[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 13]
[House]
[Pages 18227-18234]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 THE WORLD'S GREATEST DELIBERATIVE BODY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Kosmas). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I appreciate being recognized to 
address here on the floor of the House of the House of Representatives. 
This has often been described as the world's greatest deliberative 
body. And here, in these Chambers, we engage in this debate and this 
dialogue.
  But the dialogue that comes to these Chambers is a dialogue that's 
designed to be filtered through our committee system, through our 
subcommittees, through our full committee process, whether it be the 
appropriations subcommittees and committees and on to the floor, or 
whether it be through our standing committees. And what we've seen 
happen instead is that this process is under the process of a wrecking 
ball that's been taken to the traditions of this House. And each day 
that goes by, it seems that there's another one of those opportunities 
to expand this deliberative body and, instead, it's diminished by order 
of the Speaker, by order of the Rules Committee; shut down the process 
to the point today where we had the gentleman from Oregon brought a 
privileged resolution to try to be heard on an amendment that would 
have otherwise been in order under 220 years of tradition of this 
House, but, instead, it was shut down by the Rules Committee, the 
committee that serves up here in this little hole in the wall in a room 
so small that a few Members can come in. Once in a while there's room 
for their staff. I have never seen press in the room. There is no 
camera in the room, and there will be no tourists that are allowed to 
go in there and watch the real debate that takes place, if it takes 
place at all in this Congress, in the Rules Committee. It's been 
changed that way in order to avoid the light of day, the press, the C-
SPAN cameras and, in fact, even some of the recordkeeping that is a 
little bit different there than it might be if it were up in front of 
everybody in front of the television cameras. And it is of great 
frustration to most Members of this Congress to see what's being done 
to this debate and deliberative process.
  So these debates that take place here on the floor, we used to have 
some good debates, some engaging debates, some times when people 
actually changed their minds when they heard the other side of the 
argument. That's what makes this the greatest deliberative body in the 
world. But now the debate's been reduced to something that takes place 
behind closed doors, I believe, by order of the Speaker, and amendments 
are shut down time after time after time. At least a dozen of mine were 
struck through just in the last couple of days. And I have sat up there 
waiting my turn to testify in the Rules Committee to the extent where I 
really want to bring up a laptop and some other kind of book work so I 
can make my time count. And if you get up and go to get a bite to eat 
or something to drink, then you might lose your turn altogether.
  So I have, Madam Speaker, introduced legislation that, if the 
business of this House is actually going to be conducted by the Rules 
Committee, then let's move the committee to the floor of the House of 
Representatives. If you're going to change and usurp the genuine 
authority of the franchise of all 435 Members of Congress who have a 
constitutional right and duty to express the will and the wishes of 
their constituents by amending the process, offering amendments, 
seeking to improve legislation, if the rules are going to be such that 
they usurp the authority or the franchise of each Member and put it up 
behind closed doors--and the doors are closed. And as I sat there 
waiting my turn, last week, well, it's still this week, I had two of my 
own staff people waiting out in the hallway. They couldn't even get in 
to hand me a piece of paperwork. I have to send them an e-mail on my 
BlackBerry and they'll pass the paperwork in because there wasn't room.
  The business of the Congress is being conducted either in the Rules 
Committee, or behind the scenes, behind the Rules Committee, but it's 
not being conducted on the floor of the House.
  So when Members are denied amendments that would be in order under 
the

[[Page 18228]]

