Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act Of 2009 - Continued
Floor Speech
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Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I wish to pick up where Senator Brown left off. I will describe one of my real patients, but I will not use her real name. I will call her ``Sheila.'' Sheila was 32 years old. She came in with a breast mass. I examined it and thought it was a cyst. I sent her to get an ultrasound, which confirmed a cyst. OK. We did a mammogram to make sure. The mammogram said it looks like a cyst. The standard of care for somebody with a cyst is to watch it expectantly, unless it is painful, because 99 percent of them are benign cysts. I had the good fortune to do a needle drainage on her cyst 3 days after she had her mammogram. There were highly malignant cells within the cyst. She has since died.
The reason I wanted to tell the story about Sheila is because what the Senator from Ohio, in supporting the Mikulski amendment, doesn't recognize is, we don't allow the Preventive Services Task Force to set the rules and guidelines. We do something worse: We let the Secretary of HHS set the guidelines.
The people who ought to be setting the guidelines are not the government; they are the professional societies that know the literature, know the standards of care, know the best practices; and, in fact, the Mikulski amendment doesn't mandate mammograms for women. It leaves it to HRSA, the Health Resources Services Administration, which has no guidelines on it today whatsoever.
So what you are saying with the Mikulski amendment is, we want the government to, once again, decide--all of us are rejecting what the Preventive Services Task Force has said, but instead we are going to shift and pivot and say we will let the HRSA decide what your care should be.
The other aspect of the Mikulski amendment I fully agree with. I don't think there ought to be a copay on any preventive services. I agree 100 percent. But the last place we ought to be making decisions about care and process and procedure is in a government agency that, No. 1, is going to look at cost as much as at preventive effectiveness.
If the truth be known, the Preventive Services Task Force, from a cost standpoint--as a practicing physician, I know how to read what they put out--from a cost standpoint, it is exactly right. From a clinical standpoint, they are exactly wrong, because if you happen to be under 50 and didn't have a screening mammogram and your cancer was missed, to you, they are 100 percent wrong. You see, the government cannot practice medicine effectively. What we are trying to do in this bill throughout is have the government practice medicine, whether it is the comparative effectiveness panel or the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.
What we have asked is for the government to make decisions.
Let me tell you what that is. That is the government standing between me and my patient. It is denying me the ability to use my knowledge, my training, my 25 years of well-earned gray hair, and combine that with family history, social history, psychological history, where it might be important, and clinical science, and me putting my hand on a patient such as I did Sheila. Most physicians would never have stuck a needle in that cyst, and she would not have lived the 12 years that she lived. She would have lived 1 or 2 years. But she got 12 years of life because clinical judgment wasn't deferred or denied by a government agency.
There is a wonderful member of the British Parliament who happens to be a physician. When we were debating the issue of the comparative effectiveness panel, which will be applied to whatever HRSA or the Secretary does, I asked him: What about the national institute of comparative effectiveness in England? Here is what he said: As a physician, it ruins my relationship with my patient because no longer is my patient 100 percent my concern. Now my patient is 80 percent my concern and the government is 20 percent of my concern. So what I do is I take my eye off my patient 20 percent of the time to make sure I am complying with what the national institute of comparative effectiveness says--even if it is not in my patient's best interest.
When we pass a bill that is going to subterfuge or undermine the advocacy of physicians for their patients, the wonderful health care we have in this country will decline. There are a lot of other things about the bill I don't agree with. But the No. 1 thing, as a practicing physician, that I disagree with is the very fact--the thing I am most opposed to as a practicing physician--I like best practices. I use Vanderbilt in my practice. I like them. They make me more efficient and make me a better doctor. But they are not mandated for me when I see something that in my judgment and in the art of medicine I get to go the other way because I know what is best for my patient.
What we have in this bill is what we passed with the stimulus bill, the comparative effectiveness panel--which is utilized in this bill--and we have the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission saying you have to cut. Where do we cut? Whose breast cancer screening do we cut next year? When we have the Commission saying we have to, unless we act affirmatively in another way, we are dividing the loyalty of every physician in this country away from their patients. They are no longer a 100-percent advocate for their patients. This is a government-centered bill. It is not a patient-centered bill.
