BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. COBURN. Would the Senator yield for a question?
Mr. BURR. I yield to the Senator from Oklahoma.
Mr. COBURN. If we are going to tax tanning salons, why don't we tax anybody who goes to the beach? Because true sunlight is much worse for your skin than a tanning salon. So if the intention was to prevent disease, why wouldn't we tax it where most of the disease occurs? Or how about kids' sports in the summer. Let's tax kids' baseball. Or swimming. Let's tax all the swimming pools because we have exposure to UV light.
This shows the precariousness and the silliness of a large portion of this, and I yield back.
Mr. BURR. The Senator makes a great point, and I am sure we have loaded the chairman of the Finance Committee with additional good ideas he can go back and think on. I am sure before it is over, we will fine parents who don't put suntan lotion on their children--especially if it doesn't meet high enough SPF to block everything the Sun might produce.
This is out of control. This is not the way to write a bill that affects one-sixth of the U.S. economy. I mean it is bad enough it is done behind closed doors, in a back room, with only a few people there, but when the No. 2 Democrat can walk on the floor and say: I haven't seen it, either--well, if the No. 2 Democrat hasn't seen it, how many people were there? How many people had input into this? Was it just Leader Reid and Senator Nelson? Was it the Presiding Officer from Minnesota? Nobody knows. Nobody knows. The truth is, and what we do know is that the American people don't like the process, and more importantly the American people don't like the bill.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. COBURN. I want to raise an issue. It was raised in the Finance Committee markup; it was raised in the health care markup. I have behind me the Medicare cuts, and I understand they have been slightly reduced in home health--in the rebuild--but we are going to cut Medicare. We are not going to cut it significantly in the fraud--$2 billion. That is where the real waste is.
The Senator from Rhode Island came down here and said we are trying to scare people, but when we offered the opportunity for the chairman of the committee to prohibit rationing of health care in this country, both the chairman and the Senator from Rhode Island voted against it. It was simple, straightforward, saying no matter what we do in health care, we are not going to do what other countries have done, and that is ration health care. Straight up-and-down votes--party-line votes--against it.
In fact, we are going to ration health care. That is what this bill does. The way we are going to control cost is through the mechanisms outlined in this bill that are going to allow government bureaucrats to decide what you can get treated for, when you can get treated for it, and where you can get treated for it. The rebuttal to that is: In Medicare, it is already illegal for them to ration care, so we don't need a prohibition. The fact is Medicare is rationing right now. They are rationing virtual colonoscopies, they are rationing bone densitometry, they are rationing Epogen, they are rationing Neupogen--two key drugs to maintain survival during the treatment of chemotherapy. They are practicing medicine.
So when given the opportunity to vote and put an absolute prohibition on the rationing of health care, what did the chairman of the Finance Committee do? He voted against that. Because what he recognizes is the ultimate plan. And the answer to Senator Burr's question is: This will collapse. It is not going to be sustainable. The Medicare cuts won't be made by us. We will put it off on a commission and say: Oh, we had to do it, and the result of that will be rationing.
The other result will be what the Senator from Vermont actually wants, which is a single-payer, government-run system. That is why he is intellectually honest. He brought it to the floor and said this is how I think we ought to solve health care. We ought to have the government run it, and we ought to have the government make the decisions. He was honest about it. That is where this bill is going. So if you are a Medicare patient, you should be concerned. If you are a Medicare Advantage patient, you should be concerned.
I have had criticism leveled at me because I do what the chairman of the Finance Committee suggests--I make competitive bidding for Medicare Advantage. But there is a big difference. Mine has no cuts in benefits. They cut benefits 50 percent, in terms of the Medicare Advantage differential.
There are three things you can do to fix health care in this country: You can incentivize prevention and the treatment of chronic disease based on outcome; you can create transparency so that purchasers in the market can actually make a judgment about value and quality; and you can assist those who are on the lower rungs of the economic ladder to get the same kind of care we get. Those are the three things you can do.
I readily admit we don't have a great competitive model in the insurance industry. I want to change that. We had Senator Wyden come to the floor and say that he loves the free enterprise spirit, yet we want to put an artificial fix in terms of the insurance company, in terms of what you have to have for a return. What if an insurance company came up with 20 percent greater efficiency in terms of outcomes and benefits? They still have to spend that money? In the name of the free enterprise system we are going to kill free enterprise? As a practicing physician, I bristle at the way I run into insurance companies. There is no question about it. We need to fix that.