220 years of the tradition of the House of Representatives, but the 
ones that are allowed will be a whole series of amendments offered by 
the gentleman from Arizona to strike a little funding here, to strike a 
little funding there, most of which I voted for, by the way, Madam 
Speaker, it gives the image to the public that there's a legitimate 
debate going on here, but it is not the legitimate debate. And, in 
fact, if you listen to the debate, there's no exchange of ideas. 
There's no clash of the contest of competing ideas. There's not an 
exchange of dialogue. It's rare to have a Democrat yield when asked to 
yield by a Republican who simply wants to clarify a fact or make a 
point that would better bring out something in the debate that would be 
good for the American public to know.
  This process has devolved down to where it can't be called any longer 
a deliberative process. And the American people do care about whether 
their voice is heard in this Congress. And it's not being heard in this 
Congress.
  As we've watched things be rushed through, the cap-and-trade bill, 
which I call the cap-and-tax bill, rammed through here to where a bill 
was hurried up and rushed, and then, to have an opportunity to amend 
the bill didn't exist for Members of Congress. It did exist for the 
manager, apparently, because there was a 316-page amendment that was 
brought down here and dropped into the record at 3:09 in the morning, 
to stack that on top of a 1,100-page bill that nobody read.
  And the most colossal mistake in the history of the House of 
Representatives was the passage of the cap-and-trade bill. And it was 
done so with no Member of Congress having read the bill, not one. And 
no Member of Congress read the amendment, not one. And if they'd read 
them separately, they couldn't understand the composition of the bill 
because the 316-page amendment that was dropped on us at 3:09 in the 
morning was not integrated into the overall bill. It was impossible to 
do that. You've got to page forward and back and go back into the code 
and verify the references and rewrite to get this 316-page amendment 
blended into and integrated into the overall bill.
  And when the question was asked of the Speaker during the debate, is 
there a copy of the enrolled bill here in the House, there was no copy, 
Madam Speaker. There was no bill. We were debating something that 
didn't exist yet. And we passed something that didn't exist yet. And 
Members were required to vote on a bill that was 1,400-plus pages in 
its aggregate form, not having ever had it integrated, but that anybody 
understood the complete context, within the context, the complete 
content of the overall bill and the amendment. But Members voted 
anyway. And even though the Speaker said that she was going to provide 
for sometimes 72, otherwise 48 hours to be able to fully evaluate the 
consequences or the merits of the legislation that would come before 
the floor, that didn't happen. It seldom happens.
  This place is being run with an iron fist, not with the open kind of 
a process that was promised when people put their trust in the current 
majority to run this Congress in a legitimate fashion. It's not 
legitimate. We can't even put up the front that it's legitimate if we 
are debating a bill that no one, and I mean no one on the planet, has 
completely read, and an amendment that no one understands completely 
how it integrates with the overall bill, and to be able----
  We stopped the process here for over a half-hour while we tried to 
get a copy of the language that was being voted upon. And we never got 
it done. To the credit of the Clerk, she was actively trying to 
integrate the amendment into the overall bill, but it could not be done 
within the time that was available. And even if it had been, it was 
only symbolic because still, no one would have had a chance to read it.
  And I'll even take this to this wild outrageous step of we ought to 
understand the things that we are voting upon. We should be able to get 
our hands on it. We should have time to read it, deliberate it, 
consider it, and pass it out to our constituents, and they should have 
access to it over the Internet, and they should be able to give us 
input on how it affects their lives. We can't bring the wisdom of 
Solomon with us, everyone in here, and instantaneously make a decision 
and a snap judgment on something there's no opportunity to read.
  And it was an embarrassment, I know, for the majority to be debating 
a huge bill, a colossal bill, a cap-and-trade bill, and not even having 
one single, not even a symbolic version for somebody to point to and 
say, This stack of paper is what is going to save the planet--I think, 
is the position that the Speaker took.
  And so the question was asked by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Gohmert), Madam Speaker, can we message this bill over to--if this 
passes, this bill that was before us, if it passes the House, if we 
don't have a bill, can we still message it over to the Senate? Or do we 
just tell them we sent you over a bill that we passed but it's not 
ready for anybody to review. It's not been reviewed yet.
  That's the fact of what we were dealing with when the cap-and-tax 
bill was passed. And now it's messaged to the Senate. Presumably, 
somebody's put it all in its proper form. But I'm confident that not 
one Member of this House of Representatives has yet read that bill 
because now it doesn't pay. They can't shut themselves up and invest 
the time in reading the cap-and-tax bill because it's already passed 
the House, nobody having read it and no version of it in its complete 
form being available to any Member; messaged over to the Senate. I 
don't know if it was the stack of the bill and then plus the 316 pages 
in an amendment separately, or if it got messaged over there integrated 
in a fashion that they could say that they received a complete bill in 
the Senate. We don't know. And it doesn't really matter to the House 
Members because we now have another bill that's coming at us so fast 
and so hard that hardly anyone has a chance to read it, although I do 
know a couple of Members that have burned a lot of midnight oil and 
tried to get through it. They have to break it apart and assign it to 
their staff and read the parts they can as fast as they can, and others 
will read it and write their little memos on it. That's this health 
care bill. Oh, my. You should see what we have here now that's been 
cooked up by the staff.

                              {time}  1545

  This work was done urgently and, I think, effectively off of the 
components of the bill that were available, and I think this might 
actually be representative of what we have today.
  This is the flowchart, Madam Speaker. This is the schematic of what 
is created by this idea of a public plan for health insurance and to 
provide health care for the people in America. I have to point out that 
these white boxes on this schematic flowchart--in places like 
Australia, they would not call it a ``flowchart.'' They would call it a 
``scheme.'' I'll stop a little short of that one; but the white ones 
are the existing agencies and programs that are there, and the colored 
ones are the new ones.
  So you'll see a number here that's, maybe, oh, about an equal number 
of new agencies matching up with the equal number of existing agencies. 
As you read down through this, there are all kinds of components to 
this that ought to scare any freedom-loving person, but the one I'd 
direct your attention to, Madam Speaker, is down here at the bottom, 
these two circles that are in purple in the blue background.
  Now, the left-hand circle is this: It takes the traditional health 
insurance plans--the white that's existing--and now they'll have to 
qualify, and they'll have to qualify so that they'll meet the Obama 
standard for new health insurance companies. So, if you're an American 
citizen with a health insurance plan that you like and if you want to 
keep what you have for a little while, you can keep what you have, but 
the insurance company will have to comply with the new standards that 
will be written by the existing or future health insurance czar. 
Surely, we have one or will have one. We have 32 czars. We couldn't 
have nationalized health care without a health insurance czar.

[[Page 18229]]

