[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 97 (Tuesday, June 9, 2026)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2679-S2682]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Healthcare
Mr. CASSIDY. Mr. President, I am a physician. I used to work in a
hospital for the working uninsured and the uninsured, the poorly
insured, and so, as you might guess, I am very sensitive to the idea,
to the understanding, to the fact that healthcare is becoming more
expensive and less obtainable to the American people.
And last week, if I can put this up, I pointed out that the average
American household has $10,000 in credit card debt, and these aren't
people paying it off every month. These are people, like in the State
of Tennessee or in the State of Louisiana, who are carrying a balance.
And over the last 5 years, to show that this is becoming an increasing
problem, the average--if I remember correctly--the average percent of
someone's income going to credit card interest has risen from 1.9 to
3.2 percent of their income. They are not paying this off. They are
carrying a balance with 22 percent interest sometimes, and they are
paying more and more.
And the way this factors into healthcare is that, when someone has a
multithousand-dollar deductible, even if they have insurance--they have
a multithousand-dollar deductible--in order to pay for the out-of-
pocket, they are putting it on their credit card, so much so that over
60 percent of personal bankruptcies relate in part to healthcare
expenses, period.
Credit card debt reflecting the overall debt burden--the overall
problems of affordability in our society--is huge.
[[Page S2680]]
Now, we have an obligation here. We in Congress, whatever our party,
working with the President, we all have a mutual obligation to address
this issue.
And now I would like to stress that it is not just for the patient,
if you will, the family, the individual, the employee--you name how you
want to put it--to address this, but it also is important for
businesses.
I had a townhall a couple of months ago back home, or a roundtable,
and there was a woman named Debbie in DeRidder, LA, who owns a coffee
shop. She has 50 employees, and that is 50 employees for which she has
to provide insurance. And so she is having a difficult time expanding
her business because then she has to provide coverage to more
employees, and she cannot afford to expand because of the money that
she is putting toward their benefits.
Now, we need businesses to be strong. We need businesses creating
more jobs, paying better wages for the people of the United States. By
the way, that is not a Republican or Democrat or congressional or
Executive office--that is an American priority for our fellow
Americans.
So one thing that is kind of lost is the ability to hire new
employees--or, I should say, more employees--and the ability to pay
them more is getting swallowed up by the increased percent of
compensation to an employee that is going to provide health insurance.
To give a little bit more background, whenever a person, whenever a
business owner makes a decision to hire an employee, the amount they
set aside for that employee is the wage, the Social Security tax they
pay upon those wages on behalf of the employee, and then their benefit
package. The more that benefit package costs, the less they can pay the
employee.
And, right now, we are seeing the cost of health insurance climb to
the extent that businesses are not able to pay more wages because they
are having to put more into paying for the health insurance.
This is not new. This is getting worse. And we spoke earlier--to kind
of feed back into the credit card debt--businesses are compensating by
buying the cheapest policy they can. It is still more expensive but
cheaper. But that cheaper policy has a deductible that is more and
more. That cheaper policy may have a deductible of $5,000.
The average family carrying a $10,000 credit card debt doesn't have
$5,000 to pay expenses, and that brings us back to where we started.
They don't have it in their money. They don't have it in their pocket.
So they are putting it on their credit card. They are carrying the
debt, and more and more of their income is going toward paying interest
on rolled-over credit card debt.
By the way, it is a big problem in my State of Louisiana. I think we
are the No. 3 State in the Nation, in terms of families carrying credit
card debt.
And if I remember correctly, 11 percent of families nationwide are
going delinquent on their credit card debt, which means they are not
even paying the minimal balance required.
This is an issue for Congress, whatever your party, for President
Trump to engage with each other to accomplish this mission. And, by the
way, we need the President, and I personally will make an appeal to
President Trump.
Let's do something for the American people. And you can say it is an
election year. No, say it is not an election year. This is the year in
which we have got to help the American people afford their household
items. It is a huge issue.