The point Senator Burr was making is this says it is this way or the highway, when the option we offered--the Patients' Choice Act--cuts taxes, doesn't raise taxes; expands exactly to the level or beyond of this bill and it does at in a faster rate. It extends the life of Medicare. It gives Medicaid patients the same kind of care we get. But it was defeated in committee on a party-line vote. It was filed as an amendment here but not accepted. We had 10 amendments voted on from our side on 2,400 pages of legislation--10 amendments. So it is not about being bipartisan, it is about you have to take this or leave it.
What the American people ought to pray for is that somebody can't make the vote tonight. That is what they should be praying for, so that we can actually get the middle--not me, not mine. I understand I am way over here. But we ought to get the middle of America and the middle of the Senate a bill that can run through this country and actually do what we say we all want to do. There is a large difference of opinion, and it is not rhetoric that is unfounded, as Senator Burr outlined, and as Dr. Barrasso outlined with an estimate by NFIB of 1.6 million jobs lost. That may be old data, because who knows what the data is now. We haven't had a chance to look at it, because 30 hours after the bill is introduced for cloture and the cloture motion is filed, we are going to vote on it. I am not sure this is a great way to run the country.
What is in the bill? There are zero guarantees that taxpayers won't finance abortion.
There are zero prohibitions on the rationing of health care--zero. There is not one shred of evidence that we are not going to ultimately ration health care under this bill. We are. And the only reason you would vote against a rationing amendment is because you intend to see rationing carried out.
There are zero Senators required to enroll in either Medicaid or a government-run option, either through OPM or Medicaid.
There are now 10 new taxes created. There are 71 new government programs created. There are 1,697 times that the Secretary of HHS is going to write the regulations, and based on CRS calculations there are between 15,000 and 20,000 new Federal employees who are going to be required to carry out this legislation.
There are 3,607 times, before we got the Reid amendment, that the legislation says the word ``shall.'' ``Shall'' is a very important word because the word ``shall'' takes away your options. There is no option when the word ``shall'' is used. The word ``shall'' also says whoever is directing the ``shall'' obviously has more wisdom, more knowledge, more experience than the person the ``shall'' is applied to.
What we have said is, in all our wisdom, in all our many years of practicing medicine and being involved in the care of patients, that 3,607 times we are going to tell the American people what to do.
One of the big ``shall also's'' that I do not think will ever hold scrutiny before the Supreme Court is, you shall buy an insurance policy. That doesn't fit anywhere in the Constitution that I read. If you do the legal research on it, as my staff lawyers from the Judiciary Committee have done, it is highly unlikely that will ever hold up. So the whole premise of a large portion of the taxes collected in this bill will be out the window.
It also will totally change, through adverse selection, all of the insurance premiums in this country because, if you do not have an individual mandate making people buy insurance, the costs relative to the illness and the age, even though we have compressed the ratios, will rise exorbitantly.
There are still going to be 24 million people left without health insurance in this country. There is a $10 billion cost just for the IRS implementation of this bill. There is at least $25 billion in mandates placed on the States, unfunded mandates. Actually it is much higher now. There is $28 billion-plus in new taxes on employers. There is $100 billion, by conservative estimates, in fraud and Medicare and Medicaid a year, and this bill goes after $2 billion over 10 years. So we are going to go after $2 billion out of $1 trillion--not $200 billion, not $20 billion--we are going after $2 billion.
There is $118 billion in cuts to Medicare Advantage but only for those people who do not live in the State of Florida and a couple of other places. If you happen to live in Oklahoma, citizens under the Medicare Advantage are going to lose.
This is now over $500 billion in new taxes on Americans. There is a quarter of a trillion dollars not in this in expense that everybody knows is an expense. We are going to restore the SGR. We are going to fix that. And that quarter of a trillion dollars is based on no increase in physicians over the next 10 years. How many in this body think we are not going to increase the pay of physicians in Medicare under the next 10 years? The assumptions in the CBO report that accompanied the Reid amendment, if you read what they said, they said it is highly unlikely. So that is a quarter of a trillion dollars even though it was not in their numbers.
