Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

HEALTH CARE REFORM -- (Senate - September 30, 2009)

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Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I have said repeatedly that I would vote against my own bill, even if it were to pass the Senate unanimously, unless there were an ironclad guarantee--iron is not strong enough; carved in marble guarantee--from the President that he would veto a conference report that came back that did not have the kinds of protections I think my bill has.

I agree completely with the Senator from Arizona. The big fear is that we craft something in the Senate that is reasonable and then submit it to a conference and it comes back in a conference report that is not amendable and gets passed by a majority vote here and we are stuck with it.

As important as it is that we try to get the Senate bill right, we must recognize that there are two Houses of Congress. At the moment, the other body is not showing the degree of analysis we are trying to get going here in the Senate. The House bill is completely unacceptable.

If I could pick up on the comment about the consequences of what is being done with respect to Medicaid, I will add the experience from the State of Utah to the experience that has been referred to for other States.

In Utah, an expansion of Medicaid, as outlined in the Finance Committee bill, would mean anywhere from an additional $150 million to $248 million to Utah taxpayers. I realize that in a State such as California that is multiple billions of dollars in debt, an extra $150 million to an extra quarter of a billion is not a lot of money. But in Utah, it is a significant amount. We need to pay attention to the fact that every State is facing those kinds of significant increases.

I call the attention of the Senate to an analysis that is in today's Congressional Quarterly, dated September 30, talking about the bill as it is moving through the Finance Committee. I quote:

Under current law, taxpayers can deduct expenses that exceed 7.5 percent of their adjusted gross income. Under the Baucus original proposal, that floor would have been raised to 10 percent, starting in 2013.

Then further:

According to data from the Joint Committee on Taxation, 45 percent of the taxpayers affected and 53 percent of the revenue from the change would come from people 65 and over.

So for those who are asking--and we read about them in the paper all the time--why are the elderly upset, they have Medicare? The elderly are smarter than that, and they recognize that 53 percent of the increase that would come as a result of these proposed changes would come from them.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Would the Senator not agree that therefore older Americans who depend on Medicare might especially want to read the bill?

Mr. BENNETT. They certainly are going to want us to read the bill and be honest with them as to what is in it. They are going to want us to go into the managers' package, into the small details that usually are considered technical and get passed over, and be very specific in saying to our constituents: We know what is in the bill, and we are being very upfront with you in telling you what is in the bill.

One of the things we need to be upfront about is the amount of increase this will cost seniors and the amount of impact it will have on States. States will then have to turn around and raise their taxes, and seniors will pay twice, with the increase at the Federal level and the increase at the State level.

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Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I will make this comment with respect to the remarks of the Senator from Tennessee with reference to the CBO. We need hard numbers, but we do have a preliminary understanding already.

The Director of the CBO, Mr. Elmendorf, was asked if it is true that the fees established in the bill would ultimately be passed on down to the health care consumer, and his response:

Our judgment is that the piece of legislation would raise insurance premiums.

If we go more deeply into the CBO analysis, we find that not only would premiums in the individual market be higher than under the proposed reform, but taxes on insurers and drugs and devices would be passed on to consumers in the form of higher premiums. Finally, CBO also says that the premiums would be extremely high even after the proposed reforms because taxpayers would be subsidizing expensive plans. We clearly need the kind of careful analysis that clothes these comments with actual numbers. Without those, how can we vote with any kind of clarity on the proposal before us.

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