And the answer is that President Trump's intuition on this is
fantastic. During the debate over extending the enhanced premium tax
credits on the exchanges, President Trump said: Don't give the money to
the insurance company; give the money to the family--because if you
give it to the insurance company, the insurance company takes 20
percent of it for profit and overhead. And, by the way, the family is
still left with a multithousand-dollar deductible. So President Trump's
intuition on this is the correct intuition.
We need to make it so that, when the Federal Government is taking the
money we are already using to subsidize the purchase of health
insurance by employers and by the employee, the money is going to the
patient, not to the insurance company. Give the patient the power, not
the profit to the insurance company.
And so I emphasize: The President's intuition is correct, because
that opens the door for the President and for the Congress, no matter
your party, to come together to address this issue.
By the way, you could say that it is good politics. I would say: Good
policy is good politics. And so it would be important for us to
consider to do this.
Now, I have come up with a plan. I call it the MVP plan--MVP, Money
and Value for the Patients. How do we do this? So, again, taking the
President's intuition, don't give the money to the insurance companies;
give it to the patient. We advance the dollars to the patient in a
health savings account that they can use to pay for that out-of-pocket
expense. Under this plan, a family of four would get about $2,000.
And, by the way, there is a way to pay for this. This would not add
to the Nation's debt, because we already are subsidizing the purchase
of health insurance by Americans. We just do it a little differently.
And in this you give $2,000 to the health savings account. Why is
that important? Sixty percent of American families will not spend more
than $2,000 in a calendar year on out-of-pocket expenses for
healthcare.
And once you take care of that first 2k, they can take a higher
deductible policy, which will lower the cost of the premium. Put
together, this could save a family as much as $6,000 on healthcare, on
the cost of being insured.
So $6,000 a year, $500 a month--this could help that family carry a
$10,000 load right now, the part of that credit card debt coming from
the need to put healthcare expenses on the card.
This would help the employer because the employer could, plausibly,
get a policy which is less expensive, which keeps more money in the
employer's pocket--better able to hire more people or pay more
compensation.
And it doesn't increase the Nation's debt. We make it debt neutral.
And it builds upon the President's insight: You don't give the money
to the insurance company; you give it to the patient. And you add
value. So we bring money in with value to the patient.
In the HELP Committee right now, the committee I am privileged to be
the chairman of, we have a bill--bipartisan, with Roger Marshall from
Kansas and John Hickenlooper from Colorado. Our committee staff is
working hard with them on this, to increase price transparency.
Now, price transparency began with legislation and Executive orders
in the first Trump administration. I am familiar with that. Part of it
was the No Surprises Act, which I helped author, and that began the
process of price transparency.
Price transparency, just to be clear, we know what it means. Price
transparency is knowing the price of something before you make the
purchase, as opposed to knowing the price afterward.
I use the example--in the No Surprises Act, we made it so that, when
you go in for a colonoscopy, they are obligated to tell you if it is
going to cost more than anticipated. They have to tell you what that
additional cost is going to be.
I chuckle because, in the bad old days, you would find out that you
are obligated to pay the extra cost for a colonoscopy when you are
waiting to go back for the colonoscopy, and you have been prepped--and,
if you have ever had one, you know what that means--and you are sitting
there with a thin sheet over you, and they say: By the way, if you want
to walk out, you can. Otherwise, we are going forward. Just sign this
sheet of paper.
It was not a way to acquaint people with the price beforehand, at a
point in which they were prepared to walk away.
Now, under the No Surprises Act, we have to be informed. We are going
to increase that--increase the power of price transparency--so that the
patient would know, when she is going to go in, how much it is going to
cost beforehand, as opposed to afterward.
We teamed this up. There are a lot of applications being developed
right now by the private sector, taking the information we are creating
to bring value to the patient. For example, I use the example of ``my
daughter has an earache, and I need to bring my daughter
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to the hospital or to an urgent care center.''
You can take your phone and say: Urgent care center near me. Which
one has the lowest price? Is there any difference in quality?
