WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, delivered remarks during today’s hearing on how to lower health costs and make health care more affordable for American patients.
Click here to watch the hearing live.
Cassidy’s speech as prepared for delivery can be found below:
The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions will please come to order.
Everyone on the Committee agrees: the cost of health care is too high.
As a physician who worked with the underserved for decades, I’ve seen patients struggle to afford health care bills.
To make health care affordable, Congress must make a serious effort to navigate the network of perverse incentives throughout the health care system.
This includes taking a look at health insurance benefit design, price transparency, regulatory barriers, and the negative effects government discount programs have on prices Americans pay in the commercial market.
Important to recognize that Americans’ wages aren’t growing because more and more of a worker’s paycheck is going to health care. If we want to increase wages in this country, the number one thing we have to do is tackle health care costs. That is pro-worker, pro-family, pro-patient.
A key part of this conversation is employer-sponsored insurance (ESI), which provides health coverage to over 160 million Americans, over half of all Americans under 65. Over the last decade, health benefit costs have risen dramatically for employers and workers; resulting in lost wages - more money taken from Americans’ pockets. I hope the Committee can address ESI in a bipartisan way.
There are many actors within the health care delivery system, and I note everyone points a finger at the other as the source of high health care costs. But the problems are diverse, they’re intertwined. And just as Christmas lights cannot be untangled with a pair of scissors, the root causes of the nation’s health care issues must be teased apart.
We need substantive, bipartisan reforms to realign our health care system to put patients first. The Committee has a long history of working together to achieve this goal.
Last Congress, Senator Sanders and I worked together on the PBM Reform Act to address misaligned incentives affecting PBMs and to lower the price patients pay for their prescriptions. The Committee passed this legislation overwhelmingly last Congress.
The President is committed to re-evaluating the role of PBMs. Therefore, we need to work together to get this legislation signed into law.
We all agree price transparency is important. Senators Marshall and Hickenlooper are leading the Patients Deserve Price Tags Act, which codifies price transparency rules issued during President Trump’s first term requiring hospitals and insurers to publicly post the prices they charge patients in a machine-readable format.
Another area of bipartisan interest is the 340B program. The common understanding among legislators is that the discounts received by the hospitals are supposed to make health care services more affordable and accessible for low-income and uninsured patients. But the law is unclear on hospitals’ responsibilities to do so and some, perhaps many, do not pass the discounts on to patients. In fact, a recent study by the National Pharmaceutical Council found that 340B may make ESI more expensive, costing workers’ an estimated $4.5 billion from 2017 to 2023. So, not only are discounts not being passed onto patients, but there is a hydraulic effect driving up the cost of insurance for workers. Put simply, families pay more.
Beginning last year, my staff and I conducted an investigation into how health care entities use 340B revenue. We recently released recommendations to improve transparency in the program. This is an important topic to consider if this Committee wants to address health care affordability.
Our colleague Angus King once said there is no silver bullet for some issues, but there is silver buckshot.
The purpose of this hearing and the responsibility of this committee is to make health care more affordable for patients. This requires teasing apart the web of perverse incentives if we wish to create affordability. I urge us all to put aside politics to deliver this for the American people.
With that, I recognize Senator Sanders.
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