[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 11049]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   READ THE BILLS AND COMPARE THE TWO

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Texas (Mr. Al Green) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. AL GREEN of Texas. Mr. Speaker, this message is only for persons 
who may get sick. If you will never get sick, this message is not for 
you, N-O-T, not for you. Only for those who will get sick.
  Mr. Speaker, I hold in my left hand a copy of the Affordable Care 
Act. I hold in my right hand the replacement bill that my colleagues 
across the aisle have been talking about.
  This bill has passed the Congress of the United States of America. It 
is more than 2,000 pages. It was condemned for being too long, which 
may explain the size of this bill. This bill has within it preventive 
care. This bill has within it a cap on administrative costs. You must 
spend 80 to 85 percent of the money that insurance companies collect on 
health care. This bill protects persons who are under 26 years of age, 
as they can stay on their parents' insurance. This bill covers persons 
with preexisting conditions.
  I had to read this bill. My constituents insisted that I read this 
bill before voting on it.
  And my constituents want me to read this bill. This is the 
replacement bill, and they want me to be sure that I understand the 
replacement bill before I vote to repeal.
  So what I'd like to do now, for all within the sound of my voice and 
who are viewing this, I want to read the replacement bill. I shall read 
the replacement bill. Let me just read half of it first. I shall now 
read one-half of the replacement bill. Now, I shall read the other half 
of the replacement bill.
  Now, some of you will say, Al, you read too fast; I didn't pick up 
all of that. So, for those who listen slowly, or those who may have 
missed it, I shall now read the replacement bill in its entirety. 
That's the replacement bill.
  Here is the bill that we can read. I'm going to ask that I be allowed 
to place the replacement bill in the Record.
  Mr. Speaker, I ask that persons consider the empirical evidence as 
well as the invisible evidence. When you weigh the empirical evidence 
against the invisible evidence, you decide whether we should vote to 
repeal.
  Now, there may be some who contend, well, Al, really, I'd just like 
to go back to the way things were. Let's quickly go back to the way 
things were. Gladys Knight had a song titled, ``The Way We Were.''
  Here is the way we were in 2009. In 2009, when we were considering 
replacement, we were spending $2.5 trillion a year on health care. 
That's a big number. Hard to get your mind around it. That's $79,000 a 
second. It was, at that time, 17.6 percent of the GDP.
  We were spending $100 billion a year on persons who were uninsured. 
It was projected that by 2018 we'd spend $4.4 trillion, which would 
have been 20.3 percent of GDP, which is $139,000 a second.
  In my State of Texas we had 6 million people who were uninsured. In 
Harris County, where I have my congressional district, we had 1.1 
million people who were uninsured. Twenty percent of the State's 
children were uninsured. Fifty million Americans were uninsured. 45,000 
persons per year were dying because of a lack of insurance. That's one 
person every 12 minutes.
  And if you don't like that, call Harvard. I got the statistics from 
Harvard.
  The system was not sustainable. This is why we embarked upon 
producing this bill.
  So I beg that those who insisted that I read this bill before voting, 
please understand that before you vote, you ought to read this bill and 
compare the two.

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