These apps will be able to give the patient--the mom, the dad--the
information she or he needs right then as to which urgent care center
is near them, is open, their cost for a routine visit or any other type
of visit, and the quality of the care.
When you walk out, you can say: Pharmacies near me. Which has the
best price for Bactrim DS--I forget the dose; I am a doc, but I haven't
prescribed it for so long--say 250 milligrams twice a day?
And they are going to send you to the pharmacy with the best price.
Now, you are paying for this from the prefunded money in the health
savings account. So you are bringing money in the pocket of the
patient, coupled with value proposition, price transparency, and the
apps being developed in the private sector for the patient. The effect
of this is to take power from the insurance company, power from the
middlemen, and give it to the patients--power to the patient, not
profit to the insurer.
Now, we can do this. We can do this, but it will take a commitment
from Congress and from the President of the United States to do it. But
first, you have to care about it. We have to care that the families
back home are carrying a balance of $10,000 on their credit cards.
If we care about this, if the President of the United States cares
about it--when I say ``we,'' I mean the Senate; I mean the House of
Representatives--we can come together and fix it. Let's be
constructive. Let's acknowledge that this is something we have to do
together, but first, we have to care about it together.
Just to point out that it is doable, earlier this year, the President
signed into law a PBM reform bill that Congress had negotiated last
Congress but got signed into law this Congress. President Trump is
attempting to do this through TrumpRx. The MVP plan would allow--could
work with TrumpRx to give the patient access to the better price.
So, ultimately, we have to care. Ultimately, we have to make a
decision as a Congress, as a government, to address the issue which is
most pressing upon the American people: affordability.
There are some things we can't touch. Housing--whatever solution we
put into housing will not affect next year. The price of gasoline and
groceries--we cannot affect that as long as the Iranians are holding
the Strait of Hormuz. That will be up to the President to come up with
an end game that addresses that issue. But one thing we can do
collectively is to address the cost of being insured. Some of the
things we do immediately, when this happens, will begin to decrease the
amount of money a family puts in their personal budget in the cost of
healthcare.
Get engaged, all of us. With the President, get engaged. We will be
held accountable by those families if we don't, and by golly, we should
be.
I yield the floor.
Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
254th Anniversary of the ``Gaspee'' Raid
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I come to the Senate floor every year
around this time to remark upon an event in our pathway toward
revolution.
As we close in on the semiquincentennial celebration of our day of
independence--July 4, 1776--I want to take this Chamber back 4 more
years than that to June 9, 1772, when the first blow was struck of
armed conflict between the American Colonies and Great Britain's fleet.
The story begins with the arrival on Narragansett Bay of His
Majesty's officer Lieutenant William Duddingston, the captain of a
revenue cutter named the Gaspee. Lieutenant Duddingston's task was to
police the commerce going in and out of Narragansett Bay, and he went
about his task with bumptious, arrogant zeal, which included arrogant
exchanges of correspondence with the Colonial Governor and Chief
Justice and unnecessary harassment and interference with colonial
shipping on Narragansett Bay.
Before we get to June and the events that I am going to describe, I
will take a quick sidebar to one of his first exploits in February. He
had only gotten there in January. By February, Captain Duddingston of
the Gaspee seized a ship called the Fortune, and he seized its cargo.
He had the ship and the cargo transferred up to Boston, where His
Majesty's government sold the cargo and sold the ship and transferred
the funds to the exchequer of Great Britain.
What they had not appreciated was that one of the owners of the
Fortune was a Rhode Islander named Nathanael Greene, who had not
beforehand been much involved in the Committees of Correspondence and
the spirit of rebellion. But the seizure of his vessel put him into
what he called a spirit of resentment that changed the course of his
life. As students of history will know, he went on to become the chief
operating officer of the Revolutionary War, the top lieutenant to
George Washington, the guy who made the supplies and the work--
everything--happen.
He was important in that role, but he constantly begged General
Washington for a real command. Ultimately, General Washington relented,
though it wounded him to lose the administrative capability of General
Nathanael Greene. General Greene went down to run the southern campaign
of the Revolutionary War, whose motto, according to General Greene,
was: We fight, we get beat, we rise up, and we fight again.
