John Kerry, Ranking Democrat on the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, took to the Senate floor today to address S. 1955, the Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act, and other mportant health care issues, during what Senate Majority Leader Frist has declared “Health Week.”

So far, I’ve yet to see anything of value come out of the Republican controlled Senate to address the issue of millions of people in this country being without healthcare. Rick Klein reported in today’s Boston Globe that “Republican leaders in Congress have all but abandoned efforts to pass major policy initiatives this year, and are instead focusing their energies on a series of conservative favorites that they hope will rally loyal voters in November’s congressional elections.” Klein went to to say that their strategy “is on display during what Senate majority leader Bill Frist dubbed ”health week” in the Senate,” instead of dealing with the real issues of healthcare, Republican’s tried to pass through two bills that would limit medical malpractice judgments and thankfully they failed.

The following is Kerry’s statement as prepared for delivery on S. 1955, the Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act:

Mr. President, running for President and traveling our country was an incredible, almost indescribable privilege. But it also left me with a profound sense of responsibility to the people I met in town hall meetings and VFW Halls and in ropelines at rallies. People who come up to you and they pull at your sleeve and press a photo into your hand and say “look, this is my sister” – or “this is my mother” – and they tell you about a loved one who can’t afford the medicine they need, or lost their health care when the factory shut down. It stays with you forever — the faces of the people who, Republican or Democrat or independent, looked to President Bush and me and looked wearily at Washington hoping someone would listen to their struggle in a health care system that’s broken.

I’ve met working poor people living without healthcare. All of us have. Moms who are afraid to let their kids go out and play in case they get hurt because they know they can’t afford to take them to the doctor. Teachers who tell stories about students who go without preventative care and routine exams and how an untreated ear infection leads to hearing loss and a lifetime learning disability. Small business owners who desperately want to provide their employees health care but can’t afford it, or who know that their health care costs are so high they stand in the way of hiring more workers.

Mary Ann Knowles, a woman with breast cancer I got to know, had to keep working day after day, right through her chemotherapy, no matter how sick she felt, because she was terrified of losing her family’s health insurance. In Erie, Pennsylvania, I met a man named Albert Barker, who wonders how he’ll pay thousands of dollars in medical bills. After he suffered a heart attack and underwent surgery, his employer stopped his health coverage because it was too expensive. Now his wife says she just hopes and prays nothing else happens. In Council Bluffs, Iowa, I met a woman named Myrtle Walck, who doesn’t know what she’ll do if the price of her medicine rises any higher. As it is, she pays a good chunk of her Social Security check – her only source of income – to the drugstore every month just to cover the cost of her two daily prescriptions. Jacksonville, Florida — Renee Harris, who owned a school bus company that was in her family for over fifty years. She was forced to sell it because she could no longer afford to insure her workers or herself. I heard daily about workers’ fears of losing coverage because they either couldn’t afford the higher premiums, deductibles, and copays or thought their employers were going to drop coverage all together. I talked to people who told me what it was like to live knowing they were one medical bill, one hospital visit, away from bankruptcy.

All of these real problems in our health care system – and so little time in this Congress devoted to finding common ground and finding solutions to get something done for these people who desperately want to believe we’ll do something to help them.

Instead, we have a so-called “health week” that so far is speech after speech and a continued stalemate rather than real solutions.

The people I met, our neighbors, the people all of us know, they deserve to have a Congress that insists on a real debate on small business health reform – not just an up-or-down vote on a flawed bill with no chance for Democratic amendments.

Unfortunately, under this Congress and this Administration we spend too much time trying to prevent bad things from happening and then fixing them when they do, rather than putting our efforts toward moving forward on a positive health care agenda for our nation.

Right now we are fighting to fix the devastating changes forced on the Medicaid program. We need to overturn the rules allowing increased cost-sharing imposed on families that can’t afford it and prevent new rules from tossing out the Early, Periodic, Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment protections for children under Medicaid.

And we have to fix the Medicare prescription drug debacle – extending the May 15th deadline for signing up without penalties; making sure the federal government can use the power of bulk purchasing to negotiate lower prices on prescription drugs; simplifying enrollment procedures; and making the benefit more comprehensive by closing the gaps in coverage.

