[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 107 (Thursday, July 16, 2009)]
[House]
[Page H8273]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1945
              WE NEED PATIENT-CENTERED HEALTH CARE REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Boozman) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BOOZMAN. Mr. Speaker, I share the views of my constituents in the 
Third Congressional District of Arkansas that we need health care 
reform. I believe all Americans deserve access to quality, affordable 
health care; but the one-size-fits-all experiment won't give 
hardworking Americans, like Melissa Swaim, the peace of mind that she 
and her family deserve when seeking medical treatment. Melissa is all 
too familiar with doctors offices. Her son requires special medical 
treatments every 3 months that her insurance helps pay for. She is 
grateful to have insurance help cut the cost of these beneficial 
procedures and told me if her family didn't have insurance, finding the 
money to cover the cost would be very difficult. But she would rather 
scrape her pennies together and make sacrifices on her own to pay for 
her son's health care rather than have someone else decide treatment on 
his behalf.
  We need to preserve the doctor-patient relationship that Melissa and 
millions of Americans have learned to depend on. This allows patients 
to make choices that suit their individual requirements, not Washington 
bureaucrats. Politicians making decisions about our health care needs 
is a prescription for disaster. Instead of taking away health care 
choices, we need to be offering more opportunities for patients.
  We need patient-centered health care that allows them to get the 
treatments and the care that they need when they need it. The Obama 
prescription will deny patients treatments and make them wait to get 
the treatments that they are allowed to receive. Recently my mother 
needed to have the battery changed in her pacemaker. My mom is 88 years 
old. She is doing very well and is a wise and caring mother, 
grandmother and great-grandmother to her family. With government-run 
health care, after taking $500 billion from the Medicare program to 
help pay for the new plan, it's not a given that she would have gotten 
the treatment when she needed it at the proper time. This is not the 
standard of care that I want; it's not the standard of care Melissa 
wants; and it's not the standard of care 90 percent of my constituents, 
who have taken my online survey about government-run health care, want.
  We need a plan that reduces health care costs, expands access and 
increases the quality of care. Unfortunately the 1,018-page Obama 
proposal does not achieve these goals. We need to be asking some tough 
questions. We need to be asking the President, we need to be asking the 
authors of this plan such things as, Will this allow illegal 
immigrants, illegal aliens access to health care? There's nothing in 
the bill that says no. We need to ask about the elderly, people who in 
the past have enjoyed access to cataract surgery to restore their 
vision, access to artificial hips, artificial knees to increase their 
mobility in a timely fashion. Will this plan allow that sort of care to 
continue? Those are the things that we need to be working on, and 
certainly to try to cram this down the American public's throat in 2 
weeks is not workable. Luckily we still have time to get this right. 
Let's work together and make patient care the top priority of our 
reform.

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