[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 6 (Wednesday, January 20, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H255-H263]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
IMPACT OF MASSACHUSETTS ELECTION
The SPEAKER pro tempore. 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. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate being
recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of
Representatives. I have been listening to the dialogue that has been
poured before us from the three gentlemen here, my colleagues, speaking
mostly about health care, the National Health Care Act, and what this
could mean.
I would like to pick this up from the place where Todd Akin left off,
and that would be the importance of the State of Massachusetts. I do
not believe that it can be overstated, the impact of the election
returns last night. I listened to Carl Cameron on FOX News who is, I
believe, a very well-informed and probably a deeply researched
individual. He said that this was the most important congressional race
in 50 years. Well, I can remember that far back, and I would completely
agree with him. And I would suspect it may be the most important
congressional race in the history of our country, Mr. Speaker.
The situation in Massachusetts where Todd Akin laid out the poem that
said, ``and fired the shot heard around the world,'' well, this in
Massachusetts last night was a shot heard around the world. It was the
Scott heard around the world. He will be here tomorrow, straight down
that hallway,
[[Page H256]]
swearing into the United States Senate.
So how did we get to this point, and what happened? And what is the
significance of what took place in Massachusetts last night, Mr.
Speaker? Those are the issues that I think are important to the
American people here. I will make the point that we're a Nation that,
let's say, we have people who are studying every day to be nationalized
American citizens. We're a Nation that has skimmed the vigor off of
every donor civilization that has sent immigrants to the United States.
The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, 390 years ago. They
disembarked from the Mayflower because they came over here for
religious liberty, religious freedom. They established those freedoms
and liberties right there in the Bay State. Now this Nation was founded
on the same principles and the same liberty that came to us with the
Pilgrims and were built upon as the years unfolded. And it's rooted
back, a long ways back. A Western civilization itself, I would trace it
back to the Greeks 3,000 years ago and the Age of Enlightenment,
especially the English-speaking division of the Age of Enlightenment,
which brought us free enterprise.
And if there is an immigrant in the United States who is studying to
take the test to become a naturalized American citizen, there is a
whole stack of flashcards that are there that are put out by the United
States Citizenship Immigration Services. They are glossy flashcards.
The government spent a lot of money to make these things real nice. You
look on one side, and it will say, Who is the founder of our country?
You flip it over to the other side, George Washington. Who saved the
Union? Flip it over, Abraham Lincoln. Who signed the Emancipation
Proclamation? Same man. Next question, What is the economic system of
the United States of America?
You flip the card over, and if you are going to pass the test to
become an American citizen, you have to answer what it says on the back
of that card, free enterprise capitalism, Mr. Speaker. The economic
system where we don't have the government setting prices. We have the
market setting prices. We have supply and demand setting prices, and we
let people invest equity, sweat equity and capital to buy, sell, trade,
make, gain, invent. We protect the intellectual property through
patents and trademarks, and we also encourage people to make money. We
know that when you generate that wealth in the legitimate private
sector that everyone prospers, that a rising tide does lift all boats.
And that's what people were thinking, I believe, in Massachusetts
yesterday. I spent 3 days there. They were an outstanding 3 days. It
was a fantastic experience. I went to polling places. I went to
campaign headquarters, both sides of the case. I went to union halls,
and I talked to as many people across the State of Massachusetts as I
possibly could. The center line was this: the Federal Government spent
too much money. It's gotten too big. It's gotten too intrusive. They're
imposing too many mandates and regulations on the American people. They
have their own universal health care in Massachusetts, and they aren't
particularly happy with it.
One of the things they have a conscience about is not imposing that
version on the entire United States of America. They understood that
for them to cast a vote wasn't just, How did their ballot for Scott
Brown, how did it affect the destiny of Massachusetts? It wasn't a
selfish vote. They understood they have a national responsibility, Mr.
Speaker.
It was a national responsibility, and I understand this, I think, as
well as most in the country because Iowa is first in the Nation caucus,
and we take our jobs seriously, and we're all politics all the time.
Generally, every 4 years we very, very often have at least one
Presidential candidate from Massachusetts that we host. They go around
through Iowa, sit down, have coffee with us and we talk to them. We
look them eye to eye. I have done that more than once. We take our
retail politics seriously.
But when we go to the first-in-the-Nation Presidential caucus and
cast our ballot there, even though it has more impact than probably the
single vote of anyone from any other State with regard to who is
nominated as the President, Mr. Speaker, it is still only a
recommendation to the rest of the country. Iowa gets to go first. We
take it seriously. Somebody has to be first. I don't have confidence in
anybody else to do a better job. But it's still only a recommendation.
What happened in Massachusetts last night was not a recommendation
that affected the rest of the country like Iowa makes when they do the
first-of-the-Nation Presidential caucus. What happened in Massachusetts
last night was a decision for the rest of the country, a decision that
will bind the destiny of America. They understood that, and they
stepped up to that cause, and their conscience and their sense of
responsibility kicked in.
So I am very proud of what the citizens of Massachusetts have done.
They have mobilized the political effort that many of them hadn't seen
ever in their lifetimes. I talked to a lady that said that she has
worked in political campaigns for 50 years, 50 years; and she said that
when the polls closed, and they counted the ballots, they cried their
eyes out, and then they got up, and they went to work again. Well, this
time I imagine there were tears among these groups. They probably did
cry their eyes out, but they were tears of joy. And a great shout of
joy went up all across America that finally, finally somebody heard.
I have asked for reinforcements. I have prayed for the cavalry to
come, and at the last minute they came riding over the hill in the
person of Scott Brown. Now we have a chance to save, serve and protect
our liberty; and this debate now begins on an entirely different field,
on an entirely different terrain, and I believe an entirely different
outcome. I am completely in awe at how the most improbable sometimes
comes along to save us with something that appeared to be inevitable.
