[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 3582-3588]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           HEALTH CARE REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. 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. It is my privilege and I'm honored to be recognized 
to speak here on the floor and to address you tonight. Having listened 
to my friend and colleague from Ohio talk about the high moral calling 
that there is for them to pass socialized medicine, I'll just tell you, 
Madam Speaker, it's hard for me to reconcile those things. It's hard 
for me to think of a country--a beautiful country with a deep, rich, 
free tradition that would give up its freedom and its liberty and its 
sense of responsibility for the sake of the government providing 
something that 85 percent of people are providing for themselves.
  The statements that were made by the gentleman from Ohio about what 
is not freedom--it's not freedom to be able to start your business and 
have to worry about paying health care premiums or it's not freedom to 
see those premiums go up by a large percentage every year. That whole 
spiel, Madam Speaker. And I think it misses the point entirely. I think 
the freedoms that I'm hearing the gentleman from Ohio talk about are 
the types of definitions for freedom that I hear talked about by those 
that live in places like Canada or the United Kingdom or France or one 
of those countries that has socialized medicine; one of those countries 
that says freedom is having free health care provide by somebody else 
paying for it as a taxpayer. It's not the measure of freedom. It's not 
the measure of liberty. The measure of freedom and liberty is entirely 
different. You can't ever measure freedom by what is free, because 
freedom is never free. And it is a huge dichotomy in this Congress that 
people on this side of the aisle that want to subvert the definition of 
freedom. And so I will just say freedom is not about what is free.
  Let's talk about liberty. Liberty is to be able to make the decisions 
for yourself, but be bridled by morality. That's the difference between 
liberty and freedom.
  Other people in the world talk about freedom as in what's free from 
government, as if that's a measure of liberty. But when you talk about 
what's free from government, first of all, it's never free. Somebody 
has to pay the taxes, whether it's the people who are earning and 
paying taxes now or whether its the children or grandchildren that they 
would foist this debt upon with this socialized medicine bill.
  Madam Speaker, we could stand here tonight and we could talk about 
nuance after nuance of what's in this bill and what isn't. The truth 
is, the gentleman from Ohio doesn't know. And I suspect that nobody in 
the entire Democrat caucus knows. I'm confident nobody on the 
Republican side knows what's in this supposed negotiated change. A 
night or more ago, there was a bill that was brought to the Budget 
Committee. It's a shell bill. It doesn't have in it the changes that 
they're trying to get established here. It's a shell bill. It's 
designed to start the clock ticking so that when they get the arms 
twisted and the Speaker uses all the leverage at her disposal and we 
can hear the bones breaking across Capitol Hill from arms twisted up 
behind people's back, some of them carrot--some of them stick.
  When all of that is done, they want to have this machinery in place 
so that the Speaker, who sits up in her office making these deals 
behind closed doors, will have a bill come down here to the floor that 
nobody has seen, at least so far, and a bill that will be a 
reconciliation package that is unprecedented in its tactic, in its 
procedure, to propose changes to a bill that is the Senate version of 
the bill.
  And this is the unbelievable part, Madam Speaker--the very idea that 
we have before us this week, and at least threatened to come forward if 
the votes can be put together this week, a socialized medicine bill, a 
bill that could not today pass the United States Senate. A Senate 
version of the bill wouldn't pass in the Senate. Everybody in America 
knows that. That's why the results of the election in Massachusetts 
made so much difference. The people in Massachusetts, arguably the 
least likely in this modern era to save liberty for Americans, voted 
Scott Brown in as their Senator. He said that he would oppose this 
Senate version of the health care bill.

                              {time}  2130

  The bill that passed on Christmas Eve can't pass today on the eve of 
St. Patrick's Day. Not out of the Senate it can't, Madam Speaker. And 
so we are in this odd, perverse situation where perhaps for the first 
time in the history of America--and if this happens, certainly with the 
largest magnitude of impact, a bill that can't pass the Senate in its 
current condition--that being the configuration of the Senate as reset 
by the people in Massachusetts and the American people--a bill that 
can't pass the Senate comes to the House that's to be passed here on 
the floor of the House under the Slaughter rule, which deems it has 
been passed but doesn't require people to vote on it.
  And so we have a bill that could very well go to the President of the 
United States where he is salivating to sign it, a bill that couldn't 
pass the Senate, a bill that couldn't pass the House, but nevertheless 
could become the law of the land. That is the breathtaking anomaly of 
what we're facing here, and it's in a bill that cannot be brought here 
to the floor of the House because, even though Speaker Pelosi can let 
37 Democrats off right now, according to the most recent news reports, 
those 37 happen to represent ``noes'' or hard ``noes,'' and another 55 
are undecided.
  And if the Speaker's to pull the votes together, she's got to run the 
table on the 55 undecided and hold all of the ``noes'' together. Every 
undecided would have to decide that they're going to be in favor of 
socialized medicine for this to work. And the brokered deal would be 
that they would bring the Senate version of this to the floor under a 
rule that would be self-enacting, a rule that would be configured right 
up here on the third floor in that little old Rules Committee that I 
call the hole in the wall, where the hole in the wall gang usurps the 
liberty of this deliberative body and usurps the franchise of the 
Members of Congress and send the bill down here under a limited amount 
of debate time.
  Probably it would be a closed rule, so there would be no amendments 
to the rule; and the rule would be self-enacting which would 
automatically deem that the bill that has passed the Senate in the past 
that couldn't pass the Senate today is deemed to be passed by the House 
of Representatives, even though the Members on this floor don't have 
the will to vote for it so that it would go to the President of the 
United States, whom I said is salivating to sign it.
  He would sign it, and we would have the law of the land, a bill that 
swallows up one-sixth of the economy of the United States and 
nationalizes the management of the health care of every American, over 
300 million of us, into law enacted, without being able to pass the 
United States Senate, without being able to be supported and passed for 
the purposes of becoming law in the House of Representatives.
  And then behind that, the Speaker is asking people who have gone 
through a crucible to get here--and I will say, Madam Speaker, I 
respect the intelligence of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. I 
think it would be hard to believe that there are people in this

