[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 143 (Sunday, October 11, 1998)]
[House]
[Page H10525]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               HMO REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, I want to comment on the tone that we heard 
from the gentleman from Connecticut.
  I am a physician. I still practice. What we were supposed to have 
received from Mr. Gejdenson was that the problems in the health care 
field today have come about because of this Congress. They have come 
about because of a law called ERISA that this Congress a number of 
years ago passed. And the thing that strikes me rather peculiarly is 
what we hear as HMO attacks instead of attacks on physicians who are 
not doing their job.
  The number one job of a physician is to do no harm. I want to tell my 
colleagues, if I do an outpatient surgery, which I do almost every 
weekend, and my patient is not ready to go home, I fight and fight and 
fight, but I do not give up. My patient stays there until they are 
ready to go home. Do you know what? I win those battles with HMOs. I do 
not lose those battles. What we are really hearing is the inability of 
physicians to have backbone to stand up.
  The law that created the situation that we have today was created 
several years ago, not by a conservative Republican Congress, but by a 
rather liberal Democrat Congress. I do not usually say anything 
partisan on this floor, but the tone of the speech is inappropriate for 
this august body. To not challenge that tone will do more to destroy 
this institution than anything I know. We passed a bill, it is called 
the Patient Protection Act. It is not designed to put more lawyers at 
work and increase health insurance costs by lining the pockets of 
people who are going to challenge HMOs through the court system. There 
is no question we have to make changes. Those changes are being made. 
They have been made with this Congress. But the very idea that this 
Congress, this Republican Congress, is responsible for the emotional 
diatribe that we just heard is anything but the truth.
  The truth is, we have tremendous cost pressures on health care in 
this country. HMOs have done a lot to help us solve those problems. Are 
they perfect? No. Have they made mistakes? No. Is there any physician 
before HMOs were created that has not made a similar mistake of letting 
someone go home too soon? No. So we can emotionalize these issues. We 
can try to make them a campaign issue, but what we do is serious damage 
to the real problems that we have to solve in this country.
  And my heart is broken that we have the kind of discourse that we 
have in this House that creates a false paper tiger and then sets it 
down. To the American public, I apologize for what we heard in the past 
30 minutes from the gentleman from Connecticut. It is my hope that we 
can carry on conversations in this House that come up to the level of 
integrity, honesty and maturity that this House deserves.

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