[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 156 (Tuesday, October 16, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12889-S12890]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            HEALTH INSURANCE

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I wish to discuss two issues this morning 
that I believe are important not only to Members of the Senate but 
everybody across America.
  You cannot go home and visit your home State and talk to real 
families and real businessmen and real workers without coming back 
feeling that the No. 1 issue on their minds, after the war in Iraq, is 
health care. Time and again people tell us stories from their own 
lives, troubling, challenging stories about trying to find the best 
health care and pay for it. They are concerned about the cost of health 
insurance. The cost of health insurance goes up every single year and 
covers less each year. That is the real family squeeze in America.
  It isn't just from families we hear these stories. We will learn the 
same thing with businesses. Howard Schultz is a fellow I respect very 
much. He is a pretty prosperous man in America. A lot of us buy his 
products with frequency. Howard Schultz of Brooklyn, NY, now living in 
Seattle, is the owner of Starbucks. When he started a little company 
selling coffee, I don't know if he had any idea that someday he would 
have 14,000 stores across America. But he knew if he started a company, 
there was one thing he was going to do. He was going to guarantee 
everybody who worked in a Starbucks store had health insurance because 
he had a personal experience after his father lost health insurance 
after being laid off from a job, and he decided as a business leader 
that he would take care of that issue.
  So if you pay an extra 50 cents to a buck for that double, double 
skim latte, you are subsidizing the health insurance of the person 
making the coffee for you. I think it is a pretty good deal. It is a 
deal I am willing to make regularly and do most mornings.
  Howard Schultz said to me and Members of the Senate: I cannot keep up 
with the cost of health insurance. The

[[Page S12890]]

cost keeps going up. I can't raise the cost of a cup of coffee to keep 
up with this. You have do something.

