Energy And Water Development And Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010 - Conference Report - Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. COBURN. I wanted to answer a few of the points of the distinguished majority whip. The reason the Energy and Water bill is being held up is because the conference took out transparency that the people of this country need to see. It could easily be fixed by the majority agreeing that we will send that back, we will send a resolution back and ask the House to put the transparency back in. That is the purpose for it. It is not a delaying tactic. The fact is, we didn't defend what we actually voted for. That is the answer to the first question.

The unemployment benefit, we all want to extend it. We just want to pay for it. We don't want to charge it to our children. We want to get rid of some of the waste. We want to either take some money from the stimulus account and pay for it, but we do not want to charge the unemployment extension to our grandkids. We think you ought to make those hard choices.

Finally, on the cloture vote yesterday, as far as I could count, there are 60 of you and all you had to do was bring 60 votes to the floor, which you chose not to do. There were only three amendments that have been voted on on the Commerce, Justice, and State. I have three amendments pending. I agreed to have votes on them yesterday. Instead of having votes, we decided to do cloture, which was not achieved.

The final point that the Senator from Illinois makes, the very claim that we have no health care proposal--the first health care proposal that was filed and published was my health care proposal that is a comprehensive health care proposal that saves the government money, covers more people than any of the bills we have today, saves $70 billion, saves the States $1 trillion, and solves most of the problems as far as access and cost, it covers people with any preexisting illness.

It is not we do not have a plan, it is that we couldn't get our plan agreed to or listened to.

I understand the frustration of my friend from Illinois; there is no question. We do want--we almost had an agreement yesterday to finish Commerce-Justice. There is no question. Everybody knew that. Then we decided to vote cloture.

I am happy to finish. We can finish it tomorrow if we can come to agreement on the amendments. We vote on the amendments and finish that bill tomorrow and finish this tomorrow. They can both be finished tomorrow easily, so it is not about structure; it is about growing the Federal Government, expanding the size and scope of the Federal Government and charging the cost of that to the next two generations. That is the objection. It is not about slowing the process.

I understand it is frustrating being in the majority when, in fact, there are minority rights, but when the amendments aren't agreed to, aren't allowed to have majority votes, then you can understand our predicament.

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Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I listened off the floor to the debate of my colleagues. Many of the things that they identify as problems, I certainly agree with. Where we part company--having been in the health care field for over 25 years, and having practiced medicine during that period of time--is on the solutions they propose. Oftentimes, that will destroy the best of medicine that we have in America today and will render a larger government with less freedom in our country.

I want to address a couple of the issues. From the start, the assumption of those for the public option is that the government has done a good job with the health care programs they run today. I wanted to give a little history and put forth a little history.

There is no question that Medicare has benefited millions of Americans, and will continue to do so if we can figure out a way to pay for it, which is one of the sad things about the pay-fors in this bill--that we are going to borrow $500 billion and take another $500 billion out of Medicare and create another program, when Medicare is not funded. If you go through health care today in the country, 61 percent of all health care expenditures in this country go through the government. If 61 percent is already going through the government and we are having health care inflation at 7 or 8 percent, why is it that if we are so good in 61 percent of it, we still have these kinds of problems as a whole? And actually health care inflation inside government programs is higher than outside government programs, which proves the point that we should not eliminate health insurance companies, but we should make them more efficient and streamlined.

The assumption behind the public option is this: They look at Medicare and at the administrative costs of Medicare and say that is all it costs to run Medicare. Then they look at the 10(k)s, the profit and loss statements of the insurance industry, and say look how high that is. If you take all of the health care insurance industry as a percentage of the dollars spent in health care and look at their expenses and their profit and their costs for running their business, in terms of cost of capital, and compare it to the true cost of running Medicare, what you find is Medicare costs about 3 or 4 percent more to run than private health care.

Nobody could be more disturbed as a practicing physician than I am about wanting to rein in the abuses in the insurance industry. Their answer is to create competition with a government plan. I believe you create competition by creating real competition. A government plan, government option isn't competition. It is the elimination of any other market in health care. How do we know that? We know that the way people are going to sign up for a government plan is because it is going to be cheaper. If you take the same factors--for example, the 15-percent fraud rate in Medicare and Medicaid--and add that to the cost of the plan, what you are going to see is we are going to end up subsidizing the government plan to a greater extent than even CBO would put forward. I will have a report in the next couple weeks that will outline CBO's accuracy on health care costs since they have been scoring them since 1965. I can tell you right now that the record is atrocious. Sometimes they missed it by 15,000 percent. They underestimate what the costs are.

