Health Care

Floor Speech

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Mr. BOCCIERI. I thank the gentlelady from Maine not only for her extraordinary work on the House floor here but also on the Rules Committee. We appreciate your efforts to help move the country forward. There is no question, perhaps, the biggest issue that we will address in our freshmen tenure and perhaps for the time that we serve here in the United States Congress is health care. And there is perhaps arguably no more important issue that we could tackle as a Nation than to get our health care costs under control.

And I know the gentlelady from Maine is hearing what I am hearing back in my district, and that is that people, working families in our district, are one accident, one medical emergency, one diagnosis away from complete bankruptcy. And, in fact, in 2007, 60 percent of all bankruptcies were due to medical costs, some accident that a family had sustained or some unsustainable costs that had arisen because they had contracted a disease or some sort of cancer. And we need to do our part here in Congress to make sure that we are working on this issue and getting these costs under control.

They predict right now that 16 percent of our gross national product is for paying health care. And that in a few decades that cost could grow as high as half of our gross national product. That is absolutely unsustainable for our future.

And we have an obligation to make sure that our country can be competitive, that we can have a workforce that is not only well educated and trained but has access to the basic fundamentals of prevention and healthy lifestyles and access to seeing the doctor that they choose.

And when I speak to my constituents back in Ohio, in northeast Ohio, I talk about the five Ps of health care, the five Ps, the fact that we need to cover all people. Now, when we talk about covering all people, we need to understand that by not doing so it's actually costing all of us paying into the system more money. Those 46 million uninsured or underinsured people who can't seek access to their doctor because their health care effectively ended when they got their pink slip at the job, because they can't afford a COBRA payment, they are uninsured or underinsured.

And when they use the hospital emergency room as their primary care physician, they are costing all of us paying into the system four if not five times more by using the hospital room, the emergency room as their primary care physician. We need to cover all people.

And to those Americans who might be listening tonight, we need to understand that the American taxpayer right now is paying to make sure that every man, woman and child in Iraq has access to universal health care coverage. Now, it's inconsistent that we would pay for Iraqis to see the doctor they want to but yet not Americans.

The second P is that we have portability, that our workers, when they get that pink slip, God forbid, that they can take their health care from job to job to job. Portability, covering all people.

The third P that we have in our five Ps is making sure that we provide incentives for prevention, because prevention should be tied into all of this
with respect to healthy lifestyles ending the chronic diseases that plague so many.

And we have to end preexisting conditions--insurance companies using as a notion of disqualifying people from seeing their primary care physician the notion of preexisting conditions. And when that worker in a factory in Canton, Ohio, loses their job and they get hired by another factory with another set of health care principles and another set of health care opportunities, and they were a diabetic, God forbid, it becomes a preexisting condition now that they are seeking treatment from their physician for routine coverage that would have been covered previously.

We need to end preexisting condition. Portability, covering all people, adding prevention, and making sure that physicians and doctors are making and prescribing the types of health care that our patients should seek. Those are the five Ps that I hope we have in this great and robust dialog here on Capitol Hill.

So I thank the gentlelady from Maine for bringing this issue, and I hope that we have a very spirited discussion about how we can move this issue down the field.

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Mr. BOCCIERI. The gentlelady from Maine is absolutely correct about how this dilemma that is facing our country has impacted many families not only across our districts but across the country. We have a responsibility and an obligation to fix this issue so that we can remain competitive as a country and help our citizens.

Now, I want to tell you about a personal story myself. As an Air Force pilot who was deployed all over the world, I had to get shots so that I wouldn't get sick when I went overseas. I received a couple of anthrax shots as part of our mobility deployment, and I was having these terrible reactions. My knees were swelling up. They were getting red. So the flight surgeon suggested that I should go see a rheumatoid specialist. I waited nearly 3 months to get in to see this rheumatoid specialist, and then I waited 2 1/2 hours in the doctor's office when I finally got there.

When the nurse ushered me into the doctor's waiting room there, I sat on the table for about 20 minutes. The doctor came in. He did some movements with my knee and he said, Son, you're getting older. I said, Doctor, I could have made that diagnosis. But, I said, These are recurring as a coincidence to these shots that I have been getting.

So he went in the corner, wrote a prescription, and said, Call me in a month after taking these pills to see if this works. I said, Doctor, I'm 30-something years old. I'm in good shape. I want to figure out why this is happening. We went back and forth for a couple of minutes and he said, Son, I have got to get down the room to see 15 other patients so that I can keep the lights on in this building. And I thought to myself, Is that what we have reduced health care to? Is that what we have enabled our system to give and administer to our citizens? They deserve better.

And that's why our choices for the bills that we are introducing are going to add some significant improvements. One, we're going to make sure that Americans have more choices to see the doctor that they want, to develop and sign onto the plans that they want and to make sure, number two, the number two guidepost we have is that bureaucrats and bean counters are not deciding the type of health care that our citizens should get.

And, lastly, we want to make sure that families understand that there's enough money in the system. We hear from the other side about how are we going to pay for this. This is going to be more resources coming down here to Capitol Hill and being disbursed out.

We know this much, that one-third of the $2.5 trillion that we spend every year on health care, one-third of that never reaches the doctors, never reaches the patients. It's lost somewhere out in the administration of the system.

We know one-third of that money could be given and could be used to cover the 46 million uninsured and underinsured. So conceivably there is enough money in the system to pay for those people who are uninsured and underinsured. In fact, we hear that families have found that nearly 7 percent, in 1987, 7 percent of their median household income was being used and devoted for health care. And now it has grown to nearly 20 percent. In fact, Americans spend more than any industrialized country on health care, nearly $7,000 over the aggregate for a year, for a family, for a working family. And yet our health care and our life expectancy is on par with Cuba. It is on par with Cuba.

So we have got to make systematic and fundamental changes, as the gentlewoman said, to focus on prevention. Four cents of every dollar is only focused on prevention. Yet we have some of the worst chronic diseases that continue over this period.

So we want to stress that folks will have more choices, that bureaucrats and bean counters won't decide, but doctors and physicians will decide the type of health care that they get, and there is enough money in the system to pay for itself. Those are the three guideposts; those are the three beacons that we are using as we drafting the legislation here in the House.

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