Prayer
Floor Speech
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Mr. PAUL. I talk to a lot of doctors. I have been in town halls with the Senator at the different hospitals. The hospitals are concerned that if everybody goes on Medicaid they will go out of business. Many hospitals' bottom line is driven by--they can take care of the poor through Medicaid, but they rely on private insurance to make a profit. Hospitals in most communities have to make a profit to stay in business. So the rural hospitals, particularly in small areas, some of them have already gone bankrupt in Kentucky. But they are very concerned about people being shifted from private insurance to public assistance.
The President said, though, that it will be free, but it has a cost. We all pay for it through higher taxes. The other way we pay for it is we have to ration care or ration what we pay for care, so we have to limit what we pay hospitals.
Hospitals are already being forced to see less. They have been for a while. But even more so now. It is the same with doctors. How do doctors respond? Doctors, some respond by saying: I am maybe only going to see a couple of Medicaid patients or no Medicaid patient. Then when everybody is on Medicaid or the vast majority is on Medicaid, they are going to be waiting in to see a doctor.
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Mr. PAUL. When you look at the big picture of this, when we say: Well, we want to provide health insurance for everybody, which I think is a noble cause, you look at what we have. The government already provides Medicare for everybody over 65. But Medicare is $35 to $40 trillion short.
Why? It is nobody's fault really. We are living longer and a lot of people are retiring. So we have a big baby boomer generation. But Medicare is $35 trillion short. So we are instituting a brand new entitlement. It is very big, the biggest we have had in 50 years. But we are going to pay for it by shifting money from Medicare that is already $35 trillion short. That alone should give people pause.
The other thing that I think should give people pause is we cannot get people to sign up for this free program. The President is going to spend tens of millions of dollars on TV promoting it, hiring people to come knock on your door to sign up for something that is free.
You know something is disorganized when people will not take something that is free.
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Mr. PAUL. No. In fact, I think there were problems in health care. But as a physician for 20 years, what I heard most was about the cost of health care. People came to me and said it is so expensive. Or if they are a small business owner they said: Our insurance costs too much. That was their main complaint. This does nothing to control costs. In fact, Obama does the opposite. ObamaCare is a collection of mandates. I was talking earlier. It is the difference between freedom and coercion. We will coerce insurance companies and customers to buy only certain kinds of insurance. People say: It is good. My kids will be covered when they are in college and when they get out of college. That is good. But it is not free. It is going to cost you more money. So if you are the working class or the working poor, you are struggling to buy insurance, it is going to cost you more.
We always hear he is for the middle class. The middle class are going to pay more for their insurance. They already had insurance, and they are going to pay more across the board. So really there are a host of problems and this bill does nothing to control costs.
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Mr. PAUL. I met with a group today. I have here today 68,000 American senior citizens who signed a petition from Conservative 50-plus Alliance, saying they want to delay it, dismantle it, defund it, do anything, just try to slow down this monstrosity.
We have also heard from folks who work for UPS, one of our biggest employers in Louisville and Kentucky. Some 15,000 spouses are losing their insurance coverage from UPS that they had chosen. It was great coverage. UPS is a great company. Great benefits. But they are forced to cut back because of ObamaCare.
We hear from individuals throughout the State. We have received thousands and thousands of letters. One couple I met recently was actually profiled on Fox News, the Anionic family, where they said: We have to buy our insurance. We are self-employed, we do consulting work, we were paying $300 a month, and we are going to $900 a month. This is exactly the opposite. One of the real things that we had that was working in our health care that should be expanded, if we were in charge of talking about this, is health savings accounts. People could save for things that were not covered by their insurance, straightening your kid's teeth, cosmetic, elective kind of surgery, your deductible, meeting a lot of things for your tax-free account.
We had made it bigger and bigger over time. ObamaCare makes it smaller. If you have got a kid with autism or spina bifida, or special needs, you need to save that money tax free so you can help your child with all of extra stuff you need to do for your child.
The President has narrowed that. Also health savings accounts helped to bid prices down. Because when you have a higher deductible, you call up the doctor and you say: How much will that be? Or you ask the pharmacist: How much does that cost? That simple question, of asking how much something costs is concern on the part of the consumer and drives prices down. But we have gotten rid of that.
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Mr. PAUL. Yes. The thing is, there was a French philosopher by the name of Bastiat. He talked about the seen and the unseen. You may be able to--I am sure the President is going to show us the person who gets insurance. That is the ``seen.'' That will be the good effect of this. The unseen will be the person who does not get the job. But you do not know their name because they never got the job--the person that was going to be the 51st employee or the 52nd employee or the part-time worker that had 34 hours going to 29 hours. That is the unseen.