[[Page 3583]]

Congress that would be so stupid to believe that they could be promised 
that if they just vote for the Senate version of the bill with all of 
its warts, moles and scars and all of the smelly things that are part 
of it, the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the Florida 
Gator Aid, the national health clinics to the tune of $11 billion, and 
about six or seven other special packages and components that are in 
the Senate version of the bill, none of them passing the smell test.
  But asking this House to vote for a rule that automatically enacts it 
so they don't have to vote for the bill on the promise that there would 
be a reconciliation package that would be passed here in this House 
that would go over to the Senate that would be designed to fix the 
flaws in the Senate bill, strip out the Cornhusker Kickback, strip out 
the Louisiana Purchase, strip out the Florida Gator Aid, and strip out 
the $11 billion worth of public health clinics that have been leveraged 
by Bernie Sanders from Vermont and those other six or seven egregious 
bargains that have been made and convince the Democrats, 216 of them, 
to vote for a bill that will be followed by a reconciliation package 
that may or may not have the votes to pass the House of 
Representatives.
  Then it would go straight down that Hall to the Senate where the 
Senate would have to take the changes to the bill that they passed that 
are dictated by the House and expect that that's going to happen, even 
though procedural obstructions fall in the way in a breathtaking 
fashion down to the point where just the parliamentary rules would 
threaten to strip out half or two-thirds of a reconciliation bill, 
including the Stupak language which isn't going to go in here anyway.
  So you end up with the Senate bill becoming law and a futile effort 
on the part of the House to follow through on a promise to the Members 
of the House that don't want to vote for this thing that have been 
leveraged to vote.
  And what is the configuration of the Democratic Caucus, Madam 
Speaker? What are they thinking, and what would they like to get 
accomplished here? Here is where they sit. They sit in three places, 
just to analyze the political configuration here because this isn't 
policy anymore. This is politics. Politics are this: hard-core left-
wing liberals, every member of the Progressive Caucus which is linked 
to the socialists in America, they're all for this bill. It 
nationalizes health care in America. It may not do it in the first 
stroke of the pen, but it gets us there. And to be fair, there may be 
one or two of those that will decide that it's not lefty enough for 
them. But that core of the progressives, the socialists, the lefties, 
they're going to vote for this bill because they believe in it. It's a 
deep conviction on their part.
  The second component will be those Democrats that believe that they 
will take the risk, and they think that they can somehow figure out how 
to get reelected to come back to this Congress even though the American 
people, by the hundreds of thousands, have risen up in every way they 
know how to say ``no'' to this socialized medicine.
  And then the next component of this, these are the people that are 
members of the Democratic Caucus that have decided that they need to 
vote for this bill for the sake of preserving, let me say, their 
President's mojo, their President's political capital. To keep the 
caucus together on the Senate side, they would say, I'm going to have 
to sacrifice myself because this cause of keeping Speaker Pelosi in 
power and Barack Obama's mojo flowing is more important than their seat 
in Congress or the voices of their constituents, which, by the way, 
reflects to be almost one and the same thing.
  So there's the configuration. Left-wing liberal progressives that 
will vote for the bill because it moves us towards socialized 
medicine--it either is or gets us there eventually; those who will take 
the chance and decide that they think that they can hold their seat 
even though they'll vote for something that the American people have 
rejected, spit out, Madam Speaker, three to one for the most part in 
this country; and then those that believe that they can somehow either 
hang onto their seat or they're willing to pay the sacrifice. Three 
categories. That is what's going on.
  And then of course you have the Democrats that will vote ``no.'' If 
37 of them vote ``no,'' this bill can pass by a vote of 216-215. If 38 
of them vote ``no,'' then the bill fails. And I will predict that if 
it's clear that the bill is going to fail even by one vote, we will 
see, Madam Speaker, a lineup of Democrat Members of Congress come down 
here to the well and pull their red cards out of the box that will be 
sitting on this table and take their felt-tip pen, and they will write 
in there and change their ``yes'' to a ``no.'' This bill will either 
pass by one or two votes or it will fail by 40 because they don't want 
their names on this turkey, but they're determined politically to move 
this through.
  Here's what we also have, Madam Speaker, and that is that this all 
started back a year and a half or more ago, 2 years ago during the 
Democratic Presidential Caucus, and it started in Iowa. I mean, it is 
my home territory. I see it. I know it. Hillary Clinton had pushed the 
National Health Care Act as the first lady in the early nineties, in 
the beginning years of Bill Clinton's Presidency. Yes, she closed the 
doors, and she had backroom deals. She did write a bill, though; and it 
was socialized medicine. It was single-payer. The Federal Government 
takes it over and creates all these new agencies. It was a scary and 
threatening thing to what it would have done to our freedom and our 
liberty. And then the American people rejected that, spit it out, so to 
speak.
  And back here we are 15 years later with Hillary Clinton's opponent 
in the Democratic primaries pushing a socialized medicine program that 
is in some respects different from that that Hillary pushed. The 
American people see this, and they rejected it, and they spit it out.
  What has been created is a toxic stew. They went in and put this all 
together. President Obama wanted a, and still wants, a single-payer 
plan. Single-payer is a complete government-run takeover of health 
care, socialized medicine. He has said so. It's a matter of record. So 
they went together to try to figure out how to write a bill, and from 
the beginning, it was this--and I will do the metaphors, Madam Speaker.
  They went back into old HillaryCare, and they took that old soup bone 
that was laying on the shelf in HillaryCare in 1993 and '94. It had 
been sitting there for 15 years. All the meat stuck to the bone was 
tainted. They took HillaryCare off the shelf, and they put it in the 
pot, just add some water. They said, Hey, look what we have. Voila, we 
have socialized medicine--oh, no excuse me--single-payer plan. The 
American people don't want it to be called socialized medicine.
  And people looked at that skeptically and said, That's not enough. So 
they began adding more and more pieces, more and more bells and 
whistles, other ways to try to blur the taste of that tainted meat that 
was in that stew. By the time this has been churned through from June 
of last year, July, August--especially August--and September, October. 
November, it passed the House. By then, the American people knew that 
there was a toxic stew that had been cooked up and created by the 
Democrats in this Congress. A toxic stew.
  It started with old HillaryCare, dropped that old tainted soup bone 
into it, and then they began to add other vegetables and bells and 
whistles to try to blur the taste and mask it. It's still tainted. And 
the American people have said over and over again in every way that 
they know how that they don't want a potful of this toxic stew. They 
don't want a bowlful. They don't want a ladleful. They don't want a 
spoonful of this toxic stew. American people do not want any measure of 
the toxic stew of socialized medicine, but that's what we have because 
the elitists and the arrogance of the liberals have decided that they 
understand what's right for posterity, and they can manage, Madam 
Speaker, the people in the country who apparently can't manage 
themselves.

