[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 14]
[House]
[Pages 18957-18963]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2230
                HILLARYCARE AND THE NEW HEALTH CARE PLAN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Minnick). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I want to acknowledge the presence of the chairman 
of the Judiciary Committee here tonight and Mr. Ellison both. I 
appreciate the young man from Minnesota coming down here and spending 
an hour down here. I expect that out of him since he's got all of that 
youthful vigor. But the chairman of the Judiciary Committee could have 
found something else to do, and I think this is a testimonial to his 
commitment and his belief in the policy.
  And so as much as I was tempted to engage in that debate, I was also 
very interested in the exchange from the gentleman of Minnesota and the 
chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
  There are other Members off doing other things tonight, and perhaps 
doing nothing. But some of us are interested in the future of America.
  And I wanted to point out this chart that I am sure will be something 
that the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers) will recognize, or at 
least when I describe it he will recognize it.
  This is the flow chart from Hillary's national health care plan from 
1993. And it has some differences between that and the current plan 
that we have. But I had this chart on the wall in my construction 
office when it was available in 1993, and it hung there throughout the 
decade. And I believe it's still somewhere in my archives unsorted. 
They're still some things left over from that from the time I sold my 
business out to my oldest son.
  But this chart animated me. It animated me because I'm a private-
sector person. I'm a person who had to make a living competing on low-
bid and being efficient producing and building things, and I provided 
health insurance for my employees and retirement plans for my 
employees. And I was one of the early people to do that. I recall back 
in the 1980s, that was an exception in people that were within the 
scope of the business that I was in and many other businesses. And I 
was happy to do all I could do because I wanted to keep employees 
working for me. I wanted to give them the best employment we could, the 
best employment package we could.
  And when I saw this come out, this Hillary's plan, I began to look 
through all of this chart, all of these new programs, acronyms that I 
don't know that the gentleman from Michigan could come up with what 
these mean today. I thought I knew them all back then. But there were 
many of them new government programs.
  And some of this is similar to the proposals that are out there 
today. The stark difference, is this is black and white. The new flow 
chart is in Technicolor. I imagine a generation from now it's going to 
be 3-D. But it creates whole new different programs and new different 
agencies, and that was enough to put the brakes on this program back in 
the early 1990s.
  When the American people got a look at all of this government that 
was prescribed, all of the hoops they were going to have to jump 
through, they concluded that they didn't want to make that big change 
and didn't want to make that big leap.
  So just the idea of this chart, I think, if this chart had been 
pulled out of the equation, I think perhaps Hillary's health care plan 
would have passed. But the American people can see--and in one snapshot 
picture--this huge growth in government that comes about and the loss 
in freedom. This is about freedom. And when I look down through this 
list, I see HMO provider plan. Global budget plan. A global budget plan 
for a national health care plan? All of these agencies over on this 
side, DOL, PWBA, I don't even know what those mean any more, but grown, 
creating new government. How it's interrelated with State government, a 
national health board. That sounds pretty familiar. Executive office of 
the President sitting on the top of that.
  But this chart was something that caused the American people to 
wonder how many lines would they stand in, how many government agencies 
would they have to deal with. And when you look at Americans standing 
in line, it's pretty--you know we do that occasionally in the cities 
when things are busy in the grocery store or wherever. If you are 
standing in line, you are giving up some of your freedom, your time 
that you could be doing something different with. And when you stand in 
line for retail, you always have the opportunity to go for another 
line. When you stand in line for government, there is only one line, 
and you shall wait until that line slowly progresses through the door.
  We have a new chart here, and this is the chart that reflects the new 
language, and this chart is--this is a chart that when the American 
people absorb all of the components of this, they will also understand 
that there is freedom that will be lost.
  I put this out here because I want to make sure that the gentleman 
from Michigan can see this. And I want to make this point because this 
is a dialogue situation that we have here on the floor. When I looked 
at this chart, I will say that reading the bill over and over again 
doesn't draw a description that you can see in your head the way you 
can if you have the chart to follow.
  This is 31 new government agencies. This is 31 new hoops that people 
have to jump through. They won't have to jump through every one to get 
their tonsils out, but they will have to jump through some new ones to 
get their tonsils out or a hip replacement, or a knee or whatever it 
might be.
  But in this whole flow chart that reflects these many pages of 
legislation, the one that I bring my attention to--and the one that 
causes me concern--is this right here, this little segment down at the 
bottom: Traditional health insurance plans. These are the 1,200 or 
1,300 plans that the chairman of the Judiciary Committee alluded to. I 
call that a lot of competition; 1,200 to 1,300 health insurance plans 
competing against each other for the premium dollar. They're out there 
trying to devise new packages and new ways to market and different ways 
to accommodate the needs of the health insurance consumer. Thirteen 
hundred. In fact, my number is over 1,300 of these policies.
  Well, under this proposal, this new national--the House Democrats' 
health plan, this new health care plan, any health insurance policy 
that you have today would have to go into this circle, this purple 
circle here called the ``qualified benefits health care plans.'' They 
would be the private-sector plans. So these 1,300 or so plans would 
have to meet the newly written government regulations in order to 
qualify under the qualified plans.
  Those regulations will not be specified out in this bill. They won't 
say in the bill that you have a certain deductible or a certain 
copayment or no copayment. There will be some regulations that will be 
written in there such as, perhaps, portability--which I know that we 
need to address--but in any case, the qualified health benefit plans, 
that's the pool that this whole box of 1,300 would have to go into. 
They will have to meet the new standards, the new standards that will 
be written by the Health Choices Administration Commissioner, whom we 
can confidently define as a health choices administration czar. It's 
just ``commissioners'' have a better sound to it today, because we have 
32 czars. We're kind of worn down on czars, but commissioners are okay.
  This commissioner will, with whatever board that directs him and 
whatever direction he gets from the White House, and perhaps with input 
from the House and the Senate, perhaps will

