Frank Pallone

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I continue to reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I continue to reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Butterfield).

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I continue to reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. PALLONE. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Matsui).

Mr. PALLONE. Madam Speaker, I yield myself 15 seconds. Madam Speaker, again, Dr. Burgess talked about impact on hospitals. I want to point out that the health care reform law benefits hospitals by covering more Americans and thereby reducing the costs of providing care to the uninsured. Repeal would undo this benefit, increasing the costs of uncompensated care by $249 million annually for hospitals in his district. I yield 15 seconds to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Weiner).

Mr. PALLONE. Madam Speaker, I yield myself 15 seconds. The gentleman from New Hampshire, if he votes for this repeal, he is eliminating new health care coverage options for 1,900 uninsured young adults, increasing the number of people without health insurance by 24,000 individuals, and increasing the cost to hospitals of providing uncompensated care by $35 million annually in his district.

Mr. PALLONE. Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Madam Speaker, in this debate the truth should be told about the Republican repeal. In fact, the Republican bill should come up with a health warning that their measure is dangerous to America's health. For many people, the issue of having health coverage is a matter of life and death, and I would say there are so many benefits that we have pointed out during this debate that already exist for the average American that to talk about repeal at this time and eliminate those benefits for those people that have preexisting conditions that wouldn't be able to get coverage, or would face lifetime caps or rescissions, it simply needs to be told that the fact of the matter is that right now there are tremendous benefits that are coming to the average American from this legislation. And to repeal it at this point makes absolutely no sense. It's completely a waste of time. We have no indication that this repeal would ever go to the Senate or ever be considered by the President. And I just wish that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, instead of wasting their time talking about this repeal that is going nowhere, would instead focus on the economy. Focus on jobs. When I talk to my constituents, that's what they want us to deal with. We just began this session of Congress about 2 weeks ago. The focus should be on the economy, on jobs, on trying to do what we can to improve the lives of the average American. We have tremendous benefits that exist under this health care legislation now. Why focus our attention, in this first 2 or 3 weeks of the Congress, on this repeal? It makes absolutely no sense. And I would ask my colleagues, after today, please, let's focus on jobs. Let's focus on what we can do to improve the economy. Let's not continue this debate on health care, because actually what my constituents want is they want this bill to unfold. They like the benefits that have already come forward. And a lot more benefits will accrue. Most Americans will ultimately be covered by health insurance, and that's the key. Let's focus on jobs and the economy and stop this ruse about health care repeal.

Mr. PALLONE. I yield myself 15 seconds, Mr. Speaker. Mr. McKinley mentioned seniors. I would point out that, beginning in 2011, the health care reform provides a 50 percent discount for prescription drugs for Medicare beneficiaries. There are 12,100 Medicare beneficiaries in Representative McKinley's district who benefit from these provisions. Seniors benefit from this bill, and if you repeal the bill, those seniors are going to have a loss. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. PALLONE. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Weiner).

Mr. PALLONE. I continue to reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. PALLONE. Madam Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gene Green).

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Everything you said is absolutely true. I know in my State we estimate that every insurance policy, for those who have insurance and are paying their premiums, there is built into it something like $1,000 to $1,500 per year in your premium that pays for uncompensated care for others. And I actually have a statistic in that Energy and Commerce study that I mentioned that says in my district alone repeal would increase the cost of uncompensated care by $54 million annually for hospitals in my district. But what I wanted to point out was you can actually eliminate a lot of the uncompensated care because what happens, people don't have health insurance and so they don't see a primary care doctor on a regular basis. And they get sicker, and their only recourse is to go to an emergency room. I tried to get the CBO to build into this the savings that would come about because of preventive care. In other words, the fact that all of these people who are uninsured go to the emergency room, don't see a doctor, and all of a sudden they see a doctor and they stay well because they take preventive care of themselves and they do wellness and then they don't end up getting sick and going to the hospital. But that was never built into the system. The CBO won't score prevention, so to speak. But I would maintain there is huge savings. We talk about a $230 billion savings from the deficit, but in my opinion it is trillions of dollars because not built into this is the fact that all of these people who don't have primary care and end up in an emergency room now will have a doctor. They won't get sick, and you won't have to pay for all that care. So the system as a whole saves a tremendous amount of money, which is not really calculated here, in my opinion. That is what you made me think of.

