Steve Pearce: “I would like to discuss even a broader concept in health care costs. One of the most urgent questions that I get when I…”

“I would like to discuss even a broader concept in health care costs. One of the most urgent questions that I get when I am in my district, people wonder how are we going to afford health care costs. How can we afford health insurance? What are the components of that? All of us, myself included, would look for easy solutions. We would want a bill that we could pass that would just limit the cost of care. Maybe it is by fixing prices in the pharmaceutical industry or maybe fixing prices that the doctors are able to charge. Some people want to go in and limit the capability of insurance companies to raise their prices to pay for the costs that they have. Mr. Speaker, anything that we attempt is going to be simplistic and will be, without doubt, ineffective. The reasons that our health care is so expensive, is, frankly because we are demanding it. We have more demand than there is supply. When that is the case, you can either increase the supply, which is the number of doctors and the number of hospitals, or you can begin to affect demand. I would say, Mr. Speaker, that it is imperative, as long as we are going to try to solve the problem, we may address the supply, we may address the numbers of doctors, we may address the numbers of hospitals, but that does not completely deal with the problem that I see, that is, on the demand side. I think that the first step for us all is to begin to live healthier life-styles.”