I want to share a story about two of my patients over the last 6 or 7 years.
I also want to share another story about somebody I talked to this week, whose son dropped out of medical school and chose to not go to medical school. He was accepted, but he chose not to go because of this very debate and the likelihood that the government will become more involved in health care.

The story I want to tell goes to the very real need that my colleagues were addressing, which is true changes in health insurance. Everybody in this body wants to address the cost issue because that issue is what is driving the problems with health care. If somebody doesn't have access, it is not because it is not available out there, it is because they don't have the money to buy the access. So cost becomes the first stumbling block. Whatever we do, the No. 1 thing we ought to do is try to decrease the costs associated with health care.

How do we do that? Do we do that by modeling Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, Indian health care, VA? Is that how we do it? Or can we do it in a way that will truly drive down the costs? There is no estimate out there about the actual cost reductions in the bills that are coming forward, either the Finance Committee bill or the HELP Committee bill. The HELP Committee bill actually raises the cost of health care. Should we be about figuring out how to lower costs? Let me give some examples.

Safeway has had no increase in health care costs for the last 4 3/4 years. How did they do it? They created incentives for their employees to stay healthy. When I say incentives, they were paying their employees cash money to change their behavior. They are limited on how much they can do that by a law called HIPAA, and, in fact, if they could do more, then they actually could have had a marked decline in their health care costs.

Then there is a company called MedEncentive where they run the insurance program for communities' municipal employees. Everywhere they have been they have lowered the cost of health care. How do they do it? They incentivize doctors by paying them more and incentivize patients by agreeing to do what the doctor says by cutting off their deductible or lowering the cost of their prescriptions if, in fact, they will follow good practices, best practices in terms of their care.

There are other examples such as Asheville, NC, where they have had a marked decrease. On average, what we have seen is a 20 to 30-percent decrease in health care. There is not a government involved in any of that.

I want to go back. Why is it that we view a government option as the answer? Because we perceive that the government can do it more efficiently and we perceive that is the only way you force competition in the health insurance industry. I agree, there is no significant competition in the health insurance industry. But having the government compete in it versus forcing competition is where we divide and go away.

The second reason they want a government option is the following: If you are my age, in your early sixties, what is going to happen to you in Medicare is you are not going to have the same care that the people in the last 10 years have had because the reason they want a government option and the reason we want what is called a comparative effectiveness board is because the real reason for having a public option and a comparative effectiveness board is to mandate what can and cannot happen to you.

As a physician who has delivered thousands of babies and cared for every complication in gynecology and obstetrics one can imagine, as a physician who has cared for thousands of children from birth to high school, as a physician who has taken care of grandmas and grandpas in their elder years with complications from heart failure to cancer to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease to pneumonia to anything else, what is going to happen is the options are going to be limited.

The ultimate undercurrent of why we need and want a public option is that we will eventually create a system where most of America, about 82 million people, who have private insurance today will be in that public option and they will decide what you can and cannot have, which is counterintuitive to how we allocate scarce resources everywhere else in the country. We do allow the forces of competition to allocate it, but it requires individual personal responsibility. It requires a transparent market, which I agree we do not have. It requires real competition, which I agree we do not have. But the answer is not another government program.

Now back to the two examples in my practice. I give these examples because I want people to see what is going to happen as the government becomes more and more involved in health care.

These are two patients I have cared for over 20 years each presented at different periods of time with no true signs or symptoms of significant disease other than the fact that having known these people for years, I sensed something was different. I ordered a test. It was denied by the insurance company. I managed to get my friends, who happen to have an MRI who also practice medicine on a not-for-profit basis, do an MRI on this one gentleman. It just so happens the gentleman had the same disease that Senator Kennedy recently succumbed to. No signs, no physical diagnosis.

The only thing that allowed me to query that was the art of medicine. Not the book training, not the gray hair, not the experience, but the gut of knowing and having seen and been experienced with a patient over a long period of time to say something has changed. In fact, the insurance company came back and paid for the MRI.

