[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 5273-5274]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1040
            CONGRESSMAN PAUL RYAN'S PRIVATIZED FISCAL FUTURE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Yesterday, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Republican chair of 
the Budget Committee, revealed his projected future for seniors in 
America and their health insurance coverage. It's very interesting.
  What he says is, starting with people who are age 55 and younger, 
there would be no traditional Medicare. That's a pretty radical 
departure. But he says don't worry. What we will do, what in the 
Republican vision we will do, is the government will take money and it 
will give it to private health insurance companies. Seniors would be 
forced to go to those private health insurance companies and buy a 
policy from them, and it would be offset by the amount of money that 
the Federal Government gave to the private health insurance industry. 
And market discipline would prevail in the Paul Ryan view of the world. 
Isn't that a wonderful thing?
  Well, guess what? We've got that today. We have an unregulated health 
insurance industry in this country exempt from anti-trust law, unlike 
any other business in America. And over the last 10 years, premiums for 
people who buy health insurance have doubled in my State, pretty much 
the same all around the country. Some places more than doubled, other 
places a little bit less. But that's over 10 years.
  But in Paul Ryan's view of the world, that's a success. Why is it a 
success? Well, because insurance company profits are up very 
dramatically. So what if people are paying twice as much for their 
policies and they have more and more exclusions every year?
  There's another little problem with his proposal. Other than the fact 
that this is not a competitive industry, they are allowed to collude, 
red-line people. They are allowed to get together and collude and drive 
up prices. They are allowed to get together and collude and decide 
which States they will go into or get out of to help their sister and 
brother companies make more profits. He would do nothing about that. 
That system would continue.
  Then there's the little problem that he would repeal so-called 
ObamaCare. Well, one of the things I think most Americans liked about 
that legislation was it prohibits insurance companies from refusing to 
sell you a policy because you were sick once. That's called a 
preexisting condition. It also prohibits insurance companies from 
taking away your policy the day you get sick, something called a 
recision.
  In Paul Ryan's world, those things are back, preexisting condition 
exclusions.
  Guess what. Aging is a preexisting condition. Go out today, if you're 
55 years old and you've been sick once in your life, and try to buy at 
any reasonable price a private health insurance policy. In Paul Ryan's 
world, market discipline will take care of that. No.
  What he's doing is a massive shifting of costs onto seniors, the kind 
of thing that drove seniors into bankruptcy back in the 1950s and 1960s 
and had their poverty rate at 20 percent. That's why we adopted 
Medicare in this country, so that seniors wouldn't be driven out of 
their homes and into bankruptcy in their later years when most people 
require more health care. In Paul Ryan's world, the heck with that.
  In fact, the Congressional Budget Office--which some days he likes 
when they give him answers he likes, and some days he doesn't like when 
they give him answers he doesn't like, but it's an impartial group, 
bipartisan group, and at this point controlled by the Republicans--has 
said that under Paul Ryan's world, seniors, instead of paying 25 
percent of the costs of their health care, which they do today and they 
would in the future if we continue Medicare, will pay 68 percent of the 
costs of their health care.
  Now, how many people, how many seniors in this country--other than 
the people he pals around with on Wall Street and at the country club--
but other than them, how many of them can afford to pay 68 percent of 
their health care costs? What middle class American can afford that in 
retirement no matter how prudent they've been their whole life, no 
matter how much money they've saved in their whole life? Very, very, 
very few.
  So we have here a plan to enrich the private health insurance 
industry,

[[Page 5274]]

allow them to return to all of their bad old ways--recisions, pre-
existing condition exclusions and all of that--so that the government 
can give them money. And he says this will save the government a lot of 
money. Well, it might, but it's going to kill a lot of seniors or drive 
them into bankruptcy, just like the days before we had Medicare.
  If one looks at the other Republican creation of the last decade, 
Medicare Part D--you know, that thing where we helped seniors with 
their pharmaceutical costs, with their drug prescriptions--that wasn't 
done through Medicare; it was done through the private insurance 
industry. It cost three-quarters of a trillion dollars, $650 billion--
650 thousand million dollars--over 10 years. Borrowed money. That's 
Paul Ryan's world. Give all the money to the insurance companies.
  Good work, Paul.

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