[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 213 (Wednesday, December 17, 2025)]
[House]
[Pages H6017-H6019]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
FUN WITH MATH
(Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr.
Schweikert of Arizona was recognized for 30 minutes.)
Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, I promise you at least this one. I
think I have the half an hour. I am going to try not to use all of it,
and I will try to slow down some of the speaking.
Madam Speaker, I had a couple of odds and ends and then some basic
optimism on one or two things. First off, let's do some cleanup.
Last week, I actually walked through a little bit of an economic
report. We got a preview of it. I think it will be published fairly
soon. It is ``Measuring What Matters,'' and the title is: ``Why Italy
May Be in Better Fiscal Shape than the U.S.''
This is done by some of the super economic geeks out of Boston and
Cambridge, but what terrified me because I am actually doing my best to
read these sorts of documents is the little sentence I have highlighted
here. I tried to point this out last week. This is for supergeeks. If
you use a 6 percent discount rate, you need 104 percent of a child's
lifetime income who is born next year and this year just to cover the
pension and healthcare benefits in our country. You need more than they
are ever going to earn in their entire life just to cover those
promises.
Now, if you take it down to a 2 percent discount rate, which is a way
you sort of say that here is where inflation and these things are going
to be, you still need a 22 percent increase on their lifetime taxes
just to cover pension benefits. This is actually based on some numbers
where I think they may have too high a fertility rate.
The reason I point that out is we are not having the really difficult
conversation here. What happens in a country this year when my
economists on the Joint Economic Committee are saying that we may have
zero population growth in the United States this year and the fact that
we have fewer 18-year-olds today than we had 20 years ago but almost
double those who are 65 and older?
Madam Speaker, I keep coming here week after week after week and
showing charts about the debt and the unfunded liabilities. Now I am
seeing some stories today saying that net interest will be over $1
trillion this year if you add in the paying back because we have to pay
interest back to the Social Security trust fund and all of those when
we borrow the money. It could be $1.25 trillion of interest.
What you should understand there is--let's walk through some of the
hierarchy. Social Security is number one. We are going to spend $1.5
trillion to $1.6 trillion this year on Social Security. Guess what the
number two expense in our country is now? It is interest. If you do the
total interest load, interest.
The next is Medicare.
Number four turns out to be the ObamaCare, or the ACA subsidies and
Medicaid. That is number four.
Guess what is number five now in our spending? It is defense.
So often, I will talk to my liberal brothers and sisters, and they
will turn to you and say that we should cut defense. That way, we can
give out more money. It is now number five.
Look, it breaks my heart because we keep having these discussions,
and I have come behind this microphone for over a decade now and feel
like sometimes I am doing a junior economics lecture.
The point is trying to say: Here is the scale of the problem, but
there are actually solutions if we can be bold, if we can be creative,
and if we can take on the entrenched incumbency of the bureaucracy and
business models.
Let's actually do a couple of things here and see if I can make this
make sense. Let's march along--this is sort of important--and see if I
can make this make sense.
This is last year. The red is spending. The blue is tax receipts.
That gap is debt. You will notice, actually, that our projection for
the fiscal year 2026 is our tax receipts--so tax collections are
actually up. They are actually up almost 17.8 percent, which is
wonderful. Most of it is capital gains. You know, the stock market is
doing well.
Oddly enough, our spending is actually slightly down, but we still
have this massive gap. Our best guess is that we are still running a $2
trillion deficit this year. Depending on what the Supreme Court does in
regard to the enhanced tariffs, we may pick up some other liability
that we are going to have to find out a way to work out with the White
House.
Madam Speaker, this is an improvement, but the scale is still
terrifying. It is still a couple trillion dollars. I know there are
some products that have come out of the White House, CBO, and others
saying that debt may only be $1.6 trillion or $1.8 trillion. It is not
what we are tracking because so
[[Page H6018]]
far, the first quarter of this year--we still have a couple more weeks
on it--for every dollar in tax receipts, we are spending about $1.62.
We think this will even out to being about $1 of taxes in, and we are
going to spend about $1.43.
Guess what? Most of that debt--that growth and that debt is interest
because we have been refinancing a lot of our debt that was sold a few
years ago when interest rates were very, very low, and healthcare
costs.