[[Page 18958]]

write new regulations. And he will tell these 1,300 and some health 
insurance policies, You will conform to these standards in order to be 
qualified. If you are not a qualified health insurance plan, you will 
not be allowed under this law to sell insurance in the United States of 
America.
  So, when the President promises that if you like your health 
insurance plan, you get to keep it, I do not believe that the President 
could be able--with any kind of confidence--to make that promise, 
because in reality, he doesn't know yet what these qualified health 
benefits plans are. But we do know that they aren't going to qualify 
every plan as it is. They may not qualify any plans as they are. But 
they will be pushed into this circle here, and they will have to be 
written in such a way that the new plan, this other purple circle, the 
public health plan--that's the public option that the gentlemen had 
been speaking about over this last hour. The public option is designed 
to compete against these 1,300-and-some private health insurance plans.
  Now, there are a couple of things that can happen. If the public 
option is having trouble competing, they can either lower the premiums 
and subsidize them with tax dollars, or they can raise the regulations 
on the private plans so that the health insurance plan today that 
people have--one of those 1,300-and-some plans that are there--they 
have to meet the new government regulations. You raise the regulations, 
you raise the cost, you raise the premiums.
  These policies will not be the same policies if this health insurance 
plan changes. That's why the President can't make that promise. He can 
make the promise, but he can't keep it, and the American people know he 
can't keep it.
  So the difference between this full technicolor plan and the 
HillaryCare plan behind us in black and white is this: That the 
HillaryCare plan was a single-payer plan. It was a plan that was not 
quite one-size-fits-all, but it was one government plan for all.
  This is a transitional plan to HillaryCare plan. This is a plan that 
sets up and transfers all private health insurance today into 
government-approved, qualified health benefit plans. The government 
will write the regulations. They will say what's mandated. They will 
tell the companies what they have to provide for insurance, what they 
have to cover, whether they can have deductibles, whether they can have 
copayments, and what kind of portability may or may not exist. And I 
think the portability will exist.

                              {time}  2240

  By the time they write the regulations, you won't be able to tell 
whether you have a private health insurance plan or whether you have 
the public option because they will be written under the same rules. So 
it will just be the difference of whether someone is out there still 
hanging on.
  I can tell you what happened in Germany. Germany has the longest 
history with a public health insurance plan of any country in the 
world. They put it in under Otto Von Bismarck, for political reasons I 
might add. And today, even though they have a private option as we are 
being promised here, 90 percent of the health insurance in Germany is 
the public plan. It is the plan that they write and they put the 
dollars into it. The 10 percent that are out there that have private 
plans are mostly people that are self-employed, that are making the 
kind of an income that allows them to go outside the government market 
to buy some health insurance that they think might give them a little 
bit better access to the health care, 10 percent private, 90 percent 
public, 90 percent government.
  Now I don't know what is in this dialogue or in this bill that is 
going to change our way of thinking, that will change what happens here 
in the United States. But we know that as much as people say about how 
popular the Canadian health care plan may be, they keep coming to the 
United States for health care from Canada. And in Canada, there is a 
law that prohibits the Canadians from jumping ahead in the line. They 
have lines now that, let's see, the numbers, I will recall them, a 360-
day waiting period for a knee joint, for a new knee joint and 196 days 
waiting for a new hip joint.
  In America, well, we can get you in tomorrow or next week. What's 
your pleasure? We will make sure we adjust the schedule of the health 
care providers so that we do get people in for that kind of surgery, 
whether it is heart surgery, knee surgery, hip surgery, whatever it 
might be. We don't have waiting lines in the United States, unless they 
are waiting at the emergency room with people that are walking in 
there.
  I will point out, also, Mr. Speaker, that the dialogue that we have 
heard, not just here in the previous hour ahead of me, but constantly 
throughout this entire health care debate, has been the blending, the 
merging and the confusing of the terms ``health care'' and ``health 
insurance.''
  For example, when the gentleman said just previously, ``Millions and 
millions of people who don't have health care,'' that was the chairman. 
Well, we don't have anybody in America that doesn't have health care. 
Everyone in America has access to health care. But we don't have 
everybody in America that is insured. When we blur the terms and we say 
that there are millions of people that don't have health care, we need 
to drag that thing back to the reality of the truth and make it the 
point that, no, everybody has health care. At least if they will access 
it, they have health care. But they don't all have health insurance.
  When you take the full numbers of people in the United States and you 
start subtracting from that the numbers of people who are just simply 
not exercising an option of picking up health insurance, we will hear 
the number that there are 44 million to 47 million people in America 
that are uninsured.
  But when you start subtracting from that, first, I'm not interested 
in insuring the illegals in America. I think those people that came 
into the United States illegally should go home. I think we have got an 
obligation to put them back in the condition they were in prior to them 
breaking the law. We should not reward them for violating our 
immigration laws. So the illegals should be subtracted. Also, newly 
arriving immigrants are supposed to take care of themselves. They can't 
hardly press themselves on the public dole and plead with us that the 
minute they arrive here we should provide them health insurance. We 
provide them health care. Nobody gets turned away. But they cannot 
demand health insurance. Then when you subtract from that the people 
that are making over $75,000 a year, they could surely find a way to 
take care of some health insurance with some income like that.
  And you shake this number down, what are we really after here? We are 
after a number that identifies those people who apparently can't take 
care of themselves, who can't take care of their own health insurance, 
the chronically uninsured. The chronically uninsured in America are a 
number between 10.1 million and 12 million, depending on whether you 
believe the two-professor study at Penn State University or a number 
that came out from one of our nonpartisan organizations here, and I 
hesitate to quote them.
  But 10.1 to 12 million, some place in that zone, is the total number 
of those who are chronically uninsured in America. Divide that out, say 
11 million, and divide it by 306 million, you're in the zone of about 4 
percent. We have the best health care system in the world. We do spend 
a high percentage of our gross domestic product on health care, and we 
have got the best health care system in the world. I won't argue that 
we shouldn't take some dollars out of this, because there are a lot of 
dollars in our health care system. But we are looking at upsetting the 
best health care system in the world to try to address the 4 percent of 
our population that are chronically uninsured.
  Why would we do that? What is our goal? Don't we know some things 
from all of the experience that we have had in dealing with people who 
have had public policies offered to them? If you look across the 
States, what percentage of those kids that are eligible are