But it would be a shame to only focus on undoing wrongs. We need to chart real progress against America’s health care crisis.

We need to finally pass a bill on stem cell research and to fully fund all research initiatives at the National Institutes of Health.

We need to take up real legislation to get at the heart of racial and ethnic health disparities.

We need to make it legal to import affordable prescription drugs from Canada.

We need to put medical decisions back in the hands of doctors, nurses, and patients – not insurance company bureaucrats.

We need to address our nursing shortage by fully funding all programs under the Nurse Reinvestment Act we fought so hard to enact.

We need mental health parity.

We need to address our growing childhood obesity epidemic.

We need to reauthorize the State Child Health Insurance Program.

And we need to give families and small businesses access to the same private health insurance that members of Congress give themselves. It’s time we stood up and made it clear that every family’s health care is just as important as a politician’s in Washington.

This week, instead of bringing up a bill that would grant real relief to our small businesses that are so desperately in need of our help, we are considering a bill that even 41 Attorneys General have written to say is bad policy that will only exacerbate current troubles.

We’ve all seen the numbers Mr. President. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that the number of firms offering health benefits has declined from 69 percent in 2000 to 60 percent in 2005. Just 47 percent of firms with fewer than 10 employees offer health insurance, compared to 90 percent of firms with employees 50 or more. We all agree that something must be done.

But the plan offered by the Republican leadership today will not really help any small businesses gain coverage for their employees. Rather, it’s a wholesale deregulation of the insurance markets that will put consumers at risk. The Enzi approach will have a better chance of increasing the numbers of uninsured rather than offering small businesses the relief they so desperately need.

Proponents of this bill argue that prices will drop once we get rid of benefit mandates enacted by state legislatures.

These claims are simply not true. Two separate studies show that benefit mandates are estimated to increase health premiums by a total of three-to-five percent. Juxtaposed against the annual double-digit premium increases we have been seeing, it is clear that benefit mandates are not at the heart of the problem.

More importantly, states have approved these mandates because they save lives. Forty-nine states have passed laws mandating that insurers cover mammography services because they are proven to save lives. Twenty-seven states have passed laws requiring cervical cancer screenings, because too many women are dying as a result of poor detection. Forty-six states have passed laws requiring diabetes supplies to be covered, because 20.8 million Americans are living with this disease and have a basic need for care.

These are not just numbers in a report, Mr. President. In Massachusetts, we see every day how these benefits save lives. Kirsten Paragona of Ipswich discovered in a routine PAP test that she had developed stage 3 cervical cancer. She was 23 years old. Because that PAP test was included as a mandatory benefit in her health plan, Kirsten is alive today with a two year old daughter instead of living without a reproductive system.

And there’s Gracie Bieda Javier of Jamaica Plain, who lost her mother to breast cancer in 1987. Without mandated coverage for treatment, Gracie’s mother was unable to afford this service. Now, Gracie is dedicated to helping other women avoid her mother’s fate, and because Massachusetts now requires mammography and treatment services, Gracie screens and treats more than 800 low-income women a year. In her own words, “(Gracie) could not think of a better way to honor (her) mother on Mother’s Day than to make sure we maintain these lifesaving mammogram services.” Gracie’s got it right, Mr. President. These services are saving lives.

Under this bill, 2.3 million people in Massachusetts alone will lose guaranteed health benefits.

Typically, the great thing about our democracy is that if we have a better idea, we are theoretically allowed to offer that alternative on the Senate floor and engage in a debate on the merits of each approach. That’s what is so fundamentally frustrating about this week’s discussion – that differing approaches are not allowed to see the light of day.

There are a multitude of other ideas on how we can go about providing access to more affordable health care for small businesses – ideas that will provide them coverage without harming everyone else. Ideas that will help small businesses maintain their current coverage – because I hear all the time from small business owners who are doing the right thing and providing coverage but are so crunched on price they fear having to drop their policies altogether.

In my time as Ranking Member on the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, Senator Snowe and I have worked hard to find a compromise that would meet the needs of small businesses. We have held hearings on this issue, and have heard from countless small business owners on how this problem can be fixed.

