[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 13]
[House]
[Page 17232]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           HEALTH CARE REFORM

  (Mr. MAFFEI asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. MAFFEI. Mr. Speaker, I hosted a town hall meeting in my district 
in Syracuse, New York. The town hall was extremely well attended, with 
over 400 constituents from across central New York in attendance, and 
everyone was interested. I think there may have even been 400 different 
opinions in the room. The ones who were the most passionate, of course, 
were the ones on both sides of it and the extreme sides of it. There 
was the crowd that wanted a government-run, single-payer health care 
system and wouldn't settle for much else, and then there were about an 
equal number equally convinced that the government should have 
absolutely no role in health care whatsoever and that any role at all 
would be socialism. I think most of the people in my district, though, 
are somewhere in the middle.
  I would like to share just one story from my town hall. At the end of 
the evening, after some pretty heated rhetoric, a man named Doug West 
of Skaneateles, New York, came down to the front of the auditorium to 
show me his monthly insurance bill and how it went from about $350 
about 6 years ago to more than $800 today. Doug is a retired engineer 
from a local company, and unless there are is some dramatic changes, 
Doug is not going to be able to afford that rising cost forever.
  Doug and his family are examples of the constituents that I will be 
focused on in my advocacy for higher quality and more affordable health 
care.

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