A point I want to make--and I am going to come back to this a couple
of times here--a couple hours ago, we had the Joint Economic Committee
over in the Senate. It is one of my blessings. I get to chair it. We
did something, and both sides were pretty good. Some Democrats took
some pokes at us, but the theme of this Joint Economic Committee
hearing was healthcare.
We, as a body--we, as Congress--we, as a society, have turned into
financial engineering. The ACA, ObamaCare, is a financing bill. It is
who pays and who gets subsidized? The Republican alternative had much
better--well, somewhat better actuarial distribution, but it was still
a financing bill. It is who got to pay, and who got subsidized?
Medicare for all is almost completely a financing bill.
How about if we held a hearing where we talked about not the
financing of healthcare but things that could disrupt the cost of
healthcare? We had one gentleman from one of the biggest life insurance
companies in America come in and talk about it saying that here are the
things we do to keep our insured population alive and healthier.
{time} 2000
We do things. We reward them for doing these data rings, or putting
things on their wrists, or how they eat, or we gamify some exercise,
and talk about how much healthier the population is. For them, it is a
profit model. Turns out, if you sell life insurance, the longer someone
keeps making their premium payments, the more money you make. They were
incentivized.
We had one of the lead medical officers from a healthcare system in
Arizona called Banner talking about how they are trying to align a
system that actually they get rewarded for helping populations be
healthier and the technology they are using to do it.
The fact of the matter is that we are finally trying to drag the
conversation around this place from being financial engineering is the
future of healthcare, ``Let's subsidize more populations,'' even though
I am going to show you a couple of boards here of how much of that
subsidy, your tax money, is just disappearing.
Maybe the crazy conversation here is what happens with the
combination of the use of technology, of cures, of availability.
If it is true that semaglutides, you think of the GLP-1s, one of the
deals the President made is the tablet version is going to go to $149
sometime next year. We know from the Milken study a few years ago that
obesity is 47 percent of U.S. healthcare spending. Wouldn't it help if
we could help our brothers and sisters get healthier? Yes, obesity is
complex. Diabetes is complex, autoimmune. There are all sorts of things
that go on. I accept the complexity.
The morality of what happens in a society if you could, over a couple
of years, help your brothers and sisters get healthier, it turns out
you could have these remarkable changes in costs. How many times have
you heard the saying in healthcare that 5 percent of the population is
over 50 percent of the spend? It turns out that much of that 50 percent
of spending is on people who have multichronic conditions. A
substantial portion of that is because of obesity.
Let's not be afraid to talk about it. Let's do the moral thing of
helping ourselves, helping our brothers and sisters. It actually helps
the debt and deficit.
We published a major report 2 years ago now, showing that obesity
will be responsible for $9.1 trillion of additional healthcare spending
over 10 years, making it the single most expensive thing in our
country. Yet, how much work have you seen behind these microphones,
saying maybe we shouldn't always talk about the subsidization of
healthcare and start talking about what we all pay.
For a decade, I have come behind these microphones with technology
and ideas. We are going to walk through just a little bit on the ACA
because I can't stop myself after what I heard a couple of our Democrat
colleagues say.
This is from the audits and the Joint Economic research, and it is a
very simple thing. This is on the ACA, the ObamaCare subsidies, and
then the enhanced subsidies, so it is the subsidies on top of the
subsidies.
We actually get to the point where it appears only 33 percent of the
money actually goes to you as a consumer for your healthcare, for your
getting well.
We have 27 percent of what I call deadweight. It just disappears. It
is someone who is insured who has never made a claim, even though they
may have been 100 percent subsidized. Now, we are finding out huge
portions of that appear to be fraud. Last year, over 41 percent of the
ACA population, which is 7 percent of healthcare, so ACA, the ObamaCare
population, 41 percent paid no premiums. If you are not paying
premiums, you see how easy it would be to sign someone up, take the
commissions, and no one ever has to know because you are not getting a
bill. We are discovering stunning amounts of fraud.
The other thing, which was just fascinating, is that in the study, we
have almost 38 percent of these dollars disappearing, functioning
insurance. You go, but they can only hold 6, 7 percent of it. That is
not actually what happens.
We published an entire paper on this 2 weeks ago in the Joint
Economic Committee. Go to the website, Joint Economic Committee
Republicans, and you will see our methodology and where the math is.