Going back to the Mikulski amendment and what will come with the Murkowski amendment, the Murkowski amendment is far better. It does everything Mikulski does but doesn't divide the loyalty or advocacy of the physician. Here is what it does. The Murkowski amendment says nobody steps between you and your doctor--nobody, not an insurance company, not Medicare or Medicaid. We use as a reference the professional societies in this country who do know best, whether it be for mammograms and the American College of Surgeons, the American College of OB/GYNs, the American College of Oncology, the American Academy of Internal Medicine or the American College of Physicians, which have come to a consensus in terms of what best practices are but don't mandate what will or will not be paid for when, in fact, the art of medicine is applied to save somebody's life, such as Sheila's.
For you see, if this bill passed, Sheila would have lived 2 years instead of 12. Ten years was really important to her family. She got to see the children I delivered for her grow up. One of them she got to see married.
If we decide the government is going to practice medicine, which is what this bill does--the government steps between the patient and their caregiver, deciding in Washington what we will do--what you will have is good outcomes 80 percent of the time and disasters 20 percent of the time. That is not what we want.
I do not deny that there are plenty of problems in my profession in terms of not being as good as we should be, of not having our eye on the ball some of the time, of making mistakes some of the time. I do not deny that. But what I do embrace is most people who go into the field of medicine go in for exactly the right reason; that is, to help people. It is so ironic to me that we have a bill before us that limits and discourages and takes away the most altruistic of all efforts, which is to do 100 percent the best right thing for your patient.
The reason having HRSA or the Secretary set guidelines is bad is because most patients do not fit the textbook. Here is what the textbook says, but this patient has this condition, this history, and this finding that are different. What we have done in this bill is, multiple times, take the learned judgment of caregivers and say: You will bow to what the Federal Government says; you will bow to what HRSA says; you will bow to what the Secretary of HHS says. Seventy-five times in this bill, there are new programs created; 6,950 times in this bill are requirements for the Secretary to set up new rules and regulations. If you do not think that will put the government between you and your care, you have no understanding of health care in this country and you have no understanding of the problems we face today because of Medicare and Medicaid rules that interrupt and limit the ability for us to care in the best way for our patients.
I am for the prevention aspects of the Mikulski amendment. I think it is a great idea. As a matter of fact, it should not be just about women. It should be about screening for prostate cancer for men as well. It should be about treadmills for people with high cholesterol. It should be about true preventive measures. Why were they not included? Because what we have done under the Mikulski amendment is $892 million over 10 years. We want to do this for one group but we will not do it for the other.
If you think the government will not get in between, let me give three examples right now which violate Federal law today. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services today violates Federal law. They ration the following three things:
If, in fact, you are elderly and you have a complication with your colon and you are a high-risk patient to have a perforation if you were to have a colonoscopy--that is when we go in with a fiber optic light to look at the colon--Medicare denies the ability for you to have a CT automated, camera-centered, swallowed-pill colonoscopy, which is available. The technology is proven and is being used outside of Medicare. You cannot have a video colonoscopy by way of a remote-control camera. Why did CMS eliminate that? They eliminated it because it costs too much. So if you are 87 years old and you have a mass in your colon and you cannot have a regular colonoscopy, you cannot even buy this procedure; it is against the law because Medicare forbids it.
No. 2--and this has happened to me numerous times--women with severe osteoporosis--a loss of calcium in their bones at 50 years of age--diagnosed with a DEXA scan in a screening prevention so they do not get a collapsed vertebra or break a hip, you put them on a medicine. The medicines are expensive, there is no question, but they really do work. Some medicines work for some people; other medicines work for others. Once you do a DEXA scan, under Medicare rules, you cannot do another one for 2 years. So you cannot check to see if the medicine is working after 6 months, to see if you see an improvement in the calcification of a woman's bones, because Medicare said it is too expensive and we are doing too many of them. Rather than go after the fraud in DEXA scans, what they did was ration the care.
