Medical Care Access Protection Act of 2006--Motion to Proceed
MEDICAL CARE ACCESS PROTECTION ACT OF 2006--MOTION TO PROCEED
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I want to speak directly to the issue of the bill that applies to the need of women to be able to access doctors when they are delivering children and generally to get care from OB/GYNs. The Senator from Massachusetts has characterized this bill. Let me characterize it, as I think the facts are on the side of this bill.
The purpose of this bill is to allow women, especially women who are trying to have children, to have adequate health care. There is a crisis in this country today. Large numbers of women either cannot find an OB/GYN to assist them or if they can find an OB/GYN, they only have one choice. If they do not get along with that doctor, if they find they are not comfortable with that doctor, they have no other choice but that doctor.
This bill sets up a very clear decision: You can be for the trial lawyers or you can be for women. You can be for the trial lawyers or you can be for doctors who want to deliver babies as their profession. You can be for the trial lawyers or you can be for children, especially children in prenatal situations. That is the choice in this bill.
The facts are almost un con tro vert i ble because they are so clear. The number of doctors practicing and delivering babies is dropping radically. This is especially true--especially true--in rural areas. You cannot--let's put it this way: A trial lawyer cannot deliver a baby. They are talented people. In fact, in the years 2003 and 2004, they contributed over $185 million in political contributions, and as a result, they were able to garnish $18 billion in fees dealing with malpractice activity. So they are talented people. I do not deny that. But a trial lawyer cannot deliver a baby.
But we are getting to a point where if you are a young woman or a woman who desires to have a child, you are probably going to have to drive by the courthouse to find your doctor because they are being subjected to so many lawsuits, if they happen to be in the business of delivering babies.
New Hampshire is a classic example of this situation. There is only one doctor north of the White Mountains, which is a fairly large amount of area and a great place to live, and people who live there choose to live there because it is a great place to live. There is only one doctor above the White Mountains--that is called northern New Hampshire--who delivers babies. If that doctor is not around or if that doctor is on a break or maybe if you do not like that doctor, you literally are going to have to drive an hour, 2 hours, maybe even longer, in order to see a doctor if you are a woman who wants to get care in delivering your child. And believe me, that can be a dangerous experience, driving in a snowstorm. Hopefully, you can get somebody to drive you if you are about to deliver. But in any event, driving through a snowstorm in northern New Hampshire is a difficult situation. But that is what people are subjected to in that part of the State because the doctors who used to practice up there, who used to deliver babies, cannot afford to deliver babies any longer in that part of the State. Why? Because the population is not large enough to pay their premiums, which have escalated, skyrocketed, doubled--doubled upon doubled--over the last 20 years in the area of delivering children. So they have opted out of the practice. In fact, one doctor simply closed her practice and moved to another State because of the fact that the cost of insurance premiums was so high.
Another whole practice in Rochester, NH, with five OB/GYNs, simply picked up their practice and moved across the State line to Maine because of the cost of delivering babies.
One of the leading doctors in the State, Dr. Cynthia Cooper, who is head of the New Hampshire Board of Medicine and an OB/GYN, has given up delivering babies, as I understand it.
Dr. Patricia Miller from Derry, NH, a town of 38,000 people, has also given up delivering babies, after 15 years.
I had a doctor in Laconia, which is in the Lakes region--a beautiful part of the State--who essentially told me he has to deliver babies through November simply to pay the cost of the premium for his insurance. He does it because he feels it is his obligation, his obligation as a doctor, because that region would not have his talent and his care. But believe me, it is hardly an incentivizing event to pursue that type of practice.
What drives these premiums? Well, if you listen to the Senator from Massachusetts, it is the evil insurance companies. Insurance companies do not drive these premiums. What a fallacious argument that is. They set the premium in order to be able to afford to pay the costs, which costs are generated by the excessive amount of lawsuits that are being brought and the extraordinary recoveries which, on occasion, are simply out of whack.
When trial lawyers in this country are obtaining $18 billion in fees over a 2-year period that could have been money--if the Senator from Massachusetts wants to help out the health care system--that could have been money which could have gone into health care delivery, think of how many OB/GYNs would be practicing out there.
Well, one State decided to do something about that, the State of the Presiding Officer: Texas. In an act of considerable clairvoyance, I would say, they decided to take the California model, which has worked pretty well, and improve on it. As a result, they have put in place a tiered system of recovery, which is what the bill does. It essentially follows the Texas model, which was a follow-on to the California model.
In both Texas and California, recovery has been reasonable for those people injured. But equally important, doctors have started to practice medicine again, instead of just basically defending themselves from lawsuits. It has become affordable to become a doctor and practice in the State of Texas, so much so that the facts speak for themselves. Mr. President, 3,000 new doctors have moved into Texas since this law was passed, with 81 new obstetric doctors. That is a huge increase in medical opportunity and care, especially for women, women of childbearing years, and for children because Texas had the good sense to take this approach. The same has occurred in California.
So progress has been made. We have uncontrovertible facts which show that you can resolve this issue, that you can allow women to have the opportunity, especially women of childbearing age, to see doctors and have choices in doctors and be able to be cared for by doctors who wish to deliver babies and can afford to deliver babies.
This is a huge step forward for those two States. It is time the Federal Government, the National Government, address the issue, also. That is why we have brought forward this very targeted bill.
The bigger bill, which I also support, is an excellent idea. There are other specialties that need attention: neurosurgeons, emergency room docs, doctors, especially, practicing in underserved areas. If you are a doctor in an emergency room or if you are a doctor practicing in an underserved area, you are not making a lot of money. You are fortunate if you are making anything. I do not know what the hourly rate works out to, but those doctors work massive hours. Considering the huge amount of expense they put into their education and their professional development, their return is not all that high if they have decided to pursue caring for people in underserved areas, rural or urban areas, or emergency rooms. Yet they get hit with these premiums, which essentially make it very difficult for doctors to choose that course of practice, which is so important.
So a broader bill does make sense. But it gets attacked, and it has been attacked rather aggressively from the other side, with the footnotes that have been handed to the other side by the trial lawyer groups, as they try to set up the straw dog of the insurance companies or the straw dog of some sort of recovery system that is unfair to the seriously injured. So the bigger argument becomes more complex and more difficult to understand and can be more obfuscated and has been effectively by our friends on the other side and by the trial bar.
But it is very hard to obfuscate, it is very hard to get past the simple fact that there is only one OB/GYN practicing in northern New Hampshire. It is very hard to get by the simple fact that if you are a woman in rural Kansas or rural New York or rural Illinois or urban areas within those States or rural Texas, you are going to have a lot of problems finding a doctor when you decide to have children because the doctors have been driven out of the business of the practice by these excessive and unrelenting lawsuits.
So this bill is very simple. Rather than getting into the rather convoluted, smoke-filled discussion of the entire medical reform issue, it just goes at one great, important need in our country; that is, if a woman wants to have a child, she should have high-quality medical care so that child is brought into the world in the best possible condition and the woman's health is protected during the childbearing period. This bill will do that, and I hope everyone will support it.
At this point, I reserve the remainder of our time.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
http://thomas.loc.gov/