[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 86 (Thursday, May 19, 2022)]
[House]
[Pages H5200-H5203]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    HEALTHCARE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2021, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) is 
recognized for the remainder of the hour as the designee of the 
minority leader.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Arizona has 27 minutes 
remaining.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I try to come behind the mike at least 
every week when we are here, and the last few times I have been rather 
cranky. I am intensely frustrated with the policies of the majority.
  The majority, the Democrats, the left, have controlled this place now 
for what, 15 months. Poor people are poorer. Working poor are poorer. 
The middle class is poorer. And there is just this frustration for 
people like myself; we have got to stop it. Stop hurting people.
  And a couple of the responses to the YouTube video that went out on 
one of the previous floor speeches was, okay, just give us something 
optimistic. So let's try to do something optimistic today.
  But understand, this optimism requires this body to think 
differently, particularly my brothers and sisters in the majority. On 
occasion, you are going to have to back away from who writes checks, 
you know, and start to think about what the future would look like if 
we would just even fixate, focus, consider, listen to, some of these 
ideas.

                              {time}  1315

  This is the first one. I have been to the floor multiple times on 
this. I am not going to even start with the debt chart, which used to 
be a tradition. But I would often stand here with this chart and say: 
Hey, you do realize in the next 29 years, we are functionally heading 
to--what is it--$112 trillion or $115 trillion of borrowed money in 
today's dollars.
  The thing we are terrified to tell the American people is that 75 
percent of that is functionally Medicare and the other 25 percent is 
the shortfall in Social Security. It is demographics. But when you 
break it apart, that $80 trillion-plus of borrowing, that is in today's 
dollars, that is the shortfall in Medicare. Thirty-one percent of that 
is just diabetes. Thirty-three percent of all healthcare spending in 
the United States is diabetes.
  If you want to lower the cost of healthcare, if you want to make 
healthcare more available and accessible, you have got to stop doing 
what this place has been doing for a couple decades now where we play 
the game on who pays and who gets subsidized. Obamacare, the ACA, was 
about who gets subsidized and who has to pay. The Republican 
alternative had some of the same sin, and heaven knows, Medicare for 
all is purely a financing scam. It isn't about what we pay.
  So let's actually do some things that are hopeful.
  We have been tracking the theory behind this for a couple years now. 
It is functionally replacing insulin-producing cells. I did a whole 
presentation on how they take stem cells and convert them and tap them 
with a CRISPR so your body doesn't want to reject them. But the fact of 
the matter is, we have now had a couple people who have been cured of 
type 1 diabetes.
  Now, it is a proof-of-concept study. They have begun phase 1. Right 
now, the FDA has them on a pause as they are working out dosing. But 
the fact of the matter is, we are that close, conceptually, to a cure 
for type 1. And the fact of the matter is, the premise works for type 
2, but you have got to deal with some of the ancillaries, which are 
really uncomfortable conversations.
  I represent, we believe, the population with the second-highest 
diabetic population in the world, one of my Tribal communities. Mr. 
Speaker, and many of the others here, we may have urban populations 
that have diabetic populations, like our rural poor.
  The fact of the matter is, wouldn't it be amazing if Republicans and 
Democrats in this place were fixating on this concept of, we are going 
to fixate on curing the misery; we are not going to go out and build a 
bunch more clinics and say we care, so live with your misery. The 
concept that there is a chance that if we put our resources in the 
right place, just like Operation Warp Speed did--remember how many 
people here said you can't do that in a year, but they did it. Then we 
could actually have the more difficult debate here about if this is a 
cure for type 1, how do you move into type 2, what do you do for 
lifestyle, health, and what we eat.

[[Page H5201]]

