Mr. President, I have an amendment at the desk. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with. Mr. President, this is a second-degree amendment to the Baucus-Grassley amendment. I will explain…
Mr. President, I have an amendment at the desk.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.
Mr. President, this is a second-degree amendment to the Baucus-Grassley amendment. I will explain it in just a moment, but while the majority leader is still in the Chamber, let me compliment him, not only for the fine presentation he just made based upon his personal knowledge of how the medical health care system in this country works but also for his leadership and the enormous amount of time and effort he has put into crafting this legislation and working with Members to try to resolve the many disputes that have arisen. I think without the patience he has shown in dealing with all of the Members, we would not be to this point that we are today, literally on the brink of passing, in the Senate, very historic legislation. So I compliment the majority leader and personally thank him for his patience in dealing with some of my concerns about the bill and the good work he has done in working with those problems.
I also want to thank Chairman Grassley, who has shown a lot of patience and has worked hard in a very bipartisan way to put together a plan that could pass this body. I know that people on both sides of the aisle would prefer that it be closer to their particular points of view, but the chairman was always cognizant of the fact that in order to get a bill passed, it had to be done in a bipartisan way. So I compliment the chairman and ranking member for working in that fashion.
I also want to compliment and tell my colleagues a little bit about the efforts of the Secretary of HHS, Tommy Thompson. He, too, has become very personally involved in this effort and has worked very hard to effect the President's goals and plans in ensuring that we can strengthen, protect, improve and preserve Medicare. I appreciate his strong role as well.
I say all of that to make it clear that the amendment I offer is in the spirit of this bipartisan work, hopefully my work will be deemed to be cooperative with our leadership, although there is one element of the amendment Chairman Grassley and Senator Baucus have laid down that I disagree with and this is what I am proposing to amend.
What I would like to do is explain the history of this and then come to my amendment. The amendment is very simple. It strikes a sunset provision, but that does not mean anything unless one knows the context, so let me speak for a moment about that context.
When the President first proposed this year that we legislate to add a new prescription drug benefit to Medicare, he said we should do it in the context of a real effort to strengthen Medicare so that we can preserve and protect it for the future. It has served our seniors well, but we are now in the 21st century and two things basically have occurred.
First, we now know that medicines, prescription drugs, are used as the preferred treatment for many illnesses and diseases, which was not the case back in 1965 when Medicare was first created. So all of us have become convinced that we need to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. This was the President's first great goal.
The second thing he said was, there is no way we can sustain the current promised benefits under Medicare if we do not create some new opportunities for Medicare beneficiaries, if we do not really strengthen the Medicare system we have. Among the things we can do to ensure that it will continue to work is to provide some choices for seniors, and so what he proposed was those people who would like to keep the existing Medicare, with a new prescription drug benefit, would be able to do that. But, especially for those younger seniors, people who have been in the workplace and are familiar with a PPO, or preferred provider, insurance plan or perhaps an HMO or Medicare+Choice kind of plan, we would provide that alternative as well so that the senior could choose. The idea was that a lot of the people that will be coming into the senior market, being used to an employer-provided plan, might like to keep that kind of plan rather than go into traditional Medicare. So we want to provide a choice, and it will be up to the senior to decide. So that is the direction that we sat down to work in as we developed this legislation.
I would have preferred that in creating this private market alternative, or the preferred provider organization--which we will hear referred to as PPOs--to the traditional Government Medicare system, we had made it much more like the FEHBP, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. That is a medical insurance plan that most of the people who are in this Chamber today have. It serves about 10 million Federal employees including family members and retirees. This is also the health plan for Members of Congress.
I would like to tell my seniors, if it is good enough for Members of Congress, then the seniors ought to take a look at it. It is a pretty good program. In fact, it is a very good program. I would have liked to have made this new Medicare Program alternative very much in the mold of the FEHBP, especially in the way that the preferred provider organizations work, bid, and are paid. We could have done that.
