Senator Chuck Grassley, R-IA on the Health Care Bill
Wednesday, October 14, 2009SUSIE GHARIB: In Washington today, key senators huddled with top White House officials to discuss the next step in health care reform. Their goal: rewriting the bill that passed the Senate Finance Committee yesterday and combining it with another plan from another committee. It is now unclear whether this new merged bill will include some version of a public option for health insurance. Republicans like Senator Chuck Grassley oppose that. Darren Gersh spoke with Grassley about this historic debate.
DARREN GERSH, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: Senator Grassley, your Republican colleague, Olympia Snowe said the current health care system is in trouble and history is calling for reform. You disagree. Why?
SEN. CHUCK GRASSLEY (R) IOWA: Well, I disagree that this bill is the way to have reform and anybody that voted against this bill is not for the status quo. So let's say where would we agree with Senator Snowe and Senator Snowe and a lot of Democrats. This stuff might not even be called bipartisan. This issue that I'm going to discuss could kind of be consensus, like delivery reform, emphasis upon coordinated care. Let's take, you know, diabetes as an example. If you have coordinated care there, where it's done in a few places in this country, so we know it can be done successfully, you enhance quality of care. You save money.
GERSH: But under the current private health insurance system, employees are looking at a 10 percent increase in their payments, in their premiums in their out of pocket expenses. Can we do better than that? Don't we need reform this year?
GRASSLEY: You know, this bill that we voted for does just the opposite. And you heard it from joint committee and you heard it from the Congressional Budget Office and then recently you heard it from the industry itself. But I don't have to quote the industry because we've got (INAUDIBLE) and CBO saying that the 85 percent of the people that have health insurance, even under this bill, are going to see their premiums go up. And part of that is because these reforms don't kick in until the year 2013.
GERSH: The bill also says that people who aren't buying health insurance now will have to buy health insurance, but in return will get health insurance reform, meaning that people with pre-existing conditions will be able to buy health insurance and people won't get kicked out of their insurance if they get sick. Isn't that what people have been arguing for for years?
GRASSLEY: You know, I was an advocate for the individual mandate earlier in our group of six. Let's go back to June when it started out. And I tried to sell that to the people of Iowa. And they don't trust that somebody else that's getting insurance, that their premiums are going to go down. When they saw on, I think it was CNN on the bottom line, my constituents saw that the House of Representatives were thinking of charging people $1,000, they thought we had gone bananas. For the first time in history of the country, the Federal government is telling you you've got to buy something -- health insurance. And if you don't buy it, the IRS is going to fine you $1500.
GERSH: But you have to buy car insurance.
GRASSLEY: Yes and 12 percent of the people don't buy car insurance. And then, but in the case, you don't have to, you don't have to drive a car. You don't have to be compliant with that law if you want to walk or have a bicycle or use mass transportation. But by golly, when you get sick, you've got to have health.
GERSH: One idea that may come up on the public option is to let states decide if they want one. What's wrong with that if California decided it wants a public option but Iowa may say no?
GRASSLEY: The only thing that's wrong with the public option is it's a government run health program. And we have some experiences with Medicare that haven't worked out entirely right. We got problems there because Medicare doesn't pay 100 percent of cost and so you have a public option and if you do it like the House of Representatives does it, then you aren't going to pay more than Medicare pays, then how are you going to keep our rural hospitals open if the government is only paying 80 percent. That's one problem. The second problem is you're going to have the governments are not fair competitors.
GERSH: Is health care reform going to pass this year?
GRASSLEY: I think so and I say that because there's 60 Democrats and 40 Republicans. And when the Democrats stick together they can get anything done they want to get done.
GERSH: Senator Grassley, thank you for your time.
GRASSLEY: Thank you.