The gentleman from Tennessee has been willing to stick around, and I
would like to yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman
from Tennessee who happens to be a doctor, who knows what TennCare
looks like and knows what America would look like if we adopted
TennCare, CanadaCare, United KingdomCare, GermanCare, name your
country. But this is America, and take care to protect America. The
gentleman from Tennessee.
Mr. ROE of Tennessee. I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr.
Speaker, I think last night, watching what happened in Massachusetts,
was really, in the many years I have watched politics, was really
astounding. The people there I think--it was more than just health
care. We have a country now that's not in trouble. We're America, and
we know how to avoid trouble in this country. But we have a lot of our
citizens who are hurting now. They need jobs, and they need employment.
Certainly in our district and around our area where unemployment is
over 10 percent, that's the talk in the barber shops and the
restaurants: What's the economy doing? What business are we going to
lose overseas next? What manufacturing job is going to be gone?
I think the people there looked at more than just health care. I
think they looked at a stimulus package of almost $800 billion that I
don't believe has worked. It certainly has provided some one-time jobs.
But you know and I know as a former mayor that you don't take one-time
money and turn that into a long-time job.
How you do that is you incentivize the people who are creating jobs
in this country. That is small business. In this country, 70 percent of
the businesses are small business that create the jobs. And how do you
help them? You make the cost of capital, the cost of money, the cost of
creating a job less. How do you do that? Well, you cut capital gains
taxes. You can cut individual income tax rates. You can accelerate
depreciation for plant equipment that they buy. So we have a country
now that has put itself in debt that my great grandchildren will not be
able to pay off.
{time} 1815
We looked last year, and it is staggering to me how much a trillion
dollars is. I get almost overwhelmed, and I made it through calculus in
college, and I have a tough time getting my arms around how much money
that really is.
[[Page H257]]
We have a budget that went up 8 percent last year. We added 8
percent. In the State of Tennessee where I live, we had to live on less
money than the year before. That is what we had to do in our State.
That is what California is having to do. That is what every State in
this Union is having to do.
I don't know if the people here in Washington get out, as I have, and
talk to our Governors and our State legislators, but our States are in
trouble. We need our economy to pick up. If our economy was doing well,
I don't think that our health care issue would be as big of an issue as
it is. As people lose their jobs, they lose their health benefits.
The people of Massachusetts got their arms around the bigger problem,
and I think they looked at this entire country and the direction it is
going and said, Whoa, wait a minute, we don't like the direction that
the country is going. They put the brakes on this. They said let's stop
and take a slow, measured look at what we are doing.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Tennessee. He mentioned
that he has taken calculus. I would submit that they put me through
calculus, too, a couple of years, and they actually never told me at
the beginning, middle, or end that there wasn't much purpose of going
through all of those calculations. It was more about how to discipline
the mind to think rationally, logically, and reasonably. That is also
why they send people to law school. Our President went to law school
and actually taught in law school. He taught constitutional law, which
is a bit of a surprise to me that he can advocate some of the things
that he does.
The basic logic that comes isn't rooted in law school and it isn't
rooted necessarily in calculus. It isn't rooted in geometry or algebra.
It might be two plus two equals four. But the rationale that was
presented to us consistently and repeatedly by Presidential candidate,
President-elect, and then President Obama, Mr. Speaker, was health care
costs too much money. I have been browbeaten by the Europeans. They
would say we spend 9.5 percent of our GDP. You spend 14.5 percent of
your GDP. That is way to much money. Well, never mind, we make more
money than they do. And never mind, we have better health care than
they do. Never mind that we are willing to spend that. We don't like to
spend it when we are looking at it in large, but when it comes time to
save our lives or our health, we are glad to spend that kind of money.
We don't know what the threshold is, but our GDP, about 14\1/2\
percent spending, some say as high as 16 percent, we spend too much
money; so, therefore, we should solve the problem by what? This is this
two plus two. What the President proposed to us didn't spend less
money. Anybody in third grade, if you say you have a problem with
spending too much money, what do you do about that, you could hand them
a 50-cent allowance, and you spend a quarter, not all 50 cents, and a
kid can understand that at age 6 or 7, maybe even less than that.
But we are here listening to, being browbeaten and demagogued because
we have a health care policy that spends too much money. It is 9.5
percent in the rest of the industrialized world and 14.5 percent here
in the United States. So what does the President propose to do about
solving spending too much money? Spend more. Spend at least a trillion
more.
If you look at the real costs involved, look at Judd Gregg's numbers,
the first real 10 years, it is $2.5 trillion more. If you look at the
contingent liabilities that go along with this and all of the other
components, it may be as high as $6 trillion more. So the problem of
spending too much money is solved supposedly in a rational fashion and
advocated by the President, the Speaker of the House, the majority
leader of the United States Senate, and all of the people that line up
to vote for their bills, solve the problem of spending too much money
by spending a lot more money.
Now we have kind of forgotten about all of the browbeating that went
on about we need more competition in health care insurance. The
President made that argument over and over again. Well, he has the
bully pulpit, but, you know, they have yet to invent the saw that will
cut off the branch of truth. We can go out and stand on the branch of
truth and we can say, All right, how many insurance companies do you
need in America, Mr. President, to have the extra competition? Funny, a
guy that doesn't much believe in the free market system thinks we ought
to inject competition into the health insurance industry. So the
President wants one more health insurance company in America and then
that is going to fix the problems.
So I ask a simple question: How many companies are there in America?
The answer comes back, 1,300; 1,300 health insurance companies, Mr.
Speaker. And that is a little bit of a round number. So if you have all
of these companies that are competing, 1,300 of them--I have never had
that much competition, and I made my living on low bid in the
construction business. When I had seven or eight or nine people bidding
against me, I already knew somebody was going to make a mistake on the
bid and lose money and take the chance for profit away from the rest of
us.
