Republican. Comments willk my probably be more along the independent line because first, ive got to say, i have not read anywhere in the constitution or the bill of rights that we owe a Health Care System to the people. We existed without one for quite some time. With that being said, i recently outan emergency room visit of pocket out of whatever you call it for my health care. I just got a doctor bill and he spent 10 minutes with me and his cost is 17,000. That is insane. Somebody needs to put constraints and controls for that kind of craziness. Host lets pick up that issue of health the cost care because originally when i was part of the discussion for the Affordable Care act, where is that discussion now . What is the state of that . The this legislation by house or Senate Republicans do anything to lower the cost of health care . Have that is what you mike lee of utah and ted cruz of wisconsin coming out against this bill because it does not do. Nough to lower premiums what they are proposing is they want to create a Competitive National healthcare marketplace so that there is more Consumer Choice and through competition it will lower cost. That is something that i think might work in theory, whether it works in actuality, who knows. There are a lot of objections raised to say that health care they arent like cell phones, it is very tough to achieve pure competition in the marketplace because it is such a complex ate and you do develop least as far as insurance goes, you develop these regional monopolies. Insurance companies decide what areas of the country they want to cover and the kind of have dominance in those areas. How do you achieve competition . What ted cruz is talking about is allowing Insurance Companies to sell plans across state lines. At the Senate Republican lunch he handed out little cards entitled path to yes to explain what it would take to get him to vote for this legislation and he talked about letting Companies Sell across state lines. Even within the republican conference there is skepticism about whether or not that is a workable plan and the senator of south dakota, he worked in the Insurance Industry beginning in 1978 and he is an interesting guy to talk to. He is a guy who sold insurance. He knows it from a business perspective and he said it just does not work because the idea that you can buy a cheap plan from south dakota if you are someone living in new york city is fantasy, is what he says because the south dakota insurer , there are benefits in south dakota that dont exist in new york. For example, south dakota is a whole lot cheaper and there are a range of things. Again, going back to the strategy in this bill, achieve Market Competition and one of those things is increase the amount people can contribute to Health Savings account so that it is not the insurer, but the individual paying the money and can exercise more discretion as to what they are going to pay for and not going to pay for. Host portland, oregon, calvin is watching us there. Independent. Caller i want to thank you as a host of cspan for these numerous topics. Youink in many respects allow the nation to decipher intellectual dishonesty within the system so i want to thank you for your show. I would like to thank the host as well for his responses. I am a doctorate candidate and i just wanted to say that i believe what is critical in this narrative is to have the governors across the nation have a conversation and identify a Strategic Plan of concerns and take that plan and give it to both the house and the senate because James Madison said it best. We are a republic of factions unless we can be governed by justice can we live throughout the ages. I think that is a reflection of where we are with health care. Weve got to give the folks who are closest to the issue giving their position and having unified plans from both the republicans and democrats. Governors giving it to the house and the senate. The final piece in this context is i think what is critical to the dialogue of health care is that when obama got the health care past, he did not have a super majority. Therefore, he had to give it over to the Insurance Companies to draft the plan as a compromise to getting the republicans to pass it. That was where the problems came in terms of not having things that were consistent with what his narrative stated. I am going to stop it. I think this is a critical show and i hope this show continues at a different time. Host thank you, calvin, for your comments. Caller good morning. Thank you for cspan. The reason i am calling is we have Blue Cross Blue Shield and we my husbands job are paying 800 a month with a 750 dollars deductible for each person and we are a threeperson family. The reason i am calling his we need help with the prices. We have gone from 82 to 196 we pay a week in insurance. We would from 300 in dollar the to 750 dockable. Deductible entrylevel jobs, they are not even giving you full time work. They are only giving you parttime because of insurance. Obamacare has to go. Host alex bolton, what do you make of those comments . Guest is something she is buying insurance on the individual market and premiums are soaring. I dont know exactly where she is living and how many insurers are offering plans on the obamacare exchange. One of the criticisms of obamacare and the reasons republicans say it is imploding is because i think in 30 of the counties of the United States or Something Like that there is only one insurer and insurers are pulling out. The lack of composition competition means premiums are going up. The problem is you have a lot of sick people on the exchanges. Healthier people are not signing up in the numbers anticipated and that is sending up premiums. The reimbursements to Insurance Companies that were supposed to happen under obamacare to keep costs under control have been curtailed. There was an amendment a few years ago to a spending bill the riskntially capped corridor adjustment program. Essentially what obamacare envisioned to reimburse companies Insurance Companies that incurred high cost to keep the cost from being passed on to the insurer to the consumer. As the caller pointed out, that by a republican amendment. One of the biggest mistakes the democrats made. Harry reid who wrote the bill, he is the father of this legislation, but he made a mistake agreeing to limit those risk corridor payments and that hurt and disrupted the marketplace. And thatare going up is the strongest republican argument for why this law needs to go. Really, they are not repealing it, they are amending it substantially. In albuquerque, new mexico. Independent. Caller good morning. Want to hear about the. Olitical garbage medicare for everybody. Everybody puts into it, you pay your copays, ok . Stop with all this stuff. Get together and do something for the people and not for yourself. You have people in washington that make 6 figures a year and dont work. They work less than a hundred days a year. That is sad. We are getting ripped off. Robert in terry, mississippi on the line for republicans. Go ahead. Caller yes. This might be a little offtopic, but there were 3 of us kids and none of us went to the doctor, none. Onund here, people that are went to the doctor three or six times a week. Most of these people are just