[[Page 3584]]

  But what I see is 85 percent of the American people who are insured 
and 85 percent of the people who are happy with their insurance. These 
are the people who want to be able to make their own choices for 
themselves, and that's what will be rejected. There is a whole list of 
things that go out the window if this socialized medicine bill is 
passed.
  We are not the kind of people who should be moving towards greater 
and greater dependency classes. We're the kind of people that believe 
in freedom in the true sense of the word. We believe in liberty. We 
have our constitutional principles, our constitutional values, and this 
bill does not reflect them. I believe if it does become law, there will 
be court challenges to the constitutionality of it. We will see, as a 
matter of certainty, health insurance premiums will go up for 
Americans. The younger you are, the more you will see the premiums go 
up.
  There will be a large amount of nonparticipation, people who decide 
they're going to pay the fine, whether it's $800 or $2,000, because 
it's cheaper than the higher premiums that will be driven by this bill. 
And then when they get sick, they'll be going to buy health insurance 
to cover them after they're sick.
  And one of the first things that's enacted if this legislation should 
become the law of the land is--they'll call it the fix. It's the change 
in preexisting conditions. So it would prohibit an insurance company 
from considering that an applicant had preexisting health problem 
conditions, which means that if you prohibit that consideration of 
preexisting conditions, who would buy insurance until they got sick? 
Wouldn't you just wait until your house was on fire and buy your 
property and casualty insurance? Wouldn't you just wait until the hail 
was pounding the roof to shreds and buy your property and casualty so 
you can make your claim?
  That's what will happen with health care. That's about the only thing 
that happens right away, Madam Speaker, except for the increases in 
fees, the increases in taxes, the increases in revenue that comes with 
this in this bill that is, according to Judd Gregg, a $2.5 trillion 
bill. And that was when they scored it almost a year ago. Now you can 
add another $400 billion to $500 billion to the cost because the 
revenue has been shut down, and they would sign a lot of people up over 
the next 4 years before the benefits kick in. That, Madam Speaker, is 
what we're dealing with here today.
  And it's one of the reasons that my good friend Judge Gohmert from 
Texas has come to the floor. He carries a tremendous amount of 
knowledge and a tremendous amount of passion about freedom and liberty. 
He's been here defending this night after night after night here on the 
floor, in press conferences, at rallies everywhere in America. Louie 
Gohmert has a place to go. He's stepped up to defend our freedom and 
our liberty, like all Americans should be doing and like the Americans 
who filled this Capital City up today. I would be happy to yield as 
much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Texas, my friend 
Louie Gohmert.
  Mr. GOHMERT. I appreciate my friend from Iowa so much, and I 
appreciate the wonderful points you are making. I was here just out off 
the Chamber for the whole discussion by our colleagues across the 
aisle.