  So that czar will be writing the rules--it's not in the bill--on what 
it takes for the traditional health insurance plans to qualify to 
become the qualified health benefits plans. That's the private side. 
That's your health insurance if you're an American citizen--a person 
who has a plan that's not either Medicaid or Medicare. They have to 
qualify. It changes every one of them, potentially meeting a new 
standard that would be set by the health insurance czar. The health 
insurance companies, the ones that survive, will be fewer than the 
1,300 we have today, the 1,300 competing against each other, the 
insurance companies that are providing different models to try to get 
the investment dollar in there, the premium dollar, from the people of 
whom 70 percent are happy with the health insurance plans that they 
have. We won't have 1,300 when they're done complying with the White 
House health insurance czar standards. We'll have less. I don't know 
how many less, and nobody knows, because we don't know what the 
standards will be; but these private companies then will have to 
compete with the newly created, if this bill passes, public health 
plan. The public health plan will be the Federal health insurance plan 
that is there to compete against the private plans.
  Now, why would they want to do that? Why would they create a whole 
plan for the government to run with taxpayers on the hook if they've 
got 1,300 health insurance companies today that are more than happy to 
get out there and to continue to compete in the marketplace? What would 
be the merits?
  Well, the only ones that I can determine are--if you really wanted to 
establish a national health care plan that didn't have competition, if 
you wanted everybody on a single-payer plan, if you wanted to have 
nationalized health care, if you wanted socialized medicine, you can't 
do that without first creating some kind of a public health model, and 
that is what this new public health insurance model would be. Over 
time, it would, I believe, compete and would push out of the 
marketplace every one of these health insurance programs that we know 
today because the government would subsidize.
  I'll give you an example of how this works. Since we don't have 
insight into this in the United States on Federal competition against 
the private sector with regard to health insurance, here is a model:
  Flood insurance, the flood insurance that we used to have that was 
property and casualty insurance for people who were living in flood 
plains or for people who were afraid that they'd be flooded. They would 
buy their insurance in years back and would pay the premiums. If they 
got flooded, the flood insurance companies would come to their places 
and they'd take a look at the damage. They'd write them checks and 
they'd settle it out. That's how it works in the insurance industry in 
a lot of different ways. In the property and casualty at least it does.
  The Federal Government decided that there wasn't enough competition 
in the flood insurance business, so they set up Federal flood insurance 
years back to compete against the private-sector flood insurance plans 
that were there. Actually, yesterday I checked into this, and I was not 
able to discover a single company in America that is selling flood 
insurance in competition against the Federal Government. The Federal 
Government has established a monopoly now in flood insurance. Now, two 
things can happen if you have a monopoly. You can price it way out of 
the marketplace, and if you have a captive market, you can do that, or 
if you have a marketplace that you're trying to market to in your 
government, then you can undersell your costs by lowering the premiums 
below the actual costs, which is what the Federal Government has done.
  So, today, the Federal flood insurance program, the only existing 
flood insurance program in the United States of America, is the flood 
insurance program that's $18 billion in the red. That's $18 billion in 
the red because it's government. We should not be surprised at this. 
The government came into the marketplace subsidized by tax dollars, and 
it lowered the premiums for flood insurance, but by lowering the 
premiums, they took the private sector competition out of the 
marketplace. They went off to do other property and casualty. They 
cleaned the field out and became the monopoly holder of all of the 
flood insurance of America. Yet they still couldn't set the premiums at 
the risk. They set the premiums at, apparently, what their bureaucrats 
thought they should be at, and they're $18 billion in the red.
  Now, imagine what that would be like if it were the post office and 
if everybody had to go and buy a stamp. We are critical of the post 
office when they can't hold their balance sheet in the black, and they 
are marginally in the red today.
  That's the government program flood insurance, running in the red at 
$18 billion, and that, Madam Speaker, I predict, is what will happen 
with our health insurance in America.
  So, when President Obama says, If you like your health insurance, 
don't worry; you can keep it. You can't keep it if it doesn't exist. 
How could anybody have kept their flood insurance if there are no 
companies selling flood insurance except the Federal Government's flood 
plan?
  What if the health insurance czar writes the specifications for these 
companies to qualify at such a standard that they can't compete with 
the public plan? Why would the health insurance czar not write those 
regulations so that they would be at an advantage to the newly emerging 
public health plan? After all, they have to find a way to compete in a 
marketplace that is competitive.
  So the model is there. If people think that I just pulled off the 
shelf a model that happens to make my case, I would make the point of: 
show me a model where government has gone in and has taken over where 
they didn't squeeze out the private sector.
  Should we talk about crop insurance, for example? That would be 
another model. How about student loans for another model? Students 
loans used to be private. Then the government got into the business, 
and now they've taken the student loan program down to where only about 
25 percent of the student loans are private and the rest of them are 
government-brokered student loans. We have now the chairman of the 
Education and Labor Committee and many others who simply want to 
eliminate any student loans except what are government student loans.
  When government steps into the private sector, a number of things 
happen: The quality of the service goes down. The cost of the service 
goes up because you get inefficiencies that come in with government 
that would be automatically erased by the competition from the private 
sector. Then you either get rationing or you get rates that go up or 
you get taxes that are increased. In the case of flood insurance, it is 
that taxes have increased to pick up the $18 billion shortfall that is 
there. So we know the pattern. We know the drill. We should know what 
this is. We've been through this before, Madam Speaker.
  To make the point that we've been through this before, here is my 
``deja vu all over again'' chart. The ``deja vu all over again'' chart 
is the schematic, the flowchart--as the Aussies would say, it's the 
scheme--from back in 1993. This is HillaryCare. I remember this coming 
out during that period of time. I have a chart that must exist in my 
archives, a chart that hung on the wall in my construction office 
during those years. I would stand and look at that and study it when I 
would be on the phone while I would be pacing back and forth. I would 
walk by and look at this chart of HillaryCare. I would look at all of 
these created agencies and at the interconnectivity of them. It was 
something that chilled me and that galvanized me. It was one of the 
significant stepping stones along the way for me to go from the private 
sector of 28 years in the construction business into the legislative 
arena because I was so appalled by what I saw them doing to create more 
government that would be oppressive to the freedoms that I so love and 
enjoy.
  This is about freedom. This is about whether we are going to keep and

