The Majority Makers
Floor Speech
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Mr. COURTNEY. Thank you for organizing this colloquy.
As Congressman Cohen said today, this Chamber earlier today was a place of a historic event where the Prime Minister of England, Gordon Brown, addressed the people of our country as well as both Chambers. And he, I think, did a magnificent job about, number one, talking about the economic crisis that we're in in global terms, the numbers in terms of lost jobs--lost wealth that has taken place over the last 6 months is historic and staggering--but reminded us that the focus has always got to be on the impact, person by person, in terms of jobs that are lost.
In this country, where we have lost, as of the end of January, 3.6 million jobs, because of our health care system being tied to employment there is an added blow that families suffer when there is a layoff, which is that people are confronted with the almost impossible choice of maintaining their health insurance by paying for COBRA premiums--which in a State like Connecticut, for an individual that is about $6,000 or $7,000 a year, $12,000 for a family--or letting their health insurance just lapse.
One of the things that was included in the Recovery Act--and it has now been 2 weeks since the President signed that measure in Denver, Colorado--is that we have seen, I think, Member offices, have a chance to sort of see our constituents vote with their feet in terms of the interests that they've expressed about different components. And in my office, certainly, the COBRA subsidy, which was a measure that was included in the Recovery Act--again, a historic effort by the government to step in and provide families with 65 percent of the premium costs if they are laid off--again, something that has never happened in any prior recession or economic downturn--is the piece of the Recovery Act that's gotten the most traffic in terms of phone calls and inquiries into my office.
I'd like to, again, as Prime Minister Brown indicated, share a story in my district of a guy, Tim Jensen, he's a reporter for a small weekly newspaper, got laid off last September. He's one of these guys that would show up with a camera and a pad and pen at any event, supported every parade, community event, veteran ceremony. And unfortunately--as we know, the newspaper business has suffered along with many, many other industries in our country--he lost his job in September. To compound that, as I indicated, he had to foot the bill for COBRA extension, and to compound that even further, he was diagnosed with cancer later this fall. So now he's in a desperate Hobson's impossible choice of whether to maintain his health insurance, depriving his family of literally food on the table, or give up his health insurance at a time when he literally has a life or death need for medical treatments. The Obama plan, which is to provide a 65 percent subsidy for people like Tim Jensen, is literally a life safer. It is going to provide him and his family with the means to maintain that health insurance coverage and avoid, again, just a total catastrophe for him and his family.
And it does tie in to the issue which I know we've been talking about here today, which is the impact on the public finances of this country. The fact of the matter is that people who do lose their health insurance end up being a public cost later down the food chain of our health care financing system, either in the form of uncompensated care in the emergency room if there is a health care crisis, or they lapse and end up in a publicly financed program like Medicaid or some form of public assistance program for single adults, which many States operate. It is far more cost effective and rational to provide those individuals with a subsidy to maintain their existing health benefits while hopefully they will transition back into the workforce rather than to just completely abandon them, which unfortunately was the system prior to passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
So, again, a measure which will provide the individual, which Prime Minister Brown talked about, which always should be our focus, will benefit not just that individual and their family, but also our overall system of public finances and health care coverage; again, hopefully just an appetizer in terms of the main course of health care reform, which this administration is, again, beginning to unfold with the release of its 2010 budget, and a Congress that is ready to roll up its sleeves and go to work in terms of all the key committees.
So this stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, has many, many components to it, which we've talked about over the last few weeks or so and will continue to do so. But clearly, the COBRA subsidy, a new, unprecedented effort by the government to step in and help unemployed workers--which are, sadly, going to increase at least in the short term--
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Mr. COURTNEY. Just to sort of close the note there, which is that, as difficult and challenging as the time we're living in for individuals like my friend I just described, or the macro picture, the fact of the matter is we can do this. As the Prime Minister said, we have to maintain our optimism, and we will, because that's the nature of our country. And we're going to get through this and fix this problem. And thank God we've got a President who's ready to work with this Congress and get this country turned around and moving in the right direction.
With that, I yield back to Mr. Yarmuth.
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