[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 95 (Wednesday, July 20, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: July 20, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                       HEALTH CARE AFFORDABILITY

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                           HON. DOUG BEREUTER

                              of nebraska

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, July 20, 1994

  Mr. BEREUTER. Mr. Speaker, this Member commends to his colleagues an 
excerpted part of an editorial which appeared in the Norfolk Daily News 
on July 11, 1994. This is a thoughtful commentary as Congress continues 
to consider health care reform legislation.

              [From the Norfolk Daily News, July 11, 1994]

                             Affordability

       Affordability may have been a test about Medicare, the 
     program which insures health care for America's elderly, when 
     it was created in 1965. Actuaries at the time indicated the 
     costs might reach $9 billion to $12 billion by 1990. They 
     were $107 billion. No one has been penalized for the faulty 
     forecasts.
       In health matters, there is a desire to ignore costs and 
     prescribe any treatment or perform any procedures which offer 
     life-saving potential. That is because no monetary value can 
     or should be put on a human life. Yet decisions about costs 
     and benefits do have to be made. And the more the government 
     becomes involved so set standards and pay the bills, the more 
     standardized those decisions have to become; the more costly 
     to taxpayers they will be.
       If the government attempts to fix prices to ensure 
     affordability, it will fall just as all price control plans 
     have in the past. If it attempts through taxation or mandates 
     on employers to provide insurance coverage for all, without 
     regard to health risks, it inflates demands for health care, 
     thereby driving costs higher.
       Total health care costs in America are unlikely to go down. 
     That is because better quality of care is increasingly 
     available, and everyone who becomes ill wants the best that 
     modern medicine offers. Having individuals determine what is 
     best and what is affordable is the only way that effective 
     cost discipline can be imposed.
       It must be a collective decision of individuals, not that 
     of government, to determine whether to continue to spend a 
     trillion dollars (about 14 percent of the nation's total 
     output of goods and services) on health care in 1994. The 
     more that government does directly to intervene to control 
     costs or specify treatments and subsidize health care, the 
     more likely it is that total costs will rise, the quality of 
     care reduced and choices diminished.
       It is time to inject into the health care debate the 
     principle that freedom of individuals to choose is important, 
     too.

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