[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 132 (Thursday, September 17, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H9711-H9715]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   AMERICA'S ECONOMY AND HEALTH CARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. GINGREY of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I thank you, and I thank the 
minority leader, John Boehner of Ohio; the minority whip, Eric Cantor 
of Virginia; and the minority conference chairman, Mike Pence from 
Indiana--our leadership--for giving me the opportunity to take this 
hour this afternoon as the designee of the Republican Party, the 
minority party.
  Like my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, the Democratic 
majority that you've just heard from concerning health care reform, my 
hour also will be spent discussing this topic of tremendous importance 
to the American people. Certainly, we were home during the August 
recess for almost 5\1/2\ weeks, and I think, for each and every Member 
on both sides of the aisle, if they didn't know health care was the 
number one issue when they went home to their districts, they found out 
pretty quickly. I think, Mr. Speaker, you would agree with me on that. 
Certainly, it was all over the television news--cable news and the 
networks.
  So we are in a time of this 111th Congress where we're dealing with 
something that is just as important as almost anything that you can 
think of. There are other issues, of course, that are on people's 
minds, issues which are equally as concerning. One of those, Mr. 
Speaker, is the economy. The economy has been pretty rough, and we all 
know it. For the last year and a half, we've been in a pretty deep 
recession, and it seems like no matter what we do that we're not able 
to pull ourselves out of that ditch.
  So I would say to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, while the 
health

[[Page H9712]]

care reform issue is important--and it is important that we lower the 
cost of health insurance so that everybody in this country can have 
affordable, accessible health insurance plans and can have the 
opportunity to see physicians when they need to--there are other great 
concerns. One of those great concerns, of course, is the economy.
  I looked at some polls earlier today, and when 1,000 people were 
asked to list in the order of their own priorities what their greatest 
concerns were, 44 percent of them said, My greatest concern is the 
economy.

