[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 10355-10356]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Connecticut (Mr. Larson) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. LARSON of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, having traveled home this 
weekend and listened to so many back in my district concerned about the 
lack of solutions and the lack of effort on behalf of the United States 
Congress to get things done, I told them to take heart, that sometimes 
these things are difficult. And I added:
  What if I tell you that we could deal with the rising cost of health 
care, we could bring down the national debt, and do it all by providing 
better quality, coordinated, and patient-centered care? That would be a 
good goal, they surmised.
  And what if I told you we could do this without raising taxes or 
cutting Medicare benefits? And what if I told you that all of this 
notion began from the seeds of an idea that was an outgrowth from the 
Heritage Foundation, piloted by a Republican Governor in a Democratic 
State, and that served as the basis of the Affordable Health Care Act, 
which is the law of the land?
  The Affordable Health Care Act was not, in fact, what many Members on 
my side of the aisle support--a single-payer plan or a Medicare-for-all 
approach. But the law of the land is based on the Heritage Foundation 
idea and a Republican Governor from Massachusetts' formula for making 
sure that we could provide care to all of our citizens.
  Although the health care act has become politically driven and 
charged, what the American people want to see is a Congress that's 
serious about solutions, solutions that are workable on behalf of the 
American people.
  So let's start where we all agree. Paul Ryan has stated over again, 
very eloquently, that the rising cost of our debt and deficit is due to 
health care. I agree with him. When it comes to making sure that 
quality is improved for patients and care is coordinated more

[[Page 10356]]

effectively, these are not Republican or Democratic ideas; these are 
American ideas, and why we need to move forward.
  We have no less than 10 separate studies--studies from the Institute 
of Medicine, Reuters, the Commonwealth Fund, among others, that show 
that there is between $750 billion to $800 billion in waste, fraud, 
abuse, and lack of coordination within our health care system. Why, 
then, would we consider, with that kind of waste, taking any money out 
of Medicare or taking any money away from the beneficiaries who use 
that to pay for their hospitals, their medical devices, their 
pharmacists, their doctors?
  What we need to do is face what the reality is. The reality is that 
the United States spends 18 percent of its gross domestic product on 
health care. We need to drive those costs down. By doing so, as 
businessmen will tell you, any model that is that inefficient, when the 
rest of the world is at 8 and 9 percent for health care and provides 
universal access to health care, and we're at 18 percent, with millions 
of our people still uninsured, if we drive that down and wring out all 
the inefficiencies, the waste in the system, then we can have health 
care for our constituents that's both coordinated and essential and 
drives down the national debt.
  All we have to do is recognize a simple fact. Take the very best of 
our public health system. Take the very best of science, technology and 
innovation. And then take the very best of our private sector and its 
entrepreneurs and have this body come together in a coordinated fashion 
to bring that about.
  It's happening without us. It's happening in the private sector, 
where leaders like Mark Bertolini from Aetna and others around this 
country are taking steps to drive down the cost of health care. They're 
doing it by coordinating care with the Mayo Clinic, with the Cleveland 
Clinic, with Sloan Kettering, with labs like Jackson Labs in my State. 
All of this is focused on making sure that we're going to have better 
outcomes for our people.
  We can do this together. Let's work toward solutions. This Congress 
is capable of doing it.

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