Mr. PALLONE. If the gentleman would yield, one of the things that I wanted to point out and I am going to certainly talk about it, I'll talk about it more a little tonight, is my committee, the Energy and Commerce Committee today, put out a report essentially that talks about the impact of repealing the health care reform law in each congressional district, district by district. I have the information on my congressional district, the Sixth in New Jersey, that talks about the tax credits for small businesses, and it says in this report that the health reform law provides tax credits to small businesses worth up to 35 percent of the cost of providing health insurance. There are up to 18,200 small businesses in my district alone that are eligible for the tax credit. And, of course, repeal would force these small businesses to drop coverage or bear the full cost of coverage themselves. The bottom line, every small business owner I know wants to provide coverage. It's just a question of whether they can afford it. And what we do in the bill is make it affordable by giving them this major tax credit. Eighteen thousand two hundred small businesses in my district alone can benefit from it and would lose that if we repealed the bill.

Mr. PALLONE. What is it now? Crush jobs. The fact of the matter is that the bill actually decreases the deficit by $230 billion, so you'd be increasing the deficit if you repealed the bill. And with regard to jobs, I mean, look, if you think about what's in the bill, because everybody gets coverage, you're going to have to have a lot more health professionals, so that creates jobs, because premiums will stabilize, employers won't have the double-digit inflation that comes and makes it harder for them to hire people. So just the fact that your premiums stabilize makes it easier for employers to hire people. And then we have all kinds of funding for research at labs and hospitals and institutions around the country; even the R&D creates jobs. It creates jobs is the bottom line. But I would really like to go back to where I started from, and, that is, most people just say to me, ``Why are the Republicans doing this? Let this bill kick in. Let us get to the point where everyone's covered. Let's see how it works.'' We know the Senate's not going to pass the repeal. The President's not going to sign the repeal. So rather than spend our time trying to figure out ways of creating jobs, we'll just debate this for another week for no purpose, just as a waste of time.

Mr. PALLONE. Exactly. As you know, on January 1 there were a whole new set of patient protections that went into effect and one was elimination of the 20 percent copay for seniors. They get a 1-year wellness exam for which they don't have a copay, mammogram, all kinds of tests for which they would have paid 20 percent copay. All of that is out now. The reason it was done is exactly what you said: a lot of seniors would not go and have those tests done because they didn't want to put up the 20 percent. Now they get it free. The Republicans say that costs money. It doesn't. It may cost money up front; but in the long run because the people get the wellness check and they have the mammogram, they don't get sicker. So we actually recoup the money because they don't get sick. I think it is a very important point that you are making.

Mr. PALLONE. I was going to ask you to go over that chart about security and stability for America's seniors because, frankly, you know, as the gentleman from Tennessee was pointing out, there is a lot of misinformation that the Republicans give out in terms of Medicare and the benefits of this program. I mean, the bottom line is that all that we have done with Medicare is extend benefits. A lot of seniors think that somehow, you know, Medicare is going to be negatively impacted, which is simply not true. So, if you could go through that, I'd appreciate it.

Mr. PALLONE. You know, on the first point that you have there, I actually went before the Rules Committee--I guess it wasn't last week. It was 2 weeks ago now because last week we had the tragedy of our colleague from Arizona--and I had an amendment that actually said that the repeal would not go into effect if it actually negatively impacted solvency. It actually is 12 years. In other words, the bill, the health care reform, added 12 years of solvency to the Medicare trust fund. In other words, with the repeal, insolvency would begin in 2017. So this pushes that day of reckoning back, when there is not enough money to pay out, another 12 years.

Mr. PALLONE. Yes. Exactly. So, I mean, that's an important point. Again, everything that we do shores up Medicare, provides more Medicare, provides more benefits under Medicare for seniors, expands their benefits. Go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt.