In 2004, I presented America with a plan that would provide every American with the same health insurance enjoyed by members of Congress. Since that time, Senators Richard Durbin and Blanche Lincoln have taken that idea and turned it into a bill that creates the Small Employers Health Benefits Program. I am a proud cosponsor. Under S.2510, small businesses could join a national pool and take advantage of the same federal administrative functions and bargaining power that is enjoyed by eight million Federal employees across the nation. Most importantly, S.2510 protects every state mandate currently on the books.

Republicans argue that this alternative doesn’t provide the savings that small business owners desperately need. The facts tell a different story. Experts predict that premium savings for participating small businesses could reach as high as 50 percent in the first two years.

This is a plan that would work for small businesses. And if this week actually was to provide relief to small businesses, we would be discussing all of the ideas to fix this problem. But Republicans prefer to limit the debate to this bill and this bill only, and then have the guile to label Democrats as obstructionists for suggesting alternatives. This is not a strategy to help small businesses. It is a strategy to advance the Republican political agenda. And in the meantime, Senator Enzi and the Republican leadership don’t mind using our small business owners and the nearly 25 million uninsured Americans who work for them as pawns in their political game.

It’s obvious from where this discussion has been headed all along that the very partisan nature of our disagreements is keeping us from making progress on this front. That is a shame. As I mentioned, I would have much preferred an opportunity to bring up some of the bipartisan ideas that Senator Snowe and I have been working on to advance the discussion on small business health relief. We must put politics aside to win this one for our struggling entrepreneurs.

But if we can’t agree to do something for our small businesses, can we at least call a truce when it comes to our kids? To make a stand on health care, let’s start by standing next to America’s children.

What is stopping us from using health week to debate amendments and plans to provide all children with health insurance?

Covering all kids would reduce avoidable hospitalizations by 22% and replace expensive critical care with inexpensive preventative care. Kids with health insurance do 68% better in measures of academic performance. If kids start getting attention in the medical waiting room, they’ll pay much better attention in the classroom.

We’re the richest nation on the planet, yet one in four of our children go without immunizations, and one in three children with asthma don’t get the medicine they need. It’s so amazing that we hear so much talk around here about values. Eleven million kids are suffering precisely because of the absence of real values in Washington. That’s the values debate we need to have in America. You can insure every child in America for less than it costs to roll back the Bush tax cut for the wealthiest Americans. But Washington chooses the tax break for the few who don’t need it instead of healthcare for 11 million kids who need it desperately.

A 2005 Mason-Dixon poll found that:

– 82% of respondents think that every child in America should be covered by a federal health program if their parents cannot afford it;

– 90% of voters believe that 11 million uninsured children in America is a serious problem that Congress should address and solve; and

– 79% agree that it is our moral responsibility to insure health care for every child and for the federal government to invest in such programs.

In addition, the poll found that when voters were presented with a description of the KidsFirst bill, 75 percent of voters support its passage and by a margin of 3:1, believed that insuring children is more important than making the Bush tax cuts permanent.

Americans know we need to do better. They know there is no more pressing need than improving health care for our children. That is why nearly 25 national organizations representing over 20 million Americans have endorsed my Kids First plan to do just that.

When I first I sent an email telling supporters about KidsFirst, within days over 20,000 parents phoned in recordings of why the KidsFirst health plan is important to their families. I want to read a few of them for you:

Jennifer from Central Islip, N.Y. called in and said, “I have a child who is on medication…that costs me $250 or more a month. I have children who can’t go to the dentist. You know, it’s the worst feeling in the world, as a mother, to know that in order to afford health care; you’re not going to be able to afford the home you live in.”

Jordan from Reading, PA called in and said, “Nalani…my three-year old…was born with cataracts…Eventually chances are she will be blind. Unfortunately, times are really hard in my house and we don’t have health insurance and I can’t afford to give her the surgery that will fix the problem that she has. I just can’t imagine growing up knowing that there was a way that you could have been helped. But because nobody thought you were important enough and because your parents didn’t have enough money for health insurance…you went blind.”

With calls like this, you must wonder how it is that Congress continues to turn a blind eye.

Thank you.

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