of Health and Human Services rolls out more waivers for people under this health care law. Last week, she granted 500 new waivers. We now have 2.2 million Americans to whom this law does not apply. They have gotten their waivers, so it doesn't apply to them.

You might say: Who are these people? Well, they are people with friends in high places, because 166 of these are union benefit funds--166 entities covering 860,000 Americans. These are some of the same union members who lobbied Congress, who contributed in ways to say we need this health care law. Yet they say: Oh, once we have looked at it--followed Nancy Pelosi's idea and actually read the bill to see what was in it after it got passed--we don't want it to apply to us.

So 40 percent of all the waivers have gone to unions, even though union workers only account for 7 percent of the private workforce in this country. Well, if this health care law is so great for the country, why should companies and unions need waivers? And why can't the rest of America receive a waiver and get the same treatment?

That is why I come to the floor today, to tell my colleagues this health care law is bad for patients, it is bad for providers--the nurses and the doctors who take care of those patients--and it is bad for the taxpayers. By voting to repeal this health care law, we will give these waivers to every American and give them the opportunity and the freedom they request, and the flexibility they need to get the health care that works best for them, not a one-size-fits-all approach that comes out of Washington loaded with Washington wasteful spending.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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