[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 14]
[House]
[Pages 18475-18476]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              HEALTH CARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Louisiana (Mr. Boustany) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BOUSTANY. Mr. Speaker, American families and small business 
owners are struggling with high health care costs. They're also 
struggling with access to a doctor; getting to see a doctor and 
establishing a relationship with that doctor so that you can really 
lead a healthier life-style, building the kind of trust that's 
necessary so that the doctor knows the patient and knows what it's 
going to take to lead them along a healthier pathway and having the 
patient trust the doctor so that the advice that they're being given is 
something that they will adhere to. American families are struggling, 
small business owners are struggling, and we have to do something about 
this.
  Republicans believe we should reform health care, but we need to do 
it responsibly and in a very, very thoughtful way so as to not disrupt 
the system that we currently have. If you have health insurance that 
you like that leads to a relationship with a doctor, you can keep it. 
But we don't want to see a system completely devastated or disrupted. 
We want to build off of what works.
  I am a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, and we worked on 
the bill in the House which outlines the President's plan; and that 
bill doesn't do near enough to provide good, accessible health care. 
Furthermore, it's a very expensive bill. The Congressional Budget 
Office has just started looking at this and it's seeing a very 
expensive bill that's going to add significantly to the deficit.
  As a physician who has practiced medicine for over 20 years, I look 
at this and I say, whoa, wait a minute, let's get this right. It's more 
important to get it right than to rush into something and do it very 
hastily and cause disruption in the health care system where we have 
some things that are working. One of the speakers earlier mentioned the 
fact that we've got in fact in effect the finest health care in the 
world. We've got the most highly trained doctors and nurses. We have 
people from all over the world coming here to train. We have those who 
live in other countries who come here to get their health care. But we 
have a cost problem, we have an insurance problem, and we need to fix 
that, and we need to make sure that insurance coverage is meaningful 
and really leads to access to a doctor for every American.
  Republicans have ideas on how to do this. It incorporates three basic 
principles: Information for you to make decisions for your family or 
for your small business, to make cost comparisons, to create 
transparency, information among physicians so that we don't

[[Page 18476]]

duplicate tests and run up the costs. These are all important things. 
Information is very important throughout the system and we believe that 
we can incorporate this in a very cost-effective way.
  Secondly, choice. Americans want choices. They like to shop. Let's 
give Americans a wide range of choices to meet their family needs or 
their small business needs in health care. If we do that, that will 
create competition and that will start to drive the costs down of 
health insurance premiums which we're all struggling with. It will make 
it more affordable and we'll get more people on it. We can address the 
uninsured by targeting our response as one of the previous speakers 
said.
  Finally, we need to put families back in control of their health care 
destiny. There should be nothing between the doctor and the patient in 
this. That's the essence of good, high quality health care, and that's 
the only way we're going to control the cost ultimately, by fostering 
and strengthening that doctor-patient relationship and making it 
something that every American has. That's how we'll fix health care. 
Republicans have those ideas and many more and we'll be glad to share 
them as this debate goes further with the American public.

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