                              {time}  1545

  In second place was reforming health care at 14 percent of the 
respondents, and our national defense tied in third place when 14 
percent also said that was their greatest concern. It is important that 
we keep this issue as high a priority as it has, and as important as it 
is to people in this country, that the economy is the number one issue.
  Mr. Speaker, I think it was President Clinton that said, It's the 
economy, stupid. Or maybe somebody said to President Clinton, remember, 
that it is the economy.
  And it is. There is no question about it. When you are looking at an 
unemployment rate bumping up to 10 percent, and people losing jobs 
since February, when we passed the economic stimulus act, Mr. Speaker, 
$787 billion, I believe, of borrowed money, a third of that money 
borrowed from the Chinese government. That was going to stem the tide; 
we were going to make sure that unemployment did not get worse than 8.5 
percent, and that we stopped the hemorrhaging of jobs and, indeed, 
began to grow jobs.
  Well, now, here we are, some 6 months later in the process. We 
haven't spent it all, but appropriated that much money again, $787 
billion, to try to get things going to stimulate the economy. We have 
lost another 2 million jobs, and the unemployment rate is approaching 
10 percent.
  I think that one thing that I wanted to share with my colleagues this 
afternoon, Mr. Speaker, is the revision of our health care system. The 
revision of our health insurance system, while important, and important 
to our economy, it's not the number one issue. The number one issue is 
to get people back to work and start creating some jobs and do 
something about the homebuilding industry, where sales are down. Prices 
of homes are down 40 percent, probably, in some parts of the country.
  Jobs are lost in that industry, and there are so many things we could 
be doing, should be doing, to stimulate this economy. Yet the 
President's attention has been diverted so much that he is going all 
across the country, doing his own town hall meetings, almost like in a 
campaign mode, lobbying for this idea of a comprehensive, total reform 
of our health care system such that the government has more 
involvement. Maybe not total involvement, but from my perspective, Mr. 
Speaker, and those of us on the Republican side of the aisle, we have 
great fear that these plans--my colleagues that spoke in the aisle 
before were comparing the Senate version versus the House version.
  I would say, Mr. Speaker, that I have concern about both versions, 
about both versions leading to a total takeover of the health care 
system by our government. Ms. Woolsey and Mr. Ellison are very good 
people, compassionate Members, as we all know, and you could tell from 
hearing them speak, that they have good hearts.
  But if you ask them, or, and I have heard, actually--I am not going 
to put words in their mouths, but I have talked to a number of the 
members of the Progressive Caucus, of which they are a part, Mr. 
Speaker, and what many of them have said, and don't deny it, is that 
they are not going to be satisfied until the Federal government 
completely takes over the health care system in this country. That is 
similar, if not identical, to the Canadian system, or the UK system, a 
nationalized, socialized medicine, is actually what we are talking 
about.
  And so we feel, on the Republican side of the aisle, first of all, 
that's not desirable. The people don't want it. The town hall meetings 
told us that they don't want it. The recent polling tells us that they 
don't want it.
  They clearly want lower prices for health insurance, they want us to 
do something about that, and they want to make that opportunity to have 
health insurance more accessible to each and every one of them and the 
members of their families. But they don't want a government takeover, 
Mr. Speaker.
  I say to my colleagues, look, the President, in the joint session of 
the Congress, where our colleagues on the House side, our Chamber, were 
obviously here. Our colleagues on the other body, United States Senate, 
were here. Cabinet members, Supreme Court justices were here as the 
President addressed the Nation in prime time.
  You know, you can't have a better bully pulpit than that opportunity 
for the President to make his case. During that 45-minute speech, 
another great speech by President Obama, he said one thing that I 
agreed with, well, probably several things that I agree with, many 
things that I don't agree with, like a public option, which is a 
euphemism for a government takeover of our health care system.
  But President Obama did say that one thing, one area of reform that 
he has not yet seen in any bill is medical liability reform, and that 
he felt that that would bring down the cost and that he was willing to 
listen, Mr. Speaker, to ideas presented to him. His door was open--I 
don't know about those three or four levels of gates before you get to 
the door--but I am really hopeful, Mr. Speaker, that his door is open 
to Republicans and Democrats, and rank and file, leadership, to every 
Member of this body.
  In fact, even, it would be great if his doors were open to the 
citizens of this country that have great ideas and where we get most of 
our great ideas, if the truth be known. But this, this idea of medical 
liability reform, I have sent him a letter based on what he said in 
that speech. He also, Mr. Speaker, said the same thing to the American 
Medical Association annual meeting in his hometown of Chicago this past 
June.
  Mr. Speaker, I know you know this, but some of my colleagues may not 
know that in my prior life, before I came to this body 7 years ago--I 
am now serving in my fourth term--I spent 31 years practicing medicine, 
26 as an OB/GYN specialist in my 11th District of Georgia, where I 
still live and will spend my entire life. It's a wonderful, wonderful 
community in northwest Georgia.
  This issue of health care--I am as compassionate about it as anybody, 
just as compassionate as my friends on the Democratic side that had the 
previous hour. This idea of doing something about medical liability 
reform--I am so glad that the President said to the American Medical 
Association at that annual meeting, Yes, in response to a question from 
one of the doctors, We do need to do something, and I will take that 
into consideration.
  Now, he wasn't specific, just like the other night he wasn't specific 
in regard to what he would be amenable to in regard to liability 
reform.
  Mr. Speaker, tonight, I am going to spend some time talking about a 
bill that I have introduced every year since 2003, that was the 108th 
Congress. I have been a Member of the 108th, 109th, 110th and 111th and 
hope to be a Member, Mr. Speaker, of many more Congresses to come. I 
love this place. I love this body, I love my colleagues on both sides 
of the aisle.
  But each year I have introduced the bill called the HEALTH Act, and 
it is about medical liability reform. The bill number, for those of you 
who would like to look it up--and I hope you will, because I have got 
about 60 cosponsors right now, Mr. Speaker. I want cosponsors on both 
sides of the aisle, because I want this to be a bipartisan effort. I 
think that's the only way we can really accomplish things that the 
people will be happy with.

