[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 41 (Friday, March 19, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H1717-H1718]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           HEALTH CARE REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk for a few minutes again on 
the health care bill that's pending that has millions of Americans 
upset, near panicked. Obviously, we have health care problems in 
America. I don't know how to answer some of the people who have 
preexisting conditions with their kids, who have lost their jobs or 
different challenges, but you don't need to have this type of bill to 
address those.
  We've offered solutions from trying to limit defensive medicine to 
doing it across State lines. Clearly, we are going to have to spend 
some money to try to address the preexisting conditions and 
catastrophic, but you could do that and still keep the private sector 
by having some form of reinsurance that may or may not be subsidized to 
the individual or through the government in a pooling process. But 
there are ways to address this other than making the government the de 
facto center of the entire health care industry.

[[Page H1718]]

  I want to talk about four particular things. One is that in this is 
one of the most weird economic terms: ``unearned income.'' There is a 
tax increase on unearned income. Unearned income is income you've 
already been taxed for once. If you put your money in an investment 
fund or you put it in buildings or in annuities, you've been taxed on 
that. It's not unearned income. And for years, we've encouraged people 
to save so our Social Security system didn't go broke, so our Medicare 
system didn't go broke. Now we're going to tax those who've saved, and 
we're going to put a penalty on keeping people from saving. It seems 
counterintuitive that when we're facing these huge challenges in a 
retirement system that we would raise taxes on the very thing that 
we've been encouraging people to do.
  Then we have the question of industries like the orthopedics. In 
Warsaw, Indiana, a city of about 15,000 people, three of the four 
biggest orthopedic companies in the world are centered there: Zimmer, 
DePuy and Biomet. In addition, you have Medtronic with a large facility 
there and lots of other small ones. They bought the biggest companies 
in Switzerland, Germany, and France. It's a category where we lead the 
world. So what's our solution? If we're the ones leading the world, 
we're the ones inventing new things--well, we're going to tax them, so 
maybe they'll leave.
  They only have two choices. Since the new tax is half of their R&D 
cost, they can either stop the R&D so we won't know 20 years from now--
I had one 13-year-old ask me on a teletown hall call the other night 
ask me, How will this bill affect me long term with my health coverage? 
I said, I don't really know because the way we're taxing orthopedic 
companies and these, we won't know what would have been invented. The 
way we're taxing the pharmaceutical companies, we won't know what drugs 
would have been invented because we're driving it out of the U.S. or 
out totally if they can't make money on it anywhere in the world. So 
that's another part of this bill.
  Then I heard one Member on the floor tonight repeat one of the most 
often heard myths, that because Canada covers their health care, the 
health care for GM was cheaper. In fact, our Auto Caucus met with the 
head of GM when we were talking about what we were going to do related 
to GM. He said in direct response to some of the Members from the other 
party's question, No, our costs are higher in Canada. It was so 
counterintuitive, every Member was asking why they were higher in 
Canada. They said, Well, unions aren't going to take the base plan. 
They ask for the base plan with a supplement because the base plan in 
Canada and England isn't satisfactory. So if you have enough power, you 
will negotiate it more, plus the taxes are higher in Canada. He said, 
that's why--and that's why GM has followed through with this, as well 
as Chrysler--jobs have moved down to the U.S. because our health care 
was cheaper. How did this myth start? Why do we keep hearing that 
constantly repeated when they know the difference.
  The other point I wanted to make is on the so-called savings in 
Medicare. How are they getting savings from Medicare? Partly from 
eliminating your choice of Medicare Advantage, the only program that's 
ever come in under budget as part of Medicare because we had the big 
insurance companies negotiating them with the big pharmaceutical 
companies. Rather than having somebody in a government office who 
didn't know their head from a hole in the ground making the 
negotiations, quite frankly, we put people who are actually bottom line 
people who could figure out what the margins were and what they could 
survive with and move ahead with. That's why Medicare Advantage works. 
But they're going to do it by controlling the utilization of equipment.
  We never had a discussion about utilization of equipment. They want 
to say 80 percent. In Indiana, the only city that can meet 80 percent 
on heart, on oncology and so on is Indianapolis. So Fort Wayne 270,000 
people, the South Bend region with another 200,000 people, other parts 
of the State can't reach that utilization. That's the hub and spokes 
system, only they're moving the hubs to the bigger cities in the United 
States.
  We're not talking about whether you can have this type of thing in 
rural areas. We're talking about whether the type of diverse health 
care spread out with access all over America is going to be changed in 
the name of cost savings. It is a way to save money because people then 
have to do just like veterans do in the hospital system: they have to 
pay their gas. They have to decide if they're going to stay overnight. 
If they get canceled, they have to drive back home or get a motel. All 
that has shifted to the individuals. No discussion. No discussion about 
that little clause in there that talks about utilization of equipment; 
yet it's brutally already being implemented. So I hope that somehow in 
the next 48 hours, a miracle occurs, and we can defeat this bill.

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