                              {time}  2145

  I always appreciate when people across the aisle attempt to speak for 
me and what I support and what I would like to have happen and what I 
will and do vote for and vote against.
  But the great thing about debate is that the other side can be 
presented. Of course, you know, there was the occasion a year and a 
half ago where the Speaker cut off the microphones and that was 
prevented, but we stood here on the floor and spoke anyway. That's the 
great thing about America.
  But I would like to correct some things. Although I know my friend 
had the best of intentions of speaking on Republicans' behalf, but when 
he said Republicans have no interest in being part of the solution, I 
have to differ on that. And I appreciate my Democratic friend saying we 
don't wish to be part of the solution, but that's simply not true. And, 
in fact, I know Republicans that begged and pleaded to be allowed to 
have input into this bill, but it's hard to have input into a bill 
that's negotiated secretly.
  You get the union and AARP and you don't tell any Republicans when 
they're going to be meeting, when they're going to do their secret 
deals. You get the pharmaceutical industry and, yes, you get insurance 
companies to be part of secret negotiations. And I can promise you 
this, every industry, every individual who has come out and said I 
think this is a great bill on behalf of some industry, they got a deal 
cut for them in this bill.
  Now, this is the Senate bill here. I've had our House bill until this 
week. That's what I'd been working from. But it looks like they're 
serious about cramming the Senate bill down our throats, and they use 
real thin paper and print on both sides so that it's this small.
  But some other things that need to be corrected my friend across the 
aisle said during his time, Our friends on the other side of the aisle 
support the insurance industry wanting to start all over. Well, my 
friend's not completely informed, because there are those in the 
insurance industry that say, You know what? This bill, the Senate bill, 
it's okay with us. It would be all right. And if you're in the 
insurance industry and you have the Federal Government mandating that 
everybody has to buy a policy, then, you know, your eyes get big and 
you start thinking, Wow, think of all those sales.
  Of course, they don't look far enough into the future and realize 
that that plan and they, themselves, as insurance companies, won't last 
very long. They'll go the way of private insurances or insurance 
companies offering flood insurance. When the Federal Government got 
involved, it's hard for a private company to compete with the Federal 
Government that goes in the red and stays in the red, as the Federal 
flood insurance policies have done.
  He also commented that the Democrats are holding health insurance 
accountable. And that's nice to hear being said, but if they were 
holding health insurance companies accountable, you would not find one 
insurance company that's going to be okay with this, and there are 
those out there.
  My friend also commented that 67 percent of Americans support an 
insurance exchange. Well, in the House bill, which we've talked about 
it, there's the Federal insurance exchange program, and that's what 
will take over as they finish killing off the private insurance 
companies.
  And as my friend and I both agree, we don't want insurance companies 
between us and our doctor. We don't want the government between us and 
our doctor, and the proposals we've made get them out from between us. 
They get insurance companies back in the position of insuring and out 
of the business of managing. Why would we want the Federal Government 
to come in and manage our health care decisions when we don't even want 
private insurance companies managing our health care insurance?
  And I do appreciate my friend's honesty and candor when I understood 
him to say, first, that we have a moral mission. We have a moral 
mission, he said, to protect even the terrorists and the criminals on 
the street, and that that moral mission apparently does not stop at our 
border. Well, this is just a difference in philosophy.
  And I have a few other points that I want to make here, but I feel 
like my friend from Iowa will want to comment on this because we've had 
such lengthy discussions about this issue. And it is just a difference 
in philosophy that we have friends across the aisle that believe we 
have a moral mission to protect terrorists, to protect criminals on the 
street, and that that moral mission does not stop at the border.
  And see, my belief, and I believe it's shared by my friend from Iowa, 
is that when I took an oath to the Constitution, when I was in the 
United States Army, as a prosecutor, as a judge, as a Chief justice, 
and as a Member of Congress, there was nothing in my oath

[[Page 3585]]