  But H.R. 1086 is called the HEALTH Act, and it's modeled after a bill 
that was passed in California. California, with its 35 million people, 
passed a bill back in 1978. The acronym for the bill is MICRA. The most 
important aspect of that bill, Mr. Speaker, was to put a cap on awards 
from a jury to a plaintiff for pain and suffering.
  Now, when a medical case is brought before a jury, and there is 
alleged malpractice, and the patient has been harmed or injured in some 
way, there is all kinds of evidence given to the jury in regard to what 
the patient has

[[Page H9713]]

lost, how much they are disabled and whether or not they can continue 
to work, and if they can't continue to work over a lifetime, you know, 
maybe 25 more years, that they expected to work. How much is that 
worth? That's called compensatory damages, and those awards can be in 
the millions of dollars and sometimes are.
  In most of those cases, I would say, bravo, Mr. Speaker, that the 
patient was injured by some physician or some hospital practicing below 
the standard of care, and they have got just compensation. We call it a 
redress of their grievances. Maybe it doesn't make them whole, but it 
helps.
  Well, this bill, though, doesn't say anything about that, doesn't 
take away one scintilla of their right to redress of those grievances. 
It simply says that if it's a minor situation, a minimal injury or 
even, in some cases, where the jury says we know, based on 2 weeks of 
the attorneys, the plaintiff's attorneys and the attorney defending the 
physician, that the doctor didn't do anything wrong, that this was 
really just an unfortunate outcome; the doctor followed all of the 
standard practices, best practices in the community. But, golly, you 
know, we just feel sorry for the patient and, after all, the doctor is 
not really going to pay this. He or she pays a high malpractice premium 
to be insured, but it's that old insurance company, and we are just 
going to go ahead and award $4 million for pain and suffering.
  Well, that's what drives up the cost of health insurance, Mr. 
Speaker, for everybody else. And it is estimated that if we limit that 
kind of opportunity, just out of compassion, not based on any factual 
evidence, that these sort of runaway jury awards are given, if we limit 
that, then we could save, in this health care system of ours, Mr. 
Speaker, up to $120 billion a year, $120 billion a year, that estimate 
by the RAND Corporation.
  It just seems to me, Mr. Speaker, that if we go in this direction, 
that we wouldn't have to say to the American people, we are going to 
pay for health care reform by taxing the so-called wealthy an 
additional $800 billion a year. My friends, we are talking about, well, 
it's okay if you had a lot of money, why not give to the poor and the 
downtrodden and follow the Good Book. That's fine. I mean, I 
understand.
  But there is another perspective on that. You teach a man to fish, 
you feed him for life. You give a man a fish, you just give him one 
meal. And many of these people, these so-called rich that are going to 
be taxed in the House bill that they were praising so much, I think the 
number is H.R. 3200, there's a surtax on people with a combined income, 
I forget, something like $250,000.

