[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Pages 19366-19368]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           HEALTH CARE REFORM

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, over the last several months I had 
the exceptional honor of serving as a temporary member of our HELP 
Committee--Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions--where I joined a 
truly remarkable group of Senators as we wrote and fought through and 
refined and ultimately passed our part of legislation that will begin 
to fundamentally transform our broken health care system. During that 
period, Senator Kennedy could not be with us, but we certainly felt his 
spirit and his presence and the tradition of service to this issue that 
he has embodied through that time. I think he would be proud of the 
Affordable Health Choices Act we brought out. I certainly am.
  This bill, in combination with the work now being done in the Finance 
Committee, will guarantee quality, affordable health coverage for all 
Americans. It will protect Americans against back-breaking medical 
costs. It will expand access to vital preventive services. It will 
fight fraud and abuse in public and private health insurance plans. It 
will help retirees with the high cost of coverage. It will improve the 
quality of care through fundamental delivery system reforms. It will 
build a 21st century health care workforce. It will provide a new 
voluntary insurance plan, a different choice for long-term care. Most 
importantly, it will bend--maybe even break--the cost curve. In short, 
we stand at the dawn of the most significant improvement of our health 
care system that our country has ever seen. My only regret is how 
remarkably, staggeringly, embarrassingly late we are to this task. We 
often talk about the health care reform efforts of 1993 and 1994 and 
how startling it is that it has taken us 15 years to return to such a 
paramount issue for our people. But as we all know, the debate over 
reforming health care goes back decades and decades.
  Let's take a quick trip back in time. From a 1992 New York Times 
article: ``Health Care Costs Dampen Hiring.'' This at a time when our 
national health care costs were $850 billion a year. Now they are $2.3 
trillion a year; then, $850 billion a year.

       This could be the first recovery crippled by medical costs. 
     Employee benefits--health insurance in particular--have 
     become so explosive that manufacturers are increasingly 
     coping with weak demand by cutting payrolls, not overtime . . 
     . Health care costs, increasing at more than twice the rate 
     of wages, have made benefits so expensive it would be 
     surprising if companies were not responding. As they find 
     other ways to avoid paying benefits--the growing use of 
     contract workers, for example--they often say instead that 
     they are merely giving employees some flexibility.

  That was 1992. We could have that same discussion today, only we 
would have to multiply the number by three.
  Here we are back in 1988 when the New York Times reported: ``Soaring 
Health Care Costs.'' At this time, instead of $2.3 trillion a year in 
health care costs, we were spending $500 billion.
  The article says:

       Health care amounts to 11.1 percent of gross national 
     product in the United States,--

  Now, of course, we are over 18 percent.

     --a bigger share than in any other advanced country.


[[Page 19367]]


  That didn't change.

       In 1987, Americans spent $500 billion on health care, 9.8 
     percent more than the year before.

  Those trends have continued.

       This year, spending on health care is expected to rise by 
     8.2 percent, more than double the inflation rate. And despite 
     many efforts to slow health care spending, it is expected to 
     grow by another 9.1 percent in 1989. . . .The average jump in 
     premiums could hit 30 percent in 1989. But at the same time, 
     we're getting less for it.

  Further back to 1979, 30 years ago when our annual expenditure was 
less than one-tenth of today. Today, $2.3 trillion; then, $200 billion. 
The article says:

       HEW Secretary Patricia Roberts Harris said the quality of 
     American health care does not justify its price tag of more 
     than $200 billion a year. Harris said health costs represent 
     nearly 10 percent of the gross national product, the total 
     value of goods and services produced in this country each 
     year. The federal share of health costs will exceed $50 
     billion next year, including $30 billion for Medicare and $12 
     billion for Medicaid, and will claim 12 percent of the 
     Federal budget.

  But for the passage of 30 years and for all of those numbers getting 
bigger, you could say the same today.
  Finally, last, but not least, from a 1955 New York Times article. 
This article predates me. I was born in October of that year. Here is 
what it says:

       As it does each year without fail, the government declared 
     again this week that it is time to do something about the 
     rising cost of medical care.

  Let me repeat that:

       As it does each year without fail, the government declared 
     again this week that it is time to do something about the 
     rising cost of medical care. Last year, the Nation's medical 
     bill ran over $10 billion.

  It is now 25 times as much, and you could say the same thing.

       It was an increase of $3 billion since 1948. Of this sum, 
     only about 25 percent was covered by some form of prepaid 
     health insurance. In human terms, this meant that the 
     American had to scrap his budget, dig into savings or go into 
     debt, to pay some $7.5 billion for doctors, hospitals, 
     dentists, nurses, and the myriad physical accessories of 
     medical care.

  These words, from February of 1955, when one-fifth of the Members of 
this body were not yet born, could not be truer today.

       In human terms, the American had to scrap his budget, dig 
     into savings or go into debt to pay for doctors, hospitals, 
     dentists, nurses, and the myriad physical accessories of 
     medical care.