that I take so seriously about supporting and defending those on the 
other side of our borders or supporting and defending all enemies, 
foreign and domestic, that want to kill me. It was not that I want to 
support and protect and defend all terrorists and enemies, foreign and 
domestic. No, it was I'm going to help protect America from all 
enemies, foreign and domestic, protect from those enemies, not go 
across the border and take my morality to other countries and be the 
policeman of the world. And, in fact, I think we do make a mistake when 
we begin to be country building, nation building, government building 
in other nations. Our job is to protect this country. And when there 
are terrorists in this country, our job is to take them out, eliminate 
the terrorists so that they are no longer a threat.
  Now, what normally happens when people declare war on another group 
or country and you capture some of those people, in a civilized society 
like ours, you hold them until such time as their friends, their 
colleagues, their comrades decide and announce we're no longer at war. 
Then you can release all of those, except for the ones you believe or 
have reason to believe, probable cause to believe committed war crimes. 
Then you go ahead and try them.
  But it's just a difference in philosophy. And I'd love to hear my 
friend from Iowa if he has a comment on that obligation.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and I appreciate the gentleman 
from Texas, as I listened to the gentleman from Ohio talk and to spread 
this philosophy that somehow, first, there are principles that they've 
been trying to drag back and establish rights that don't exist for a 
long time. This goes back to, probably, Woodrow Wilson or earlier, but 
FDR comes to mind. And if one should go out to FDR's Memorial here in 
this city, you'll see the memorial that displays the four freedoms. 
Back in those years, Franklin Delano Roosevelt made a speech about the 
four freedoms, and Norman Rockwell painted the cover of a magazine on 
that that showed the four freedoms, one at a time. The first freedom 
was, freedom--let's see--freedom of speech. The second one was freedom 
of religion. The third one was freedom from want, and the fourth one 
was freedom from fear.
  Now, I go back and look at that, and I don't think I was very old 
when I first realized about that speech of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 
the four freedoms speech--the freedom of speech, religion, want, and 
fear--and I knew even then, as a young man, that there is no freedom 
from want and there is no freedom from fear, that these are things that 
can be resolved. These aren't rights that come from God.
  Our liberty comes from God. It says so in the Declaration. We hold 
these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. And 
we're endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among 
them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
  And by the way, the pursuit of happiness, in the left-wing version, 
means anything hedonistic you might want to do that makes you happy or 
gives you pleasure for the moment. But pursuit of happiness our 
Founding Fathers understood was rooted in the Greek word eudaemonia, 
which means that pursuit of truth, both the physical and the mental 
versions of truth.
  So we have these liberties that come from God that are clearly 
delineated in the Declaration of Independence and the foundation for 
our laws in the Constitution, and no one in America has a God-given 
right for freedom from fear or freedom from want. Those are 
manufactured rights that jerk this country off on to the left towards 
the socialist side of this.
  And as I listen to this debate on health care, it comes back to a 
position that's continually made, that people have not only a right to 
health care, but they have a right to their own individual health 
insurance policy that they own.
  And the folks on this side of the aisle, the Democrat side of the 
aisle, have continually conflated two terms. Well, many more, but the 
two that I'm talking about are the terms ``health care'' and ``health 
insurance.'' Over the last year and a half or 2 years, the subject has 
been conflated to the point where, when people say ``health care,'' 
often they mean health insurance. And if you say ``health insurance,'' 
you generally mean health insurance. But if you say ``health care,'' 
you might mean health insurance or health care.
  And many Democrats on that side of the aisle, and I don't know that 
that's the case with the gentleman from Ohio, have made the statement 
that everybody in America has a right to health care and that they have 
a right to their own health insurance policy.
  And I'll make this point, that everybody in America has access to 
health care, albeit in some cases it's the emergency room. Everybody 
has access to health care. We don't let people die in the streets. 
You'd never see that happen in the United States. We take care of 
people.
  We don't have a collapsed system, as the gentleman from Ohio would 
have us believe. We have the best health care delivery system in the 
world. We have the best health insurance system in the world. Both of 
them can use improvements, and we should do that. But we should not 
throw the baby out with the bathwater. We shouldn't give up on the 
great things that we have that give so much quality and so great a life 
expectancy in this country for the sake of moving towards the 
socialization or the nationalization of a policy that diminishes us as 
a people.
  And so, going through those four freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom 
of religion--which I agree with, those are God-given rights--freedom 
from want and freedom from fear, takes me back to a hearing we had in 
the Ag Committee at the beginning of the markup for the last farm bill 
that we did. And there, Janet Murguia, the president of La Raza--La 
Raza, I would point out, Madam Speaker, is the organization that is 
called--the ``La Raza'' is Spanish for ``the race.''
  Now, if we had a, let's say, Caucasian organization that was 
exclusive to that, that had called themselves ``The Race,'' they would 
be called the racists. But meanwhile, we accept La Raza as the people 
that are doing the negotiating for our food stamps.
  And Janet Murguia testified that one of the obesity problems we have 
in the United States comes because people, they know where their next 
meal is going to be--they couldn't find somebody that was suffering 
from malnutrition--but she said that they may have anxiety about where 
their next meal is going to come from.
  I think I am going to pick this up in a little moment and yield to my 
friend from Texas.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Well, I appreciate that very much. I would like to 
follow up on that with something that our friend across the aisle said 
before us tonight. He said that when this bill passes, we'll have a lot 
to run on, and I agree. And I think they'll need to be running a great 
deal after this bill were to pass because the vast majority of 
Americans don't want it to pass. That's very clear.
  So you ask yourself, Why would the majority of the House of 
Representatives and the Senate and the President try to cram a bill 
down the throat of a majority of Americans that don't want the bill 
when it could hurt them politically?
  Well, there is so much government in this bill that they know if this 
bill passes, then the government intrusion, whether you want to call it 
socialism or progressivism, it's the government taking over such a 
massive part of our lives, basically taking over our lives.
  But I would want to point out page 100 of the Senate bill. You know, 
why were the unions so happy to jump on this? You know, unions are 
beginning to look at their health insurance policies as--some of them 
are--as a massive debt, and they'd like to get rid of it, and we know 
that they'd be unable to do this under the bill. But people will be 
glad to know, people who are in unions who are retired and have union 
health insurance, they'll be glad to know that they won't lose their 
union-negotiated health care, at least not until the date on which the 
last of the collective bargaining agreements relating to the coverage 
terminates.

[[Page 3586]]



