Right after the final health care vote today, I introduced a bill to apply the new health care law to the President, Vice President, cabinet members, top White House staff, and the congressional staff who drafted the measure enacted this week.  I’ve offered amendments to establish this accountability in Congress and the administration, but the amendments have twice been rejected by the Senate majority.  Congress can act to pass my free-standing bill at any time, and it should.

Click here to watch an interview about the history of this effort.

If Congress doesn’t act, there’s a double standard.  As it stands today, President Obama does not have to live under the Obama health care reforms, and neither does the congressional staff that helped to write the overhaul.  The message to the people at the grassroots is that the reforms are good enough for you, but not for us.   Even so, the new health care law includes most of the amendment I got adopted by the Finance Committee last September, and that will require members of Congress and their staffs to get their health insurance through health insurance exchanges.

Public officials who make the laws or lead efforts to have laws changed should live under those laws.  It’s the same principle that motivated the bill I got passed in 1995, which for the first time applied 12 major civil rights, labor and employment laws to Congress.

 ***

Also today, senators voted to defeat my amendment to get rid of one of the sweetheart deals in the new health care law, giving five rural states better treatment than every other rural state, including Iowa.

My amendment would have used money that’s obligated to the special deal for improved Medicare payments to physicians in all rural states this year and next.  My amendment would have better safeguarded a formula fix that I got in the health care reform during Finance Committee work last fall.  This fix makes sure accurate data is used to make geographic adjustments for Medicare payments to physicians and other health care professionals.  It’s a matter of equity for rural providers who have been penalized by an unfair formula factor.

Despite the defeat of this amendment today, my formula fix remains in the new law.  In fact, a number of my amendments and legislative initiatives are in the health-care reform bill that became law on Tuesday, including my reform to make sure tax-exempt hospitals are held accountable for their special status.  My legislation to require pharmaceutical and device manufacturers to report payments to physicians is included.  So is my legislation to establish greater transparency about nursing home ownership and safety, and my bill to disclose self-referral ownership interests in imaging facilities.  I authored the Medicare fraud-fighting provisions in the new law, and the value-based purchasing reforms are based on legislation I developed several years ago in the Finance Committee.  I also developed the provisions to improve Medicare reimbursement for mid-sized “tweener” hospitals, a number of which are located in Iowa.  These items and others were put into the proposal during the many months of work I did last year as Ranking Member of the Finance Committee with the Committee Chairman, Senator Max Baucus, during our effort to try to put together a bipartisan reform bill.  The provisions remained in the legislation throughout the process, and the fact that they did shows that they are good policy and nonpartisan initiatives.

The final health care reform bill was massive in size and scope, and I voted against it for a number of reasons, including the fact that it increases taxes and new mandates on job-creating small businesses, raises taxes and fees that the Congressional Budget Office says will be passed on to consumers and result in higher health insurance premiums, imposes mandates and huge fines on individuals, fails to address reforming the Medicare physician payment sustainable growth rate formula known as the SGR and, instead, cuts Medicare spending not to improve Medicare but to start an unsustainable new entitlement program.  It also fails to do anything about health care inflation, which was supposed to be a major goal of reform. 

Click here to see an interview about it.