So if there are 1,300 companies and they are competing, throwing one
more in there doesn't really help that mix. But it wasn't the
President's idea to provide more competition anyway; he just thought we
would believe that. His idea was to get government in the business of
providing that which the people in the private sector could do very
well themselves.
And, by the way, these 1,300 companies offer a different variety of
policies that individuals could shop and buy, approximately 100,000
different policy varieties, Mr. Speaker. So you can multiply 100,000
policies out there and you can look at 1,300 companies that are
brokering them, and imagine how is it the Federal Government getting
into the business could legitimately compete with those kinds of
entities.
And if you want more competition, the way you provide that is open up
the trade from State to State so people can buy health insurance in
Tennessee instead of New Jersey. The gentleman from Tennessee knows
what that is like. That would make sure that all 1,300 companies
competed against each other, and these 100,000 policy varieties would
probably get to be less because they wouldn't have to accommodate some
of the silly mandates that come down from the States.
So a young man buying health insurance in New Jersey, a healthy 25-
year-old might pay $6,000 a year for a typical policy. Or he could go
to Kentucky where there are fewer mandates, and a similar but not
identical policy might cost that same individual $1,000. Now, what kind
of a smart, young person usually on a limited budget would write a
check for $6,000 if they could write a check for $1,000. Wouldn't we
then have more people insured if they had more options? That's the
answer.
Furthermore, there are things we want to fix. We want to fix lawsuit
abuse. The health insurance underwriters produced a number. The one
that I trust the most--and I have seen numbers on the cost of
lawsuit abuse in America on health care to go as low as 5.5 percent of
the overall cost of health care services provided. I have seen it go as
high as over 30 percent. The number that I trust is 8.5 percent. So 8.5
percent of the cost of health care in America is $203 billion a year,
and this is included in the additional tests that have to be given
because they are done for defensive medicine purposes. Also, the
litigation and settlements that don't have a medical reason for them.
We want people to be whole. If they have suffered from malpractice, the
legitimate system is there, but the abuse has taken this way out of
sight. So $203 billion a year going almost all of it to the trial
lawyers, not to the patients but the trial lawyers.
And do you think there is a single Democrat in the House of
Representatives or a single Democrat in the Senate who would stand up
and say this is completely and totally utterly wrong to be funding
trial lawyers on the backs of health care patients and acting like we
are reforming health care and protecting the trial lawyers completely,
not allowing insurance to be sold across State lines, and denying full
deductibility for everybody's health insurance premiums?
Mr. ROE of Tennessee. If the gentleman would yield, let me give a
practical example of what you are saying there.
[[Page H258]]
Let's say years ago if I were working in the emergency room and a
patient came in with right-sided pain, I might be concerned about
whether they had an appendicitis. I would get a blood count. It was at
that time probably a $15, $20 test. It is probably a $50 test now. You
do a physical examination, take their vital signs, their blood
pressure, their pulse and temperature and do a physical exam, and you
would say, I don't think there is a chance that you have an
appendicitis, but let's let you go home and if you get worse, start to
have more pain, come right back and we will reevaluate you.
That is not going to happen anymore because part of the legal system
now, you know if you do that and you don't get a CT scan, a very
expensive test on that patient and you go out and you happen to have an
appendicitis, the one in 500 times that might happen, you will be held
liable. So all 499 people are going to come out of the emergency room
glowing in the dark, just about, because of all the X-rays that they
have had to protect the doctor from a potential lawsuit of the one in
500. That is the problem that you get into with the tests that are not
needed basically to protect the physician. And why wouldn't the doctor
order those tests? You don't want to put up everything you have earned
in your entire life for the risk of that one in a thousand, that
jackpot that somebody might have.
The thing you also brought up is people are genuinely injured in the
system. We don't have any way to adequately compensate the injured
parties without the attorneys getting their hands on a significant
amount of the settlements.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I had a conversation with an orthopedic surgeon a
couple of months ago. He said to me, I have a small practice. He said
95 percent of the MRIs that he orders are completely unnecessary except
he has to cover everything because someone might try to hit the
jackpot. So he has to order those tests. Everybody in the business
orders all of those tests.
If you cut out that 95 percent, his number is that it costs patient's
insurance companies, taxpayers, a million dollars a year just to fund
the unnecessary tests in one that he calls a small practice. That gives
you an implication. You can multiply that $1 million across the whole
country, and what you come up with is $203 billion in additional costs.
We can't get them all out of there. There is a bill that we have
introduced that finds about $54 billion over 10 years. I think it ought
to be tougher than that. I think we ought to tighten this thing down
more.
The argument again that has been made out of the White House and out
of the majority party and from the Speaker's office itself, too, is
that Republicans don't have any solutions. Well, they must have sat up
some night in one of those formerly smoke-filled rooms to come up with
an idea like that. It is completely and utterly false, Mr. Speaker.
Republicans have introduced at least 42 separate bills in this 111th
Congress that reform health care. And I can tell you exactly how many
of them were incorporated into this document that was promised to be a
bipartisan document, and that is a complete double aught goose egg.
None. No free market solutions, no patient choice solutions, no medical
malpractice lawsuit abuse reform, no selling insurance across State
lines, no full deductibility, no real transparency, none of the
components that give people options and choices have been considered.
And why? Because if you put free market solutions in and you give
people the liberty and the freedom to make their own decisions on
health care, first, they are going to take a financial responsibility
and a personal responsibility. If you help out on the lawsuit abuse,
more people are going to say, I don't need that test either, Doctor,
and so let's save the money and not do that. But the bottom line is
Republicans have always injected free market solutions in place; for
example, health savings accounts.
Health saving accounts are just starting to grow the way they need
to. That is 2003 legislation, wiped out by this proposal that comes
from Speaker Pelosi, the President, and Harry Reid. No more health
savings accounts if you read the legislation and figure out how it is
going to come out. Imagine this, Mr. Speaker. If a young couple had
engaged in health savings accounts when it was first set up by this
Congress in 2003 and they invested $5,150 as the maximum amount into
their health savings account, and if they spent $2,000 a year out of
that health savings account in legitimate expenses and accrued the
balance of that account at 4 percent per annum and compounded it, they
would reach retirement age, the two of them in reasonably good health
with $950,000 in their health savings account.
