Congressional Record, Volume 157 Issue 3 (Friday, January 7, 2011)

[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 3 (Friday, January 7, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H126-H133]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

HEALTH CARE AND OTHER ISSUES

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for
60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I very much appreciate the
privilege to address you here on the floor of the House in this
leadership hour designated by the majority leader.
There are a number of subjects I wanted to take up this afternoon,
but I am first inspired by the statement made by the gentleman from
Texas, Judge, Congressman, Mr. Poe, about Marine Mike Merola.
This is one of these recurring stories that we hear across the
country. Somebody that is an ACLU individual, somebody that thinks
somehow they get indignant because there is something somewhere that
would allow them to vent some of their prepackaged hyperventilation
against patriotism or the truth or life or the Constitution or the
Declaration of Independence or American values or the values of Western
Civilization or Judeo-Christianity, all those people out there are full
of indignities.
So an American flag and a marine flag offends somebody? I say tough.
I am glad you are there. Fly that flag. Fly it proud and fly it long.
I especially appreciate the statement made by Mr. Poe about the sound
of that flag. My flag is on a flagpole about that same height, 20 foot.
I step out my door in the morning, I check the wind and the weather and
I look at that flag, and I listen to that sound. And there is times I
am sitting there in the dark at night on my deck and I am hearing that
flag from the light that shines on it around the corner just a little
bit, and I hear that ripple of Old Glory. It gives me comfort and it
gives me pride, and it reminds me of the privilege of serving here,
anywhere you can serve Americans anywhere on this globe.
I think of a time also on March 18, 2003, where I went out here to
Pershing Park, this side of the White House, when there was an antiwar
demonstration that took place. I actually walked around through the
Mall, around the Washington Monument as they prepared their
demonstration. I remember former chairman of the Judiciary Committee,
John Conyers, standing on a little stage there with great big speakers
calling for the impeachment of President Bush because it looked like
there was an impending liberation of Iraq. And I saw a man there.
Every kind of discontented, counter-cultural, anti-American group was
represented in those thousands of people that came here that day. I saw
the Japanese communist flag. I saw Vegetarians for Peace. I saw every
counter-culturalist group you can imagine. And I saw a man there, an
aging hippie. He had on a jacket. He was a photographer, you could
tell, and he was taking pictures with great pride of this anti-
Americanism.
He reached in his pocket of his jacket, a worn leather jacket, and
pulled out of his pocket a flag, an American flag, a silk American
flag, a small flag, and he used it to wipe the lens of his camera. That
is an image I will never forget.
But no one stepped up to say he couldn't do that. Where were they
then? Where were the critics of Mr. Merola then? When flags are used as
grease rags to scrub the lens of a camera that is taking pictures of
anti-Americans joined together to protest the saving of our freedom
that Marine Merola has stepped up to defend.
Those actions against him are offensive to me, and I say guard the
flag, defend the flag, and I will stand with you, and I know Judge Poe
will too. Thanks

[[Page H127]]

for bringing this up. I appreciate it, Judge.