getting their kids on some kind of disability. I dont understand it. 300 billion, that doesnt mean nothing to washington. Its just ridiculous. They are just all trying to get host alex bolton, what are your talks . Two callers talking about washington distrust of whatever they might do. Guest i think to say i didnt go to the doctor as a kid. If you are still around, you are lucky you were not that as a kid. A lot of these medicaid covers more kids. I think there is a consensus that everyone deserves some basic or minimum level of medical care, especially if you are a child or disabled, that you cannot just be allowed to that is whytreet so medicaid has a lot of support in congress and that is why many republicans who are certainly critics of obamacare, they like the fact that it expanded medicaid and it remains an issue right now. Yesterday you had rob portman of ohio saying he is concerned about what the medicaid cuts meant to constituents in his state. In ohio and other states, the prescription epidemic is a big problem and medicaid covers a lot of those people. Heller of nevada said he has syrias concerns about what this bill means for veterans on concerns serious about what this bill means for medic and veterans on medicaid. For even the fiercest radix of obamacare, medicaid was viewed as a very important thing. They also acknowledge it is not necessarily sustainable or pat toomey who helped write this bill, he put out kind of a fact sheet yesterday or argument sheet defending the bill and said medicaid is not sustainable. Maybe one of the arguments i think one of the arguments that can be made for reforming medicaid and reducing payments is we need to keep it around for the longterm. I think both sides agree medicaid is important. Host davenport, iowa, jack, a democrat area good morning. Caller good morning. I went to the annual work for hathaway meeting and Warren Buffett said the u. S. Is spending 17 of its gdp compared to the european and canadian care. Ng of 11 on health that has a greater impact on our corporations than any tax reforms for Corporate Income taxes. Does anything in this proposal address the overspending and Health Care Overall system itself . In other words, lowering 17 to 11 like the rest of the civilized world. Host alex bolton. Guest i dont think so. Discussedat has been much. Passed incare was 2009, there was a lot of talk about ending the cost curve and that is what the president talked about. They talked about reducing how much we spend on health care. One of the big things they come up with came up with was the cadillac tax, a tax on expensive plans and i was supposed to bend the cost curve because it provided disincentive for insurers spending tons of money on these goldplated plans. Interestingly, that is the one Obamacare Tax they kept in place. I think republicans bought into that theory. It doesnt get implemented until 2026, so it doesnt happen until a ways down the road pretty they have embraced that idea we are planned. Tax cadillac we havent had a chance to see if it works or not because it keeps being postponed. Democrats dont like it because unions in particular, their members tend to have generous plans and so democrats have postponed this and try to eliminate even though it was in vision, senator harry reid who was the Senate Majority leader for years, he wanted to get rid of the cadillac tax. It has been postponed. That is the major cost perform alsois still in there and the idea that with Health Savings accounts, if you contribute more to it, you can exercise more consumer discretion in terms of buying plans and through natural competition in the marketplace you will lower cost. On the other hand, rand paul who is a no and i dont think will flip to the yes, he seems the most staunch no. For bill is obamacare lite him and subsidies in the republican bill are just as costly and just as big when you total them all up as a obamacare would be. His argument is spending taxpayer money on insurance plans, private Insurance Companies is contribute into medical inflation. That it is causing cost to go up. Whether this bill will really reduce the cost curve, it will keep one of the main obamacare reforms. Idle think people are expecting the search in premiums that much i dont think people are expecting a surge in premiums that much. President barack obama issuing a statement on facebook yesterday saying i recognize repealing and replacing the affordable has become a core tenet. Still i help our senators step back and measure what is really at stake and consider the rationale for health care or any other issue must be something more than simply undoing something that democrats did. Brian in virginia, democrat. Caller insurance is a complex problem. Health insurance and everything. One of the big things that needs to be reformed is tort. Doctors pay an exorbitant amount of Liability Insurance because somebody can have a hangnail and the guy messes up and he bleeds a little bit and he sues him and gets 8 million or something. We have all heard the mcdonalds coffee story, which is not Health Insurance, but the cost of Health Insurance the fees the doctors charge are exorbitant and one of the reasons is because their Liability Insurance is through the roof. The Affordable Care act nor the republican act do anything to lower the cost of the medical bills. Host lets take that because the house is about to gavel in early this morning so i want alex bolton to talk about the debate that also happened when lawmakers were considering the Affordable Care act. Guest that is a good point. Another thing republican policymakers point out is because of the medical liability, because of the lawsuits doctors face, that there is a tendency to to call fored the cat scan right away or the of right away or the battery tests right away which adds to the cost of health care, what they want to protect themselves from liability. They dont want to be held accountable in court and ask why did you not prescribed all these tests to figure out what is happening, you couldve saved my clients health. So the port situation tort situation does lead to the over prescription of health care. This bill is passing in the senate under a process known as reconciliation. That is what is allowing republicans to pass with a simple majority. It has to have budgetary impact. Could some of the provisions in the senate bill next week be ruled out of order because of the reconciliation consignments . Guest that is absolutely right. This bill has now been drafted and it has to go before the Senate Parliamentarian and she will make the decision what will stay in and what will go out and we do not know how she is going to rule. That is a potential monkeywrench in the process. Guest alex bolton host alex bolton with the hill. We appreciate your time. We will bring you over to the house. They are coming in early for the legislative session. Gavel to gavel coverage life here on cspan. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] the speaker the house will be in order. The prayer will be offered by our chaplain, father conroy. Chaplain conroy , let us pray. We ask your blessing of strength and perseverance that each member might be might best serve their constituents and our entire nation. May it be their purpose to see to the hopes of so many