[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 112 (Thursday, July 23, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H8698-H8705]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
{time} 2230
HILLARYCARE AND THE NEW HEALTH CARE PLAN
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Minnick). Under the Speaker's announced
policy of January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is
recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I want to acknowledge the presence of the chairman
of the Judiciary Committee here tonight and Mr. Ellison both. I
appreciate the young man from Minnesota coming down here and spending
an hour down here. I expect that out of him since he's got all of that
youthful vigor. But the chairman of the Judiciary Committee could have
found something else to do, and I think this is a testimonial to his
commitment and his belief in the policy.
[[Page H8699]]
And so as much as I was tempted to engage in that debate, I was also
very interested in the exchange from the gentleman of Minnesota and the
chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
There are other Members off doing other things tonight, and perhaps
doing nothing. But some of us are interested in the future of America.
And I wanted to point out this chart that I am sure will be something
that the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers) will recognize, or at
least when I describe it he will recognize it.
This is the flow chart from Hillary's national health care plan from
1993. And it has some differences between that and the current plan
that we have. But I had this chart on the wall in my construction
office when it was available in 1993, and it hung there throughout the
decade. And I believe it's still somewhere in my archives unsorted.
They're still some things left over from that from the time I sold my
business out to my oldest son.
But this chart animated me. It animated me because I'm a private-
sector person. I'm a person who had to make a living competing on low-
bid and being efficient producing and building things, and I provided
health insurance for my employees and retirement plans for my
employees. And I was one of the early people to do that. I recall back
in the 1980s, that was an exception in people that were within the
scope of the business that I was in and many other businesses. And I
was happy to do all I could do because I wanted to keep employees
working for me. I wanted to give them the best employment we could, the
best employment package we could.
And when I saw this come out, this Hillary's plan, I began to look
through all of this chart, all of these new programs, acronyms that I
don't know that the gentleman from Michigan could come up with what
these mean today. I thought I knew them all back then. But there were
many of them new government programs.
And some of this is similar to the proposals that are out there
today. The stark difference, is this is black and white. The new flow
chart is in Technicolor. I imagine a generation from now it's going to
be 3-D. But it creates whole new different programs and new different
agencies, and that was enough to put the brakes on this program back in
the early 1990s.
When the American people got a look at all of this government that
was prescribed, all of the hoops they were going to have to jump
through, they concluded that they didn't want to make that big change
and didn't want to make that big leap.
So just the idea of this chart, I think, if this chart had been
pulled out of the equation, I think perhaps Hillary's health care plan
would have passed. But the American people can see--and in one snapshot
picture--this huge growth in government that comes about and the loss
in freedom. This is about freedom. And when I look down through this
list, I see HMO provider plan. Global budget plan. A global budget plan
for a national health care plan? All of these agencies over on this
side, DOL, PWBA, I don't even know what those mean any more, but grown,
creating new government. How it's interrelated with State government, a
national health board. That sounds pretty familiar. Executive office of
the President sitting on the top of that.
But this chart was something that caused the American people to
wonder how many lines would they stand in, how many government agencies
would they have to deal with. And when you look at Americans standing
in line, it's pretty--you know we do that occasionally in the cities
when things are busy in the grocery store or wherever. If you are
standing in line, you are giving up some of your freedom, your time
that you could be doing something different with. And when you stand in
line for retail, you always have the opportunity to go for another
line. When you stand in line for government, there is only one line,
and you shall wait until that line slowly progresses through the door.
We have a new chart here, and this is the chart that reflects the new
language, and this chart is--this is a chart that when the American
people absorb all of the components of this, they will also understand
that there is freedom that will be lost.
I put this out here because I want to make sure that the gentleman
from Michigan can see this. And I want to make this point because this
is a dialogue situation that we have here on the floor. When I looked
at this chart, I will say that reading the bill over and over again
doesn't draw a description that you can see in your head the way you
can if you have the chart to follow.
This is 31 new government agencies. This is 31 new hoops that people
have to jump through. They won't have to jump through every one to get
their tonsils out, but they will have to jump through some new ones to
get their tonsils out or a hip replacement, or a knee or whatever it
might be.
But in this whole flow chart that reflects these many pages of
legislation, the one that I bring my attention to--and the one that
causes me concern--is this right here, this little segment down at the
bottom: Traditional health insurance plans. These are the 1,200 or
1,300 plans that the chairman of the Judiciary Committee alluded to. I
call that a lot of competition; 1,200 to 1,300 health insurance plans
competing against each other for the premium dollar. They're out there
trying to devise new packages and new ways to market and different ways
to accommodate the needs of the health insurance consumer. Thirteen
hundred. In fact, my number is over 1,300 of these policies.
Well, under this proposal, this new national--the House Democrats'
health plan, this new health care plan, any health insurance policy
that you have today would have to go into this circle, this purple
circle here called the ``qualified benefits health care plans.'' They
would be the private-sector plans. So these 1,300 or so plans would
have to meet the newly written government regulations in order to
qualify under the qualified plans.
Those regulations will not be specified out in this bill. They won't
say in the bill that you have a certain deductible or a certain
copayment or no copayment. There will be some regulations that will be
written in there such as, perhaps, portability--which I know that we
need to address--but in any case, the qualified health benefit plans,
that's the pool that this whole box of 1,300 would have to go into.