  There is some data out there we have been working on that shows one 
of the key contributors to income inequality in our society is the fact 
that family members are suffering. They are having their toes cut off. 
It is health. So we hear speech after speech after speech after speech 
here about income inequality, the poor, the poor, but how about 
embracing technology and taking a run at it. Yes, there is a chance it 
doesn't work, but we are talking trillions and trillions of spending in 
our near future just on diabetes. Isn't it worth investing and ending 
the misery?
  There is hope that that is actually something that would be honorable 
and noble and compassionate and moral. But it doesn't fit the playbook 
here because that isn't the people showing up here writing you a check.
  A point of reference we have got to get through our heads: Five 
percent of our brothers and sisters who have chronic conditions, often 
multiple chronic conditions, are the majority of healthcare spending. 
So if 5 percent is functionally 50 percent of all the spending, what 
happens if you help cure some of those chronic conditions? If you want 
to have an impact on the cost of healthcare, stop thinking of it as a 
financing problem; think of it as a cures issue.
  I will argue, this is optimistic. It is hopeful. We are in a time of 
technology miracles. When is the last time you had anyone, particularly 
from the majority, talk about something that was optimistic, that could 
make the poor less poor, make society healthier, provide an opportunity 
that didn't also require government running our lives? In many ways, 
this does just the opposite. It sets us free.
  This isn't pie in the sky. Some of this is happening around us. I 
mean, this week--I should have brought the picture--but the FDA 
approved a home COVID test that does more than COVID. It actually also 
detects flu and RSV. It is a home test, and it has been approved. So 
this isn't utopian; it exists.
  The other thing that becomes a more difficult conversation is: If we 
care about people and we care about freedom and we care about crashing 
the price of healthcare, why not legalize technology?
  So I just sort of show this as--in some ways this is as much about 
the picture to get the concept. Let me tell the story first. A few 
years ago, I was reading some of the crazy blogs and research stuff. I 
sit on an airplane 10 hours a week. There is a story about this 
material science professor who has built this thing that you blow into 
and pretty instantly it tells you if you have a virus, it can figure 
out sort of the category of the virus, and then turns around and can 
ping off your medical records on your phone. Theoretically, it could 
actually order your antivirals.
  The newer generations are doing much more than just the category of 
virus. They are picking up bacteria. There is even one out there that 
the researchers say can pick up a number of dead cancer proteins, 
because when a cancer cell dies, it throws off that dead DNA strip. It 
is functionally a flu kazoo. I thought you would like that name.
  What is the problem with that technology? In this place, it is 
illegal. You would have an algorithm writing a prescription. You would 
have a pharmacist filling prescription. The Social Security Act says 
you will see a doctor, not an algorithm, not something you can have in 
your home medicine cabinet that you can blow into.

  But do we actually care about people, or do we care about the people 
lining up at our offices who want to slow down the technology? Think of 
the lobbying that goes on in this place to stop telehealth.
  The fact of the matter is, I have done telehealth here for a dozen 
years. The number of times my office was full of people saying we 
really like the technology, but we need to slow it down; we don't think 
you have enough cost controls. They will do anything because it changes 
the economics of delivering healthcare.
  The pandemic hit, and to the majority's credit, a piece of 
legislation I had worked on for years, they grabbed that language and 
plugged it in. That is our telehealth expansion we have today.
  You do realize, it goes away. The expansion on telehealth goes away 
when the pandemic is declared over. There are people lobbying on 
Capitol Hill to make sure that happens.
  So we talk about how much we care, but the fact of the matter is, 
opportunities, technologies, the ability to use this to stay healthy, 
if it is not making certain people money, they are here on this campus 
trying to lobby against it.
  You start to realize, this isn't utopian. The technology exists. When 
you have a breath biopsy that you can blow into that instantly can tell 
you if you have COVID, why doesn't this place look forward? Because so 
much of the policy we debate here, it is as if we are talking about the 
1990s.
  The fact of the matter is, there is investment coming in. This is 
another breath biopsy and the things you can wear that someone like 
myself--I have hypertension. You wear the thing on your wrist, and it 
helps you manage it.
  Mr. Speaker, one of the simplest things--and it is not even thought 
experiment--16 percent of all of U.S. healthcare spending is 
functionally related to people not taking their medicines. So if you 
have hypertension, do you take your hypertension medicine. If you have 
high cholesterol, do you take your statins, the things that keep you 
from having a stroke.
  A pill bottle lid that just beeps at you when you forgot to take your 
medicine in the morning or the things that drops the pills for grandma 
to stay healthy, the model says it is $550 billion. So 16 percent of 
healthcare spending, $550 billion a year. So more than half a trillion 
dollars a year if you just use something as simple as a pill bottle lid 
that reminded you to take your medicines.
  I know that is a little utopian, and it wouldn't be the completion 
adoption. But it is the concept. There are solutions around here that 
exist. We are just incapable of discussing them because they don't fit 
sort of the blinded, narrow vision, because we had our talking points 
from our political campaigns a decade ago and we haven't read a damn 
article since then.
  So my fixation on telehealth is how about people in areas like my 
Navajo Nation that doesn't have WiFi. Well, the fact of the matter is, 
you are seeing it in Ukraine right now, aren't you? When you have 
satellite broadband that is available to functionally everyplace in 
North America right now, wouldn't it be cheaper, more efficient, and 
actually forward-looking to say maybe the solution for the family that 
is in the middle of rural America, give them the plate-shaped satellite 
dish and, boom, they have WiFi, they have broadband? It makes them 
available to use telehealth. Wouldn't that be something.
  Instead, are we going to subsidize billions and billions and billions 
of dollars to run a strip of fiber out there, which we have been doing 
for decades. It is time we actually sort of entered this century.
  Then there are other things that just drive me nuts. How much 
discussion have you had from the White House, from the Democrat 
leadership here, about supply chains; much of inflation isn't their 
fault; it is not their spending; it is not their regulatory process; it 
is not the changing capital stack; restricting access to hydrocarbons. 
It is not their fault; it is not their policies; it is shipping.
  But then they do brilliant things like this, where they actually 
have--in their Build Back Better legislation, they slipped a sentence 
in there saying you don't get to automate the ports. So think about how 
insane this is.
  The giveaway to the longshoreman union was so important to the 
Democrats that they will give speeches about how we need to fix the 
supply chain, we need to get the goods moving, but we are going to make 
sure that you can't do it through automation. It is in their 
legislation.
  Do we have a vision of what the future can be where it is more 
productive, more prosperous, more hopeful, more opportunity for 
everyone, or does our majority here of Democrats continue to slip 
little things like this in that basically calcify the misery that is in 
our communities right now?
  Why this slide is important is that if we are forward-looking--I just 
came across this, and it is the thought experiment. So a couple of 
SpaceX engineers have a company, and they are working, apparently, with 
the rail community--and I know this picture isn't great. It is little 
autonomous electric platforms.

