[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 90 (Tuesday, June 18, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H6484-H6485]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  INCLUSION OF REPUBLICAN MSA PROPOSAL THWARTS EFFORTS TO MAKE HEALTH 
                  INSURANCE ACCESSIBLE AND AFFORDABLE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Connecticut [Ms. DeLauro] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Speaker, I am a very strong supporter of health care 
reform and of the Kennedy-Kassebaum bipartisan legislation to afford us 
a first step in dealing with some very important issues that face 
working families today on the issue of health care. There is a serious 
problem that we do have today that working families face, two 
particularly.
  First, is the whole issue of health insurance portability, that when 
you leave one job and go to another, what happens to your health care? 
People find themselves in that position today more and more without the 
opportunity of having the kind of health care coverage they need in 
switching jobs that is good for them or for their families.
  The second issue that is very critical and important is the limits on 
coverage for individuals who have a preexisting condition where 
insurance companies will deny the opportunity for health insurance 
to somebody who has a preexisting condition.

  Mr. Speaker, I have a preexisting condition; I am a cancer survivor. 
Ten years ago I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Fortunately, today I 
am cancer free. But there is not a small business or some business who 
wants to put me in their insurance pool because it drives those 
premiums sky high. Or if I go out and get insurance on my own, it is 12 
or $14,000 a year to cover people who are cancer survivors.
  These are serious health care problems. They face approximately 21 
million Americans in this Nation. Too many families, working families, 
in my district, the Third District in Connecticut, pay their bills, 
they work hard, they play by the rules, and they do live in fear of 
losing their health insurance if they change their jobs. Too many of 
them cannot even get health care coverage because of this preexisting 
medical condition. This is not only bad health care policy, it is 
wrong.
  We have an opportunity with the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill, a bipartisan 
bill that addresses both of these issues. As I said, this is a first 
step. It is not all that we want to accomplish in health care reform, 
but it is a way in which we can modestly reform the health insurance 
industry to meet the needs of working families.
  Sadly, under the banner of reform with this bipartisan bill, the 
congressional majority and the Speaker of the House today took the 
floor to talk about an opportunity for health care reform, but under 
this banner of reform what we have seen the congressional majority and 
the Speaker of the House do is to twist this opportunity, and in fact 
what would result would hurt consumers, and it would, in fact, increase 
the number of insured, the reason being the introduction of something 
called a medical savings account.
  Medical savings accounts are expensive, they are destructive, and 
they are bad health care policy. They encourage the healthiest and the 
wealthiest individuals to opt out of the insurance pool. They allow 
individuals to create private accounts to pay for their medical 
expenses, and in exchange individuals get a bare bones catastrophic 
insurance plan with extremely high deductibles. It is shortsighted. 
What it does by people opting out, the healthiest and the wealthiest 
opting out of the traditional insurance pool, you leave the most frail, 
the sickest people in that pool, thereby driving the premiums up.
  Mr. Speaker, I will tell you in order for the insurance companies to 
take care of these more sickly people, that cost goes up, and I am 
going to quote you a group, The American Academy of Actuaries, not a 
liberal group. These are the green eye shade people who look very 
carefully at the cost of insurance. Their estimate is that the process 
of skimming, getting the healthy out of this system, would result in a 
possible 61 percent increase in health care premiums for those who 
remain in traditional plans. If rates rise, people will no longer be 
able to afford insurance, and you thereby increase the number of 
uninsured in this country, certainly not what we want to try to do.

[[Page H6485]]

  Let me mention another group to my colleagues, the Consumers Union. 
These are folks who produce Consumer Reports; you know when you go to 
look at buying a car, an appliance, and you take their word for what is 
happening, you do a comparison look. This is what they said on 
Wednesday June 12: No health care reform this year is better than a 
bill with the Republican MSA proposal attached. The inclusion, and I 
quote, of the Republican MSA proposal in the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill 
makes the legislation worse than a wash for consumers. It takes us 
backward in our efforts to make health insurance accessible and 
affordable.
  MSA's are a time bomb. They turn the very principle of insurance on 
its head. Instead of pooling resources to take care of people when they 
get sick, MSA's funnel money away from doctors' bills and into accounts 
that will help healthy people accumulate wealth.
  Please, understand that we have an opportunity to do something good 
for working families and health care, not through what the Speaker of 
the House wants to do with medical savings accounts.

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