[[Page 18230]]

maintain our freedom and expand our freedom or whether we're going to 
trade that off for a dependency and accept the dependency that comes 
from a government plan that has a bunch of, I want to say, elitist, 
liberal-thinking people who think that the American people can't make 
their own decisions, so they have to make the decisions for us.
  It's the same kind of thinking that would take the deliberation of 
the House of Representatives up in the hole in the wall in the House 
Rules Committee and let the Rules Committee take the orders from the 
Speaker's office and not allow it to come down here to be heard in the 
light of day. They think they know. They think they're smarter than 
you. They think they can draft a proposal that is a utopian model of 
health care for the United States of America, and they will tell you 
they can save money. They don't actually tell you that you're going to 
get better service, because this is the best health care system in the 
world. We don't wait in line. We don't have to take a number. We don't 
get hurt and lay around waiting for somebody to come along and take 
care of us. We don't stand in line. Americans should not stand in line.
  I can think of the times I've had to do that, and it grates on me. I 
don't like standing in line at TSA to get on a plane. I remember who 
brought that about. That's the terrorists. We ought to always blame 
them. I don't like to stand in line with my credit card in order to pay 
a bill, and the retailers know that. They don't allow lines out there, 
because you won't make the purchase. You don't want to stand in line 
either. We will stand in a line sometimes for a concert or for a ball 
game when we're trying to cram 50,000 or 100,000 people through those 
gates in a short period of time for a definitive time when something 
starts. That's about the only time that Americans stand in line.
  Canadians, the British, the Europeans, they stand in line for health 
care. It's appalling the standing in line that they do. Russians stand 
in line as a matter of course. It's part of their culture. It's the 
living that they make, apparently. I think they wander around Moscow 
looking for another line to stand in. They've been so conditioned to 
stand in lines. They hunch their shoulders, look down, wander around, 
look up once in a while, find a line, go get in it, and then find out 
what the reason is.
  Americans don't do that. We have freedom. We are a freedom-loving 
people, and it's our free markets and our free enterprise and the 
entrepreneurial nature of this and the innovativeness of it. It's also 
the property rights and the patents and the trademarks that we have 
that make this country go, and we are the economic growth engine for 
the world.
  Here is an example of the Canadian model--and they're our neighbors, 
and we love them, and we get along great with them, but the Canadian 
model would be this, and this came out from Senator Mitch McConnell 
from the Senate side: The average wait time for someone who needs a 
knee replacement in Canada--a knee replacement--is 340 days. Can you 
imagine? Finally, your knee wears out, and you're using a cane or 
you're on a crutch or you're in a wheelchair or you're sitting around 
the living room or you're not going back to work. You go to the doctor, 
and he takes a look at your knee and schedules you for a knee 
replacement. He looks on the calendar and turns the pages--1, 2, 3, 4, 
5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 months, 11 months. He turns the page 11 times on the 
calendar to find the date that he can write your name in. You have to 
go 340 days to get your knee replacement in Canada.
  Yet we would just leap into the abyss of socialized medicine because 
the President's idea is that the government can do it better than the 
private sector can? We just have to learn how to do it better than the 
Canadians, the British or the Europeans?
  How about the average time for a hip replacement in Canada? According 
to Mitch McConnell, the average time is 196 days for a hip replacement. 
So your hip socket wears out. Now, that's a little tough to do that 
always with the cane, although it happens. You're on a crutch or two 
crutches or you're on a cane or you're in a wheelchair gimping around 
for 196 days. You know, I don't know if you call that ``elective 
surgery.'' I don't think it is. I think, at some point, for the quality 
of your life and for your productivity, the necessity is to get the 
surgery done.
  That's rationed health care. I don't know the numbers of how many 
people died of something else while they were waiting to get their knee 
joints replaced or their hips or how many of their lives were altered 
because of it or how much was diminished of the quality of their lives, 
of the people who had to wait in those lines. That's just joint 
replacement.
  I had a meeting last night with a doctor who does orthopedic surgery 
in Canada and in the United States. He goes back and forth across the 
border and does that work. He told of the case of a patient who had 
come in who had torn up his knee. He said a torn meniscus, and I 
believe he said an ACL, an anterior cruciate ligament, those two 
things. It was a knee wreck--swollen and badly painful. He was up 
there, and he did the examination, and he said, Fine. We'll get you 
into surgery right away, and we can fix you. We'll patch up that 
ligament, and we'll patch up the torn meniscus, and we'll fix you.

                              {time}  1600

  In America, that surgery would happen, oh, the next day. They might 
elect to allow the swelling to go down--that could happen--but it could 
happen also that the surgery could be the same day or the next day if 
the surgeon decided that was the best thing for the patient. And that 
would be the criterion, by the way.
  But in Canada, he did everything he could to schedule him with the 
proper surgeon, and this man had to wait 6 months to be further 
examined before they could evaluate whether they would schedule him to 
repair his knee.
  So they put him in a brace, sent him out of there on crutches, and 6 
months later he showed up at the specialist who examined him and 
scheduled him for surgery 6 months later. A torn knee, a year wait, 
almost a year to the day from the date of the injury to the date of the 
surgery. And then, of course, he has the rehab time on that before he's 
back and limbered up before he can go back to work.
  This individual wasn't productive for more than a year, lost more 
than a year's wages. Why? Why would we waste this human collateral that 
we are? The most precious resource that we have in this country is our 
people. And we need to become the most productive people on the planet.
  One of the jobs that we do here in the House of Representatives--we 
should be doing here--it would be enhancing the overall average 
productivity of all of our people in this country. And if we do that, 
we'll also increase the quality of life for everyone in this country.
  When we diminish it by disrespect for life, whether it's the unborn, 
whether it's someone who was injured that would be allowed to lay off 
over on the sofa or sit in the living room chair and not be going to 
work when they could be fixed in a short period of time and back into 
it again, that's what happens in countries that have socialized 
medicine, national health care, a Federal public payer plan which has 
been devised in those countries that I mentioned, but not in the United 
States, in part because the American people from 15 or 16 years ago saw 
this schematic and they were as appalled and animated by it as I was.
  And they got on the phone. They called their Congressman; they called 
their Senator. And they came to Washington, and they jammed the offices 
full of people. And they went to the offices of the Members around the 
country.
  They wrote letters to the editor and letters to their Members of 
Congress. And they got on the radio programs that existed at the time--
and some of them did--and the American people had a dialogue about how 
they wanted their health care to look and what they wanted to maintain.
  And they completely rejected this model, this old model from the 
early 1990s, this alarming model of creating all of this growth in 
government that

