[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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