Rep. Doggett: We must assure the resources for prevention

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Like the last motion, this one deals with the real life struggle of so many American families.  It may be a family with a sick or disabled child who suddenly find themselves facing bankruptcy because of their lack of access to our health care system.  It may be a senior with Parkinson’s in a nursing home.  Or it may be a young woman who needs mammography to avoid a threatening health condition.

The last debate we had about this health care issue is as if the people who sit around this table came from different planets.  At least they come from very different life experiences. I see the people that we are talking about it, I talk with them, I interact with them.  I have a senior come up at a Neighborhood Office Hours and tell me that the state Medicaid program will cover only three of the five prescriptions that the doctor said were essential to their health care.

We were told by our Republican colleagues in response to the last motion, “Don’t worry, it’s a phony number that 400,000 people will be denied health care because we plan to repeal all of the Affordable Health Care Act and they wouldn’t have gotten coverage anyway.”  What kind of a response is that?

And then the suggestion that all they’re really doing is scrubbing it down, eliminating the waste, eliminating the fraud in the Medicaid program is outrageous.  There has been fraud in the Medicaid program—some of the most significant fraud has been by pharmaceutical manufactures in my state and across the country.  I think we should do everything we can to prevent that fraud—but why should the woman who needs a breast cancer screening, the child who needs a diabetes screening or an immunization, why should they pay for that fraud that we haven’t done enough to ferret out?

So we get to this motion and the whole idea of trying to reduce health care costs.  I think it’s a significant part of the Affordable Health Care Act to reduce long-term health care costs not only by trying to limit some of the growth in the expenditures, but trying to prevent the need for the health care service in the first place. 

I have been to a number of events recently where I have seen individuals who have severed limbs, in some cases more than one severed limb, and are in a wheel chair and it’s because their diabetes got out of control, because it wasn’t prevented.  Diabetes is almost at an epidemic stage in some parts of Texas that I represent.  This motion is about trying to prevent conditions like diabetes before they get run away, before they cost us even more money in hospital costs and lost productivity, not to mention the lost joy of life and being able to get around.

Just this past weekend, I was at a celebration for the Komen Foundation in Austin who every year puts on the Race for the Cure—a gathering in Austin, Texas and we’ll have thousands out this Saturday in San Antonio.  So much of the focus of this race and organization is about prevention.  It is about reaching out and helping women get the care they need before they might develop some form of breast cancer.  That’s what this motion is about—about assuring the resources for prevention. 

It was the American Cancer Society that said a person who lacks health insurance and who develops Cancer has a 60% greater chance of dying than someone who has insurance.  That’s what the Affordable Care Act, of which this Prevention and Public Health Fund is a part, is all about. 

And then there’s a question of how we pay for it, because we do pay for this motion.  We have a number of provisions in our tax laws that favor the export of American jobs.  Through this motion, Ms. Schwartz closes those tax loopholes and pays for prevention by preventing the loss of American jobs.  We have a terrible problem with the export of our intellectual property because of the incentives for loopholes and tax dodges—and some of those loopholes can be closed through this motion.