Protecting Seniors' Access to Medicare Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this bill.

This legislation is a ghost hunt. It doesn't exist. There is no IPAB. There is nobody that has been appointed. Nothing is going to happen until 2024.

So the question you have to ask yourself is: Why are we out here? Well, we are out here because some people think that trying to control costs in health care is a bad idea.

If you go back and read the Medicare legislation when it was put in, the AMA extracted from this Congress the right to charge their usual and customary fees. They have been driving the costs, and we have been trying to control it with all kinds of mechanisms all the way through it. Only with the incidence of the ACA have we seen the curve come down.

We have actually extended the life of Medicare to 2030. Right now, we are spending 17 percent of our gross domestic product on health care. When I came to this Congress, it was about 12 or 13 percent. It has only gone up. We have not been able to do it ourselves. So the creators of this bill said: Let's put something in on the outside that can give us some suggestions.

Now, when we had Simpson-Bowles--and I know the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee thought the Simpson-Bowles idea was a good idea--what happened after it was brought out in public? Nothing. We ignored it.

The reason for IPAB is to put pressure on the Congress to act to control costs. I guess Republicans don't care about costs because they don't understand that there are 10,000 people signing up for Social Security every single day. That is 3.5 million people.

The numbers are going up. The costs are going to go up. People are going to run around here saying we have got to cut benefits; we have got to shift the costs to the old people; we have got to do all this. The IPAB was a way to force the Congress to face the consequences of their own inaction.

Dr. Roe is correct; we spent 16 years kicking the can down the road on this issue of SGR. That was, again, an attempt to control costs. It never worked. It was ill-conceived in the beginning.

This is an issue where there is some real muscle in it, and people are afraid of that. They are afraid of it 9 years out because they know how the Congress does. This is just another way to try to undercut and make Medicare and the ACA not work.

Mr. Levin pointed out the other thing that is important, and that is the place they look for the money is to go to community health, health departments. Nobody needs health departments. Why do you need people looking at restaurants to see if they are safe to go into, or to look at the water supply or look at what is happening in sewage? You don't need that stuff.

This $7 billion they are going to grab here is straight out of the health departments of our country. Every one of your counties is going to be facing the impact of this.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.

Mr. LEVIN. I yield the gentleman an additional 1 minute.

The only thing that I think one can say is that it is a bad idea to get rid of some muscle to force us to look at costs, but it is worse to pay for it by taking money away from health departments. They are the ones that always get cut.

Who wants inspectors? The other side says: We don't like regulations. It is regulations that are ruining America. We have got to get those regulations out.

You don't want regulations enforced in restaurants? Then take $7 billion away from it and see what kind of restaurant problems you start to have.

Milwaukee had the cryptosporidium organism in the water supply. That is a health problem that is dealt with by the actual health department in the county. We are taking $7 billion to pay for this badly constructed idea.

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