Servicemembers Home Ownership Tax Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. JOHANNS. Mr. President, the citizens from Nebraska are absolutely on to this gimmick. They know it is a gimmick. Here is what I tell the Senator from Texas: I had an opportunity, as she knows, to be their Governor for 6 years. Every year, I had to walk in front of the unicameral--our one-house system--and give a state of the State address and lay out a budget plan. If I had walked into that chamber with a budget plan with these kinds of gimmicks, they would have been rolling in the aisles laughing at me, literally. They would have been rolling in the aisles.
I always did a State fly-around, where I visited the communities and talked about my budget vision and my legislative package, et cetera. The people of Nebraska would have run me out of the State had I tried to balance the State budget based upon this kind of gimmicky approach.
The Senator has absolutely hit the nail on the head. What we have here is a situation where those who wrote this bill--as we all know, it was written behind closed doors and nobody knew what the bill was until a few weeks ago--but those who wrote the bill said: Oh my goodness, the President has said we have to bring this bill in under $900 billion. That is what he said. How are we going to get that accomplished? So they used gimmicks. They uploaded the bill, front-end loaded the bill on the revenues, so that starts right away. Then the benefits don't start for 3 or 4 years. So it is magic; we have made the bill come in under $900 billion.
Let me offer this thought: Who loses on this crazy accounting gimmick? Do you know who loses? The constituents we represent in the United States--not just in Nebraska. They are going to pay the taxes. They are not going to see the benefits. It is like buying a car and paying on it for 4 years but not getting the car for 4 years. They are going to pay on it.
Sadly, and most concerning to me, is that this gimmickry is going to be passed on to the next generation because, when it doesn't work, somebody has to pick up the bill. The full cost of this bill, we have come to recognize, is $2.5 trillion. This bill doesn't fit together. It doesn't pass the smell test, as we say back home in Nebraska.
My hope is that sanity will revisit what we are doing and people will say: Time out. We can't ask the American people to go along with this. We have to call a timeout and get this right.
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Mr. JOHANNS. That is such a compelling story. I want to add something to that. When you think the policy could not get more crazy and insane, you hear about this idea that they are going to expand Medicare, which is due to be insolvent in 2017. But the tragedy of that in relating it to the story you just told us is this: That will hammer our rural hospitals. Why? Because they cannot stay open on Medicare reimbursement rates. They cannot stay open on Medicaid reimbursement rates.
This poor woman who dragged herself to try to get some care all of a sudden could be faced with the possibility that the hospital she relies on will not stay open under this health care bill.
I have been to those hospitals. I have seen the struggles they are going through with Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement. Every hospital administrator tells me the same thing: We would close our doors if we had to live on that.
So what is their solution? Expand Medicaid and Medicare. You have got to be kidding me. Who are they listening to? You know what. Take this bill out to the rural areas of Nebraska. You will get an earful.
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