Health Care
Floor Speech
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Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I echo what the Senator from Arizona said about the CLASS Act. He was here, as was I and many others, debating this bill and saying this was a program destined to be bankrupt. In fact, if we look at the independent Actuary, he was saying the CLASS Act was unworkable. They said it would collapse in short order.
Within the HHS Department, there was a nonpartisan career staff that called it a ``recipe for disaster.'' There was plenty of advance warning this wasn't going to work.
The Senator from Arizona correctly pointed out it was used as a gimmick to make the overall cost look less and, therefore, bring it into balance. As we know now, the CLASS Act could not work. They have had to acknowledge that, and the amendment put on by Senator Gregg, which would have forced them to certify, made that abundantly clear.
To the point of the Senator from Mississippi, the purpose of the exercise was that we have to do something about the cost of health care. In fact, the President of the United States, when he was running, said this:
If you've got health insurance, we are going to work with you to lower your premiums by $2,500 per family per year. We will not wait 20 years from now to do it, or 10 years from now to do it; we will do it by the end of my first term as President of the United States.
I am sure the Senator from Arizona probably remembers very well many of these statements. But the facts tell a
different story. If we look at what health care costs are doing, and even what was predicted by the Congressional Budget Office, they said the law was going to increase health insurance premiums by 10 to 13 percent, which means families purchasing coverage were going to pay an additional $2,100 because of the new law. That has actually been borne out.
If we look at the cost of health insurance for people in this country today, it has gone up, not down; it has gone up dramatically--since the President took office, about 25 percent for most Americans. All these promises about getting costs under control, the promises about keeping what people have, the promises about this being done in a way that would protect Medicare--we all know Medicare was going to be slashed when this was fully implemented, to the tune of $1 trillion, and there would be $1 trillion in new taxes also.
The American people got a bad deal, and they know it. That is what the public opinion polls show.
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Mr. THUNE. It would be, and, by the way, we have that amendment and would be happy to offer it. We tried to call up the bill, but it was objected to by the Democrats. The thing about bad ideas around here is that they tend to come back. This idea ought to be put away once and for all. Yet it is on the books, as the Senator pointed out. I don't know why, after all the evidence out there now that has been put forward, including the Health and Human Services Secretary saying this will not work. But we continue to maintain it on the books in the hopes of some in the administration, I am sure, that it can be resurrected in the future. It was a bad idea then, and it will be in the future. It just doesn't pencil out. We cannot make it work. It saddles future generations of Americans with massive amounts of debt
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Mr. THUNE. I would say to my colleague from Mississippi that one of the areas where jobs may be created is in the Federal Government because it is going to take an awful lot of Federal bureaucrats to oversee and lots of new IRS agents to implement this legislation. That would be the only place we will see job creation.
But when it comes to private sector job creation, the thing about this is, it raises the cost for health insurance coverage for employers, and it raises taxes on a lot of people who are involved in health care.
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Mr. THUNE. The combination of those things is only going to cost jobs.
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