[[Page 18231]]

nobody can completely understand, maybe Hillary understood what she 
wanted to do. And look at this: the government agencies and programs 
interact. Some of these I recognize, Department of Labor. I don't know 
what PWBA is or NGFSHP, NQMP. I think I knew at the time.
  But all of these government agencies created or interacted--look at 
this. The global budget. This is part of the HillaryCare plan. And I 
will submit this scary HillaryCare plan is not as scary as the 3-D 
technicolor modern plan, the ObamaCare plan, that has emerged in this 
Congress that has the idea that it's going to squeeze out the private 
health insurance in America.
  How about the Bureau of Health Information? They will aggregate your 
health information. The Health Choices Administration, HCA. Health 
Choices Administration Commissioner.
  We know what's happened. America has run out of patience with czars 
so we're not going to see very many more czars, I don't believe. I 
mean, 32 may be like our threshold, the political threshold of the 
number of czars that we can have in America. So we start naming them 
``commissioners'' instead. Commissioners aren't as alarming as czars. 
Commissioners weren't the precursors to Marxism in the Soviet Union. So 
we're not as alarmed when we call them ``commissioners.'' So we have 
the Health Choices Administration Commissioner.
  Health choices. What does that mean? That means if the doctor doesn't 
make the choice that's consistent with the directive of the Health 
Choices Commissioner, they are going to find the doctor. And we don't 
know what that amount is yet, but it will be hefty. And if the doctor 
then doesn't comply a second time--not defies necessarily--but just 
doesn't comply with the Health Choices Administration Commissioner, the 
second time the bill provides that he face jail time.
  Now, are we going to lock up doctors because they keep their 
Hippocratic Oath and they do no harm and they order the kind of 
services that protect people? Are we going to ration health care? Are 
we going to let the government set this entire standard for the entire 
United States of America? And why would we do that when we realize that 
in Canada there are whole companies that have sprouted up in Canada. 
Just think of them as travel agencies that merged with health care 
services.
  And they realized that the Canadians--there is a law in Canada that 
prohibits a person from jumping to the head of the line when it comes 
to health care services. So if you have a bad knee, you're going to 
wait 340 days. It's against the law to move ahead in the line, jump 
ahead in the line. Nobody wants to be in a line that's getting longer 
while you are standing in the back of it.
  If you hurt your hip, a 196-day wait. But there are people in Canada 
that can't wait. They can't wait for a hip. They can't wait for a knee 
and certainly not for heart surgery, and many do.
  So some of the companies, Canada, have a policy that's set up as part 
of their employment policy. And when they recruit some of their 
employees, the package will be, Here is your salary package, here's 
your retirement plan. And by the way, we have this plan for you. If you 
need heart surgery, we'll package this thing up and we'll fly you down 
to Houston for heart surgery or Ann Arbor or maybe Rochester, 
Minnesota, at the Mayo Clinic. This happens on a regular basis.
  The travel agencies that merged with the health care-providing 
agencies provide the turnkey operation. Let's say you need heart 
surgery in Houston. Companies will set this up for the individual that 
can't wait in line, can't live for the line to get short enough that he 
can get the treatment, so they package this up and it will be, Here's 
your round trip plane ticket from Toronto to Houston. Here's a hotel 
you will go to, here's your transportation on the shuttle bus from the 
airport to the hotel. And the clinic is next door. You'll go over for 
the examination at X time on this morning. If all of these things hold 
up and they are comparable, then you'll go forward with the surgery at 
such and such a time at this location.
  Here's what it will cost for all of the items: the surgeon, the 
anesthetic, the operating room, the list of all of the incidentals that 
go into this. They package it all up, you write one check, and American 
health care saves your life. So does the entrepreneurial nature that 
sets up those businesses in Canada to access American health care.
  But what a cruel thing to do to the Canadians to adopt their plan or 
a plan similar to them. ObamaCare health care, where then do the 
Canadians go when they need health care that's urgent, that's life 
saving, or turns them back into productive citizens again? They've got 
their relief valve of the United States today. This scary, multi-color, 
technicolor--we'll turn this into 3-D I hope one day--model says to the 
Canadians it could be the end of their options. They could say to the 
American people that it's a whole series of different things that we've 
never had to think of before
  Why would we give up our freedom? Why would we give up our freedom 
when 70 percent of us like the health care systems that we have and the 
health insurance plans that we have? And the argument that comes from 
the Democrats consistently is there are 44 or 47, or they will often 
say almost 50, million people that are uninsured in America. Well, I 
guess if there is a plan for Canadians and they don't have to sign up 
for it, just show up at the emergency room, if they're not signed up, 
they're uninsured, too.
  If you've got a program that takes everybody, whether they're signed 
up or whether they're not--I wonder how many people are actually signed 
up in Canada--but if the number is let's just say 44, maybe on the 
outside 47 million, I can take you this way, Madam Speaker, and that is 
that out of those 44 or so million people, you've got to subtract from 
that the illegals that are here in America.
  I don't think anybody seriously wants to provide a health insurance 
program for people that jump the border illegally and sneak into the 
United States and that are working here illegally and violating our 
laws. I don't think we want to fund that. I don't think we want to give 
them the Cadillac of what would be left of our health care program. So 
I would subtract those out of that list.
  We can debate what the size of that number is. Some say 11 million. 
I've been here now--this is halfway through my seventh year. We've been 
saying 11 or 12 million illegals in America since I arrived here in 
this Congress. I have gone on down on the border and watched them pour 
across the border at night, participated in catching a few of them, 
including a significant supply of illegal drugs that come with them. 
The number of border crossings that we have had on average since we've 
been here, the illegal border crossings where we catch them average 
more than a million a year since I have been in this Congress.
  So we've caught over 6 million, probably closer to 7 million who were 
trying to cross the border and get into the United States.
  The Border Patrol, when you ask them what percentage do you catch, 
some will say 25 percent. That's actually the official line in the 
testimony before hearings, from the Border Patrol themselves, but when 
I ask them that question, they will laugh at me. They will say, Oh, no. 
Not that many. Perhaps 10 percent.
  Well, I'll take the 25 percent number and multiply that times the 7 
million illegal crossings that we've caught and just say that's three 
times that number that have actually gotten into the United States 
successfully if we're intercepting only one out of four.
  You've got four, three get across, one we caught. He goes back. 
That's how that works. And I guess it's three times the number. Three 
times 7 million is 21 million. That's 21 million that came in. Some 
died. Some went back. But that's one way to measure how many illegals 
have come into the country as soon as I have been in Congress. And if 
you add that number to the roughly 12 million number, now we're up in 
the 30-some million category.
  And it's easy, Madam Speaker, to understand why I think the numbers 
of

