[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 19]
[House]
[Page 26431]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      THE PELOSI HEALTH CARE BILL

  (Mr. BURTON of Indiana asked and was given permission to address the 
House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, this is the Pelosi health care 
bill: 1,990 pages. Nobody in this place has even come close to reading 
it. In addition to that, it costs $2.25 million per word. That's per 
word. There are almost 3,500 ``shalls'' in there, and a ``shall'' is a 
mandate that Congress do something. Nobody has read this thing. It's 
going to cost all this money.
  Members of Congress can exempt themselves from being involved in the 
public option. Every time you go to a town hall meeting, the American 
people say, Are you guys going to be included? Well, this bill says you 
don't have to be included if you're a Member of Congress because we're 
more important than the guy on the street.
  You know, this is just a terrible, terrible bill; and the people of 
this country don't want it passed. I've had five town hall meetings, 
and the people overwhelmingly are opposed to this thing. They want us 
to solve the problems of health care. They want us to do it in a 
responsible way, but they certainly don't want this thing, and this 
doesn't even include the manager's amendment. This is a bad bill, and 
it should be defeated.

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