[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 177 (Wednesday, December 2, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H13454-H13457]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1930
                     THIRTY-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) is recognized for 
60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, we're happy again to kick off another 
edition of the 30-Something Working Group in which we will try to bring 
some facts and some analysis to the floor of the House of 
Representatives.
  I can't help but get up after having to sit through what our friends 
on the other side were talking about a little bit. And it's 
interesting, Mr. Speaker, as we see some of our Republican friends have 
a very short memory as to what transpired here. And I have been 
fortunate enough to be here over the last 7 years and was able to watch 
President Bush with the Republican-controlled House, a Republican-
controlled Senate, a Republican Supreme Court, many State legislatures 
and the State Governors' Mansions were controlled by the Republicans. 
In Ohio, I know that of course was the fact. Run up huge budget 
deficits, start wars, cut taxes for the top 1 percent, take their eye 
off Wall Street, ignore health care, continue to support and subsidize 
the oil economy, push globalization, not enforce our trade laws--all 
with a rubber stamp from the Republican Congress.
  And then all of a sudden in 2008, 2009 the bottom falls out. Wall 
Street collapses. We see the stock market collapse, credit locks up. On 
and on and on. And our friends on the other side act like that just 
happened by happenstance.
  And now, in order to try to address those issues, we have to make 
some very difficult decisions as a country and come together as a 
country. And we get people ignoring the previous 8 years, when anybody 
who is being realistic can see how we got here.
  And all we want to do now is have a conversation about how we move 
forward and how we use this and see this as an opportunity to address 
some of the major structural changes that we have in the United States 
of America. And there are two major ones in our economy that have been 
like an albatross around the necks of small business people all over 
our country and big businesses all over our country, and that is health 
care and that is energy.
  And so this Congress has stepped up to bat to address two of those 
major problems without a lick of help from the Republicans, not a lick 
of help. And at the end of the day, they're going to be on the wrong 
side of history, like they were for Social Security and Medicare and 
civil rights and a lot of the other major issues that really gave us 
things to be proud of in this country.
  And so as we move forward with the House bill on health care--and now 
the Senate is opening up debate and having debate on the health care 
bill--we are trying to address the concerns of the American people.
  And I want everyone, Mr. Speaker, to understand the issues that we 
have taken up here as a Democratic Congress. And this is all with the 
understanding that we know that the unemployment rate is too high, 
there are too many people out of work. There is a lot more work to be 
done.
  But if you look at the previous 8 years prior to President Obama, you 
will see an administration that completely catered to Wall Street and 
Big Business in the United States of America, whether it was a trade 
agreement, whether it was immigration laws, whether it was health care, 
whether it was energy. You could bet your bottom

[[Page H13455]]