And what is the interest that Charlie Rangel has on that: Tax it.
They want to tax it. I want to give an incentive to buy a Medicare
replacement policy and let them keep the change. That Medicare
replacement policy would cost about $72,000 per person today. That is
one of the Republican solutions, but it doesn't fit very well with
socialized medicine, you know. That is what happens.
This is an effort to try to mix. They didn't try to mix, but the
reason it doesn't mix is because it is oil and water. It is freedom and
liberty. It is market solutions and individual responsibility and
doctor-patient relationships on this side, and over on this side it is
socialized medicine, one size fits all. Big Brother at the top
draconianly mashes this down on everybody else in America, and you have
to accept the policy that they give you and you have to then get in
line.
Mr. ROE of Tennessee. If the gentleman would yield, let's just talk
about, for a minute, we have this very complex, over 2,000-page bill
which I have read. The Senate bill is over 2,500 pages, which I will
admit I have not read. I have seen the synopsis of it. We have 118 new
agencies in this very complex schematic that you have down there in
front of you. We should, on both sides of the aisle, be able to agree
on a few things. One is that we agree that the cost of care is rising
too fast and we have the uninsured out there that we need to cover.
Those are the two basic premises that spurred this entire debate. How
can you best solve those problems? It is not that complicated. You can
do several things.
One, as you point out, let's just look at five things that we can do
on 25 pages, not a complicated 2,000 pages. You can let people buy
insurance just like you do your auto insurance or your life insurance.
We see advertisements every night on television with a little gecko
running around, those cute ads they have. Let people buy health
insurance across State lines.
Let young people who don't have health insurance stay on their
parents' plan, if they don't have a job that provides it, until they
are 26 or 27 years old. Pick your number. You can cover 7 million
people by doing that at zero cost to the Federal Government.
You pointed out very eloquently liability reform. You save billions
of dollars doing that.
You simply sign up the people right now who are eligible for
government programs without creating another new one. You cover 19
million people by doing that. You are not creating another agency and
118 new bureaucracies.
Expand the health savings account. I will give you personal
experience. I have had one for 2 years. I put $5,000 a year in. Instead
of the insurance company keeping my $10,000, I have spent about $2,000.
My wife and I are both healthy, fortunately. We have $8,000 in our
health savings account that we can use how we choose, not the insurance
company.
{time} 1830
I think for someone who owned an individual policy, you can treat
them like a big corporation. Let them deduct their premiums just like
General Motors gets to do, like the big unions do, and so forth.
And then I think the last thing you have to do is you have to put
some individual responsibility for each of us, so that everybody, no
matter what care they get, needs to pay something for the care. It
shouldn't be totally free. We saw that in Tennessee, when our costs
just skyrocketed because of the very generous plan we had there where
there were no costs to the patients and it was overutilized.
So those are five or six things that every one of us in this room, in
this auditorium, ought to be able to agree on and take care of. And it
wouldn't be hard to do. It is an easy solution. We
[[Page H259]]
should be able to pass that in no time at all. And the President ought
to listen to that. He really should. These are simple, real-world
solutions.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Tennessee. They are
simple, real-world solutions. They are free market solutions. They are
commonsense solutions. And there is this other part about human nature.
It is helpful when a country has its leaders that believe in the
principles that built this as a great Nation, and also understand the
human nature part.
There has to be incentives in place. And a nanny state can never be
enough of a nanny to take care of people's failings. I think it was
Phil Gramm that said this first, that I heard it anyway, and that is
you take the safety net out there, that safety net that taught a man to
fish, and then you give him the fish instead, and you turn the safety
net into a hammock.
So here is the safety net down here, and as Congress keeps cranking
that safety net up higher and higher and higher, and it becomes more
and more of a cushy hammock. And you know, there is a reason why the
most successful civilizations in the world generally originated
someplace in a temperate climate instead of down by the equator.
Because there wasn't an incentive. You didn't have to prepare for
winter.
Where I live, you by golly got to be ready for winter, which means in
that window of time that we have from around the first of April until
about the first of December you got to get all the things done you are
going to get done outside. That means all the food has got to be put
up. That means all the staples have to be put in place to get your work
done. We got to get our construction work done then, because in the
wintertime it gets cold and it gets dark soon. That means you have
industrious people.
Now, I am not drawing a comparison between the Mason-Dixon line. I am
drawing a comparison between the equator. And I want to make that point
clear for my colleagues here. But the industriousness of people, that
was necessary. Squirrels put away for the winter, grasshoppers freeze
to death. And if you give people the hammock instead of the safety net,
they are not going to take care of themselves, and more than likely
they are going to have to require us to do that because we are not
allowing them to be tested.
There is a value to adversity. When I think of the things that I have
gone through, and I don't wish them upon anybody, the challenges that
are there, but every one of them put a little more steel in me, a
little more mettle in me, and caused me to be better organized, work
harder, be more industrious, prepare more. And if you take away that
reward for planning for your future, you will have people that don't
plan for their future.
If you pay young women to have babies if there is not a man in the
house, they will have babies. If you pay them as long as they don't go
to work, they won't go to work. These are simple things that anybody
can understand that seem to have completely escaped the President of
the United States and the majority party and the troika of leadership
we have in this country called Obama, Pelosi, and Reid.
Mr. ROE of Tennessee. If the gentleman would yield for just a second,
there is a great book out by Milton Friedman, Free to Choose. And he
makes a statement in that book, if you want more of something, you
subsidize it. If you want less, you tax it. And it is a very simple
principle you can apply to health care or anything else. If you have
government programs that are subsidized by the taxpayers, you will
create more people who use those programs. We have seen it over and
over and over again.
