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U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan,
R-Janesville, talks about his plans for health care
reform during a visit to The Freeman on Wednesday.
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WAUKESHA - With a bad economy, new president, and host of
issues facing the American public, Congress has been
tackling very big subjects lately. U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan,
R-Janesville, stopped by The Freeman on Wednesday to talk
about some of the issues he is passionate about. The
following are excerpts from that interview.
The Freeman: I understand you wanted to talk about health
care.
Ryan: This (Patients’ Choice Act) is a very
comprehensive bill I’ve helped introduce with a few other
colleagues...What we’re trying to show here is that you
can have comprehensive health care reform that guarantees
everyone gets access to affordable health insurance
regardless of their preexisting condition without having the
government run the whole thing. You can do this without
having to have a huge tax increase, without all this new
spending and without a federal government takeover of the
health care system.
So we thought it was important - we meaning myself and my
colleagues who put this out there - that we need to have a
real debate about health care. No one wants to defend the
current system because in many ways the current system is
not defendable. There are a lot of problems with it. But, we
shouldn’t take the entire system and have the federal
government take it over.
I believe that if you’re going to criticize the path we’re
on now, I feel obligated to offer my employers a different
way forward, a different path to fix this problem. What has
happened now is Congress is putting on a fast track the
health care legislation that the (President Barack Obama)
administration and the majority in Congress are writing.
What I mean as a fast track is that once they pass the
budget, there’s a special rule in the budget that
prohibits filibusters, that fast track’s bills through
Congress and that’s called reconciliation and that’s a
rule that’s reserved for budget saving items, like
reducing spending. They put that rule on the health care
legislation that’s going to pass. That means that they
could move this, even though this actually increases
spending. They came up with a gimmick on how to achieve
savings (and) it has to save $1 billion over 10 years. If it
just does that, then it has the fast track rules, meaning
debates are limited to 35 hours, only a majority vote is
needed to pass in either the House or Senate, which means
you can’t filibuster it...they’re doing it a little
different now.
They haven’t put a bill out there yet, so the American
people don’t know yet what exactly is happening. But the
bill will be passed in the House and the Senate in July. The
plan is to have it signed into law in September and we haven’t
even had a real debate on this yet. What they’re telling
us is the bill is a public plan option - sounds innocent
enough. The rhetoric is that if you like what you got you
can keep it, but we’re just going to have more options,
more choice and we’re just going to have a public plan
option. Sounds innocent enough. Here’s the problem with
that idea - all the experts tell us, the actuaries and
everyone else, you set up a government-run option, it’s
kind of like have the government as both the player and the
referee in the same game. It’s a stacked deck in favor of
the government. What inevitably happens... is that a
government-run option quickly becomes a government-run
monopoly. What I mean is that the government will pay lower
rates. They’re saying the government plan would pay
Medicare rates. Right now with Medicare, doctors lose money
on Medicare, they overcharge the private providers, private
insurance makes up the difference ...
