Continuing Resolution

Floor Speech

Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Madam President, I rise near the end of this very important and profoundly significant budget debate to make some points not only about the dollars and cents in our health care system, but also to speak about a growing and persistent threat--the threat of irresponsible cutbacks to vital health care services for our Nation's most vulnerable--in the name of an ideological war on women's health care.

Our Nation is in the midst of a fiscal crisis. We need to recognize that there is a very immediate and important imperative to cut the costs of health care in this country. The costs of health care are spiraling out of control at a rate five times the rate of inflation.

The President, commendably, is talking about the need for serious measures and sensible conversation about what can be done to control and reduce the costs of health care. Just this week, the administration initiated Partnership for Patients, which is another step in the President's continuing efforts, and I believe this body's continuing efforts, to prevent and reduce needless costs to our health care system. For example, reducing the incidence of re-admissions to hospitals and providing for better outpatient treatment after people are out of the hospital; reducing the incidence of hospital inquired infections; to reducing the incidence of overprescription--or misprescribed drugs--these kinds of costs are preventable. We have an obligation to reduce those costs in health care when they are preventable.

Higher quality at lower cost has to be our objective. And, lowering costs also means preventive care for women when they cannot afford it. That is what Planned Parenthood does. The threat of H. Con. Res. 36 is to that profoundly important goal--higher quality health care at lower cost--that we can achieve as a nation if we invest in preventive care.

The threat of H. Con. Res. 36 is, therefore, not only to the 1.4 million Medicaid patients across the country who would be deprived of that preventive care, and not only to the more than 60,000 women in Connecticut who are at risk, but to all of us, to our families, and to our fiscal health. We know Planned Parenthood saves $4 for every $1 invested. Smart investments that go to provide the Pap smears, breast exams, and other kinds of preventive health care that not only save our health care system money, but that are an absolutely critical part of high quality health care in the United States.

But this debate is about more than costs. It is about human beings. It is about those women who need that preventive care for their future and their family's futures and eventually for their children's futures. Every woman across our Nation, including 1.4 million Medicaid patients who consider Planned Parenthood their primary source for preventive health, deserves to visit a health care provider she trusts--a health care provider that many of us have in this body whether we are men or women.

I am talking about women such as Rebecca in Meriden, CT. Rebecca's parents' health coverage did not extend to her, and she made too much money to qualify for Connecticut's Husky Program--too much money meaning $10 an hour and working part time, a total of $10,000--too much money to qualify for Husky. She depended on Planned Parenthood for regular health screenings and contraceptive care. As she said in her own words:

Planned Parenthood was my saving grace for my reproductive health.

Women such as Maya, a 23-year-old uninsured young woman, a waitress, part time, doing an unpaid internship for a nonprofit organization. She went to Planned Parenthood for her routine Pap smear, and the results showed abnormal cells that required a biopsy and an operation to have the precancerous cells removed. That procedure could have been lifesaving for Maya; as are all of the routine screenings that Planned Parenthood provides for countless women across the country and in Connecticut. All of these procedures take place day in and day out around Connecticut, for a price they can afford. These stories from Rebecca and Maya are heard around our Nation, at least 60,000 strong in Connecticut alone.

As Martin Masselli, Community Health Center advocate and the president of Community Health Care, Inc. in Middletown, recently said:

Defunding Planned Parenthood would be the moral equivalent of turning off the electricity and a whole segment of health care would go dark.

That is what H. Con. Res. 36 means in human terms. In dollars and cents: preventive health care, the kind of work done by St. Vincent's in Bridgeport and Hartford Hospital, and Yale-New Haven hosptial, and countless others around the State and in the country because our hospitals and health care providers are responding responsibly to the need for higher quality and lower costs. We must preserve the momentum to move forward and to make sure the promise, as well as the obligation, the opportunity as well as the mandate, is fulfilled.

I call for my Senate colleagues to stand together for women such as Rebecca and Maya and for clinics and hospitals and providers across the Nation who depend on Planned Parenthood and to reject this resolution, to reject the effort to turn back the clock and to settle this debate once and for all, to end the ideological war which has itself nothing to do with saving money; that in fact, will cost more than it saves. I call for us to turn our attention, as we should and we must, to people who want us to put America back to work to create jobs, to foster economic growth, to fulfill the mandate that was articulated and expressed so eloquently by the people of this country in this last election, which was not to wage war on women's health.

The message was to put Connecticut and put America back to work, create jobs and continue our fragile economic recovery.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source