Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

HEALTH CARE REFORM -- (Senate - August 03, 2009)

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Mr. BROWN. I appreciate the leadership of Chairman Dodd and Senator Harkin on the whole bill. Senator Harkin has led the way on prevention. Senator Whitehouse and I worked together on writing the public option which provides a choice--not any government mandates, not as the other side would like to create, this fear in the public that it is going to lead to single payer.

Also, I thank the Presiding Officer for his work on tobacco and other issues on the HELP Committee too.

I listened as we began this evening. Before Senator Dodd spoke, we heard from a colleague, a Republican colleague from the South, from Mississippi, I believe. We heard over and over all these scare tactics, all the kinds of words they use about single payer, about government takeover, about socialized medicine. It just serves to scare the public, to confuse the public.

What they have done especially is trying to scare senior citizens into thinking we are going to do something to their Medicare, require them to come in and not just have a living will but have a plan on how they are going to die. Some of the things they are saying are absolutely amazing.

I wish to kind of cut through that for a moment because I know we tend to use words--we talk about exclusivity and single payer and the gateway and the exchange, all these words we use around here. I wish to cut through that. I wish to share tonight, as I have every night we have been in session for the last week or so, some letters I have gotten from people in Ohio. I know the Presiding Officer gets these from Portland, OR, and Eugene and Senator Dodd gets these from West Hartford and New London and New Haven and I know Senator Whitehouse and Senator Harkin get letters such as these from their States. But this is the reason we are doing this health care bill. This is the reason we have worked hard, doing our jobs, as we should, to pass legislation that will protect what works in our health care system and fix what is broken.

We know many people want to keep their health care plans that they have. If they are satisfied and want to keep them, we want to help them keep them, but we want to build some consumer protections so they cannot be denied care when they call their insurer when they need a health care treatment; so they can't be discriminated against; they can't have a community rating system gamed. That is what people have seen. So if you have your own health insurance and are happy with it, we want you to keep that, but we want some consumer protections around it.

This bill is full of assistance for small business that works so very hard to help people, small businesses that want to insure their employees but often cannot afford it. This bill will work so well to encourage and assist people who want health insurance to get that health insurance.

Let me stop talking, except to read a few of these letters I have received in the last few days.

Jon, from Franklin County--central Ohio, Columbus area--writes:

I am a self-employed 28-year-old with Type I diabetes. After being denied coverage by many health insurance companies, the only plan I could find charged outrageous monthly premiums.

After having a policy for 5 months, the insurance company increased my monthly premium by another $100.

It is vital I have health insurance. I was diagnosed with Type I diabetes at age 12, and I have taken very good care of my health with diet and exercise.

As Senator Harkin talks about.

I didn't ask for this disease but ask you to vote for reform--especially the public insurance option.

We need realistic premiums and choices without penalties.

That is what the public option does. If you don't have health insurance or you have inadequate insurance or insurance you are dissatisfied with, you can go into what is called this exchange. You have a choice, a menu of options. You can go with Aetna or with an Ohio medical mutual fund, mutual company, or you can go with the public option. Nobody forces you to do anything, but providing you a wide range of options will give you much better insurance than you might now have if you are dissatisfied.

Thomas from Knox County, a Navy veteran--that is about 25 miles from where I grew up, in Mansfield:

I would like to urge you to support health care reform that includes a public insurance option. While private insurance is adequate in many cases--

Thomas, the Navy veteran, writes--there are far too many instances where private insurance is denied or is inadequate to meet the needs of the insured.

A neighbor of mine, a retired minister, was forced to sell his home and move in with his son after battling cancer and having tremendous debt as a result. And he was insured.

We know how often that has happened. As Chairman Dodd has pointed out, people who so often have declared bankruptcy because of their illness often had insurance, but their insurance had lifetime caps. One of our consumer protections we are building into the health care system with this bill is no more lifetime caps so people can get the insurance they thought they had, can get the coverage they thought they had.