An identical thing happened about 4 months later with another individual. One of those individuals, by the way, is still alive. The other, unfortunately, succumbed.

So we do need real competition in the insurance industry. We need to make sure we create that. The debate between what my colleagues on the other side of the aisle offered tonight is how do you best do that. Do you do that by setting up a government program that is infinitely funded and will actually charge rates that will be under the true costs and will be just like another Medicare Program where we have an unfunded, long-term liability that our kids are going to have to pay for, close to $75 trillion? That is the worry. That is what the real debate is.

I thought I would spend a minute talking about can we fix health care without tremendously growing the size and scope of the Federal Government. You cannot even talk about health care until you are willing to talk about what we are doing today. What we are doing today and what we are going to be doing tomorrow, and, if this bill passes, what we are going to be doing for the next 20 years is borrowing a large percentage of the money we will spend from our grandkids. That is an unsustainable course. It is not one that we can achieve.

As we do that, we end up with youngsters such as this. If you cannot read this, it says: ``I'm already $38,375 in debt and I only own a dollhouse.'' That is a pretty stark statement. Here is a cute little girl on whom her parents have put a placard. Her parents obviously recognize that we are spending money we don't have on things we don't need.

I am not saying there isn't anybody in this body who doesn't want health care reform. Nobody probably wants it more than I do. It is the type and how we get there that is important and do we make her situation worse. Do we raise the amount of money we are borrowing to be able to fix a problem that is going to be a government-centered problem rather than a patient-centered focus?

Then we have this quote from Thomas Jefferson:

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

That is a pretty interesting statement and pretty insightful and foretelling because that is exactly where our Nation finds itself today--``wasting the labors of the people under the pretense'' that the government will take care of them.

In about 10 years, government spending is going to be about 35 percent to 40 percent of our economy, and that is if we make it in the next 10 years given the present financial difficulties we have. But if we think and ponder a little bit about what Jefferson had to say and we look at the Constitution, what we find is that through the last 20, 30, 40 years in this country, back to 1965, we started stepping outside the bounds of the enumerated powers that our forefathers brought forth. We have ignored them. Consequently, now we have government program after government program and agency after agency and we cannot afford it. We are borrowing the money. Under the guise of taking care of U.S. citizens, we can rationalize it.

America's health care is the best in the world. It just happens to be the most expensive. There are lots of ways to drive that cost down that are not at all considered in the bills in front of the Congress. Incentivizing people to do the right thing, the best thing, incentivizing the elimination--do you realize that 80 percent of the cost of health care today is defensive medicine; that if you attacked it slightly, not by eliminating lawsuits but by eliminating frivolous lawsuits--let me give the details. Ninety percent of all the suits that are filed never go to court and never get settled and never get answered. In other words, they are extortion claims. There is not a real medical claim. There is not a real issue, and it is not carried forward. Of the 10 percent that are either settled or carried forward, 89 percent of those are decided in favor of the medical community. So that is 11 percent of 10 percent, which is 1 percent of the cases.

If, in fact, we did not have the 90 percent of the cases that are frivolous, that are extortion attempts, what we know is that we could save about--CBO says under their score with limited liability changes, $54 billion over the next 10 years. Other sources say it is closer to $74 billion, $75 billion. Madam President, $74 billion to $75 billion a year does a lot to help individuals in terms of free care, in terms of lowering the cost of care because, in fact, every insurance company in the country is paying for that care.

Finally, I will make one other point, and it is this. What most Americans do not recognize is that in this new bill that is coming out of the Finance Committee, there is a significant number of taxes. Actually, you are going to recognize the fourth tax on health care in this country. Right now you pay income taxes and a large portion of that income tax is now paying for Medicare and Medicaid--57 percent of it and 43 percent we are borrowing.

The second tax you pay is a Medicare tax of 1.45 percent and your employer pays 1.45 percent of every dollar you earn no matter how much you earn.

The third tax you pay is your private health insurance, whether you buy it through your employer or you buy it yourself, costs $1,700 more per year because of the underpayment for the cost of health care for Medicare and Medicaid. So the cost of actually purchasing your health care goes up by about $150 a month per family because we underpay the true cost of care under Medicare and Medicaid, and they are both broke.

