Mr. President, I wanted to take some time to talk about the health care bill before the Senate which the majority leader is anxious to get passed before Christmas. I suspect that he knows if this…
Mr. President, I wanted to take some time to talk about the health care bill before the Senate which the majority leader is anxious to get passed before Christmas. I suspect that he knows if this bill sees too much light of day, he could lose 1 or 2 of his 60 votes, and that is why his managers' amendment was kept under wraps so that no one knew anything about it until the last minute.
On our side of the aisle, we would like to hold off until after Christmas to give all Members of the Senate and the American people a chance to review this legislation. Obviously, this is not going to happen. I think that is unfortunate.
When you compare the number of days we spent debating this bill to other major pieces of legislation that have come before this body in recent years, the Democrats' haste is obvious.
For example, in 2002, I was very much involved in the legislation that created the Department of Homeland Security. We spent 19 days over 7 weeks on the floor debating that bill. We took 20 votes on amendments during the debate. The final result was bipartisan. Ninety Members of the Senate voted for it.
Tragically, for the American people, unlike other important health care-related bills such as the Medicare Modernization Act that garnered wide bipartisan support, this bill is nowhere near bipartisan and did not receive a single Republican vote for cloture at 1 this morning, and only one Republican in the House of Representatives supported it.
In my humble opinion, the way this bill was negotiated behind closed doors, and without the input of Members from both sides, will sour relations and bipartisan discussion on other major issues to come before the Senate, such as debt and deficit reduction--notably bipartisan legislation that I have been working on very closely with Senators Gregg and Conrad, a comprehensive energy bill, reauthorization of the surface transportation bill, climate change legislation, and-- very important--a jobs bill.
The problems facing our country are too serious for business as usual, each side one-upping the other for political advantage, with the 2010 elections casting shadows on what we should be doing for the benefit of our country, at a time when this Nation is as fragile as I have seen it in my entire life.
Our future and the future of our children and grandchildren is in our hands. Our constituents and the world are watching. Our credibility and credit are on the line, and so is our economic and national security, and, quite frankly, our leadership position in the world. We need fewer partisans in this body and more statesmen.
Last week I came to the floor to remind my colleagues and the American people about the fiscal realities that face our Nation and explained how this health reform legislation, which is now likely to pass based on this morning's cloture vote, would make an unsustainable fiscal situation even worse.
Let me remind you as we stand right now that our Nation's debt has exceeded $12 trillion for the first time in our history. In fact, from 2008 to 2009 alone, the Federal debt increased 19 percent, boosting national debt as a percentage of GDP from 70 percent last year to 84 percent this year. We have not seen this kind of debt-to-GDP ratio since the end of the Second World War.
We have amassed a staggering $70 trillion in unfunded obligations over the next 75 years or an estimated $600,000 per American household.
Our Medicare Program is already on shaky footing with $37 trillion in unfunded future Medicare costs, and the Medicare trust fund is expected to be insolvent by 2017. Frankly, this is why I am disappointed the Senate failed to support Senator Gregg's amendment we considered earlier in this debate to ensure that the savings achieved by
Medicare cuts would be used to ensure the viability of the program, and not new entitlements.
I ask my colleagues, can our Nation take on new programs and costs when we cannot pay for what we are doing right now? Our Nation's fiscal picture is not pretty. Our obligations to our entitlement programs are exploding. If we keep going the way we are, our debt will double in 5 years and triple in 10.
Our budgets are unbalanced as far as the eye can see. Last year we borrowed $1.4 trillion, and 50 percent of our debt is in the hands of foreign countries. The American people get it. They already know the Federal Government is the worst credit card abuser in the world, and we are putting everything on the tab of our children and grandchildren.
They are not the only ones. Internationally, our creditors are concerned. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has noted:
We have lent a huge amount of money to the United States
and of course we're concerned about the security of our
assets and, to be honest, I am a little bit worried. That's
why here I would like to urge the US to keep its commitment
and promise to ensure the safety of Chinese assets.
That is what he said to the President--anybody who goes to China today. They are worried about the fact they have lent us a lot of money and maybe they might not get it back.
While the international community understands our crisis, somehow Congress does not get it. Here we are considering a bill that, when fully implemented, spends more than $2 trillion over 10 years to restructure our health care system.
I respect my friends on the other side of the aisle, but the assumptions they make are optimistic about the cuts in this bill, especially when one considers this body's propensity for acting in a fiscally irresponsible manner.