[[Page H5202]]

You would pull a container off and put it right on the platform, and 
that container drives to where it is supposed to go. It is a little 
spur crossing. It is going to Arizona storage if it is leaving the Port 
of Long Beach through the port of the Alameda corridor that is all 
backed up, for those of us who lean a little more toward the west. But 
it is a technology solution.
  Instead of this place holding hearings and saying, What the 
regulatory barriers are? What the labor regulatory barriers? There is 
an optimistic solution. This place will run away from it, because one 
of the union groups doesn't like it. It becomes about power and money; 
not what is actually good for the American people. But there are 
solutions like this of autonomous railcars.

                              {time}  1330

  This one has been out for a few years, and they are working on it. It 
is actually making amazing progress. You are hearing the discussions 
right now of food insecurity around the world. I believe it is mostly 
University of Illinois that has been doing this amazing work on how to 
get plant productivity dramatically better.
  I have done whole presentations here on the floor about C4 plants, C3 
plants, and how you tweak them. Remember, God made the plants so 
sometimes they grab an oxygen molecule. They really wanted the carbon 
molecule.
  I apologize for the folks trying to take this down. Wave at me if I 
am talking too fast. I have had a lot of coffee, which is a typical 
day.
  The optimism of what would this mean to feeding the world? What would 
this mean to inflation? What would this mean just for the morality of 
there being the efficiency--if you need less fuel, water, fertilizer, 
if the technology is real. In the early reports, it is pretty darn 
impressive.
  We are holding hearings on this, right? We are having discussions of 
how this would be amazing to help the world grow more food and protect 
the environment? Of course not. Because there is no one showing up with 
a check to talk about this.
  The next one I am going to show you is just my fixation. You do 
realize in the last decade, the United States has removed so much 
baseload nuclear power that its functioning equals every bit of 
renewable that has hit the grid.
  On one hand, here we have this optimism. Think about all the 
photovoltaic and wind. Isn't this exciting? Oh, by the way, we removed 
so much baseload nuclear power, we haven't gone anywhere.
  I know there is a huge cadre of my colleagues here that despise 
nuclear power. You have a Nobel Prize physicist saying, hey, we think 
there is actually a way you could use a high-pulse laser to break 
nuclear materials down. You have other people reporting that, saying we 
need to be taking the spent nuclear and refining it because our nuclear 
stocks have crashed. There is a long history to that, post-Cold War, 
lots of weapons grade. We have been knocking it down to use in other 
uses, and now that stockpile is running out.
  But why wouldn't you invite this physicist here to Capitol Hill and 
say: What would it take investment-wise, timewise, to have a way to 
break down nuclear waste? Remember, he is the guy with the Nobel Prize; 
this place isn't. This is optimism. This is hope.
  Then you have other things. I remember talking about this technology 
as a kid of how you could build batteries. We used to refer to them as 
a rust battery. It is a closed loop. They are very heavy. They only 
work in utility grade. You couldn't have them in your car. But they 
don't use rare earths. Why aren't these people here on Capitol Hill 
talking to us about how we could fix our power storage situation, 
particularly for those of us in the West where, during the afternoon, 
we have all this photovoltaic coming in, but then the Sun goes down, 
and we are still running our air-conditioning, and we have this crash?
  There is hope. There are opportunities. Do all these work? I don't 
know. But that is what this body is supposed to be about: What does the 
future look like? Instead, we are litigating ideas that are 20 years 
out of date.
  This one is out there right now, I guess near Houston, where they 
have a gas-fired power plant. I believe it is called the Allam-Fetvedt 
