3% Withholding Repeal and Job Creation Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. BARRASSO. I agree with my colleague from Arizona. I thank him for his leadership and congratulate him for the piece of legislation that is currently on the floor. I am here to speak in support of it because I want to get small businesses hiring again and get people back to work.
We need to find ways to make it easier and cheaper for the private sector to create jobs. This health care law my colleague has asked me about is one thing the President promised, saying: If you pass it, health insurance for families will go down--he said about $2,500 per family per year. Instead, we have seen--in response to the Senator--health insurance rates go up. Across the board, people agree they have gone higher and faster than if the law had never been signed.
I think it was interesting and telling yesterday that the voters of Ohio went to the polls and voted overwhelmingly--almost 2 to 1--to say they don't want to be forced to participate in the President's so-called health care law. What people in Ohio and people in my State and in all of the States around the country are asking for--and this is my goal--is to provide people with the care they want from the doctor they want--the care they need from the doctor they want at a cost they can afford.
There are things we need to do, but to put these additional expenses and mandates on the small businesses of this country, the job creators, just makes it harder and more expensive for those small businesses to hire more people. At a time in this Nation when we have 14 million Americans out of work, over 9 percent unemployment, we need to take positive steps to help them get back to work. I view this health care law and the expenses as a heavy, wet blanket on small businesses that are trying to hire people. We know of small businesses around the country that know that the penalties are significant when they hire that 50th employee. We have businesses that could grow, but they are not going to hire that extra person because of the significant expenses to the business. They need some certainty. They are getting so much uncertainty out of Washington with rules, regulations, redtape, the expense of the health care law, and the threats that keep coming of increased taxes. Small businesses and businesses are just not hiring.
That is why I am here to commend and compliment my colleague from Arizona for bringing forth to the American people a positive proposal to put people back to work.
Mr. McCAIN. I ask the Senator this on two other issues. One issue was not included in the health care reform act, which is the issue of medical malpractice, which the Senator, Dr. Barrasso, has had a lot of personal experience with. The other is this--which I think is symptomatic of really the way we cobbled this whole thing together, which is that we have now found a provision in the bill that cannot be and will not be enforced, the so-called CLASS Act.
Mr. BARRASSO. Both of those are areas where there can be significant savings.
Folks have said that if they do this sort of legislative
approach to remove this lawsuit abuse, the savings to the Federal budget would be about $50 billion over the budgeting timeframe--$50 billion. Any physician, nurse, practitioner, or physician assistant would say the savings would even be greater because of the additional tests and so-called defensive medicine that is practiced in an effort to protect hospitals, physicians, health care providers from the possibility of a lawsuit. They do a lot of extra diagnostic studies--x rays, CAT scans, MRIs, and blood tests--to try to not miss something, which is very unlikely, but they want to protect themselves from a suit. I think the savings would be even greater, but even the government accountants say it would save $50 billion.
The other is the so-called CLASS Act--something one of my Democratic colleagues said was comparable to a Ponzi scheme that even Bernie Madoff would be proud of. It was an accounting gimmick, a bookkeeping trick used during debate and passage of the so-called health care law. It was aimed at trying to bring money in in the first 5 years of an accounting scheme where they would then not have to pay for any services and to start paying for services about the sixth year, and then the expenses would go up and up. What they have now realized and what we realized on this side of the aisle initially, right away, and pointed out on the floor before the vote, is that this could not work long term.
In an effort to try to use this scheme to say the health care law would pay for itself, they forced this through, crammed it through, as they did with the rest of the health care law. Now we find out that even the administration says this cannot work, it is not going to work. OK, just repeal that part of the law. Oh, they sure don't want to do that because that would admit it was a scheme from the beginning.
Mr. McCAIN. Would it not also disturb the predictions as far as the fiscal impact of the CLASS Act as well?
Mr. BARRASSO. It would. It would undermine the argument of the President, who says this is going to pay for itself, when, in fact, it is not.
