Senator Lamar Alexander made the following remarks on the floor of the U.S. Senate today.
“I’d like to show why our proposals are better than theirs. For example, Senator Enzi of Wyoming has a small business health plan he’s been trying to get this Senate to vote on for years. In fact, this plan came up before the Senate, and our Democratic friends blocked it. They like to say that Republicans are the party of ‘no.’ But they are the party of ‘no’ because on May 11,2006, they voted ‘no’ to small business health plans which would lower health care costs for hundreds of thousands of employees in this country.”
“The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has basically said that enacting the Republican proposal would extend more insurance to at least 750,000 Americans who are employees of small business. That’s number one: more people insured. Number two, it would lower the costs of insurance premiums—not raise them, as this 2,000-page bill would—for three out of four employees. And number three, it would reduce the cost of Medicaid, the government program for low-income Americans, by $1.4 billion. More people covered, lower premiums, and a lower cost—that’s what they mean by ‘bending the curve.’”
“The difference between the Democratic proposals for health care and the Republicans’ is the Democrats start with a 2,000-page bill, with a government takeover, with more than $1 trillion in spending, with new taxes, higher premiums and Medicare cuts. And we don’t believe they can spend that much more money without increasing the debt—in other words, this is all going in the wrong direction. Republicans believe we ought to be reducing costs step by step, and step number one should be small business health plans.”
“Senator Reid, the distinguished Majority Leader, has a health care bill in his office. He has been meeting secretly for weeks with people, we don’t even know who, writing a bill which may emerge as early as today. And then when we get it, we’ll have to all read it and I’m sure that we’ll find more premiums, more taxes, more Medicare cuts, probably additions to the debt, probably more transfers of costs to state governments.”
“We have the Finance Committee bill with $900 billion of new taxes over ten years when fully implemented. That’s not going to create new jobs. New taxes are passed on. If you run a business with 40 people or 100 people or 150 people and you get a big new tax, what do you do? You lay off an employee, you reduce wages, you stop offering health care. You have to do that or you go out of business. That’s what happens.”