  How little we have changed.
  Fifty-four years later, astoundingly, despite all of this time and 
all of this trouble and all of this tragedy, this is still a game to 
some people, a political game. Fifty-four years later, health reform 
still faces opponents who will do whatever they can to delay or derail 
the reform process, turning what is our most desperate domestic 
political crisis into political theater.
  Last Friday, one of our colleagues on the Republican side told a 
group of conservative activists:

       If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his 
     Waterloo. It will break him.

  Think about that for a minute. One hundred thousand Americans die 
every year because of avoidable medical errors, and the response from 
the other side is ``let's find a way to break the President of the 
United States.'' More families now go into bankruptcy because of health 
care costs than for any other reason; families across this country who 
lose everything. And the response: ``Let's find a way to break the 
President of the United States.'' We watched Detroit crumbling under 
the weight of its health care costs, and General Motors, one of our 
fabled companies, fail. And what is the response? ``Let's not fix it. 
Let's find a way to break the President of the United States over 
this.''
  We have a health care costs tsunami bearing down on us, one that 
truly could break the fiscal back of this country, but do they want to 
deal with it? No. They want to play politics to break the President of 
the United States. We have an insurance industry that turns on you when 
you have the nerve to get sick, denying you care and denying you 
coverage. They call it medical loss when they have to pay for you. 
Across this country people suffer. When they are sick, when they are 
down, when they are hurt, when they are at their weakest, their own 
insurers turn on them and try to interfere with their health care and 
try to deny them payment and coverage. What is the response from the 
other side? ``Let's try to find a way to break President Obama.''
  This is not President Obama's Waterloo. This is not one man's battle. 
This is a war in which millions and millions of Americans are 
casualties every day: the child whose insurance policy carves out from 
her coverage the asthma care she desperately needs; the doctor whose 
office spends more time fighting the insurer over claims and 
authorizations than delivering health care; the small business owner 
whose employees are like family for her and who can no longer afford to 
cover their health care; the elderly retiree who falls into the 
Medicare prescription drug doughnut hole; the diabetic who cannot 
obtain a policy at all from anyone because he or she has a preexisting 
condition.
  This should not be a political battle of right versus left. It is 
truly a battle of right versus wrong. I have come to the floor 
countless times now to share Rhode Islanders' personal and family 
tragedies, their sorrows, and their frustrations with our present 
health care system. My constituents share their stories with me at 
community dinners across Rhode Island, in our senior centers, at 
coffees, and as I walk the main streets of towns across our State.
  Earlier this year, I launched a health care storyboard on my Web site 
where Rhode Islanders can share their experiences and ideas for health 
care reform. In just a few short months, literally hundreds of Rhode 
Islanders have written to me to share their ideas and experiences. 
Those stories are fraught with anguish, pain, frustration and, too 
often, tragedy. They break your heart. They break your heart to read. 
Rhode Island is a small State. If we have it happening hundreds and 
hundreds of times, in the Presiding Officer's State of New Hampshire 
and across this country, it has to be happening thousands of times, 
tens of thousands of times, hundreds of thousands of times every day.
  With all that suffering going on, with all the risks to our country 
of the perils of the costs coming at us from our health care system, if 
the other side can't care about the merits and substance of health care 
reform--if you cannot care about the merits and substance of health 
care reform, if, for you, it is just political theater, if all it is, 
is a way to ``break'' the President of the United States of America, in 
a time of domestic and international crisis, if your goal is to break 
the President rather than do something about health care, if that is 
how little you care about health care, then you can't care about the 
merits or substance of anything else because there is nothing 
domestically that is as important to our country as health care reform. 
If you cannot care about that and deal with us on the merits on that, 
then you can't care about anything.
  What is really frustrating about this is for these Rhode Islanders, 
tormented by our health care system, and for their millions of fellow 
Americans across the country, who have those same experiences, there is 
a better way. We are working toward it. We can find it, and we can make 
it happen.
  We have to do better, we can do better, and we will do better with 
this legislation than 47 million uninsured and millions more teetering 
on the brink, one paycheck away from losing their insurance, one 
illness away from losing their insurance. We can and we have to and we 
will do better under this legislation than 100,000 Americans dying 
every year because of avoidable medical errors and because, among other 
reasons, we have the worst health care infrastructure, information 
infrastructure, in health care than in any other American industry 
except the mining industry. We can make this better. We can do better 
and we have to do better and we will do better than health care 
outcomes for Americans that are at the bottom of all of our 
industrialized competitors--at the bottom; with all of our capabilities 
as Americans, our ingenuity and our entrepreneurship, we are at the 
bottom of developed nations in health care outcomes for our people,

[[Page 19368]]

and we pay twice as much as they do to get there.
  America can do better than this. Beginning with the work of the HELP 
Committee, we are on our way. Let's not squander the opportunity and 
the responsibility this day presents. Let's not be distracted by calls 
for delay or appeals to the pettiest political instincts this Chamber 
could express.
  As I see it, we are about 55 years late already. We don't need 
further delay; we need to get this done. Year after year, Americans 
have had the same complaints about their health care system. We have it 
within our power, under the leadership of this President, to make it 
happen, and we will.
  I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

                          ____________________