Statement From Lee Terry

Statement of Hon. Lee Terry (NE-02) on H.R. 3962,
The Affordable Health Care for America Act
November 7, 2009

Madame Speaker, we all agree that rising health insurance premiums are placing a heavy burden on many American families. Improving access to affordable health care and reducing its cost is important. But this plan to turn America’s health care over to a massive and costly government bureaucracy is just flat wrong.

It is also outrageous that no Republicans were allowed to participate in the writing of this bill, creating a liberal echo chamber bent on expanding government, raising taxes, and killing jobs.

The President and the Majority in this House have said that you can ‘keep what you have, if you like it.’ But in reality this is a simple government takeover of health care and ‘keeping what you have’ will cost Americans more for health care. I have concluded that this legislation is the pathway to a single payer, national government run health plan.

I’ve spoken with businesses in my own district who say that providing health insurance comprises 15 to 20 percent of their costs – so an 8 percent payroll tax is something they will gladly accept. They will then eliminate their current employee health plans and push employees onto the new government health exchange to bear the cost of purchasing their own health care.

Seniors will lose the most as Medicare suffers draconian cuts that are Orwellianly called “savings.” The popular Medicare Advantage program is also cut as the bill lowers payments to traditional Medicare levels, thus reducing health care benefits to seniors, and even gives federal bureaucrats the power to eliminate the program by rejecting plan bids to provide Medicare Advantage coverage.

This bill also creates a huge unfunded mandate on the states by raising the level of Medicaid coverage to individuals up to 150 percent of the Federal Poverty Level ($33,075 for a family of four). Nebraska taxpayers will be asked to pay for this expanded health care for years to come.

Madame Speaker, I am deeply concerned by the bill’s $1.3 trillion cost, cuts to important services in the name of ’savings’ and the intrusion of government into the health care system. I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to vote “no” on this disastrous piece of legislation.