Frankly, our history on the so-called doc fix is illustrative. We continue to kick the cost of fixing Medicare payments for physicians down the road, instead of dealing with its more than $200 billion cost.
The bill before us does not even have the 1-year fix that the original bill had included. My friends on the other side of the aisle have decided to put it off and deal with it in a separate measure because it would make this bill even more expensive.
As congressional observers have noted, we continue to put off the difficult choices. The fact is, Congress is not willing to take short- term pain for long-term gain. This is my 11th year, and it is the same old story year after year.
This brings me back to the health care bill. I have heard all the arguments of why health care reform is needed, and--do you know something--I agree with most of them. Frankly, there are a number of incremental things we could do today to make real improvements in our system in a bipartisan way. In fact, I encourage my colleagues to take a look at some of the proposals contained in the alternatives offered by my colleagues, including Senators Wyden and Bennett.
These and other legislative proposals include things we can do on an incremental basis to improve our system, such as making it easier for small business to group together to reduce their health care costs; passing medical liability reform, where we have more tests being taken because doctors are afraid of being sued; increasing flexibility in the private market so people have more options and can choose insurance products that best meet their needs; implementing policies that encourage wellness and prevention; eliminating the fraud and abuse that have and will continue to plague our public health care programs; eliminating the ability of insurance companies to deny people insurance coverage because of preexisting conditions; or eliminating the caps that insurance companies put once an individual reaches a certain amount.
Instead, we are going to pass a massive new spending bill that does little to fix our problems in the long run. What too many of my colleagues do not understand is there are limits to what government can do. There are limits on what government can do. When I was mayor of the city of Cleveland, Governor of Ohio, people would come to me with ideas to expand programs and services. Often, even though I saw the merit of these proposals, just like I see the merit of a lot of the suggestions we need to have in terms of health care, I knew we did not have the money to pay for these proposals, especially because we had to balance our budgets. In those situations, I had to be honest and say no.
It is the same thing here. I am sure the Presiding Officer has people coming into his office every day saying: I want you to help with this worthy cause. I sit, I listen patiently, and I say to them: If what you are asking me to do means we are going to have to borrow money, and it is going to be paid for by our children and grandchildren, what do you have to say? Nine times out of 10, they say: No. Thank you very much, Senator. And they go out the door. They get it. They understand that.
Unfortunately, Congress does not get it. It is not just my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, folks. No one's hands are completely clean. That is the way it is. We just keep on going the way we are, keep going down the road.
Here we are in the worst recession since the Great Depression. Millions of Americans are out of work. Others lucky enough to have a job are wondering if they will be next to be laid off or fired. In my State of Ohio, the unemployment rate is 10.6 percent. Yet we are talking about health care reform, cap and trade, which will put unsustainable burdens on doing business in this country and make it more difficult to get this economy going again.
What people in this country want is to go back to work and have some assurance that their jobs are safe. The best way to give them security and access to health insurance is to get them back to work.
We should not be asking our Nation's businesses to take on new tax burdens in the current recession. Yet this bill before us would impose $28 billion in new taxes on employers--$28 billion. Furthermore, the legislation creates a new Medicare payroll tax that will likely hit approximately one-third of the small businesses in this country, which employ some 30 million Americans. These new taxes are likely to significantly hinder these engines of job growth.
Another troubling tax that will impact businesses in my State is the tax on device manufacturers. I have heard from one of our Ohio companies that this tax could force it to move its operations overseas to keep its doors open. In fact--this is unbelievable--according to the company's own calculations, the new device tax will exceed 100 percent of its domestic earnings and research and development budget. It has nothing to do with their profitability. They say: You are this business. You have a percentage of it, and we are going to lay the tax right on your back.
Ohio cannot afford to lose these jobs to another country at any time but certainly not right now in this struggling economy. But this is just the beginning for businesses, large and small. The bill will add a whole new, never seen before, layer of bureaucracy on our businesses. Think about that. Small and even large businesses are already overwhelmed with management and paperwork demands as a result of government mandates. Many of them have to hire multiple tax attorneys and accountants to help them navigate the Federal laws and their tax obligations.
I cannot help but wonder how many businesses, both large and small, will have to hire new ``benefit managers.'' There is an area where we will create some new jobs. We are going to hire benefit managers to help them keep track of the new requirements to ensure they are offering the appropriate benefits or paying the appropriate fine. What a nightmare.