Mr. PALLONE. Thank you. I want to thank you for all that you do on this issue. I have seen you come to the floor so many times over the last year or more talking about the importance of the health care reform and now, of course, pointing out how ridiculous it is to try to repeal it, which is what the Republicans are going to try to do tomorrow. I just want to start out by saying that we were just home for the Martin Luther King weekend, and so there was an opportunity to talk to a lot of people at the various Martin Luther King events over the 3 or 4 days that we were home, and the issue is jobs. That's all people want to talk about. Everyone comes up to me and says, What are you going to do about the economy? What are you going to do about jobs? Nobody talks about repealing the health reform bill. And what I get basically from my constituents is they know the health reform bill passed. They know that it's kicking in. A lot of the patients' protections that you mentioned have already kicked in, and they want to see how it goes. Even those who were not necessarily for it in the beginning think it is a complete waste of time for us to be rehashing the debate and talking about repeal because they want to see what is actually going to happen with the health care reform. And to the extent that they have seen certain things, protections, kick in, they're happy with it. And what they say to me is, Look, if over the next few years if certain aspects don't work out, then you can go back and revisit it and maybe make some changes. Nobody is suggesting we can't make changes on a bipartisan basis. But this idea of just repealing it outright when it just went into effect a few months ago, almost no one I talked to is in favor of that. They just don't think that makes sense. The other thing that I wanted to say, and I keep stressing over and over again--I actually have this chart, and I know you pointed to it as well--is: Who is going to actually gain from the repeal? We know that insurance companies keep raising their prices. We know that historically they try to discriminate by eliminating people who have preexisting conditions or by having lifetime caps on insurance policies. The only ones that gain from this repeal are the insurance companies because essentially they can go back to the situation, to the status quo where they can have double-digit premium increases. You know, in your own State of California, it wasn't unusual to have a 30 percent increase. I think Blue Cross just announced a 50-something percent increase. And so they make money by constantly raising premiums and also by discrimination. In other words, if you have a policy, a woman, for example, that has breast cancer and then she has a recurrence, well, if she reaches the cap on coverage for the year or the cap on coverage for a lifetime, then she has no insurance to cover her reoccurring cancer. Or the other thing is that sometimes they even rescind a policy. If they can find some way to say that it didn't apply to you, they would simply rescind it altogether, and you'd get sick and wouldn't have insurance at all, even when you thought you had the greatest need for it. So I just want to stress, this chart says GOP patients' rights repeal would put insurance companies back in charge where children with preexisting conditions are denied coverage, young people aged 26 can't stay on their parents' plan, pregnant women and breast and prostate cancer patients could be thrown off insurance rolls--that's the rescission--seniors pay more for their drugs. The bill, as you know, has, for those in the doughnut hole, until this bill went into effect, if you reached the doughnut hole, then you had to pay 100 percent for your prescription drugs. You got a $250 rebate last year. As of January 1, you have a 50 percent reduction, and that's going to eventually become zero so you will have complete coverage under Medicare part D. So, if you repeal it, seniors are going to pay more for their drugs. And that's the other thing that is amazing. They talk about how this is going to, I guess they're not using the term ``killing jobs'' anymore. They got away from that.

Mr. PALLONE. I mentioned before how the money that was going to the community health center in Long Branch, in my home town, was being used to coordinate with Monmouth Medical Center so that people didn't have to go to the emergency room. When they came once, they were put into a computer, and it was exactly the electronic system that you talked about. I went to Monmouth Medical Center one day because they had expanded their emergency room because they had so many people flooding the emergency room. Particularly in these tough economic times, a lot of people don't have health insurance, more and more people, so they had actually doubled, I think, the capacity of their emergency room. But they coordinated electronically with the community health center with this money that came in. So they showed me how a person would come in, and then they would be put into the system electronically with the community health center and they wouldn't come back to the emergency room. One of the big issues now across the country--in fact, I just did an opinion piece about it in my local newspaper, the Asbury Park Press--is how emergency rooms are being flooded with more and more patients because more and more people don't have insurance. So we have to figure out a way to deal with that. Obviously, the health care reform does that, because once everybody gets insurance, sees a doctor and gets primary care, you won't have the need for as many people to go to the emergency room. When you expand an emergency room and add on all this additional capacity, it's millions and millions of dollars. That money isn't necessary if people see a primary care doctor. An emergency room should just be for an emergency, when people are trauma or something else that happens. It shouldn't be a place where people have to go because they can't get a doctor. I yield back to the gentleman.

Mr. PALLONE. This is true in the health reform, that there's a lot more money for community-based health care clinics, but we also have that in the stimulus, the Recovery Act. Actually, I had two clinics that were funded under the Recovery Act that had not received Federal funds before. And just to give you an idea of what they did, one of them is in my hometown of Long Branch. They coordinated with the emergency room at Monmouth Medical Center so that every time someone comes to the emergency room who's eligible for the community health center--because they probably, many of them are uncompensated, have no insurance--now they go back and coordinate so that that person doesn't come back to the emergency room again--which, of course, is a tremendous expense--and instead goes to the community health center where they get primary care. So that is an example of where some Federal dollars that are going to community health centers are now being used to make it so that people don't have to go to the emergency room because they're getting the primary care in the clinic for probably maybe a hundredth of the cost of an emergency room.

Mr. PALLONE. Could I ask the gentleman to yield?

Mr. PALLONE. I'll let my colleague from Tennessee go first.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. And I noticed that the little girl, Christina Green, the one who unfortunately passed away, actually told her parents that she wanted to have a career that involved helping those less fortunate than her. And I think if there is anything that we can do in the aftermath of this tragedy, as Ed Pastor said at the prayer service, let us be inspired to better the lives of others. Let's try to make something positive of this tragedy. That little girl was so much in my heart when I heard about her and her wanting to have a career in public service and her being there at this outreach center because of that desire.