Cycle, and it has no smokestacks. They basically use the throw-off to 
spin.
  So you burn, you spin. Instead of boiling water and having the steam 
spin it, it is the burn that spins the turbines, and then they capture 
all the CO2 and save it and use it for other sources. There 
is no smokestack.
  This is up and running today. Yes, it has had some engineering 
problems, but the concept, why don't we talk about this? If you say you 
care about greenhouse gases, and we care about the fact that much of 
America may have brownouts, blackouts, powerwise in the United States 
this year, there is a way the technology is the solution.
  This last one I am going to do just because it is the quintessential 
that sometimes there is a solution, but no one has figured out really 
how to make a bunch of money on it, so no one here is ever going to 
talk about it.
  A number of my brothers and sisters on the left despise natural gas. 
I am fascinated with it because you do realize a couple of years ago 
the expansion of fracking and natural gas got us within a couple hairs 
of actually the Paris accords without us even being part of the Paris 
accord agreement, and it was because of natural gas.
  My brothers and sisters on the left who despise natural gas give the 
excuse of: Well, there is methane. There is methane leakage, and 
methane is like nine to one in global warming counts even though its 
half-life is disputed a bit.
  If we had a way to deal with the methane bleed, would my Democratic 
colleagues let us let Wall Street, let pension plans, everyone else 
finally go back to investing in natural gas?
  Well, there is some research out there that said: Hey, did you know 
that if you can take kitty litter, clay, I think they tag it with some 
copper oxide, it becomes a methane sponge, and it is really, really 
cheap? It is, functionally, clay.
  Why wouldn't we have a hearing about this and have a discussion 
saying: You are saying we could go back to extracting lots of natural 
gas? Because the price is off the charts. Why this is so important is 
do not let someone lie to you and say: Well, the reason your gas 
prices, the reason the natural gas prices, are so high is Russia's 
invasion of Ukraine.
  The futures market last September, October was telling us that fuel 
prices were about to go off the charts. It had already begun. It was 
substantially because of the cancelation of the pipelines, the 
permits, and the capital stack, the threat that the Securities and 
Exchange Commission was going to require all sorts of disclosures. The 
fact of the matter is, this majority became very hostile to 
hydrocarbons. It was already coming. The Russian invasion just made 
some of these prices that you are going to suffer through this summer 
happen earlier.

  Part of the excuse is, well, natural gas, yes, it is half the 
environmental load of maybe coal. But they still hate it because of 
that methane.
  How about if I came to you and said: It doesn't cure all the 
problems, but it would cure part of it? There is a solution.
  Mr. Speaker, my last comment, this place has been miserable for the 
last 15 months. It has been dour; it has been angry; it has been sad. 
Wouldn't it be interesting if somewhere in here our colleagues on the 
left and the right just held a few hearings and said what does the 
future look like for technology disruption that is good for poor 
people, that is good for the working poor, good for the middle class? 
Instead, it is sort of this march toward ``screw them, let them 
suffer'' because our ideology is more important than what is really 
going on.
  Both parties here deserve to be judged by not our words, not our 
virtue signaling, but what we actually accomplish. Take a look at what 
we did when we had the full majority. Take a look at the economy in 
2018, 2019, first quarter of 2020 because we fully intend to judge you 
for what you did these 2 years.
  The fact of the matter is, income inequality, food insecurity, the 
poor, the middle class all had a hell of a lot better economy and 
better life during our years than yours.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

[[Page H5203]]

  

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