[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 65 (Thursday, May 12, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H3273-H3276]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               OBAMACARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Berg). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is 
recognized for 30 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. It's a privilege to be recognized to address you 
here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, in 
this great deliberative body. I came here to talk about a different 
subject matter. But after I listened to my colleagues for a little 
while, I believe it's pretty important that we set some of this record 
straight. I don't know where they would be satisfied. It seems as 
though the attack is on anybody that's in free enterprise and the 
support goes to anything that is government. Anything that raises taxes 
and grows government is good, and anything that taxes free enterprise, 
and especially profits--those evil profits--are bad. That's the theme 
that I hear from the gentlemen who spent the previous half hour or hour 
demagoguing the issue of Big Oil and big insurance companies. This is 
particularly appalling to me when I walk in here on the floor and I 
hear a statement made by the gentleman from California saying this: 
You're going to turn them over to the most voracious sharks in the 
country--the health insurance companies. Well, if it happens to be that 
the health insurance companies are operating without competition, 
keeping their prices down, why doesn't the gentleman or others that 
might believe that engage in the health insurance industry?
  The President of the United States made it very clear. He said he 
wanted more competition in the health insurance industry. He wanted to 
create a government-run, government-owned health insurance industry as 
part of ObamaCare. And he didn't realize, I don't think, when he 
uttered that statement, at least before ObamaCare was passed and began 
to knock the competition out of the way, that there were 1,300 health 
insurance companies in America--1,300--and over 100,000 policy 
varieties that one could choose from depending on the State that you 
might live in.
  That's a lot of companies, and they've all been shot down here with a 
blanket allegation that they're voracious sharks. How can anybody be a 
voracious shark if there are 1,300 companies to compete against and 
100,000 policies to choose from? Surely, there's something there that 
would satisfy the gentleman from the perspective of that array of 
variety that was available before the President decided he wanted to 
make the 1,301st insurance company be the Federal Government and 
perhaps give us a half-dozen or so policy varieties with a community 
rating that compressed it down, that raises the health insurance 
premiums for the youngest, lowest income people among us, and 
subsidizes the premiums for the highest income people among us.

                              {time}  1900

  That's ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker, and it clearly is. The gentlemen 
seemed to have forgotten what they all worked together to do to America 
over the last 19 months. They worked to impose ObamaCare on 300 million 
Americans, 306 or so million Americans, and they come here on the floor 
tonight to talk about the effort on the part of Republicans to try to 
save this Republic from the voracious appetite of government, the 
voracious shark of government that feeds upon the sustenance of the 
American people, that puts into debt every single person, every man, 
woman and child in America, and puts the mortgage on their head the day 
they are born.
  Last fall, I talked about my granddaughter, my most recent 
granddaughter, Reagan Ann King. She's about 7 months old now, 6 to 7 
months old. On the day she was born, her share of the national debt was 
$44,000. Welcome to America; welcome to the world; welcome into life. 
You owe Uncle Sam $44,000, and the interest is building. The interest 
is building, and this young lady is going to have to work a long time 
to pay that off.
  I hear the same Members over here, at least from the same party, 
talking about the average debt that a college graduate has, that 
student loans are costing too much money. They had to confiscate all 
the access to the marketplace for the free market on student loans and 
turn it completely into a government-run operation because they 
believed that somebody was making money off the interest, and they 
lamented that an average student loan when someone graduated from 
college was in the area of maybe $20,000 to $40,000. But it doesn't 
concern them that their policy and the President of the United States 
and the former Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the majority leader of the 
United States Senate, Harry Reid, the three of them, the ruling troika, 
President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, could get in a phone 
booth and do what they would to America, and they have driven up this 
national debt and deficit to the point where it is appalling to the 
fiscally responsible Americans who pay their bills on time with the 
paycheck that they have with the amount that's left after they pay 
their taxes and their payroll.
  They want more government, more taxes, more irresponsibility. They 
want the nonproductive sector of the economy to feed on the productive 
sector of the economy, and they stand here and talk about a company 
that they claim made over, maybe the aggregate of all these companies, 
made over a trillion dollars in profits in the last decade. I'd like to 
see that data. And perhaps, if they have anybody on that side of the 
aisle that's ever actually engaged in business, they would do a 
calculation to see what the return on investment was, what was the 
capital investment that returned that kind of an investment, if those 
numbers would actually hold up under scrutiny, and I suspect they 
won't. Then, if they're going to do a legitimate measure, they would 
also take a look and see what have been the windfall profits of the 
Federal Government in collecting royalties off the product that has 
been produced by these companies that are doing high-risk exploration 
in deep waters to make sure, yes, for a profit--they should have a 
profit--but they also are making sure that there is cheaper energy here 
in the United States certainly than there would be otherwise if we 
didn't have these companies exploring for oil in places like the gulf 
coast and up in the Bakken region, and if we didn't have some kind of 
support here in Congress to open up offshore drilling, drilling on the 
non-national park public lands in America.
  We're an energy-rich nation. We have a large share of the world's 
energy and a smaller percentage of the world's population, and we have 
that energy, I suspect, because we've actually explored for it, 
identified it, measured it and quantified it. But, of course, that 
stuff escapes the people on the other side that are making these 
arguments for political reasons.
  The talking points of the Democrats are now, demagogue the Republican 
budget, attack the Republicans and accuse them of threatening senior 
citizens, and they completely deny the

