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Monday, 30 January 2006 |
Remarks by Amy Klobuchar
St. Paul, MN
Good morning. The politics in Washington and the ongoing scandals make me deeply concerned about our country. I think Minnesotans are ready for a change. Even as middle-class Minnesotans struggle with significant increases in basic living costs related to health care, home ownership, education and energy, the Republican leadership in Washington continues to embrace the wrong priorities by catering to big oil and pharmaceutical companies. That is plain wrong.
I want to make the interests of Minnesota's working families a top priority again. I have spent my life helping people, standing up for what's right and championing new ideas that have produced results. Now, I am ready to take my experience and my fight to Washington.
On Tuesday night, George W. Bush will give his State of the Union address. I'd like to hear him talk about solutions for people, for a change.
There's a lot of things I'd like to hear in the State of the Union ... I don't think I'll hear them, but I'd like to hear them. The President should be using the opportunity to call for bold change in how and where we get our energy ... look at the speech I gave on energy a few months back. I'd like him to take responsibility for the lead up to the war. I'd like to hear about tax fairness and true fiscal responsibility.
But today I'm here to talk about something that I hear about in every town, in every living room in this State: tomorrow night the President must explain how he is going to help people in this country afford health care, not just health care for the healthy and the wealthy.
In every State of the Union that the President has ever given, he has promised to reduce health care costs for Americans. But it sure hasn't happened in Minnesota. Tomorrow night promises to be no different. All signs suggest that the President is looking to shift more of the health care burden to middle class families. This is unacceptable. When the cost of health care is increasing at a rate more than 3 ½ times the rate of wages, when the cost of an average family's health care policy is more than $11,000, when our premiums have increased by nearly 75 percent, we cannot force families who are already caught in the middle class crunch to pay more for health care.
I'm here to talk to you today about some of the things that I'd like to hear from the President tomorrow night about health care -- real solutions, that make immediate progress toward helping people. These families deserve to have someone who puts their interests, and their budgets, first in Washington.
As I've traveled the state this past year, I've heard many concerns from working families about health care. I've listened to small business owners in Tofte who struggle to provide quality health care for their employees. I've listened to parents in Brooklyn Park who worry about their college-aged children who don't have health insurance. And I've listened to teachers in Saint Cloud who have seen the cost of health care swallow up large portions of our school's operating budgets. Linda and Rochelle are hear today from our last living room forum in Brooklyn Park.
When it comes to health care, everyone wants the same things: They want their coverage to be affordable, they want it to be secure and not go away when they change jobs, and they want it to be high quality.
For too long, special interests have dominated the health care debate. I've taken on the health care industry before, and I know how to do it.
When my daughter was born 10 years ago, she was very sick. She was sent to the newborn intensive care unit and had to be fed by machines. At the time, some HMOs were kicking new moms out of the hospital after just 24 hours. I had just given birth and was up all night while they performed emergency tests on our new baby. Then I was kicked out. As my husband wheeled me out, he said, "This wouldn't have happened to the head of the HMO." I said: "This wouldn't have happened to the wife of the head of the HMO." So, as a private citizen, I went to the State Capitol, I took on the HMOs and the insurance industry lobbyists and I fought to get one of the first laws in the country to guarantee minimum 48-hour hospital stays for new moms and their babies in Minnesota. And we won. I saw how powerful lobbyists, some earning salaries of over a million dollars a year, can wield influence over good health care policy. When they tried to delay the implementation date of the new law, I brought six pregnant women to the conference committee and we won.
If we want to make health care more affordable for people, we need to send someone to Washington who can take on these powerful interests that have controlled the health care debate for far too long.
Here are a few things I would like to see in the State of the Union address tomorrow:
First, we need to fix Medicare Part D. Since the new Medicare prescription drug benefit went into effect at the beginning of this year, our seniors have faced unbelievable headaches trying to get the drugs that they depend on. Pharmacists are unable to verify that patients are covered by one of the plans. Low income enrollees are being asked incorrectly to pay $250 deductibles. The result is that people go without prescriptions, or pharmacists and other advocates spend hours trying to navigate the bureaucracy. More than two dozen states, including Minnesota, have declared public health emergencies and spent millions of state dollars trying to fix this problem. As my mom, a retired teacher, noted, Medicare Part D received the grade it deserved.
