[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 14]
[House]
[Page 19574]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




         HEALTH CARE REFORM THAT EMPOWERS THE AMERICAN CITIZEN

  (Mr. PLATTS asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute.)
  Mr. PLATTS. Mr. Speaker, recently, I was asked during a radio 
interview if I thought legislation for health care reform would pass 
the House sometime this year. My answer was, ``I hope so.'' All of us 
want more affordable, better, more accessible health care for our 
citizens. The question is: How do we achieve this very important goal?
  Unfortunately, the plan embodied by this diagram is not the way to do 
that. This plan will cost millions of jobs. It will cut almost a half 
trillion dollars out of Medicare, hurting seniors. It will raise taxes 
on small businesses, making it harder to provide health insurance. As 
the CBO has told us, when fully implemented, it will raise the cost of 
health care by over $200 billion. That's more than $2 trillion in 10 
years.
  Unfortunately, the House leadership who are promoting this plan and 
those who are supporting it have forgotten the physician's principle of 
``first do no harm.'' This plan will do great harm to health care for 
each and every American citizen. We must defeat this plan, and we must 
enact legislation that will truly be about empowering the American 
citizen, and that will be about what is best for their health care.

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