Executive Calendar

Floor Speech

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Mr. BRAUN. Mr. President, Senator Grassley and I attended the rollout of President Trump's Executive order to get the healthcare industry on the move. The chairman of the Finance Committee, the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and Senators like me--I am a mainstream entrepreneur--came to the Senate to discuss issues just like this.

I have probably been on the floor more than any other Senator, and every time I do it, I tell the industry: Wake up. I took you on 10, 11 years ago, in my own business, to give good healthcare coverage to my employees. Year after year, it was a litany of, you are lucky your premiums are only going up 5 to 10 percent this year. You have all heard it before. It took risk, and it took some novel thinking, but it can be done. Most entrepreneurs aren't going to put the time I put into it to make it work for my own employees.

When you hear Democrats, Republicans, three or four committees, and the President of the United States talking about a healthcare system that is broken, you should get it through your thick head that there need to be changes made. It shouldn't be coming from Congress, even though it will keep coming.

I think the message is out loud and clear: Wake up and start fixing these things, or you are going to have a business partner whose name is Bernie Sanders and another idea of Medicare for All that we would regret once we got it. But, like most things here, like most big problems in this country, we wait too long to solve the issue.

To give you a few things on what led me to be passionate about it, when I had to give up my own company's good health insurance, I had a very generic prescription that I needed to get renewed. There were eight pharmacies in the little town of Jasper, roughly, so I knew I would be able to get quotes. I had no health insurance. I was in between being a CEO of a company and a Senator. I said, I am going to try to see what this is going to be like. I knew it should cost 20 or 25 bucks, maybe a little less.

The first place I called, they stumbled around and couldn't even give me a quote on a common prescription. Finally, after about 3 to 4 minutes, they said $34.50. I called another place that I thought would be a little quicker on its feet. It took 10 seconds, I got a quote for $10, and they said: By the way, you can pick it up in 10 minutes.

That is more the way the rest of the economy works, but healthcare consumers have gotten used to not doing any of that heavy-lifting themselves. And believe me, the industry has evolved from Big Pharma, to big hospital chains, to the health insurance industry, which is in the middle of all of it. There are pharmacy benefit managers, and the drug companies give them $150 billion worth of rebates, and through their costs and profits, less than half of that makes it to the consumer or to the pharmacy.

The case is out there. We, as Senators and Congressmen on the other side, shouldn't need to be going to the floors of our Chambers to tell you the obvious: If you don't do these things, I don't believe we here--at the speed at which we normally operate--can do it quickly enough for you to save yourselves from that other business plan, which is Medicare for All.

So what do we do to prevent that? No. 1, the industry should be out there doing what all other companies do--be transparent. In any other part of our economy, where do you not ask for and have plenty of information to work with. What does it cost, and what is the quality? I know that where I live, people would drive 60 miles to save 50 bucks on a big-screen TV that costs a thousand bucks.

When I instituted a plan in my own business that encouraged my employees to do that, to have skin in the game, amazing things happened. Every time you pick up the phone or get on the web and look for that comparison, it is kind of hard to find, but it is there. The industry just needs to give more of it and not hide behind a system that has benefitted them. When we created that in my own business, people shopped around for prescriptions and routinely saved 30 to 70 percent, as they do on MRIs, CAT scans, and most other procedures.

I put the time and effort into it. Most CEOs--and you always hear about how employees are happy with their employer-provided insurance. That is because the employers are generally paying for anywhere from 85 to 100 percent of it. So folks working somewhere don't really have skin in the game.

Consumers of healthcare need to do what they do in all other industries and in all other things that they buy--take the time to ask how much it costs, what is the quality, and then the industry get with it so that we can fix the system before the other option actually takes place. There aren't enough CEOs and there aren't enough legislators to, I think, get the industry in shape, and the industry itself knows what these problems are. Get with it before you have a different business partner whom you won't like.

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