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[Page: S7692] GPO's PDF---
Mr. GRAMM. Madam President, we have had a health care debate for the last couple of weeks. The problem is that we are on appropriations bills. We are trying to pass a bill that will help stabilize the condition of farms and ranches all over America.
However, our colleagues on the Democrat side of the aisle have seemed determined to talk about health care. I will talk about health care today.
I begin by saying, first of all, this is not the beginning of the health care debate. Here are some bills we have debated on health care since President Clinton has been in office. This is the Clinton health care bill . We were told in 1993 there was a crisis in America and we needed to deal with it. The way to deal with it was setting up health care collectives where every American would be forced to buy their health care from one in their geographic region that would be set up with a local collective leader, appointed by the Government. Then all the doctors would work for this health care collective and the Government from Washington would issue mandates.
Then people such as myself said that this is a terrible loss of freedom. When you adopt the Clinton health care bill that I have on the desk, when my mama is sick, she will end up talking to a bureaucrat instead of a doctor. We were told by Senator KENNEDY and by President Clinton we have to give up this freedom because we have 30 million American families who have no health insurance.
So in 1993, we were told if we would pass these bills and let Government run the health care system, if we would force every American into a health care collective where Government could run it efficiently and where Government could guarantee our health care, that we would lose some freedom, but we would deal with the problem of lack of coverage. We were told that the problem in 1993 was access.
We had a big debate. At one point 82 percent of the American people thought these health care collectives were a great idea. Finally, a few Members of Congress stood up and said, ``Over my cold, dead political body.'' It was like somebody had taken a pin and stuck it in a big, fat inflated balloon. It just went whoosh, and suddenly everybody decided this was not a debate about health care; this was a debate about freedom.
The reason I go back to this history is two things. First of all, please remember when we are debating the so-called Health Care Bill of Rights , it has the same authors who wrote the Clinton health care bill setting up health care collectives. They have not changed their minds about what kind of American health care they want. They really believe the Government knows best. They really believe if the Government ran the health care system that everybody could have access and everything would be better because the Government, through these health care collectives, could make decisions for us and we are basically ignorant people and we do not know how to make decisions for ourselves. This was and is still their goal.
We defeated the Clinton health care bill because the American people decided it may have been Senator KENNEDY's goal, it may have been Bill Clinton's goal, but it was not their goal. In fact, I would have to say that during the months I debated this bill by talking about cost and about efficiency, it was similar to throwing rocks at a tank. But suddenly when the issue changed to freedom and the right to chose, we blew the tank up.
The same people who several years ago said give up your freedom because the problem is access changed their minds once we defeated them. Now they have a new health care bill they call the Patients' Bill of Rights . Oh, it does have something I guess you could call rights . Let me explain the basic problem and then I want to explain what they call rights and then I want to explain what I call rights and what I think Main Street America would call rights .
Here is the problem in a nutshell. First of all, having spent 2 years trying to sell us on the idea we should give up our freedom to get access, they now say: Access is not a problem. Forget the 30 million people who do not have health insurance. In fact, Senator KENNEDY's bill would take health insurance away from another 1.4 million Americans by driving up costs. These are estimates by the Congressional Budget Office. For the people who did not lose
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When I am saying Senator KENNEDY's bill , by the CBO estimates, would take insurance away from 1.4 million people, and for the people who got to keep their insurance because they had enough income, it would cost them $57.2 million, don't think I am just talking about money. Don't think I am just talking about a piece of paper that says ``Insurance Policy.'' I am talking about breast examinations, mammograms, Pap tests, and prostate screenings. I am talking about lives. I am talking about families. I am talking about your mama. I am talking about people you care about. This is a big issue. It is an important issue.
What is the problem that Senator KENNEDY wants, or tells us he wants, to deal with this year. The problem several years ago was too much freedom, and we had to get people in these health care collectives where Government could provide health care. Now the problem is the private HMOs, after which these Government collectives were modeled, are not giving people enough choices. The same things the Kennedy bill denied when it was the Clinton health care bill , such as the right to sue the Government when it was providing health care, now, all of a sudden, Senator KENNEDY wants to give you the right to sue your doctor. So under the Kennedy plan, if your baby is sick and running a 104 fever, you may not be able to get a doctor, but you can sue. For most people, that is not what they want. But it is interesting that Senator KENNEDY, who denied you the right to sue when he was going to let Government run the health care system, now is willing to attack the private sector and to expand lawsuits.
What does he claim he wants to deal with? What he claims he wants to deal with is the following problem. People join HMOs to try to hold down medical costs. You have two people who are working, they have three children, they are trying to make ends meet in their family, they are sitting down the first day of the month at the kitchen table writing those checks, trying to figure out how they are going to pay the bills. So they join an HMO because it is cheaper. The one thing they are very much unhappy about is that the HMO too often gets in between them and their doctor.