Why we would allow, in this country, that a retired minister has to sell his house and has to move in with his son because the insurance he had when he got seriously ill would not cover his illness?

What does that say about our failures in the past in enacting health reform?

Thomas from Knox County, a Navy veteran, says:

Please do not vote for any plan that would only fatten the wallets of the insurance and drug industry without significantly fixing the problem for the average American citizen.

What Thomas is talking about is what has happened in this body and what happened in the other body, where I was a Member, 5 years ago when the Bush administration pushed through a Medicare plan that betrayed the middle class. It was a plan that the drug companies wrote, the insurance companies wrote. It was a Medicare plan that simply did not work for the middle class. It worked very well to fatten the wallets, as Thomas said, of the drug and insurance companies.

Let me share a couple more.

Lia from Miami County writes:

Recently our daughter graduated with her masters degree and was ready to join the workforce. Last summer between semesters she had major back surgery. We are so proud that along with her recovery, she managed to carry her full curriculum with great grades. But she developed complications and subsequently endured three surgeries and 2 weeks in the hospital.

Her student health insurance expires at the end of July. During her recovery, she was not able to search for a job and has been denied from multiple insurance carriers due to her preexisting conditions. We are now faced with additional medical expenses and no insurance coverage.

I fully understand the need for healthcare reform to assist those who are facing the same issues that we are with our daughter. Please stand up for those in Ohio and other states that are doing their best to create a better life. Please support healthcare insurance reform with a public and a private option.

She understands we want both. A public option will, frankly, make private insurance companies more honest. Private options help make the public option work better too. It will make it more flexible, and it will make it respond better to market conditions. Having them compete with each other will work for Lia from Miami County, from Piqua, or Troy, that area of the State north of Dayton.

The last letter I would like to share is from Mary from Cuyahoga, from the Cleveland area:

Please, please, please, do whatever you can to get the healthcare reform bill through Congress this year, and stop the insanity we are experiencing now. My husband and I are retired. He has had diabetes for the past 28 years. Thank God for Medicare. But he is part of the doughnut hole generation.

What that means is, again, what happened 5 years ago when the Bush administration pushed their partial privatization of Medicare through the House and through the Senate, the bill that was written by the drug companies for the drug companies, the bill that was written by the insurance companies for the insurance companies, it simply did not provide senior citizens who had high drug expenses with their drug benefits. There was something called a doughnut hole where people simply lost the coverage for which they were paying.

My husband has now reached the limit of the payments that Medicare will make on his medications. Now he has to spend thousands of dollars out of his pocket to stay healthy. Why would you pay for only a half year of his medications? What is he supposed to do the rest of the year? Hope for the best?

My husband had taken charge of his health through better diet and exercise. Yes, we need to take responsibility for our health, especially a disease such as diabetes, but we need healthcare that will help when all of our efforts fall short and illnesses take over. Please vote for healthcare reform.

All of us get letters like this every day. Thousands of these letters are sent to the Capitol every single day from people who are struggling. Most of these letters, I have found, come from people who have had health insurance, they have lost it because of a preexisting condition, they have seen it fall far short of what they were promised because they had a very expensive illness, or they have sometimes seen their health insurance go away because they have lost their job.

In every one of these cases I have read tonight, in every letter I have read, the dozen or so, couple dozen letters I have read here on the floor of the Senate, in every single one of these cases the legislation that those of us--Senator Whitehouse and Senators HARKIN and DODD and the Presiding Officer, the Senator from Oregon, Mr. Merkley--the legislation we wrote will take care of this. It will protect what works in our system. It will fix what is broken. It will give people who already have their insurance and are satisfied with it more consumer protection so they can keep their insurance they are satisfied with. It will give those who do not have insurance an opportunity to buy decent health insurance, with a public option, if they so choose, or to go to a private insurance career.

I yield the floor.

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