I move to strike the last word, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, you may recall, I was standing here approximately 2 hours ago waiting to speak with several other Members on the efforts of my Republican friends to eliminate Medicare as we know…
I move to strike the last word, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman, you may recall, I was standing here approximately 2 hours ago waiting to speak with several other Members on the efforts of my Republican friends to eliminate Medicare as we know it, and for reasons that are known only to the Chair, I was denied the ability to do that. Well, I am back.
And just to review the bidding, here is where it was before that order was made. We had the chairman of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, a good man, a guy I like, stand down in the well and say, oh, no--and this, by the way, is someone who was elected by the Republican Members to represent him in races all around the country, saying that the Ryan plan wasn't a plan. It was--and I am quoting here--a construct to develop a plan. And he said that the proposal was not a voucher program. And then he said it was a one-size- fits-all, that Medicare was draining our economy is what he said.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, that might be the rationale for our Republican friends wanting to eliminate Medicare, but none of those things are true. It is not a construct to develop a plan. It is the proposal of the Republican Party of the United States of America to eliminate Medicare as a guaranteed entitlement. If you don't believe me, go get the book that they wrote. Go get the budget that they wrote, go get the bill that they wrote.
And if you believe that it's not a voucher program, listen to their own Members talk about it. The Medicare program today is not, I say to my friends, one size fits all. My good friend from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) was on the floor before talking about how it's one size fits all. How can it possibly be you can be a Member of the United States House of Representatives and not understand how Medicare works?
Each individual senior gets to go to the doctor of their choosing, gets to go to the clinic of their choosing, gets to decide for themselves where they go, and then the doctor and the patient make decisions.
The only question is: Are we going to say to citizens who are 65 and older, Here is a coupon. Go buy private insurance at 25 and 30 percent overhead rather than the Medicare program, which the actuaries say cost 1.05 percent in overhead?
We have also heard them say, You are demagogueing. We don't really want to get rid of it. You do.
Now, there is a saying here in Washington that a gaffe is when the Republicans actually say what they think. So there have been plenty of opportunities to see this gaffe in full play. Now, they
have been tying themselves in intellectual knots trying to get out from under the basic facts.
By the way, I hope your insurance plan, the Ryan plan, covers the twisted arms and limbs you get tying yourselves in knots explaining this.
It is a radical departure from where we are today. Mr. Gingrich was right, even the blind squirrel can find a nut once in a while. He was right. It's a radical departure, but it's yours. Own it. Show a little gumption. Show that you are prepared to own your own proposals. But now that you want to do it and the American people are seeing the difference between Democrats and Republicans, now you are trying to squirrel your way out of it, with no disrespect to squirrels.
You say we don't have a plan. Not only did we pass a health care plan a year ago that extended 10 years the life expectancy of Medicare, but I will go one better. I will give you a plan. How about Medicare not starting at 65? What about 55 or 45 or 35? What is it that health insurance companies do in this country?
Now, I know that my Republican friends are wholly owned subsidiaries of the insurance industry, but that should not mean that our seniors lose their Medicare because of it. So, my friends Mr. Sessions and Mr. Gingrey were trying desperately to try to figure out how to get out from under your own beliefs. We believe in Medicare. We created it. We believe in Social Security. We created it. We believe in the health care act. We created it.
As a matter of fact, every improvement to health care in this country, Democrats propose, Republicans oppose. And now they have a chance to get rid of it, and they are doing it. But at least if you are going to do it, at least if you are going to try to do it, don't try to silence people who point it out.
And I think the lesson here is it might be later. If you had me come back at midnight, I would have said it. If I came back at 2 a.m., I would have said it, because the American people are going to see what's going on here.
You have a proposal to eliminate Medicare, a proposal to privatize a portion of Social Security by investing in the stock market, a proposal to roll back the expansion of prescription drug coverage for seniors. You have a proposal to take away the benefits of those 25 and younger to be able to get health insurance. That is your proposal. Own it. Live with it. Embrace it, because we are not going to let you get out from under it.
And you may delay me, you may gavel me, you may tell me you have got to come back at 2 o'clock in the morning. It's not going to change the fundamentals of this debate, that if you believe fundamentally in Medicare, at this point you have got two choices: Tear up your Republican Party membership or give up control of Congress, and, frankly, some of you are going to have to do both.
I rise as the designee of the gentlelady from Florida (Ms. Castor) to offer an amendment that is satisfied by the preprinting requirement.
Mr. Chairman, I support this amendment and hope we all vote for it.
I just do want to take an opportunity to respond to the gentleman who was just at the microphone. It is one thing to say you're saving Medicare, but if you leave a different Medicare when you're done than today, if it is entirely different, how have you saved it?