Let me just do a little analogy, if I may. It is similar to going into the examination room with your doctor--even with your doctor you feel a little bit uncomfortable taking off your clothes; everybody has had that experience. But with an HMO it is almost like the HMO gatekeeper is in the examination room with you. What you really want is to get him out of the room and leave you just with your doctor. What you want is what we show here--if you will just forget the symbols for a minute and just look at this stethoscope--what you want is you at one end of the stethoscope and your doctor's ears at the other end and you want to get any HMO gatekeeper out of the examining room.
Senator KENNEDY looks at this problem and here is his solution. His solution to the problem is: OK, you are unhappy because you are in the examining room and you have this gatekeeper in there with you and your doctor. Here is how he solves the problem: He solves the problem by saying, OK, you have your doctor in there, you have your HMO in there, and then what he calls your rights --his Patients' Bill of Rights --your right is not to get the gatekeeper from the HMO out of the examining room. That is not your right. Your right is to have a Government bureaucrat join the HMO gatekeeper and your doctor in the examining room with you, and then to have a lawyer join the Government bureaucrat who joins the HMO gatekeeper in getting between you and your doctor.
So Senator KENNEDY's solution to your problem is he puts two more people in the examining room with you. What kind of freedom does he give you? It is an interesting concept of freedom. I do not want to sound too partisan, but it sure defines the difference between the two parties. Freedom to Senator KENNEDY is having a Government bureaucrat who is there who might take your side. Freedom to Senator KENNEDY is freedom to hire a lawyer and sue somebody.
That is not the freedom most Americans are talking about when they talk about freedom. Freedom is the right to choose. Freedom is the right to fire your HMO. Freedom is the right to make your own decisions. That is what freedom is about. This so-called Kennedy Patients' Bill of Rights may be about rights , but it is not about freedom.
The Republican alternative, which we would like to debate and hope to adopt--in fact, to facilitate the debate, our leader has suggested over and over the most eminently reasonable proposal I can imagine. The eminently reasonable proposal is, let the Democrats write the best bill they can write, where they pick exactly the bureaucrat they want who will be there with the gatekeeper in the examining room with you, and then set up the system where you can hire the best lawyer you want to be there, all of them listening to your heartbeat with your doctor--the bureaucrat ready to regulate and the lawyer ready to sue. Let them write the best program they can write, and let us write our best program, and then let's put them before the Senate and let Members choose.
Our Democrat colleagues do not want to do that because they know what will happen. They know that ours will be chosen. Now we have spent weeks and weeks fooling around with this thing.
To get to the point I want to make, because I know our leader is coming over in a minute to start the debate, the Democrat bill is not what people want. This is not freedom. What people want is the right to fire their doctor, if they want to fire their doctor, to fire their HMO, if they want to fire their HMO, and choose for themselves. On a dark night when their baby has a 104-degree fever, they do not want to be given the freedom to call a lawyer, they want to be given the freedom to call a doctor. What good does calling a lawyer do after the fact? They want the ability to call a doctor to get the best medical care they can for their child.
Our bill goes back to this chart. That is, there are two people in the examining room, and you choose to put both of them there under our bill . No. 1, you choose to put yourself there; and, No. 2, you choose the doctor who is in the examining room with you.
How does it work? Under our bill , we give people freedom. We give people the right to choose. One of the choices--and I can go through many provisions of our bill . I am just going through one today, and it has to do with medical savings accounts.
When we first started debating medical savings accounts, a lot of our Democrat colleagues were for them, but now that they understand them, they hate them, and they hate them because they empower people. They empower mothers and they empower fathers to make decisions rather than governments or HMO's.
This is how it works. You have a choice, and one of the choices you can exercise is to set up a medical savings account. You would buy an insurance policy, and you would choose that insurance policy from the company you want to provide the services. It would guarantee your medical expenses beyond, say, $3,000 of expenditures, so that if somebody gets really sick, you have an insurance policy. But then you and your employee would together over time put $3,000 into a medical savings account, and that money would belong to you.
Each year, if you had medical expenses, you could spend it out of the medical savings account, where you choose how to spend it on health care and who provides the service, and if at the end of the year you have not spent the money, it belongs to you. So you have an incentive to be cost conscious and efficient and to have a stake in your health care system. But also, you have the right to choose.
Here is how Senator KENNEDY's plan works. Under his plan--and let me take the Washington phone book because it is on top--under his plan, you have total freedom to look under ``lawyer'' and hire any lawyer you want to sue,
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freedom to look under ``physician'' and hire any physician.
