[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 16 (Wednesday, February 23, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: February 23, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                           HEALTH CARE REFORM

  Mr. KINGSTON. Madam Speaker, I would like to yield a few minutes to 
tie this up, and I want to invite both of the gentlemen to join me in 
discussion on health care. But let us talk about H.R. 6.
  Mr. CUNNINGHAM. I will be happy to. The amendment by the gentleman 
from California that offered it states that it will not affect private 
schools and home schooling, as the gentleman from California suggests. 
We feel differently.
  There is going to be an amendment offered on the House floor and in 
the committee that will codify and clarify that rule, and it was not 
the general intent in H.R. 6 to do so. We think it will be taken care 
of.
  Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman will yield then, what you are saying is 
there will be an amendment that will be offered that will allow parents 
to continue to home school without having to be credentialed by some 
big brother or some government body?
  Mr. CUNNINGHAM. At this time, that is the intent.
  Mr. KINGSTON. I wanted to also just throw into that discussion the 
fact that if you look at the record of home schoolers, and there are 
statistics on this, they have a low dropout rate, very low teenage 
pregnancy rate, high college placement level, high SAT scores. It is 
one educational system that does seem to be working, and at the average 
cost of less than $500 per student. So it is a very, not just 
profamily, but very proeducation plan.
  Mr. CUNNINGHAM. If the gentleman will yield further, be very careful. 
I support home schooling and private institutions, but my wife is a 
principal in the public education system, and I know at her school they 
are doing a very good job.
  Mr. KINGSTON. We have a lot of good public schools in our area, too, 
but I think it is important that anytime something is preceived as a 
threat to education that we all work for it, and one of the things that 
I am hearing from public and private and home schoolers in a uniform 
way is to keep the Federal Government out of our school system.
  Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman will yield for a minute, I do appreciate 
the fact that our great top gun has a wonderful wife, Nancy, who is a 
principal of a school. The only thing I have a question about is the 
fact that you make them take flight training at the age of 7. I think 
that may be a little extensive.
  Mr. CUNNINGHAM. That is only my daughters.
  Mr. HUNTER. That is only your daughters? I am only kidding. I hope we 
do not get letters on flight training.
  Mr. KINGSTON. One of the subjects we wanted to discuss earlier, and 
you two have been leaders in this, was the health care, and what I 
wanted to do, and you may have seen this article, but it was January 11 
in the Wall Street Journal written by William Crystal.
  One paragraph said so much, and I am going to read from it. It says,

       The passage of the Clinton health care plan in any form 
     would be disastrous. It would guarantee an unprecedented 
     Federal intrusion into the American economy. Its success 
     would signal a rebirth of centralized welfare state policy at 
     the very moment such policy is being perceived as failure in 
     all other areas.

  I thought that was such a good statement. But what was also 
interesting about it is Mr. Crystal goes on and outlines the reforms 
that he feels are necessary, and he said that in 1992 when Lloyd 
Bentsen was in the Senate, what he was an advocate of is only targeting 
the areas that were broken.
  So, let us not rebuild the whole health care system according to now 
Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, but let us just work on what is 
broken. Then he outlines the things that Bentsen supported as a U.S. 
Senator which were, which parallel many of the Michel ideas.
  Mr. CUNNINGHAM. If the gentleman would yield, I know my friend from 
California had a debate in California, and I would like him to discuss 
that.
  But 85 percent of the American people like their health care plan, 
but they also realize that it needs a lot of fixes. One-third of the 
people not insured are basically your young people. When you were 18, 
you could not be told that you needed a health care plan. The other 
group is the people that are moving between jobs.
  Both the Clinton plan and the Republican plan take care of 
portability and preexisting conditions.
  Mr. HUNTER. Bring up preexisting. That is important.
  Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Preexisting, and that is if you have a heart problem 
or cancer, it may be difficult for you to get a job, but if you change 
jobs with the new insurance plan, both of them take care of that, and 
that kind of reform where insurance cannot cut you off.
  The last group is the important people we need to focus on, and that 
is the people who are too poor to provide for it. They are the working 
poor. But do we need to revamp the whole system, build a giant 
bureaucracy where the Government has control over lives? No. We do not.
  I have a prediction that President Clinton's plan will not pass as it 
is, but that we are going to see a lot of modifications to it. But I 
think also that we are going to have in the end a lot of bipartisan 
support from Republicans and Democrats, and I have got a vision that we 
will produce a health care plan that will be healthy for this country.
  Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman will yield, I think that it is important 
for us to fix the problems that the gentleman has talked about, the 
preexisting. My mother-in-law has had three open-heart surgeries. It 
has been tough for them to get insurance.
  The portability, that is the ability to carry your health insurance 
from one job to the other.
  But the one thing that I am very much afraid of is Government taking 
over health care. I know that, because I have been on the defense 
committee, on the Committee on Armed Services, for a number of years. I 
have noticed that even though we build tanks and ships and planes, 
because we have to have them, Government does not do anything cheap. It 
always costs more than the private sector, and the thing that scared me 
last week was reading in the Washington Post about the hospitals in 
Canada which are now shutting down for so-called vacations because they 
have run out of money.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Requiring a 12-day unpaid leave of absence.
  Mr. HUNTER. Leave of absence.
  The other thing that bothered me was seeing in Canada, which was 
supposed to be this workers' paradise of health care, specialized 
health care, there are 177,000 Canadians waiting for operations, and 44 
percent of them surveyed say they are in some kind of pain.
  Americans are pretty wary when somebody says, ``I have got the 
Government solution for you.'' A lot of them say, ``Hold on to your 
wallet.'' I am afraid if we give Government control of health care, we 
are going to have the same results Canada has had.

