CQ Transcriptswire

SPEAKERS: SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL, R-KY., SENATE MINORITY LEADER

SEN. LAMAR ALEXANDER, R-TENN., CHAIRMAN, SENATE REPUBLICAN CONFERENCE

SEN. LISA MURKOWSKI, R-ALASKA

[*] MCCONNELL: We’re going to comment on a variety of different things today. But just let me lead off on health care.

Obviously, the president, having just gotten back into town, is awfully anxious to engage in another rush-and-spend activity. He’s clearly trying to get us to pass a health care bill before the August recess, when one has not even yet been written, not even yet been vetted. And the impact of it of course is enormous.

It strikes me once again that this looks a lot like the way the stimulus package was done. We were told, if you recall, that if we would pass it very quickly unemployment would not go above 8 percent. It’s headed above 10.

We’re told on this that in part the reason for doing health care is that it will actually save money over the long term. Most of us are scratching our heads wondering how you can design a plan in order to try to cover the uninsured, bring more people into the coverage, and still save money. In fact, that won’t happen.

So what we need is real cost estimates that make sense, so we have a sense of how much it costs and what it will do.

Two of the senators behind me are involved in the markup in the HELP Committee and can comment on where that is headed. And with that, let me turn to Senator Alexander.

ALEXANDER: Thank you. Thank you, Mitch.

Earlier this year, the president had a summit meeting on entitlement spending, runaway mandatory government spending leading to too much debt.

A few weeks ago he said we need to pay as you go, if we spend a dollar, we need to save a dollar.

And he made it clear a couple of weeks ago that health care was included, health care has to be paid for.

So we agree with that. We want health care this year and we want it paid for. We don’t want to add to the federal debt. We have too much debt, which will lead to higher interest rates, weaker dollar and enormous problems.

So there is no reason to even consider passing a health care bill in the Senate or the House until we know exactly how much it will cost. It involves 17 percent of the American economy. The consequences of our decisions will last for years.

Apparently the House will be just presented with a bill for the first time today, the middle of July. The Senate Finance Committee won’t begin writing a bill until next week. It will take several weeks for the Congressional Budget Office to let us know how much these proposals cost, how we can make sure we don’t add to debt. We have a number of provisions that have a lot to do with trillions of dollars, employer taxes, Medicare cuts, taxing money from grandma to pay for some of these new programs. We need to know the costs.

ALEXANDER: We need to know the costs. And the one I’m particularly concerned about is the proposal that in five years all of the costs for the states for the large expansion of Medicare would be shifted back to the states, causing huge increases in state taxes and causing great pressure on our colleges and universities, which are underfunded today.

MURKOWSKI: One of the things that we seem to do well is work real hard on developing the laws of unintended consequences. And that’s clearly what we’re seeing with this legislation that is moving through the HELP Committee right now.

I had an amendment this morning talking about small businesses within this country. We recognize that small business in America is the backbone. It is the -- it’s what makes this country go.

Well, in fact, we -- we recognize it so strongly that the administration this weekend talked about perhaps using a portion of the TARP money to help bail out our small businesses.

Now, whether you agree or disagree that that’s a wise use of the funds, come into the HELP Committee, where what we’re talking about doing is taxing our small businesses, imposing on them a tax that will -- if it doesn’t push them out of business, it will allow them or push them to make decisions about who they’re hiring and how many individuals they’re bringing on, because they can’t afford the costs of this employer tax that we are moving through a committee.

We need to be careful that as we advance legislation that affects everybody in this country, that we are not -- we are not destroying the fabric that this country was built on, and that’s the small businesses.

Moving too fast doesn’t give us policies that this country needs.

(UNKNOWN): We’re a day and a half into the nomination hearings of Judge Sonia Sotomayor. And I think we’ve all found that she is undeniably a very charming person with an amazing success story, somebody who’s risen from humble origins to the top of the legal profession and the judiciary.

(UNKNOWN): I guess what we’re scratching our heads at, at this point, is how to reconcile what we’ve heard so far from her about her judicial philosophy with some of the radical statements that have been made in the past about the law and her wondering, or denying, actually, whether there was anything such as objectivity or neutrality in judging, that it was an exercise of power by judges who bring not -- not the attitude of an impartial umpire but rather one that may depend -- where an outcome may depend on who the judge is, and playing a particular emphasis on sex, on ethnicity and on race.

I think most people in America expect judges who will decide cases based on a standard of equal justice, one that is color-blind and does not distinguish between individuals or outcomes depending on race, ethnicity or sex.

And so that’s the -- what we are going to continue to ask her questions about. And I hope we can get her to reconcile those two very conflicting visions, one presented in the hearing and another one reflected by her speeches and writings that have been written and heard about so much.

MCCONNELL: We’ll take a couple of questions, if there are any.

QUESTION: On health care, what kind of guidance have you been giving (OFF-MIKE) Republicans (OFF-MIKE)

MCCONNELL: Well, I think everyone understands the -- the direction Republicans would like to take: no government plan, no tax on small business, and a genuine bipartisan effort.

As long as we are simply being called upon to take 60 percent or 70 percent of something we don’t like, we don’t really think that’s meeting in the middle.

So we’d like to see health care accomplished this year. There are a wide variety of things, I think, that could be done on a pretty broad bipartisan basis.

I’ll give you some examples. As you’re very familiar with, equalizing the tax code so that individual purchasers of insurance are treated the same way corporations are for tax purposes; incentivizing wellness programs like the one we’ve seen succeed at Safeway, which are actually penalized under the plans that the Democrats have been kicking around.

Medical malpractice, to get at the problem of junk lawsuits against doctors and hospitals, those are the kinds of things that I think would have a significant impact on improving the situation without destroying what we all know is the finest health care in the world.

As Senator Cornyn and Senator McCain and I were down at M.D. Anderson during the recess, meeting with their health care professionals, they are dealing with patients from over 90 countries, almost all of whom have government health care. They’re coming to America for the finest health care in the world.

We’d like to keep that and figure out how to work on the problems that we have with regard to cost and access. It’s a very big, complicated subject, and here we are a few weeks before the recess, and you get the impression they’re willing -- they want to pass just anything they can as rapidly as they can.

And the reason I was comparing that to the stimulus, we know that that at least so far is a failure. It, once again, was sold to us on the basis that we had to do it tomorrow in order to prevent catastrophe. I think that’s a flawed strategy. I think we ought to take our time and do it right.

I’m going to take one more if there are...

(CROSSTALK)

QUESTION: Senator McConnell, Senator Ensign has said that he will remain in office (inaudible) reelection. Do you support him in (inaudible)?

MCCONNELL: Well, I think Senator Ensign will have to speak to those issues himself. And you can ask him about it.

Yes?

QUESTION: (inaudible).

MCCONNELL: Well, I’ll give you a general response. I think that the American people are appalled to look up and find the government’s in the banking business, the insurance business, the automobile business, the student loan business, and now want to be in the health care business even more so than it already is through Medicare and Medicaid.

I think the American people are recoiling not only at the amount of debt and spending we’re running up, but also witnessing the government involved in all of these businesses. The government needs to get out of these businesses as rapidly as possible.

Thank you.

END

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Jul 14, 2009 14:43 ET .EOF

Source: CQ Transcriptions

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