[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 13]
[House]
[Page 17699]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




         UNEMPLOYMENT, CAP-AND-TAX, AND AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GINGREY of Georgia. Madam Speaker, after losing an additional 
467,000 jobs last month, our Nation's unemployment rate reached a 25-
year high of 9.5 percent. It is time for the administration and the 
Democratic majority to admit what the American people know all too 
well: the vaunted Democratic stimulus bill has failed to stimulate 
anything other than a few Federal bureaucrats and the Chinese, who are 
loaning us, with hefty interest, I might add, those stimulus dollars.
  When President Obama and the Democratic leadership rammed the 1,073-
page stimulus bill through Congress without giving Representatives on 
either side of the aisle, much less voters back home, a chance to 
actually read it, they promised that the $1 trillion price tag would go 
to ``saving or creating 3.5 million jobs.'' Well, Madam Speaker, I must 
ask the question, Where are the jobs?
  To make matters worse, the House passed the ``Pelosi Global Warming 
Tax'' 2 weeks ago that will only make it harder for businesses and 
families to survive by piling an additional $3,000 on to every 
household's energy bill. This cap-and-tax policy, they call it cap-and-
trade, but it is a cap-and-tax policy, would further impose artificial 
emissions standards on American companies and energy producers, 
increasing the cost of doing business and forcing them to cede market 
share to overseas competitors who will not be subject to these limits 
on carbon dioxide emissions. I repeat: they will not be subject to 
these limits, and I'm talking, of course, about China and India.
  And now the same people who turned General Motors into ``Government 
Motors'' have set their sights on a government-controlled health care 
system that gives power to bureaucrats rather than doctors, like 
myself, to make decisions about your care. As we have seen in Great 
Britain and Canada, the end result would be the virtual elimination of 
private health insurance and the creation of a one-size-fits-all 
government health plan that would ration care by limiting the types of 
treatments patients can receive.
  Madam Speaker, instead of another government takeover, we need real 
solutions which will make health care more affordable and more 
accessible while leaving critical choices and decisions about their 
health where they belong, in the hands of patients and their 
physicians.

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