The way it works in the FEHBP is we do not have any limit on what kind of a bid the PPOs have to have. If they meet the basic criteria, providing the care we have mandated by statute, they can bid and provide the service and they can try to sell it to us. The federal government's share of the cost is determined by the use of a weighted average of all the health plans' costs.
If it is a good deal, federal employees and Members of Congress will sign up. If it is not a good deal, we will not. Generally, we do not tell the PPOs how much they can bid or how much they can charge. If they bid too much and charge too much, nobody is going to buy it. So they all have pretty reasonable bids and pretty reasonable costs, but theoretically they could bid themselves out of the market. It is up to them.
These insurance actuaries are pretty smart. They know how they can meet all of the requirements that they have. They have to be sure they cover the benefits they have promised. They have to provide those. They have to make a little profit, of course. They have to make sure the premiums are low enough so that people will sign up and, of course, most importantly in the beginning, they have to win the bid. If they do not win the bid, if they are so
high that nobody will sign up, well, then, there is no reason for them to be in the game in the first place.
They look at all of those things, and they figure out how much they can afford to bid, what the premiums will be, and so on. It is a pretty good plan, and I wish we could have been able to offer that to our seniors. But instead, the determination was made by Chairman Grassley and others that we would take the key component of the President's plan with respect to the PPOs and write that up into the legislation, draft it up, and that section of the legislation says we are going to limit the number of bids because we really want to control the cost, and so we are going to say only the three lowest bids are going to succeed, and then the President proposed to pay the PPOs at the middle bid of the three bids.
So the insurance companies that bid have to figure out, how much is it going to cost us to provide care to each senior, and that is what they bid, but they have to be sure the bid is low enough that they win because only the three lowest ones will be accepted.
That is what President Bush proposed, and it is deemed to be a way of both providing a lower cost to the Government kind of care but a quality care because obviously people are not going to sign up and utilize it if they do not think it provides quality care.
There are a lot of things about the way PPOs operate that ensure good quality care. This is a good idea. The President proposed it, and that was the original idea in drafting this.
But then a very arbitrary thing happened. The people in this building know that everything we do has to be under the rules of the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office. Everything has to be scored by CBO. That is to say, we send it to CBO, and they tell us how much it is going to cost in their mind. When we said we were going to allocate $400 billion over 10 years to this new prescription drug benefit, we had to make sure that the CBO score fit within the $400 billion.
Well, CBO came along and they said this competitive bidding system was going to cost a lot more money--it was over a $100 billion--it was way more than Chairman Grassley and Senator Baucus wanted to allocate to the preferred provider organization part of the system.
So they said, we have to do something that does not cost anything or does not cost very much. So they decided to solve the problem CBO had created by simply writing in, in effect, a limitation that said this will not cost anything because we are going to set it at the very same level as traditional Medicare payments. There is a complicated formula. I am not going to get into all the details, but essentially it is the higher of the Medicare+Choice payment rate or the traditional fee-for- service Medicare reimbursement level.
The bottom line is, they said we are going to cap the amount the PPOs could be reimbursed. If you want the contract, you can bid anything you want to bid, but you can't be reimbursed over a certain amount, and that amount is defined in statute. By definition, therefore, the score did not cost very much and therefore it could fit within this $400 billion. So they thought that might solve the problem.
But the problem with this is, it will not work. A lot of people realize it won't work, but we still have to comply with the CBO score, they say. I will get to a solution in a moment.
How do we know it won't work? CBO, the same organization that did the score, says all of 2 percent of seniors will sign up for this PPO alternative. Two percent. Why? Because this arbitrary capped rate is not going to be enough to provide the coverage for them that we promise. So why would they want to sign up with a PPO when they can get the coverage under traditional Medicare?
When I am eligible for Medicare, that is what I would do. I would not sign up if a plan cannot deliver the goods. CBO says only 2 percent will sign up. As a result, obviously, we have to find an alternative.