{time} 1240

I came here to talk about a number of things tonight. One of them is
the repeal of ObamaCare. Freedom-loving Americans fought this for a
long time. It began to roll out at us in the summer of--I've got to
roll my years back now--in the summer of 2008, when President Obama was
elected. I should actually take you back through a little bit of this
history, Mr. Speaker, because there's some of these components that the
American people forget about.
There was a relatively unknown State senator from Illinois named
Barack Obama, and he gave a speech before a national convention of the
Democratic Party. That elevated him into some level of national
prominence. There were those that decided they wanted to move him
forward to become President of the United States. Hillary Clinton also
decided she wanted to be President of the United States. And these two
found themselves--actually, after John Edwards, anyway--locking horns,
the two of them, for the nomination of the Presidency of the United
States under the Democrat Party. I know a little bit about this. Barack
Obama's movement began in Iowa. He brought his people over from Chicago
and they started a movement and they did battle with Hillary Clinton in
Iowa. John Edwards was there, of course. That went on for 4 years.
But we have to remember that here, in 1993 and 1994, when Bill
Clinton was elected President, remember, he said you get at twofer--you
get Hillary and you get Bill. Well, I wasn't all that happy getting
Bill, let alone Hillary. But he assigned Hillary the job of writing a
national health care act. And this was a complete takeover of our
health care in the United States. Socialized medicine in an even purer
form than ObamaCare is today.
We watched as this unfolded and she set up closed-door meetings and
they cooked up this bill. And I recall the flow chart of the
HillaryCare bill. I had a laminated copy of it in my office, my
construction office in Odebolt, Iowa. And it gives me chills to think
yet about the expansion of government that emerged from the HillaryCare
proposal.
But we need to remember, Mr. Speaker, the relevant component of that
is yes, a government takeover of health care that had been advanced and
advocated in this country for quite a few years. But America's
rejection of HillaryCare was resounding. And if Bill Clinton were going
to maintain his capital as a President, they had to pull that bill
down. The American people were against HillaryCare. I was against it.
It actually animated me into getting engaged in politics. I do not
think I would be here today if it weren't for Bill Clinton and Hillary
Clinton deciding they were going to step in and take our liberty.
But, in any case, Hillary Clinton's credentials, now Secretary of
State--and with all due respect, and I mean that honestly--her
credentials on health care were greater than those of Barack Obama. He
had to build himself foreign policy credentials and he had to build
himself health care credentials. And so they turned the Presidential
nomination debate into a health care debate, a health insurance debate.
And as they battled their ideas out, they had to find ways that they
could separate themselves from each other and still remain Democrats.
And so we heard all kind of statements out of Barack Obama as he
competed for credibility on the policy of health care. And in the
process of doing that, they convinced the American people that they
were in a health care crisis in America. They intentionally and
willfully, and I'm talking about Democrats in general, conflated two
terms. They ended up duping the American people. They conflated the
term health care and the term health insurance, to the point now where,
when we hear someone say health care, we don't know whether they're
saying health insurance or whether it's actually taking care of
someone's health.
I recall then the newly elected Governor of Iowa, Chet Culver, now
just voted out of office, came out here to the Capitol to sit down with
the congressional delegation meeting, the Iowa congressional
delegation. We sat in a conference room over in the Senate. And he
said, There are 40,000 kids in Iowa that don't have health care. We've
got to get them health care. And I looked at him and I said, Governor,
I don't think that's true. I don't think there are any kids in Iowa
that don't have health care. Could you give me an example of a child in
Iowa that doesn't have health care. Well, no, he couldn't do that.
Neither could he actually even tell me that he really meant health
insurance. I had to feed that line to him so he could understand the
difference. It was so embedded in his head that health care and health
insurance, the conflated terms, could be used interchangeably.
Mr. Speaker, if people are having trouble understanding this, I'd use
another example of conflated terms--the difference between immigrant
and illegal immigrant. I was asked earlier today what do I have to say
about people that accuse me of being anti-immigrant. I said, That's
offensive. There isn't anybody in this entire Congress that's anti-
immigrant. And the reporter stopped. Well, what kind of a statement is
that? Surely there are. I said, No, there isn't anybody in this entire
United States Congress that's anti-legal immigrant. Everybody I know in
here--and there's a new class I don't know that, but I suspect they'd
fit the same mold--everybody I know in here is supportive of legal
immigrants. We cheer them. We're proud of them. When they take the oath
of naturalization, I often go and give a little speech and welcome them
to being citizens of the United States of America. It is a proud time.
I present them Constitution, and I sign. I want them to revere it the
way I do, the way many of us do.
But they have conflated the term ``immigrant'' with ``illegal
immigrant'' and then they have the audacity to accuse people of being
anti-immigrant, when everybody I know is pro-immigrant--pro-legal
immigrant. And everybody in here ought to be anti-illegal immigrant.
But that's how they use the language to distort the argument and get
people confused on where they stand on the issue.
So they did that with health care and health insurance. And when
Barack Obama was establishing his credentials on health care, they
began to convince the American people that we had 47 million people in
this country that are uninsured. Well, that actually may be true. It
may have been true. And you can start down through the list of 47
million and start to subtract from that the numbers that are here that
are here illegally. That's at least 12 million, 12.1 million. I believe
it's more than 20 million, but I'll take the 12 million. And I have to
guess at the totals here because it's been a little while since I've
run through these.
But, generally speaking, you take 47 million that are listed as
uninsured by the Democrats and you subtract from that those that are
here illegally, those that qualify for Medicaid but don't bother to
sign up, those that make over $75,000 a year and presumably could
provide their own health insurance, those that qualify under their
employer but have turned down that opportunity for that health
insurance. And when you get done subtracting those that do have
options, including affordable options, and you narrow the 47 million
down to those who do not have their own health insurance policy and do
not have affordable options, that's 12 million. That's actually the
12.1 million number I reached to remember.

That's less than 4 percent of the United States population without
their own health insurance policy and without an affordable option.
Less than 4 percent. What percent of the health care industry did they
want to take over in order to address that less than 4 percent, those
12.1 million? A hundred percent. Barack Obama proposed to take over 100
percent of our health care industry in America in order to get at those
less than 4 percent that are uninsured, without an affordable option.
He told us--remember these things--We're in an economic crisis. We're
in an economic crisis, and we can't fix this economic crisis--Barack
Obama--unless we first fix health care. And how do we do that? Well,
the argument against it by him, and Hillary Clinton as well: We spend
too much money on health care. What's their solution? Spend a lot more.
Throw a trillion dollars at health care. He also argued that if you
like your policy, you can keep it.

[[Page H128]]

If you like your doctor, can you keep him. And when he said it, he knew
that that commitment could not be kept. You can't keep your health
insurance policy if the policy doesn't exist any longer. You can't keep
your health insurance policy if the company doesn't exist any longer.
The President said we needed to have more competition in the health
insurance industry. The demagoguery's been going on here for the last
couple of days about not turning over this country to the health
insurance companies, again who get accused of being vipers. Well,
they're in a free market system. They need to be able to compete
against each other. The President wants to have--and was not successful
in this component--wants to have a Federal health insurance policy, a
program, to compete against the health insurance companies. He argued
that there needed to be more competition in the health insurance
industry.
And so, what does he do? He wants to have the Federal Government do
that. Does the President even know how many health insurance companies
we have or had at the passage of ObamaCare? Probably not. He's probably
not watching C-SPAN right now, Mr. Speaker, but if any of his staff are
out there, I can tell you what that number was: 1,300 health insurance
companies in America. 1,300 companies competing against each other. Not
all of them against each other, not one competing against all the other
1,299, because there's a McCarran-Ferguson Act that allows the States
to protect the insurance companies within their States and set up
monopolies or quasi-monopolies within the States.

