Department of Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010

Floor Speech

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2010 -- (Senate - December 17, 2009)

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Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Arizona.

I was thinking as I listened to the Republican leader, I wonder if the Senator noticed the comments of the Governor of California on Monday. Governor Schwarzenegger said on ``Good Morning America'' that he supports the idea of overhauling health care, but: ``the last thing we need,'' said Governor Schwarzenegger, ``is another $3 billion in spending when we already have a $20 million deficit.''

He was referring to one of the unintended consequences of this bill, which is big State costs for Medicaid being shifted to the States--unfunded mandates.

So here is Governor Schwarzenegger's advice, following up on the comments of the leader: ``So I would say be very careful to the Federal Government.''

This is from the Governor of California:

Before you go to bed with all this, let's rethink it. There is no rush from one second to the next. Let's take another week or two. Let's come up with the right package.

I wonder if the Senator saw it.

Mr. McCAIN. I thank the Senator from Tennessee who also understands this issue as well as or better than anyone, having been a Governor and recognizing the problems the Governors face.

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Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Arizona for his comments. We have two physicians in the Senate, Dr. Coburn from Oklahoma and Dr. Barrasso from Wyoming. I wonder if they would bear with me for a minute or two to reflect on something the majority leader said--minority leader said--I hope he is the majority leader before too long--and the Senator from Arizona.

The minority leader, the Republican leader, talked about a historic mistake. There has been a lot of talk around here about making history on health care. The problem is there are many different kinds of history, as the Republican leader has pointed out. It seems our friends on the other side are absolutely determined to pursue a political kamikaze mission toward a historic mistake which will be disastrous for them in the elections of 2010, but much more important, for the country.

I did a little research on historic mistakes. We have made them before in the United States. Maybe we would be wise to take Governor Schwarzenegger's advice and slow down and stop and learn from our history rather than try to top our previous historic mistakes, such as the Smoot-Hawley tariff. That sounded pretty good at the time in 1930 when the idea was to buy American, but most historians agree it was a mistake and it contributed to the Depression.

There was the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798. It sounded good at the time. We were going to keep the foreigners in our midst--they were mostly French then--from saying bad things about the government, but it offended all of our traditions about free speech.

In 1969 Congress enacted the ``millionaires' tax,'' they called it, to try to catch 155 Americans who weren't paying any tax. That turned out to be a historic mistake, because last year it caught 28 million American taxpayers until we had to rush to change it.

Just a couple more. There was the Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988. That was well named, but it turned out to be a catastrophe, a congressional catastrophe. The idea was to help seniors deal with illness-related financial losses, but seniors didn't like paying for it. They surrounded the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in Chicago and now the leader of that group is a Member of Congress.

Then there was a luxury tax on boats over $100,000, another historic mistake, because it raised about half the taxes it was supposed to and it nearly sank the boating industry and it put 7,600 people out of jobs.

I ask my friends from Oklahoma and Wyoming--it is going to be a lot harder for Congress, if they try to fix the health care system all at once, to come back and repeal it than it was to repeal a boat tax. Do my colleagues think we ought to take the time to avoid another historic mistake?

Mr. COBURN. Well, I would answer my colleague from Tennessee. As a practicing physician, what I see as the historic mistake is we are going to allow the Federal Government to decide what care you are going to get. We are going to compromise the loyalty of your physician so that no longer is he or she going to be a 100-percent advocate for you, he or she is going to be an advocate for the government and what the government says. Because in this bill--even the one that is going to come--there are three different programs that put government bureaucracy in charge of what you can and cannot have. It doesn't consider your personal health, your past history, or your family history; they are going to say here is what you can and cannot do. That is called rationing. That is in the bill. That is coming. That is a historic mistake because it ruins the best health care system in the world in the name of trying to fix a smaller problem in terms of access, and it ignores the real problem.

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Mr. ALEXANDER. I say to the Republican leader and the Senator from Kentucky, I believe there is another bit of history being made. This process is historic in its arrogance. This isn't very hard to understand. The proposal is to take 17 percent of our economy, affecting 300 million Americans, and nothing could be more personal, as the Republican leader has said, than our health care.

But now we don't have the bill. We do not have the bill. It is being written in secret in another room. If there is any part of this debate that went through to every single household in America, I believe it was when the Finance Committee voted down a motion--the Democrats voted down a motion that the bill should be on the Web for 72 hours so that the American people could see the text, know what it costs, and know how it affects them.

Eight Democratic Senators wrote the Democratic leader and said they want to insist that they know what the text is, and that they have the official score from the Congressional Budget Office, and that they have it for 72 hours before we move to vote.

We don't have the bill. We don't have the official score from the CBO. Seventy-two hours is three more days, and even though eight Democratic Senators and all the Republican Senators said we want to know what it costs, know what it is, and how it affects us, they want to run it through before Christmas.

Mr. McCAIN. May I mention to my colleague that maybe the reason why they don't want it to be online for 72 hours is because when they examined what we have--on page 324 in this bill is an $8 billion tax on individuals who have nongovernment approved plans. On page 348 is a $28 billion tax on businesses that cannot afford to offer insurance to their employees. On page 1979: Raises an almost $150 billion tax on many middle-class workers using so-called Cadillac health insurance plans. Page 1997: Will cost families and individuals an additional $5 billion by prohibiting the use of savings set aside for health care expenses through health savings accounts. Page 2010: Will make the cost of lifesaving medicine more expensive by taxing pharmaceutical research firms an additional $22 billion. The list goes on and on, including on page 2040: Increasing Medicare payroll taxes by $53.8 billion.

That may be a reason why it is going to be difficult for them to win passage of this after 72 hours of examining this bill.

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Mr. ALEXANDER. We come to the floor every day and point out the problems with the bill. We don't have a bill now, we can't read it, and we don't know how much it costs or how much it affects the American people. It raises taxes and premiums. It will increase the debt, because it doesn't include things such as the physicians Medicare reimbursement. It cuts Medicare by $1 trillion over 10 years once it is fully implemented.

We point out what we think should be done. My colleagues have talked about it many times. Instead of wheeling in another 2,000-page bill, we should focus on the goal of reducing costs, and we should take several steps toward doing that. The Senator from Arizona talks about one of those things, which is reducing the number of junk lawsuits against doctors. I don't think that is in the bill, unless it is secretly being added in the back room today.

Mr. McCAIN. Well, I don't think that is being added today. Again, I also point out that Americans are now against passage of this legislation. But in that polling data, it is very interesting, also, the majority of seniors, by much larger numbers--the actual beneficiaries of Medicare--are turning against it, and the intensity of Americans against it--which is harder to gauge in a poll--is incredible.

If the responses that our efforts are getting are anything close to indicative of the mood of the American people, and the intensity of it, it is probably as great as I have ever seen in the years that I have had the privilege of serving in the Congress of the United States.

This polling data says more Americans now believe it is better to keep the current health system than to pass President Obama's plan. That is a message being sent, and the intensity is higher than any I have ever observed in my years of service. I thank them for that.

There is a chance that we can stop this, and we start in January. We would be willing to come back and sit down and negotiate, with the C-SPAN cameras on--as the President said or committed he would do as a candidate. We would sit down together here, at the White House, or anywhere, and we can fix this system that we all know needs fixing.

As the Senator from Oklahoma said, it is the cost that has to be addressed, not the quality.

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