[[Page 18959]]

signed up for SCHIP? And we look at how government abuses SCHIP when in 
Wisconsin 87 percent of those signed up for State Children's Health 
Insurance Program are adults, and in Minnesota, the gentleman from 
Minnesota, Mr. Ellison's, State, 66 percent were adults? They were 
abusing the system. They were not using the system.
  If you look at the numbers of people who are eligible for Medicaid 
versus those who are actually signed up for Medicaid, just slightly 
over half of those that are eligible for Medicaid are actually signed 
up. So why would we think that we can fix this problem of the 4 percent 
of the population that is chronically uninsured even if we do bring a 
public plan and a public option? Why would we think that they would 
sign up? I don't think they are going to sign up in any greater numbers 
than they do for SCHIP or any greater numbers than they do for 
Medicaid.
  One of the reasons is because a certain percentage of the population 
is just simply not responsible enough to step up to that 
responsibility. And there is supposed to be a reward in this country 
for people who do take the initiative and take care of themselves. But 
I'm concerned about this loss of freedom. I'm concerned about this 
transition of the traditional health insurance plans crowded into the 
qualified health benefits plans with new regulations written that may 
compel them to pay certain benefits that would be morally objectionable 
to many of us.
  And then it is written so that they would compete with the public 
benefits plan. And seeing also that this is a transition to get us to 
the HillaryCare plan which was a complete substitution of the private 
health insurance in America and replaced with a government-run plan, 
another major moral objection that I have.
  I will say this is actually the moral objection, and I will tell this 
in an anecdotal form. Sometime in the early 80s, at least sometime in 
the 80s, my Congressman was Fred Grandy. Many people will remember Fred 
Grandy as Gopher on ``Love Boat.'' He was a very smart guy, a Harvard 
graduate, a policy wonk. He still has left an impression upon 
colleagues I serve with here on how smart and how policy-able he is and 
was active in those years.
  It was unusual for a Member of Congress to come to my little town. 
Fred Grandy did do a stop in my little town of Odebolt, and we met in 
the basement of the Lutheran church. There was a pretty good crowd for 
a small town. There were about 80 people there. I went and sat down in 
the front row. Most of the reason is because I can't hear very well in 
the back row. Of those 80 people there, Congressman Fred Grandy 
proposed his model for a national health care plan. As he described it, 
I listened to it carefully.
  Then he stopped, and he said, how many of you in the room are 
employers? I raised my hand. I remember looking around the room, and 
there were 12 of us with our hands up, a dozen out of 80 or so that 
were employers. And then he asked the question, how many of you provide 
health insurance for your employees? I left my hand up. But it was the 
only hand up out of the 80 in the room. And then Congressman Grandy 
came directly in front of me, and he leaned down and he said, and of 
the way I have described this national health plan, how much will this 
change the way you do business? And I gave him the answer that was in 
the front of my head, and I think I would do that pretty much today, as 
well. I said, well, Congressman, it probably won't change the way I do 
business very much unless you're going to compel me to pay for 
abortion, in which case I quite likely will no longer be an employer. 
That was my answer. It was a blunt answer, and it was exactly what I 
was thinking. And the place erupted in applause. I had no idea that 
there was a nerve out there to be touched in that fashion. I had no 
idea that I would ever enter into public life in any fashion. I had no 
idea that I'd be serving on the Judiciary Committee at a time like 
this, no idea I would be standing here on the floor of Congress 
relating a story that was more than 20 years old where I found out it 
wasn't just me that considers requiring Americans to pay tax, to take 
their tax dollars to fund the ending of innocent human life and calling 
that the expansion of freedom is abhorrent to many Americans.