It also said if, in fact, the cuts came through, which they thought highly unlikely that they would, and if they didn't, then the fiscal numbers associated with the bill are out the window. The final number everybody ought to be paying attention to is $12.1 trillion; $12.1 trillion is what our kids owe outside of owing ourselves--$1.1 trillion. That is going to double in the next 10 years.
Anybody with a lick of common sense who looked at the numbers on this bill would say: Washington, your accounting programs aren't any different from Enron. The same fate of those who created the Enron scam ought to apply to the Congress of the United States. The very fact we are not considering an SGR fix is evidence of that. At least you have to add a quarter of a trillion dollars every 10 years to this bill just to keep doctors even. And don't forget the fact that 34 million new Americans over the next 10 years are going to enter Medicare--are going to enter Medicare.
What are the alternatives? I will not offer other amendments and make the chairman object to them because I know his answer. He calls it a stunt. It is not a stunt when you do not have vigorous amendments offered on the Senate floor. It is not a stunt. The stunt is not allowing amendments to be offered. To allow only 10 of our amendments to be offered on this bill is beneath the dignity of the Senate--on the biggest bill in the last 100 years in this Congress, the only bill in the last 100 years that is going to affect every American in a personal way but also in a fiscal way, a financial way.
There was an amendment to be offered, a conscience protection for physicians. We didn't get a vote on it. Should we force physicians in this country to perform abortions or should we have a vote on whether, if they have a conscience protection, they ought to be exempted from that? Should that not be a part of health care reform? We are not going to get a vote on that.
How about an amendment to reduce the waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid Programs and protecting Medicare benefits? And increasing the fraud and waste from $2 billion to $100 billion over the next 10 years, that is just 10 percent of what is there. We are not going to get a vote on that. It is not going to be available. The American people are not going to get to hear the debate on that. They are not going to make up their mind. Why? You don't want them to hear the debate on it. If you truly wanted to have a debate on fraud we would have a debate on fraud, and we would have an amendment saying put your stamp down, or are you for the people who are defrauding? Or are you for the status quo? We are for the status quo. We are for the well-connected.
The amendment on rationing that I talked about--or an amendment to limit the bureaucratic increase associated with this bill, which is an amendment I offered, we are not going to get a debate on that. That is a very straightforward amendment. It just says we are not going to increase the number of bureaucrats to implement this bill. We are going to drive efficiency in HHS; that is where this is going to. We are going to say: You can't get a net increase in bureaucrats so get more efficient. Since we are running $1.4 trillion or $1.5 trillion deficits, that is something that everybody else in the country would be doing, but we are not going to do that. We are not going to allow an opportunity for a vote or debate on that. We are not going to have that opportunity.
I have heard the majority mention several times that we didn't have anything to offer. We offered the Patients' Choice Act. CBO said it cut long-term costs on Medicaid, that it saved money on Medicare. They said it saved $1 trillion over the first 10 years for the State and the estimates. Because we couldn't get the commitment that was made to us by the chairman of the HELP Committee that he would score the bill, the bill didn't ever get scored by CBO--but an outside score says it saves at least $70 billion the first 10 years and far in excess of that afterwards. It covers more people than this bill, saves personal choice, doesn't put somebody between you and your doctor.
I heard the Senator from Rhode Island say we were lying about that happening. It is happening today, both from insurance companies and Medicare and Medicaid. So if we really wanted to reform health care we would be attacking that. Instead, we are going to make it worse.
Let me tell you how we are going to make it worse. We are going to use cost comparative effectiveness, which is exactly what the U.S. Task Force on Prevention Services did. They used cost comparative effectiveness, and when they looked at breast cancer, they said it is not cost effective to screen women before the age of 50. You know what. They are right. It is not cost effective. But it certainly is clinically effective, especially if your wife is the one who is 40 and has breast cancer and it was found by a mammogram.
You see, judgment goes out the window. What do we do? We reversed that finding, one of the first things we did as we started the debate.
Are we going to do that every time the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force issues a ruling that is cost effective but not clinically effective? Are we going to do that every time the cost comparative effectiveness panel says: You will do this, and the American people say: That isn't right, the American Cancer Society says: That isn't right. Every time we get one of those rulings will we have to pass a piece of legislation to change it?
The purpose of the three panels is well intended. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission is well intended. Help us cut costs. But the only way you go for cost is through prevention and management of chronic disease. You are not going to cut costs any other way because 75 percent of everything we spend is on five chronic diseases. So unless you attack the real problem, the real disease, with our health care system, you are not going to solve it.
