Health
Health issues affect us all and determining the best means of addressing them is an important part of my work in Congress.
Before coming to Washington to be your member of Congress, I owned and operated a dental practice in Flagstaff, Arizona. Day in and day out, I saw patients young and old, sick and healthy, rich and poor. Serving the community as a healthcare provider, both working in my dental chair and interacting with other healthcare providers throughout Arizona, taught me that the best health care is not only centered around preventative services, but based in the local community. Perhaps nowhere more so than health care have the top-down, one size fits all solutions that Washington loves to embrace been found inadequate and unacceptable. I agree that America needs health care reform to lower costs, increase access, and enhance patient choice. However, these solutions rarely, if ever come from the heavy hand of the federal government. This is why I deeply opposed the ACA, otherwise known as government takeover of health care signed into law by President Obama in March 2010: Copy of health care law
There are a number of serious flaws in this bill. First of all, it contains an individual mandate to force every single American to obtain health insurance coverage. This is unconstitutional on its face, and has been successfully challenged in federal court. Ultimately, I believe the Supreme Court must overturn the individual mandate.
ACA also sets up a labyrinth of contradicting tax credits and subsidies for individuals and employers with respect to their health insurance. The result will be millions of folks who, contrary to the President’s promise, do like their health care but will not be able to keep it. These individuals will be forced onto the government run exchange systems. Although we have yet to see these exchanges in operation, past experience shows us that the federal government overseeing the states’ operation of these exchanges will result in poorer quality health insurance at a higher price for millions of Americans.
It makes the regulatory and bureaucratic aspect of government provided health care even worse: Your New Health Care System
You may also be interested to know that the ACA provides for drastic benefit cuts to Medicare beneficiaries. Economic studies have projected that by 2020, Medicare reimbursements to medical providers will be less than those of Medicaid. In fact, $500 billion worth of the supposed “cost savings” in ACA were actually cuts to support for Medicare Advantage, which has proved a popular and well liked program.
ACA is very bad news for states, already struggling in this poor economic climate, who are forced to deal with a number of oppressive unfunded mandates in order to continue managing a Medicaid program for its citizens. The State of Arizona has appealed to the Secretary of Health and Human Services here in Washington for relief from some of these oppressive requirements, which are slated to cost the state hundreds of millions this year alone.
There are many things not to like about ACA, but it can be summed up this way: the law was built on a broken system, which does not incentivize doctors to provide patient care in a comprehensive, preventative, cost efficient way. In fact many Medicare and Medicaid rules incentivize the opposite. In the meantime, continued provider cuts are causing many bright, talented young people to consider other careers besides medicine. This is the wrong direction for America to go in.
It will not surprise you to learn that one of my very first votes in Congress was in support of H.R. 2, a bill that I cosponsored, to repeal ACA completely. I have also signed on as cosponsor to a number of bills that repeal particularly odious parts of the bill, such as H.R. 4, H.R. 21, H.R. 436, H.R. 452; H.R. 605; H.R. 1184; H.R. 1185.
But my efforts for reform do not stop at dismantling bad laws. I also believe that we have an opportunity this Congress to enact serious, patient centered, reform. I crossed party lines to introduce the Competitive Health Insurance Reform Act that would repeal the McCarran Ferguson Act. The McCarran Ferguson Act was meant to counteract a 1945 Supreme Court decision, and carved out an exception to some federal antitrust laws for health insurance companies. I believe that health insurance companies should be playing by the rules that other corporations in this country do, and so I believe the McCarran Ferguson Act should be repealed. I believe that seeing this repeal through will increase competition, lower costs, and facilitate the purchase of health insurance across state lines.
Another critical issue for us to address is tort reform. According to the Institute for Legal Reform, medical malpractice tort costs are costing medical providers and hospitals billions per year – these costs are directly passed onto the patient in the form of higher premiums and copays. In certain specialties, the cost of malpractice lawsuits is driving many providers out of the business entirely, which only decreases access for patients to quality providers. As a result, I am proud to cosponsor H.R. 5, the HEALTH Act. The HEALTH Act sets a statute of limitations on medical tort lawsuits, limits non-economic damages to $250,000, and makes other critical reforms that will discourage frivolous lawsuits and mitigate the burden these reforms have on the economy and our health care system.