                              {time}  2250

  And that, at the core of this, I don't know how this administration 
avoids the position that they have taken, but I don't know how American 
people step up and get out their checkbook and write a check to the IRS 
if that check is going to go into--or write a check for health 
insurance premiums for that matter--if that check is going to go into 
Planned Parenthood, the abortion clinic, into the snuffing out of 
innocent human life.
  When it gets to the point where it is a moral principle, the American 
people, I don't believe, will tolerate the imposition of a policy like 
that. And this policy, some will say, well, we don't have any proof 
that it's going to be, we're going to be compelled to pay for abortion 
in this health insurance plan. The history of the entire funding of 
abortions since Roe v. Wade has been, if there is not a specific 
exemption in the bill, if there's not a specific exemption passed by 
Congress, then government will fund abortions. That's how it has been 
since 1973.
  And so this bill, when it was offered in committee to prohibit any of 
this money from going to abortions, that amendment was shot down on 
almost exactly a party-line vote. So this Congress has already spoken. 
If anybody thinks that this massive, technicolor flowchart, new health 
care plan, crowd your private plan into competing against the public 
plan and eventually the public plan swallowing all of the private 
plans, if anybody thinks this isn't designed today by the people in 
power in this Congress to fund abortion, they would be wrong.
  And we had the opportunity of the White House Budget Director, when 
asked the question, he would not rule it out that they would be funding 
abortions under this program. So, we all have to take them at their 
word, their spoken or unspoken word. But if the legislation doesn't 
explicitly exclude abortion, we know that they are going to be seeking 
to fund abortion.
  Sixty-nine percent of Americans oppose taxpayer funding for abortion 
according to a Zogby poll just last year, 69 percent oppose. And in May 
of 2009, a Gallup poll finds that 51 percent of Americans identify 
themselves as pro-life. But if you start dropping off some of the 
exceptions, you go right on up the line as high as 75 or more percent. 
And no one can win the argument, if you ask them what instant their 
life began if they believe in the sanctity of human life, unless they 
take the position that they are pro-life.
  And so I think that this legislation that goes after a big chunk of 
our economy, at least 17 percent of our economy, it goes directly after 
a strong moral objection that many of us hold against abortion itself, 
let alone compelling people to fund abortions here in the United States 
or in a foreign land.
  And now, Mr. Speaker, I take you back to the President's basic 
principles that he's argued about as to why he says we need to 
establish this national health care plan. His principle is this: The 
economy is a mess. It's not quite any longer in free fall, but we are 
in an economic situation that's quite difficult. And he says, President 
Obama, health care is broken. And he also contends that we can't fix 
our economy unless we first fix health care. Well, health care/health 
insurance, let's put that all together, because now I think he's 
talking about the package.
  And so here's the situation. The economy is in a shambles. It's 
limping along. It doesn't show any signs of recovery. It may still be 
declining. And so with a bad economy, and the President says we have to 
overhaul the health care system in America in order to recover 
economically, here's the principle.
  How do you bring something out economically if you're going to 
propose a $1.2 trillion to $2 trillion plan that's going to require 
increasing taxes by $800 billion or $900 billion and leave, by all 
accounts, at least a negative $239.1 billion deficit created by all of 
this?

[[Page 18960]]

  How do you, if we can't afford a health care plan that we have, how 
do you create one that costs $1 trillion to $2 trillion more, increases 
the deficit and increases the taxes, how do you create all that and say 
that's a fix? It looks to me like no, it's more like an addiction on 
increasing taxes and increasing government.
  Here's a conclusion that I've come to, Mr. Speaker. No matter what 
kind of logic this side of the aisle will apply, no matter what the 
metrics are from an economic approach, no matter what we can point to 
that shows that this is the best health care system in the world--and 
by the way, before I get to the conclusion on the no matter whats, I 
want to list the things that I do agree on.
  We spend too much money on health care in this country, too high a 
percentage of our GDP. We have to do something about portability in 
America, because when people move from job to job, they should not have 
to stay in a job because their health insurance doesn't go with them if 
they leave. We agree on those things.
  Something else that's missing from this flowchart, though, is 
liability reform. Medical malpractice insurance is too high, and it is 
a significant part of this, but, you know, if you can produce all 
government workers producing all the health care, then you can end up 
with sovereign immunity and we can maybe get rid of this litigation in 
the end, if that's where it's going. I suspect it's not.
  So those are the two things that we agree on. Costs too much money, 
we need to make it portable. Aside from that, there are many other 
solutions that I would apply.
  One of them would be if health insurance premiums are deductible for 
anyone, if they're deductible for the corporation or the employer, they 
should be deductible for everyone. The same kind of commodity should be 
deductible for an individual, for the ma and pa shop, for the farms. 
They should be deductible for everybody in America in the same fashion 
that they're deductible for a company. That would move a lot of people 
out of their existing programs and let them market or shop and own 
their own policy. So I'm for full deductibility.
  I'm for expanding health savings accounts. I'm for limiting the 
liability under medical malpractice, adopting the language that we 
passed out of the Judiciary Committee and off the floor of this House 
about 3 or 4 years ago that caps the noneconomic damages at $250,000. 
I'm for doing those things.
  I don't know anybody that's for doing nothing. We want to do all we 
can to fix this program, but we want to keep the competition in place 
and we want people to keep their freedom. But it does not follow 
logically, Mr. Speaker, for the President to claim that we are in an 
economic difficulty of proportions not seen since the Great Depression 
and that we can't fix the economy without first fixing health care/
health insurance, and that the fix for health care and health insurance 
is a $1 trillion to $2 trillion government spending program with an 
$800 billion and $900 billion tax increase, with a $239.1 billion 
deficit.
  How does going further in debt, spending more money, solve a problem 
for a health insurance program that already spends too much money? If 
you put more money into the system, where are they taking it out? I 
don't see where they're taking it out except squeezing down Medicare. 
That's one of the components that are there, and I've seen numbers as 
high as $500 billion that might be, not in here on this flowchart, but 
in the finer print of the bill.
  If they squeeze down Medicare, Medicare that, in my district and on 
average is paying only 80 percent of the cost of delivering the 
service, and in Iowa, out of the 50 States, we have the lowest Medicare 
reimbursement State in the entire country. We have the lowest 
reimbursement rate. We are in the top five in quality year after year. 
There are a number of different categories. Sometimes we're number one 
in some of the categories. But out of all 50 States, when you look at 
the aggregate of the quality of the health care, Iowa ranks in the top 
five consistently year after year after year, and we are last in 
reimbursement rate in the country year after year after year.
  And so this idea of squeezing $500 billion out of the Medicare 
reimbursement rates because they think somebody's making too much 
money, what happens is it pushes those costs over onto the private 
payers, called cost shifting. You shift the cost. At some point, this 
bubble has to burst. I think that this bill squeezes it to the point 
where the bubble bursts.
  And so I would make this point, too, that we should get our verbiage 
right. We should call health care health care. That's the providers. 
That's the service. That's when we are taking care of patients. We 
should call health insurance health insurance. That's when a premium 
gets paid to an insurance company and the insurance company pays the 
liability that comes when there's a claim, when there's health care 
provided.