[[Page 18232]]

illegals in this country are probably greater than 20 million. And we 
know that the numbers of those working in this country is a number 
that's over 7 million working in this country at least, and that is a 
Federal data point number.
  But if we cut the illegals out of that list of 44 million of the 
uninsured, and then if we subtract from that number those that are just 
in transition between one health insurance plan to another, then we get 
down to a number that's a little more understandable. And it's a number 
that comes from two Penn State professors who did a study some years 
ago. And if I remember correctly, their number was that there was about 
10.1 million Americans that are part of the chronically uninsured.
  Now, we should be addressing not the illegals, not those in 
transition between their health care plans because they're going to 
find another one and they're going to likely stay on that one. There is 
always that happening while people are looking for the best plan.
  But if we really have something to fix, we should be fixing the 
chronically uninsured, that 10.1 million. And I think I took that and 
divided it by the population and rounded it up to the nearest 
percentage point. Take 10.1 million, divide it by 300 million and you 
end up with a number that's a little over 3\1/2\ percent.
  So let's give the benefit of the doubt to the liberal utopian people 
who draw up these schematics that we're trying to fix something like 4 
percent of the problem. Four percent of the population is chronically 
uninsured, and we would tear apart the entire system to try to fix this 
4 percent. And what percentage of the 4 percent will be fixed?
  Well, according to one of the estimates on how the result of those 
that would be recruited by this plan would work out, this plan pushes 
tens of millions off of their own private insurance plan. Puts them on 
the government plan. And in the end, the result would be such that they 
ended up--by one measure, 97 percent of America would be insured. But I 
don't think that includes that--I don't know how they address the 
illegals.
  Well, we have now 96 percent. By the time you take out the 
chronically uninsured and the illegals, 96 percent of America is now 
insured. Now, I don't want to argue that of the chronically uninsured, 
this plan would only get 25 percent of them enrolled. It may not be. 
But if you want to look for a measure on what's likely to happen, one 
need go no further than the Medicaid rolls in America. There it is, if 
you qualify. Sign up for Medicaid. It's a free program. You don't have 
any responsibilities except to sign up, and you will be covered if you 
meet the standards of the lower income that's necessary.
  But of those that are eligible for Medicaid in America, just slightly 
over 50 percent of them are actually enrolled. So why would we think 
that we could enroll the part of that 4 percent of the chronically 
uninsured; why would we think we could get a higher percentage of them 
to enroll in a government plan, or furthermore, if they're no more 
responsible than that, why would we want to? What is the upside?

                              {time}  1615

  Aren't there other solutions and better solutions? And the answer to 
that question of course is yes and yes. There are many better solutions 
than what's being proposed in this particular outrageous and scary 
schematic.
  We should do many things. We should expand our health savings 
accounts. One of the best things we did with health care in this 
Congress in this last decade is to pass health savings accounts, and if 
a young couple in that year, say at 20 years of age, had invested the 
maximum amount in their health savings account that year and done so 
each year--first year was $5,150 and it's indexed for inflation, moving 
on up. I don't know the number today any longer; I've lost track. But I 
did do the math on this and build a spreadsheet to do the calculation.
  If that couple at age 20 invested the max in their health savings 
account and did so each year until they reached Medicare eligibility 
and spent $2,000 of real dollars out of that account in legitimate 
health care costs for each year, and you accrued that at about a 4 
percent rate, which was legitimate at the time I did the math--and it 
will be legitimate--again, that couple arrived at retirement age with 
more than $950,000 in their health savings account.
  Now, why wouldn't we as a Nation take a look at that, utilize that, 
and give them a reward for their responsibility and see if we can find 
a way to make a deal with them that will get them off of the 
entitlement roll and because they have the assets to take care of 
themselves? And I would argue this, Madam Speaker.
  I would say to that couple, take your $950,000 and buy a paid up 
Medicare replacement policy and keep the change tax free. Right now, 
the intent of this Congress is to tax those health savings accounts 
when either they are spent or when the people that own them die. They 
want to tax that. I say, if they will take themselves off of the 
Medicare entitlement rolls, I want them to have the balance of that tax 
free.
  We can work out some formulas where we can actually help them buy 
that out, but today, let's just say if a couple, similar couple, 
arrived at age 65 today and they wanted to do an altruistic thing and 
not be part of the Medicare entitlement, they could buy a Medicare 
replacement policy for right at $72,000 per patient. So, say, a husband 
and a wife, for $144,000, could buy a replacement policy. That would be 
the cost, I should say. I don't know if you can actually buy the policy 
these days because government has monopolized health insurance for 
people past the age of 65, but that's the risk, that's the average risk 
for the health care costs. From 65 until natural death, it would be 
$72,000 per individual.
  So it's reasonable to think that we could set up a Medicare 
replacement policy that people could buy and let them cash the 
difference tax free. That would be a great incentive for a lifetime. 
It's one of the things we can do.
  Another thing that we need to do is increase the amount that can be 
deposited into the health savings account; in addition, medical 
malpractice. You can look through all of these schematics, this 
Technicolor schematic of the modern day ObamaCare version or one can 
look through this black and white older version of the HillaryCare 
health care schematic, and you can't find anything in here about the 
reform of the unnecessary, punitive malpractice litigation that's 
taking place all across this country.
  We all know about the lady that spilled a cup of coffee from 
McDonald's in her lap, and she was awarded in the initial decision--I 
forget the number now--$3 or $7 million or whatever outrageous number 
that was, and I know it went back under appeal, and it lowered the 
number down, but it surely intimidates people.
  A case here in town, it wasn't medical, but it was a judge that sued 
a cleaners and took one or two of their stores out of business because 
they lost his pants. And we see businesses out because of litigation 
that's brought about in that fashion.
  How many tests are done in America because the doctor is paying a 
very high malpractice premium? In order to protect himself from a suit, 
he has to run a bunch of extra tests because that's what you do in the 
industry to protect yourself from the lawyers. First, take the oath to 
do no harm, go out to serve people in a profession that has great 
honor, and have it be framed by fear of litigation instead of doing the 
right thing. That's the medical version of a good Samaritan watching 
someone get run over on the street and not going to help them--well, a 
formerly likely good Samaritan that's afraid they will get sued because 
they will reach outside of their profession in an effort to help 
somebody and they get sued. And doctors run tests every day by the 
thousands to protect themselves from litigation.
  And yet, nothing in the old schematic and nothing in the new 
Technicolor schematic addresses the medical malpractice insurance. Now, 
we addressed it in the Judiciary Committee

