Inside Texas Politics | Full interview with Congresswoman Beth Van Duyne

Congressman good to see you again good to see you why Denton for this field here well North Texas we've been pushing for a health care focus in north Texas for you know a year now that I've been on the committee because you think about the various Healthcare needs that we've got how North Texas is so diverse and how it represents basically every area of the country but more specifically the healthcare services that we have provided here you know we are at Global Medical resources right now that'

s that's located in Denton and the focus of this hearing is on on emergency access Emergency Care access and you look around this this this this hanger and you see all the different Vehicles this uh company services over 40 states and their Emergency Services needs so having it in north Texas with all of our providers with all of our needs and and all of our Solutions I thought was really important let's talk about Solutions when yeah when people think about about the state of healthc care there

's a lot of issues that that need to be solved but the first thing I think of is the rural areas that are losing the hospitals yeah that seems to be a county issue or a local issue is there a federal role there well when you look at the hospitals that are losing that are losing um uh the rural areas that are losing their their hospitals one of the reasons is reimbursement rates and how costly it is to provide Health Care you know more people may have access to health insurance it doesn't mean th

ey've got access to health care and when the cost is so excessive that they can't afford it even if they have if they're covered by insurance it's it's basically the same thing as not having it but you're it's one of the Lar lest um um costs per month that people pay for a service they can't even afford to use one of the problems that we found and this is from various uh roundtables Healthcare roundtables that I've had in this District what we're hearing from providers is the amount of excessive

regulations and the regulatory burdens that are being placed on them by the federal agencies like Medicare Medicaid those Medicare CMS the amount of paperwork that they have to do the amount of administrative work that they have to do if it's a large Healthcare System that can spread it out they actually have the whole department that's focused on regulatory issues but when you look at some of the smaller healthare systems when you look at the smaller um um single uh solar practitioners the sma

ll group practices they can't and as a result they're either forced to sell to a large Healthcare Network or go out of business Washington DC has plenty of huge committee rooms yeah why why come out here to an airplane hanger and have you know a dozen and a half members of Congress to listen to Witnesses here when you could just as easily have them go to DC it's it's so much better to get out of DC I think so often people who work in DC who are elected and go up to DC forget that there's the res

t of the country and getting outside of the Beltway and coming into people's backyards it's amazing the difference when you have that intimidation of the hearing room and you've got the witnesses that are coming into our you know our backyard versus going into theirs you hear their testimony you hear some of the push back where they've got folks in the audience that are their supporters and that you know are their family friends their employees hearing their stories firsthand go by going directl

y to them and getting outside of DC I think is important we all represent various U various districts and hearing firsthand and coming to them as opposed to forcing them to come to DC I think is really important what do you expect to hear I think you're going to hear a lot of stories about you know some of the issues that uh that these providers and these patients have been dealing with with CMS again on the regulatory side the regulatory burdens that are stifling them that are causing them to n

ot have better quality not have better access you know not not have lower costs but are really the regulatory issues that are doing nothing more than than preventing all of those things from happening um and preventing um them from being able to actually invest further in in healthcare quality and in in patient services so much of what we see coming out of CMS is is a is a hit to Health Care Providers it's not doing anything for the patient it's actually preventing Healthcare Providers from bein

g able to service their patients because their head is stuck in a computer it's stuck in a keyboard it's stuck in a screen and I asked this question when I have our Healthcare roundtables I ask our providers how much of your time spent face to face with your patient and when when you I hear i' I've heard like 40% I said hold on when you go to talk to a patient don't count the time that you're having to type in their answers but literally the time that you're talking to them that number goes down

to 15 to 25% and it's direct result of them having to play cya with the insurance companies and CMS to make sure that they're filling out the paperwork correctly it's got nothing to do with with quality of care what could the federal government do though cut the red tape I what kind of cut the red tape absolutely what kind of bills do you expect to come out of this we had a no transparency act for example that got passed the idea we had a ton of support for it the idea was to provide transparen

cy to patients when they were looking at their healthare options to make sure that they knew what the costs were going to be what we have found though in the last 3 years is how that that that bill has been uh articulated how it's being um executed by CMS is completely against the intent of the law so making sure that we're holding the agencies that have to do with healthcare for example CMS accountable for how they're actually implementing our regulations is important how they're implementing t

he law the intent of the law is important and I think you're going to hear from from Witnesses today that I've heard from um various roundtables in north Texas the way that CMS is implementing these laws is not with the intent it's not helpful it doesn't do anything to help the the their patient care that is everything to increase cost to increase time of of uh of patient access and to decrease access thank you for the time thank you very much good to have you here