                              {time}  2300

  That's the difference. I've watched this verbiage get confused over 
the immigration debate over the last few years, too. I made the point 
then--and in fact it was to the White House at the time--that they 
couldn't get past the idea that they were proposing amnesty. They tried 
to redefine amnesty, and the American people didn't buy it. We can't 
redefine this language around health care. The American people are not 
going to buy it. They know the difference between health insurance and 
health care. And they like to know where it is because they know their 
very lives are at stake, and they don't want to stand in line.
  I have a chart here that describes the quality of American health 
care. This is the survival rate of cancer patients compared to 
different regions. Here's prostate cancer, here's breast cancer. 
There's two good indicators that are there. If you look at the United 
States, our survival rates are at the top in both prostate and breast 
cancer. And then when you see the--shall I call it burgundy here--
that's Canadian. Canadian survival rates are higher, substantially 
higher, especially for prostate, than they are for Europe or for 
England. Europe and England are down, Canada's up, the U.S. is better 
than Canadian. It's also the case when you look at breast cancer, only 
it's not so stark, the difference between Europe and England and the 
United States.
  I look at this and I think, how did Canada be so close to the United 
States with survival rates of cancer? We have the best survival rates 
here, by the way. How can Canada be so close? Could some of it be that 
because Canada is so close, Mr. Speaker? Could it be that Canadians 
come from Canada down into Detroit to get their cancer treatment? Could 
it be that they're coming down to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota to get 
their cancer treatment, and could that be one of the reasons why their 
survival rates are better in Canada as compared to the other countries 
that have a socialized medicine program?
  But make no mistake, Mr. Speaker, this is socialized medicine. It's 
the government writing the rules. It's taking away your freedom. You 
can't own your health insurance policy the way you own it today. The 
government will interfere and intervene and will write new rules. And 
when the President says that you get to keep your plan if you like it, 
I guess maybe if you're working for a company, you may get to keep your 
plan if you don't like it. But when Wal-Mart makes a decision, as they 
did a couple of weeks ago, that they would endorse an employer mandate 
health insurance plan, that should tell us something.
  Why would Wal-Mart do that? They insure about 52 percent of their 
people. Their competition insures about 46 percent of theirs. So 
there's a little push there competitively. But surely they have to 
think that the health insurance for their employees is going to be 
cheaper if it's under a public plan.
  So when the President says if you like your health insurance plan, 
you get to keep it, what does he say if Wal-Mart, for example, should 
decide that they're going to drop all of their private insurance 
carriers and policies

[[Page 18961]]