I will give you a brief example before I yield to my colleague from
Georgia. In this country we talk about, and I heard many times about
how--and we do have failings in our health care system. It is not
perfect. But when President Clinton had a heart attack, he was taken to
an emergency room to the hospital, where he had a heart cath and
discovered that he had blockages in his arteries and needed a bypass
operation for it to save his heart. He got a bypass operation. It was
delayed a couple, 3 days I am sure because of a blood thinner they gave
him. I don't know that, but I am pretty sure that is what happened or
they would have done it immediately.
Let's say you are in small town Johnson City, Tennessee, and you
don't have any insurance or anything at all, and you have a heart
attack and you come to the emergency room, what is going to happen to
you is you are going to get a heart cath and you are going to get a
bypass operation, and then we will figure out how to pay for it.
In Canada if you have that heart attack, what they will tell you is
there is a list that you get on that you can get a catheterization,
where they put the dye in your heart and see if you have a blockage.
You will get on a list. And when your name comes up, you will get the
cath. And then you will get put on the list to see if you get a bypass
operation. That is the difference and the delay in the care. And I have
seen it happen. I know people that that has happened to in Canada.
They have wonderful physicians in Canada, I want to point out also. I
know many of them, have worked with some that have moved to our
community. Well trained, excellent doctors. So when you get the care, I
think, in Canada, it is good care. I really believe that. When it is
available, I think it is excellent care because of the experience I
have had with Canadian-trained physicians. Some of my colleagues I
worked with every day were well-trained physicians.
That is the rationing of care that we speak of that we don't want to
have happen in our country. And we have enough of that as it is. People
will tell you that insurance companies ration care. And they do. And I
think certainly they are to be held culpable also.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Tennessee. And I just
relate a very quick story that was presented to us by Dr. David Janda,
who has written a book. He is out of Michigan. He has practiced in
Canada. When he first went up there to work in the emergency room, and
he is an orthopedic surgeon now, he had a patient come in, a young man
who had torn up his knee playing softball, torn meniscus, ACL, I think,
one of the ligaments. And he looked at him and he said you need
surgery. I can schedule you in the morning. And he is in a Canadian
emergency room. Must have been his first day at work. He found out that
he couldn't schedule this young man for surgery the next morning. He
couldn't even schedule him for a review to get the surgery
approved under the Canadian health care plan.
So he had to back up and put him on crutches. And 6 months later this
young man was allowed to be examined by the doctor who approves the
request for surgery, and 6 months later they actually did the surgery.
Almost 1 year to the day, the surgery took place in Canada that would
have taken place the very next morning in the United States. Meanwhile,
this young man can't go to work, his leg atrophies, he is running
around on crutches. His life has been altered because different things
happen in your life in that fashion. He didn't get back in the groove.
What does that cost when you let people come out? That is an example.
And I know that we have experts here tonight. And so watching that
clock tick, I am very interested to hear what the gentleman from
Georgia has to say, whether it be about the Hawkeyes, the Yellow
Jackets, or his field of expertise.
Mr. GINGREY of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I think that I thank the
gentleman from Iowa for yielding. And I am not going to say one word
about the Hawkeyes and the Yellow Jackets. Maybe we will come back to
that another year. But congratulations, by the way, to the Hawkeyes.
They did a great job.
Mr. Speaker, it is an opportunity to come before our colleagues
tonight and to join with Representative King from Iowa and
Representative Roe, Dr. Roe from Tennessee, and later on you will hear
from Michelle Bachmann, Representative Bachmann from Minnesota, talking
about the health care bill and health care reform in general.
I think we would be remiss if we didn't talk about the election
yesterday in the Bay State, Massachusetts. Many of my colleagues have
already spoken about that. And there is a lot of political pundits on
every channel, cable, broadcast, network, whatever, trying to analyze
and say, well, what happened? How did this occur? And, you know, we all
have our own opinion,
[[Page H260]]
but quite honestly, I think it is a lot about health care.
It was kind of instructive that when people were asked, coming out of
a voting booth, what they thought about the health care reform bill in
the Bay State that the same percentage that were opposed to it is the
percentage that Senator-elect Scott Brown received in the election. It
was the same margin. So clearly, health care was a significant issue in
that race in my opinion.
I think the people in Massachusetts clearly had about a year-and-a-
half, 2 years to look at the commonwealth care that was enacted. And
they don't like it, Mr. Speaker. They don't like it because it, instead
of lowering the cost of health care, it has driven it up. Although more
people are insured and have coverage in the Bay State, they are, as my
colleagues have talked about in regard to other systems, there is a
long queue, there is a long wait. It is very difficult to get a
physician to see you, particularly if you are one of those who has a
subsidized policy.
And basically, the state is going broke. And they have had to make a
number of changes. They have had to drop dental care as part of the
coverage. They have had to drop many thousands of legal immigrants who
were not citizens, but had coverage. They no longer have coverage. And
I know my colleague especially, Mr. Speaker, Dr. Roe from Tennessee has
probably already talked about TennCare and their experiment 10, 12, 15
years ago, and the miserable failure of that.
So yes indeed, health care had a lot to do with the outcome yesterday
in Massachusetts. But it was not just health care. I think that people
are so tired, Mr. Speaker, of this Federal Government ignoring them and
dissing them, as the expression goes. We had the August recess that
lasted 5 weeks, and all of these town hall meetings all across the
country, and we come back, and you would think that the majority party
and the administration would have listened to those people. And
instead, what they did is they simply changed the number on the House
bill. They took off H.R. 3200, because the people had railed against it
so loudly over that 5-week period of time, instead they just changed
the number on the bill.
Mr. ROE of Tennessee. Will the gentleman yield?
Mr. GINGREY of Georgia. I gladly yield to my friend from Tennessee.