                              {time}  2200

  So people will be able to keep, if you're in a union, or, Madam 
Speaker, people are in a union or they have retired and they have union 
health care, they can be assured they do not lose their health care--at 
least not until the date on which the last of the collective bargaining 
agreements relating to the coverage terminates. And then, of course, 
once a new union contract has to be negotiated, all bets are off.
  So that should provide some comfort if there is a year or two left on 
a collective bargaining agreement, then they can be comforted. They 
have got that insurance if they like it, and they can keep it until the 
collective bargaining agreement terminates.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas from picking up 
there from where I was forced to leave off.
  To take this up then, Madam Speaker, the situation of asking Janet 
Murguia, the president of La Raza, to testify as to why we needed to 
increase food stamps by 46 percent before the Ag Committee. And not 
being able to find people that are suffering from malnutrition and not 
being able to find people that aren't having their meals today, they 
testified that there were people that were having anxiety because they 
don't know where all of their future meals were going to come from. And 
because they had had uncertainty, they tended to overeat, and if they 
ate out of anxiety--not having full comfort that there would always be 
plenty of food for them there, they might attend a feast or gorge 
themselves in those times--she argued if we would just give everybody 
46 percent more food stamps, people wouldn't have this food anxiety, 
and they would eat less, and we would solve this human obesity problem, 
at least improve it, by providing food stamps for people.
  Now, here I am sitting in the United States Congress, highest level 
in the land or the world, for that matter, and I'm listening to a 
witness begin to tell us why we should expand food stamps. And her 
argument is if we give people more food, they won't be as fat. People 
are fat because they eat out of anxiety, and if we make sure there was 
a mountain of food in front of them, they wouldn't eat out of anxiety 
anymore and apparently they would lose weight and they would be 
slender.
  Now, my response to that takes me back to the statement that I made 
earlier about the manufactured rights that came out of the presentation 
of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Freedom of speech and religion, that's 
fine. The other two of the four, freedom from want and freedom from 
fear, now those are breathtaking principles to lay out in the 1930s. 
But if you listen to Janet Murguia's testimony, her argument is that 
people have a right to have freedom from fear of want. And that fear of 
want causes people to overeat so they get obese, and if we can solve 
that problem and give them their freedom from fear of want, then they 
won't eat as much, they'll be thinner, and they will be healthier.
  This is a bizarre, upside-down, topsy-turvy world that we live in, 
Madam Speaker. And when we think about what freedom is and what liberty 
is, Americans that understand it have an entirely different 
understanding of what liberty is than people in Canada, Great Britain, 
and around the world. Their argument is that whatever is free expands 
freedom.
  So if you have a lot of food stamps and rent subsidies and heat 
subsidies, you'd have a lot of freedom. I suppose you would because you 
wouldn't need to go to work. You would have the freedom to go do 
whatever you want to do, sit around and be a couch potato, or go off to 
play golf or go fishing every day.
  But that's not what we're talking about. Not the freedom to be 
irresponsible or not to take responsibility for yourself. We're talking 
the liberties that come with this Constitution, that liberties that 
allow us the right to speak freely, to worship as we please, to 
peaceably assemble, and redress our grievances, the right to keep and 
bear arms, the right to keep property. However, the Kelo decision 
altered the Constitution itself. The right to face your accuser, to 
have a jury trial. The list goes on and on. Free from cruel and unusual 
punishment. Those are liberties that we have. They are delineated in 
Constitution. These are laws that come down from God. But He didn't 
ever promise us that we wouldn't have fear from want because there is 
something intrinsic in human nature that says that we have got to get 
out there and strive and struggle.
  But this Democrat health care bill is about expanding the dependency 
class in America. If they can expand the dependency class--they're the 
representatives of the dependency class; we're the representatives of 
the liberty class. We're the people that want to work, that want to 
expand families. We want to provide for and encourage more personal 
responsibility. We want to see that spark of vitality come out of every 
human being. And we want that to join together. And we know that our 
job is to find ways that we can to lay the groundwork and help nurture 
so that the average annual productivity of the American goes up. If it 
does, so does our quality of life--at least in terms relative to the 
rest of the world it does. We have got to have a moral foundation to do 
that. And it requires individual responsibility, not growing the 
dependency class.
  If you take people and they're on a safety net already, a safety net 
that has been cranked up to where we are a welfare State today--some 71 
different welfare programs--and this safety net that was designed to 
keep people from falling through and freezing to death or starving to 
death now has been cranked up to the point where the safety net has 
become a hammock, Madam Speaker, and the more comfortable that former 
safety net, now a hammock, is, the less incentive there is for people 
to take care of themselves. They lose their incentive.
  And so they lose their will to try, they lose their will to be 
creative. They lose their ingenuity. And they don't think they have to 
put themselves out to the point their parents did or their grandparents 
did.
  I look at the people that settled the part of the country that I live 
in. Those ancestors in about 1875 came out there and stuck a stake in 
the ground out in the prairie and claimed a homestead of 160 acres. And 
a lot of them came out in covered wagons. And if they had a good day 
traveling, they would walk behind the oxen 10 miles a day on a good 
day. Some days they didn't move at all because it was muddy, they were 
bogged down, something went wrong, they broke an axle or wheel or 
whatever it was. Ten miles a day on a good day to get out on the 
prairie to drive a stake in the ground and say, This is my 160 acres, 
and if I build a home on it and I take care of it and I farm it and 
make it productive--under the Homestead Act they could keep it. That's 
the American dream.
  They went out there to live free or die out there on that prairie, 
and they had to raise their food and they had to protect themselves 
from the elements and from hostiles. And that independent spirit is the 
thread of the Americans that we are today.
  We didn't ever think about capitulating. We didn't think about giving 
up. We never thought the winters were too tough or the days too long or 
the work was too hard or too hot or too sweaty or too dusty or snowy or 
rainy. We did what we had to do because we were driven to succeed, we 
were driven to achieve the American dream. And by the way, there wasn't 
a fallback position. That fallback position would have been freeze to 
death, starve to death, let the hostiles take over you. Any number of 
things could happen.
  Well, that American spirit is what has brought about the thriving of 
the American people and our tenacity globally. If you look at where we 
are economically, American business has gone around the globe. We set 
the standard. We set the pace in patents and in trademarks and 
creativity and in productivity. We set the pace from a military-
security standpoint. We set the pace from a cultural standpoint. We set 
the pace from a religious standpoint.
  All of these things that I am talking about here are undermined by 
people on this side of the aisle and undermined by a socialized 
medicine bill

[[Page 3587]]

that the Senate could not pass today, the House would not approve of, 
that diminishes us and expands our dependency so that it can expand the 
political class that supports and votes for them.
  This is a cynical political move, and if it was about policy, Madam 
Speaker, then one of them, just one of them--and I have a question I 
want to project to the gentleman from Texas here in a moment--but if it 
was about policy, then the President of the United States, the Speaker 
of the House, Harry Reid of the Senate, or someone out of all of these 
Democrats over here would have pointed to a country in the world that 
has a better health care system than the United States and said, Let's 
emulate that.