It is interesting, if you ask people watching at home or when you go to townhall meetings, do you think under this health care law your health care will be better or worse, they will say worse. Very few think it will be improved under this law the President forced through. And then if you ask the same group of people, a cross-section of people in our States, if they think the cost of their care will go down, as the President promised, or go up, they all say it is going to go up. So they are going to have to pay more, get less, and be unhappy with it, which is why I think yesterday in Ohio two-thirds of the voters who turned out--and the margin was over a 1 million voters difference between those for and against. They overwhelmingly voted to say: We don't want to have to live under the Obama health care law; we want to be able to opt out of that, which is all small businesses want to do. They don't want to have to deal with these expensive bandaids. Let's work together and within our States and work with other small businesses, but we don't want to live under these very expensive Washington mandates, which makes it that much harder for us to hire people.
Mr. McCAIN. Can we return just for a minute to medical malpractice reform because many people, when you talk about that, believe there has to be appropriate compensation when malpractice occurs. We all know malpractice occurs, so we don't want the innocent victims of medical malpractice--however it occurs in the health care scenario--to not be able to get just compensation in the case of malpractice on the part of the caregiver.
Mr. BARRASSO. That is exactly right. I agree. Studies have shown that in the system we live under today, less than one-third of the money actually goes to people who are deserving and ought to be receiving that money, and the other two-thirds goes to the system--lawyers, courts, and expert witnesses. So very little of the money paid in premiums actually gets to the injured party.
There are ways to do a better job of that with significant savings in the process--making sure people are appropriately compensated if an injury occurs but at the same time getting savings out of a system which is overwrought with money going to the wrong place and which also results in so many unnecessary tests being done in efforts of doctors and nurses and hospitals to protect themselves.
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Mr. BARRASSO. Madam President, I would like to comment. Section 8 of this Jobs Through Growth Act is the Government Litigation Savings Act. This was something introduced in the House by Cynthia Lummis, a Member of Congress from Wyoming, and myself in the Senate. This legislation will return the Equal Access to Justice Act--or what I refer to as EAJA--back to its original purpose.
The small business entity or individual citizen should not have their individual liberties overrun by Washington. EAJA was meant to provide people with limited financial resources--veterans, Social Security claimants, small business owners--the ability to defend themselves against harmful government actions. That is how it was intended to be used. It allows individuals to sue the Federal Government, to recover part of their attorneys' fees and the costs.
This was a well-intended law, but it has been exploited--exploited by large environmental groups with large legal departments--and it is being used now as a profit center for these large organizations through litigation against our government, and they are all getting paid to do it. The total amount that has been paid is unknown, and the reason it is unknown is that since 1995 something called the Paperwork Reduction Act defunded all the reporting requirements.
There is an attorney in Wyoming, Karen Budd-Falen, who has conducted research to see how much money a lot of these environmental groups have made. She found 14 different environmental groups have brought over 1,200--14 groups have brought over 1,200--Federal cases in 19 States and the District of Columbia. They have collected over $37 million in taxpayer dollars through this Equal Access to Justice Act and similar laws, and this doesn't even include settlements and fees that were sealed from public view. This is what we can find in public documents.
Lowell Baier, who is the president emeritus of the Boone and Crockett Club, tracked through the IRS 990 forms and found that of the most litigious so-called nonprofit groups, they average over $9 million a year of taxpayer money, which of course hinders economic growth, limits creation of jobs by individuals and by small businesses and by energy producers, farmers, and ranchers.
So I am very happy to see my colleague included our efforts in this overall jobs package because I think these are the sorts of things we are trying to overcome and that make it harder and more expensive for the private sector to create jobs. I want to find ways to make it easier and cheaper for the private sector to create jobs.
If I could, we have been talking about the private sector. The majority leader has said: Oh, the problem isn't the private sector. He said it was the public sector--the government. Government is doing just fine. It is the private sector that has lost over 1 1/2 million jobs from February of 2009 to September of 2011.
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