[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 11]
[House]
[Page 14929]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            MEDICARE REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Tennessee (Mrs. Blackburn) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. Speaker, we have had a busy agenda since we 
started back into session in January. I am like a lot of freshmen. I 
feel like we have spent a lot of time looking at reform issues. That is 
something that my constituents want to see, and it is certainly 
something where I look forward to placing a good bit of my energy as we 
look for waste, fraud and abuse in government and look for 
opportunities to reform the system and to lower the cost of doing 
business with the government.
  We have reformed education. We have lowered taxes. We have provided 
our Nation's military servicemen and women with a pay increase. And 
Republicans are now working to ensure that America's seniors have 
access to affordable, quality health care that will help lessen the 
financial burden of prescription medications.
  Any effort to provide a prescription drug benefit absolutely must 
include a Medicare reform plan that not only preserves the system for 
today's seniors and for future generations but also provides seniors 
with a Medicare that is more efficient and flexible. Medicare must 
include the market-based incentives that have fueled research and 
development of products that are keeping us healthier longer and 
improving the lives of millions of Americans. There are three issues 
that virtually all senior citizens agree on. These three critical 
components of the reform initiative are affordability, access and 
choice. These are three premises that we need to be sure to include in 
our plan.
  On the first point, affordability, Medicare reform legislation must 
make health care more affordable for seniors. Currently seniors are 
paying more on doctor visits and prescription drugs than they are on 
any other expenses combined. This is really intolerable. I think when 
we look at the reform to the Medicare system and think about 
affordability, we need to be sure that whatever we do as we look at 
reforming Medicare must be affordable by the government so that we are 
not going to place a burden on our children and on future generations 
and create a system that just a few decades down the road cannot even 
be afforded.
  No less important to our seniors is that we preserve their ability to 
have a choice. What I hear from my constituents is that they want the 
power to choose their physician and their hospital. For our rural 
communities, being able to choose a doctor means having a physician in 
their town. It does not mean having access to a physician that is 50, 
100 or 200 miles away in some urban area. Too many of our seniors are 
forced to make frequent trips hours away from their homes in order to 
get routine primary medical care. More importantly, allowing seniors to 
choose their doctors is the right thing to do, and it is what we would 
all want to do for our families.
  Most seniors also agree that access must be a reform priority. Once a 
Medicare enrollee chooses his or her doctor, they should be able to see 
that doctor on a regular basis, not to be shifted from one physician or 
one plan to another. Quality health care becomes less and less assured 
when a patient has to go from doctor to doctor or from clinic to clinic 
with consistency. We want to be sure that that access is readily 
available. We also want to be sure that access includes having access 
to new medications and to new technologies as research and development 
brings those forward. What I am hearing from a lot of the constituents 
in my district is that they would reject a one-size-fits-all universal-
type plan. In Tennessee, we are familiar with what bad policy can do to 
health care. A few years back, Tennessee decided that state-managed 
health care was the way to go, and today the State is in a very 
difficult situation because of a health care system that is not 
providing access to many of the individuals that are enrolled in that 
system.
  Some are going to come down to this floor and try to convince 
Americans that one giant health care system is what we should all 
support. I can tell you that my mother's health care needs are much 
different from my health care needs. My health care needs in Lawrence 
are different from those of many of my neighbors in Tennessee. What we 
can all agree on, though, is that a plan must be affordable, it must 
provide choices, and must be accessible. A one-size-fits-all plan has 
proven time and again not to reduce our health care needs, but to 
increase those costs.

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