Let's go back to this question that CBO raised by its scoring and whether or not an arbitrary limit will actually work. CBO says it won't; only 2 percent are going to sign up.
Why do they say that? First, we have the experience of Medicare reimbursement over the last many, many years. Sadly, the government has a cap on what it pays the doctors and hospitals and other health care providers, too. We do that by statute. We say we are only going to pay you X amount if you do certain things and you cannot go above that.
What happens? After a while, there is so much upward pressure on that amount because it does not begin to keep track with inflation, especially health care inflation. Pretty soon the doctors are saying, we not only cannot make any money getting reimbursed at this low level, but we cannot pay our nurses, we cannot keep our doors open, there is no way we can stay in practice providing services to our senior citizens if you are going to pay this ridiculously low amount. In fact, a lot of doctors have retired, gotten out of the business, discouraged their kids from going into medicine, and we see real shortages, especially in certain specialties. There are other factors that lead to that as well, but this is a big one.
So every year or two, Congress, responding to that pressure, says: My goodness, we have to change that reimbursement level. It is too low. So then we have these big fits and starts where we hold it down for a while and then all of a sudden we raise it up to the level necessary to compensate the hospitals and the doctors and nurses to take care of our senior citizens. We did this for the physicians just a few months ago because they were getting cut significantly in the reimbursement rate and CBO said we paid $54 billion to fix the physician problem for basically one year. That is one-eighth of the amount of this entire bill, over a 10-year period, just to make sure that the cut did not go into effect last year for the doctors so they could stay in business.
We find there is supposed to be another cut in physician reimbursement levels this year, and again we are most likely going to have to make an adjustment.
The problem is artificial government controls, price controls, do not work. They do not work in Medicare any better than in rent control or the gasoline price controls we had in the 1970's or any other price controls. Free market countries like the United States have learned that lesson. Socialist countries have not. I would have thought we would have learned the lesson. But that is the way the Medicare system works. It is the perfect exhibit A if you want evidence of the fact these controls in providing health care services do not work. Just look at the reimbursement providers in Medicare today.
I mentioned it is a lot like rent control. There is always the inexorable pressure. Is it any wonder when you finally remove the rent controls that in some places the rents actually go up? The owners get enough to refurbish the place to keep it up and people are willing to rent the places that look a lot nicer and better than back when there were rent controls. Sometimes the prices do go up. That is the price of quality health care.
We should never get into the situation in this Congress where we are going to shortchange our seniors by trying to put artificial caps on what we pay the people who take care of them. It will not work.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. If you want quality health care, you are going to have to pay for it one way or another. It may work to have a price control for a little while, but it does not work for very long. We found that out, and that is why every couple of years we have to make the big adjustments.
So why would we think the price controls would work with the new preferred provider organizations that we are trying to establish as a credible alternative to traditional Medicare? A lot of people will find the benefits of those PPOs to their liking. Why do we think the price controls will allow them to work? CBO says it will not happen; only 2 percent will sign up. Clearly, we had to find a way out of this dilemma.
The bottom line is, under CBO's rationale, either nobody bids because they cannot get reimbursed or we have to do the constant adjustment. There is no adjustment provided for in this legislation. Or there is a modest adjustment, but not an adjustment that will take care of this problem.
What do we do to solve the problem? We do not want to create the PPO option and then destroy its effectiveness
before it can even work. I am very worried, to digress a moment, we will create some expectations on the part of our seniors that we cannot satisfy. That will be fundamentally wrong. It would be very wrong to suggest that we are going to do something for our seniors that, in fact, we are not doing. I, for one, am simply not going to be part of that. We cannot promise seniors an option that, in fact, we know, in advance will not work.
What is the solution? Obviously, the solution is to go back to the way we were going to do this in the first place, back to the President's proposal, and not have the arbitrary cap. Simply allow competitive bidding. Let the market decide what the right levels are. These people are smart. They will find the right level. It may be, in some areas, some time, below the Medicare reimbursement. That is what the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the organization that oversees these programs, believes. It may be the same. It may be more. It will be different from region to region and year to year. Let the market decide that.