They will have to meet the new standards, the new standards that will
be written by the Health Choices Administration Commissioner, whom we
can confidently define as a health choices administration czar. It's
just ``commissioners'' have a better sound to it today, because we have
32 czars. We're kind of worn down on czars, but commissioner are okay.
This commissioner will, with whatever board that directs him and
whatever direction he gets from the White House, and perhaps with input
from the House and the Senate, perhaps will write new regulations. And
he will tell these 1,300 and some health insurance policies, You will
conform to these standards in order to be qualified. If you are not a
qualified health insurance plan, you will not be allowed under this law
to sell insurance in the United States of America.
So, when the President promises that if you like your health
insurance plan, you get to keep it, I do not believe that the President
could be able--with any kind of confidence--to make that promise,
because in reality, he doesn't know yet what these qualified health
benefits plans are. But we do know that they aren't going to qualify
every plan as it is. They may not qualify any plans as they are. But
they will be pushed into this circle here, and they will have to be
written in such a way that the new plan, this other purple circle, the
public health plan--that's the public option that the gentlemen had
been speaking about over this last hour. The public option is designed
to compete against these 1,300-and-some private health insurance plans.
Now, there are a couple of things that can happen. If the public
option is having trouble competing, they can either lower the premiums
and subsidize them with tax dollars, or they can raise the regulations
on the private plans so that the health insurance plan today that
people have--one of those 1,300-and-some plans that are there--they
have to meet the new government regulations. You raise the regulations,
you raise the cost, you raise the premiums.
These policies will not be the same policies if this health insurance
plan
[[Page H8700]]
changes. That's why the President can't make that promise. He can make
the promise, but he can't keep it, and the American people know he
can't keep it.
So the difference between this full technicolor plan and the
HillaryCare plan behind us in black and white is this: That the
HillaryCare plan was a single-payer plan. It was a plan that was not
quite one-size-fits-all, but it was one government plan for all.
This is a transitional plan to HillaryCare plan. This is a plan that
sets up and transfers all private health insurance today into
government-approved, qualified health benefit plans. The government
will write the regulations. They will say what's mandated. They will
tell the companies what they have to provide for insurance, what they
have to cover, whether they can have deductibles, whether they can have
copayments, and what kind of portability may or may not exist. And I
think the portability will exist.
{time} 2240
By the time they write the regulations, you won't be able to tell
whether you have a private health insurance plan or whether you have
the public option because they will be written under the same rules. So
it will just be the difference of whether someone is out there still
hanging on.
I can tell you what happened in Germany. Germany has the longest
history with a public health insurance plan of any country in the
world. They put it in under Otto Von Bismarck, for political reasons I
might add. And today, even though they have a private option as we are
being promised here, 90 percent of the health insurance in Germany is
the public plan. It is the plan that they write and they put the
dollars into it. The 10 percent that are out there that have private
plans are mostly people that are self-employed, that are making the
kind of an income that allows them to go outside the government market
to buy some health insurance that they think might give them a little
bit better access to the health care, 10 percent private, 90 percent
public, 90 percent government.
Now I don't know what is in this dialogue or in this bill that is
going to change our way of thinking, that will change what happens here
in the United States. But we know that as much as people say about how
popular the Canadian health care plan may be, they keep coming to the
United States for health care from Canada. And in Canada, there is a
law that prohibits the Canadians from jumping ahead in the line. They
have lines now that, let's see, the numbers, I will recall them, a 360-
day waiting period for a knee joint, for a new knee joint and 196 days
waiting for a new hip joint.
In America, well, we can get you in tomorrow or next week. What's
your pleasure? We will make sure we adjust the schedule of the health
care providers so that we do get people in for that kind of surgery,
whether it is heart surgery, knee surgery, hip surgery, whatever it
might be. We don't have waiting lines in the United States, unless they
are waiting at the emergency room with people that are walking in
there.
I will point out, also, Mr. Speaker, that the dialogue that we have
heard, not just here in the previous hour ahead of me, but constantly
throughout this entire health care debate, has been the blending, the
merging and the confusing of the terms ``health care'' and ``health
insurance.''
For example, when the gentleman said just previously, ``Millions and
millions of people who don't have health care,'' that was the chairman.
Well, we don't have anybody in America that doesn't have health care.
Everyone in America has access to health care. But we don't have
everybody in America that is insured. When we blur the terms and we say
that there are millions of people that don't have health care, we need
to drag that thing back to the reality of the truth and make it the
point that, no, everybody has health care. At least if they will access
it, they have health care. But they don't all have health insurance.
When you take the full numbers of people in the United States and you
start subtracting from that the numbers of people who are just simply
not exercising an option of picking up health insurance, we will hear
the number that there are 44 million to 47 million people in America
that are uninsured.
But when you start subtracting from that, first, I'm not interested
in insuring the illegals in America. I think those people that came
into the United States illegally should go home. I think we have got an
obligation to put them back in the condition they were in prior to them
breaking the law. We should not reward them for violating our
immigration laws. So the illegals should be subtracted. Also, newly
arriving immigrants are supposed to take care of themselves. They can't
hardly press themselves on the public dole and plead with us that the
minute they arrive here we should provide them health insurance. We
provide them health care. Nobody gets turned away. But they cannot
demand health insurance. Then when you subtract from that the people
that are making over $75,000 a year, they could surely find a way to
take care of some health insurance with some income like that.