Mr. ROE of Tennessee. You can call a polecat a skunk, but it is still
a polecat or a skunk, whatever you name it. I yield back.
Mr. GINGREY of Georgia. Absolutely, the gentleman is right. And so
people are sick and tired of being disrespected. They were very
disappointed of course in the economic stimulus package, $787 billion
that was supposed to keep the unemployment rate at 8 percent, no higher
than 8 percent. It is 10.2 percent now. 16 million Americans out of
work, many of them in the Bay State.
I think it is a message. It is a message to the administration, to
President Obama, and the Democratic majority, Speaker Pelosi, Leader
Harry Reid in the Senate. Look, you still have an opportunity, my
colleagues, you still have an opportunity to come together in a
bipartisan way and do things in an incremental fashion that truly will
lower the cost of health insurance for everybody and make it better and
rein in, yes, the abuses of the health insurance industry as well.
And what is this big rush, anyway? The Democratic majority, Mr.
Speaker, insisted on getting it done in 2009. They didn't want to face
this during an election year. Well, look, the American people are
saying to us, and especially to the majority and to the President, We
don't care about the next election. Get it right. Don't rush to
judgment. What is the big hurry? Why not get it done in 2011 if it
takes that long? But get it done right.
The people of Massachusetts went to the polls, they knew that their
bill was an abject failure, and that is basically what they were
saying. If the administration and this majority ignores it, they do it
at their own peril.
With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back to the gentleman from Iowa,
because I know there are others that want to speak tonight.
Mr. KING of Iowa. And reclaiming before I yield, I want to pose a
question here for consideration. Canadian health care plan, the average
length of time to wait for a knee replacement is 340 days, a hip
replacement 196 days. Where I come from, we don't stand in line. I went
to Moscow a while back, and I watched people hunched over in their
shoulders with their big coats and hats walking around looking for a
line to stand in. And then when they got to the end of the line, then
they went and looked for another line to stand in. I think a lot of
times they didn't even know why they were even standing in line.
And it occurred to me, and it may not be universally true, but it
occurred to me that free people don't stand in line. And if you are
standing in line at Kentucky Fried Chicken, that means that somebody
ought to have a free market opportunity to set something up next door.
And people will go over there and get their service. But that is what
the free market principle does. People don't stand in line when it is a
free market principle. I would submit also that people die in line.
I yield to the gentlelady from Minnesota.
{time} 1845
Mr. KING of Iowa. The gentlelady from Minnesota.
Mrs. BACHMANN. I thank the gentleman from Iowa.
I also have so much esteem for my colleague from Tennessee, Dr. Roe,
and also my colleague from Georgia, Dr. Gingrey. They are just
wonderful examples, and they enlighten all of us who aren't medical
professionals. But they've been there, done that. They have skin in the
game, and they know what's at stake. They know what's at stake for
those who have put so much into becoming physicians, who have put their
life on the line to be healers, but also the people they serve. They
see the real cost in human health, in terms of misery that is down the
road if we embrace this system.
I come at it a little bit differently. My background is that I am a
former Federal tax lawyer, and I see how egregious tax costs can
destroy businesses, destroy families, individuals, farms and
creativity. And also as a business owner. My husband and I have started
two businesses. We're not a big deal; we've employed 50 people, but we
do know what it is to take and start a business from scratch using our
own equity, our own capital. We have to be disciplined and make a lot
of good decisions. We have to get it right every time so that we can
make a profit.
My husband told me that he spoke to a number of other small
businessmen that have said to him they will have to cut jobs with their
small businesses if this health care bill goes through. There are a lot
of small business employers that would love to provide health
insurance, but they can't because currently health insurance is so
expensive.
I think one thing that cannot escape this discussion that we're
having tonight among colleagues, whether we're health care
professionals or tax lawyers or small business owners, is this;
President Obama's Chief Economic Advisor, Christina Romer, said herself
that if President Obama's plan would go into effect, that America would
see 5.5 million jobs lost if we adopt his plan. Not only would it cost
us trillions of dollars that we simply don't have, but it would cost us
5.5 million American jobs. It isn't that those jobs wouldn't be done,
but they wouldn't be done in America. It's another 5.5 million jobs
that would go offshore.
I yield to the gentleman from Tyler, Texas, Lou Gohmert.
Mr. GOHMERT. So what you're saying is the President's health care
bill really is a jobs bill, but instead of creating them, it eliminates
them.
Mrs. BACHMANN. It eliminates them, and I think one can understand
why. We saw a chart or a graph that was recently produced several weeks
ago. It plotted all of the private-sector experience in the Presidents
from the last 100 years. It showed that in President Obama's Cabinet,
in his administration he has less private-sector experience in real job
creation than any other administration: 7 percent experience. No wonder
every answer that comes out of this administration is more spending,
higher taxes, more government. But the last seven economic recessions,
every blooming one of them
[[Page H261]]
we have come out of the recession--from government? No. From small
business creation.
We would love, in our small business, to create more jobs, but I will
tell you this, from the other small business job creators that I know
in Minnesota: Right now they are scared to death. They don't want to
add more jobs because they know if they add more jobs, they're stuck
with more costs that they may not be able to take. They don't want to
hurt the existing people they have now that they hired. They don't want
to have to close their doors and fold up. A great business in our
State, Home Value stores, just announced last week that they were
closing their doors after over 35 years in business. Why? Because of
this job-killing, bone-crushing debt that's coming out of Washington,
D.C. Let's reject that.
The American people last night rejected President Obama's decision
because if there is one headline that would encapsulate all of 2009 it
would have to be this: ``The Federal Government takeover of private
industry.'' That's what last year was all about. The American people
said no way; we believe in America, we believe in job creation, we
believe in prosperity. And that's what last night's poll numbers
reflected.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I would propose that it
actually goes another step yet, and that is, we talked about the
government takeover of the private sector, and we talked about between
30 percent and 33 percent of the private-sector profits nationalized by
mostly this President's administration. We've seen the nationalization
take place, the government takeover, but the most personal and private
property we have is our own bodies. This is a government
nationalization, a government takeover of our individual persons and
bodies, managing our health care and seeking to tell us what we can eat
and what we can't, what we can drink and what we can't, managing our
own personal bodies. What could be a more egregious violation of
liberty and freedom than that?
