State Health Care Premium Reduction Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, 2 minutes is almost impossible to actually have an honest and detailed debate/discussion in here.

But do understand--and I believe this is a sin of both sides--we are playing this game where we are moving around who pays. We are doing almost nothing to actually reduce the underlying cost of healthcare. Your bill is doing it; ours has done it.

But this bill actually has a very cynical mechanism in it. This board is being recycled from H.R. 3. We are all familiar with the mechanism of reference pricing. We have debated it around here for years.

So, if you are in Great Britain and there is a new drug that gives you a year of healthy life and it costs more than $37,000, it is not purchased. That pricing, that scarcity mechanism, is what the Democrats' bill is importing. So its savings are actually very cynical, because it is going to take away pharmaceuticals that make people healthy.

How could we be doing this, even allow this mechanism, in a time of a pandemic?

You are about to crush all of the little biopharma companies that we are hoping desperately produce miracle cures, and, in a perverse way, for large pharma. You have just given them the market, because you have taken away those who are nipping at their heels.

I beg of you, think about what you are actually doing, because this type of financing mechanism will kill people. It will end lives, because it will create a dearth, a shortage, of the next generation of cures.

Let's not engage in that cruelty. There are better ways to get there. And we have proposed many of them. It would just be nice to get heard, because there are solutions, and this is a really dark one.

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