[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Pages 18672-18673]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           HEALTH CARE REFORM

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, the choices in this health care debate 
should be about which ideas contain the best solutions to fix a 
severely broken system. The choices in this health care debate should 
be about how best to lower costs while increasing quality of care and 
how best to bring security and stability back to health care. The 
choices in this health care debate should be about how to make it 
easier to stay healthy. But for some, the choice seems to be whether we 
should do anything, whether to act at all. This is a false choice. That 
is not a choice we have. Not acting is not an option.
  A week or so ago, the Republican leader in the House of 
Representatives said:

       I think we all understand that we've got the best health 
     care system in the world.

  Unlike the vast majority of Americans, he seems pretty content with 
the status quo.
  Just this week, the junior Senator from South Carolina said that we 
just need to ``get out of the way and allow the market to work.'' In 
other words, he says: Let's do nothing. Let's repeat the same mistakes 
of the past and dig ourselves deeper and deeper into this hole the 
Obama administration inherited.
  That is not responsible and is not legislating. That approach does 
nothing to help the millions of Americans who live just one accident, 
one illness, or one pink slip away from losing their health coverage. 
That posture certainly does nothing to help the millions of Americans 
who have no health insurance to begin with. If we just get out of the 
way, as the Senator suggests, health care costs will get higher and 
more people who have health care this year will not be able to say the 
same next year. Today, 14,000 people in America will lose their health 
insurance. Yesterday, 14,000 people already lost their health 
insurance. Tomorrow, 14,000 people will lose their health insurance. No 
weekends off, no holidays--14,000, 7 days a week.
  If we let the market work its will, as the Senator suggests, less 
than a decade from now you will have to spend almost half of the 
family's income on health care. That is not sustainable. If we sit this 
one out, as the Senator suggests, more parents will decide they can't 
take their children to the doctor when they are hurt or sick because it 
simply costs too much to pay the medical bills, and more small 
businesses will lay off more of their workers because it simply costs 
too much to give them health coverage. If, as the Senator suggests, we 
do nothing, we will keep our economy from recovering, keep businesses 
from growing, and keep families from getting the doctor visits and 
medicine they need to stay healthy. Allowing the market to work is code 
for letting the greedy insurance companies, companies that care more 
about profits than people, continue to deny coverage because one has a 
preexisting condition or they have gotten a little too old or maybe 
they have even changed jobs.
  We have already seen what happens when we do nothing. Over the past 8

[[Page 18673]]

years of inaction, the costs of health care rose to record levels and 
the number of Americans who cannot afford insurance did the same. Right 
now in Nevada, far more than 100,000 people already lack coverage, the 
coverage they need to have adequate care when they get sick or hurt. We 
can't afford to treat these people in emergency rooms, which is where 
the uninsured go for treatment. That is the only place they can go in 
many instances. If we don't act, many more Nevadans will lose their 
coverage and many around America will also lose their coverage.
  There are a lot of good ideas about how to fix the health care system 
in America. At this critical time for our economy's health and our 
citizens' health, it is important we exhaustively determine what those 
changes should be. The question is not whether we should explore any of 
them; our job is to determine which of these paths will lead us back to 
recovery, prosperity, and good health.

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