We are back to, once again, arguing: Is this how you want your
taxpayer dollars to disappear? We want our brothers and sisters to have
the most affordable healthcare possible in America, but to do it, do
you want us to funnel your cash, your tax dollars, into this level of
fraud? We have to walk through this.
Why the fixation, particularly for my Joint Economic Committee and
myself, on changing the actual costs of healthcare is you look at the
long-run charts, the national healthcare expenditures, we have the
substantial gap--and I know these types of charts are almost impossible
to read, but what I am trying to help you understand here is here is
the gross domestic product. We are growing as a country, but the cost
of healthcare is growing substantially faster.
A factoid, I beg of you, whether you be on the left side, or the
right side, or confused somewhere in between, in 7 years, the $1
trillion we spend this year on Medicare becomes $2 trillion. We double
the spend on Medicare in the next 7 years, and in 7 years, the trust
fund is gone, meaning if you are a hospital or a doctor and part of
your revenues that you receive on Medicare patients is from the
Medicare Part A trust fund, it is gone. It is gone in 7 years. Let
alone, the Social Security trust fund is also gone in 7 years, and we
will double senior poverty.
We are not allowed to talk about that. I will get an angry text
message this evening saying: David, you can't talk about that, as the
Democrat political consultants are saying, oh, good, more attacks.
The immorality of this place to not want to tell the truth about our
demographics and the complete barrier we have built legally on
innovation--I have a couple of really geeky things here, but I am going
to skip them and go to something that is a little crazy.
Every week when I do these, I try to come here with something that is
optimistic. A few years ago, I got behind this microphone and talked
about a University of Houston drug that basically takes fentanyl in
your system--and I am sure I am describing it partially wrong, but I am
doing my best--and attaches a protein to it, and, therefore, the drug
can't pass the blood-brain barrier. It lasts for 6 months to a year.
What would happen if I came to you and showed you some of the
economic studies we have done in the Joint Economic Committee by
reading the literature? Some of our data, we are a few years out of
date, but in 2020, we were approaching $1.5 trillion for the cost of
fentanyl in America in 2020. Do you realize that is more than the
defense budget? That is almost what we are
[[Page H6019]]
going to spend this year in Social Security, the cost to society from
fentanyl.
What happens if someone like me comes to you and says, hey, and
anyone that is interested, look it up because WIRED Magazine last week
actually did an amazingly detailed article--it is a long article; it is
a long read--on the labs around the country. They featured the
University of Houston and a couple of the private companies that are
trying to bring these things to market. They call it a fentanyl
vaccine. It is technically not a vaccine. What would happen in our
society if someone who has used a synthetic opioid, it has rewired
their brain, and it is one of the ways we help them get through rehab?
How about if you are the police officer who doesn't have to worry about
having Narcan close by?
The other challenge I will give you is to go look up a couple of the
articles that are about Philadelphia and some of the animal
tranquilizers, and this is beyond the xylazine and--I think that is
spelled with an x. It is a whole other category that makes it almost
impossible to detox because the cravings are so violent.
{time} 2010
Once it starts on the East Coast, it is coming across the country. I
beg of everyone here to start to think about what happens if our
ability to help bring a solution, a drug solution to help our brothers
and sisters and protect our first responders--because so far, the data
on--let's call it a fentanyl vaccine--is that it is 92 to 98 percent
effective. What if this were worth a few hundred billion dollars in
economic savings to our society in a single year?
Repeatedly, I come here and I talk about helping our brothers and
sisters with obesity, the technology, that you can walk around and have
a medical lab attached to your body. Here are some of the others that I
talk about, with biology and synthetic biology and other solutions.
They are out there. But how do I get the brain trust around here to
come together and say: We are going to take all of these ideas and
build a unified theory, and this unified theory is how we crash the
price of healthcare, instead of spending a couple more years arguing
back and forth on how much more money we should borrow to hand out as
subsidies, particularly to insurance companies.
That is my simple theory I am trying to sell. There are solutions.
They are complex. You have actually got to read a lot of long articles
to try and understand what is going on. You have got to stop being
afraid, and you have got to stop protecting incumbent business models
that are terrified of having cures, solutions, better and faster ways
to do it, and the use of technology. If we get rid of that fear and
start doing what is moral and economically rational around here, we are
in the time of miracles.
Mr. Speaker, I am going to let you go back to your lives. I yield
back the balance of my time.
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