Sure enough, he did. He fought over and over and over again, never
winning a battle but definitively winning the war in one of the first
real examples of guerrilla-type conflict the world had seen. They were
used to staged, matched armies in colorful regalia, standing at a
reasonable distance from each other and firing at each other with
muskets and with cannons. The entire campaign in the South was a
guerrilla campaign in which they fought, they got beat, they got away,
they rose up, and they fought again.
The result was that General Cornwallis, commanding the British Army,
wrote to his wife:
That damn Greene is more dangerous than Washington.
He was a very significant participant in the victory that America
achieved and the independence that we asserted on the Fourth of July,
1776. He doesn't get the credit he deserves because he spent so much of
the war facilitating the work of General Washington, but historians
know what a remarkable job he did running that southern campaign. You
can trace that all the way back to Lieutenant William Duddingston and
the Gaspee seizing his ship the Fortune and lighting up that spirit of
resentment.
So scroll forward to June 9, 1772. Lieutenant Duddingston is still
helming the Gaspee, and the Gaspee is still harassing Rhode Islanders.
A June day on Narragansett Bay is a beautiful thing to behold, and in
the sparkling light of that wonderful day, a little ship called the
Hannah, bearing cargo, was sailing on its way up to Providence, which
was one of the maritime centers of the Colonies, and the Gaspee gave
chase, seeking to arrest the Hannah and seize its cargo and send it off
to Boston the way the Fortune's had been sent. Only Captain Lindsey of
the Hannah decided: To hell with that. I am not going to surrender. I
am going to run for it.
He sailed away up Narragansett Bay with the Gaspee in chase.
Along the Warwick shore, about halfway up Narragansett Bay, the
Pawtuxet River comes into the bay, and, as rivers do, it carries silt
and dirt from the river washing through into the bay. When the river
slows down and the water goes out into the larger bay, the silt and the
sand fall to the bottom, and there is a little barrier along the bottom
of the bay left by the river.
Well, Captain Lindsey had sailed there quite a lot, and like any good
captain, he had a pretty good idea of how deeply his vessel drew. He
sailed over the sandbar off of Namquid Point
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and continued on his merry way in the sparkling midday of June 9, 1772.
Behind him came the bigger, heavier, lumbering Gaspee, and it
floundered and stuck on that sandbar. The tide was falling, so the
Gaspee was going no place until the tide fell all the way to low tide
and came all the way back up to the tide level at which it foundered
and then raised farther enough to lift the vessel off where it was
stuck.
When the Hannah got to Providence, her captain told the story of what
had taken place. He described to the worthies on the Providence shore
that the Gaspee--this dread vessel that had caused so much nuisance and
cost to Rhode Islanders--was stuck.
That night, Rhode Islanders rode down from Providence to the Gaspee
at night in longboats with muffled oars. As they approached the stuck
Gaspee, Abraham Whipple, who was the local sheriff and was in the
party, yelled out that he was there to arrest the captain of the vessel
and arrest the vessel. Duddingston was not about to put up with that,
so he called his crew up to the deck, called them to arms, and a battle
ensued between the longboats surrounding the Gaspee and the Gaspee
itself.
As the Rhode Islanders swarmed onto the Gaspee, among the gunshots
was one that struck Captain Duddingston, so, injured, he surrendered
his crew, and the Rhode Islanders captured--his rank was lieutenant;
his position was captain. Captain Duddingston. Lieutenant Duddingston.
They took him ashore with the crew and turned them all over to be held
prisoner and detained. Then they went back out onto the bay, out to the
stricken and stranded Gaspee, and they set her alight. When a ship
burns, particularly a ship of that era, whose rope is covered with tar,
whose rigging is canvas, whose structure is wood, with so many parts
that are varnished and oiled, the combustion is rapid. And, as the
Gaspee burned, the fire reached the Gaspee's powder magazine. And, when
the fire reached the powder magazine, the gunpowder did what gunpowder
does, and it blew the Gaspee to smithereens.