The lack of art in medicine will become readily apparent in 2015, 2016, and 2017. We will see bureaucratic decisions in between a patient and their provider. That is not a scare tactic. That is absolute fact. We have it now with Medicare. It is there. If I have a woman who is 55 years of age today and I order bone density testing on her and find she has severe osteoporosis, I put her on medicine but am forbidden by Medicare to do the followup exam that is clinically necessary to see if the medicine is working, and not only that, under Medicare rules, she can't even use her own money to buy that test. So 2 years later, we do the test, and we haven't corrected her disease. Now we change medicines to try to find out, but we can't find out again. So she ultimately falls and breaks her hip. There is a 20-percent mortality rate from falling and breaking one's hip. But those are the rules we are operating under now, right now, that you want to expand.
Government isn't ever compassionate. It is never compassionate. People are compassionate. Thought has to be in the middle of the practice of medicine, not distant thought, near thought. The very fact that an insurance company tells the doctors what they can and cannot do is no worse than what we are getting ready to do with the rest of government-run health care. We didn't fix that problem. We didn't address that problem with this. We didn't guarantee that you could walk with your feet. We said: Here is how much money you can earn, but we didn't address that.
I will give two examples. Two people I have taken care of for over 15 years, both had no clinical indications that they had anything wrong. I contacted the insurance company. I thought they needed an MRI of the brain. Both of them were denied. I got friends who are radiologists to do their MRI. They both had brain tumors. One is still alive. What we are setting up isn't any different than what you have a complaint and gripe about now with the insurance industry. You didn't fix that in this bill. There is no health care reform in this bill. There is health coverage expansion, but there is no reform.
One of those people is still alive, but had we followed either Medicare guidelines, cost comparative effectiveness panel guidelines, which would have forbidden doing an MRI, that one person out of the two would be dead today. So as we sit here and look at our health care system, my biggest worry is, I will be in Medicare. I will get rationed. I know that. The way we are going about it, that is what is going to happen. We are going to ration care. We will not vote to not ration it. You know it is going to be rationed or you would have voted for the amendment in committee that provided a prohibition.
But my real concern is not my generation. My real concern is those who will follow us with $12.1 trillion worth of debt and the fact that every one of those is 25 years of age and younger today. Twenty years from now, they will be responsible for $1 million of both debt and unfunded liabilities for which we will have to collect, on average, $70,000 a year just to pay the interest on what we are sending them. Before they pay the rest of their income taxes, before they pay payroll taxes, before they pay unemployment taxes, before they send their kids to school, before they buy health insurance, before they buy a home, before they buy transportation, the real worry that should be in front of this country, which is the No. 1 issue on the public's mind, is: How do we get out of this financial mess? That is the No. 1 issue on people's minds. It is not health care.
I have no hopes of convincing my colleagues that through 25 years of practicing medicine, dealing with Medicare, dealing with Medicaid, that that is of any value to you. Because we are hell-bent on passing a health care bill and dealing to make sure we can and creating inequities throughout this country and dividing our country.
We heard the Senator from Rhode Island characterize us as liars, birthers, supporters of the Aryan nation. That is what I heard. I sat and listened to it. I think he doth protest too much, for he knows that is not true. There is nobody on our side of the aisle who cares any less than anybody on the other side of the aisle about fixing health care. The rub is, you believe the government is the most powerful thing and the best way to do it. We don't agree with that. We actually believe in the American people. We actually believe in the entrepreneurial spirit of the average American making good decisions for themselves every day, doing things we never do, which is prioritizing where their money is going to go and how they are going to spend it and working like heck to advance the cause of their own family, their own freedom, and their own liberty. You don't believe that because, if you did, you would never put this kind of bill on the floor. This bill limits liberty. This bill says you shall.
Think of the first big step in this bill. In the United States, you no longer have the ability to not buy health insurance. If you have $ 1/2 million in the bank and you want to put that at risk and say: I don't want to, you either have to pay a fine, a tax, or you have to buy health insurance. So where is the liberty and where is the commerce clause in that and where does that tie in with individual liberty and individual responsibility? We say: If you don't want to be responsible, then we will make you responsible. We don't say: You have to suffer the consequences of your lack of responsibility.
