Climate Change
Floor Speech
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Mr. BARRASSO. It seems to me, as we are on the Senate floor discussing the issue wide open--any American can come in here and listen to us--hidden behind closed doors is the other party, maybe sharing what is in the secret negotiations, maybe not, because it sounds as if a number of their members don't know.
What I do know from practicing medicine for 25 years and taking care of families around the State of Wyoming is that people depend on Medicare for their coverage. There are seniors who depend on Medicare and Medicare Advantage. The reason they call it Medicare Advantage is because there are advantages to being in it. It coordinates care. It helps with preventative care, which is not part of the regular Medicare Program.
Yesterday, I heard my colleague from Arizona say there are those who want to shut down Medicare Advantage--AARP, he said--because they are the ones to benefit and profit if, in fact, Medicare Advantage is lost to the seniors in this country. Madam President, 11 million Americans depend on Medicare Advantage. Yet they are losing because of a vote this body took. This body voted to strip $120 billion away from our folks who depend on Medicare Advantage.
I know the Senator from Arizona has another important point he wants to make.
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Mr. BARRASSO. I have great concerns about the health care availability for the people of our great country. This is a front-page story in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle on the 13th: ``Doctor shortage will worsen.'' That is what I am worried about. I am worried about the patients at home. I am worried about the folks in Arizona, Alabama, and Tennessee. ``Doctor shortage will worsen.'' ``It is estimated that as many as one-third of today's practicing physicians will retire by 2020'' and provider shortages will continue to increase. It says that based on health care so-called reforms they are proposing, the strain on certainly Wyoming's physician shortage will even possibly lead to longer wait time for appointments as patients travel even farther for care.
As I look at this bill that raises taxes $500 billion, cuts Medicare $500 billion, and causes people who already have insurance--insurance they like but they are concerned about the cost--they will see the cost of their premiums going up. There is very little in this bill that I think the American people would be interested in having for themselves.
The President has made a number of promises. He said: I won't add a dime to the deficit. Eighty percent of Americans do not believe him. Recent poll, CNN: 80 percent of Americans don't believe the President on that point. How about taxes? With taxes, he said he won't add a dime to your taxes. Eighty-five percent of Americans don't believe him there. They believe their taxes are going to go up. Yet they don't believe the quality of their care will be better.
So when we talk about a bipartisan solution, we want to improve access to care, we want to get costs under control. This bill raises costs.
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Mr. BARRASSO. It is interesting because what you are doing now is fundamentally talking about the core of the bill, the core that cannot be changed as they drop this or add that. It is the core that led the dean of Harvard Medical School to say this bill, the core, is going to make spending worse. It is going to drive up spending and it is going to not improve quality.
This physician at Harvard has said people who are supporting this are living in collective denial. It is no surprise that the American people are very skeptical, very suspicious. It is why the dean at Johns-Hopkins Medical Center this past week wrote an editorial that said ``this bill will have catastrophic effects'' and it will do more harm than good. We are talking about the health care of the people of our country.
Mr. SESSIONS. Will the Senator yield? Those two deans are saying that the entire promises of this bill--that it would reduce cost and improve quality--both are not true?
Mr. BARRASSO. That is what we are hearing from the deans of medical schools. It is what I hear at home all the time. People in Wyoming read this and say this is wrong. This is going to make it harder for doctors to practice, harder for us to recruit doctors, harder for hospitals to stay open. We are saying in Wyoming--the Washington Post said it on Saturday, ``Medicare Cuts Could Hurt Hospitals, Expert Warns.'' We are seeing that affecting the quality of care. We are seeing it in terms of will we have a doctor shortage? Will that worsen? We are going to deal with that at home, but people are seeing it all across the country because fundamentally this bill is flawed. It does not address the sort of concerns we have, and we are trying to get costs under control. This will drive up costs. We are trying to help improve the quality of care. This will not improve the quality of care. We are hoping to improve access for patients. This will make it harder. This will make longer waiting lines, this will limit people's choices, it will limit care in the rural community. I know about those in Wyoming. You know about them in Alabama.
When we read the report by the Actuaries from the committee that oversees Medicare--and they didn't rush to do this. They are talking about the bill that now has been out, the 2,000-page bill that has been out for people to read for 3 weeks. It took them 3 weeks to do the report because they wanted to do a very thorough evaluation and they looked at it, and they said we think one out of five hospitals in the United States will end up closing within 5 years and one out of five doctors offices will close if this goes through. This is what the Democrats are proposing, something that is going to lead to one in five hospitals closing, one in five doctors offices shutting their doors, saying we can't continue to keep the doors open under these circumstances.
This report has said the whole effort to drive down the costs of care is wrong. At its core it is wrong; that the cost of care is going up if we pass this bill that is ahead of us now, regardless of the little changes they may make at the periphery. At the core this is going to drive up the cost of care. At the core it is going to cut our seniors who depend on Medicare for their health care.
Medicare is going broke. This is not going in any way to help that. It is going to make it worse. Then if they try to put more people into that Medicare ship that is already sinking, that is going to make it worse as well.
Plus the way they try to solve this, to say we are going to cover all these new people, many of them, the majority of them are going to be put on Medicaid--Medicaid, a program that Governors across the political spectrum have all said is a failed program, a program that is driving the States into bankruptcy, a program that Governors call the mother of all unfunded mandates--that is the way they are trying to get the costs down, by putting the cost on the States.
It is still the same people of America who have to pay those bills, whether you are paying your taxes here or there. Plus they are going to raise taxes. This report from the Medicare Services Group looked at that and said all of those taxes are going to go up, $500 billion in taxes. Of course those are going to get passed on, so people of all different income brackets in the United States, all people are going to get hit with those taxes. Some people may see a little benefit, but by 4 to 1, four times as many people are going to get taxed as people who are going to see any benefits.
We are looking at a program, a core fundamental of a bill that to me is fatally flawed--fatally flawed--that will raise prices, raise insurance premiums for people who have insurance, cut Medicare and raise taxes. And you say, how could people support that?
We need the solution to improve quality, get costs under control and improve access. This does not do any of those things. Plus it starts collecting taxes, as my friend from South Dakota said--it starts collecting taxes in 3 weeks but yet doesn't give services for 4 years.
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Mr. BARRASSO. I would like to ask my colleague, we are talking about a job-killing bill, and we are not talking about a couple of jobs. The National Federation of Independent Business estimates that mandating that employers provide health care will cost 1.7 million jobs over the next 4 years, between now and 2013. We are not talking about a couple jobs, 1.6 million jobs when our unemployment rate is already 10 percent. When I look at this as a job-killing bill, bad for our economy at a time when the No. 1 issue I hear about at home are jobs and the economy, that is another fundamental reason to take a look at a bill that at its core is fatally flawed and say: Don't do that right now. Our economy can't afford it. The jobless rate, we cannot afford to see that number get worse.
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