                              {time}  1910

  Mr. CUNNINGHAM. I believe I have a parliamentary inquiry, Madam 
Speaker. Under the new rule, may this Member mention a Member from the 
other body if it is in a positive light?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Clayton). The answer is ``No.''
  Mr. CUNNINGHAM. No? Well, let me just say a Member from the other 
body----
  Mr. HUNTER. Call him ``Senator Positive.''
  Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Senator Positive was giving a health care townhall 
meeting, and he told about a health care bureaucrat to whom he was 
talking, and the Senator said, ``I care more for my children than you 
do, and I want to have control of where my child goes for health care 
and who gives that health care, because I care more.'' And the 
bureaucrat looked at Senator Positive and said, ``No, you don't. I as a 
bureaucrat care more about your child than you do.'' Well, Senator 
Positive thought a second, he looked at the bureaucrat and said, ``What 
are their names?'' The point being that people want the individual 
right to choose a doctor and to choose the health care plan they want. 
They do not want to be thrown into a tank under several bureaucracies 
and be told what happens. Most of the American people, I believe, do 
not support that kind of health care. That is why I think we are going 
to wind up with a better health care plan. I look to the future, and I 
think we will end up with one that is a bipartisan plan that all of us 
can support.
  Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California.
  Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Some of the components that we are talking about 
which are some of the Michel ideas, the Republican ideas, and hopefully 
the bipartisan coalition emerging ideas, would be eliminating the 
preexisting illness that was talked about but also the Medisave 
accounts, the portability which the gentleman talked about, and also 
allowing vouchers for the working poor people under certain income 
brackets, some malpractice reform, the medical IRA's, full 
deductibility for health care premiums for small unincorporated 
businesses which right now are limited to 25 percent.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Tort reform, insurance reform.
  Mr. HUNTER. You know, one thing we have to remember as Members coming 
from California, we once had a workmen's compensation system to 
compensate people injured on the job. It was hailed as the euphoric new 
dream plan for workers. But it was so costly, so filled with fraud and 
Government cost so much, that in the end we drove literally thousands 
of businesses out of California because they could not afford this 
workmen's compensation system.
  The workers who were supposed to be benefitted by this compensation 
system ended up with the worst benefit of all, which was no job. They 
lost their jobs because Government saddled employers with a burden 
which they could not carry.
  I just hope that the Clinton administration does not jump forward and 
say we are going to increase taxes by 7.1 percent on only small 
businesses.
  I had a business the other day who showed me $160,000 they had to pay 
to open the door. This is a business that employed about 15 people. 
They have to pay about $160,000 just to open their door. They said, 
``Hunter, if this giant health care plan passes this tax and puts this 
new tax on us, we are leaving, we cannot afford that.'' I hope that 
burden is not put on business.
  Mr. KINGSTON. I think we are about out of time. But I know the 
gentleman from California has a point.
  Mr. CUNNINGHAM. You know, if you tell an employee, a union worker or 
a Federal employee, that everything they worked for in the health care 
plan is going to come under this alliance, they do not like it. Senior 
citizens do not like it, whom we call chronologically gifted.
  I think these things certainly will be worked out, that we will end 
up with a bipartisan health care plan.
  Mr. KINGSTON. Madam Speaker, I certainly appreciate the input of both 
gentlemen from California.

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