[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 11384]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             CO-OP DEFAULTS

  (Mr. PITTS asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. PITTS. Mr. Speaker, would you invest in a company if there were a 
40 percent chance that you would lose all of your money? That doesn't 
sound like much of an investment. Most people would call that gambling. 
But that is exactly what the Federal Government is about to do in 
setting up the new ObamaCare health care co-ops.
  The Department of HHS will loan more than $4 billion in the coming 
years as an attempt to set up at least one co-op in each State. They 
project that 40 percent of the loans given out to plan the co-ops will 
go into default. 35 percent of the loans to keep the co-ops solvent are 
also projected to go into default. This could add up to billions of 
dollars lost.
  We raised taxes by more than $1 trillion so that we could burn it 
away on projects with an extremely high rate of failure. When we take 
money away from the private sector and then burn it away on government 
projects, the result is going to be lost jobs and a struggling economy.
  We need jobs, not more failed government programs.

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