No one has mentioned the thousands of additional Federal workers. Nobody has talked about it. When we did Part D of Medicare, they had to hire over 500 people at CMS. So we will have to hire all kinds of people, including--listen to this--at the Internal Revenue Service. I bet you would have a hard time finding an American who thinks it is a good idea to get the IRS involved in delivering our Nation's health care.
The worst thing we can do is borrow another $2.3 trillion, create additional Federal programs, and put a bigger burden on the engine of job creation. I find this especially troublesome after hearing the Chief Actuary at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
last week report that under the original Reid health care bill costs would go up, not down. In fact, according to his analysis, the Federal Government would spend $234 billion more on health care if this legislation became law than without it--$234 billion more with this legislation than what we are spending right now.
It is not just the Federal Government. As I discussed in some detail last week, most States will have new fiscal obligations of about $26 billion under this bill. If you are not lucky enough to be from one of the States, such as the Cornhusker State or another State that got a special deal in this legislation to get the Democratic leadership's 60 votes, your Governor is going to be hit with a portion of the cost of expanding the Medicaid Program to cover all individuals up to 133 percent of the Federal poverty level.
In the State of Ohio, we have had 154,000 more people come on Medicaid just with the current extent of poverty, and to go to 133 percent, it is going to be incredible.
As a former Governor of Ohio, former chairman of the National Governors Association, and past chairman of the National League of Cities, I am very familiar with what unfunded mandates can do to State and local governments.
By the way, there is a point of order that lies against this bill as an unfunded mandate in terms of local and State government, and also business. The American people should understand that the new State obligations under the Medicare expansion will mean less funding, OK, less funding for primary and secondary education, higher education programs, roads and bridges, county and local government projects, and safety service programs run by their States. In fact, I used to call Medicaid the Pacman that gobbled up our State budget dollars.
So let's look at this. You take the side over here of Medicaid, but then what you do is you expand that, and it is going to be more expensive, and then you look around and you say: We have great needs with secondary and primary education. The kids are complaining about the fact that tuition is going up for our institutions of higher education. Our local government officials are complaining because the State and local government funds that are going to them are not available to them because all of this money is flowing in this direction. In other words, under the Reid bill, we will put more stress and further unfunded mandates on the States, making our health care fiscal picture even worse than it would be without doing anything at all. This doesn't make any sense.
As I have often said--in fact, when I was Governor, I said--Gone are the days when public officials will be judged by how much they spend on a problem; the new realities dictate that we work harder and smarter and more with less. In fact, I remember giving my state of the union addresses or state of the State addresses in Ohio, and they used to take a pool about how many times I would say ``harder and smarter and more with less.'' That is what our States are doing but not the Federal Government--not the Federal Government, oh, no. States are raising taxes and cutting but not the Federal Government. We are just in there borrowing and borrowing and borrowing as if there will be no tomorrow.
The costs incurred by our children and grandchildren as a result of this bill will be a crushing blow to their futures--a future that is already ominous because of this body. In other words, what we are saying to them is we are putting the cost on their credit card.
You are in a new world where the competition is going to be keener than ever. We have all kinds of competitors that we didn't have when I was growing up, so they are going to have to work harder. Then we are going to say to them: By the way, your taxes are going up. We are going to put a burden on your back because we weren't willing to pay for or do without during the time we were in a position of responsibility.
Another legacy I am upset about leaving for our children and grandchildren is the public funding of abortion. The other day, I explained to an individual that since Roe v. Wade, we have had over 40 million abortions--40 million abortions. Yet I have friends of mine who are wanting children, and they are going to China, they are going to Russia, they are going to other places to find those children, but here in the United States over 40 million abortions. Unfortunately, the language that was inserted in the managers' amendment does not protect taxpayer dollars from being used to fund abortion. In fact, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and National Right to Life have said the language, and thus the bill, is unacceptable and should not move forward.
Turning back to the fiscal arguments against this bill, one of my colleagues said yesterday that those of us on this side of the aisle who argue we cannot afford this bill are being disingenuous and we are engaging in scare tactics, even asking when the ``lying time''--from a colleague on the other side--the ``lying time'' for this side of the aisle will stop. Well, we will see. We will see. I am not going to be a Member of the U.S. Senate in 2012, but if God gives me the health and the energy, I will certainly be around to remind people who was telling the truth and who was not.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