And you shake this number down, what are we really after here? We are
after a number that identifies those people who apparently can't take
care of themselves, who can't take care of their own health insurance,
the chronically uninsured. The chronically uninsured in America are a
number between 10.1 million and 12 million, depending on whether you
believe the two-professor study at Penn State University or a number
that came out from one of our nonpartisan organizations here, and I
hesitate to quote them.
But 10.1 to 12 million, some place in that zone, is the total number
of those who are chronically uninsured in America. Divide that out, say
11 million, and divide it by 306 million, you're in the zone of about 4
percent. We have the best health care system in the world. We do spend
a high percentage of our gross domestic product on health care, and we
have got the best health care system in the world. I won't argue that
we shouldn't take some dollars out of this, because there are a lot of
dollars in our health care system. But we are looking at upsetting the
best health care system in the world to try to address the 4 percent of
our population that are chronically uninsured.
Why would we do that? What is our goal? Don't we know some things
from all of the experience that we have had in dealing with people who
have had public policies offered to them? If you look across the
States, what percentage of those kids that are eligible are signed up
for SCHIP? And we look at how government abuses SCHIP when in Wisconsin
87 percent of those signed up for State Children's Health Insurance
Program are adults, and in Minnesota, the gentleman from Minnesota, Mr.
Ellison's, State, 66 percent were adults? They were abusing the system.
They were not using the system.
If you look at the numbers of people who are eligible for Medicaid
versus those who are actually signed up for Medicaid, just slightly
over half of those that are eligible for Medicaid are actually signed
up. So why would we think that we can fix this problem of the 4 percent
of the population that is chronically uninsured even if we do bring a
public plan and a public option? Why would we think that they would
sign up? I don't think they are going to sign up in any greater numbers
than they do for SCHIP or any greater numbers than they do for
Medicaid.
One of the reasons is because a certain percentage of the population
is just simply not responsible enough to step up to that
responsibility. And there is supposed to be a reward in this country
for people who do take the initiative and take care of themselves. But
I'm concerned about this loss of freedom. I'm concerned about this
transition of the traditional health insurance plans crowded into the
qualified health benefits plans with new regulations written that may
compel them to pay certain benefits that would be morally objectionable
to many of us.
And then it is written so that they would compete with the public
benefits plan. And seeing also that this is a transition to get us to
the HillaryCare plan which was a complete substitution of the private
health insurance in America and replaced with a government-run plan,
another major moral objection that I have.
I will say this is actually the moral objection, and I will tell this
in an anecdotal form. Sometime in the early
[[Page H8701]]
80s, at least sometime in the 80s, my Congressman was Fred Grandy. Many
people will remember Fred Grandy as Gopher on ``Love Boat.'' He was a
very smart guy, a Harvard graduate, a policy wonk. He still has left an
impression upon colleagues I serve with here on how smart and how
policy-able he is and was active in those years.
It was unusual for a Member of Congress to come to my little town.
Fred Grandy did do a stop in my little town of Odebolt, and we met in
the basement of the Lutheran church. There was a pretty good crowd for
a small town. There were about 80 people there. I went and sat down in
the front row. Most of the reason is because I can't hear very well in
the back row. Of those 80 people there, Congressman Fred Grandy
proposed his model for a national health care plan. As he described it,
I listened to it carefully.
Then he stopped, and he said, how many of you in the room are
employers? I raised my hand. I remember looking around the room, and
there were 12 of us with our hands up, a dozen out of 80 or so that
were employers. And then he asked the question, how many of you provide
health insurance for your employees? I left my hand up. But it was the
only hand up out of the 80 in the room. And then Congressman Grandy
came directly in front of me, and he leaned down and he said, and of
the way I have described this national health plan, how much will this
change the way you do business? And I gave him the answer that was in
the front of my head, and I think I would do that pretty much today, as
well. I said, well, Congressman, it probably won't change the way I do
business very much unless you're going to compel me to pay for
abortion, in which case I quite likely will no longer be an employer.
That was my answer. It was a blunt answer, and it was exactly what I
was thinking. And the place erupted in applause. I had no idea that
there was a nerve out there to be touched in that fashion. I had no
idea that I would ever enter into public life in any fashion. I had no
idea that I'd be serving on the Judiciary Committee at a time like
this, no idea I would be standing here on the floor of Congress
relating a story that was more than 20 years old where I found out it
wasn't just me that considers requiring Americans to pay tax, to take
their tax dollars to fund the ending of innocent human life and calling
that the expansion of freedom is abhorrent to many Americans.
{time} 2250
And that, at the core of this, I don't know how this administration
avoids the position that they have taken, but I don't know how American
people step up and get out their checkbook and write a check to the IRS
if that check is going to go into--or write a check for health
insurance premiums for that matter--if that check is going to go into
Planned Parenthood, the abortion clinic, into the snuffing out of
innocent human life.
When it gets to the point where it is a moral principle, the American
people, I don't believe, will tolerate the imposition of a policy like
that. And this policy, some will say, well, we don't have any proof
that it's going to be, we're going to be compelled to pay for abortion
in this health insurance plan. The history of the entire funding of
abortions since Roe v. Wade has been, if there is not a specific
exemption in the bill, if there's not a specific exemption passed by
Congress, then government will fund abortions. That's how it has been
since 1973.
And so this bill, when it was offered in committee to prohibit any of
this money from going to abortions, that amendment was shot down on
almost exactly a party-line vote. So this Congress has already spoken.
If anybody thinks that this massive, technicolor flowchart, new health
care plan, crowd your private plan into competing against the public
plan and eventually the public plan swallowing all of the private
plans, if anybody thinks this isn't designed today by the people in
power in this Congress to fund abortion, they would be wrong.
And we had the opportunity of the White House Budget Director, when
asked the question, he would not rule it out that they would be funding
abortions under this program. So, we all have to take them at their
word, their spoken or unspoken word. But if the legislation doesn't
explicitly exclude abortion, we know that they are going to be seeking
to fund abortion.
Sixty-nine percent of Americans oppose taxpayer funding for abortion
according to a Zogby poll just last year, 69 percent oppose. And in May
of 2009, a Gallup poll finds that 51 percent of Americans identify
themselves as pro-life. But if you start dropping off some of the
exceptions, you go right on up the line as high as 75 or more percent.
And no one can win the argument, if you ask them what instant their
life began if they believe in the sanctity of human life, unless they
take the position that they are pro-life.
And so I think that this legislation that goes after a big chunk of
our economy, at least 17 percent of our economy, it goes directly after
a strong moral objection that many of us hold against abortion itself,
let alone compelling people to fund abortions here in the United States
or in a foreign land.
And now, Mr. Speaker, I take you back to the President's basic
principles that he's argued about as to why he says we need to
establish this national health care plan. His principle is this: The
economy is a mess. It's not quite any longer in free fall, but we are
in an economic situation that's quite difficult. And he says, President
Obama, health care is broken. And he also contends that we can't fix
our economy unless we first fix health care. Well, health care/health
insurance, let's put that all together, because now I think he's
talking about the package.
And so here's the situation. The economy is in a shambles. It's
limping along. It doesn't show any signs of recovery. It may still be
declining. And so with a bad economy, and the President says we have to
overhaul the health care system in America in order to recover
economically, here's the principle.
How do you bring something out economically if you're going to
propose a $1.2 trillion to $2 trillion plan that's going to require
increasing taxes by $800 billion or $900 billion and leave, by all
accounts, at least a negative $239.1 billion deficit created by all of
this?
How do you, if we can't afford a health care plan that we have, how
do you create one that costs $1 trillion to $2 trillion more, increases
the deficit and increases the taxes, how do you create all that and say
that's a fix? It looks to me like no, it's more like an addiction on
increasing taxes and increasing government.
Here's a conclusion that I've come to, Mr. Speaker. No matter what
kind of logic this side of the aisle will apply, no matter what the
metrics are from an economic approach, no matter what we can point to
that shows that this is the best health care system in the world--and
by the way, before I get to the conclusion on the no matter whats, I
want to list the things that I do agree on.
We spend too much money on health care in this country, too high a
percentage of our GDP. We have to do something about portability in
America, because when people move from job to job, they should not have
to stay in a job because their health insurance doesn't go with them if
they leave. We agree on those things.
Something else that's missing from this flowchart, though, is
liability reform. Medical malpractice insurance is too high, and it is
a significant part of this, but, you know, if you can produce all
government workers producing all the health care, then you can end up
with sovereign immunity and we can maybe get rid of this litigation in
the end, if that's where it's going. I suspect it's not.
So those are the two things that we agree on. Costs too much money,
we need to make it portable. Aside from that, there are many other
solutions that I would apply.
One of them would be if health insurance premiums are deductible for
anyone, if they're deductible for the corporation or the employer, they
should be deductible for everyone. The same kind of commodity should be
deductible for an individual, for the ma and pa shop, for the farms.
They should be deductible for everybody in America in the same fashion
that they're deductible for a company. That would move a lot of people
out of their existing programs and let them market or shop and own
their own policy. So I'm for full deductibility.
I'm for expanding health savings accounts. I'm for limiting the
liability
[[Page H8702]]
under medical malpractice, adopting the language that we passed out of
the Judiciary Committee and off the floor of this House about 3 or 4
years ago that caps the noneconomic damages at $250,000. I'm for doing
those things.
I don't know anybody that's for doing nothing. We want to do all we
can to fix this program, but we want to keep the competition in place
and we want people to keep their freedom. But it does not follow
logically, Mr. Speaker, for the President to claim that we are in an
economic difficulty of proportions not seen since the Great Depression
and that we can't fix the economy without first fixing health care/
health insurance, and that the fix for health care and health insurance
is a $1 trillion to $2 trillion government spending program with an
$800 billion and $900 billion tax increase, with a $239.1 billion
deficit.
How does going further in debt, spending more money, solve a problem
for a health insurance program that already spends too much money? If
you put more money into the system, where are they taking it out? I
don't see where they're taking it out except squeezing down Medicare.
That's one of the components that are there, and I've seen numbers as
high as $500 billion that might be, not in here on this flowchart, but
in the finer print of the bill.