I know ``premium support'' or ``price support'' is the term of art that is now trying to take hold as you desperately try to figure out how to explain what you are doing, but let me make it very clear, and if I say anything incorrect, the gentleman can rise and I will permit him to correct me.
Under the proposal of the gentleman from Wisconsin, under the proposal of the Republicans in Congress, that at a certain point in the future, Medicare as we have it today, as a guaranteed entitlement safety net program for seniors, will cease to exist. That is the Ryan plan. I will pause while anyone seeks to correct that.
That silence you hear, ladies and gentlemen of the United States of America, is because I just said something that is factually correct. The Ryan plan, which is now the Republican plan, which is now the plan that has passed the House, would end Medicare as we know it. Now, that has never been something that they have hidden from before. They even had a book, ``The Young Guns,'' or something. Does the gentleman from New Jersey remember what it was called? It was like ``The Young Guns.'' They were parading them all around the country with this book that explained it, this is the way Medicare is going to look.
You say it is price support. Okay. It is price support unless you can't be supported by the price of the voucher. If you are a senior citizen, I say to the previous speaker, if you are a senior citizen and you are given this thing, call it what you want, a coupon, a voucher, a price support document, and you go around and look for insurance in your neighborhood and you can't find it, under the law that you passed, you are out of luck. But you are not entirely out of luck. Your family can go pay out of their own pocket and may be able to buy insurance.
Now, you are a good, fit, healthy man, God bless you, and you should be
so for many years to come. But the fact is that many senior citizens cannot go into the private market and buy insurance with a price support document or voucher or coupon. They won't be able to get it, which is why Medicare was created in the first place, because the conventional way of saying, ``You know what; each and every person for themselves is the way we are going to get health care'' was leaving senior citizens out.
I want to explain to my Republican colleagues a little something about economics. When we join together as a society, as a large buying pool, we get better treatment as consumers. We get a lower price. Fewer people buying car insurance, prices go up. All of us in a pari-mutuel relationship, prices come down. That is basic economics, but it is being violated by the Ryan plan, which is the Republican plan, which is the plan you now own and have to defend.
But to say, you know, We don't really want to defend it because we are uncomfortable with it, it is yours now. And you say, We are trying to save Medicare. We are trying to save it. If you want to save it, then it has to be a Medicare program. It can't just be some kind of a coupon.
But I want to talk very briefly in my remaining time about this idea that we don't have plans. I have a plan that I want you all to consider. It is taking the efficient program of Medicare, which has managed to keep administrative costs far below any insurance plan in the country, any one of them. If any one of them can come even close to Medicare efficiency, then I would say let's go get that one, but they can't.
Why is it that we say that only people 65 and above should get that efficiency? Why don't we say to the roughly 30 percent profits and overhead insurance companies are taking, Who needs you guys? You are taking our money.
We are giving it to insurance companies. They are not doing any exams. They are not doing any checkups. They are not operating on any people. All they are doing is taking our money, taking 20 percent off the top and then passing some of it along to doctors and hospitals. What are they performing in the economy? Let's take them out of the formula.
Now, we didn't go this way in the ObamaCare plan, which I proudly call it. But I have to tell you, there is a competition going on in this country right now between the for-profit, employer-based model with a 30 percent overhead and Medicare with 1.05 percent overhead. I say Medicare for all Americans. It is an American Democratic plan that we should extend to more people. You want efficiency? Get more people into that buying pool. Let's take advantage of the large numbers of people that we have and cover them with insurance at a lower rate.
But we didn't go that way. We went a Republican way. In the Obama proposal, it was essentially a Republican proposal that said let's give them all health insurance. Now what you are saying is let's see if we can do that for senior citizens and still call it Medicare. You can't. You can't.
You say you are saving Medicare. You are destroying Medicare, and we Democrats and the people of this country are going to stop you.
Point of Order
I ask to be heard on the point of order.
It is arguable whether or not this does increase spending because all this does is change the effective date. But I can tell you this: This is the exact same argument we heard today from Mr. Cantor, who said they would not authorize any spending to help the people who were the victims of that horrible tornado recently because that, too, would need to be paid for.
Sometimes you have things that are emergencies in this country. Sometimes you have things that, frankly, under the emergency powers of this Congress, we should be able to implement.
I believe that while it is arguable that the effective date changes the net expense of this bill, because all this really does, the fact of the matter is that we have a responsibility to seniors in this country. We have a responsibility to those on Medicare to try to save it, just the same way I would say we have a responsibility to the citizens of this country who were ravaged by storm. And to hear your leadership say we would not allocate any funds for that purpose without going through a budget debate is outrageous.
Will the gentleman yield?
I just want to point out something else. Who is going to be left to pay for it?