This is more than a glitch. Medicare Part D is a basic policy failure. First off, the plan is far too complicated. We want our seniors spending their golden years with their grandchildren, not attending five hour meetings and surfing the internet looking for the right drug plan.
Second, and just as important, this plan didn't give the country a fair deal. When the President talks to the Nation, I'd like to hear him say that he is going to introduce a bill to lift the ban on price negotiations with the prescription drug companies. The Administration and Congress saddled seniors with inflated drug prices when they banned the federal government from negotiating prices. We should be doing it like the Veterans Administration -- the government should be negotiating prescription drug prices and and saving money for taxpayers and consumers, not doling out contracts like Christmas presents. Instead, Republicans in Washington chose to "dance with the ones that brought them" there -- the lobbyists for the giant pharmaceutical companies and powerful special health care interests.
A recent study found that the 20 drugs most commonly prescribed to seniors are, on average, 48.2% higher under the new Medicare Part D plans than what they cost under the VA program. Similarly, a professor at our own University of Minnesota found that the prices in this state for 25 top prescribed brand name drugs were 20 to 30 percent higher under Medicare Part D than the Medicaid prices for the same prescriptions.
Make no mistake: Medicare Part D increases business for private insurance companies and allows big drug companies to charge top-dollar prices to seniors. When this thing passed, there were twice as many pharmaceutical lobbyists on Capitol Hill as members of Congress. In fact, Thomas Scully, the head of Medicare while the bill was being put together, left his office soon after the bill was signed into law to become a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical companies. Meanwhile, the bill's point person, Representative Billy Tauzin, quickly left Congress after the bill was passed to become president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, earning a salary of over a million dollars a year.
Let's hear the President say he is going to lift the ban now. The administration and Congress have saddled seniors with inflated drug prices when they banned prescription drug negotiations. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, we could save as much as $91 billion dollars a year if we lifted this ban.
Third, I'd like to hear the President pledge that we should have universal health care, starting with kids. Everyone should have the same sort of health care that members of Congress enjoy. The Federal Employee Health Benefits Program offers a choice of plans to more than 8 million federal employees and their dependents, including Congress. I favor immediately allowing small businesses, self-employed people and others to buy affordable health insurance through the same health care plan that covers Members of Congress. Representing one of the biggest hospitals in the state, I can tell you that people do end up going to the doctor when they're sick, but it's called the emergency room, and it's incredibly expensive. There are ways to make sure people are covered while saving money, starting with the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program and our own VA's Administration. You just have to have the will to do it.
Finally, I'd like to hear the President say that he's going to crack down on health care costs. According to some estimates, our country spends over 30 percent of our health care dollars for overhead.
We need to be investing in health information technology like electronic medical records. We need to be cutting down on health care fraud -- one in every ten dollars spent on health care is lost to fraud and abuse. We need to be rewarding best practices and quality, and giving states the leeway to expand coverage, like we did here in Minnesota with Minnesota Care.
We need to have a laser focus on curing disease. Finding a cure for the chronic and fatal diseases that ravage our families becomes more difficult when the pharmaceutical companies spend two and a half times more on advertising than they do on research and development. We need to crack down on all administrative bloat so when people pay for health care their money goes to doctors and nurses -- not accountants and Super Bowl ads.
Many of the things I've talked about today can be done immediately. They don't take a brain surgeon (if you can afford one). Others will require looking at models in our own country and throughout the world to see what works best. But they all have one thing in common: they take the will and determination to take on the big interests to change things for people.
Tomorrow night, the President will address the nation. He has an opportunity to present bold solutions for the people of this country. Whether it is energy policy, tax reform, fiscal responsibility, or health care, we need leadership. He needs to talk to people like Linda, Rochelle and my mom. I've been talking to them, and to people all over this state -- when it comes to health care, and all of the other issues that our nation faces: we need action, we need progress, and we need results. if they won't fix it in Washington, then you're just going to have to elect me so I can do it.
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