[[Page H3274]]

fact that people 55 and up in the Republican budget are expressly 
protected from any kind of budgetary changes. It is truly an 
entitlement for those 55 and up.
  I'm not going to take the stand that we should then transfer that all 
the way down and guarantee my little granddaughter, Reagan Ann King, 
that her anticipated Medicare and Social Security benefits will be what 
she expects them to be on the day she's born with her $44,000 worth of 
national debt that she has to pay off. Are we going to guarantee her 
that she gets her retirement benefits under Social Security in the 
amount that has been calculated in the actuarial tables and a promise? 
Is that an entitlement? Are we going to guarantee her the level of 
Medicare? Are we going to take away any incentive for all children born 
in America to establish themselves, to protect themselves, to plan for 
their own retirement, their own future, and perhaps be responsible 
enough to take themselves off the entitlement rolls so that there can 
be a future for America?

  This economy collapses unless we address it. If we don't have the 
will, if we're going to listen to this kind of talk and cower before 
that and misdirect the American people with statements that clearly 
cannot be supported by the facts and think somehow there's a solution, 
my question is: What's your solution? More debt, more deficit, more 
demagoguery? For what? You'll put America into debt to exchange it for 
more political power? We saw what you did with political power and the 
American people rejected it in a resounding election just last 
November, and the large super-Democrat majority in this Congress turned 
completely over to a large Republican majority instead. Eighty-seven 
freshmen Republicans. You should be able to understand, none of them 
got elected because they want to grow government or increase the debt 
and deficit. Not one. Every one ran on the repeal of ObamaCare.
  While I'm on the subject, Mr. Speaker, I would make this point. Of 
all that was said about what it is that allegedly Republicans would do 
with seniors, here's what ObamaCare exactly does with seniors. It cuts 
Medicare by $532 billion, a direct assault on seniors, a direct assault 
on their Medicare. Now. It's not a delay. It's as soon as they can get 
this monstrosity implemented, and they believe that they're going to 
take that money and roll it over into something else, and it was part 
of the smoke and mirrors to come up with a CBO score that they could 
allege that it was actually going to be a money saver.
  But the American people threw a lot of people out of office last 
November because they knew when the President of the United States, the 
Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader all say the same thing, 
we're going to insure 30 million more people with ObamaCare and it's 
going to be at no cost, 30 million more people insured at no cost, the 
American people know that's false. No matter how many times it's 
repeated, they know that that's false. You can't get more for less. 
Things cost money.
  And they could understand this. That if you take the 306 or so 
million Americans and if you're concerned that there is a percentage of 
them that are uninsured, we should only be concerned about the 
Americans that were uninsured and remain uninsured, I might add, that 
don't have affordable options.
  If Bill Gates is uninsured, I don't have any heartburn over that. 
Bill Gates can manage his own health care. He can be self-insured. He 
may well be, for all I know. If Warren Buffett is uninsured, I'm not 
concerned about that. He can manage his own health care. If somebody 
that's making $174,000 is uninsured, I'm not concerned about that 
person because they're making enough money to take care of their own 
health insurance. And on down the line. To what level?
  But the people that they're trying to argue were uninsured, this 
larger number of around 46 million uninsured Americans, when you start 
subtracting from that those that are eligible for Medicaid but don't 
bother to sign up, those that are eligible under their employer but opt 
out, those who are here in the United States illegally. I don't want to 
cover them, Mr. Speaker. As you begin subtracting from the 46 million 
and you get down to the number of those Americans that are uninsured 
and do not have affordable options, that number turns out to be not 46 
million but 12.1 million. That's making $75,000 or less. That's the 
measure. Those who are uninsured and don't have an affordable option.
  Now, 12.1 million is still a lot of people, but it only amounts to 
less than 4 percent of the U.S. population. And ObamaCare completely 
transforms the best health care system in the world, the best health 
care delivery system in the world, and the best health insurance system 
in the world to try to get at a small percentage of the less than 4 
percent of Americans who were uninsured without affordable options.
  What do we have today? Do you hear any Democrats coming to the floor 
to tell us how many people are uninsured in America after ObamaCare was 
passed?

                              {time}  1910

  I can offer this guarantee. It's more. There are more that are 
uninsured today than there were on the day that ObamaCare was passed 
because more employers became more doubtful about what it would be that 
would be imposed upon them. There are fewer employees today than there 
would be if ObamaCare had never passed because the companies don't have 
the confidence that they can operate within the environment of an 
implemented ObamaCare.
  And I listen to demagoguery on big insurance companies, Big Oil, big 
banks. Well, America is set up on competition, and if these companies 
have such a market share and such an advantage that now they can take 
unreasonable profits from the marketplace, somebody's going to get in 
the market and they're going to start a bank and oil company or 
insurance company.
  But here's what I'm for within the area of health insurance. I want 
to allow people to buy insurance across State lines. I want the people 
in New Jersey, the young man that's buying a typical policy, in good 
health, roughly at age 23, for $6,000 a year--that's before ObamaCare 
passed--I want him to be able to go to Kentucky and buy that similar 
typical policy for a 23-year-old healthy male in Kentucky for about 
$1,000 a year. Isn't that a good solution? That way your 1,300 health 
insurance companies that we had are competing all against each other 
instead of being isolated within the States, operating under individual 
State mandates. And they can then afford policies that can have higher 
deductibles, higher copayments and significantly lower premiums.
  And I want to see people get off the entitlement rolls, both of 
Social Security and of Medicare, and this can be done. And, Mr. 
Speaker, I will take you quickly down the path of how we get there with 
Medicare and HSAs.
  Under the HSA legislation that was passed in 2003 under Medicare part 
D, a young couple, let's just say, they presumably fell in love and got 
married at age 20 and went to work on their life's work. I can do the 
math work with round figures. And over the course of 45 years of work, 
from 20 until 65, they maxed out on their health savings account. They 
started at $5,150 a year for that couple, and then it grows by COLA on 
up and just continues as long as there is a cost-of-living allowance 
that increases it. And if you subtract from that amount $2,000 a year 
that would come out of their health savings account in what we might 
call typical expenses of health care, going to the doctor, doing those 
things that you don't want to put on your insurance policy and if you 
compounded the balance of that health savings account at 4 percent, 
which is historically accurate--and I did this math before we had the 
downturn over the last 2\1/2\ years--it comes up to this.
  That couple would arrive at Medicare eligibility age 65 with a health 
savings account that had $950,000 in it. $950,000, Mr. Speaker. Now, 
the liability, the present value, present negative value of an 
individual that arrives at Medicare eligibility age today is about 
$72,000. That's the average that the Federal Government would be paying 
for health care benefits for the duration of the life of the individual 
after they reach 65 Medicare eligibility, $72,000. So the couple then 
would be at $144,000, and you have to adjust it for inflation, but I 
just go without tonight for the purposes of mental figuring.
  So you would take the $950,000 and you subtract $144,000 to take care 
of