What built this country was people figuring out if you don't act responsibly, it is going to cost you. We are going to put a block on that and say: You don't have to act responsibly. You don't have to act in your own best economic interest. Don't worry. We will take care of it.
Jefferson warned of that. One of the Founders of this country warned us against doing the very thing we are doing today. If you read the Federalist Papers, you will see what Madison wrote about the welfare clause and the commerce clause. He said, whenever the Senate starts to think about claiming it means something different than it does, here is what we want you to know. It doesn't. It is very limited in scope.
I said yesterday in a press conference that this country is at the point of a crisis of confidence such as we have not seen in hundreds of years. It is true. Whether you are a very liberal individual or a very conservative individual, you don't have any confidence in us. The reason you don't is because we don't act in the country's best interest. We act in our political best interest. Republicans are equally guilty. We look at partisan issues rather than principled issues. What we miss in all that is the best right thing for the country. We are missing it with this bill. We are missing the best right thing for the country.
Mr. CORKER. Will the Senator yield?
Mr. COBURN. I am happy to yield.
Mr. CORKER. I was listening to the Senator from Oklahoma. I know he cares deeply about his patients and continues to treat patients as he serves in the Senate. What he has done is pointed out the fact that there will be much interruption, changes in the physicians' and patients' relationship. But the big picture is what the Senator is concerned about, too; that is, the tremendous indebtedness this country has by the fact that--the good chairman of the Finance Committee is here today listening patiently, and I know this has to be painful to him--half the reform we are talking about is actually putting people in Medicaid, a program that 40 percent of physicians will not see and 50 percent of specialists will not see.
Mr. COBURN. And the outcomes are poor.
Mr. CORKER. Last weekend, the New York Times talked about many physicians prescribing antipsychotic drugs to young people because they don't want to deal with them on Medicaid. So half this reform is people going into this type of program and half the money is coming from Medicare, which is insolvent.
We have spent all this time, all kinds of bipartisan meetings. I know you spoke about the issue of partisanship. I know the good chairman is here. We, early on, said we wanted to join in health care reform. We just didn't want to take money from Medicare, which was an insolvent program, to fund it. What was the major building block of this program? Taking $464 billion from Medicare to fund reform. We were, in essence, blocked out on the front end saying something we thought was the wrong type of principle to build upon.
Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, if, in fact, we got rid of 50 percent of the fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, we would generate $600 billion every 10 years, more than offsetting the cuts that have been outlined in this bill.
Mr. CORKER. So if I understand correctly, of the new patients going into Medicaid, 50 percent of the money comes from an insolvent program. We are not dealing with the doc fix. Much of the savings they have talked about is just like the doc fix that back in 1997, the AMA, both sides of the aisle agreed to do something to save money for Medicare. As the Senator knows now, the Reid amendment takes out all the doc fix, now with a $285 billion gap over the next 10 years to deal with physicians. It is another example of how we don't have the courage. We put in place cuts. We are not going to do that. We know what damage that will cause to patients. In this particular case, we should not do that. But the fact is many of these cuts that have been discussed will never take place. They will never take place. At the end of the day, I come back to the very thing you talked about; that is, we have $12 trillion in debt, $38.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities for Medicare alone, and here we are passing a bill that is using up the resources we might otherwise use to make it solvent.
Instead of doing that, we are leveraging a whole new entitlement. I heard some of the pundits this morning parroting some of the things I have heard from my friends on the other side of the aisle. Let's pass this bill. We know it is not very good, but we will fix it as we move along.
What I fear is the way we are going to fix it, we are going to fix it by adding tremendous debt on future generations. My guess is over the next very short period--2 or 3 months--the other side of the aisle is going to come right back up here with a huge, several hundred billion dollar unpaid bill to deal with one of these issues we have been talking about. That is the way business is done here.
Mr. COBURN. The Senator raises a good question. How long have we known and how long has Medicare been in trouble that we haven't fixed it? We will not fix it. We will do exactly what the Senator says, what we always do, what we have done since I have been in this body. We put the credit card into the machine and say: Transfer this to your grandkids. We take no pain ourselves. What is lacking in our country today is moral character to lead on the basis of sacrifice. It should start with us as Senators in this body.
Mr. President, I understand our time has expired.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The minority's time has expired.
Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I thank the Chair, and I look forward to hearing the remarks in the cloakroom of the chairman of the Finance Committee.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT