[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 2]
[House]
[Page 1876]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         HEALTH CARE INSURANCE

  Mr. DeFAZIO. Well, the President has discovered that we have a 
problem with health insurance in the United States of America, and that 
is good news. Approximately 1 million more Americans have become 
uninsured for health care every year that the President has been in 
office, a record 46.1 million have no health insurance, 8.3 million of 
them are children, 609,000 people of them in my State of Oregon, alone.
  The President goes on to say, having discovered this problem, that we 
must address the rising costs so that more Americans can afford basic 
health insurance. I think there is a lot of room for agreement there. 
Unfortunately, the solutions the President is offering are straight out 
of the neoconservative and right-wing think tanks.
  The same people who told us we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq 
are now giving the President the solutions for the uninsured in 
America. They are saying the problem is those who are insured have too 
much insurance. We should tax middle-class Americans, particularly 
union members, who have good health plans, those that actually provide 
for some dental and vision coverage, in order to provide health 
insurance to those who don't.
  Now, what the President is ignoring here are a few problems with the 
wildly profitable insurance industry. First off, it is exempt from the 
antitrust law. There are only two industries exempt from the antitrust 
law, baseball and insurance. Now, I don't care that much about the 
baseball exemption, but insurance should not be exempt from antitrust. 
They should not be allowed to meet together and collude to jack up 
prices, collude to determine who they will cover and who they won't 
cover. Now those are big problems. If we dealt with those problems, 
that would dramatically drop the cost of health care.
  The President is a free market forces guy; well, let's have free 
market forces in health care. We don't today; it is a cartel. They 
collude to set the prices; they collude to decide who won't get 
coverage. Those are big problems. They want to cherry-pick. They only 
want to insure people who aren't going to file claims. We all know 
about that with our homeowners insurance now; you file a claim? Whoops, 
sorry; we don't want to insure you anymore even though you have been 
paying us a premium for 20 years. This is an industry that must be 
reined in. But no, that is not what the President is going to do. He is 
going to tax middle-class people. He is going to tax union members, 
people who have decent health care so that some money could then be 
provided as tax deductions for those who don't have health care. Well, 
there is another problem with that; of the 46.1 million people, 
remember, 8.3 million are children, no earnings there. And many of them 
come from families that earn less than $50,000 a year. What is a 
Federal tax deduction worth to those families? Zero, nada, zip. Of 
course, the President doesn't understand that.
  Actually, this will provide tremendous benefits to young, healthy 
people like, say, people who are millionaires at Google who have chosen 
not to buy health insurance, they will get a nice $15,000 a year tax 
break. But for the family that earns $50,000 a year, they will not get 
a tax break because they are not paying Federal income taxes. So the 
President's plan is worthless for those who most need it. It penalizes 
those who are getting by.
  And who is the President to talk about gold-plated health care plans? 
He has socialized medicine. He doesn't pay a penny. He gets a $20,000 
physical exam for free every year, in addition to any other health care 
he might need. And he is talking about Americans, families with gold-
plated plans who can actually take their kids to the dentist and get 
partial payment? Seniors who can actually get some new eyeglasses so 
they can see again? That is gold-plated in the President's world. Those 
people should pay taxes so that we can give a phony benefit to the 
uninsured. This is not the way to solve the problem.
  If the President had any guts he would take on the insurance 
industry. He would join me in proposing to take away the antitrust 
exemption from the insurance industry, stop them from redlining people 
and cherry-picking, and that would make health insurance cheaper for 
all Americans, not the preposterous proposal he is putting forward.

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