                              {time}  1600

  Well, many of those people, Mr. Speaker, are small business men and 
women who pay their taxes just like an individual, like a small 
business, sole proprietor. And when you add that surtax on top of their 
marginal rate and on top of their State and local taxes and FICA, they 
are paying 52 percent, more than half of their income, in taxes.
  So many of them will just simply say, you know, this little company 
that we started years ago, this little roofing company, this sheet 
metal company, this real estate shop, and we created these 10, 15, 20, 
25 jobs, and we have been good to our employees and provided them 
health insurance, we are now in our fifties and we have been prudent 
and frugal and saved back and we planned on working another 10-15 years 
and keeping this company going and maybe turning it over to our 
children or grandchildren, but this is crazy. We are not working for 
ourselves or employees, we are working for the Federal Government so 
they can totally reform health care and turn it into a socialized 
medicine system. Well, we are just not going to do it and we are going 
to close the doors, and we are going to have that many more people on 
the unemployment rolls and that many more people without health 
insurance.
  I have been hearing my colleagues talk about, and I think President 
Obama, Mr. Speaker, said it just last week in his speech, this is a 
crisis; 14,000 people every day, 14,000 people every day are losing 
their health insurance, and we have to do something about it.
  Mr. Speaker, 14,000 people are losing their health insurance every 
day not because of the cost of health insurance. They are losing it 
because they lost their job, 6 million of them in the last couple of 
years, 2 million since February when we passed the so-called economic 
stimulus bill. So we have to put all of these things in proper 
perspective.
  So this bill that my colleagues were praising, H.R. 3200, I am on the 
committee, I have read the bill, the 1,100 pages. The pay-for of $1.5 
trillion over 10 years, and that is a very conservative estimate as 
told to us by, as they said, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget 
Office, $1.5 trillion, $8 billion coming from taxation on those small 
business men and women, that job-killing taxation and another $500 
billion, Mr. Speaker, taken out of what, the Medicare program.
  Do you think, my colleagues, that we can afford to cut Medicare by 
$500 billion when we have already been told by the trustees that by 
2017 there will be less money coming in from Medicare FICA than is 
going out in benefits to our 45 million, I think there are, Medicare 
beneficiaries? And that the long-term unfunded liability of Medicare 
out to the year 2075 is $35 trillion, and that is with a ``T,'' $35 
trillion.
  So we say, oh, well, we need the money because the President said we 
are not going to do this bill, either the Senate bill or the House 
bill, whatever is the one that is ultimately chosen, we are not going 
to spend one dime, no, I think he even said one penny, I think he said 
one penny. We are not going to spend one penny of Federal money; it is 
all going to be paid for. So that's the pay-for, the $800 billion worth 
of taxes and the $500 billion cut to Medicare.
  Mr. Speaker, $500 billion over 10 years. I heard someone from AARP 
say that is a small cut. Well, in 2008 we spent $480 billion on the 
Medicare program. So if we cut it $500 billion over 10 years, that, my 
colleagues, is $50 billion a year. Divide 500 by 10, $50 billion a 
year. Well, $50 billion as a numerator over $480 billion as the 
denominator, I believe that is more than 10 percent a year. Mr. 
Speaker, cutting Medicare when it is about to go broke by the year 
2017, over 10 percent a year for the next 10 years, you tell me that 
makes sense, so we can guarantee insurance for another 5 percent of our 
population, many of whom don't want it but yet we are going to force 
them to take it, to buy it. Certainly it is not going to be free.
  But what happens to our Medicare recipients, our moms and dads and 
grandparents who are let's say on Medicare Advantage. Medicare 
Advantage is that option that you have under Medicare, you have to pay 
a little bit more, but it covers prevention and wellness and you get to 
go to the doctor and have an annual physical and Medicare pays for it. 
And you have screening for a lot of dreaded diseases, and Medicare pays 
for it. And a nurse calls you back, maybe a week after your 
appointment, to make sure that you got your prescriptions filled or 
that your fever went down or that you checked your blood pressure and 
it is okay.
  All of that is provided under Medicare Advantage that is not 
available to the 80 percent who get Medicare as traditional fee-for-
service. It doesn't pay for a physical except the entry physical to 
Medicare when you first turn 65, but you need one when you are 68. You 
need one when you are 72, and then you might need one every year 
thereafter.
  So Medicare Advantage, my colleagues, we may be paying too much and 
we may need to sharpen our pencil. I'm not saying that we don't look at 
everything very, very closely. We should do that on everything, every 
dime. As the President said, Mr. Speaker, every penny of taxpayer 
dollars that we spend should be well spent, and we should be sure that 
we are not overpaying the insurance companies that provide the Medicare 
Advantage option.
  But it must be pretty popular, Mr. Speaker, because 11 percent of 
those seniors pick Medicare Advantage. Well, to pay for that $500 
billion out of Medicare, guess where the biggest chunk comes from? It 
comes from Medicare Advantage to the tune of about $170 billion. It 
literally guts Medicare Advantage. It literally guts Medicare 
Advantage.