dollar that President Bush was on the side of Big Insurance, Big 
Pharmaceutical, Big Oil, Big Agricultural, right down the line.
  And when we came in as Democrats, we began to change that. And all 
you have to do--and they say you can judge someone by their enemies--
the Democratic Party took on the Big Oil interests. The Democratic 
Party is taking on the insurance industry. The Democratic Party is the 
one party getting the banks out of the student loan business. And all 
of these sweetheart deals that were set over the last 8 years are on 
their way out the door. And President Obama got stuck with a heck of a 
mess, there is no question. A heck of a mess.
  But in America, we have to live in reality. I know some people on the 
other side may not necessarily agree with that or like that, which is 
fine. But we are the majority party, and we have to deal with reality 
without illusions and deal with the facts that are at hand.
  And here are the facts: if we do absolutely nothing with health care, 
the average family of four next year will have an $1,800 increase, 
$1,800. And then the following year it will be another $1,800, and the 
following year it will be another $1,800. That's reality. Everyone is 
agreeing on that
  If we do nothing, human beings, American citizens in this country, 
will continue to get denied coverage by insurance companies because 
they have a preexisting condition. That preexisting could be you were 
involved in a domestic violence situation; that preexisting condition 
could be infertility, or as we even heard, spousal infertility. You're 
denied. Diabetes. Cancer. That's if we do nothing. If we do nothing, 
just in my congressional district in northeast Ohio we will have 1,700 
families go bankrupt next year because of health care costs--if we do 
nothing. And on and on and on right down the line. An inhumane, costly, 
expensive, inefficient health care system.
  And so we chose to take on the big fight. We chose to make a human 
decision to say this problem needs to be fixed, it needs to be 
addressed, and we know it's politically risky but we know we're going 
to do it because there are too many people in the country, Mr. Speaker, 
who need us to act and not sit on the sidelines where it is safe.
  It would have been nice, we could have just said, You know what? 
We're going to play it safe. We're not going to do anything that's 
going to upset anybody or get FOX News riled up or Rush Limbaugh or 
Clear Channel, the right wing talk radios. We're just going to play it 
safe. But at the end of the day, history would not be very good to us 
because they would have said, What did they do in Washington, D.C., 
when this decision, these hard decisions needed to be made 10 years 
ago?
  And our kids and our grandkids would say, Jeez, Mom. Jeez, Dad, you 
were in Congress during the very difficult time. We needed some big 
decisions to be made. What did you do when you were there? And you can 
look proudly at your kids and say to them, I did nothing. I played it 
safe. I sat on my hands because I wanted to get reelected or I was 
afraid that Rush Limbaugh would make fun of me.
  The reforms that are coming out of this House of Representatives--as 
I have said when I am back home in Youngstown, Ohio; in Niles, Ohio; in 
Warren, Ohio; in Ravenna; in Kent and Portage County; Akron--these 
reforms are for our people, our people who have struggled and fought 
and got zero wage increases over the last 30 years, who've got to 
haggle with the insurance company, get denied, get ignored while 
they're on their death bed, lose their job, lose their pension. That is 
wrong, Mr. Speaker. Wrong. And we're going to do something about it.
  So let's just take what happens when health care reform passes. There 
will be some time until the exchange gets set up and, you know, whether 
there's a public option and what it looks like. That may take a couple 
of years. But immediately what happens is that no longer in America 
will you get denied coverage because of a preexisting condition. Never 
again. If you have a child, a son or daughter, who is under the age of 
27 years old, they can stay on your health care insurance. So all of 
those young people in their early and mid-20s who can't get health 
insurance or can't afford health insurance can stay on their parents' 
health insurance. That gets implemented immediately.

  If you have a health care catastrophe in your family--and being a 
Member of Congress, we get these calls, and we are out in the public 
and we meet these people at the fairs, at the festivals, at the bowling 
alley, at the bingo halls, at the civic events--there will be a cap on 
how much you can pay out of pocket per year on health care costs so 
that we can eliminate people in the United States of America going 
bankrupt because they had a health care catastrophe. And all of our 
friends on the other side of the aisle who talk about family values and 
everything else voted against that. Voted against it.
  So when you look at the health care reform bill, it is a values 
issue. It is a family values issue that we need to address. And our 
budgets and our investments speak to that, speak to our values and what 
we care about and what we stand for.
  And when you look at it, AARP's endorsed it, the American Medical 
Association's endorsed it, the Catholic Bishops had nothing but good 
things to say about it. And even the Business Roundtable, the top CEOs 
in the country, said that the health care reform bill in 2019 will save 
them $3,000 an employee, $3,000.
  Now, you can argue with me, you can argue and call people ``liberal'' 
and ``socialist'' and pull out all of the names that our friends on the 
other side have been using for the last 60 or 70 years in their 
rebuttals to policy initiatives by the Democratic Party, but you can't 
argue with the Business Roundtable saying that it's going to save them 
$3,000 per employee.
  And aren't we tired of getting calls from small business people 
telling us about all of the increases, all of the rate increases? And I 
just got a call the other day from a health care provider talking about 
this issue and another from a health care business person who said he 
just got in the mail a 50 percent increase for his business. He had one 
person out of a couple hundred get sick. Pushed the number up. Next 
thing you know, he goes from paying $600,000 a year to next year he is 
going to have to pay a million dollars a year. And he said, Timmy, I 
may have to shut the doors. I may have to shut the doors. That's what 
we're trying to prevent.
  How can we have any sustained long-term economic growth if we don't 
take care of the health care issue in this country? If we keep 
strangling our small business people? And I understand that there may 
be some small business people that maybe disagree with any extension of 
the role of government in any area. But there is nothing left to 
control the massive insurance industry in the United States of America 
unless we do what the people have always done when we needed to address 
a big problem in this country, and that is join together through our 
elected officials who we send to Washington to help us.