                              {time}  2210

  Well, whom shall we emulate? China? Russia? Cuba? Canada? Great 
Britain? Germany? I think all of us would reject all of those 
proposals. If there is a country out there that does it better, I would 
like to know, and we will take a look at that. I pose that question as 
more than a rhetorical question, but a real question of substance that 
has been unanswered. And I would yield to the gentleman from Texas 
wherever he would like to take that.
  Mr. GOHMERT. And I certainly appreciate the question, because we just 
happen to have a chart here. And this is a chart, as it says, 
government-run care means lower survival rates for cancer. Now, we have 
been told by friends across the aisle, well, but if you look at England 
or you look at other countries, you find that they have a longer life 
expectancy than we do in America. Well, not if you're looking at cancer 
survival rates. If you compare apples to apples, you find out, as my 
friend from Iowa said, there is no better health care anywhere in the 
world when you want a good, the best survival rate, whether it's 
cancer, heart disease or whatever.
  Now, the place where the statistics get skewed is our life expectancy 
in the United States has added in and this is terribly unfortunate, a 
higher murder rate than some of those countries have. And one other 
thing that really skews the figures in the United States is that when a 
baby is born, it doesn't matter if that baby is 20 weeks premature, 10 
weeks, 8 to 10 weeks, like my wife's and my first child, if that child 
is born alive and subsequently dies, even if it's an hour later, that 
counts in our statistics because in America the majority still feels 
that every life counts.
  Well, in many of the countries that they try to compare us with with 
our life expectancy, if a baby is born prematurely and dies, they don't 
count that. We count it here. And when you have a child that dies 
within an hour or 2 hours, it dramatically brings down the life 
expectancy. But it's one of the things I love about America. We care 
about lives here in America. And so you look at this chart, if you 
could choose a country to go to if you got cancer, well, you could go, 
this green here is England, but that is not the greatest survival rate.
  My goodness, look at prostate cancer, 50.9 percent survival rate. 
That's not so good. In the United States, we have a 91.9 percent. That 
is phenomenal, up 41 percent. That means in the United States, if you 
get prostate cancer, for every two people that get prostate cancer in 
the United States, most of the time, both of them are going to live. 
However in England, you have two people that get prostate cancer, one 
of them will die. And it's so unnecessary because they have access to 
the same types of health care we do.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Just as I look at the statistics here, and I see 
the 91 percent of survival rate of prostate cancer in America, that 
means out of 10 patients, nine will live. I look at the ratio in the 
United Kingdom, 50 percent. That means out of two patients, one of them 
will die. One out of 10 will die in America, one out of two will die in 
England. That is the comparison in the results of this health care.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Why would you want to go to any other country? So who 
could blame the Newfoundland prime minister when he had a heart 
problem, for saying, I love you, Canada, you're my country, I love you 
and I am totally devoted, but I am flying to the United States for my 
heart surgery, which he did. He is a smart man, obviously.
  But you look at breast cancer, and I've been shown statistics that 
are not on here. For example, in breast cancer, if a tumor is found 
localized in a breast, then we have a 98 percent survival rate, 98 
percent survival rate, if a cancerous tumor is found localized in the 
breast. In England, it's about 20 percent less than that. In other 
words, even though both countries have wonderful technology, when you 
have a government-run program, you have to put people on lists.
  And the President is right. He is not being disingenuous when he says 
we are not going to deny coverage. For the most part, that is right. 
What you do is you put them on lists so that they die before they get 
what they need. And I was talking to a really sweet secretary in Tyler, 
Texas, my hometown, and she has emigrated from England. And she told me 
that her mother got cancer in England and died of that cancer because 
she was in England. Each step of the way, finding the tumor, having 
surgery, having therapy, all the things that you have, chemo, all those 
things, you get on a list. She said, my mother was found to have 
cancer, and she died because she lived in England. After I emigrated to 
the United States, I was found to have cancer, and she said I'm alive 
because I was in the United States instead of England. She said, 
because I didn't go on a list.
  And this is not some wealthy person. This is a middle class secretary 
with a lot of class. And she knows just how good we have it here. And 
so you've got all men's cancer: 66.3 percent survival rate here; in 
England, 44.8 percent; 53 percent in Canada. That's a lot of people. We 
heard our friend from Florida come down and rant and rave about people 
and you're killing folks in our district. But all I can see when I look 
at these cancer survival rates and death rates is when you want us to 
go to a government-run health care--I know it's not intentional, I know 
it's not intentional--but the fact is you will cause people to die 
unnecessarily.
  There is no reason to have this kind of drop in prostate cancer 
success, but that's what we have. And it's so unnecessary.
  You've got all women's cancer, 62.9; 55.8 in England. There's not 
quite as big a discrepancy, but if you're one of the 9 percent or 7 
percent in these different categories or even 41 percent that are going 
to die because you don't live in the United States, then you probably 
think the United States is the place to be for health care. You take 
out the murder statistics and you make all countries deal with their 
statistics of premature babies who die after they're born, then you 
would find the United States at the top of the charts on life 
expectancy.
  So I appreciate the gentleman yielding on that particular issue.