Here we have a woman and you have diagnosed her properly. You have started her on the medicine, but you have to wait 2 years. What happens during that period of time if you are given a medicine that is not working effectively? Because it did not work in her case, you have to wait 2 years and her osteoporosis advances and she falls and breaks her hip because Medicare said we were doing too many of them?
Take what CMS did to all the oncologists in this country. They said we are paying too much money for EPOGEN. EPOGEN is an acronym for erythropoietin, which is a chemical that is kicked out by your kidneys to cause you to make red blood cells. When you get chemotherapy for breast cancer or colon cancer, like I have had, sometimes that chemotherapy not only kills your cancer but it kills your blood cells. Because we were using too much EPOGEN, Medicare put out a rule rationing EPOGEN and said: Unless you have a hemoglobin of X amount, you cannot get a shot of EPOGEN, and by the way, you cannot take your own money and buy it either. The doctor will get fined if he gives it to you if you don't meet the guideline. What happens? For 80 percent of the patients, it worked fine. But for those patients who have other comorbid--other conditions, such as congestive heart failure or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease--emphysema--where significant drops in hemoglobin can cause organ failures in other parts of the body, there was no exception made by CMS for a physician to make a judgment and say: This rule should not apply here because this patient is going to end up in the hospital.
My oncologist told me a story of one of his patients who could not get EPOGEN. It ended up that their heart failure was exacerbated because they got anemic from the chemotherapy, ended up on a ventilator in ICU, and died. Why did they die? Because they got heart failure. Why did they get heart failure? Because they got too anemic. Why did they get too anemic? Because Medicare would not allow the doctors to give them the medicine.
What is wrong with the bill, what is wrong with the Mikulski amendment is we rely on government bureaucracies to make the decisions about care rather than the trained, learned, experienced, truly caring caregivers in this country to make those decisions. Instead of going after the fraud in Medicare, which is well in excess of $90 billion a year, we decided we will ration care.
The authors of this bill are going to say: No, that is not true. But when I offered amendments in committee to prohibit rationing of Medicare services--to prohibit it--it was voted down. Every person who voted for moving on this bill voted against the rationing. Why would they do that? Because ultimately the feeling is: We know better. Washington knows better. We know your patients better. We know how to practice medicine better. We are going to take ivory tower doctors who do not have real practices anymore, we are going to take retired researchers, and we are going to tell you how to practice. And we are going to save money by limiting what you can get.
The chairman of the Finance Committee has said we do not truly cut Medicare Advantage, that the services are not reduced. The chairman's own bill, on page 869, subtitle C, part C--I won't go through reading it--reduces Medicare Advantage payments. The differential from $135 to--I will read it to the chairman. The chairman is shaking his head. Let me read it to him. Let me also reference what CBO has said. I will be happy to yield to the chairman if he wants to talk now.
Mr. BAUCUS. As soon as I get the page number, I guess I would like to ask the Senator from Oklahoma a question.
Mr. COBURN. I will be happy to yield for a question.
Mr. BAUCUS. What page?
Mr. COBURN. Page 869, subtitle C, part C.
Mr. BAUCUS. I don't have it with me right now, but there are no required reductions in fringes or extras--
Mr. COBURN. No required reductions in what?
Mr. BAUCUS. Fringes, such as gym memberships, and extras such as that. The bill basically provides that there be no reductions in guaranteed Medicare payments. There is a long list of what guaranteed Medicare payments are.
Even the Medicare Advantage companies, which are private companies with officers and they have stockholders--they have to report to their board of directors, and they have all these administrative costs, very huge admin costs. The reductions to Medicare Advantage--the application of reductions to Medicare Advantage plans are at the discretion of the officers. The officers can decide they are not going to cut the fringes; that is, the fringes and the extras that are beyond, in addition to the guaranteed Medicare benefits.
If an officer wants to, it is his discretion, I am assuming--
Mr. COBURN. Reclaiming my time, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record CBO 11/21/2009, which shows an average from $135 down to $51 per month on the average Medicare Advantage beneficiary.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD
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Mr. COBURN. The fact is, if you like what you have, you cannot keep it, for 2.6 million Americans. You can say that is not true. That is what CBO says. Here are their numbers. They sent the report to the chairman.