If they squeeze down Medicare, Medicare that, in my district and on
average is paying only 80 percent of the cost of delivering the
service, and in Iowa, out of the 50 States, we have the lowest Medicare
reimbursement State in the entire country. We have the lowest
reimbursement rate. We are in the top five in quality year after year.
There are a number of different categories. Sometimes we're number one
in some of the categories. But out of all 50 States, when you look at
the aggregate of the quality of the health care, Iowa ranks in the top
five consistently year after year after year, and we are last in
reimbursement rate in the country year after year after year.
And so this idea of squeezing $500 billion out of the Medicare
reimbursement rates because they think somebody's making too much
money, what happens is it pushes those costs over onto the private
payers, called cost shifting. You shift the cost. At some point, this
bubble has to burst. I think that this bill squeezes it to the point
where the bubble bursts.
And so I would make this point, too, that we should get our verbiage
right. We should call health care health care. That's the providers.
That's the service. That's when we are taking care of patients. We
should call health insurance health insurance. That's when a premium
gets paid to an insurance company and the insurance company pays the
liability that comes when there's a claim, when there's health care
provided.
{time} 2300
That's the difference. I've watched this verbiage get confused over
the immigration debate over the last few years, too. I made the point
then--and in fact it was to the White House at the time--that they
couldn't get past the idea that they were proposing amnesty. They tried
to redefine amnesty, and the American people didn't buy it. We can't
redefine this language around health care. The American people are not
going to buy it. They know the difference between health insurance and
health care. And they like to know where it is because they know their
very lives are at stake, and they don't want to stand in line.
I have a chart here that describes the quality of American health
care. This is the survival rate of cancer patients compared to
different regions. Here's prostate cancer, here's breast cancer.
There's two good indicators that are there. If you look at the United
States, our survival rates are at the top in both prostate and breast
cancer. And then when you see the--shall I call it burgundy here--
that's Canadian. Canadian survival rates are higher, substantially
higher, especially for prostate, than they are for Europe or for
England. Europe and England are down, Canada's up, the U.S. is better
than Canadian. It's also the case when you look at breast cancer, only
it's not so stark, the difference between Europe and England and the
United States.
I look at this and I think, how did Canada be so close to the United
States with survival rates of cancer? We have the best survival rates
here, by the way. How can Canada be so close? Could some of it be that
because Canada is so close, Mr. Speaker? Could it be that Canadians
come from Canada down into Detroit to get their cancer treatment? Could
it be that they're coming down to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota to get
their cancer treatment, and could that be one of the reasons why their
survival rates are better in Canada as compared to the other countries
that have a socialized medicine program?
But make no mistake, Mr. Speaker, this is socialized medicine. It's
the government writing the rules. It's taking away your freedom. You
can't own your health insurance policy the way you own it today. The
government will interfere and intervene and will write new rules. And
when the President says that you get to keep your plan if you like it,
I guess maybe if you're working for a company, you may get to keep your
plan if you don't like it. But when Wal-Mart makes a decision, as they
did a couple of weeks ago, that they would endorse an employer mandate
health insurance plan, that should tell us something.
Why would Wal-Mart do that? They insure about 52 percent of their
people. Their competition insures about 46 percent of theirs. So
there's a little push there competitively. But surely they have to
think that the health insurance for their employees is going to be
cheaper if it's under a public plan.
So when the President says if you like your health insurance plan,
you get to keep it, what does he say if Wal-Mart, for example, should
decide that they're going to drop all of their private insurance
carriers and policies and go over onto the public plan? Doesn't Wal-
Mart or any employer have the option to shift if we offer? If we offer
people a public plan over here in this chart, is it the President's
position, that a company can't switch? Is he saying to a company that's
providing health insurance to their employees, if your employees like
these plans, you have to keep it? Is he saying that to the descendants
of Sam Walton?
I don't think so. I think companies will make that decision. It will
be an economic decision. It may well be a moral decision for a lot of
our responsible employers as well. But the President cannot guarantee
that you get to keep your health insurance plan. That decision will be
made by the employer if he provides it. And if you're an individual
that owns your own plan, that plan will still have to qualify to be
sold in the United States of America. It will not be legal to sell
health insurance in America unless you comply under this circle with
the qualified health benefits plans, the rules of which will be written
by the health insurance czar.
Thirty-one different agencies there. There's a lot of freedom that's
lost, a lot of lines will be created, a lot of freedom will be lost,
some lives will be lost, and we know that people die in line.
Mr. Speaker, I have a couple of subjects that I wanted to address
when I came here tonight, and I wanted to just take this little moment
while the Chair of the Judiciary Committee was here and ask, as we've
had many of these discussions and dialogues, if he would be open to a
little colloquy. I would make the point to the gentleman from Michigan
that today the Government Reform Committee released a report on ACORN.
I have read the executive report on ACORN. From my perspective if the
82 pages of report that's released support the statements made in that
executive summary, it is earth-shaking for me to read all the
implications of that.
I know that you've had some real interest in looking into ACORN to
examine the propriety of the operations that they have, with the very
breadth of all the corporations that are affiliated, and I would just
inquire if the gentleman has had an opportunity to read the executive
summary of the Government Reform report at this point.