Now, there was not enough money in the $400 billion to do this. So what happened was Chairman Grassley and Senator Baucus were able to conclude that about $12 billion was available in the bill to be allocated for some purpose.
Very candidly, many Democrats did not want to do what I am suggesting. So they said you can only have half of the $12 billion to try to make your plan work. We want to use the other half to do something we want to do. What they want to do in the bill is perfectly reasonable, and I don't have any objection to the Grassley-Baucus amendment in that regard. In fact, I don't have any objection to most of the Grassley-Baucus amendment. I think it is a good amendment except for one thing.
What the amendment does for the $6 billion I spoke of, it says, starting in the year 2009, the Secretary of HHS can use competitive bidding that does not have this arbitrary payment cap on it, up to spending $6 billion if you have to spend it. The CBO scoring would suggest you could probably cover one or two of the 10 regions of the country if there were going to be 10 regions during one of the bidding cycles. It does not give us much of a chance to do this, but at least it establishes the principle.
The Secretary will at least have one chance, in one region, during one bidding period, to say at least in this situation we are going to eliminate our caps and see what happens.
Theoretically, if the bids come in below that cap, he still has the $6 billion to do that in another region. It is like somebody guaranteeing a loan. If the loans get paid off, then the person who guaranteed it never has to pay off. This is like $6 billion to guarantee the loan. This is $6 billion to see that the preferred provider organizations get paid, if in fact their bids exceed the Medicare cap level. It may exceed it; it may not.
Chances are, if it does not happen until 2009, which is the way the amendment is written, it will exceed it because of this pressure that inevitably builds when you have price controls keeping the prices down. So for 4 years the prices are going to be tamped down and finally then in the fifth year we get to go out to bids, and my guess is they probably will be higher and the proponents of the competitive bidding will say: See, we told you it would cost a lot of money. Of course. It might. If you tamp down something that the market would cause to rise a little bit every year and you tamp it down for 5 years and don't have some opportunity to adjust it, then naturally if you take the cap off it is going to rise. So CBO is probably correct, it probably will cost some money. That is the inevitable result of lifting the price control after you have kept things tamped down for too long.
The alternative, of course, is that there may not be any PPOs bidding because they cannot provide the services we have promised to seniors. But there is a little bit of an opportunity here to provide this unrestricted opportunity for bidding. That is what the amendment originally said that was drafted. I was originally going to be a cosponsor of the Grassley-Baucus amendment because even though it did not reestablish the competitive bidding process very much, there is a little sliver in there and at least we could go to conference, to the conference committee between the House and Senate, and argue that we had established the principle and we wanted to make sure that principle could continue on.
But, again, a funny thing happened. There were objections on the Democratic side to this process extending beyond the 5 years that it was in effect. What they said was you have to spend the $6 billion in that 5-year period. There will not be any money after that.
I said that's OK.
But then they said: And the authority to do this has to sunset at that moment, after 5 years. You cannot have the authority to do this, regardless of the cost, later on.
Later they said: Well, as long as it is cost neutral, but as I pointed out that is probably a false promise because of the price controls keeping the prices tamped down. So my amendment eliminates that sunset clause. It says: No, if this is a good idea, let it continue.
Ironically, if the CMS is correct, then it is not going to cost any more. And if CBO is correct, it is going to cost more and, as a result of that, we are going to have to have some alternative to the competitive bidding process with the price caps on it because there are not going to be any PPOs to offer the health care benefits. If, in fact, they cannot make it work under the money that is then available, there has to be an alternative available. That is why this should not sunset. It is why the authority to do this should continue on.
