[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 98 (Tuesday, June 6, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H2746-H2747]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              ADDRESSING THE MASSIVE PROBLEM OF HEALTHCARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Georgia (Mr. McCormick) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCORMICK. Madam Speaker, we have a massive problem. We just got 
done talking about the budget and the deficit, but there is no possible 
way to address that without addressing healthcare.
  Healthcare is the biggest spending item for the government. Madam 
Speaker, $1 out of every $5 spent by the government is spent on 
healthcare, and it is the quickest growing inflationary cost to 
Americans.
  Right now, if we consider Medicaid and Medicare, and we consider the 
amount of money we spend on private pay, which is about one-fifth of 
the economy also, in a GDP of roughly $24 trillion, we are spending $6 
trillion on healthcare alone. If it were taken by itself, it would be 
the third largest GDP in the world. It would have twice the GDP size of 
India, which has 1.47 billion people. This is a massive problem.
  What are we going to do? How do we take on something so complex? I 
think it is an underserved problem in the

[[Page H2747]]

United States Congress. We have been kicking the can down the street 
for far too long, from the Clinton administration all the way to the 
Obama administration. The Affordable Care Act did nothing to make it 
affordable.
  We have done nothing to curb the inflationary costs, and it is 
certainly not the doctors' problem because doctors took a 2.3 percent 
pay cut last year alone. If you are an ER doctor in Georgia, you 
probably took about an 18 percent pay decrease in 1 year, and that is 
after serving during COVID for 3 years on nights, weekends, and 
holidays. That is your congratulations.
  How do we address this? Quite frankly, we are going to have to make 
some hard choices. America has to understand, first of all, how complex 
this issue is when you have PBMs, GPOs, pharmaceutical companies, 
insurance companies, Medicaid, Medicare, when you have the government 
involved, private pay, when you have hospital systems and healthcare 
providers. These are just some of the problems we have.
  Right now, 90 percent of the ingredients that go into drugs are 
produced in China. You have almost all of the market for amoxicillin 
and Augmentin cornered by an adversarial nation.
  We have admin costs that have grown in the hospital system from 25 
percent to 40 percent in just the last 10 years. Take that into 
account. Forty percent of every dollar spent on healthcare is spent on 
administrative costs. That means too much regulatory burden, not enough 
competition.
  We continue to talk about a single-payer system as the end-all, be-
all to healthcare. Let's take that into account right now. Medicaid is 
done at a loss. It doesn't pay the bills. As a matter of fact, we have 
an act right now that talks about supplementing people with a tax break 
so they can actually see more Medicaid patients and afford it and stay 
open. It is not the answer.
  If we go to a single-payer system, you are talking about adding $30 
trillion of expense to the government in the next 10 years. That means 
$30 trillion more in either tax or debt.
  We have pretty much lost our minds over the $32 trillion of debt we 
are already in. Imagine adding $30 trillion more to spending. It would 
be the largest increase in spending and government control there has 
ever been in American history. We have a massive problem.
  On top of that, despite spending about $32 billion on electronic 
medical records and spending a lot of money on coders, in many cases, 
we still have 45 percent of claims not being reimbursed by insurance 
companies. This simply can't continue to happen.

  People are using their insurance companies the wrong way. If we used 
car insurance the same way we use healthcare insurance, you would be 
spending your car insurance to actually change your car oil. It would 
probably cost about $500 per pop, and you wouldn't be able to afford 
car insurance.
  We need to look at this in a different way. The problem is, if I talk 
about cutting administrative costs in medicine, people will immediately 
vilify me for trying to cut Medicaid and Medicare. This is why it has 
to be a bipartisan issue. We have to have a real conversation, and it 
can't be about calling people names but about actually solving a 
problem.
  If we want to talk about a real solution, I think we have to start 
thinking about not just taking this as subcommittees, not just a 
subcommittee of Energy and Commerce, not just a subcommittee of Ways 
and Means, not just a subcommittee of VA or a subcommittee of Foreign 
Affairs. We actually have to have staff that are dedicated to a process 
that is so complex, so big, has so many lobbyists involved that it is 
impossible for a physician with an MBA to figure out how to handle it 
himself.
  This is something we are going to have to take as a problem that all 
of us have to solve without vilifying each other. If we don't do it 
soon, we will increase government and increase spending, and we will 
have rationing simultaneously.
  Final point: If you want a good example of a single-payer system, the 
VA is exactly what you are going to get, and it is not popular.

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