Health Care

Health Care

The Need for Reform

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t worry about health care. Whether it is a parent of a child who needs it, a senior who depends upon it, a business person paying for it, or a medical professional providing it - concerns about health care are growing daily. Can we afford it? Will it be there when we need it? What does the future hold?

Health care is becoming too expensive for many families and small businesses and the one size fits all solution that is known as ObamaCare is only driving prices higher. Gallup recently released a report that showed 'more American adults lacked health insurance coverage last year than in any year since Gallup and Healthways started tracking it in 2008.'

17.1% of all Americans lacked health insurance at some point in 2011 according to Gallup. That's more that 50 million Americans and five million Texans. Others who do have coverage pay $1,500 more a year for those who don’t. Our country faces a terrible shortage of nurses and other medical professionals. Medical mistakes are costing lives and billions of dollars a year.

There are sensible solutions to these problems; we just have to show the will to provide affordable access to all Americans. I support tax credits and savings accounts that put patients and doctors back in the control of health care decisions. You and your doctors are best able to make decisions about the health of you and your family. And health care should be portable – so you can keep your same coverage and your same doctor when you move from job to job.

But partisan fighting in Washington, together with the sheer size and complexity of the problem, has grid-locked Congress. Few new ideas are being discussed, and lawmakers keep placing ban-aids on our problems instead facing surgery.

In an effort to find new, innovative ways to increase access to health care and make it more affordable, I embarked on a grass-roots initiative called “50 Ideas to Improve Health Care.”

View the results of this initiative.

Supporting Research for Pulmonary Hypertension

Pulmonary hypertension is a serious and often fatal condition where the blood pressure in the lungs rises to dangerously high levels. In PH patients, the walls of the arteries that take blood from the right side of the heart to the lungs thicken and constrict. Over 100,000 Americans suffer from this devastating condition, which predominately strikes young women.

To fight this disease, I have introduced legislation, H.R.1810 : the Tom Lantos Pulmonary Hypertension Research and Education Act of 2011 to encourage the National Institutes of Health to aggressively pursue a cure and also create an outreach program to better educate the public and medical community about PH. This legislation unanimously passed the House in September, but did not pass in the Senate prior to adjournment.

Learn more about PH and how you can help.

Ensuring Safe Access to Life-Saving Medicines for Immune-Deficit Patients

Presently, there are approximately 10,000 Medicare beneficiaries living with primary immune deficiency disease (PIDD), a disease that leaves the patient unable to produce protective antibodies or to develop immunity to help the body fight serious infections.

Consequently, PIDD patients require regular infusions of intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) in order to maintain their health and fight disease. Unfortunately, changes in Medicare reimbursement policy have had the unintended consequence of limiting many beneficiaries access to this lifesaving treatment. Now patients must go to hospital to receive treatment instead of in their own home – and for a patient with a compromised immune system, a hospital is like a death trap.

To fix this problem, I have introduced the H.R.1845 : the Medicare IVIG Access Act. This bill would give Medicare the authority to adjust payment for IVIG to reflect the true costs of administering it.

Do you want this maze between you and your health care?

As Republicans continue to fight to repeal bad health care legislation, we also continue to work on ways to increase health care accessibility and affordability for all Americans.