[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 39 (Thursday, March 5, 2009)]
[House]
[Page H2985]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           HEALTH CARE REFORM

  (Mr. PALLONE asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute.)
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I was pleased to see my colleague from 
Pennsylvania, Mr. Murphy, who serves on the Energy and Commerce 
Committee with me, to talk about the need for health care reform and 
the health summit that President Obama's calling today. It is a 
bipartisan summit. It is an effort to reach out to both parties to come 
up with solutions for health care reform.
  And as Mr. Murphy said, one of the biggest concerns is cost 
containment. We know that there's a lot of money in the system that we 
think can be saved and used to make health care available to more 
people. Basically, if you listen to President Obama, he said we need to 
expand coverage. We want to have universal coverage. Everyone should 
have health insurance.
  But one way of achieving that and paying for it is to deal with the 
costs, because we know that they're out of hand. And increasingly, 
employers can't afford health insurance because of the costs. 
Individuals that go out and try to buy health insurance in the 
individual market find it hard to afford the cost. And also, we have 
existing government programs like Medicare, Medicaid and SCHIP that 
it's hard for them to continue to function because of the costs of 
those programs.
  We need reform now on a bipartisan basis.

                          ____________________