ENZI: REDUCING HEALTH CARE COSTS CRITICAL TO EXPANDING ACCESS

Washington, D.C. – At today’s Senate Finance Committee roundtable on, “Expanding Health Care Coverage, U.S. Senator Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) said that efforts to expand health care coverage must be coupled with efforts to bring down health care costs. “Unless we halt skyrocketing health care costs, any attempt to expand health care coverage will be financially unsustainable,” said Enzi, who serves as Ranking Member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, and as a member of the Senate Finance Committee.

Enzi reaffirmed his commitment to working on a bipartisan basis to enact meaningful market-based reforms that will expand access, reduce costs, and improve quality of care. “We need to drive down costs and produce better value by promoting robust, free market competition that benefits patients and ensures higher quality, more affordable health care options,” Enzi said. “Vigorous competition is the best way to reduce costs, encourage American innovation and ingenuity, and protect the rights of patients to choose the physicians and health care providers that best meet their needs.”

“Forcing private plans to compete with a new government-run public program, with its price controls and ability to shift costs to private payers, will inevitably doom true competition and could ultimately lead to a single payer, government-run health care program,” Enzi said. Enzi also warned against financially unsustainable expansions of programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

“Adding new, unfunded liabilities to Medicare and Medicaid will further drive up costs for taxpayers and add to the mountains of debt we are passing to our children and grandchildren,” Enzi said. “Expanding government-run programs without addressing their outof- control costs is fiscally irresponsible and threatens America’s long-term economic health.”

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