[[Page H9714]]

  So when the President says, Mr. Speaker, you and I and all of our 
colleagues have heard him say it many times, if you like what you've 
got in regard to your health care, nothing will change. If you like 
what you have, you can keep it.
  Well, try to convince those 10-11 million people, senior citizens, 
precious senior citizens who are on Medicare Advantage. They may want 
to keep it, but if the providers of the Medicare Advantage are losing 
money on the programs--and they will if you cut 17 percent of their 
reimbursement--they will simply say, look, I have other business lines. 
I sell property and casualty. I sell automobile, homeowners, 
catastrophic, I sell life insurance; but I'm out of this. There is no 
way.
  So that is 11 million people, potentially, not all of them, but a 
large number of them who will lose their health insurance, what they 
like; they wanted to keep it, but they didn't get to. So it is an 
indirect taking it away from them.
  When you talk about, well, this is a way we are going to pay for it 
and not spend one extra dime, it is very important. It is just very 
important that people understand what the pay-for is. That is why I say 
in regard to medical liability reform, the current system of the 
runaway awards given to patients for pain and suffering, there are a 
couple of other provisions in my bill, the provision of course that we 
cap the award for pain and suffering at $250,000. Several States have 
done that. Several States have actually done that and expanded that 
number to $350,000. And it has worked fine.
  My mind is open in regard to some changes because the bill, H.R. 1086 
that I am talking about, is based on a California law that was passed 
30 years ago. So, you know, to say today, well, $350,000, I think is a 
reasonable thing. And I would be willing in a heartbeat to talk to the 
President about that, to talk to the leadership of the Democratic 
majority party about that.

  Mr. Speaker, there are a couple of other things about medical 
liability tort law that I think our colleagues need to understand. 
There is something called joint and several liability. So here's the 
scenario. A patient suffers an injury and the plaintiff's lawyer names 
everybody that had anything to do with that patient during a hospital 
stay. Let's say it is a patient that is scheduled for surgery on 
Monday, a routine operation. And the doctor who is going to perform the 
surgery says to her partner, I'm going to be at church Sunday morning 
with my family. Do you mind when you are making rounds seeing your 
patients, would you stop in and see Mr. Smith and just make sure that 
everything is okay and tell him that I will come by this afternoon and 
check on him and see if he has any last minute questions before the 
surgery?
  So the doctor's partner does that. He kind of sticks his head in the 
door and says hello, and your doctor will be by this afternoon.
  Well, that doctor could, under current law, be just as liable of any 
adverse outcome of that next day surgery as the operating surgeon. The 
way the current law says, if that doctor who all he did was say hello, 
I'm your doctor's partner and I just wanted to stop in and tell you 
that she will be by this afternoon, if he has the most coverage, maybe 
he bought a more expensive malpractice policy, Mr. Speaker, and he 
has--well, you have heard the expression, he has the deepest pockets, 
then in a lawsuit, he could be liable for everything, although he never 
even laid a hand on the patient. Well, that's wrong and that ought to 
be corrected.
  That's why we need to eliminate this policy. It is called joint and 
several liability. In other words, everybody who is named is equally 
liable. Clearly, as that analogy I just presented shows, that's not the 
case. It ought to be very specific, and it ought to be proportioned.
  I would think, Mr. Speaker, that would be plain as the nose on your 
face. There is another provision of H.R. 1086, the Health Act. It is 
called collateral source disclosure. I mentioned earlier, Mr. Speaker, 
about the evidence that is presented to a jury so they can figure out 
what award, if any, is appropriate for a patient who is injured by a 
physician or a hospital, medical facility, that has practiced below the 
standard of care, and it is a very scientific approach.
  If the patient had to come back in the hospital and stay for another 
2 weeks or month, if the patient had to have another surgical procedure 
done, if the patient had to be put to sleep and had to have the 
services of an anesthesiologist, if the patient went home and had to 
have a specialized wheelchair, if the patient had to have an assistant 
to help them with daily living, all of that stuff is--and I'm sorry, 
Mr. Speaker, I use the word ``stuff.'' That is improper. But all of 
those things, items of cost, are used to calculate what the total 
amount of a judgment should be if in fact it is determined that what 
the doctor did led to this terrible, unfortunate outcome.