  He told us this 2 years ago. I saw him recently. Same challenge, same 
issue--his business is trying to do the moral, conscientious thing to 
cover its employees, even part-time employees, and is having a tough 
time.
  Large corporations, like General Motors, finally struck a deal with 
United Auto Workers, and the biggest problem, the biggest challenge in 
their negotiation is what to do with the health insurance of employees 
and retirees.
  So when you hear this over and over again, you think to yourself: 
Well, what is Congress going to do? And the answer is: Virtually 
nothing. There is no leadership in Washington. And it has to start in 
the White House when it comes to health care reform, with one 
exception--an important exception.
  Ten years ago, we said: With 40 million uninsured Americans--15 
million being kids--it is time we provide health insurance for those 
uninsured children in America. It was a Republican Congress, but 
Democrats supported it. That bipartisan bill passed; it was signed by 
the President and went into effect.
  In a span of 10 years, we moved from covering zero children to 6.6 
million children, who were given help through their families to buy 
health insurance from private insurance companies. Mr. President, 6.6 
million out of 15 million were covered--a bipartisan proposal that 
worked.
  Now that law is about to expire. It is called the Children's Health 
Insurance Program. So we decided we needed to not only keep this 
program going, but we needed to expand it from 6.6 million kids to 10 
million--or 10.5 million kids. Let's keep moving until every kid in 
America, every child has health insurance. Well, we put together 
another bipartisan proposal, brought together some very conservative 
Republican Senators, such as Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Orrin Hatch of 
Utah, and many others, and said: Let's work out something in a 
cooperative way that extends this program responsibly. And we did it. 
We ended up with an increase in the Federal tobacco tax and the 
revenues dedicated to covering more children with health insurance. I 
like that because more expensive tobacco products means fewer kids will 
buy them. I like to keep tobacco out of the hands of kids until they 
become adults and can make a responsible decision about a product that 
can lead to addiction and disease and death. So I like the tradeoff 
here from a public health viewpoint.
  We passed that bill extending the Children's Health Insurance 
Program--over 10 million to be covered--with 69 votes in the Senate. 
That is pretty good here. We have these death-defying struggles and end 
up passing amendments by one or two votes, but we passed this by a big 
margin and then sent it over to the House, and they passed it. It was 
then sent to the President of the United States, where he had his 
chance to extend children's health insurance, and he vetoed the bill. 
He said no. He said it is socialized medicine, too much government 
involved in it.
  Well, I disagree with the President. First, this is insurance from 
private health insurance companies; it is not Government insurance. 
Secondly, this isn't socialism. What we are talking about is helping 
working families. The poorest families in America and their children 
are already taken care of. We have Medicaid in every State in the 
Union. The poorest kids have that. They have that Government health 
insurance protection. And the kids of families where mom and dad get 
benefits are already covered. It is the kids who fall in between, the 
kids of mothers and fathers who go to work every day and have no health 
insurance, those are the kids we are trying to help. So this isn't 
about poor people; this is about middle-income working families who 
don't have health insurance at work.
  What if you had to go out tomorrow and buy a health insurance plan 
for your family. Assume your employer doesn't offer any benefits. What 
are you going to pay? Well, if you happen to have a pretty healthy 
family and you don't want a lot of coverage and you have a big 
deductible and a big copay, you may get by for $600 a month. But if 
there is a complication there--a sick child, your wife has had some 
problems, you have had some problems--you know what happens to those 
premiums. Pretty soon, they are $800 a month, $1,000 a month, and 
people who are making regular, middle-class incomes in America cannot 
afford them. That is the reality. So when someone in the White House 
says we shouldn't be helping families making $60,000 a year to pay 
these health insurance premiums, I think they are really out of touch 
with reality.
  This morning, two of my colleagues, Senator Cornyn of Texas and 
Senator DeMint of South Carolina, came to the floor to talk about 
health care. Good. We need more conversation. But we also need their 
support. They didn't support the passage of the Children's Health 
Insurance Program. I wish they had. We really need to make this a 
broader, bigger, bipartisan issue.
  In just 2 days, the House of Representatives will try to override the 
President's veto. I don't know if they will make it. They need 15 
Republican Congressmen to switch over to override the President's veto 
to extend the Children's Health Insurance Program. Maybe they can't do 
it. If they fail, it means, at the end of the day, this program will 
cover fewer children in America. Is that our goal? I think our goal 
should be the other way. We need to reach a point where everybody in 
America has the peace of mind of health insurance.
  I am lucky. As a Member of the Senate and a Congressman, I get to 
enroll, as other colleagues do, in the Federal Employees Health 
Benefits Program. This is a great deal. For 8 million Federal employees 
and their families, we get to choose open enrollment every year--in my 
case, for my wife and myself, from nine different private health 
insurance plans offered in my home State of Illinois. Nine choices. It 
is like shopping for a car, my friends: if I don't like last year's 
model, I am trading in for a new model. I can go to a new company. Now, 
this is something most Americans would dream of, to have that kind of 
opportunity. It is available to me as a Federal employee.

  Shouldn't every American have that peace of mind? Shouldn't we all 
understand that if you go to work every day, and you love your family, 
that you ought to be able to provide them the protection of health 
insurance? For 47 million Americans, the answer is no, they do not have 
it. For 9 million kids out of that 47 million across America, they have 
no health insurance.
  A child without health insurance is a child without a regular doctor, 
a child without regular checkups, a child who may not get the 
immunizations they need. That is what kids face when they do not have a 
medical home, or a health insurance policy. I need not tell you what 
happens when a medical disaster strikes a family like that. It becomes 
overwhelming. It can bankrupt a family that thinks it is in a pretty 
comfortable situation.
  So I urge my colleagues in the Senate and in the House, on both sides 
of the aisle, to get together. There has to be some common ground here. 
I thought children's health insurance was a great place to start. I 
hope the House will override President Bush's veto. I think the 
President is out of touch with working families in America and the 
reality of the challenge they face with health insurance. So I hope 
that we can override his veto, that we can extend this program and 
cover many children today who don't have protection.

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