[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 197 (Thursday, November 19, 2020)]
[House]
[Page H5936]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   HONORING NATIONAL RURAL HEALTH DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Arizona (Mr. O'Halleran) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. O'HALLERAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in honor of National Rural 
Health Day.
  I am proud to represent Arizona's First Congressional District. Our 
district is larger than the State of Illinois, and it is one of the 
most rural in the country.
  Many of my constituents must spend hours traveling hundreds of miles 
to access any kind of care, let alone specialist care.
  This year, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit our rural communities 
especially hard.
  In March, we passed the CARES Act: Sweeping legislation to address 
the coronavirus pandemic and provide relief to struggling healthcare 
facilities workers, families, small businesses, and Tribes.
  Within this package, we pushed to include $8 billion in funding 
specifically for our rural Tribal Nations. We also secured over $1 
billion to support the Indian Health Service in Tribal health systems.
  The CARES Act included $200 million for new rural telehealth services 
and $3.1 billion in funding for community health centers.
  But this is not enough. We need to pass a new, comprehensive COVID-19 
package now.


                           A Talk About Life

  Mr. O'HALLERAN. Mr. Speaker, I want to divert for a second from what 
I have written here and talk about life.
  When I became a police officer a while back, I did it because I 
wanted to save lives. And right now, our doctors and our nurses across 
this country are doing that with limited help and with the need for 
more supplies.
  So our businesses are struggling.
  But when I would go to a door and knock on that door when I was a 
homicide investigator and tell someone's loved one that their son or 
daughter had died suddenly through violence, it was one of the harshest 
things I had to do in life, and I had to do it way too many times.
  And now I sit here almost 4 years and see a national emergency 
declared, and month after month after month we have not made a decision 
to help the American people again. Families are being broken up. We all 
care about families. People are suffering because they have lost their 
jobs. We care about that, I know, all of us.
  I know that each and every one of us, if we had a family member that 
was about to die, that we would want to be there by their side, but 
also, we would do everything we could to save that life. And, yet, here 
we sit as a body, and the Senate sits as a body, and the administration 
is here, and month after month after month we have failed to address 
these severe problems within our country.
  Whatever Governors do, they do. That is because part of the issue is 
that we haven't provided enough responsibility and direction.
  But the other part of it is that we just haven't gotten our job done. 
After 4 years I sit here and look out and know that 1,800 fellow 
Americans died yesterday and a thousand more the day before and a 
thousand more the day before that, and the amount of cases are going up 
and spiraling. Thank God the healthcare industry has found some ways to 
help our families.
  But the vaccine is not around the corner. It is months away from 
having any impact; months away. And people will still die; our fellow 
Americans. We cannot allow this to happen.
  We are going to be going on Thanksgiving break. Really? I couldn't 
comprehend it when we left for the summer and our fellow Americans were 
dying. I really can't comprehend going home for Thanksgiving and not 
working as hard as I can before that to make sure that our American 
families do not have to suffer anymore.
  When I worked in the Chicago neighborhoods as a police officer, 
people were suffering then without this going on. And now they are 
suffering even worse.
  This is something that I signed up for, to save lives as a police 
officer, and to do that here as much as we can. And we should all be 
going in that direction. I know you want to. I know we want to, but we 
have to show it.
  We can say to leadership, go leadership and negotiate. Us being here 
is a way of making sure they and our country know that we care. We care 
enough to not just go away week after week after week and not allow the 
people of America to know their leaders are here for them.

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