and go over onto the public plan? Doesn't Wal-Mart or any employer have 
the option to shift if we offer? If we offer people a public plan over 
here in this chart, is it the President's position, that a company 
can't switch? Is he saying to a company that's providing health 
insurance to their employees, if your employees like these plans, you 
have to keep it? Is he saying that to the descendants of Sam Walton?
  I don't think so. I think companies will make that decision. It will 
be an economic decision. It may well be a moral decision for a lot of 
our responsible employers as well. But the President cannot guarantee 
that you get to keep your health insurance plan. That decision will be 
made by the employer if he provides it. And if you're an individual 
that owns your own plan, that plan will still have to qualify to be 
sold in the United States of America. It will not be legal to sell 
health insurance in America unless you comply under this circle with 
the qualified health benefits plans, the rules of which will be written 
by the health insurance czar.
  Thirty-one different agencies there. There's a lot of freedom that's 
lost, a lot of lines will be created, a lot of freedom will be lost, 
some lives will be lost, and we know that people die in line.
  Mr. Speaker, I have a couple of subjects that I wanted to address 
when I came here tonight, and I wanted to just take this little moment 
while the Chair of the Judiciary Committee was here and ask, as we've 
had many of these discussions and dialogues, if he would be open to a 
little colloquy. I would make the point to the gentleman from Michigan 
that today the Government Reform Committee released a report on ACORN. 
I have read the executive report on ACORN. From my perspective if the 
82 pages of report that's released support the statements made in that 
executive summary, it is earth-shaking for me to read all the 
implications of that.
  I know that you've had some real interest in looking into ACORN to 
examine the propriety of the operations that they have, with the very 
breadth of all the corporations that are affiliated, and I would just 
inquire if the gentleman has had an opportunity to read the executive 
summary of the Government Reform report at this point.
  Mr. CONYERS. If the gentleman will yield, I haven't read it yet. But 
I will be reviewing it tomorrow and I will be prepared to discuss this 
with him next week.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for that 
commitment. I look forward to having that dialogue. This is something 
that you know I've been very concerned about for many months. I know 
that the chairman of the Judiciary Committee has taken a real interest 
in this. This is real evidence, as I understand it, real definitive 
evidence that's now in the Congressional Record in a composite form.
  Hopefully the chairman and his committee staff could take a real 
thorough look at this and either produce a response to the evidence 
that's there, or I would be very interested in opening up hearings so 
we could examine ACORN.
  Would the chairman have any inclination on what he might do at this 
point?
  Mr. CONYERS. Not until I've examined the document the gentleman has 
referred to.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the chairman for his 
indulgence in this. Again I appreciate it. It's late at night here, and 
John Conyers is here engaging in this health care debate and paying 
attention to the things that matter. I did intend to bring up the ACORN 
issue at this point, so it wasn't an injection into the dialogue.
  If the gentleman had further points, I would be happy to yield.
  Mr. CONYERS. Well, I haven't seen the report that you've reviewed. 
But I will be happy to look at it next week. We're in dialogue. We see 
each other every day that we're in session. I will be delighted to 
discuss it with you.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the chairman again for 
his indulgent attention to the matter. I will at this point, then, move 
on to that subject matter. And unless the gentleman from Texas came to 
speak on health care and health insurance, I would be happy to yield.
  Mr. GOHMERT. I appreciate my friend from Iowa yielding and that is 
something I did want to mention, as I am still so deeply disturbed by 
the fact that this Congress would be censored, where we did not have 
the freedom to debate, when that ability is what gave us this country, 
is what started this country. If you go to the Speaker's Web site, you 
will find all kinds of references that are clearly political and 
clearly demeaning to Republicans. Yet I don't know of any Republican 
that has said that she needs to personally pay for her Web site since 
it's political.
  Yet here we find out today that we're not allowed to use the term 
``government-run health care'' because that is considered political and 
demeaning to the Democrats' plan and, therefore, if we're going to put 
that in any correspondence, then we have to personally pay for it. We 
can't do like the Democrats have done, when they send out all this mail 
trashing Republicans, some of it valid, a few years ago, that we were 
overspending.
  And so I thought perhaps the silver lining would be when they got the 
majority they'd do what they said and cut spending, but it's gone the 
other direction. Nonetheless, in the chart, as I'm sure my friend from 
Iowa has pointed out, that has these 31 different new created entities, 
we're not allowed to put that, we're told, on our Web site. Otherwise, 
we'll have to pay for the Web site. We're not allowed to send that out 
in any literature because the fact of the business is, that might 
educate people on just what it is that's going on here. But we were 
told we have to use the term ``public option'' rather than 
``government-run health care.''

                              {time}  2310

  John Carter was told today that if he was going to use the term 
``government-run health care,'' he would have to pay for his mail-out. 
He couldn't use franking to do so. That he would have to use the term 
``public option.''
  It is so outrageous that in this body we're being censored by people 
who have made a living out of being political. It is just outrageous. 
And I've got too many friends on the other side of the aisle that I 
can't believe would condone that kind of conduct. Because they should 
have the freedom to criticize any Republican plan. We should have the 
freedom to criticize any Republican plan. And we both should have the 
freedom to criticize the Democratic plan. That's supposed to be 
constitutional. Yet, we're told we can't use political, demeaning terms 
to their health care plan.
  I'm telling you, it is socialized medicine on its way. It is 
nationalized health care. It is the government's effort to take over 
your body.
  I've got three daughters, my friend knows. While somebody is under my 
roof and I'm paying their health care bills, then I feel like I've got 
the right to tell them you need to eat better, you need to do this, you 
shouldn't do that, because I'm paying for their health care bill. And 
if they're going to run it up doing something, then I have a right to 
have some injection and control over that. That's what this is about.
  I've said it months ago, that what we're running into in this body is 
the GRE, the Government Running Everything. And that's what is taking 
over health care.
  Once the government has this government-run program, let's face it, 
you cannot in the private sector compete with a government, especially 
a Federal Government program. Because it can run in the red and it can 
count on being funded by the government. You can't compete with that if 
you're in private business because you can't run in the red. You've got 
to run in the black or you go bankrupt. Well, it used to be you went 
bankrupt, unless the government wants to run in and bail you out 
because you're good buddies with people in the government.
  Nonetheless, I talked today, this morning, with a lady from Tyler. 
And I love her delightful British accent, because she's originally from 
England.

[[Page 18962]]