Obviously, localities in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York are not going to let people lie sick in the streets. It's just going to mean local taxes are going to get raised and that State taxes are going to get raised because, ultimately, it's not whether people get health care; it's just how it's paid for. Frankly, by cutting it off, it doesn't mean that. It just means that we're passing it along in an unfunded mandate to localities.
I thank the gentleman for yielding.
I move to strike the requisite number of words.
I say to the Chair, when I was here at 6 o'clock and was cut off by the Chair and was taken off my feet and lost my ability to speak for reasons that are only known to the Chair, I was prepared to make my 5-minute remarks, and the other Members were prepared to do the same.
I want to say that, just as a matter of comity and as a matter of our all getting along, this is an important debate, and if the effort were to try to figure out a way to stymie the debate and to silence some of us, I just want to remind you that it's not going to work and that we're going to find a way to make this debate happen even if it's late into the evening. But I just want to continue on a point that the gentleman from New Jersey made, and I want us to understand a little bit about the basic tenets of how Medicare works.
Many Members on the other side of the aisle came to the floor today and talked about Medicare as being a one-size-fits-all plan. Medicare works because of its flexibility. My father is a member of an HMO. He chose that option. People can go to individual pay-per-service doctors.
Now, there is no disputing that health care--all health care--is on a rising arc that is unsustainable. That's why the Republican strategy of doing nothing and drilling its head into the sand for years was no longer sustainable, and that's why we Democrats, without a single Republican vote, had to do something about it. The arc of cost is strangling our economy. The arc of cost of not having people insured and of passing along the bills to all of us was an unsustainable model. That's why we made changes that made Medicare more efficient.
For example, one of the things that my friends want to eliminate is the idea that, under Medicare now, under the Affordable Care Act, under ObamaCare, preventative services for seniors are reimbursed 100 percent--no copayment. Why do we do that, and how does that save money? It's because of what our parents and grandparents have taught us time immemorial, that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and that by providing coverage for that you actually save money in Medicare. How did we extend Medicare by 10 years? That's one of the ways that we did it.
What my colleagues fail to understand is that we acted just last year. You ask, Where is your plan? We acted just last year to extend the life of Medicare; to expand services provided under Medicare; to reduce the cost to the economy; to provide coverage for the uninsured; to reduce the burden on localities and cities that have to pay for the uninsured now. That's what we did.
What are you doing? You're saying let's take not only the Affordable Care Act and eliminate all of those protections, but let's go back 40- some-odd years, and let's eliminate the Medicare Act, and let's replace it with something that, oh, lo and behold, takes taxpayer dollars and gives it to insurance companies.
Now, anyone watching this movie from the beginning knows that that's your basic modus operandi, that that's what you always seek to do--to enrich insurance companies. But if you want to provide care for seniors--Democrat seniors, Republican seniors, seniors with no party affiliation--Medicare has turned out to be a very efficient way to do it. Does that mean there are not rising health care costs across the board? Yes, but I'm going to tell you something. Here's this for an interesting little fact:
Medicare's rising cost is actually less than that of the private insurance market. Well, how can that be? Because, as I said, Medicare doesn't take money for profits. Medicare doesn't take money for shareholders. Medicare doesn't take money for advertisements. Medicare doesn't take money for giant call centers, where you call them, and they put you on hold and then ultimately don't give you their service. They don't give giant bonuses to their CEOs. Medicare is an efficient program that's well run because that's how we roll, we Democrats. We do efficient programs that are well run.
What do you do? You want to eliminate them. You like that.
That's how they roll. They want to eliminate these programs. We're standing in the way, but we're not standing alone because seniors of all stripes and even people who are young people who want to someday become seniors understand a program that works when they see it. They also understand a party in retreat when they see it, I say to my good friend. We see how you guys are coming down here. Well, it's not a voucher; it's a coupon. It's not a coupon; it's a price support. Earlier in the day, someone said you're draining the Federal Government. One size fits all.
You guys, I have not seen so much defensive talk in years. But you ought to be a little bit defensive about this because we found out what you believe in. You campaigned on what you were against, and this is apparently it. But here it is. Now you've got to defend it. You should do a better job than simply saying, Oh, no, no, no, no. We love this Democratic program. We're not trying to hurt it.
The American people are much too smart for this. They know if you say we're taking away a guaranteed protection and we're replacing it with a price support document, or whatever euphemism you're going to work, that we Democrats are going to stand up and call you on it every day. You can huff and you can puff, but eventually, it's going to be us blowing your house down. Ultimately, it's going to be the citizens of this country saying, You
know what? I remember now why we put Democrats in charge when we wanted to take care of people, because they create programs like Medicare, and Republicans want to eliminate them.