{time} 1250

I think we should repeal that.
If we repeal that, we will allow then people to buy insurance across
State lines, and we would instantly put those 1,300 health insurance
companies in competition with each other. That would achieve the goal
to lower the costs and increase the options and provide for people to
have more choices themselves, and it would help sustain the doctor-
patient relationship at the same time.
Mr. Speaker, of the 1,300 health insurance companies, how many policy
varieties existed a year ago? 100,000 health insurance policy varieties
existed a year ago. That's not enough competition--1,300 companies and
100,000 policies? The President wanted a new Federal company to compete
against them. Now, that's because he understands this pattern.
We've seen this pattern happen several times in the past. It happened
most recently with the Student Loan Program. The Federal Government
took it all over. They started out with the argument that they needed
to have another option--a public option--for school loans, student
loans, so that they could provide a little more honest competition with
the free market.
What do we get out of George Miller, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and
Harry Reid?
We get the complete takeover of the Student Loan Program over a
little period of time. A great, giant leap came down this hallway in a
reconciliation package from the Senate, actually threaded right into
this ObamaCare bill.
What's another pattern?
There was a time--let's just say, oh, at about the time of the Bay of
Pigs--when the Federal Government wasn't engaged in flood insurance.
All of the property and casualty flood insurance in America was
privately provided in the marketplace. We know what free enterprise
does. If there is a demand, somebody will come up with a business idea
to supply that demand. That was going on in the early part of the 1960s
until the Federal Government decided that, really, they needed to get
in and compete with that a little bit, so they set up the Federal Flood
Insurance Program.
So what did they do? They drove out all of the private sector
competition.
Today, if you're worried about your house being flooded or your
factory being flooded, you have to buy flood insurance from the Federal
Government. In order for them to compete with the private market, they
passed legislation that, if there were a real estate loan from a
Federal bank, they were compelled to buy flood insurance. So they wired
in a customer base; they set the premium rates, and they drove
everybody out of the flood insurance industry.
While all that's going on, what do we get out of that? We get a
Federal Flood Insurance Program that's $19.2 billion in the red and no
private sector competition whatsoever and no way to judge, actually,
the risk because the industry hasn't developed.
You know what government does: it atrophies. Anybody who doesn't have
competition atrophies. They don't develop the technology. They don't
develop the new approaches and the innovative ways to market, and they
don't streamline. They don't have to find savings. They just raise fees
or borrow money from a general fund. That's where the $19.2 billion
came from. Then, of course, that's the American people going into debt
for $19.2 billion.
Why? Because the Federal Government decided they wanted to go in and
provide a little competition so that they could keep the private sector
flood insurance industry honest because the people who passed that are
not free market personnel. They are anti-capitalists. They are not
capitalists. They are not free enterprise people.

So we have some of the pattern that's there. We've got the flood
insurance pattern. We've got the pattern of the student loan program.
Then we have the pattern of the President wanting to step in and drive
out the competition in the health insurance industry.
The American people have watched that component. They've watched the
statements about: you can keep your health insurance policy. If you
like your policy, you can keep it. Yet the Federal Government under
ObamaCare regulates every single health insurance policy, and they will
decide which policies you can keep and which policies are banned by
regulations to be written later by a gentleman by the name of Berwick,
who believes that we should ration health care and not spend money on
the lives of people who may be at the end of their lives.
Now, Sarah Palin called that ``death panels.'' If you have to put
something down in a Twitter that explains it all, I think she did that.
We've seen the manifestation of that out of the Obama
administration--with his appointments, with the actions, with their
taking the initiative to want to pay doctors to counsel people to
accept death when there is medicine there that may save them or extend
their lives. I don't think that's the business of the Federal
Government to pay people to counsel others to die quicker. That's what
turns out of that policy, and I'm glad that they rescinded it. I am
hopeful that it isn't something that creeps back again, but if you've
got a Dr. Donald Berwick there, it is going to creep back on us. That's
his philosophy. He is there for a reason.
ObamaCare cannot be allowed to stay in this code. It must go. It has
got to be repealed, and we are about to do that.
The first legislative steps on this took place yesterday with the
rules debate upstairs--hours of debate on the rule, on how this debate
would go on. We debated the rule here on the floor today, and it
passed. The chairman of the Rules Committee, Mr. Dreier, did an
outstanding job of ushering this all through; and he has been useful, I
think, in also negotiating the types of language that allow for a
legitimate debate on the floor of the House--far more legitimate than
the debate that actually crammed ObamaCare down the throats of the
American people.
So, Mr. Speaker, I come here to celebrate the opportunity to begin
taking back a significant measure of American liberty, that is, the
repeal of ObamaCare--pulling it out by the roots lock, stock and
barrel. We must pull it all out, and we can't leave one visage of it
in.
This ObamaCare the American people understand. They diagnosed it.
They looked at it. They felt it and they ran the tests on it. They
began to find out what was in it. Remember Speaker Pelosi saying we
have to pass this bill in order to find out what's in it? Well, there
is actually some truth in that because no matter how brilliant people
are, no matter what their experience, there is not one person alive who
could have shut themselves up in a room for I don't care how long they
would want--a week, a month, a day, or a