Now we have a fourth tax of which 50 percent is going to be levied on people from $40,000 to $140,000 a year, billions and billions of dollars of new taxes.

Then we have taxes on the insurance industry. I don't have any problem with that--taxes on medical devices, taxes on PhRMA. But who is going to pay those taxes? Those taxes are going to get filtered down to the increased cost of health care. When we pay a tax when we go to a store to buy something, we pay that tax on top of the price.

So the groceries or the TV or whatever it did cost--what we thought it cost--it would cost that plus tax. That tax, in terms of the insurance industry, in terms of the Medicare, in terms of the drug industry, in terms of the medical device industry, in terms of PhRMA, is going to get passed on, causing an increase in cost. That does not include the tax you will incur if you choose not to buy health insurance because you think you are healthy or you want to self-insure yourself. You are going to pay a tax for that. Oh, by the way, if you happen to have a great health care plan or maybe a moderate health care plan, the way the bill is written, you are eventually going to pay a tax because it is going to be too good a plan. So we are all going to have four taxes on health care.

I wish to make one other comment. We all traveled during the month of August and we met with our constituents. This is the HELP bill that came out of the committee after 3 weeks of hard work. This is not the complete bill that the Senate will be considering. This is just part of the bill, and it is 840-some pages long. The standard protocol in committees, if you vote a bill out of committee and you have changes to it, what you do is put a modified bill on the floor--a substitute bill when the bill comes to the floor. Well, there are 85 changes to this bill that have not been approved by the committee. Yet this is the committee bill.

So not only do we have a debate that is erroneous in terms of the direction it is taking--in creating a larger government, taking away individual freedom, individual choice, limiting one's availability of insurance, increasing premiums, increasing taxes, and taking away an individual's ability to choose--we also have a bill that has been modified, outside the rules of the Senate, 85 times versus the bill I voted on in committee. That shouldn't surprise us, however, because of the way we are handling health care.

So I will sum up with just a couple other points. I don't believe there is an American out there who doesn't think we need to do something about making health care more affordable, more available, and fairer in its treatment. I don't think there is an American who doesn't agree that we have a lot of waste in the health care system that can be eliminated. I don't think there is a physician out there who doesn't think we need to make some changes in terms of competitiveness in insurance and how that interferes with the decisionmaking by physicians and other caregivers. But I also don't think it is truly appreciated that in this country, if you are sick, you are going to get the best treatment anywhere in the world. It is just that it costs too much.

So how do we address that? Do we address that by growing the Federal Government and creating in this bill 88 new government programs with the bureaucracies that come with it or do we enable people to have the freedom to choose, to make their own choice about what they want and they need? With the finance bill, we are going to tell you what you have, we are going to tell you what the minimum is, we are going to limit your choices, and we are going to see a run toward either a regional co-op plan or a public plan.

But there is no question that what we are going to see is government-centered involvement in what we do and how we do it. That may be the direction we ultimately go. But the loss that comes with that is the loss of freedom, a loss of choice, and a diminished demand for personal responsibility and accountability, which is the very thing this young lady is counting on us doing the opposite of.

We are going to double our debt in the next 5 years. We are going to triple it in the next 10 years. It is going to be worse than that because we are spending money like drunken sailors. What do we owe the generations who follow us? What is it that we owe them? Do we owe them the heritage that was given to us? Are we going to transfer that heritage on, or are we going to ignore it?

In terms of health care, what is the best thing for our country in the long term? Can we take on another $1.3 trillion of government at a conservative estimate, especially when you count what is going to happen with what is called SGR--the physician payment reform? Can we take on $1.3 trillion? Will it only be $1.3 trillion? Will we move another 10 percent of our GDP to the government? Because that is what we are doing. At what point in time does the American experiment quit working?

I look forward to the debate on health care. The plans before us will raise premiums, decrease care, limit choice, and bankrupt our grandkids. By saying no to that plan, it doesn't mean you don't want to fix health care. There are some great plans out there to fix health care that don't cost money; that, according to CBO and others, will give the same results but will not create the massive new Federal bureaucracies and take away personal freedom to make decisions about you and your children and your family based on what your needs are, what your perception is, and what your ability is.

Madam President, I thank you for the time tonight, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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