Posted on Sun, Oct. 18, 2009

For people who truly need health care reform, the bill passed last week by the Senate Finance Committee isn't the answer. I voted "no." Here's why:

The bill costs $1.8 trillion when fully implemented, and still leaves 25 million people uninsured.

Although it is true that the Congressional Budget Office has scored the bill as cutting the deficit, this is only achieved through massive cuts to Medicare and huge new taxes on every American.

The bill cuts Medicare by more than $500 billion, and CBO estimates that future cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program will accelerate by 10 to 15 percent each year.

It cuts Medicare Advantage — a program with huge satisfaction rates among 41,000 Kansas seniors — by more than $117 billion.

To further pay for this new spending, the bill imposes more than $400 billion in new taxes that will burden all Kansans.

The bill levies a $201 billion excise tax on high-cost health insurance plans. However, CBO says that eventually the tax will hit a majority of, if not all, health insurance plans in America, resulting in higher premiums for all.

The bill also imposes new taxes on health insurance providers, manufacturers of brand-name drugs and medical devices. These taxes will be passed directly on to you in the form of higher insurance premiums.

In fact, the bill will result in insurance premium costs going up for many of the 85 percent of Americans who currently have insurance. Independent estimates have said that, as compared with cost projections based on our current system, premium costs could go up by as much as $1,500 for single coverage and $4,000 for families over 10 years.

In addition, some 3 million Americans will lose their existing employer-sponsored coverage under this bill.

Government entitlements will skyrocket, as 14 million more people will be added to the Medicaid and SCHIP rolls, and 23 million new people will receive taxpayer-financed government subsidies to purchase insurance.

Finally, the bill will result in a substantial government intrusion into your most personal and private health decisions. It will use the long arm of the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services to force you to purchase an insurance plan loaded up with a laundry list of benefits that you don't want or need. It will place the government, and not you and your doctor, at the center of your treatment decisions.

Unfortunately, I fear the reform legislation will only get worse from here. This finance committee bill must be merged with the bill from the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Whatever the Senate passes must then be merged with the House version, which contains a public plan steeped in controversy.

As we go through this process, I will continue to fight for real reforms Kansans want, such as preventing health insurers from denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions, ensuring patients have their choice of providers, enabling people without employer-sponsored health insurance to deduct premiums, offering incentives for healthy behaviors, improving transparency in health care quality and costs so that patients decide how to best spend their health care dollar, and reducing health care costs overall through tort reform.

I urge you to pay close attention to the debate in the coming weeks. The so-called reforms under consideration by this Congress won't get any more personal than this for every man, woman and child in Kansas.

Pat Roberts, a Republican senator from Kansas, is a member of the Senate Finance Committee.