As to this point I just want to say I cannot imagine, after all the work that has gone into this--people have looked at how complex this is--we would think that we are smart enough in the Senate to know exactly what the price of this insurance contract ought to be for every Medicare beneficiary 10 years down the road. How do we know that? We cannot possibly know that. How do we know what a fair price for a Mercury automobile is going to be in 10 years? A price that is just exactly fair, that lets, say, Ford Motor Company make some money, just low enough to entice us to buy the car. We don't know that. That is why we have a free market. You charge whatever you want to charge and if it is a good deal, people will buy it; if it is not, they will not.
It is the same thing here. We are not smart enough to fix these prices and we are playing with the quality of health care of our senior citizens.
My fear is we are going to keep this ratcheted down so much that we will have an experience like we had not so long ago with the HMOs of this country, where they were squeezing the benefits and patients got pretty angry about it. They said, we don't want to have to go to a doctor we don't know, we don't want to have them tell us they can't see us for 6 weeks. We don't want them to say it would be nice to have a MRI or CAT scan but all we can give you is a X-ray. That is where the call for the Patients' Bill of Rights came in, and I supported it because I don't think patients should get squeezed down in their health care just because we are trying to save money.
Of course we want to save money. We are talking about taxpayer money here. But the whole concept of the preferred provider option, the private sector option, was to be able to save money in the long run for the Medicare system. That is why the President proposed it and why we, especially on the Republican side, said this is something we need to do to strengthen Medicare. We need to provide an option that will enable us to keep the costs of this under control as Medicare goes into the future. And for the reasons the majority leader articulated so well a moment ago, we believe these preferred provider organizations will be able to do that. So they can balance good quality care with efficiencies and effectiveness at cost control as well. That was the whole idea for it.
But we cannot get into a situation where we tie both hands behind their back and then tell them to go out and serve our senior citizens. We say: You can go do that but you can't get paid any more than X, and X doesn't go up unless we cause it to go up.
That is the reason for the fix that I proposed. It was in the amendment originally but then it was determined
that this had to be sunsetted. My amendment eliminates the sunset, allows the authorization for the pure competitive bidding to continue on. That is as simple as it is and is the primary reason why I did it.
Let me note a couple of other items. Some people, especially my friends on the Democratic side, have said, wait a minute here, this has to be balanced. And I said I agree. The drug benefit, according to CBO, right now in the bill, the underlying bill, is $402 billion over 10 years. It slightly exceeds the $400 billion. In the same bill we are spending $7.8 billion over 10 years on the PPOs and Medicare+Choice, which are the HMOs.
So it is $402 billion on the drug benefit, $7.8 billion on the PPOs and HMOs. I think we could afford to put a little bit more money toward ensuring that the PPOs can be successful here, that they will bid and provide these services to our senior citizens.
Another point: When we put these price controls on the providers, as we do today under Medicare, as I said, there is no free lunch. Somebody has to pay. What happens is that the private sector health insurance in our society is subsidizing Medicare. The hospitals and the doctors and all the other providers have to make it up somewhere and that is where they make it up. This raises the cost of private insurance. A lot of people find that very hard to pay. In fact, it takes some people out of the private insurance markets. So, ironically, one of the reasons not as many Americans are insured as should be is because the premiums are too high because the private sector has to subsidize the care that we are providing on the Government side of the equation through Medicare and Medicaid.
This price cap is going to further that subsidization, ironically at a time when millions of retirees are going to be leaving the private market because their employer will no longer want to provide a benefit that the Government is providing for at a taxpayer subsidy. So there is going to be a lot smaller private sector market to subsidize a lot bigger amount, which will cause more people to lose their insurance because of the higher cost of premiums. It does not make sense to underfund Medicare.
The final problem: Remember at the very beginning I mentioned the FEHBP, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. It is interesting that throughout the history of the FEHBP we have not had any of the problems I have been talking about here. Congress has rarely had to do anything to modify the FEHBP system. It works very well. Yet every year or so we have had to modify the reimbursement to Medicare providers in response to what we did through the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. We have had to do it ever since because we are not smart enough to know what every doctor in this country and every hospital ought to get paid to take care of us. Yet that is what we tried to say in the statute. So we have to keep changing it. Why would we want to not go with a system that we know has worked very well? We can do that by allowing this open bidding and allow the free market to work.