Mr. BAUCUS. Will the Senator yield?
Mr. COBURN. I will be happy to yield.
Mr. BAUCUS. It is true--first of all, we need to back up. Isn't it true that the MedPAC commission came to the conclusion that the Medicare Advantage plans are overpaid?
Mr. COBURN. Absolutely. I agree with the chairman.
Mr. BAUCUS. It is also true that it is their recommendation that the Medicare plans overpaid by the amount of 14 percent.
Mr. COBURN. I don't know the actual amount. I agree with the chairman that they are overpaid.
Mr. BAUCUS. That is true. They are overpaid.
Mr. COBURN. Yes.
Mr. BAUCUS. If they are overpaid, doesn't that necessarily mean there are reductions in payments attributable to each beneficiary by definition?
Mr. COBURN. I disagree with that.
Mr. BAUCUS. If they are overpaid--
Mr. COBURN. Here is what I would say. This morning, the claim made by the chairman and Senator Dodd is that Medicare Advantage is not Medicare. Medicare Advantage is Medicare law. It was signed into law. It is a part of Medicare. The chairman would agree with that?
Mr. BAUCUS. Absolutely. In 2003, I made the mistake and agreed to give the Medicare Advantage plans way more money than they deserved. And as the Senator from Oklahoma has said, they are overpaid.
Mr. COBURN. I agree with the chairman. You won't hear that from me. How did we get there? How did we get there? How did we get there, to where they are overpaid? We have an organization called the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. They are the ones who let the contract, are they not? They, in fact, are. Twenty-five percent of the overpayment has to be rebated to CMS today; the Senator would agree with that? Seventy-five percent for extra benefits, 25 percent rebate.
How did we get to where they are overpaid? Because we have a government-centered organization that is incompetent in terms of how they accomplished the implementation of that bill.
What was said by Senator Dodd this morning--and I confronted him already on it, but it bears repeating--is that the Patients' Choice Act eliminates the dollars without eliminating the services because it mandates competitive bidding with no elimination in services for Medicare Advantage. So if you want to save money, competitively bid rather than go through eight pages of reductions year by year in the payments that go back to Medicare Advantage.
We have this complicated formula that nobody who listens to this debate would understand. I know the chairman understands it because he helped write it. But the fact is 2.6 million Americans, according to CBO, will see a significant change in their Medicare benefits. Medicare Advantage is Medicare Part C. We have had a kind of a differential made that it isn't really Medicare. It is Medicare. And 20 percent of the people in this country who are on Medicare are on Medicare Part C--Medicare Advantage--and they like it. And why do they like it? Because most of them don't have enough money to buy a supplemental Medicare policy to cover the costs that are associated with deductibles and copays and outliers. So I agree with the chairman that Medicare Advantage is overpaid, but I disagree with the way you are going about getting there.
I also disagree with taking any of the money that is now being spent on Medicare Part C and creating another program. I think all that money ought to be put back into the longevity of Medicare.
In case you don't understand how impactful that is, we now owe, in the next 75 years--actually, we don't owe it, because none of the Senators sitting here will be around. Our kids are going to get to pay back $44 trillion in money for Medicare we will have spent, that we allowed to grow, in fraud, close to $100 billion a year and then did nothing about it. This bill does essentially nothing about that $100 billion a year, or $1 trillion every 10 years. If we were to eliminate that--which this bill does not--we would markedly extend the life and lower the debt that is going to come to our children.
That leads me to the other important aspect of the health care debate. We know when you take out the funny accounting--the Enron accounting--in this bill, and you match up revenues with expenses, you are talking about a $2.5 trillion bill. The chairman of the Finance Committee readily admits he has it paid for, and CBO says you have it paid for. But how does he pay for it? He pays for it with the 2.6 million people who like what they have today and who are going to lose what they have today. He pays for it by raising Medicare taxes. Then the Medicare taxes he raises he doesn't spend on Medicare, he spends that on a new entitlement program. Think about what we are doing. Is there a better way to accomplish what we are doing?
I thank the chairman for indulging me and allowing me to continue this long. I will wind up with a couple of statements and then share the floor with him.