[[Page H3275]]

what would be the premium for a Medicare replacement policy, a paid-up 
Medicare replacement policy similar to an annuitized health care plan 
for life. And now you're in this area of--let's just say $806,000 would 
be the balance in your health savings account, $806,000. And what's the 
Federal Government's interest in that health savings account after that 
point? They want to tax it as regular income as it comes out of that 
account as being spent by the individual, or they want to tax it as 
death tax later on if the people, once they pass away, to tax it on the 
way to their heirs, the death tax.
  Why wouldn't this Federal Government offer to the people that have 
their health savings account, why wouldn't it offer them this? Buy a 
Medicare replacement policy, and you can keep the change tax free and 
you can will it to your children or you can use it as a pension plan.
  Now, we're already solving this situation of Social Security, 
Medicare by allowing HSAs to grow and let people manage their own 
lives. That's the kind of thing that we need to have going on for 
solutions, not demagoguery, not trying to conflate the philosophy of a 
budget that's designed to get us to balance.
  Where's your balanced budget over there on that side of the aisle? Is 
there a single one of you that will stand up and tell me that you have 
offered a balanced budget? You didn't even offer a budget when Nancy 
Pelosi was Speaker the last year or two here, and now you're here 
attacking this budget. You don't have a plan. You don't have a platform 
to stand on to criticize this platform, and you had plenty of 
opportunity to offer your own. But there's no balanced budget that's 
being offered on this side of the aisle. That's clear. That's why no 
one responds to me, or I'd yield to someone who wanted to allege that 
Democrats offered a balanced budget. If they did, it would be with--
what's that word? The voracious shark of tax increases would be what 
would happen, Mr. Speaker.

