Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under Chapter 8 of Title United States Code, of the Rule Submitted By the Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of Health and Human Services Relating to

Floor Speech

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Mr. BRAUN. Mr. President, we are going to vote on a CRA later this afternoon, and this has been the issue dominating D.C. and did in my campaign: the cost of healthcare.

I am going to vote against the CRA, and I am not going to go into the particularities of it. I just want to tell you how it works on Main Street USA and kind of my perspective of how we really solve healthcare in a way that is going to be affordable and last for a long time.

I just finished visiting all 92 counties in Indiana talking to Hoosiers, young and old, small businesses to farms. Everyone is concerned about where is healthcare cost going in the future.

We don't seem to, here, have a real good plan for it. As a Main Street entrepreneur that took it on myself a few years ago to create a sustainable, affordable plan, most people think it absolutely can't happen using free market principles. I will go into a few details of how that works in my own business.

ObamaCare was addressing an issue that has been boiling up for a long time. I took on the insurance companies to fix it in my own company back in 2008--covered preexisting conditions, no caps on coverage.

But ObamaCare was a solution that was never going to work. It was Big Healthcare in cahoots with Big Government. Never have I seen that result in something less expensive and more effective.

I believe in free markets driving the solutions, and the healthcare industry is who I blame for being in this pickle. That sounds unusual coming from a free market guy that doesn't believe in government.

But not all markets are free. One of the most disappointing things is when my own Republican colleagues mistake the healthcare industry for being one that is free and transparent. It has evolved over the years to where it has become as bloated and dysfunctional as the Federal Government that runs trillion-dollar deficits.

ObamaCare decisions are made by healthcare industry executives and Federal Government bureaucrats, instead of by patients, employees, and mostly employers who are the only ones that really have skin in the game when it comes to our healthcare system.

I believe the underlying principles of ObamaCare were right on. No one should go broke because they get sick or have a bad accident.

I believe that you cover preexisting conditions with no caps on coverage. Kids staying on the plan until they are 26? Fine. But it didn't work from the beginning, and it won't be an affordable--it was the Affordable Care Act. It turned into the un-Affordable Care Act, and it is not a solution in the long run.

The solution will be to get the industry out of the doldrums and to realize that when 80 Senators weigh in with an idea of how to fix your business, the cat is out of the bag. You have a problem. Sadly, in a place like this, which you can see can get sidetracked in so many different ways and then never really craft solutions that last in the long run, that is kind of what we are up against now.

The bills that have come through from three different committees-- primarily Finance and the one I am on, Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions--do some good things. Senator Grassley and I did an op-ed this week about negotiating drug prices in a way that is going to bring them down. These bills have real things that will work. I am disappointed that they are not aggressive enough, but we need to start somewhere.

The drug companies have been notoriously involved in--after they do such a good job coming up with a solution, a remedy, then hand it over to a broken distribution system that ends up--and I will tell a little story.

When I was uninsured, after I had to get off my great company's insurance that was based upon wellness, not remediation, and my employees and patients were encouraged on dollar one to shop around and find solutions--that worked. Here, the industry does everything it can to not make it work. This should have been a simple thing to do.

Luckily, I don't have many prescriptions. I knew it was a generic that should cost 15 to 20 bucks. I had six or seven places to choose from in my hometown. I went to the first one that would have been the most convenient and fumbled around for 2, 3, 4 minutes. They kept asking me what my insurance plan number was. I said: I have none. I am uninsured. I want your best deal.

It came back $34.50.

I made another call to a place that I know has been on the leading edge. It took them 10 seconds, $10, and they said: By the way, we can have it ready in 10 minutes.

That is the way things worked in the real world.

Any of us that run businesses where you have transparency, competition--take LASIK surgery for instance. It is the only part of healthcare that actually works. Do you know why? Insurance companies aren't involved. Providers deal with patients, consumers. Ten, 12 years ago, $2,000 to $2,500 an eye, done with a scalpel. Now the technology is better, and you can get it done for $250 to $500 an eye. That is the way things should work.

The solution is not more of what we tried that has failed. It certainly isn't Medicaid for All. How can that work when, if you are honest about how much it is going to cost, it would nearly double the size of our Federal Government. Plus, why would you turn something like that over when we can't even get it right in the Veterans' Administration, where about 10 million patients are covered, not 330 million? That would be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. It would be a disaster. We can't afford it. Of course, no one around here ever asks the question about how you pay for anything.

We are going to completely exhaust the Medicare trust fund in 6 to 7 years. Employers and employees have been paying into that since the 1960s. That will probably be the first reality check this place has-- maybe along with the fact that foreign countries and everyone else are not going to keep lending us money to finance trillion-dollar deficits--which, by the way, will hit $1.5 trillion in 6 to 7 years, when the interest on the debt is going to be more than we are paying for defense.

In conclusion, our healthcare system needs radical change, but it needs to be changed in a way that takes the power from the industry and government and gives it back to the patient/consumer, like it works in the real world.

I will use this example: I know that in my hometown, if you are buying a big-screen TV--which, by the way, costs about one-fourth to one-third of what it did 10 years ago, kind of like LASIK surgery--I know people in my hometown would probably drive 50, 60 miles to save 50 bucks on a thousand-dollar purchase. We don't do that. The healthcare consumer has atrophied. They talk about they love employer-provided insurance. Well, that is because the consumer pays for very little of it.

I will give a few details of what can happen when you are innovative, when you incorporate the concepts of skin-in-the-game, doing more than asking others to pay for it. In our own plan, people enter their deductible less than they did 11 years ago because the incentives were put in place. But I found a way to do it uniquely, where most CEOs didn't want to take the risk.

I believe in insurance for everyone. I believe in access. You heard me earlier. In this day and age, preexisting conditions--that ship has sailed. I backed that up with actions in my own business. But I don't believe that you can take more of what is proven never to work and try to get it to be where it is twice the size of our current government.

Republicans can lead on healthcare but only if we stop acting as apologists for a healthcare industry that is dysfunctional and broken to the core, and then you set yourself up, for politicians here--and a public that generally falls for it--that that is going to be the solution.

On our first foray into surrendering that right to the government through ObamaCare, it yielded what it was predicted to--higher costs and fewer options.

The only prescription for our ailing healthcare system is consumer- driven, transparent competition. I look forward to unveiling more of those ideas, and that is why I will vote against the CRA this afternoon.

I put the challenge and the onus on the back of the healthcare industry to get with it before you have a business partner that you are not going to like--the Federal Government.

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