[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 69 (Tuesday, April 29, 2008)]
[House]
[Pages H2767-H2768]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            REAL HEALTH CARE SOLUTIONS FOR AMERICAN FAMILIES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Louisiana (Mr. Boustany) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BOUSTANY. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
  Mr. Speaker, Americans remain frustrated with the cost of health 
care. As costs rise, fears grow that they'll lose coverage and even 
fall into bankruptcy. Americans face this anxiety every day. But it 
doesn't need to be that way. We can give all American families 
confidence in a health care system.
  Americans deserve more affordable and more widely available health 
care. Americans deserve real access to health care, not just health 
care coverage that doesn't lead to access but real access to health 
care. That's why we must modernize our health care system and learn 
from other sectors of the economy where competition has driven down 
costs, particularly in the insurance arena, so that we can drive down 
those premium costs and make it more affordable for all American 
families.
  When addressing health care, Washington fails to put the needs of the 
patient first. I know this as a physician. I was in private practice 
for 14 years and saw how policies really drove a wedge between the 
patient and their doctor.
  Patients want personal, quality, high-value health care. That's what 
we all want. That's going to be the way that we get true quality in 
health care. We must focus on what patients most want and need: 
prevention, early detection, early diagnosis, control of chronic 
illnesses, enhancing the quality of life, and wellness programs.
  I know as a physician that trying to get a patient to quit smoking 
takes a

[[Page H2768]]

lot of work. Simple television commercials and public service 
announcements, while they help, won't do the job. But if you have a 
doctor-patient relationship where the doctor knows the patient and that 
trust develops and a doctor supports the patient in their effort to 
quit smoking, it's much more likely to be successful.
  The same thing with dietary measures. These are the kinds of things 
that we need to do that will help reduce the cost of health care and 
will help make Americans more healthy. These are the kinds of solutions 
that will help Americans stay out of hospitals and avoid other 
expensive institutional forms of treatment.
  Just yesterday, my colleagues and I across the aisle debated these 
very issues at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital. It was a great 
debate. But let me say that Republicans focused on strengthening the 
doctor-patient relationship that is fundamental to good quality health 
care. As I said before, we can't expect good quality health care to 
come about without this fundamental relationship between a doctor and a 
patient.
  We think back to the old days, of Marcus Welby and how a physician 
portrayed as Marcus Welby on television had that relationship with the 
patient and their family. We think back to Norman Rockwell paintings 
that depict this type of relationship that patients had with the 
doctor, of mutual trust that focused not just on sickness but on 
health, not just on the disease process but how the disease affected 
the entire patient's well-being and their family circumstances.
  These are the things that we as Republicans want to focus on as we 
try to introduce information technology into health care, a wide range 
of choices for families to pick a good health care policy that meets 
their specific needs, not somebody else picking what they need, let 
families pick what they need and put families back in control of their 
health care destiny.
  Our opponents on the other side of the aisle have suggested a one-
size-fits-all program, something like you see in Canada or in England 
where there are waiting lists for care. I know as a physician that when 
I was in Rochester, New York, we had patients who were being told they 
couldn't have heart surgery for 18 months and they were coming across 
the border into the U.S. to have their heart surgery done. A friend of 
mine who is a heart surgeon in England was told 6 months into the year 
that he couldn't do any more heart surgery and when he attempted to do 
so, his superiors threatened to fire him. Think of the patients that 
suffered because of this type of rationing of care. That's not what 
Americans want. Americans want a health care system that provides 
access and that's affordable and available.
  I know, I think everyone knows, that Americans deserve better than 
what we're getting, and I know and I'm very confident that we can make 
it better if we adhere to those principles I outlined earlier, of 
information and choice and patient and family control. We can create a 
health care system that meets patients' needs and allays Americans' 
anxieties, a health care system that gives all of us confidence that 
our health care needs will be taken care of. And we can do this by 
putting in place new policies that respond to consumer needs, 
individual needs, and the demands for more available and affordable 
health insurance and for more control over our health care decisions. 
That's what we all want. We want a health care system that provides 
real access to care, not just coverage on paper. There are far too many 
examples of where folks have coverage but not real access. We want 
access.

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