I do not question the motives of the President or the other side. I think they want to help people, but they did not think this thing through. So even their side now is scratching their head. The author of the bill is calling it a train wreck. The Teamsters said, ``We did not know we are going to have to pay all of those taxes on our health insurance. Warren Buffet, former President Clinton, all of these people are questioning. This is really going to hurt some of the people you tried to help.
That is one of my concerns. I know there has been a lot of talk about procedure around here. So we ought to have the ability to amend this to make it less bad--that is the way I like to describe it--and make this bill less bad for the American people. There has been a lot of dialogue on our side but there has not been much on theirs. Are they willing to talk about fixing ObamaCare and making it less bad for the American people.
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Mr. PAUL. Absolutely. It is the content. But it is because there has been no input. ObamaCare is 100 percent the President's bill, 100 percent the work of the Democrats, with no input from our side. I think people actually do--when you go home, they do want to establish dialogue. They do want us to work together a little bit. There has been no working together on ObamaCare. It is theirs. The President got it exactly wrong the other day. It is hard to inform the people this way.
He said: Republicans want 100 percent of what they want or they are going to shut down government. I think it is the opposite. He wants 100 percent of what he wants. He doesn't want any compromise. We have a bill before us. There is a discussion about ObamaCare. Why not? Nearly 80 percent of us voted and said the medical devices tax is going to be a disaster for innovation in the medical industry. It is a bad piece of this bill. We should repeal it.
Why not have a vote on that? To my understanding there will be no vote on any amendments to make ObamaCare any better.
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Mr. PAUL. I think there is also something important about how we change ObamaCare. If a law has problems and we incorrectly pass the law that has the least blemishes, it should come back and we should re-debate and fix it or try to make it less bad. I think it is the best way to put it.
The thing is that it is illegal, it is unconstitutional, and it is unprecedented to do this on his own.
To my mind, win or lose this week, this is an important philosophical battle, bigger than ObamaCare. It is as big and as broad as the country is. That is whether or not the Congress writes the law and the President executes the law.
If the President gets to vote, write, and execute, that is a type of tyranny. Montesquieu talked about the separation of powers. He said when the legislative power becomes the executive power, that is a type of executive tyranny.
We have to do something that says to the President--and that is why I think this needs to be pursued all the way to the Supreme Court--rebukes the President and says you are not a king. You are the President, and the legislation comes from Congress, not from you.
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Mr. PAUL. I think that is what people see as unseemly. They see: Well, gosh, if there are problems, is it right for him to just give exemptions to his friends?
You see a line of people going to the White House that were big contributors of his. It is as if you can buy access to good law.
The President changed the law only for people who gave him money. Can he give out grants and loans to people who are his contributors? I think this is what sort of belies this tale when he says: I am for the middle class.
Well, I don't see the middle class. I don't see my neighbors or any of my friends getting any special deals at the White House. In fact, I see them bearing the brunt of people who do get special deals.
I don't like, if you have really good health insurance, placing a tax on you, a special tax. Many of the unions will get that. I will stand here and fight tooth and nail not to have a special tax on the unions.
Some might be surprised by that. It is not for me a union-nonunion thing. It is about is it good for America, is it good for Americans.
Some executives have good insurance, too. Should we have a special tax on something that is good? It doesn't seem like the right thing to do.
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Mr. PAUL. I think one of the disappointing things about the debate both then and now is that we are talking about something all Americans want. They want affordable health care. They want most people to have insurance. They want everybody to have insurance if we can do it.
But we have made it a partisan battle--not we--but Congress and the deliberative process has become very partisan, when in reality there are probably things on which we could agree, even the problems with ObamaCare.
I think half of the other side half agrees that there are problems and they ought to be fixed.
Because of some kind of stubbornness that we are getting 100 percent of what we want or we are willing to risk shutting down the government, that is what we get from the other side. It is their way or the highway. They want all of ObamaCare or they want the government to shut down.
I think in reality there are a lot of good things that we could actually come together and work on because ObamaCare never addressed price. Eighty-five percent of the public had insurance and their price is going up. We do need to get together and talk about how to try to bring cheaper health care to people in our country.
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Mr. PAUL. Yes. I don't think it has actually fixed the problem. I think we were at 45, so I don't think it fixed half the problem.
The other interesting thing is of the people who didn't have health insurance, a third of the people without health insurance were young, healthy, and actually made more than $50,000 a year. They weren't getting health insurance because it was too expensive.
What did we do to help them? We made health care more expensive.
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Mr. PAUL. No. I think once the bill has come due at the State level, you are going to have a real uproar on your hands because there is a printing press in Washington that runs 24 hours a day printing money. In the State capitals they don't have a printing press, they are limited--at least to a certain extent--on their borrowing.
When the Medicaid bills come due in Kentucky, our State and other States, I think there will be another war on the question of ObamaCare. The question then will be do we throw out the Governor who increased our Medicaid by 50 percent and bankrupted our State in the process?
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