I would like to pose a question for a response here and maybe go down
through some things in my mind and see if there is dissent among the
esteemed Members of Congress that are here on the floor.
First I would ask you, if they impose a centrally controlled system
of government-run health care, will it result in a loss of personal and
economic liberties? And is it an indisputable violation of the
principle of limited government established by the Constitution? Would
you agree with that?
Mrs. BACHMANN. Absolutely. Yes, I would. I would agree with that.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I will ask another question. If they impose a
government-run health care system, would such system result in
increased costs in taxes to individuals, to families, to businesses, as
well as to all taxpayers at the Federal, State and local levels?
Mrs. BACHMANN. It would. And that's what I am so worried about as a
tax lawyer, that this will mean diminished opportunities for Americans
because we will see increased taxes in defiance of President Obama's
promise to the American people.
Mr. KING of Iowa. What kind of harm would that do to the American
economy and the businesses and jobs and productivity and quality of
life?
Mrs. BACHMANN. It would be irreparable harm. It would be very
difficult to come back from.
Mr. ROE of Tennessee. Would the gentleman yield?
Mr. KING of Iowa. I will yield.
Mr. ROE of Tennessee. What the gentlelady from Minnesota has said is
absolutely true. Just in our area, at Vanderbilt University in
Nashville, Tennessee, the largest employer in the county, 14,000
people--these are jobs that don't go overseas, they're not exported,
these people are doing great work--new innovations, new treatments that
may go away with this system--they're afraid to hire anybody. In my
local town, our medical center, 9,000 employees in their system. The
adjoining city has a medical system of 6,000. That's 15,000 people that
work in health care in two cities with a little over 100,000 combined
population bringing quality care to the people of Appalachia.
What I am worried about is if that's going to go away. Those jobs
will dry up--and those are great jobs that are not exported anywhere,
they are jobs for Americans with health insurance, with retirement
plans, great benefits, and we may be tanking that also.
I want to just reminisce for a moment when I graduated from medical
school and think back as the gentlelady from Minnesota, Congresswoman
Bachmann, was talking about. When I graduated from medical school there
were five high blood pressure medications, three of them made you
sicker than the high blood pressure did. Now we have over 50 wonderful
medications to provide for people. Antibiotics, a plethora of
antibiotics; we had one or two at the time I graduated. Ultrasounds,
MRIs, PET scans, survival rates of cancer. The research is just
astonishing that's going on in America. We are the leader in the world;
the world looks to us for medical innovation. With this right here I'm
afraid it will stymie that innovation.
I think back--and we were talking about this a moment ago--one of my
good friends and a colleague, a medical colleague whose wife is
English, his sister-in-law lived in England. She died of chronic
lymphocytic leukemia. That's a disease that Americans just don't die of
any longer. We live with that disease. It's treatable. She was treated
with a blood transfusion. We could have done that 50 years ago. That's
all the treatment. And she got that treatment because she was too old
to be treated. We don't do that in this country. And I'm afraid we're
heading down that path.
I yield back.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, the value of life changes.
And another point, a point that I think John Shadegg made very well,
is that this policy here--whatever number they attach to it or whatever
they might try to do--will have mandates in it. And what it will do is
it will require certain health insurance policies to have those
mandates covered in there, and it mandates that people buy them or
employers provide them. And his case is that that's a tax. I would ask
the man who is the judge if he could explain why it's a tax when the
government makes someone buy a policy and then takes it out of their
taxes if they don't and puts them in debtors prison if they hold back.
If you have to buy something, why does that make it a tax?
Mr. GOHMERT. If it's mandated by the government, then certainly it's
a tax, because that is all that the government is entitled to do. Under
our Constitution, you can't force somebody to buy a product.
And I appreciate your directing that question to me because obviously
all the prior questions were directed at my friends from Louisiana and
Minnesota because you qualified it by saying, This question is for the
esteemed Members. So I stayed quiet throughout your answers, but now
you have included me as the unesteemed Member.
Mr. KING of Iowa. They're polar opposites, Mr. Gohmert; they're
Tennessee and Minnesota.
Mr. GOHMERT. Yes, exactly, Tennessee. Tennessee and Minnesota.
But that is what has gotten people upset across the country and is
what we saw in Massachusetts. They've seen what's going on around here.
There was a promise that C-SPAN would be covering all the
negotiations because we're talking about people's lives, the length of
their lives, and their loved ones, how long are they going to be able
to be living in this world, whether they will get the medication they
need, or are they going to be told you're too old? So as the President
so ably said before he was elected, those negotiations need to be out
there. And all we've seen is the nasty, sordid deals that were cut
after being behind closed doors so that you have insurance companies
signing onto the President's bill. And then you go through and say, ah,
here are the pages where they got their deal cut. Ah, here is the deal
that the plaintiffs lawyers got. Ah, here's the deal the pharmaceutical
industry got. And they're conflicting. And it is such a mass of mess
the way they've cut these deals and they've forged them together. And
the ones that are going to suffer are the people in this country when
there is no reason to.
[[Page H262]]
Mr. KING of Iowa. Should they be negotiated publicly and free of
political favoritism, Mr. Gohmert?
Mr. GOHMERT. Exactly.
Mrs. BACHMANN. If I could just respond on the tax portion. Government
can directly mandate that you must pay a percentage or a fee, which is
a direct tax. But if government requires you to do something or
purchase a health insurance policy in conformity with what government
says must be the items in that policy, that's just as much a tax as if
government says you must pay a percent or an exact amount. The final
result is the same because the taxpayers' pockets are picked for what
government mandates it must be picked for. It is a tax, pure and
simple. That's the point.