                              {time}  1615

  Well, if the patient has disability income insurance, and when the 
injury occurred they were 30 years old, that disability income 
compensates them for 80 percent of their salary for the rest of their 
life. If the patient has health insurance that covers anything else 
that had to be done, that information should be known to the jury 
because, if not, we're looking at a situation we sometimes call double 
dipping. All of these things, Mr. Speaker, drive up the cost of health 
care and health insurance for everybody else. For everybody else.
  So, Mr. Speaker, that's why I was so pleased to hear the President 
say that he acknowledges that and something ought to be done about it. 
His mind is open. And I will say to him and to my colleagues in this 
body and in the Senate that my mind is open as well. And we should sit 
down, if necessary, Mr. Speaker, with a blank sheet of paper and just 
say, Look, certain things in Representative Gingrey's bill, H.R. 1086, 
we don't agree with, but here are some other sections that we think are 
very good. And, by the way, we have some ideas here--the majority 
certainly, because it would be their bill--and would say, Look, let's 
put this in and that in, and let's get to a point where we can all 
agree.
  If we take this attitude, Mr. Speaker, on every aspect of health care 
reform and health insurance reform, I can name, and, in fact, I would 
like to name, several things that I just know that there would be 
bipartisan agreement on in regard to how the insurance companies treat 
their clients.
  We, on my side of the aisle, we Republicans absolutely would prohibit 
insurance companies from canceling or rescinding a person's health 
insurance coverage after the fact by saying, Oh, you know, 5 years ago 
when you took out the policy, you didn't answer every question just 
right. You had a lab test that you didn't tell us about or you had 
hepatitis when you were 16 years old in playing high school football 
and you completely recovered, but still, you didn't tell us about it 
and so now you're 45 and you have to have your gall bladder taken out 
and, lo and behold, that $20,000 bill, estimate of benefits that you 
got, we're not paying a dime of it. You're paying all of it. That's got 
to stop. That absolutely has to stop.
  We are in total agreement that insurance companies should not be 
allowed to deny coverage for preexisting conditions. We are in 
agreement that setting up exchanges, insurance exchanges in every State 
where a person who doesn't have insurance or works for a small company 
that doesn't offer it can shop. And you've got multiple insurance 
companies. There are 1,300 of them, I think, across the country, that 
offer health insurance products that they can compete and that a person 
could go online and know exactly what is covered, what the deductible 
is, what the copay is, who the doctors are in the provider network. 
Even go online and check and find out if the doctors have a good 
record, if they're cost-effective, and make a decision. If their income 
is lower than 300 percent of the Federal poverty level--for a family of 
four, that's about $65,000 a year--then to supplement them so that they 
can afford to buy those policies.
  We're in agreement with that, Mr. Speaker. My colleagues, we don't 
disagree. We have compassion, too. The two Democrats who were here 
earlier may be two of the most compassionate Members of this body, but 
we have a heart as well, and we want to help people. We want to help 
the downtrodden. But we don't want to, as I said at the outset, to just 
simply say we can't solve this problem.

[[Page H9715]]