                              {time}  2220

  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, and so we have seen what the 
data is on survival rates for cancer in the United States versus Canada 
and Great Britain and one other country.
  There is another point that has been made, I say it has been made 
consistently by the President of the United States, it has been made by 
the Speaker of the House, and that is this point that there is nothing 
in any bill that is likely to pass the House or the Senate that could 
become law that doesn't fund abortion or illegals. This is where the 
argument came in. Madam Speaker, it is a Joe Wilson argument.
  Well, I will deal first with the issue of illegals. The House version 
of the bill is looser than the Senate version of the bill. But when the 
President says we are not going to fund illegals, he is not right on 
that. The Senate version is a little tighter. But if you go to the 
language in the Senate bill, it says essentially that it lowers the 
standards.
  We had a standard that existed under the Medicaid standards, which is 
pretty close to the gold standard as far as the Federal Government is 
concerned, that if an individual were going to sign up for Medicaid, 
that they would have to prove their citizenship by providing a

[[Page 3588]]

birth certificate and a couple of supporting documents or a series of 
naturalization papers that would allow people to sign up and receive 
Medicaid benefits.
  But when this House, under the leadership of Speaker Pelosi, changed 
the language under SCHIP, the State Children's Health Insurance 
Program, which I called socialized Clinton-style HillaryCare for 
illegals and their parents, when they changed that, they lowered the 
standard, and the standard then for Medicaid and the standard for SCHIP 
became the same, and that is the standard that exists in the Senate 
language of the bill. Even though it says we are not going to fund 
illegals, the proof is simply a requirement that they introduce and 
offer, let me say, attest to a nine-digit Social Security number.
  Well, if you have people that are adept at gaming the system, they 
are not likely to be so intimidated that they would not be able to 
produce a nine-digit Social Security number. It is unlikely that it 
will be checked. The standards to require that are a little tighter in 
the Senate version than they are in the House version, but the 
Congressional Budget Office, when one examines their calculations, it 
produces this number:
  Under the Senate language, 6.1 million illegals could access health 
care benefits, health insurance benefits under the Senate version of 
the bill which presumably, if you listen to the Speaker of the House, 
the House is ready to pass. 6.1 million illegals. And yet, the Speaker 
and the President say we are not going to fund illegals because they 
say in the bill they are not going to fund illegals. But you have to 
look at the standards.
  This is akin to the no earmarks edict that was delivered to this 
House at the beginning of the 110th Congress the first year of the 
Pelosi Speakership when the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, 
David Obey, brought a big appropriations bill to the floor. And when he 
was challenged for all the earmarks that were in it, even though they 
had pledged they were not going to provide earmarks--this is the Pelosi 
Speakership--David Obey said, There are not earmarks in this bill. But 
when pointed out to him that there were hundreds of earmarks in the 
bill, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee then went to the 
first page of the bill, I believe it was the second paragraph, and he 
read verbatim from the bill--generally speaking, not verbatim from me--
is this: There are no earmarks in the bill by definition; therefore, 
this bill doesn't have earmarks.
  Can you actually write stuff out, the things that we can't believe 
our lying eyes because someone has said by definition it doesn't exist? 
That is what is going on here.
  They will argue by definition they don't want to fund illegals, but 
the result is 6.1 million illegals taking advantage of the Senate 
version of the bill by the calculations of the nonpartisan 
Congressional Budget Office. The House version funds illegals. The 
Senate version funds illegals. And the House version, I know a little 
better, it funds them in a myriad of ways.
  Also, the Senate version funds abortion with American people's tax 
dollars. That is something also that the President says they are not 
doing. That is something that the Speaker of the House says they are 
not doing. And I haven't actually heard Majority Leader Harry Reid say 
one way or the other.
  But there are a couple of ways that this happens. One of them is in 
this chart right here. And so, Madam Speaker, it goes like this:
  When you have Americans that have to fund into these three different 
systems, pay taxes, or enroll in an exchange plan, or enroll in an 
exchange plan that covers abortions, some of them will be enrolled in 
an exchange plan that covers abortions unintentionally because their 
employer will offer that. And they will sign up and they won't ask the 
question, and they won't know that their premium is going to fund 
abortion. But in any case, they will enroll in the red version here 
that funds abortions.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Would the gentleman yield?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I would yield.
  Mr. GOHMERT. If you look at page 122, the exact point is made that 
you are making. It says that there is at least one such health care 
plan that provides coverage of services described in clauses i and ii 
of subparagraph (b).
  You look at subparagraph (b)(i), and it says: The services described 
in this clause are abortions for which the expenditure of Federal funds 
appropriated for the Department of Health and Human Services is not 
permitted based on the laws in effect at the date that is six months 
before the beginning of the plan year.
  So this has actually misled people into thinking, oh, there is a 
provision here that prevents you from using money----
  I am sorry. We were told we had 6 minutes, and we have used 4. Okay.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. In that case, I take the gentleman's point and I 
think it has been driven home effectively by this chart and the 
language that we know.
  Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence. And if I called you Madam 
Speaker, I apologize. I didn't have a rearview mirror. And I yield back 
the balance of my time.

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