  So I think perhaps we've dispatched what took place in the previous 
half hour or an hour, and I will then now, without segue, transition 
into the subject matter that I came here to talk about. That's this.
  Day before yesterday, I listened to the President's speech that he 
gave in El Paso, Texas, and it was surprising in a way, a bit shocking 
in a way. It was a political speech on immigration. I mean, that's 
clear. And the people that analyzed it came to the same conclusion that 
I did, Mr. Speaker.
  But as I listened to the President of the United States, who was 
standing in El Paso very near the border of the United States, begin to 
ridicule people who want border security, well, first, he uttered the 
breathtaking statement that the border fence is, quote, basically 
complete, close quote. Mr. Speaker, the border fence is basically 
complete, uttered by the President of the United States? I have a few 
data points I think he should go back and revisit.
  One of them is, Mr. President, there are 2,000 miles of southern 
border, about 4,000 miles of northern border. But just dealing with the 
southern border, 2,000 miles of southern border.
  Now, whatever it was that Janet Napolitano told you, Mr. President, 
here are the facts on the border fence as of today, as constructed. Out 
of the 2,000 miles, there are 350 miles of pedestrian fence. That's 
called primary fencing. That's a fence that you don't just walk 
through. It's a bit of a barrier. They get climbed all the time, but 
it's a single fence. Often it's a chain-link fence. I don't know if 
they're referring to the barbwire fence. I suspect not, because I think 
actually we've got a little bit more of that on the border. Even the 
Federal Government, the Department of Homeland Security claims the 
primary fencing, pedestrian fencing is 350 miles out of the 2,000 
miles. Now, they add this all up and they say we've got all of these 
miles of fencing, but if it's double fencing or triple fencing, they 
count each mile of it even if it's layered. Then, if that's the case, 
it's all done, it's a triple fencing, then we've got 6,000 miles of 
fence, Mr. Speaker, but that isn't the case at all.
  Here's the comparison. 350 miles of primary fencing or pedestrian 
fencing. Now, we know that a single fence doesn't do us a lot. It slows 
some traffic down and it gives a line of demarcation. Double fencing 
slows them down a lot better, and it sets up kind of a no man's land we 
can patrol and sometimes catch illegals inside of that before they 
climb the second fence and go off into the underbrush.
  So of the secondary fencing they have, there's not 350 miles of that. 
Remember, 2,000-mile border. Secondary fencing, 36.3 miles. Now, 
remember the primary fencing, 350 miles; the secondary fencing, 36.3 
miles. I'm going to tell you that we don't have a lot of effectiveness 
until we get to at least the secondary fencing component of this.
  So of 2,000 miles of border, 36.3 miles of secondary fencing, 36.3 
miles is kind of what you can say is somewhat built, but a lot of it 
requires also triple fencing. And I've been down to visit the triple 
fencing, and that exists in a number of places and it exists very 
effectively in some areas of Arizona, in the southwest corner of 
Arizona, of course on the Mexican border.
  Now, when you look at the border, out of the 2,000-mile border, the 
fence that is--they call it tertiary, that's the third layer of fence. 
I have 350 miles of primary fencing, 36.3 miles of double fencing; and 
of that 36.3 miles, 14.3 miles are triple fencing.

                              {time}  1920

  The triple fencing, as far as I know, has never been defeated by 
anyone. They go around it. They may tunnel under it sometimes, but 
they've not defeated the fencing, and it's been pretty effective. But 
if you've got effective fencing at 14.3 of the 2,000 miles and within 
220 yards of that triple fencing--and by the way, there is triple 
fencing in El Paso--the President is standing within 220 yards of 
triple fencing in El Paso, arguing that the fencing is basically 
complete, and he's ridiculing Americans who want border security by 
saying--now I'm just going to include myself in this--that we'll never 
be satisfied, that we keep raising the bar. Well, no. I always set the 
bar up pretty high. I don't think I need to raise it.
  It reminds me of the way Margaret Thatcher once responded to a 
student when she was in Iowa and she was asked the question, What have 
you changed your mind on since you left office? She thought a little 
bit, and she said, Goodness. I was in office 11\1/2\ years. My 
principles were very soundly based. I saw no reason to change them.
  Well, the principle that I've laid out for border security, as far as 
infrastructure on the border, is this: We've got 2,000 miles on the 
southern border through which comes 90 percent of the illegal drugs 
consumed in America. I don't suggest that we have to build 2,000 miles 
of triple fencing. I want to build a fence, a wall, and a fence. Yes, 
that's effective. It's cost-effective as well. I only suggest that we 
build that fence until they quit going around the end, Mr. Speaker. 
That will be the measure. That's how we'll know if it's effective. If 
they're going around the end, we'll extend it a few more miles. If they 
keep going around the end, we'll keep building. If the illegals are 
still entering the United States, then we'll build it from Brownsville 
all the way up to San Diego or to Tijuana if you prefer.
  The President said the fence is basically complete, that he's 
basically got 14.3 miles of completed fencing on 2,000. I don't think 
anybody is going to think that that's a very basic completion. I should 
have, perhaps, done this math, but if I just do 14.3 miles and if I 
divide that by 2,000 miles, I get--let me see--seven-tenths of 1 
percent of completion. That would be the President's idea of basically 
complete. Seven-tenths of 1 percent of the entire 2,000-mile border has 
triple fencing on it and 2\1/2\ times more than that, so maybe you'd 
have, oh, let's say, 18 or 19--1.9 percent completed if you'd just 
consider the double fencing instead of the triple fencing.
  And the President is making fun of people who might want a moat?
  I have a picture here. I've flown that within the last couple of 
months in a helicopter to evaluate the border, almost all of it, all 
the way from El Paso across all of New Mexico and almost all of 
Arizona--I know I've flown all of it at one time or another--and it 
occurred to me that the President was standing pretty close to the moat 
at the time, 220 yards away from right there at the border. Not only 
does it have the triple fencing that Janet

