Health Care

Floor Speech

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, it has not been that long since the President's health care proposal has been passed. If we recall, it was passed on Christmas Eve, after a long battle. We were told: Don't worry what is in it; we will have to pass it first to find out what is in it. I remember Senator Brown was running in the State of Massachusetts, a liberal State. He said, If you elect me--and he was running in the special election--I will vote against it and provide the vote that kills it. But the matter was delayed--his appointment and confirmation, after he won his election. It was put off and the interim Senator cast a vote for the bill and it passed by a single vote and the result was 60 to 40. I think it was a dangerous step for America.

I am the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee and the Senator from Wisconsin is a member of that committee. We have serious concerns about what is in this bill now that we are beginning to read it and beginning to apply it and see what might happen. Senator Johnson is a successful businessman who ran for the Senate and joined us just a little over 1 year ago. He came here to do something. I have been exceedingly impressed with his approach to business. He had looked at these numbers and challenged the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Secretary Sebelius, on some numbers last week. The situation was quite troubling.

Maybe Senator Johnson can tell us about his concern and what he raised last week--the economic impact of what happened with jobs, the American economy, and the debt of our country. Maybe we can begin our discussion with where he is coming from and what he observed from his exchange last week.

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Mr. SESSIONS. The Senator has been in the real world, having to make a payroll and manage a company. If he, as a CEO, made a representation that this was going to reduce the cost of insurance for your employees by $2,500, and it increases by 2,200, that would be a stunning event, would it not? Does it bother the Senator, as a person from the real world--and this is the first time he has been in elected office--to have people walking around with numbers that are so divergent, promising to reduce health care costs, and they actually are driving costs up?

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Mr. SESSIONS. The Senator is right. I was here. There was a promise made to achieve passage of the bill. A lot of Americans didn't believe these promises and thought they were inflated to begin with, and this promise--a fundamental promise--has already been proven to be wildly inaccurate.

And thank you for raising that.

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Mr. SESSIONS. Well, the promise was that--and it was repeated here, and the President went on national TV, and I believe he said it at the State of the Union--this bill would not add one dime to the deficit. If you drop out the $80 or so billion--and he estimated that his plan, if passed, would actually create $143 billion in surplus, in extra revenue for the Treasury; it wouldn't cost anything, it would create more money. So you lose $80 or so billion because the CLASS Act has proven to be the Ponzi scheme Senator Conrad said it would be, and we just saw in the President's budget a request for $111 billion more for the exchanges. Well, that already wipes out entirely, does it not, the promise that it wouldn't add to the deficit? Even before the bill is implemented, the projections are that it would cost money rather than make money for the Treasury. Is that the Senator's analysis so far?

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Mr. SESSIONS. Well, Senator Johnson has been talking about this issue for some time, and it looks as though reports are coming along to validate his concerns. But the administration estimated that only 1 million would go into the exchanges, and these are the areas where, if you don't have employer-based health care, the government will subsidize your health care program for you, and it costs the Treasury money. This is how we get in financial trouble, when we make bad estimates.

The Senator thinks the numbers that go into the exchanges could dwarf 1 million. How many could it be, based on the reports the Senator has seen?

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Mr. SESSIONS. That is astounding.

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Mr. SESSIONS. Now, for example, $400 billion a year over a 10-year window would be $4 trillion. If the Budget Control Act that we worked on so hard last summer, which the President is already undermining, were to take place, it would only reduce spending over 10 years by $2 trillion. And this would be an unexpected $5 trillion, $4 trillion added on top of that, would it not?

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Mr. SESSIONS. And it is not baked into the numbers now. We are not assuming it is going to be $4 trillion or $5 trillion more under Obamacare, we are assuming only 1, I guess.

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Mr. SESSIONS. Well, is it too late? Is this a fait accompli, this health care law that was passed? Can we not reverse it or is it, in the Senator's opinion, practical at this point for us to pull back from this path?

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Mr. SESSIONS. Well, the Senator raised these issues with Secretary Sebelius last week in the committee, and the exchange has been on the TV and on the Web and has become a bit of a sensation, really. People have been looking at it, and it has been very troubling.

Would the Senator tell us what troubles him about Secretary Sebelius's answers--or her lack of them--and what you think we should do next?

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Mr. SESSIONS. Well, a $111 billion error is a big deal. You think about it. We brought in $2,200 billion, and this is $100 billion--about 5 percent of the entire estimated revenue we had in the government last year. To miss that on one part of one bill is very troubling to me. We are fighting every day, wrestling with a highway bill, and we came up $2 billion short over 2 years. And the whole bill is held up, votes on it, points of order raised on it, and here, blithely, into the President's budget comes another $111 billion. I am sure there can be some explanation for it, but I really do think the American people, don't you, are owed a prepared Secretary before the Budget Committee who can lay out explanations for what this is so we will know how much over cost we already are on this plan.

