[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 48 (Thursday, March 25, 2010)]
[House]
[Page H2445]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           HEALTH CARE REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Polis) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. POLIS. A key part of the historic health care reforms that this 
Congress has now passed is the way that it empowers people to rise from 
poverty and reduce their reliance on government for providing their 
health care. Medicaid provides health care as an entitlement to the 
very poorest Americans. For a family of four, the Federal poverty line 
is about $22,000. For an individual, it's just under $11,000. So your 
earnings have to be below that to qualify for Medicaid. Now one thing 
that our health care reform package does is it increases that dollar 
amount to 130 percent of poverty, but the other thing it does is it 
provides a way out of poverty, a way to earn more money without losing 
your health care.
  Currently, many people who hover just around the poverty line can't 
accept a raise, can't take a second job. If they take a raise of 10 
cents an hour from $8.50 to $8.60, if they work 50 or 60 hours a week 
instead of 40, they lose their eligibility. Their income puts them 
slightly above the poverty line. And what they lose in health care 
benefits is far more than the money that they earn if they earn an 
additional $500 or $800, which could make all the difference in their 
lives.
  With health care reform, we're replacing that with a sliding scale. 
No more does all that aid cut off right when you hit poverty or 130 
percent of the poverty level. You have an incentive to get out and earn 
that extra dollar to better yourself, to work that extra hour because 
the Federal assistance for your health care will decrease on a sliding 
scale. This will provide an incentive and help lead people off of 
government health care.
  It's rather ironic. I've heard people on the other side of the aisle 
talk about a government takeover of health care. Of course the 
government isn't taking over any part of health care with this bill. 
Not only that, we finally will help people get off of government 
assistance for health care by giving them the incentive to work more 
and have individual responsibility to pay their own premiums for their 
own policy with their own money. No more will people lose all of their 
health care benefits as a perverse incentive not to work that existed 
prior to this historic law being signed by President Obama. I am 
confident that over time, this law will lead to less people relying on 
government for their health care, more individual responsibility. 
People will have an incentive to get themselves and their families out 
of a life of poverty, to break the vicious cycle of poverty that has 
held too many families and too many generations in chains.
  The government needs to encourage people to better themselves, and 
with this historic health care, we are doing that by allowing a sliding 
sale of subsidies all the way up to a couple hundred percent of the 
poverty level. So as that family earns $25,000, $30,000 a year, is 
working their way up, climbing on up the ladder of opportunity that 
this country offers, so too will their aid decline that they are given 
to afford health care, but it will decline on a sliding scale so that 
when they earn that extra dollar, they may lose 40, 50, 60 cents of 
Federal Government assistance. But there is an incentive to earn that 
extra dollar because, by golly, they get to keep part of it and spend 
it for themselves and their family. And that can make all the 
difference in lifting Americans out of poverty and encouraging the 
American value of individual responsibility for all American families.

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