Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act Of 2009
Floor Speech
Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act Of 2009
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Mr. LeMIEUX. Madam President, I come to the floor today to draw back the curtain a little, I hope, and to widen the lens to talk about the issue of the bill before us, not just on this particular amendment but on what it is going to mean for my constituents in Florida and for the people of this country.
I had the opportunity last week to be back home in Florida, in south Florida, in Palm Beach County and Broward County and Miami-Dade County, where I talked to doctors, hospital administrators, folks who run Medicare Advantage plans, as well as everyday Floridians, specifically senior citizens. The responses I heard were nearly unanimous, and that was grave concern about the bill that is being debated on this floor and a general confusion as to why the Congress is pursuing the path that it is. The people of Florida do not understand why we are going to cut Medicare to create a new program. The people of Florida do not understand why we are going to raise taxes to create a new program. The people whom I have spoken to in Florida do not understand why we would undertake a new $2.5 trillion health care proposal if it was not going to reduce the cost of health insurance for the 170 million to 180 million Americans who have health insurance today.
Why are we embarking upon this measure if it is not going to affect most everyday Floridians and everyday Americans who are struggling under the high cost of health insurance? Health insurance premiums have increased 130 percent in the past 10 years.
When the President put this proposal forward and when he campaigned on it, he said his major goal was to reduce the cost of health insurance. When he addressed the Nation in a joint session of Congress on September 9, he said his plan would reduce the cost of health insurance. But we find out that for at least 32 million Americans, it will raise the cost of health insurance 10 to 13 percent. So at least half of the goal, if not most of the goal, of his plan for most Americans in this country will not be accomplished. Yet we are going to cut nearly $ 1/2 trillion out of Medicare, we are going to raise taxes by $ 1/2 trillion, and we are going to spend $2.5 trillion on this program, which was admitted to by Senator Baucus yesterday on the floor, which cannot be, under my understanding, in any way budget neutral.
But I want to speak specifically about the cuts to Medicare. It cuts $192 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, ``to Medicare's payment rates for most services.'' I think we have to be clear here that if you cut providers, you are going to cut services. The very reason we talked about increasing doctor payments in that $ 1/4 trillion program was so that patients would not receive fewer services, so there would be ample doctors providing services for Medicare. It is beyond logic to argue that cutting providers will not cut services. What will happen when we cut providers, doctors, nursing homes, home health agencies, hospitals? Fewer and fewer of them will provide benefits, and fewer and fewer of them will take Medicare.
The Chief Actuary of CMS believes the cuts in the bill we have before us could cause providers to end their participation in Medicare:
..... providers for whom Medicare constitutes a substantive portion of their business could find it difficult to remain profitable and might end their participation in the program.
Every American understands this. If we pay less money to health care providers, they are going to offer less benefits or more and more they are not going to participate in Medicare.
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission found in June of last year that 29 percent of Medicare beneficiaries who were looking for a primary care doctor had a problem finding one to treat them. This is of grave concern to the 3 million Floridians who are on Medicare. If a doctor will not see them, what kind of health care plan is this? These seniors, our ``greatest generation,'' have paid into this program their whole life. It is illusory if they can't find a doctor who will treat them.
One of my constituents, Earl Bean, from Sanford, FL, recently told CNN that he called about 15 doctors when he was trying to find health care, and he was told they were not taking new Medicare patients. So when we cut $ 1/2 trillion out of Medicare, is that going to improve health care for seniors or is it going to continue to decline health care for seniors? You can't get blood from a stone. It is going to make the situation worse. For anyone to come to this floor and say that it would not is incredible.
We have in Florida the second highest Medicare population. When we cut $135 billion from hospitals and $21 billion from the disproportionate share fund, which is basically money that goes to these hospitals to provide health care for seniors and the indigent, how are they going to be able to provide that health care? I spoke to the administrator of the North Broward Hospital District and told him about this cut to the DSH funds, and he told me it would be devastating to their provision of health care.
Then we are going to take a very popular program called Medicare Advantage--more than 900,000 Floridians in my State--and we are going to cut it as well. I recently visited the Leon Medical Center and their new facility in Miami Dade County where they provide state-of-the-art, first-class health care for seniors; not only normal health care but eyeglasses, hearing aids, dental care, and the constituents who go there love it. They are getting the kind of health care that you would hope your senior citizens in your family would get.
The principal of the company, Ben Leon, told me they have saved $70 billion in the way they have run their system. He told me if we continue on this path with these cuts to Medicare Advantage, he will not be able to provide
these good services going forward. There are some fixes to grandfather folks in, but all in all people will be cut, and all in all the program will not be as good, and it will decline the health care of seniors in Florida and across this country.