And she had called wanting to speak with me, really needing to speak 
with me about health care.
  She told me that her mother died of cancer and she herself was later 
found to have breast cancer, and that if she had been under the system 
her mother was, she would have died. But she's alive because she's in 
the United States and is a citizen here. Her mother is dead because her 
mother was in England and she didn't get the kind of care she would 
have here in America that Sue got. I don't want people dying like that 
unnecessarily. And the government has to put you on lists.
  I will yield to my friend from Iowa. Have you quoted the President on 
that town hall? I see my friend shaking his head.
  This was Pam Stern on the town hall meeting with the President and 
talked about her mother, that she's now 105, but over 5 years ago her 
doctor said that he couldn't do any more to help her unless she had a 
pacemaker. But she's nearly 100 years old.
  And the daughter felt like--her doctor--that she ought to get a 
pacemaker. Everybody was in favor of it, except her arrhythmia 
specialist, who had never met her. So her doctor said, He needs to meet 
you, because that's going to be worth a thousand words.
  So he makes an appointment with the arrhythmia specialist. He meets 
with Pam Stern's mother and he realizes--and, according to Pam--that 
because he saw her and her joy of life, then he said he was indeed 
going to go forward with the pacemaker because this woman had a real 
zeal for life and was enjoying life and doing well.
  And so Ms. Stern went on and said to the President--was asking about 
his plan and was wondering what treatment someone elderly could have, 
and asked this, basically: Outside the medical criteria for prolonging 
life for someone who is elderly, is there any consideration that can be 
given for a certain spirit, a certain joy of living, quality of life, 
or is it just a medical cutoff at a certain age?
  And I went online early this morning and watched this YouTube and 
typed it up myself and went back and forth to make sure I got 
everything right. I left out two or three uhs.
  Anyway, he says, ``We're suggesting--and we're not going to solve 
every difficult problem in terms of end of life care. A lot that is 
going to have to be--we as a culture and as a society starting to make 
better decisions within our own families and--and--for ourselves.''
  I've have got to pause here. The woman is 105. She got a pacemaker 5 
years ago, and her quality of life is excellent. How does she need to 
make better decisions within her family? Her family is supposed to tell 
her you can't have a pacemaker because it's time for you to just roll 
over and die?
  But the President goes on. He says, ``But what we can do is make sure 
that at least some of the waste that exists in the system that's not 
making anybody's mom better, that is loading up on additional tests or 
additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to 
improve care, that at least we can let doctors know and your mom know 
that, You know what, maybe this isn't going to help. Maybe you're 
better off not having the surgery but taking a--a painkiller.''
  The woman got a pacemaker and has had a wonderful quality of life, a 
zeal and a joy for life and, according to this President, maybe what we 
just should have told her is, You don't need a pacemaker. You need a 
painkiller.
  It is just unconscionable. We value life more than that in this 
country. And what grieves me most--and I heard on the news; I don't 
know if it's true--that AARP is now endorsing this. If they are, then 
at some point, bless their hearts, they're going to owe their members 
an apology. Because if we go to this proposed plan that supposedly on 
the news they said today they were endorsing the President's plan, then 
the people who will be hurt dramatically will be the seniors. They will 
go on lists like Sue's mother did in England and they will die because 
that's what will happen.
  That's how you keep a socialized medicine plan from going broke. You 
put people on long lists, they stay there, and then they die.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Briefly reclaiming my time, I hope to come back to 
the gentleman from Texas. I would add to this that in this bill there's 
also language in there that sets up government counselors to go and see 
the family and talk to the children of people who are aging and 
presumably to counsel them on hospice care and end of life decisions in 
order to avoid the cost of taking care of people when they get older.
  This is going to be an economic equation that's going to be counseled 
by people who will go to college to learn how to do that and they'll 
get a check from the Federal Government to go and visit the children of 
our senior citizens, and perhaps our senior citizens, and counsel them 
in why a pacemaker is not a good option; why pain pills are a good 
option instead.
  This changes our values. When I think about the President answering 
that question with recommending a prescription for pain pills, even 
after the fact, what kind of arrogance does it take for an individual 
who, let me just say, has no medical training, has not examined the 
patient. Just simply tosses out a prescription because he is President 
of the United States. That is a very high degree of self-confidence and 
that is very much an understatement on my part.
  I'd illustrate also what happens with the health insurance. When you 
see the private health insurance plans get crowded into the public 
health benefits plan and they have to compete against the public, they 
will have set up under this bill a very similar scenario to what we had 
when the Federal Government decided to get into the flood insurance 
business.

                              {time}  2320

  Now, you can look across the country and try to buy a private flood 
insurance plan, and all you can find out on the market is a Federal 
flood insurance plan because the Federal plan crowded out the private 
plans and crowded it out because they didn't charge premiums that 
reflected the risk. And the result is, the Federal flood insurance plan 
is $18 billion in the red. They've starved out all the competition. The 
government has a monopoly on flood insurance. They set the premiums, 
and the taxpayers in America are subsidizing the flood insurance for 
other Americans to the tune of $18 billion. That's the deficit.
  When government gets in this business, we lose those automatic checks 
and balances that come with competition, and we lose the human nature 
of dealing with people individually. I don't want to be in these end-
of-life decisions. I don't want to write the rules for that, and I 
wouldn't think that a President would want to make such a prescription 
of take the pain pills. It's what you have. Old age is terminal, so 
take a pain pill until it's over. That's what I hear was prescribed to 
this lady.
  I yield to my friend from Texas.
  Mr. GOHMERT. My friend from Iowa's words are exactly right. Like my 
friend from Iowa said, this is after the fact, after we know it's 
helped, he still says that at least we can let the doctors know and 
your mom know that, you know what, maybe this isn't going to help. 
Maybe you're better off not having the surgery but taking a painkiller.
  But let me also point out, the President is a very smart individual, 
well educated, extremely articulate, obviously very good and 
persuasive, but he won't be the one making the decisions. It will be 
some bureaucrat who is not as smart as the President. That's where this 
is going.
  I have shared on this floor before about a gentleman from Canada I've 
talked to whose father died in the last year or so, whose father was on 
a list to get a bypass surgery for 2 years, and some bureaucrat kept 
moving people in front of his father. I said I thought it was a crime 
to move up the list in Canada. He said it is illegal to pay somebody to 
move you up, but it's not a crime. In fact, it's required that the 
government has bureaucrats in little cubicles somewhere that are not 
nearly as smart as President Obama who read these things, look at this 
stuff and say, you know what, let's move this guy in