[[Page H129]]

year--and read through those 2,500 pages of ObamaCare and actually
understand each component of it and do an analysis and be able to
comprehend the implications of that monstrosity that has now become the
albatross around the neck of the President and the Democrat Party in
the United States of America.
No, no one could understand it. It is that complicated; but over
time, we began to see the implications. Republicans predicted many of
the implications that were in the bill. We pointed to a lot of the
parts of it that were bad; but there wasn't time, and there weren't
enough people and enough voices to raise all of the issues that are bad
about something of this nature.
When you take away people's liberty, that is a big deal, Mr.
Speaker--when you take away the right of people to buy a health
insurance policy of their choice. No matter what money they have, no
matter what their health, you have to buy a health insurance policy
that is approved by Uncle Sam.
Now, I kind of like Uncle Sam. I like his image. I like his colors--
red, white and blue--but I don't like the tarnished image that he was
given by ObamaCare. I don't like the idea of besmirching the memory of
Madison and Washington and Franklin and Jefferson. I don't like the
idea that these God-given rights that we have, that clearly our
Founding Fathers defined with precision that do come from God, can be
besmirched and can take away the freedom of a freedom-loving people.
But the American people don't like it either. The American people
rose up, Mr. Speaker.
Those who argued that they wanted to offer a whole series of
amendments on the repeal of ObamaCare said it's not an open rule; it's
not an open process, that they want to come down here and be able to
offer amendment after amendment under an open rule. Then they think
that somehow, by doing so, they can perfect a bad piece of legislation.
Well, in their piece of legislation, even they can only name four
things that they are willing to defend in 2,500 pages. Of course,
they'll demagogue us on every single one of those.
The four things that they defend are:
Preexisting conditions language. Republicans will address preexisting
conditions, not with socialized medicine, but with a practical,
constitutional, free market approach. That's fine. We need to have that
debate and advance that kind of policy, and that has been part of our
agenda all along, for several years now. That's the first one.
The second one is they claim they closed the doughnut hole. Well, I
thought the doughnut hole was a bad idea in 2003. It was there because
of the constraint in the funding that was available; but they closed
the doughnut hole by increasing fees and taxing others, and low-income
people are already exempt from it.

{time} 1300

So it isn't of significance from a policy standpoint. It is
philosophically and politically, and so they make their second
argument, doughnut hole.
Third one is they think that something that we just couldn't do
without, that should take us all down because we're willing to repeal
the idea that insurance policies must all have a Federal mandate in
them that your children shall stay on there until they're 26 years old.
Now, I'm astonished by this. I'm astonished that Republicans would
think that's a good idea. I can actually name you two Republicans that
were elected to Congress at age 25. Now, I don't know what kind of
pride they would have in their newfound adulthood to walk down the
aisle, like they did here a couple of days ago to swear into the new
112th Congress, and up until the moment they take the oath of office,
they're still on Mommy and Daddy's health insurance.
Now, that's how bad this idea is that we would raise kids up and give
them the keys to the car at age 16, and give them the right to vote and
choose the next leader in the free world at age 18, and give them the
right to drink at age 21, and keep them on Mom and Daddy's insurance
until they're 26. Why?
I wanted my kids to grow up. I announced to them when they were 18
that I'm now legally off the hook, guys. We nurtured you as long as we
can. We're still doing that. We don't have to anymore. I'm so proud of
what they've accomplished and what they've promised to accomplish, but
I wanted my kids to grow up, and that should be our goal when we're
raising them, not to keep them children forever, keep them on our
insurance until age 26. To what purpose? Can't they defend themselves
and find a way?
And by the way, insurance companies, if there's a market for this,
isn't there going to be a policy out there that you can buy, at your
own choice, that will allow you to keep insurance on until your kids
are 26? If there's a market for it, keep them on there until they're
eligible for Medicare. It's all right if it's driven by the free
market. It's actually constitutional if the States want to impose such
a ridiculous mandate, but it's not constitutional and it's not all
right if the Federal Government imposes such a thing because it raises
the cost of everybody's premium, and it limits our choices and it taxes
people that don't have any kids, people that are on individual
policies.
So there's three things in ObamaCare that they are proud of, and I'm
not particularly proud of any of those three. Actually, the fourth one
may come to me and I'll bring it up in a moment, Mr. Speaker, but
here's another rub.
ObamaCare wipes out more than half of the health savings accounts
opportunity that's there. We established health savings accounts in
part D in 2003. A young couple could start in today with $5,150 in
their health savings account, and let's just say they got married--fell
in love, got married, age 20. I can do the math, which is why I use the
age 20, Mr. Speaker. And they maxed out on their health savings account
at $5,150 that first year. It's adjusted for COLA, and so we go up,
that amount would go up each year as they went through their happy
married bliss for the next 45 years until they qualified for Medicare.
Now, I'd like to see that expanded, but here's how this works. If you
look historically back over the last 30 or 40 years, you will see that
that type of an investment like an HSA would accrue at a 4 percent
compounded interest rate, not over the last 2 or 3 but over the last 30
or 40. That's a reasonable number to predict. And so your couple that
started with an HSA with $5,150 and deposited the max in it every year
and spent $2,000 a year out for normal medical expenses would arrive at
Medicare eligibility age with about $950,000 in their health savings
account. Boy, what a glorious opportunity that is.
The Federal Government's interested in that $950,000 because they
want to tax it. They want to tax it as ordinary income when it's taken
out of the health savings account if it's not used for health along the
way.
I suggest this. Why wouldn't we say to that couple, take the money
that's in your health savings account, buy a Medicare replacement
policy, a paid-up-for-life Medicare replacement policy--be worth about
$72,000 per person at this point, so $144,000 out of this $950,000, and
so you get what, $806,000 left over. That's the change.
I would say to Americans who had that kind of responsibility and
prudence, Keep the change. Take yourself off the Medicare entitlement
rolls when you're eligible by buying a paid-up replacement policy,
annuitized policy. Keep the change tax free. Travel the world. Will it
to your kids. Do what you want to do.
And if we do that, we turn health savings accounts into life
management accounts, Mr. Speaker, these kind of accounts that young
people would savor the day that they could start their account in their
health savings account, and they would nurture it and protect it and
want it built up to the point where it's 20, 30, 40, $50,000, $100,000.
They would be there in this private market of insurance that we must
preserve and protect--actually got to go back and restore it by
repealing ObamaCare.
They would be in that marketplace saying, I want a $10,000 deductible
policy. I want a major medical deductible policy. I can have a higher
copayment policy. I need lower premiums. I have the prospect of good
health. I exercise. I watch my diet. I watch my weight. I get regular
checkups, and so I'm willing to--and, in fact, it'd be prudent to have
catastrophic policies with high deductibles and potentially a higher
copayment for people who have the funds in their health savings
accounts so that they are protected by insurance for its proper form.
Insurance should not be for hangnails. It should not be for the
little

