[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 24 (Wednesday, February 24, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H798-H799]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           HEALTH CARE SUMMIT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Teague). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from California (Mr. Garamendi) is recognized for 
5 minutes.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Tomorrow is an extremely important day here in 
Washington, D.C., and across the Nation. Tomorrow's a day in which the 
President will hold a summit on health care. The outcome of that 
meeting is of extraordinary importance to individuals, to families, and 
to millions upon millions of Americans, indeed, the entire Nation. A 
successful outcome would be one in which we have bipartisan consensus 
on the critical issues of health care, on how we're going to provide 
coverage for all Americans, how we deal with the pernicious and all too 
common insurance company practice of terminating policies when a person 
becomes ill or denying coverage because of some preexisting condition.
  Tomorrow's summit is extraordinarily important in that the outcome of 
that summit may very well give us insight into how we control the 
extraordinary increase of cost in health care, a cost that is not 
sustainable either for individuals or for this economy. We're currently 
spending somewhere in the range of 17 percent of our current GDP on 
health care. Compared to the rest of the industrialized nations, that's 
nearly 60 to 70 percent more than they spend of their wealth. Most 
every other industrialized nation spends 10 percent or less. We're 
giving away an extraordinary advantage to our competitors.
  Now, if our health care system actually produced extraordinary 
outcomes for all the population, we might say it was worth it, but the 
fact of the matter is that our health care system does not. Our 
population statistics, which are the statistics on how well we are, how 
long we live, how well our children thrive, how many of them die at 
birth and in early childhood, all of those statistics would indicate 
that this Nation's health care system is very, very poor. In fact, we 
rank below Colombia and other emerging nations around the world.
  So what are we going to do?
  This House passed a very important piece of legislation that goes to 
address many of these issues--the issue of how we contain our costs, 
how we improve our system, how we provide for wellness rather than just 
sick care--a very complex bill, but one that also provided a very, very 
important element, the element of a public option.
  I'm from California, and 2 weeks ago the largest insurance company 
providing policies, more than 80 percent of the single-person policies, 
said, well, I think we're going to increase our rates by up to 39 
percent, and that was on top of a similar rate increase in the previous 
year; some 60 percent increase for those individuals that are not in a 
group that have to go out and buy insurance on their own, a totally 
unaffordable situation. And they also announced that in the intervening 
year, or the year after these increases went into effect, they would 
willy-nilly, and at their own will and their own desire, increase the 
cost of those policies, an extraordinary and new event.
  Those individuals, in fact, every individual in America needs a 
public option, a place to go to get a competitive health insurance 
policy that provides real benefits at an affordable cost. This House 
passed such a public option.

[[Page H799]]

Hopefully, at tomorrow's summit, that issue will be renewed. But the 
papers in this town say that that issue is dead. I think not, because 
in America we do have public options today--they're not readily 
available to all of us unless you happen to be 65--and that public 
option is Medicare. If you happen to be a Federal employee, like I and 
others in this room, you have a public option available to you. If 
you're in the military, you have a public option available to you, a 
military family.
  Public options are widely available in America. We need to provide 
that option for every American. We need real competition. We need 
WellPoint Blue Cross of California to have a competitor. They have none 
today.
  Fortunately, this House, today, took a step to end the monopoly, to 
end the antitrust exemption that the health insurance companies have. 
It will help, but it will not provide the solution that we need. We 
need that public option. We need the health care reform that this House 
passed. And hopefully tomorrow, at the President's summit, the outcome 
will say, follow the lead of the House; give us a public option, give 
us the controls on prices, give us the steps toward staying healthy, 
and let's finally put this Nation into a universally available health 
care system.

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