Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

HEALTH CARE REFORM -- (Senate - October 01, 2009)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. UDALL of Colorado. Mr. President, let me start by thanking my colleague, the Senator from Oregon, for holding this important gathering on the floor of the Senate this morning.

Mr. President, as my fellow freshmen have stressed, health insurance reform is essential in helping us lower spending, chip away at our Federal deficit, and strengthen our economy.

While the reform proposals before us would contain costs across the board, I wish to focus on a particular area of health care reform near and dear to nearly 45 million Americans, and that is Medicare. Reforming how we pay for Medicare and how we spend those valuable taxpayer dollars is one of the biggest cost-containing tools we can include in health care reform, and it will also improve the health of seniors.

Coloradans have rightly asked me and Senator Bennet how health care reform can reduce government spending on Medicare while at the same time strengthen benefits and improve their health. They want to know how they can be getting more as the government spends less.

The answer is that health insurance reform can make our government and us smarter consumers. Because right now, 30 to 50 percent of spending on health care does not make a patient healthier. That is a lot of room for savings.

Let me give you an example. Today, Medicare actually pays doctors and hospitals more to amputate a leg than it does to treat early diabetes and actually prevent that amputation. Our government should be paying for quality outcomes, not writing checks that encourage expensive care that could have been prevented in the first place.

Let me give you a couple of examples of how reform can change these incentives, help improve care for our seniors, and also decrease costs for all of us, the taxpayers.

First, reform can lower the rate of unnecessary hospital readmissions. Right now, one-quarter of all Medicare patients who are discharged from a hospital end up going back into that hospital for the same problem. Health reform would reward hospitals such as Saint Mary's in Grand Junction, CO, which coordinates care and followup to make sure patients do not end up back in the hospital.

Second, reform can hold hospitals accountable if they are not doing enough to reduce the number of patients who develop infections in their facility. Such infections cause seniors to stay in the hospital longer, cost tens of thousands of additional dollars to treat, and--in the worst cases--they are life threatening.

Health care reform would also invest in and encourage innovative ways to deliver more efficient care to seniors. So-called patient-centered care can prevent seniors from being admitted to the hospital in the first place.

You will notice a theme here: The government would be paying less when we pass health reform, and seniors would be healthier for it.

I have not even touched on the billions of dollars per year in waste, fraud, and abuse that health insurance reform will help wring out of the system. I also have not discussed the tough cost-controlling mechanisms, such as a new Medicare payment advisory body to ensure Medicare dollars are being spent efficiently to improve patient care and balance our Federal checkbook.

The reforms we are considering are critical to changing the way the government pays for Medicare so we can ensure its long-term sustainability. The reality is, if we do not act, as was mentioned early this morning--if we keep spending as we do today--Medicare will be bankrupt by 2017, just 8 years from now. That is a sobering thought.

If we take the step to reform our health care system, it will have the immediate effect of extending the life of our Medicare trust fund for 5 more years, and at the same time we will lay down a foundation that will keep costs down in the long term so we can make Medicare sustainable for generations to come.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source