[[Page H130]]

things. Insurance should be for the things that we can't fund
ourselves. That's why it's there. It's protection so that you don't go
broke when something catastrophic happens.
We would have people not only managing their health; they'd be
managing their health insurance premiums. They'd be advocating for
lower premiums. They'd be saving more money in their health savings
account, managing their health for a lifetime while their health
savings account transitions into a pension plan.

This is a full lifetime management account, and why can't we do that
in the United States of America? These free people that we are, why
can't we do that in the United States of America?
Well, ObamaCare goes in and cuts out more than half of the amount
that they can contribute into their health savings account because
ObamaCare is about, yes, a Federal takeover of our health care, and a
health insurance industry eventually, but it's about also expanding the
dependency class in America. It's about causing people to give up on
trying and taking care of themselves and just finally sighing and get
in the herd with the rest of the sheep and go submit to the government-
run health care plan. And when they tell you you can't have a test,
then you don't go for a second opinion; you've already been trained to
accept the rule of the State. So they either test you or they don't;
they give you treatment or they don't.
You can look up to Canada to see the waiting list times for hip
replacements, knee replacements. One of those, I believe it's the knee
replacement, is 194 days that you wait. The hip replacement then is
three-hundred-and-some days. It's possible it's the other way around,
but we're dealing with half a year or more, almost a year in waiting
time.
I remember a presentation that was given downstairs in HC-9 a year or
so ago. A doctor from northern Michigan, Dr. Jansma as I recall, has
written a book on this, but he went up across the border to work within
the emergency room in a hospital in Canada, and he had done a lot of
orthopaedic surgery. And there was an individual that tore up a leg
playing ball, came in. He looked at it, diagnosed it. He needed to have
surgery. He said, I can schedule you for surgery in the morning. We
should move on this quickly.
Well, the surgery couldn't be scheduled. He didn't know it at the
time, but he didn't meet the government regulations. They had to go
through and get another bureaucrat to approve it, and they had to wait
to get it approved, and then they had to wait to schedule the surgery.
This young man, in the prime of health, had a job, couldn't do it with
his leg torn up. It took 6 months to schedule this young man to go
before the specialist to do the secondary diagnosis to approve the need
for the surgery so that they could rationalize spending taxpayer
dollars to fix his leg. So it's going to be free health care up there,
but you don't get it unless the right doctor, the one who's appointed
by the State, approves the surgery.
So from the day of the time his knee was torn up and they took him
into the emergency room, they had to patch him up, put him on crutches,
and he had to gimp around for 6 months with a torn-up knee to go in and
have the government doctor look at his knee and approve that he needed
surgery.
Well, then you would think that that surgery might happen, oh, the
next day like it would in America. But it didn't happen until another 6
months. Mr. Speaker, 6 months to wait for government approval for
surgery that would have happened the next day in the United States of
America with this doctor, another 6 months just to approve, then
another 6 months to get the schedule to work through to get the knee
surgery. And how much rehab does it take to put somebody back in shape
after their leg is atrophied for a year and they have drug it around on
crutches?

