[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 89 (Tuesday, July 12, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: July 12, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                 MORE ON HEALTH CARE REFORM LEGISLATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Johnson of Georgia). Under a previous 
order of the House, the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Kingston] is 
recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, my discussion tonight is on health care. 
We do have the four plans which the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. 
Emerson] had mentioned. There is the Senate Finance Committee plan that 
requires 95 percent coverage by the year 2002. Then there is the Senate 
Labor plan, universal coverage by 1998, which has the same goal as the 
House Ways and Means Committee plan and the House Education and Labor 
plan.
  The one bill, though, that I think is significant and that the 
gentleman from Missouri did not bring up is the Dole bill. The bill 
introduced by Senator Dole has two significant features, in my opinion, 
from a political standpoint.
  First, it has the reforms that target the high-risk people, the $5 an 
hour brick mason who works for 6 or 8 months a year and then is laid 
off a month or two, the people with low incomes, the folks with 
multiple sclerosis or muscular dystrophy, people in the high-risk 
bracket that cannot afford health care through the traditional means. 
It targets those. That is probably the best feature about it. It does 
this through insurance reform and through low-income vouchers.
  The second thing that is politically significant about the Dole plan 
is that it has 91 cosponsors. If you have that many cosponsors on a 
bill in the other body, then you have an opportunity to filibuster and 
come to the table. It is obviously that at this point the majority 
party does not want a bipartisan reform, but this plan by Dole, because 
of the strength of it, might just be the mechanism that achieves a 
bipartisan reform plan. Of course, we have been on this side of the 
aisle ready all along to work with either body, both Democrats in the 
Senate and the House, to achieve health care reform.
  There is another subject on health care reform that I think people 
have to be very clear on when we talk about universal coverage. When we 
talk about reforms with universal coverage, we are talking about two 
things: accessibility and affordability.
  How do you have universal coverage without making it accessible for 
all? You have to have planning. You have to have oversight so that the 
distribution system, which would be employers, are in place to make 
sure everyone has health care. So in order to have universal coverage, 
you really do have to have mandates by which businesses or employers 
provide health care for their employees. That might be easy for the 
Fortune 500 companies, the General Motors, and IBM's of the world. They 
are already doing it anyhow. But what about that three-person lawn 
mower shop or the beauty shop or the pet store, the clothes store? Are 
they going to comply? Well, they will comply if that is the law. But 
who is going to make sure they do? The Department of Labor, the 
National Health Board, what Big Brother government agency is going to 
come breathing down their neck and make them fill out all the requisite 
forms and so forth to show compliance?
  I am not sure what we will call it, but we will have that oversight 
agency making sure that compliance is kept. That is the first thing 
about universal health care. We just have to say, if you are going to 
have universal coverage, you have to have central planning, and you are 
going to have to have employer mandates.
  The second part of it is, how you are going to make it affordable. 
Every single socialized medicine country in the world has budgets on 
their health care.

  When you have budgets, what you essentially say is that we are going 
to spend this amount of money on health care. As soon as we do that, 
the decisions come down, as they are finding out in Oregon right now, 
that you have to decide, do you give a 75-year-old a cataract operation 
or do you give a 33-year-old wage earner with three kids a liver 
operation. And in socialized medicine countries, that type of rationing 
generally favors the younger middle-aged wage earner over the senior 
citizens.
  Now, this is why the senior citizens in my district and, from what I 
am hearing from other Members of Congress, all over the country are 
saying, only 1 percent of the senior citizens are uninsured right now. 
They have coverage through Medicare for the most part. Yet the 
administration in many of the bills that are being proposed right now 
are ones that do set budgets and do limit the amount of decisionmaking 
that families can make on their moms and dads and grandparents and put 
that decisionmaking power in the hands of a bureaucracy, a national 
health board or some kind of alliance system.
  When they do that, Mr. Speaker, we are talking pure and simple 
rationing. I would say this: If you have universal coverage, you will 
have to have rationing. You will have to have employer mandates. We as 
a body need to keep this in mind.

                          ____________________