[[Page H3276]]

Napolitano made fun of--she said, If you show me a 20-foot fence, I'll 
show you a 21-foot ladder--but in El Paso, here's what we have:
  We have the Rio Grande River, moat No. 1, with water in it, flowing 
down. You have a fence. You have a patrol road. You have another fence. 
Then you have a canal that has a fairly fast current in it and a lot of 
water with concrete sides and bottom. Then you have another fence, so 
you have triple fencing. If anybody is going to come into the United 
States into El Paso, they've got to get across the river--sometimes 
swim, most of the time wade--climb a fence, avoid the Border Patrol 
that has a patrol road and stations posted along inside the column of 
the two fences, climb a second fence, get into the canal, swim the 
canal, get up over the top of the next fence and into El Paso.
  Mr. President, it's not happening in El Paso because fences work. By 
the way, the natural water streams there have been really useful as 
well, and I think that, if I had any staff that stood me up within 220 
yards of a structure like that to make fun of it, I'd probably have 
different staff the next day. I hope he takes note of that, Mr. 
Speaker. I make these points that the immigration situation in the 
United States is this:
  We have a GAO study, and this study that just emerged here a few 
weeks ago tells us that there are a number of people who die in the 
Arizona desert while sneaking into the United States. The loss of every 
one of those personal lives is a tragedy, and it's of high proportion 
to their families, but I began asking the question: How many Americans 
die at the hands of those who do get into the United States? That study 
report comes out and tells us this:
  In the Federal, State and local prisons in America--and this is a 
very minimum number. This is a floor, not a ceiling. We know the number 
is higher. We know it's no lower than this--there are currently 
incarcerated 25,064 criminal aliens who were arrested for homicide and 
who are currently incarcerated in those prisons that I mentioned in the 
United States. That's 25,064 homicide victims at a minimum that we know 
of, and that's some of the price for our not securing our border.
  If we had 100 percent enforcement on our border and 100 percent 
enforcement over people in the United States illegally, then 
theoretically at least all 25,000 of those people would be alive. They 
would not be under the ground in the United States--one coffin at a 
time, one obscure village at a time, one tragedy in a family at a time. 
It's more than 25,000, certainly, which is a number that soars when you 
think of it, a number of multiples of the victims of September 11, and 
we sit here and say, Well, you know, it's only people who want to come 
here to make a better life.
  It's not only that to the families who have lost victims to this.
  I just sat down and had a discussion within the last couple of hours 
with Tiffany Hartley, whose husband was a victim of the vicious murder 
out on the jet skis on Falcon Lake, which is just north of McAllen, 
Texas, on September 30 of last year.

  The tragedy of his death, the unwillingness on the part of this 
administration to go in and investigate his death, to find the 
perpetrators who killed her husband, and come to the truth of that 
incident is inexcusable and unconscionable. The Justice Department 
needs to drill in with this. They need to turn up their diplomatic 
pressure. The State Department, Hillary Clinton, needs to connect with 
the Mexican consul. Let's get to the bottom of this. Let's get the 
facts as they stand. Let's find out who investigated what and when, and 
let's take a look at the communications as they go back and forth so we 
can get a sense of the level of focus that maybe existed or maybe 
didn't exist.
  I'm calling upon Eric Holder to take a look at the murder of David 
Hartley. Do so for Tiffany. Help her get some closure.
  Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________