{time} 1310

So he's out of work for a year and a half. His productivity has been
stopped. And additionally, his development professionally has been
diminished substantially. This is the kind of thing that happens when
government gets involved setting up formulas. It's what the people on
that side of the aisle want to do. And that's why the roof caved in,
and there was a cataclysmic electoral change that took place on
November 2, the election when the American people said, Enough, enough
to the ruling troika, the Obama, Pelosi, and Reid ruling troika. Enough
to the liberty-stealing legislation that was coming out of this
Congress one after another after another, with cap-and-trade and
government takeover of businesses, and the government takeover of the
health care industry, including their massive regulation of the health
insurance industry.
The American people rejected ObamaCare. The American people came to
this city by the tens of thousands to protest against ObamaCare. The
American people, for the first time, I believe, in the history of this
country, came to this Capitol in such massive numbers that they not
only crowded out here on the west lawn by the tens of thousands, there
were so many people, they surrounded the Capitol. They formed a human
chain to surround the Capitol and say, Keep your hands off of our
health care. And it wasn't just a stretched human chain where people
were barely hanging onto each other by their fingertips. They were six-
and eight-deep all the way around the Capitol building saying, Keep
your hands off our health care. They were shoulder-to-shoulder, and
they were six and eight deep, a full doughnut.
Talk about the doughnut hole. The Capitol of the United States of
America was in the doughnut hole of the freedom-loving, constitutional,
and conservative people who came here to reject ObamaCare, to petition
the government peacefully for redress of grievances. That's what
happened. And still, their hearts were hardened. Still, the regal
Speaker Pelosi marched through the throngs with her magnum gavel in her
``let them eat cake'' moment, and still they don't get the message.
We swore in 87 new freshmen Republicans here, nine freshman
Democrats. The majority changes, every gavel changes hands in the
entire Capitol. It's amazing. It's amazing that it's so hard for them
to hear the message from the American people. Do they still have the
level of arrogance? Is it still an intellectual elitism of liberalism,
the leftists that think that they have apparently some kind of gift of
intelligence that supersedes the common sense and the wisdom of the
American people? I reject that. The American people rejected that. And
we have 87 new faces over here that I believe are God's gift to
America, Mr. Speaker.
And I so look forward to the impact. We have already seen the impact.
We have seen the impact in the rules package vote. We have seen the
impact in the rules vote here today. And we'll see the impact on the
repeal of ObamaCare on Wednesday after this rule that provides for--I
guess I didn't keep it with me--but this rule that provides for I
believe 7 hours of debate, 7 hours. Nancy Pelosi would give us an hour
split, 30 minutes on each side, no amendments. Seven hours of debate, a
debate on the rule, full debate up in the Rules Committee. And we are
going to start this process of repealing ObamaCare. It began with the
rules votes here yesterday in the Rules Committee and here on the floor
today. We have begun the long, hard slog of the repeal of ObamaCare,
Mr. Speaker.
It is, I believe, a new precedent to see the American people rise up
this instantaneously to reject a piece of legislation that was passed.
I recall when it was passed here November 7 out of the House, it went
back to be worked through the--let me say worked through the
procedures. I withdrew that ``shenanigan'' word and replaced it with
the ``procedures'' in the United States Senate.
But in an unprecedented fashion, they put that legislation together
in the Senate. And on Christmas Eve morning, they circumvented the
filibuster, and they pushed through on a reconciliation package, they
called it, a piece of legislation that had to come through to marry up
with the House legislation in order to, some say in the press, ``buy
the votes'' to get barely enough to pass ObamaCare here in the House.
Well, that legislation, their version of ObamaCare, passed in the
Senate on Christmas Eve morning. Around 9 o'clock was when they opened
the vote. They had a chance procedurally--the Republicans did--to delay

[[Page H131]]

that vote until 9 o'clock Christmas Eve. I argued vociferously that
they should use every procedural tool at their disposal to delay that
vote to the maximum amount, and perhaps something would happen. Like
what if a blizzard would have come along and shut this Capitol down,
and they wouldn't have been able to put the votes together? Look how
close that came, if you look back upon it.
But in any case, when ObamaCare passed the Senate, I asked a question
to one of the senior Senators over there who opposed ObamaCare, and did
so well: What do we do now? What's our next step? We had 9 more hours
we could have fought, or 12 more hours we could have fought. We didn't
fight all 12 of those hours. What do we do next? His answer was, Well,
we pray, and we pray for a victory in the special election in the
Senate race in Massachusetts.

Well, at that time, a lot of people in America didn't know the name
Scott Brown, and I thought that that was a pretty big reach, to think
we were going to put our stakes in saving America's liberty in a
special election U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts. Massachusetts had a
full, at the time, 100 percent congressional delegation of all
Democrats, the strongest Democrat State in the Nation that I know of.
So I thought it was a bit of a presumptuous thing to talk about asking
the Lord to intervene in Massachusetts, which was the message that I
got. But I took a look and I decided, that's our best chance. I ended
up going to Massachusetts, and I spent 3 days there.
On January 19, Scott Brown was elected to fill what's commonly known
as ``the Kennedy seat'' in the United States Senate, from
Massachusetts. He had pledged to vote ``no'' and kill ObamaCare. That
made it the veto-proof Republican minority in the Senate. Most people
thought on that night that ObamaCare was dead, and that was January 19
last year.
Well, subsequent to that, the President held a health care summit at
the Blair House February 25. That's where he identified his health care
plan as ``ObamaCare.'' And in that health care summit, there were
certain selected Republicans who were invited to sit with the Democrats
around this big table. And there were rules. Of course the rules
applied to people differently. The President interrupted Republicans 72
times. Somehow he got his mojo back. Somehow they put together this
legal maneuvering to be able to bring legislation here and say they got
it--and actually, they got it passed. I'm not taking that issue.
The then-chair of the Rules Committee wanted to just deem ObamaCare
passed because they didn't want to take a vote on it. They couldn't get
the votes out of their own conference because there were 12 anonymous
individuals in a list called the Stupak Dozen that would not vote for a
bill that would use Federal funding for abortion. So they sat with
their coalition. The President of the United States promised to sign an
Executive order that they seemed to think would amend legislation after
it passed the House. And even that wasn't enough. They had to have
their reconciliation package out of the Senate that would be married up
with and effectively amend some of the ObamaCare legislation itself.
So, Mr. Speaker, the convolution of all of this, it was a legislative
circus of every legislative shenanigan that I can think of to put this
together in such a way that they finally got stuff to the President's
desk signed in the proper sequence and order so that the attorneys and
the constitutional scholars could look at that and say, Well, actually
there is a piece of legislation that somebody's going to have to follow
the direction of.
So we had a Presidential Executive order that was designed to amend
legislation passed by the people's House and the United States Senate
that was promised before the legislation was presented to the floor as
a condition of its passage here so they could get the votes from the
Stupak Dozen and others. And there was a reconciliation package from
the Senate that amended the legislation. They passed it out of the
Senate before the legislation was brought before the House. When do you
ever bring legislation that is designed to amend legislation that's not
yet passed? You only do that if you don't have the support of the
majority of the people in either body.
And I will tell you this, Mr. Speaker: On the day ObamaCare passed,
as stand-alone legislation, that big 2,500-page package, if there are
no extraneous issues, like promises of Executive orders from the
President or a reconciliation package in the Senate that amends it, if
it was ObamaCare stand-alone, 2,500 pages dropped here in the House of
Representatives for an up-or-down vote, anybody that was here, any
student of what was here knows, Mr. Speaker, they did not have the
majority votes to pass ObamaCare.