[[Page 18233]]

a few years ago, and we put a cap on noneconomic damages of $250,000. 
That is what they have in California. Not a lot of good things happen 
legislatively in California, but that's one that did. Proposition 209 
was another, just to toss an aside into this dialogue. But we capped it 
at $250,000 noneconomic damages and let people be made whole. If they 
were injured by malpractice, they would get the cost of their medical 
care. They would get real economic loss of income. They would even get 
a little pain and suffering, but the punitive damages, the things we 
consider to be punitive damages that were defined in the bill as 
noneconomic damages, would not be awarded beyond $250,000.
  Why would you pay a lady millions of dollars for spilling a hot cup 
of coffee in her own lap in order to send a message that McDonald's 
shouldn't serve hot coffee? How many things in this life do we no 
longer have access to because a trial lawyer's figured out a way to 
make a living and then the other lawyer's figured out a way to write 
the rule so that we could avoid that kind of litigation?
  How many of us have climbed into a vehicle and gone down the road and 
decided, I want to program my navigator, and found that your navigator 
doesn't work while you're moving because some lawyer decided you might 
get in a wreck for programming your navigator, and then sued the 
manufacturer for being distracted from your driving? Why is it their 
fault if you don't have responsibility? But instead, they put the 
failsafe in so you have to pull off on the side of the road, and a lot 
of it, they defeat the intent of having that kind of a device.
  That's what goes on with health insurance as well. That's what goes 
on with health care providers. A very high cost in health care in 
America is because of unnecessary tests that are being run in order to 
avoid litigation.
  So maybe if we had all doctors that were paid by the government, then 
they would have the sovereign immunity that would come from being 
Federal employees so they wouldn't be sued. Now, that might be a way 
where Obama might save some money on health care. I don't want to go 
there, but it might be the only thing that actually might be legitimate 
as far as saving money, and then they will argue that they will reduce 
some of these costs down by providing efficiencies through technology. 
I will support that.
  Let's have better records. Let's have those records be easily and 
quickly available to qualified people so if you live in Kansas City and 
you end up in the hospital in San Francisco, they can do a quick bar 
code off of your driver's license, for example, and access your health 
care records so they know what you're on for prescription drugs; they 
know what kind of treatments that you had. You may not be conscious and 
there may be no one with you. Even if they are, they may not know what 
you're taking for medication. Let's do that technology.
  Do we have to do this in order to utilize more modern technology? We 
are moving in that direction with the technology anyway. I suppose the 
health care czar will tell us just what technology we can use and set 
some mandatory parameters on how we get there. I am nervous about that.
  So there are some efficiencies. There are wellness plans that can be 
incorporated into health insurance programs that are incentives, and if 
we have those incentives there, people will do the right thing. If you 
lower my health insurance premium, I'll lose a few pounds and I'll 
exercise a little more and I'll go in for a checkup a little more, and 
they will diagnose the problems earlier, and we'll live longer and 
healthier as a people. That's the free market. That's not a one-size-
fits-all socialized medicine plan.
  These are the things that we should be looking at to improve our 
health care systems here in the United States, but going down this 
path, going down this path of creating the huge bureaucracy, the Health 
Benefits Advisory Committee, imagine what that is; the Public Health 
Investment Fund, oh, how they manage your dollars while it's in there. 
What else do we have? We have the mandate by insurance that goes down 
to the consumers, the Health Insurance Exchange Trust Fund, the 
Clinical Preventative Services Task Force. So that's going to be 
preventative services.
  Another thing that happens when you have socialized medicine--I will 
tell this in a narrative the way I heard it. When this plan went in in 
Canada, at that time I had a good number of business relationships with 
friends in Canada, and they gave me the unfolding narrative. One of 
them--his name was Peter actually--said to me, here's what's going on. 
They passed a national health care plan in Canada, the socialized 
medicine plan, and they said you need to be responsible and go to the 
clinic for your checkups and don't overload the emergency rooms and 
treat your health care in a responsible fashion and only go when you're 
sick, don't go when you don't need to except for your regular checkups, 
be a responsible consumer. That's how it was sold. And by the way, they 
did the actuarial projections on the cost by expecting Canadians to be 
responsible consumers.
  And he said, so, the first year of the national health care plan in 
Canada worked like this. People were respectful. They did go to the 
clinic. They didn't crowd the emergency rooms, and it went along pretty 
good for the first year. And by the second year, the third year and the 
fourth year, people weren't willing to take time off from work to go to 
the clinic when it was convenient for the doctor. So, on the weekends 
and at nights when they did have time in their schedule, they just went 
to the emergency room and abused the privilege.
  And so Peter explained it to me this way. He said, it was just like a 
company that for the first time was having a Christmas party and they 
invited all the employees in to have a dinner and a few drinks and to 
celebrate Christmas together. And everybody comes and they have one or 
two drinks and they tell good stories about the boss and pat him on the 
back, and everybody was just nice and full of love and responsibility 
and grateful that they'd had a Christmas party that they could 
celebrate together as a working family, or a family of workers to be 
more correct.
  But he said by the second or third and the fourth year of the 
socialized medicine plan in Canada, it was like the second, third or 
fourth year of the company Christmas party. They abused the privilege. 
They drank too much. They told nasty stories about their boss. And they 
expected their Christmas party and the bonuses to be an entitlement 
rather than a bonus.
  And so that was the attitude that he described of the Canadians: 
jamming the emergency rooms when they went at the times that was 
convenient for them, not going to the clinics, not being responsible, 
and that they had abused the privilege. And the costs went up and the 
service went down and the lines got long and people died in line. 
That's the tragedy. That's the tragedy of socialized medicine.
  I met a man a few months ago in a home improvement center, and he was 
an immigrant from Germany. And he told me about his hip surgery. It 
wasn't a sad story. It was matter of fact the way he delivered it. He 
had to wait about 6 months to get a hip replaced as a German, but he 
wanted it done badly because it was painful and it limited his options 
on how he could move around and what he could do. And so he had to 
travel from Germany down to Italy where the line was shorter, and he 
was operated on in fewer days than if he had been waiting in line in 
Germany.
  And I listened to that story, and I thought, what would it be like to 
have to go to another country to get your health care because the lines 
are shorter? What would it be like to get your health care because 
there's a line? We're Americans. We don't stand in line. We have 
freedom. We have fought for that freedom. We have worked for that 
freedom. We've paid for that freedom. We don't stand in line. We don't 
make ourselves dependent upon bureaucrats to make decisions on what's 
better for all of our lives. We go out and make our lives better. 
That's what we are. That's who we are.