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Mr. SESSIONS. So you are an employer. You have employees, and you have been helping them, you have been providing health coverage, and you realize, well, I can cancel my employer contributions, let the employee go to the exchanges, and they will be subsidized by the American taxpayer.

Where is the money coming from that will provide the extra money they will need to get full coverage?

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Mr. SESSIONS. What about a new business--some small business starts up, and they are thinking about whether they are going to provide health care for their employees, and they have the option of the exchanges. Do you think a new business would be even more likely to not provide coverage and let the employee go to the subsidized exchange?

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Mr. SESSIONS. I had a number of people in a meeting I was at explain the realities of it.

They told us the whole fear of regulation and the health care bill and the revenue that is going to be extracted from them to pay for it would result in lesser employees, making it impossible for them to provide the coverage. One told me they could lose as many as 70 employees. I remember that figure.

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Mr. SESSIONS. It is not fully implemented yet. There are a lot of opportunities for us to get off this train before a disaster occurs. I truly believe it is not too late for us to alter the course.

I think the American people have never been happy with it. They have been told they wouldn't have to give up their health care. They were told it was going to bring down the cost curve and reduce the costs, and they were told it was going to pay for itself; there would be more money coming in than the bill would cost.

Would the Senator say all three of those promises have now already been proven false?

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Mr. SESSIONS. I will add one more thought to the costs, and I have looked at this very carefully.

On December 23, the night before the bill passed, I got a letter back from the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, who also had stated it would create a surplus in the bill of $143 billion based on conventional accounting procedures. I asked him: Were they not double counting the money, about $400 billion? Were they not double counting it, counting it as income to Medicare and counting it as money available to fund the bill here, President Obama's ObamaCare? Weren't they using the money twice?

Think about that. Here we are on the eve of a vote, December 23, the vote is tomorrow morning, December 24, and we are not agreed on whether the money is being double counted. He wrote back and said it is being double counted, ``although the conventions of accounting might suggest otherwise.''

The way they scored this bill was carefully done by experts to get the score they got, that it would make a surplus of $140 billion. But the money was Medicare money. They raised taxes for Medicare. They cut costs for Medicare. It created some money in Medicare, but the money was borrowed by the U.S. Treasury and spent on this new program. The money is owed to the Medicare trustees, who are trustees by law. They are holding debt instruments from the United States. But because it is an internal debt, it doesn't score. That may seem complicated, but it is not. Trust me, they borrowed this money. Sooner or later, when Medicare is going into deep financial distress, they will call their bonds from the Treasury and the Treasury is going to have to pay it, and they are going to borrow the money on the open market is what they are going to do so they can pay the Medicare trustees the money they borrowed from them. This is not a good way to do business. That is just one of the additional problems we have with this.

But, I thank Senator Johnson for focusing on all these issues but particularly for raising the cost of the exchanges. Because that, by any estimate--wouldn't the Senator agree--is a dangerous number. It could surge above the number we are at. Does the Senator think most any person, even if they thought it would be 1 million people, would have to admit it could be 5, 10 or 20 million people? Nobody knows for sure.

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Mr. SESSIONS. We have to know that. We have a responsibility, as representatives of the people, to understand are we talking about another $100 billion in cost over just 1 year's time that we weren't expecting.

I believe the Budget Committee is a good forum to have that. The Senator and I serve on that committee, and I hope Senator Conrad can agree and would agree to give Secretary Sebelius an opportunity to state her view of the situation.

I have to say, I am more and more convinced that we cannot afford this health care bill. We cannot afford it. We don't have the money. We don't have the money. I think it will damage health care, and we have had a lot of debate and experts tell us that, and it will reduce the quality of care in America. But what I am saying to the Senator is, we can't afford it, and it threatens the financial viability of our future. We need to save Medicare and Social Security, the programs we have. It would be a terrible tragedy if we start off on another program. As the Senator talked about Medicare 30 years ago, 40 years ago, it surged way beyond any estimate they would ever have expected in terms of costs.

If we start on another program, I don't see how this country can sustain it. The entitlements we have today are now taking up about 60 percent of the entire budget of America: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Over 50 percent, almost 60 percent of our entire spending goes for those three programs. To start another massive new program, when those are all unsound financially and in crisis and need to be fixed, is the height of foolishness, in my opinion.

I hope we can have a good hearing. I thank the Senator for his leadership; he is a great addition to the Budget Committee. I thank him for spending hours digging into these numbers, bringing his business and accounting skills to bear, and letting our lawyer bunch benefit from somebody who can actually add and subtract.

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