Mr. CONYERS. If the gentleman will yield, I haven't read it yet. But
I will be reviewing it tomorrow and I will be prepared to discuss this
with him next week.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for that
commitment. I look forward to having
[[Page H8703]]
that dialogue. This is something that you know I've been very concerned
about for many months. I know that the chairman of the Judiciary
Committee has taken a real interest in this. This is real evidence, as
I understand it, real definitive evidence that's now in the
Congressional Record in a composite form.
Hopefully the chairman and his committee staff could take a real
thorough look at this and either produce a response to the evidence
that's there, or I would be very interested in opening up hearings so
we could examine ACORN.
Would the chairman have any inclination on what he might do at this
point?
Mr. CONYERS. Not until I've examined the document the gentleman has
referred to.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the chairman for his
indulgence in this. Again I appreciate it. It's late at night here, and
John Conyers is here engaging in this health care debate and paying
attention to the things that matter. I did intend to bring up the ACORN
issue at this point, so it wasn't an injection into the dialogue.
If the gentleman had further points, I would be happy to yield.
Mr. CONYERS. Well, I haven't seen the report that you've reviewed.
But I will be happy to look at it next week. We're in dialogue. We see
each other every day that we're in session. I will be delighted to
discuss it with you.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the chairman again for
his indulgent attention to the matter. I will at this point, then, move
on to that subject matter. And unless the gentleman from Texas came to
speak on health care and health insurance, I would be happy to yield.
Mr. GOHMERT. I appreciate my friend from Iowa yielding and that is
something I did want to mention, as I am still so deeply disturbed by
the fact that this Congress would be censored, where we did not have
the freedom to debate, when that ability is what gave us this country,
is what started this country. If you go to the Speaker's Web site, you
will find all kinds of references that are clearly political and
clearly demeaning to Republicans. Yet I don't know of any Republican
that has said that she needs to personally pay for her Web site since
it's political.
Yet here we find out today that we're not allowed to use the term
``government-run health care'' because that is considered political and
demeaning to the Democrats' plan and, therefore, if we're going to put
that in any correspondence, then we have to personally pay for it. We
can't do like the Democrats have done, when they send out all this mail
trashing Republicans, some of it valid, a few years ago, that we were
overspending.
And so I thought perhaps the silver lining would be when they got the
majority they'd do what they said and cut spending, but it's gone the
other direction. Nonetheless, in the chart, as I'm sure my friend from
Iowa has pointed out, that has these 31 different new created entities,
we're not allowed to put that, we're told, on our Web site. Otherwise,
we'll have to pay for the Web site. We're not allowed to send that out
in any literature because the fact of the business is, that might
educate people on just what it is that's going on here. But we were
told we have to use the term ``public option'' rather than
``government-run health care.''
{time} 2310
John Carter was told today that if he was going to use the term
``government-run health care,'' he would have to pay for his mail-out.
He couldn't use franking to do so. That he would have to use the term
``public option.''
It is so outrageous that in this body we're being censored by people
who have made a living out of being political. It is just outrageous.
And I've got too many friends on the other side of the aisle that I
can't believe would condone that kind of conduct. Because they should
have the freedom to criticize any Republican plan. We should have the
freedom to criticize any Republican plan. And we both should have the
freedom to criticize the Democratic plan. That's supposed to be
constitutional. Yet, we're told we can't use political, demeaning terms
to their health care plan.
I'm telling you, it is socialized medicine on its way. It is
nationalized health care. It is the government's effort to take over
your body.
I've got three daughters, my friend knows. While somebody is under my
roof and I'm paying their health care bills, then I feel like I've got
the right to tell them you need to eat better, you need to do this, you
shouldn't do that, because I'm paying for their health care bill. And
if they're going to run it up doing something, then I have a right to
have some injection and control over that. That's what this is about.
I've said it months ago, that what we're running into in this body is
the GRE, the Government Running Everything. And that's what is taking
over health care.
Once the government has this government-run program, let's face it,
you cannot in the private sector compete with a government, especially
a Federal Government program. Because it can run in the red and it can
count on being funded by the government. You can't compete with that if
you're in private business because you can't run in the red. You've got
to run in the black or you go bankrupt. Well, it used to be you went
bankrupt, unless the government wants to run in and bail you out
because you're good buddies with people in the government.
Nonetheless, I talked today, this morning, with a lady from Tyler.
And I love her delightful British accent, because she's originally from
England. And she had called wanting to speak with me, really needing to
speak with me about health care.
She told me that her mother died of cancer and she herself was later
found to have breast cancer, and that if she had been under the system
her mother was, she would have died. But she's alive because she's in
the United States and is a citizen here. Her mother is dead because her
mother was in England and she didn't get the kind of care she would
have here in the America that Sue got. I don't want people dying like
that unnecessarily. And the government has to put you on lists.
I will yield to my friend from Iowa. Have you quoted the President on
that town hall? I see my friend shaking his head.
This was Pam Stern was on the town hall meeting with the President
and talked about her mother, that she's now 105, but over 5 years ago
her doctor said that he couldn't do any more to help her unless she had
a pacemaker. But she's nearly 100 years old.
And the daughter felt like--her doctor--that she ought to get a
pacemaker. Everybody was in favor of it, except her arrhythmia
specialist, who had never met her. So her s doctor said, He needs to
meet you, because that's going to be worth a thousand words.
