Doctor's Caucus: Health Care
Floor Speech
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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. I thank my good friend from Tennessee.
What an important topic. As you have been, Dr. Roe, I have been out in the community throughout my congressional district, listening, sitting with individuals and families and businesses, a lot of small businesses. All indications are, at the very best, costs are going up, and there are so many questions that people have. Most is unknown, but what is known is very negative. It will have a negative impact on individuals and families and businesses.
I'll be careful here because, as with scope of practice, I'm with a bunch of physicians. I know even as a former therapist and rehab services manager and manager in hospitals, I know not to diagnose, but I can't resist. I'm going to diagnose. ObamaCare is terminal. It is. It is going to fail under the crushing weight of its own flawed design, and all evidence points to that. I'm not going to re-plow the fields that you all have as to what Democratic Senators are admitting and acknowledging in going public, but many of us have held concerns about this law for some time, and I'm glad that some proponents of the law are now really finally speaking the truth on it.
For example, this past week, on May 3, Investors Business Daily reported how retailers are slashing work hours in anticipation of the implementation of the
President's so-called Affordable Care Act.
I quote:
Retailers are cutting workers' hours at a rate not seen in more than three decades, a sudden shift that can only be explained by the onset of ObamaCare's employer mandates.
Opponents of this law haven't been far off the mark when it comes to predicting the harm this law would impose on the economy, and this week's report from the Investors Business Daily is just the latest in a long list of failed promises under the Affordable Care Act. I think about each new tax or regulatory mandate and about the number of regulations that came out under HIPAA, and those of us who were working in health care, we saw the cost that that added to care. Now multiply by over 100 the new bureaucracies that there will be--so it's HIPAA on steroids--and what that will do to crush the availability of affordable health care.
The President's so-called Affordable Care Act becomes even more unaffordable for individuals, families and for businesses. I had the opportunity and the privilege of working for almost 30 years in health care, serving people facing life-changing disease and disability. I always followed four principles during my professional work, and they've guided me in health care here in that whatever we did to make changes in health care should decrease costs, increase access and make sure America always remains a place of quality and innovation, and it should be the patient who makes decisions in consultation with his physician. When I read that bill, it stood out to me that the language of the Affordable Care Act was going to violate those four principles, and we've seen nothing but evidence mounting that that is occurring today.
In terms of cost, we've seen what happens to premiums, and the American people know that because they see what those premium costs are that are coming to them. It's beyond what their budgets can sustain, and it's much more than what they were paying prior to the signing of that bill. The fact is that there are more than two-dozen new taxes that are coming. I don't care who you tax in the end, there is only one person who winds up paying the tax, and that's the consumer in the end. So that's adding to their costs.
It has redefined full-time employment to 30 hours. I have to wonder as, today, we have record unemployment and underemployment. How many more Americans are going to be pushed into underemployment? I know it's an unintended consequence, but if you're underemployed, how do you afford the costs of those increased premiums coming your way?
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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. We talk a lot about and we hear a lot about unemployment numbers, but underemployment is a terrible story in itself. This, unfortunately, puts the wrong types of pressure on the business community to actually have people working part time, which is now anything under 30 hours and working two and three jobs in trying to make ends meet.
Access, I said, was the second principle. The Affordable Care Act--ObamaCare--has violated access from many different perspectives. You just look at the announcement in the past 2 weeks about the preexisting condition fund. That was one of the two target groups under which this piece of legislation was shoved down the throats of the American people, and that fund is depleted. It was so poorly designed that now the President appears to have no intention of doing anything with it, so it's leaving out all the folks with preexisting conditions.
I think all of us would agree, in our vision of what we're to do in health care, that that is a group for which we want to try to find a way for them to be able to purchase affordable health insurance. Just because you're born with or develop a disease or a disability, it shouldn't keep you from coverage. ObamaCare is failing on that.
The other one I would say is the expansion of Medicaid, which Dr. Bucshon did a nice job of capturing. We're going to put somewhere between 18 and 50 million Americans on medical assistance, and they're all going to get this nice card that says they have medical assistance, and they'll have it in their wallets or they'll have it in their pocketbooks.
But the reality is most physicians today will not accept a patient on medical assistance. So just because you have coverage, it doesn't mean you have access. The folks that wrote this bill clearly were clueless about the approach that we need to take. There are things out there that we should be doing, and I think those are things that we can agree upon.
Finally, quality and innovation. The excise tax is going to stymie innovation and quality that we've enjoyed here in this country. With regards to patient choice, I just come back to one thing among many, the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The Independent Payment Advisory Board is where you've got a group of bureaucrats appointed by the President that will make decisions about which procedures are approved by Medicare.
Medicare is an area I worked very closely with. Actually, after the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, I was asked to serve on a technical-expert panel to review prospective payment for Medicare. This Independent Payment Advisory Board is going to determine and give a blessing of ``yes'' for that procedure and ``no'' for that one. That's not patient choice. That's being dictated to by bureaucrats who are unelected and therefore unaccountable.
Let me close very quickly.
You meet a lot of people that have been impacted by this early. There was one woman in particular who lived her whole life planning her retirement and was so looking forward to it. She is a smart lady. She had laid her plan out. She had worked for a company. Part of her plan was health care, what was going to be affordable. She had her company plan and had invested, and then it was announced that the employer was going to switch over and put them into the exchange with the retirees.
This woman spent most of her adult life taking care of a brother and a sister who were less fortunate in life and needed a family member to step up and be there. This woman's retirement plan has been totally crushed by ObamaCare, and she's concerned now. As a smart lady, she went out to get some estimate of what it was going to cost her in her retirement now for health care compared to what it was before. It's completely unaffordable. So does she choose health care, or does she choose to still be there for her brother and her sister who have come to rely on her? I think there's many of those stories.
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