We will cut $15 billion from nursing home care and $40 billion from home health agencies. I spoke to a provider of a home health agency practice in Florida. He said these cuts will put half of the home health care agency folks out of business. At a time when we have 11.2 percent unemployment in Florida, this health care bill is going to cost people their jobs, and it is going to decline the quality of health care.
I am also concerned about this Medicare advisory board. This independent board of nonelected folks is going to have the power to cut Medicare by $23 billion over the next 10 years, and it will be up to this body to reinstate those cuts. These people are not elected, my constituents in Florida don't know who they are, but they are going to be responsible for the decline of their Medicare and their health care.
The ``greatest generation,'' who fought to protect this country, is looking at this health care bill and wondering why. Folks with health insurance in this country--more than 170 million who are not going to see their health care costs go down but up--are wondering why. Americans who are seeing higher taxes and penalties for not buying these health insurance programs under this bill are wondering why.
If we are here to reform health care--and we should be--if we are here to try to make sure the 45 million people in this country and the nearly 4 million Floridians get health insurance--and we should be--then why don't we take a step-by-step approach?
I am new to this body. My first day here was September 10, so I have not even been here 3 months. But I can tell my colleagues, the American people, if they knew what I know now and could see what I see, would be baffled by this process. There is not a give-and-take on this issue. We didn't all sit down together in a conference room and work this out to have a bipartisan bill. The Democratic leader worked on it with his colleagues but not with us.
So now we have a program that cuts Medicare, that raises taxes, that doesn't decrease the cost of health care for the majority of Americans and will cost us $2.5 trillion and can't be budget-neutral, at a time when we have a $12 trillion debt, a debt that requires each of us--each family--to put $100,000 on our shoulders to be responsible for that debt, a debt where the third largest payment in our budget is for interest payments, and over the next 10 years those interest payments will go up by $500 billion, enough to pay for many of the budgets of the Federal Government----
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator has used his 10 minutes.
Mr. LeMIEUX. Including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.
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Mr. LeMIEUX. I wonder if I could ask a question.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida is recognized.
Mr. LeMIEUX. I have a question for my colleague from Tennessee. I am new here. This is all new to me. I thought the goal was to reduce health care costs while trying to provide health care for more Americans. We are taking money out of health care for seniors to create a new entitlement program. We are taking money out of nursing homes, home health care, hospitals, and a program called Medicare Advantage that people in my State I know enjoy very much. How does it make sense that we are taking money out of Medicare to start a new health care program?
Mr. ALEXANDER. Well, if I may say--and then I think maybe others could respond--if you are going to spend $2.5 trillion a year, you have to get the money from somewhere. What the Democratic health care bill does is get it three places. One is from seniors, one is from taxes, and one is from the grandchildren of seniors; that is, debt. It comes from those three places.
What we heard earlier this week was the Congressional Budget Office saying the total effect of that $2.5 trillion is that for most Americans, premiums would continue to go up as they already are, and that for people who go into the individual market they will go up even more--they will go up even more--except there will be some subsidies for a little over half of those people, and where is the subsidy money coming from? It is coming from Medicare. So that is the answer to the question.
Mr. LeMIEUX. It would seem to me--and again, I am new to this process--that 100 Senators would vote for Senator McCain's proposal because everyone in this Chamber believes we should strengthen Medicare. Who could be for taking money out of Medicare if we don't need to? These are two separate issues. Shouldn't every Senator in this Chamber say let's send this back to the Finance Committee so those cuts can be restored and we can start over and take a step-by-step approach? That only seems fair to me.
Perhaps my colleague from Oklahoma could comment on that.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma is recognized.
Mr. COBURN. I thank the Chair.
We are in trouble in Medicare in this Nation. Everybody knows it. We have made promises. The unfunded liability on Medicare is $79 trillion. For us to take $ 1/2 trillion, no matter what the Enron accounting says afterward, the fact is we are going to reduce that; we are going to make that worse. We may not make it worse next year or the year after, but we are going to make it worse. It is going to be worse for seniors, but it is also, as the Senator from Tennessee said, going to be extremely worse for the seniors' kids and grandkids. Not only have we done that, we have raised the taxes in Medicare on a certain group of people and we are going to take that money and not put it in Medicare; we are going to take that money, a Medicare tax, and create a new entitlement.
So the Senator from Florida is absolutely right. If you vote against the McCain motion you are saying you want to cut $ 1/2 trillion out of Medicare and that it will have no effect whatsoever on the care.
I remind the Senator from Florida, there are 1 million people on Medicare Advantage in the State of Florida, 1 million people who are going to lose benefits under this bill. One million people in the State of Florida will lose benefits under this bill.
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