                              {time}  1945

  We need to ask them to get together and solve this problem, and that 
is what is happening. And we see the insurance industry and the extreme 
right wing of the Republican Party, the neoconservatives, continue to 
be offended. Nobody here wants to hurt anybody. Nobody here wants to 
destroy America. We are here to help, and we are here to address these 
problems collectively as a country.
  We have people on the other side of the aisle, because Rush Limbaugh 
says they shouldn't, they won't even work with us. Getting rid of 
preexisting conditions, letting people be on their parents' insurance 
until they are 27, limiting how much out-of-pocket you can spend, 
making sure that they can't knock you off the rolls after you have 
insurance coverage, these are some basic things that we should all be 
able to agree upon. Mr. Speaker, we are doing it.
  And the same issue happens with energy, to where we send in this 
country $750 billion a year in wealth out of our country through the 
gas stations that go to oil-producing countries: a $750 billion wealth 
transfer right out of our country. And a couple of years ago, Mr. 
Speaker, we spent about $115 billion out of the Defense Department 
escorting ExxonMobil and Big Oil ships in and out of the Persian Gulf. 
So if you do the math, the Persian Gulf oil that ends up in your gas 
tank should really

[[Page H13456]]

be $1.50 more because of the subsidies that the American taxpayer has 
paid to provide the security of these ships going in and out of the 
Persian Gulf. Now in addition to that, subsidies for oil companies, tax 
credits and tax cuts to go and continue to drill, so completely 
subsidizing Big Oil and the oil economy.
  And what Democrats have said is, how do we put together an energy 
policy that will take some of the $750 billion and instead of letting 
it go offshore and out of our country, how do we direct it back into 
the United States, and at the same time reduce CO2 and at 
the same time resuscitate manufacturing in the United States of America 
through our windmills, through our solar panels, using natural gas that 
is here in the United States.
  We don't have the kind of oil that some of these other countries do. 
And why do we prop up these dictators and these royal families who have 
no concern for our well-being, when we can use the need for energy and 
make it work for us and put together a system and a national policy 
that is pro-American.
  There is not a bigger, more patriotic piece of legislation in the 
United States of America's House of Representatives right now than the 
energy bill that passed this House. What kind of national security plan 
is it for us to continue to send money that goes to these kingdoms that 
fund terrorist organizations that don't like us when we could be 
putting steel workers to work making the 400 tons of steel that go in 
the windmills or resuscitate manufacturing in the United States of 
America by making sure that our people manufacture the 8,000 component 
parts that go into a windmill. To me that makes a good deal of sense.
  And both of these issues in the long term are jobs programs. Does 
anybody have a better idea, Mr. Speaker, on how to stimulate 
manufacturing in the United States? I can't think of one. We have tried 
to cut taxes on the top 1 percent and hope something trickles down, and 
that means they will invest back in America and will create jobs in the 
United States. That didn't work. It did not work. The Republicans had 
the House, the Senate, the White House. They implemented the whole 
George Bush economic policy, and it didn't work. And here we are today.
  I know our friends like to be critical of the stimulus bill, but in 
January we lost 750,000 jobs. Now we are still losing a couple hundred 
thousand jobs a month, but it is not quite as bad. We are trending in 
the right direction, and we do need to put together a jobs program. We 
do need to invest in the transportation and put thousands and thousands 
of people to work. We need to do that. We need to make those 
investments. There is no question about it. And we need to get back to 
a moderate, balanced, prudent, wise, economic policy and tax policy 
here in the United States.
  The old Keynesian economic theory that asked some of the wealthiest 
people in our country to pay a little more in the good times, cut taxes 
in the bad times and increase social spending to stimulate the economy 
and smooth out these rough edges, worked for a long time in this 
country. It led to the construction of a great middle class, balanced 
investments in education and transportation and roads and bridges. It 
is time for us to get back to that.
  In the Mahoning Valley in the 17th Congressional District, we are 
putting together what is a very smart, balanced, economic policy 
locally where we are making the proper investments and laying the 
proper groundwork. What we are trying to do locally is to line up with 
where the national policy and the national trends are going. You had to 
be sleeping if you can't tell that the world is moving towards green 
technology, green energy. The hedge funds, the big money people are all 
moving in that direction. The scientists, the engineers, all moving in 
that direction. All of the research moving in that direction.
  And so there is health care reform and what that will do for our 
local community, and there is energy. And so we have been fairly 
fortunate amidst all of the economic problems and the high 
unemployment, that we are seeing back home seeds that are beginning to 
sprout, and that once credit loosens up, we will see long-term economic 
growth.
  But we need our national policies, Mr. Speaker, to shape us as a 
country and push our economy in the right direction. The big decisions 
that are being made here through the Obama administration are sound. I 
think we are making some smart long-term decisions, and it will pay off 
in the long run.
  We see it in sports all of the time where you can start a game or 
start rebuilding your program, whether it is college football or 
basketball or the NBA or whatever the case may be, where you see a 
great coach start to implement the plan and you don't necessarily start 
winning all of the games right away. You saw it with Bill Walsh in San 
Francisco, and you see it with the Patriots and the Steelers. It 
doesn't always start off with the Super Bowl. And for the Browns, Mr. 
Speaker, it has been a rough road, but we are going to get past it. It 
has been a difficult time to have been a Cleveland Browns fan. But the 
bottom line here is we are in a rebuilding process. We are laying the 
groundwork. We are making the fundamental decisions necessary to allow 
for long-term economic growth.
  When you look at health care and 30 million more people that are 
going to have health insurance, we are going to need docs, we are going 
to need nurses. There is going to be a total reinvigoration of health 
care information technology.
  Just, for example, I was at the National College a few days ago in 
Youngstown, Ohio. They have programs primarily in health, health 
information technology and some business entrepreneur classes. The 
college opened up with 50 people. It now has 850 kids from Youngstown 
and Campbell and Struthers and Warren going to this school to learn 
health information technology.
  Now here we have people, young and middle-aged, looking at where the 
economy is going and what they need to be doing. And so the huge 
investment in health information technology in the stimulus bill, the 
investment that we will be making in health care by making sure that 
everybody is covered and coordinating all of these different systems, 
is going to be an opportunity for many of these young kids who are 
doing what we asked them to do: Go to school and get educated and do 
the right thing, and you will be rewarded.