[[Page 18234]]

  And this color-coded schematic threatens our freedom. It threatens 
your freedom. It diminishes the spirit and the character of the 
American people and turns us into dependents. It takes the safety net 
that we have today and it cranks it up a few notches and turns it into 
a hammock. And we take less responsibility, and the psychology of who 
we are as a people are diminished. What about that American spirit, 
that can-do spirit? That idea that we can do anything?

                              {time}  1630

  The idea that we can go to the Moon, if we decide we can go to the 
Moon. What about what happened when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor? 
We took on a national mission and a two-front global war and put 16 
million men and women into uniform and came out of the other side a 
global power and the only surviving industrial power in the world.
  We set the pace with our economy, with our politics, with our 
culture, with our faith and our values, and an inspiration for the 
world. The rest of the world looks up to us. They do see what's been 
accomplished here. And we have taken the talent of every culture in the 
world and rolled it together in this great melting pot and come out of 
it with something that is a unique vitality, a unique vitality that 
doesn't exist in any other people in the world, in part, because we've 
skimmed the cream of the crop off of every Nation in the world.
  The people that came here, came here because they wanted to have a 
chance at the American Dream. They wanted to have an opportunity to 
become an American and an opportunity to be independent economically 
and carve out and pull themselves up by their bootstraps and provide 
for their own family and sit down at the supper table at night and be 
proud of what they have accomplished for their day, for their week, for 
their month, for their life.
  And we should be proud of what's been accomplished in this country by 
the lives of all of those that have gone before us. This is not worthy 
of their effort and sacrifice. This isn't worthy of a proud and 
independent people that should be reaching for more freedom instead of 
giving it up in exchange for dependency.
  This is dependency. It goes the wrong way. It takes us to the left. 
It takes us to a dependency. It takes us to a myopic image of a utopian 
version where they have always thought--and let's just say in that part 
of Western Europe your utopian thinkers have emerged. They have always 
drawn these kind of schematics to come up with a better way to be able 
to find this utopia on Earth.
  They completely and diametrically are opposed to the philosophies of 
Adam Smith and the philosophies that emerge in the Old and in the New 
Testament.
  The independence that we have to have, the personal responsibility 
that we have to have, the moral standards of the core of who we are as 
a people, diminished by this color-coded schematic.
  And I pray, Madam Speaker, that the independence of the American 
people, the spirit that's within us, the inspirational responsibility 
that we have for the world, will cause us to rise up and reject this 
model, this model that's not for Americans.
  It's not an American thought process to always be taking 
responsibility away from people and diminishing their freedoms in the 
process. We need to be about expanding freedom, not diminishing 
freedom. And when we do that, our spirit rises up to the top. Our 
energy and our work ethic rises to the top. And we are stronger 
economically. We're stronger as family. We're stronger as faith. We're 
stronger as a culture and as a people, and we need to do that to set 
the inspiration for the rest of the world.
  Somebody's got to lead. This is our time, and I challenge the people 
in this Congress and this country to do the right thing by this policy.
  With that, Madam Speaker, I thank you for your indulgence, and I 
yield back the balance of my time.

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