Under Senator KENNEDY's plan, assume, to make a long story short, it is 2 o'clock in the morning. My youngest son Jeff, let's say he is 3 years old--actually he is 22 now, but he was 3--and let's say he has a 103-degree fever. I am never spooked fever until when I see it in my own children. When my children are sick, like any father, I begin to get nervous.
Under Senator KENNEDY's plan, I get out the telephone book and I look under ``physician.'' I am not interested in a lawyer. A lawyer cannot do me any good. If I do not get help quickly, I may want to look up and call a preacher. I figure he might do me good, but a lawyer is not going to do me any good.
Under Senator KENNEDY's plan, I get out the phone book and look up ``physician'' and ``services.'' Under his plan, I have to call people up and say: I know it is 2 o'clock in the morning, but I am in such and such HMO. Are you a member of my network? Do you participate in the program I participate in? They may or they may not. Most of them do not. In fact, if one goes down the list and picks the biggest network available in Washington, DC, only a very small fraction of the doctors listed in the phone book are members of that network.
How does our plan work? My wife and I have put money into our medical savings account. We can have it in one of three forms. We can do it with a checking account. This is an actual medical savings account program by Golden Rule Insurance. They give you a checking account, out of which you pay medical bills.
This card is through Mellon Bank, and this is a medical savings account. It is a MasterCard.
This is through Visa, and it is a medical savings account from American Health Value.
It is 2 o'clock in the morning, and I have a sick child. Under our plan, I call up and I have to ask only one question: Do you take a check? Do you take MasterCard? Do you take Visa? If he does, that doctor is my doctor.
I picked a page of the phone book and had my trusty aides call. This is on page 1017 of the DC phone book. On page 1017 of the DC phone book, there is not one doctor on that page who will not take a check. There is not one doctor on that page who will not take a MasterCard. There is not one doctor on that page who will not take Visa. In other words, under the Republican plan, if your baby is sick, you can go to any doctor. If your baby is sick, you choose.
What is freedom? Freedom in health care is not the ability to have a Government bureaucrat second-guess the HMO which is second-guessing your doctor. That is not what freedom is about. Freedom is not being able to have a lawyer who can sue the HMO which is second-guessing the doctor and sue your doctor. That is not what freedom is about.
Freedom is about the ability to fire your HMO. Freedom is about the ability to choose. Why don't we have a situation where we make everybody go to one kind of grocery store and we have the Government regulate it? We can set up the ability to sue them. We do not do that because, basically, it does not work. That is how we run Government, and that is why it works so poorly.
If a grocery store does not sell what I like, I do not go there. If people do not clean my shirts or if the gas I put in the car makes it run poorly, I go to another station and buy another kind of gasoline.
All through my life I exercise my freedom to choose. What the Republican plan brings to health care is the freedom to choose.
We have gone so far down this road, where we are making American health care look like this, that even our hometown doctors are talking about joining labor unions because they want somebody to help them negotiate with the bureaucrat, they want somebody to help them negotiate with the HMO, and they want some ability to protect themselves from lawsuits.
Is that what we want in American health care? I don't think so. I think we want freedom. We want people to have the right to choose. What our bill does is do that. It gives you an opportunity to hire anybody you want to hire, to pick up any phone book in any city--I have here a phone book from Atlanta, GA. Again, you open up the part of the phone book that has to do with the listing of physicians, and any time you pick up the phone, when you have a medical savings account, you can say: Do you take a check? Do you take MasterCard? Do you take Visa? If they do, you are in.
Under our bill , you do not find yourself without health care because you are a member of some medical group in Washington but you happen to be in Atlanta when you get sick. Under our plan, the basic currency we use, which is U.S. currency, is taken everywhere.
So that is the choice I think people want. This Democrat bill is not freedom. It almost abuses the English language to call this a Patients' Bill of Rights .
What kind of right do you have in health care when you are guaranteed the right to pick your own lawyer? The right you want in health care is the right to pick your own doctor. The right you want in health care is the right to pick your hospital. The right to choose in health care is the right to say: I don't like how I am being treated. I don't like the kind of service being provided. I think your cost is too high, I think your quality is too low, and I am going to leave.
Those are not freedoms guaranteed in Senator KENNEDY's Patients' Bill of Rights . His freedoms are: Look, if you are not happy with the quality of service, then you wait right here--it may take several hours or you may have to come back on Tuesday at 4 o'clock--but we will have a person from Health and Human Services, and they will listen to you and they will talk to you. If you are not happy, you can meet with them. You will have to sign some forms. They will want to look at your medical records; they will go through them.
It may take weeks and weeks and months and months and years and years, but under Senator KENNEDY's bill you will have these bureaucrats who will be protecting you. That is freedom to Senator KENNEDY.
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