  And so in 10 years, Mr. Speaker, in 2019, 2020, we will look back on 
these decisions that have been made in this Congress and we will see 
that we have eliminated a lot of human suffering because of what we 
have done with the health care system. We will see that we have reined 
in costs for the insurance companies, and that has allowed small 
businesses to reinvest back into their own companies and give pay 
increases to their workers as opposed to covering all of the health 
care increases. We will see people who believe that a compassionate 
government can exist to advocate on their behalf.
  A lot of people say, I am afraid of the government. It is not the 
government you need to be afraid of; it is the big insurance company 
you need to be afraid of. It is the Big Oil companies you need to be 
afraid of. And we are taking them on. Ten years from now, it is going 
to be looked back upon as one of the turning points in our Nation's 
history, like Medicare and like civil rights, and like a lot of the 
great programs that have been established to help our people. Average 
Americans are getting represented in this government.
  We will look back on our energy policies, and we will see that we 
have reduced our dependency on foreign oil. We have given people hope. 
We have reestablished America as an innovative leader in the world, and 
it will help with health care reform and lift up the middle class 
because we need to start making things again in the United States. We 
need to start making things again. And with windmills and wind 
turbines, these are things we can't ship in from China. We have to make 
them here. We are, and it is going to put middle class people back to 
work. So those two major issues are going to unleash the creativity 
needed, the American spirit needed, the American independence needed.
  I am proud of what is happening here. I am proud of what is happening 
in the United States. I know it is difficult. I know it is tough. I 
know it is noisy,

[[Page H13457]]

Mr. Speaker, but these things are happening for us in the United 
States. When it is all said and done and that parent goes to get health 
insurance, or some young person goes to get health insurance, and they 
call the insurance company, and they have diabetes or cancer, the 
insurance company cannot deny them.

                              {time}  2000

  Their parents are going to say, Did you know there was a day 5 years 
ago where you would have gotten denied coverage? And 20 or 30 years 
from now, our kids will say, You've got to be kidding me. That really 
happened in America? And we look back on the civil rights movement 
today. Our generation says, You've got to be kidding me. White people 
and black people weren't allowed to drink out of the same water 
fountain?
  That's how we're going to look back. Did we really, as a country, do 
that? And it is shameful that that happened in this country. Those are 
the same exact feelings and sentiments that we are going to have here 
in the United States years from now. And we will say, Did we really 
deny people health care? We really had people die because they couldn't 
afford health care when the treatment was available and the technology 
was available? We really let that happen?
  This is a turning point in our country's history, and I'm proud to be 
a part of it.

                          ____________________