[[Page 18963]]

front of his father and this guy. They kept moving people in front of 
him for 2 years, and he died because the bureaucrat was wrong. His 
father really did need the surgery.
  So it's scary enough that the President would say about a woman who 
had successful pacemaker surgery 5 years ago that, you know what, maybe 
we just should have said to her, You're better off without the surgery. 
Take a painkiller. Well, imagine somebody who is not even as smart as 
he is making those decisions for you. So this is really dangerous stuff 
before us.
  And if I might add one more thing, you know, some people say that 
this debate over health care is all about politics. I just want to say, 
if this debate over health care were really just about politics, the 
smartest thing that my friend from Iowa and I could do is sit back, say 
nothing and let this bill pass, not point out all the dangerous stuff 
in this thing, the life-ending stuff in this, the freedom-ending stuff 
in it, just sit back and not say anything, because what would happen is 
the bill would pass if we didn't stand up against it and didn't let the 
people in America know how bad it is so they didn't inform their 
Congressman. Just sit back and let America find out how many freedoms 
are taken away, how many loved ones they lose because they're in this 
system. The American public, I believe, would be so irate, they would 
turn out the Democratic majority for at least two or three more 
generations, they would be so irate. That's the political side of it.
  But the factual side is, this is so bad, and we care so deeply 
because we know where this goes. I saw socialized medicine in the 
Soviet Union as an exchange student there in '73. I don't want this. I 
know how it goes. I would rather stay in the minority and be free of 
this kind of government intervention that ends lives and takes money 
for abortions and takes money to have people take a painkiller and die 
instead of having the pacemaker they need. I would rather do that and 
stay in the minority than have people endure this kind of plan. That's 
politics. And if we were smart politically, we wouldn't point out all 
the problems. We would just go home and let America find out and then 
put us in the majority party.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I completely agree with the 
judge in that statement. This is a horrible policy for America. I would 
put it out this way: This is the HillaryCare plan. This is 1993 
HillaryCare, the flowchart that I think sunk HillaryCare. The chart 
that scared the American people and mobilized them to ring the phones 
off the hook then, to run ads and raise their resistance because they 
did not want to have a government-run plan that took away their 
freedom. That's HillaryCare. This is ObamaCare. If you hated 
HillaryCare, you can't like ObamaCare.
  This flowchart, the black-and-white HillaryCare flow chart, was 
devastating to a national health care agenda. Can I say, a government-
run health care program? Can I say that about the old one, I wonder? I 
wonder if this one was mailed off by frank mail. I wonder if the people 
in charge then in 1993 had ruled that there wasn't freedom of speech on 
the part of Members of Congress. I will bet that this chart went into 
all kinds of envelopes and got spread all the way across America, and 
people opened it up and put it on their kitchen counter and stuck it up 
with magnets on the refrigerator and thought, What are they doing there 
in Washington, D.C.? We didn't send them there to grow a Big Government 
program. They rejected it. That was the end of the momentum of the 
Clinton Presidency then when HillaryCare went down.
  Now we have ObamaCare, and the censoring of this--first of all, I 
want to make this point that I don't really need to show this chart and 
send it to my constituents. They already know what we're going into. 
They know that my vote on this and my effort on this thing are pretty 
well settled. I have said for years that I'm going to oppose any 
national health care plan.
  No amount of logic is going to change the minds of the people over on 
this side of the aisle. They have come to a political conclusion, a 
conclusion that they're going to band together and they're going to 
pass something that President Obama will sign. He'll sign most anything 
as long as it says that it's got the public health plan in it. If it 
has the public health plan in it, it will starve out the private and we 
will have what almost all of them have said from the beginning.
  They want a single-payer plan, a government plan. They don't believe 
in private health insurance. They don't believe in the best health care 
system of the world. They do believe in censoring, but the American 
people cannot be censored. We have Internet. We have Twitter. This kind 
of a chart can be forwarded all over this country, and by tomorrow 
morning it could be on every computer if the American people just 
decided they wanted to make sure that you could see it. You can't 
understand this health care program if you read the print, but if you 
look at this chart on your screen, you will pick up the phone, and the 
American people will be scared enough, I think, to jam the phone lines 
again in field offices.
  I yield to the gentleman from Texas.
  Mr. GOHMERT. I realize the gentleman's time is going to expire at 
11:30, but I just wanted to finish. This is about freedom of life, 
pursuit of happiness. This is about freedom and life, and Mark Levin's 
book Liberty and Tyranny, he has got so many tremendous quotes, but I 
just wanted to make this final comment.
  President Reagan--this quote's in the book--said ``Freedom is never 
more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our 
children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and 
handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset 
years telling our children and our children's children what it was once 
like in the United States where men were free.'' That's why we're here 
fighting.
  I yield back the balance of my time.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. When men were free. Reclaiming my time, and 
concluding. I want to conclude. However appropriate it was, the 
statement made by the gentleman from Texas, that when the President 
says if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it, here is 
what the bill actually says.
  Section 102, ``By the end of the 5-year period, a group health plan 
must meet the minimum benefits required under section 121.'' That set 
qualified plan I talked about, no plan is going to be the same in 5 
years as it is today. If you like your health insurance plan that you 
have, as John Shadegg said, get ready to lose it or rise up and defend 
your freedom.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________