[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 14]
[House]
[Page 18471]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    RUSHING INTO A HEALTH CARE PLAN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
North Carolina (Ms. Foxx) for 5 minutes.
  Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I'm sorry I don't have the time to respond to 
the majority leader's comments about PAYGO. But I would just simply say 
that the Democrats passed a PAYGO policy when they first took over, and 
we're getting deeper and deeper into debt. If that's what PAYGO does, 
then woe be unto us if we sign on to it.
  The President, the Speaker and the majority leader are all in a rush 
to pass legislation here. So much in a rush, they will not even give 
Members a chance to read the bills. Why is that? It's perhaps because 
they don't want people to know what's in the bills. But the American 
people want to get health reform right, not just fast. Artificial 
deadlines for passing legislation serve a political purpose, not a 
legitimate purpose. I have promised that I will not vote for any health 
care legislation that is not publicly available in its final form for 
at least 72 hours in advance of a vote. Every Member of Congress should 
have time to read the health care bill they are asked to vote on, and 
the American people should be given this same common courtesy. Let's 
give them significant time to fully understand the details of a health 
care proposal rather than steamrolling partisan legislation through 
Congress. We should make August a national health care awareness month 
so that Americans can let their Member of Congress know where they 
stand before voting because we already know of many problems in the 
proposals that are being put forward. Number one, the bill contains 
zero savings from eliminating or even reducing waste, fraud and abuse. 
In an attempt to correct this egregious lack of oversight, Ways and 
Means Republicans offered six amendments during the committee's markup 
to reduce wasteful spending. All of them were rejected by the 
Democrats.
  We know that the House Democrats' health care plan will increase 
Federal spending significantly, that coming directly from the CBO, 
appointed by the Democrats. We know that it's going to raise taxes on 
small businesses through surtax increases. Of taxpayers who file in the 
top brackets, more than half of them are small businesses. The Democrat 
plan, according to a study by the Tax Foundation, would raise the top 
tax rate in 39 States to more than 50 percent.

                              {time}  1045

  Significantly, it includes fines of up to $500,000 on employers who 
make an honest mistake thinking they had provided what the government 
deemed ``sufficient'' coverage. It will impose an 8 percent payroll tax 
on employers who can't afford to offer health insurance to their 
employees, and on employers who do the right thing and offer health 
coverage to their employees but it is deemed insufficient by the 
government, and employers who are not paying at least 72.5 percent of 
an employee's premium or 65 percent for family coverage.
  What they plan to do is take over more aspects of our life. Every 
piece of legislation that is passing out of this House this session is 
aimed at putting the government more in control of our lives and giving 
us less freedom. The health care bill is the worst of those. Cap-and-
tax was horrible; this is even more horrible.
  We must not rush into passing health care legislation. We must slow 
down and get things right. The American people are hurting. We know 
they are hurting. Unemployment is going up dramatically under this 
Congress and under this President, and we need to be dealing with what 
we can do to create jobs and help individual families, not make things 
worse by killing more jobs and raising taxes. That's what PAYGO does. 
It is hard to make cuts in spending, easy to raise taxes, and that's 
what they plan to do. We shouldn't let them fool the American people 
again. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. We have 
got to stop letting the Democrats do these things, rushing bills 
through, hiding things in obscure language, and taxing us into high 
unemployment in this country.

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