  Golly, we put a man on the Moon in 1969. It took us about 8 years to 
do it. We caught Russia and passed them because we had the 
determination, the will to do that. And you tell me now, 50 years 
later, that we can't solve this problem without just saying, Look, we 
throw up our hands. We can't do it. The Federal Government, you take it 
over and run our health care system and let's have everybody on 
Medicare or Medicaid.
  No. We have a lot of things that we can work together on, and we need 
to do that.
  This idea of medical liability reform and the savings that it brings, 
certainly it should be on the table, and heretofore it has not been. 
There's not one section in any of the three bills that came through the 
House or the two bills that came through the Senate. We need that, just 
as we need, Mr. Speaker, a comprehensive electronic medical records 
system. That's another cost saver of maybe $150 billion a year.
  Yes, there's some upfront costs. Indeed, I think the President put 
$19 billion into the economic stimulus package to make sure the 
government continues its efforts to set the standards so that all these 
computer systems, hardware, software, for every specialty and every 
subspecialty, can talk to the Medicare system, can talk to the Medicaid 
system, can talk to the VA, can talk to the military, can talk to every 
private insurance company across this country.
  So if you go on vacation and if you have a little card about the size 
of a VISA card or American Express card that's got your identification 
in there, very secure and encrypted, and you're at the South Pole, for 
goodness sakes, and you fall and hit your head on the ice and you're in 
a coma and they take you to the emergency room, somebody can reach in 
your back pocket, get your wallet out, swipe that card and know exactly 
what your medical history is, what medications you're on; if you're 
taking Plavix, not inadvertently give you Coumadin and kill you. So 
electronic medical records is something that we can, should, and I 
think do agree on.
  Mr. Speaker, I think that if we put the bickering, as the President 
said, try to put the bickering aside and listen, and the majority party 
allows the minority party in the room, we can do this. We can do this. 
And I think the American people would be proud of it.
  There's one other thing that I have been proposing and my colleagues 
on this side of aisle, this idea of why is it that people can only buy 
health insurance in their own State. Their own State may have passed 
all kinds of mandates on health insurance that require a test for this, 
a test for that, coverage for this, coverage for that. All of these 
things that sound nice when you propose them, but they are part of a 
basic policy, and so every policy that's sold in the State has to 
include all those things.
  Well, these people can't afford health insurance in that particular 
State. Maybe it's my own State of Georgia, or Alabama, Louisiana, or 
Florida, Massachusetts. But yet, they are forced to buy insurance in 
their own State--and many of them don't because they can't afford it.
  Well, let's let them go online and shop in a neighboring State or 
anywhere in the country that they want to look and see. Just like on 
Medicare part D, the prescription drug plan, you will see that the 
competition in the free market will keep those prices down and make 
them competitive and that an individual can pick a policy that's almost 
tailor-made for him or her, just as they do in the prescription drug 
plan.
  In the prescription drug plan, part D of Medicare, my mom goes online 
and she makes a list of the six medications that she's on and she gives 
her Social Security number, she gives her zip code so that she would 
know which pharmacies are close to her and what plans are available, 
and she looks and sees how much the different plans charge for the 
medications that she's on. She doesn't care what they charge for 
something that she's not taking. That doesn't matter to her. It's the 
uniqueness of her that allows her to shop in that way and get the best 
price.

  We can do that with these health plans through these exchanges. We 
can set up these high-risk pools so that people that have birth defects 
or they come down early in life with type 1 diabetes or they have 
osteoporosis or multiple diseases, they can become part of a high-risk 
pool in each State. And we can say to the insurance companies once 
again, You have to participate and you can't charge more than 1\1/2\ 
percent--1\1/2\ times what the standard rates are.
  Again, I started out the hour specifically talking about medical 
liability reform and the significant savings. I think I even referred 
to it as a silver bullet worth of savings. And I think that that is 
something that certainly ought to be--if we pass health reform this 
year, that certainly should be a major provision; electronic medical 
records, of course, as well, and many of the things that I mentioned. 
But to just throw up your hands and say, We can't do it.
  We have got 435 of the best and brightest people in this country 
serving this Congress. All walks of life, all educational levels, all 
previous professions, and we can't do this? We have to just literally 
toss up our hands and say, Let's let the Federal Government do it?
  There yet is not one word in this Constitution that talks about 
health care and the requirement of the Federal Government providing 
health care, not one word, and I look at it often, my colleagues. I 
look at the glossary often.
  I look at things like: Arms, the right to bear; assembly, the right 
of; counsel, the right to; grievances--we talked about that earlier, 
didn't we--redress of; petition the government, the right to; the 
press, freedom of; religion, freedom of; speech, freedom of. But not 
one word about health care.
  I want to just close by saying to my colleagues, we don't want to let 
the Federal Government take over our health care system. There's an art 
to medicine. It's not an exact science, and we don't need bureaucrats 
getting between our doctors and our patients.
  The American people are telling us that. And I say woe be unto us if 
we turn our back on them and force a government-run health care system 
down the throats of the American people by some parliamentary trickery. 
I hope, Mr. Speaker, that my colleagues are smarter than that. I know 
they are. I know they are.
  In the final analysis, we're going to do the right thing, and I hope 
and pray that we do it in a bipartisan way.

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