You know, after practicing medicine for 25 years, I know we have a lot of problems in health care, and I appreciate the efforts of the chairman of the Finance Committee to try to find a solution for them. It is not a bipartisan solution, but it is a solution. And it is a solution that grows the government. It puts the government in charge of health care and creates blind bureaucracies that step between you and your doctor. That is one way of doing it. But wouldn't a better way be to do the following: Let's incentivize people to do the right thing, rather than building bureaucracies and mandating how they will do it. Wouldn't it be better to incentivize tort reform in the States? Wouldn't it be better to incentivize physicians based on outcomes? Wouldn't it be better to incentivize good behavior by medical supply companies, DME, drug companies, hospitals, physicians, through accountable care organizations, through transparency for both quality and price?
We don't have any of that in here. What we have is a government-centered bureaucracy that, according to CBO figures, will add 25,000 Federal employees to implement this program--25,000. If you call the Federal Government, how long does it take you now to get an answer? Yet we are going to add 25,000 employees just in health care. That is an extrapolation of the amount of agencies, dividing what CBO says per agency and per cost they will come up with. Wouldn't it be better to fix the things that are broken, rather than to try to fix all of health care?
I heard one of my colleagues today say on the floor, and I think it is true, that people in America are upset with us, and I think rightly so. I apologize to the American people for my arrogance. I apologize to the American people for the arrogance of this bill; the thinking that we got it right; that we can fix it in Washington; that we don't have to listen to the people out there; that we don't have to listen to the people who are actually experiencing the consequences of what we are going to do. I apologize for the arrogance of saying we can create a $2.5 trillion program and that we know best. Well, you know what, we don't know what is best.
As Senator Alexander has said so many times, what needs to happen is we need to start over. We need to protect the best of American medicine. And what is the best? Well, if you get sick anywhere in the world, this is the best place in the world to get sick, whether you have insurance or not. If you have heart disease or atherosclerotic disease, this is the best place in the world. It costs too much, there is no question, but it is the best place. If you have cancer, you are one-third more likely to live and be cured of that cancer living in this country than anywhere else in the world--for any cancer. It just costs too much.
This bill doesn't address the true causes of the cost. What are the true causes of the cost? Well, No. 1, we know Medicare and Medicaid underpay and so we get a cost shift that is $1,700 per year per family in this country. So you get to pay three taxes in this country on health care: You pay your regular income tax, which goes to pay for Medicaid, and it also now starting to pay for Medicare as well; you have to pay 1.45 percent, plus your employer gets to pay 1.45 percent of every dollar you earn for Medicare; and then your health insurance costs $1,700 more per year because Medicaid and Medicare don't compensate for the actual cost of the care because of the government-centered role that is played in terms of the mandates, the rules, and regulations.
We have a tort system in this country that costs upward of $200 billion in waste a year, which is 8 percent of the cost. Ninety percent of all cases are settled with no wrong found at all on the part of caregivers, and of the remaining 10 percent only 3 percent find anything wrong. Of 97 percent of all the cases, only 10 percent go to trial, and 73 percent of that 10 percent are found in favor of the providers. So we spend all this money practicing defensive medicine and there is not one thing in this bill to fix that problem. That is 8 percent.
Take your health care premium, or your percentage of your health care premium, and apply 8 percent, and that is going down the drain because I am ordering tests you don't need but I need to protect myself in case somebody tries to extort money from me with a lawsuit that I know is going to get thrown out, but I have to have it there to prove it. And then we have inefficiencies.
Ultimately, what we need to do is to protect what is good, incentivize the correct behavior in what is wrong, and go after the fraud in health care with a vengeance--put doctors in jail, hospital administrators in jail. Don't slap them with a fine and ban them from Medicare. Put them in jail. The people who are stealing our grandkids' money, up to $100 billion a year, need to go to jail. We play pay and chase. We pay everybody and then we try to figure out whether they deserve to get paid. Nobody else does that, but the government does, and that is who we are getting ready to put in charge of another $2.5 trillion worth of health care?