So he makes an appointment with the arrhythmia a specialist. He meets
with Pam Stern's mother and he realizes--and, according to Pam--that
because he saw her and her joy of life, then he said he was indeed
going to go forward with the pacemaker because this woman had a real
zeal for life and was enjoying life and doing well.
And so Ms. Stern went on and said to the President--was asking about
his plan and was wondering what treatment someone elderly could have,
and asked this, basically: Outside the medical criteria for prolonging
life for someone who is elderly, is there any consideration that can be
given for a certain spirit, a certain joy of living, quality of life,
or is it just a medical cutoff at a certain age?
And I went online early this morning and watched this YouTube and
typed it up myself and went back and forth to make sure I got
everything right. I left out two or three uhs.
Anyway, he says, ``We're suggesting--and we're not going to solve
every difficult problem in terms of end of life care. A lot that is
going to have to be--we as a culture and as a society starting to make
better decisions within our own families and--and--for ourselves.''
I've have got to pause here. The woman is 105. She got a pacemaker 5
years ago, and her quality of life is excellent. How does she need to
make better decisions within her family? Her family is supposed to tell
her you can't have a pacemaker because it's time for you to just roll
over and die?
But the President goes on. He says, ``But what we can do is make sure
that
[[Page H8704]]
at least some of the waste that exists in the system that's not making
anybody's mom better, that is loading up on additional tests or
additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to
improve care, that at least we can let doctors know and your mom know
that, You know what, maybe this isn't going to help. Maybe you're
better off not having the surgery but taking a--a painkiller.''
The woman got a pacemaker and has had a wonderful quality of life, a
zeal and a joy for life and, according to this President, maybe what we
just should have told her is, You don't need a pacemaker. You need a
painkiller.
It is just unconscionable. We value life more than that in this
country. And what grieves me most--and I heard on the news; I don't
know if it's true--that AARP is now endorsing this. If they are, then
at some point, bless their hearts, they're going to owe their members
an apology. Because if we go to this proposed plan that supposedly on
the news they said today they were endorsing the President's plan, then
the people who will be hurt dramatically will be the seniors. They will
go on lists like Sue's mother did in England and they will die because
that's what will happen.
That's how you keep a socialized medicine plan from going broke. You
put people on long lists, they stay there, and then they die.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Briefly reclaiming my time, I hope to come back to
the gentleman from Texas. I would add to this that in this bill there's
also language in there that sets up government counselors to go and see
the family and talk to the children of people who are aging and
presumably to counsel them on hospice care and end of life decisions in
order to avoid the cost of taking care of people when they get older.
This is going to be an economic equation that's going to be counseled
by people who will go to college to learn how to do that and they'll
get a check from the Federal Government to go and visit the children of
our senior citizens, and perhaps our senior citizens, and counsel them
in why a pacemaker is not a good option; why pain pills are a good
option instead.
This changes our values. When I think about the President answering
that question with recommending a prescription for pain pills, even
after the fact, what kind of arrogance does it take for an individual
who, let me just say, has no medical training, has not examined the
patient. Just simply tosses out a prescription because he is President
of the United States. That is a very high degree of self-confidence and
that is very much an understatement on my part.
I'd illustrate also what happens with the health insurance. When you
see the private health insurance plans get crowded into the public
health benefits plan and they have to compete against the public, they
will have set up under this bill a very similar scenario to what we had
when the Federal Government decided to get into the flood insurance
business.
{time} 2320
Now, you can look across the country and try to buy a private flood
insurance plan, and all you can find out on the market is a Federal
flood insurance plan because the Federal plan crowded out the private
plans and crowded it out because they didn't charge premiums that
reflected the risk. And the result is, the Federal flood insurance plan
is $18 billion in the red. They've starved out all the competition. The
government has a monopoly on flood insurance. They set the premiums,
and the taxpayers in America are subsidizing the flood insurance for
other Americans to the tune of $18 billion. That's the deficit.
When government gets in this business, we lose those automatic checks
and balances that come with competition, and we lose the human nature
of dealing with people individually. I don't want to be in these end-
of-life decisions. I don't want to write the rules for that, and I
wouldn't think that a President would want to make such a prescription
of take the pain pills. It's what you have. Old age is terminal, so
take a pain pill until it's over. That's what I hear was prescribed to
this lady.
I yield to my friend from Texas.
Mr. GOHMERT. My friend from Iowa's words are exactly right. Like my
friend from Iowa said, this is after the fact, after we know it's
helped, he still says that at least we can let the doctors know and
your mom know that, you know what, maybe this isn't going to help.
Maybe you're better off not having the surgery but taking a painkiller.
But let me also point out, the President is a very smart individual,
well educated, extremely articulate, obviously very good and
persuasive, but he won't be the one making the decisions. It will be
some bureaucrat who is not as smart as the President. That's where this
is going.
I have shared on this floor before about a gentleman from Canada I've
talked to whose father died in the last year or so, whose father was on
a list to get a bypass surgery for 2 years, and some bureaucrat kept
moving people in front of his father. I said I thought it was a crime
to move up the list in Canada. He said it is illegal to pay somebody to
move you up, but it's not a crime. In fact, it's required that the
government has bureaucrats in little cubicles somewhere that are not
nearly as smart as President Obama who read these things, look at this
stuff and say, you know what, let's move this guy in front of his
father and this guy. They kept moving people in front of him for 2
years, and he died because the bureaucrat was wrong. His father really
did need the surgery.