It is now about 4 in the morning on June 10, 1772. More than 4 years
would go by before the Fourth of July Declaration of Independence; and,
interestingly, more than a year and a half would go by until another
event--that is much more prominent even though much less brave and
significant--took place, and that is the so-called Boston Tea Party.
Now, I have nothing against my friends from Massachusetts, but they
got drunk; they went onboard a civilian ship. They seized bales of tea,
and they pushed the tea bales into Boston Harbor. Well, bully for them,
but well more than a year earlier, Rhode Islanders had seized a vessel
of Her Majesty's Navy; had captured the crew; and had blown the damned
boat up, and I think that deserves a little credit. So I come here
every year. When I go home this weekend, we will be marching in the
Gaspee Days Parade that goes by Namquid Point--now called Gaspee
Point--where an annual celebration takes place.
And I want to make sure that all of the pages who are here know that,
when they hear about the Boston Tea Party, they should know to scroll
back 18 months to a bolder, more violent, and more remarkable
engagement by Rhode Island.
The aftermath was immediate. King George was furious. He demanded
that everyone involved be hanged, and he sent commissioners to come and
root out who the miscreants were who had participated in the raid on
the Gaspee. And here is what is interesting. There are probably five
long boatloads of Rhode Islanders--enough to overwhelm the crew of the
Gaspee--and enormous rewards were offered for people to cooperate and
testify against their comrades--against all that pressure from the
King, against all that inducement of reward. In Rhode Island, no one
squealed. The commissioners went home emptyhanded. The nooses hung
empty. That was the second conclusion. The blowing up of the vessel was
one thing. The solidarity of not yielding to testify against their
fellow colonists was the other.
So I will read my poem about this event with apologies to the ride of
Paul Revere.
Listen, my colleagues, and you shall see
How Rhode Islanders blew up the dread Gaspee.
Great Britain was fearsome, she ruled the sea,
But Rhode Islanders burned with the fire to be free.
So when George sent his frigate to tax our coast,
And its arrogant captain was heard to boast
That he'd soon have Rhode Island under his sway,
[Well] a course was set for a fateful day.
Narragansett Bay sparkled bright and blue
June 9 of 1772,
The trading ship Hannah was making her way
With cargo for Providence that fine day.
King George's Gaspee pursued in chase,
But the Hannah decided to give her a race.
Away fled the Hannah with wind in her sails,
As the Gaspee's cannon fired from its rails.
Evading the Gaspee's cannon balls,
The Hannah sailed for the Namquid shoals.
Fast and light, Hannah crossed the shallow,
But when the Gaspee attempted to follow,
She ran aground on the Warwick shore,
In a falling tide, and could move no more.
That night dark longboats with muffled oars,
Came slipping quietly down the shore,
To rid our Bay of the dread Gaspee,
And show old King George that Rhode Island [would be] free.
The battle was fierce off Warwick Neck.
When the gunsmoke cleared from the Gaspee's deck,
The Rhode Islanders had her as their prize,
And her crew bound up in chains and ties.
When the crew was ashore, Pawtuxet's Rangers
Assured they'd present us no further danger.
Back to the Bay, in the dark of the night,
Went the Gaspee Raiders to set her alight.
The fire spread through the Raiders' prize,
'Til a blast filled the Narragansett Bay skies.
The fire had reached the Gaspee's magazines,
And her gunpowder blew her to smithereens.
Away sped the Raiders into the dark,
Leaving in the embers freedom's spark.
``I want their names!'' King George demanded,
And ordered the Raiders be apprehended.
But his call for hangings came to naught:
His nooses hung empty; no charge was brought;
Because never a traitorous tale was told.
Rhode Island stood steady and silent and bold.
The spark that was struck in the Gaspee Raid
Lit a flame that still burns in our hearts today.
And the lesson from then is a lesson now,
That every American still will avow.
``However majestic your powers be,
You should heed our warning: don't tread on me.''
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.