Health Care
Floor Speech
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Mr. BOOZMAN. I appreciate the Senator's leadership in this area. I also appreciate the fact that he jumped out and ran for the office and was elected, because we desperately need people such as Senator Johnson, people who were successful businessmen who understand the unintended consequences of much of what we do. I, similar to the Senator, also have a firsthand understanding of this issue from an employer's perspective and maybe a little bit unique perspective.
Before I came to Congress, I practiced optometry and helped run an eye care clinic with my nine other partners for 24 years. So when President Obama's health care bill came before us when I was in the House, I fully understood, from both the medical provider and from the business aspect, that from both accounts, it was the wrong approach to the problem of rising health care costs and, with the Doctors Caucus in the House, worked very hard to highlight the problems and to also highlight the alternative options working through the free market approach.
There is no doubt about it, we are facing a serious crisis. Health care costs are crippling Americans. Many Americans lack access to quality health care. It is stifling our Nation's overall economic development. There are real difficulties with physicians and hospitals that they face when it comes to accessibility and affordability of health care services. But despite all that, there is a right way and a wrong way to address the problem. The President's health care law is simply the wrong approach and the wrong answer.
Coming with a pricetag of $1.75 trillion, the law causes many more problems than it solves. It is not lowering health care costs, as we are seeing. In fact, it is driving them up. It is not deficit neutral. It is a budget buster.
Because of Medicare cuts, because of the way it is set up, it is going to lead to rationing and decreased quality of care. It will not help the economy. In fact, it is further stalling the recovery.
On that note, specifically, the President's health care law makes it difficult for small business owners to hire more employees. At a time when our economic recovery continues to lag, the concerns over new mandates, confusing rules, and additional taxes in the law have small business owners rightfully concerned. Again, I can appreciate this in the sense of not only being an eye care provider, a health care provider, but somebody who had 85 employees.
Far from getting jobs, as the President promised, it is estimated the law will actually result in 800,000 fewer jobs over the next decade. It is almost as if the law was written with no input from America's small business owners and the health care providers that will run it.
In the 24 years I was at our clinic in northwest Arkansas, we grew our staff from 5 employees to 85. My colleague from Wisconsin can attest to the fact that guiding one's business to the point where one can add personnel is not an easy task.
It takes strategic planning and management, but it also takes an economic environment that allows small businesses to expand, invest, and hire. Instead of doing that, the health care law furthers the climate of uncertainty that our job creators already face.
Small business owners are certainly hurting in this economy. They are worrying about tax hikes that Washington keeps threatening to force upon them. They see an enormous flood of regulations coming their way. Gas prices keep skyrocketing. Profits are way down as a result of the sluggish economy. There is so much uncertainty, what mandates will evolve from this health care law and ultimately what these costs will be for small business owners only adds to that unease.
When interviewed, business owners said that the major concern that keeps them from hiring--and I have been out and about as much as anybody in the last 2 years, and this is exactly what I am hearing--is the uncertainty caused by the cost that they believe they will incur by the new health care law. We need to repeal and replace it with health care reform based on a free market system.
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Mr. BOOZMAN. I think this rationing is such an important situation. We are already seeing rationing right now. As an optometrist more than being a Senator, I get calls all the time from people who have moved into town and they can't find a health care provider for their aunt or uncle who is in the Medicare age group. Physicians are definitely cutting back because of the payment plan.
Seniors are smart enough to figure out that you can't add 30 percent more patients under this plan, and along with that, there is no increase in physician fees, no increase in the infrastructure required to take care of them. Something has to give, and that is going to be two things: quality of care and rationing.
The same thing is true of Medicaid. In Arkansas, we are going to have to increase our Medicaid rolls by 250,000 people. Our State only has 3 million people to begin with. Again, something has to give. How do you pay for that? The reality is that will cost us in the neighborhood of $400 million. Where will that come from? It will come from providers. It will come from decreased funding for education, roads, and things like that. Again, you can't do this without rationing and consolidation.
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