So it's scary enough that the President would say about a woman who
had successful pacemaker surgery 5 years ago that, you know what, maybe
we just should have said to her, You're better off without the surgery.
Take a painkiller. Well, imagine somebody who is not even as smart as
he is making those decisions for you. So this is really dangerous stuff
before us.
And if I might add one more thing, you know, some people say that
this debate over health care is all about politics. I just want to say,
if this debate over health care were really just about politics, the
smartest thing that my friend from Iowa and I could do is sit back, say
nothing and let this bill pass, not point out all the dangerous stuff
in this thing, the life-ending stuff in this, the freedom-ending stuff
in it, just sit back and not say anything, because what would happen is
the bill would pass if we didn't stand up against it and didn't let the
people in America know how bad it is so they didn't inform their
Congressman. Just sit back and let America find out how many freedoms
are taken away, how many loved ones they lose because they're in this
system. The American public, I believe, would be so irate, they would
turn out the Democratic majority for at least two or three more
generations, they would be so irate. That's the political side of it.
But the factual side is, this is so bad, and we care so deeply
because we know where this goes. I saw socialized medicine in the
Soviet Union as an exchange student there in '73. I don't want this. I
know how it goes. I would rather stay in the minority and be free of
this kind of government intervention that ends lives and takes money
for abortions and takes money to have people take a painkiller and die
instead of having the pacemaker they need. I would rather do that and
stay in the minority than have people endure this kind of plan. That's
politics. And if we were smart politically, we wouldn't point out all
the problems. We would just go home and let America find out and then
put us in the majority party.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I completely agree with the
judge in that statement. This is a horrible policy for America. I would
put it out this way: This is the HillaryCare plan. This is 1993
HillaryCare, the flowchart that I think sunk HillaryCare. The chart
that scared the American people and mobilized them to ring the phones
off the hook then, to run ads and raise their resistance because they
did not want to have a government-run plan that took away their
freedom. That's HillaryCare. This is ObamaCare. If you hated
HillaryCare, you can't like ObamaCare.
This flowchart, the black-and-white HillaryCare flow chart, was
devastating to a national health care agenda. Can I say, a government-
run health care program? Can I say that about the old one, I wonder? I
wonder if this one was mailed off by frank mail. I wonder if the people
in charge then in 1993 had ruled that there wasn't freedom of speech on
the part of Members
[[Page H8705]]
of Congress. I will bet that this chart went into all kinds of
envelopes and got spread all the way across America, and people opened
it up and put it on their kitchen counter and stuck it up with magnets
on the refrigerator and thought, What are they doing there in
Washington, D.C.? We didn't send them there to grow a Big Government
program. They rejected it. That was the end of the momentum of the
Clinton Presidency then when HillaryCare went down.
Now we have ObamaCare, and the censoring of this--first of all, I
want to make this point that I don't really need to show this chart and
send it to my constituents. They already know what we're going into.
They know that my vote on this and my effort on this thing are pretty
well settled. I have said for years that I'm going to oppose any
national health care plan.
No amount of logic is going to change the minds of the people over on
this side of the aisle. They have come to a political conclusion, a
conclusion that they're going to band together and they're going to
pass something that President Obama will sign. He'll sign most anything
as long as it says that it's got the public health plan in it. If it
has the public health plan in it, it will starve out the private and we
will have what almost all of them have said from the beginning.
They want a single-payer plan, a government plan. They don't believe
in private health insurance. They don't believe in the best health care
system of the world. They do believe in censoring, but the American
people cannot be censored. We have Internet. We have Twitter. This kind
of a chart can be forwarded all over this country, and by tomorrow
morning it could be on every computer if the American people just
decided they wanted to make sure that you could see it. You can't
understand this health care program if you read the print, but if you
look at this chart on your screen, you will pick up the phone, and the
American people will be scared enough, I think, to jam the phone lines
again in field offices.
I yield to the gentleman from Texas.
Mr. GOHMERT. I realize the gentleman's time is going to expire at
11:30, but I just wanted to finish. This is about freedom of life,
pursuit of happiness. This is about freedom and life, and Mark Levin's
book Liberty and Tyranny, he has got so many tremendous quotes, but I
just wanted to make this final comment.
President Reagan--this quote's in the book--said ``Freedom is never
more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our
children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and
handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset
years telling our children and our children's children what it was once
like in the United States where men were free.'' That's why we're here
fighting.
I yield back the balance of my time.
Mr. KING of Iowa. When men were free. Reclaiming my time, and
concluding. I want to conclude. However appropriate it was, the
statement made by the gentleman from Texas, that when the President
says if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it, here is
what the bill actually says.
Section 102, ``By the end of the 5-year period, a group health plan
must meet the minimum benefits required under section 121.'' That set
qualified plan I talked about, no plan is going to be the same in 5
years as it is today. If you like your health insurance plan that you
have, as John Shadegg said, get ready to lose it or rise up and defend
your freedom.
With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________