Mr. GOHMERT. And along those lines--I appreciate the gentleman
yielding--we've heard the President say, well, you know, States require
you to buy insurance for your car, so this is nothing new.
Mrs. BACHMANN. It's not the same.
Mr. GOHMERT. It is very new. Of course we've heard the argument that
actually, yes, States do require you to buy insurance if you're going
to drive a car. You don't have to own a car or drive a car to live in a
State, not in any State.
But another thing that's lost in the equation too is there is no
mandate by any State in this country to buy insurance to protect your
own car and your own person. You are required to buy insurance to
protect the other person whom you may harm while you're driving. And
all of that is based on the privilege of driving, it is not based on
just living.
We are supposed to have, under our Constitution, as was mentioned in
the Declaration of Independence, this right to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness. Whether you're an unborn child or whether you're
an old geezer like some of us, you actually have a right to life. And
here the Federal Government is saying we're going to snuff yours out a
little early because we just don't find that you're all that
productive. Where is that line drawn once they're allowed to say now
you buy a product or you don't get to live here?
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I have this other thought. It
occurs to me, and I believe in H.R. 3200 there was an amendment offered
that would have required Members of Congress to live under the same
law. That offer for that exemption was voted down by Democrats. So if
you had a bad policy, wouldn't you want to exempt yourselves from that?
I would ask the gentleman from Tennessee what he thinks of that.
Mr. ROE of Tennessee. I think you're absolutely right. I mean, it's
the ``do unto others, except don't do it to me.''
Mr. KING of Iowa. Would you support language that would require that
Members of Congress stand in the same shoes as the citizens of America?
Mr. ROE of Tennessee. There is not one of us standing here now that
wouldn't agree with that 100 percent.
And Congressman Gohmert makes a good point about the mandate. Let's
give some practical experience about what's happening to the mandate.
Mandate means you have to purchase something, and in Massachusetts it's
health insurance. It also says that you cannot be denied because of a
preexisting condition. So the Harvard Pilgrim health care plan,
beginning in March of 2008 until this year, 2009, 1 year, they found
this, that almost half the people who got their health insurance
through the Harvard Pilgrim plan kept it for an average of 5 months.
{time} 1900
You couldn't turn them down, so they waited until they got sick, and
when they got well, they dropped it. If you were in that 5-month period
of time, that plan spent over $2,000 a month on those folks. For the
other folks, like me, who just bought it for the year, they averaged
then about $300 a month. So people scammed the system. They paid the
tax until they got sick because it was cheaper than buying the health
insurance. Then they bought the health insurance and kept it until they
got well.
It's the same thing as using Congressman Gohmert's example of a car
wreck. Well, you have your car wreck, and then you buy the best car
insurance policy you can, and when your car is fixed, you drop it.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.
Mr. GOHMERT. It is so important also to note that, with all the talk
about our friends across the aisle who are concerned about the working
poor in America, if you look at the bill that was passed out of this
House, it makes it very clear: if you can't afford the great policy
that is mandated and if you're just above the poverty line where the
government is going to pay for it, you'll have an additional 2\1/2\
percent income tax on your income. That is outrageous. Those are the
people who, if they could afford to buy the insurance, they would buy
the insurance. Now you're going to pop them with another 2\1/2\ percent
tax. That's not caring about the working poor, about the people who are
helping make the engine in this country go.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, it's quite likely that this
fellow right here, the health choices administration, czarissioner,
would probably rule that those high-deductible, high-copayment, low-
premium policies wouldn't fit his idea of what health insurance is in
America. So the low-income people who can only buy in, according to the
way this thing was laid out in negotiations in the Senate, would have
about four different tiers of policies.
It's interesting: those who have the lower premiums pay the least
amount. Those who have the highest premiums pay the highest amount. The
people who can pay the highest premiums are the ones who get the best
kind of health insurance out of that, and those who can afford the
least have to have the highest copayment, but they can't do the high
deductible because that doesn't fit the socialist model. That's part of
what's going on.
Mrs. BACHMANN. If I could add to that, the one thing that doesn't get
talked about very much here is the iron ceiling on wages that was
contained in this bill.
If you have a double-income couple with no kids and if their combined
income is $64,000 a year or more, at that point they lose all Federal
subsidy. So what they have to do is go out, and if their employers pay
the 8 percent fine to the government and don't provide health
insurance, they have to go with after-tax dollars and purchase health
plans, which, in Minnesota, would cost about $14,000 a year. So you'd
have a couple making $64,000 a year who has to go and buy a plan out-
of-pocket; but if the couple made $63,000 a year, Uncle Sam would pay
their way. That's the iron ceiling on wages. There is no incentive to
make a dollar more, because you would be so heavily penalized by going
out of the subsidy, and that kills the American Dream.
Why would we have a couple of people here in this Chamber make a
decision for over 300 million people? Let's free up decision-making for
300 million people to make the cheapest and best choices for
themselves.
I yield back.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota and the other
participants here tonight from across the board, from Tennessee and
Texas.
I will just summarize what's going on here.
I think that a government-run health care system takes away our
liberty. It nationalizes our bodies. It will result in increased costs
and taxes. The taxes come in the form of mandates as well as whether we
think we're paying taxes or premiums. It should not add to the crushing
national debt or impose mandates. No tax dollars should go for
abortions or for illegal aliens. It should be negotiated publicly, out
in the daylight. It should apply to all Members of Congress. It should
provide equal protection under the law. It should be free market-based,
and it should protect the vital doctor-patient relationship.
That's the summary of what we want to do here, and it's what we have
the opportunity to do because the cavalry came riding over the hill
just in the nick of time in the form of, today, Senator-elect Scott
Brown and, tomorrow, Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
I yield back the balance of my time.
[[Page H263]]
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