{time} 1320

It was done on the condition that the President would sign an
executive order and the Senate reconciliation package would be brought
in the form that they demanded it.
So, we watch all this process and we think it's making sausage. You
don't want to eat the sausage when you watch them make it. I'm happy to
eat the sausage when they make it. I really don't want to eat this one.
The American people didn't want to eat this one either. The American
people rejected it. The American people brought their voice and their
effort.
And I went home that night, the last one to leave this Capitol. And I
told myself I will lay down, and I'm going to sleep until I'm
completely rested up, and I'll wake up fresh in the morning, and I'll
retool, and I'll start a new plan and see what I can do to save
America, see what I can do to save what's left of America, because our
liberty had been ripped out. Our Constitution had been violated. And I
knew the bill was going to be signed eagerly by President Obama, which
he did on March 30.
So I laid down and slept for about 2\1/2\ hours, and it was the sleep
of the exhausted. And I woke up. I sat down at my computer and I wrote
up a request for a bill to repeal ObamaCare. That bill draft request
went in at the opening of business that following morning. It was
waiting for them to unlock the doors, my staff was. And that request
turned into a draft within a couple of hours, and got back into my
hand, 40 words, 40 words. And those 40 words are included in this
repeal that is coming, that is now before this House that will be
debated on Wednesday of next week.
I introduced those 40 words into the legislation and ironically,
coincidentally and perhaps providentially, Michelle Bachmann of
Minnesota was doing the same thing at perhaps the same time and put in
a bill draft request almost simultaneously, and our bills came down
within 3 minutes of each other, exactly the same 40 words that said the
same thing: pull ObamaCare out by its roots. That's not the quote;
that's the summary, Mr. Speaker. And, actually, I'm not going to
summarize the bill this time. We don't have 2,500 pages in this repeal,
but I would just say a few more words about that.
We started then the repeal process within hours of the passage of
ObamaCare and it being messaged to the President within hours. And
people said, well, that's just throwing a tantrum. You're just
frustrated. You've lost. Why can't you just pack up your things and
move on? We've got to move on. Put that behind us. That debate's over
with.
Well, the debate's not over with when a Congress defies the will of
the American people. And this Congress, the 111th Congress, the one
just passed, defied the will of the American people. And the result was
87 new freshmen Republicans courageous, bold, principled,
constitutional conservatives, young, vigorous, with ideology, driven
people, statesmen and women in the group that will emerge as national
leaders.
I believe there's a Speaker in that class. I know there are committee
chairs in that class. I believe there's a reasonable chance that
there's a President of the United States in this class that was elected
in 2010. There may be more than one. We have leaders there. They came
to this Congress to repeal ObamaCare. And the filing of the repeal of
ObamaCare on that late March day, that early morning of the late March
day, started the process. The start of that process began within hours
of the passage of ObamaCare and well before its actual signing into
law, it was introduced before the President actually signed it into law
to repeal it.
And Michelle Bachmann and I and Connie Mack and, let me see, Parker

[[Page H132]]

Griffith, they come to mind as people that have introduced legislation
to repeal, and we worked that together with many others. There wasn't
hesitation. Republicans wanted to sign on to the repeal, and they did
so quickly. And over a period of time, the numbers of signatures
accumulated to about 86, and 86 were ready to sign for repeal.
Then we decided, let's turn this into a discharge petition. Nancy
Pelosi won't let this come forward until it does. So we did that. And I
filed a discharge petition here on the floor, Mr. Speaker, and Members
began to go down and sign the discharge petition. And the numbers of
signatures went up on the discharge petition, when they said it was
impossible to repeal ObamaCare, all the way up to 173; and it became
bipartisan with the signature of Gene Taylor, whom, I believe, would
have been re-elected to this Congress had he not voted for Nancy
Pelosi. He did lose his election. And he served well here in this
Congress.
But the result of this is that the existence of the bill to repeal
ObamaCare in the last Congress was inspiring to new candidates that ran
for office. It was inspiring to their supporters. It was inspiring to
their constituents and their voters. And the discharge petition, with
173 signatures said, Republicans have the resolve to repeal ObamaCare.
Republicans have the resolve.