I think for all of these reasons it would be very wise for us to remove the sunset on the Grassley-Baucus amendment and let this process work, even a little bit, and show our colleagues in the House of Representatives and, frankly, all the country that we are committed to this principle of the free market ensuring the best deal for the American taxpayers but also the best deal for our senior citizens.
I am just going to close with this thought: Medicare is a mandatory system in the United States of America. There is essentially no option. When you are 65 years old, it is Medicare or no care. A doctor cannot take care of you outside of Medicare after you turn 65. There is only one exception, and that is if the doctor says: I will not treat any Medicare patients for a period of 2 years.
Now, we do not want to force our doctors into doing that. We want them to stay in Medicare, taking care of Medicare patients. But the only way a doctor can treat people outside of Medicare is to swear-- there is a formal process for doing it--that he will not treat any Medicare patients for 2 years. We do not want them to do that, but that is the only way. You would have to find such a doctor. If your condition is diabetes, and that doctor is an orthopedic surgeon, you probably will not have too good of luck.
So most seniors do not have the option of searching around trying to find a doctor who works outside of Medicare because most of them do not do it. Fortunately, most of them stay in Medicare. But this is the only circumstance under which you can find a doctor outside of Medicare.
Since we are saying--literally mandating--that our moms and dads-- pretty soon some of us--have to take the Government program for our health care after we turn 65--and nothing is more important to us than our health and our family's health--my mom's health--it bothers me a lot that we are setting up a system to take care of my mother that we know in advance is bound not to work. It promises a benefit it cannot deliver. But because of the scoring problem, we have to do it that way.
There is a better alternative: to take the time to do it right, to make the personal commitment to do it right, to understand there is no such thing as a free lunch--that I want to deliver the best quality care for my mother as I can because she does not have an option.
If she had an option to go into some other system, as they do in Great Britain, then I would not be quite as concerned.
But we are forcing everybody into a system, and then we are saying-- as we tie its hands behind its back--now you make sure you can go out and serve, when CBO says only 2 percent of the people will sign up for that. So that means everybody is going to continue on with traditional Medicare.
Now, maybe that works for them, but we know there are going to be some huge problems not too far down the road with traditional Medicare. Are we going to be able to deliver the benefits we promised? If you look at the numbers, we are going to have big tax increases or we are going to have to go deeply into debt in order to do that.
There is an alternative, and that is this option I have been talking about. Because we are playing with real people's lives, and because the ultimate value here is the quality of medical care we are going to ensure our senior citizens get--because it is the only way they can get medical care--we have the highest obligation to give this matter our most serious attention and not simply rush it through because we want to finish the bill before the July Fourth recess--although I certainly understand the Secretary and our leadership's desire to try to do that to get the bill in conference--but to take enough time and to give it enough thought to do it right.
This is forever, in a sense. It is for a long, long time. And for those friends of mine who say, ``Oh, don't worry about it; we are going to make a lot of changes in this,'' how many changes have we made in some of the sort of ``sacred cow'' laws in the United States--things that everybody supports and so nobody wants to even suggest to change: Social Security, Endangered Species Act, Medicare itself?
It is easy to demagog these issues, and, as a result, Members are not very keen to make changes with them; you are accused of trying to destroy the program or whatever it might be. So I think my colleagues who say, ``Oh, don't worry; we'll fix it later,'' miscalculate the courage they are going to have later when they realize it has to be fixed.
The time to do it is now. The time to get it right is now. The President is right, this was the way to do it. And so, to support the President's program, I am offering this amendment to get back to what that program was. I hope my colleagues will support me in this because nothing less than quality health care for my mother and the rest of the senior citizens in this country is at stake.
Mr. President, I appreciate your patience, and I yield the floor.