One of the reasons health care is in trouble in this country is that 61 percent of all the health care is run through the government today. Look at TRICARE for our military, look at VA care, look at Indian health care, at SCHIP and Medicaid. There is an estimate of $15 billion a year in fraud in New York City alone on Medicaid. That is one estimate, per year, in one city on Medicaid. And then Medicare. And we are going to say those are running so good that we ought to move another $2.5 trillion, or 15 percent of health care, to where we are at 76 percent of all health care is run by the government? I reject that out of hand until we can demonstrate we are good at what we do.
What we ought to be doing is turning it back. The private sector isn't the answer to everything. I agree with that. I can't stand 80 percent of the insurance bureaucrats I deal with. But at least I have a fighting chance, because they will call me back when I need to do something for a patient. I never get a call back from Medicare. They do not call me back. The State doesn't call me back on Medicaid when I need to do something. So I go on and do it and find somebody else to pay for it. That is the kind of system we have today.
Think about the mothers in this country in a Medicaid system where 40 percent of the primary care doctors in this country won't see their children. That is Medicaid. That is realistic Medicaid today in our country. So they have a sick kid, but they can't get in to a doctor, even though they have insurance. They have Medicaid, but they can't get in. Why can't they get in? Because only 1 in 50 doctors last year who graduated from medical school goes into primary care. We have created an abrupt shortage in primary care. And, No. 2, the payment is not enough to pay for the overhead to see the child. So you have a weepy woman who is worried about her sick kid, and care is delayed if you can't get in. It doesn't matter if you have Medicaid if you can't be seen. So what happens? She goes to the emergency room. What happens in the emergency room? We spend three or four times as much as we should, because that is an emergency department. The doctor has no knowledge of the child or the mother. He doesn't want to get sued, so we have a 40-percent defensive medicine cost in the emergency room.
The answer is not more government health care. The answer is creating the incentives for people to do the right thing. The only way we get things under control in health care in this country and the only way we create access for people in this country is to decrease the cost of health care. This bill doesn't decrease the cost of health care. If we want to make sure we do what is best for American medicine while we fix what is wrong, we will do it one significant part at a time. I can't imagine dealing with thousands, tens of thousands of more bureaucrats in health care, and I can't imagine the impact it is going to have between me and my patients.
It is going to severely impact them. Do I want everybody in this country to have available care? Yes; 15 percent of my practice was gratis, for people who had no care, who had no money. That is true with a lot of physicians out there in this country. It is true with a lot of labs. It is true with a lot of hospitals. It is true with a lot of the providers in this country. They are caring people.
We are going to tie them up. We are going to put regulations and ropes around them. We are going to mandate rules and regulations, and we, in our arrogant wisdom, are going to tell Americans how they are going to get their health care. I certainly hope not. But I am not thinking about me. I am thinking about our kids and our grandkids.
I will end with one last comment. Thomson-Reuters, in a study put out October 9 of this year--it is a very well-respected firm--their estimate of the $2.4 trillion that we spend on health care per year in this country is that between $600 and $850 billion of it is pure waste. Defensive medicine costs and malpractice is between $250 billion to $325 billion by their estimate. Not one thing in this bill to address that--not one thing.
Fraud, there is between $125 and $175 billion per year--insignificant in this bill, $2 billion to $3 billion.
Administrative inefficiency, 17 percent--between $100 and $150 billion wasted on paperwork in health care every year.
Provider errors--that is me--between $75 and $100 billion; that is either wrong diagnosis or failure to treat appropriately. It is the smallest of all.
What are we doing? We are going to tell the providers--the hospitals, the medical device companies, the drug companies, the doctors, the radiologists, the labs, the physical therapists--we are going to tell them how to do it. That is not where the problem is.
My hope is that the American people will come to their senses and say: Wait a minute. Slow down. Stop. Fix the important things. Fix the worst thing first, the next thing second, the next thing third, the next thing fourth. The unintended consequences of this bill are going to be unbelievable. Nobody is smart enough to figure all this out--nobody. Nobody on my staff, nobody on the Finance Committee, nobody in Majority Leader Reid's office can predict all the unintended consequences that are going to come about because of this bill.
The chairman has been awfully patient, and I see my colleague here to offer an amendment. With that, I yield the floor.
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