And so the inspiration and the resolve, along with a fairly long list
of anti-free market, anti-freedom things that took place out of the
Pelosi Congress and the Obama administration, all contributed to give
us the inertia to get to this point to where we are today.
But the legislation that I introduced then, actually amended at the
end of the last Congress because it needed to consider the
reconciliation package that came from the Senate after the bill was
passed. It wasn't possible for me to introduce legislation to repeal
that because it hadn't passed. So packaged it up together and put that
in as a squared away, on point, full 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare
legislation that I introduced, again with Michelle Bachmann on the last
day of the last Congress, and on the first day of this Congress. And
that's the legislation, that's the language that is considered before
this Congress and will be voted on Wednesday of next week and will
result in the House repealing ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker.
And so it's a 2,500-page bill. I wouldn't presume to come to the
floor and read a 2,500-page bill, Mr. Speaker. But I would do this: I
think it's a delightful experience to read a bill that's short and to
the point. And this is H.R. 2; H.R. 2, the repeal of ObamaCare. And I'm
going to just read this into the Record, Mr. Speaker, aside from the
titles, just down to the meat of the bill. And it won't take very long.
It's actually, altogether now, 131 words.
But it reads this way: ``Effective as of the enactment of Public Law
111-148, such act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or
repealed by such act are restored or revived as if such act had not
been enacted.''
Boy, that sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Now, that's just the first
part.
And it repealed, effective as of the enactment of the law, ObamaCare,
such act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended are repealed by
such act are restored or revived as if such act had not been enacted.
It doesn't take a lot of complicated language to say pull it all out by
the roots as if it had never been there. That's what we get with the
repeal that's before us now that will be debated on and voted on
Wednesday of next week.
This is the language that I introduced long back when people said
it's just a frustrating, political exercise. You will never repeal
ObamaCare. You can't get a vote on ObamaCare, so why are you going
through the motions? It's just a legislative tantrum. No, it's not.
It's tangible. It's not a tantrum. It's tangible. It's here. It's here
before us now.
Here's the second component of it. This is the reconciliation package
that couldn't be addressed on the day it passed but can now. It says
this: ``Effective as of the enactment of the Health Care and Education
Reconciliation Act of 2010,'' the Senate Reconciliation Act, ``Public
Law 111-152, title I and subtitle B of title II of such act are
repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such title
or subtitle, respectively, are restored or revived as if such title and
subtitle had not been enacted.''
Once again, the repetition of that language, for the two major
components of ObamaCare now, they are repealed, and the provisions of
law amended or restored by such title or subtitle, respectively, are
restored or revived as if such title or subtitle had not been enacted.

{time} 1330

Well, isn't that refreshing, Mr. Speaker, that we have a piece of
legislation here that's not 2,500 pages. It's not so long and
complicated that we can't read it here on the floor. It's not so
complicated that anybody that might be sitting in the gallery or
watching on C-SPAN or might be reading through the Congressional Record
can understand what is going on here. This is in the full light of day
with the support of the American people.
Sixty percent of the American people, according to a Rasmussen poll
here sometime back, support the repeal of ObamaCare, as do I. And, Mr.
Speaker, I look forward to the debate on Wednesday. I look forward to
the vote going up on the board on Wednesday. I look forward to the
beginning of the repeal of ObamaCare.
The press asked me a question on that earlier today: If you pass the
repeal of ObamaCare--we will pass the repeal of ObamaCare--is that the
end? No. To reflect back on Winston Churchill, it's not the end. It's
not even the beginning of the end of ObamaCare, but it is perhaps the
end of the beginning of the end of ObamaCare. That's what I believe is
coming.
I heard the gentleman from Texas bring up Churchill when he said,
``sweat, blood, and tears.'' There are some people out there that bring
some quotes to mind that stand out for me, and one of them is the
Congressman from Indiana, Mike Pence. His statement on our persistence
and due diligence in bringing about ObamaCare is this--and I wrote it
down because it impressed me, not the words but the manner in which he
says it. It is always superior to my delivery. But it is this, Mr.
Speaker. Congressman Pence of Indiana said, if House Republicans got
the message from the American people last November, ``we won't just
vote once to repeal ObamaCare; we will vote to repeal ObamaCare again
and again until we consign their government takeover of health care to
the ash heap of history--where it belongs.''
Nice quote, Mike Pence. It sounds like Ronald Reagan to me. ``We will
vote . . . again and again until we consign their government takeover
of health care to the ash heap of history--where it belongs.''
I intend to stay with this with an even heightened level of
persistence, Mr. Speaker, to bring about the final and complete repeal
of ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker, to be able to one day watch as the President
of the United States, the next President probably, puts an end to
ObamaCare. It will take persistence on our part. It will take
determination. We will pass this out of the House. We can pass it again
and again, send it over to the Senate where Harry Reid gets a hot
potato on his lap that gets hotter and bigger each time.
We have appropriations bills coming through here. We have a CR that
ends March 4th, and everything that funds our government, we should put
into that language that prohibits any of the dollars from being used to
implement or enforce ObamaCare. We can shut off all of the
implementation of ObamaCare. If this House stands resolute and
determined, there is not a dime that can be spent by the Federal
Government without our approval. So we can shut off the funding that
implements or enforces ObamaCare, and we must. And we must stick with
it.
We must stick with it with the determination that comes from people
like Mike Pence, with the tone that comes from Ronald Reagan that comes
from his mouth, and I think the determination that comes from Winston
Churchill. We will fight on this. We will fight until the end. We have
the majority to start with now in the House. We shall not flag or fail.
We shall go on to the end. We shall fight with growing confidence and
growing strength, whatever the cost may be. We shall never surrender.
We will carry on this struggle until, in God's good time, with all His

[[Page H133]]

power and might, He steps forth to the rescue and liberation of our
God-given American liberty. That's what will happen in this Congress.
The day will come, Mr. Speaker, that the next President of the United
States, I pray, stands on the west portico of the Capitol here in this
building down that hallway and off to the left to take the oath of
office. And when the Chief Justice steps forward and he takes his oath
on the Bible, I want to see that next President of the United States
take that oath with pen in hand, Mr. Speaker, and I want him to take
the oath, ``preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the
United States, so help me God.'' And before he even shakes the hand of
the Chief Justice to be congratulated as the next President of the
United States, I want that pen in that hand to come down on the podium
and sign into law the final repeal of ObamaCare as the first act of
office of the next President of the United States, and I will support
the man or woman that's willing to do that.
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention and the honor to address
you.
I yield back the balance of my time.

____________________