[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 16876-16880]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2013, the gentleman from California (Mr. Garamendi) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, 435 Members of the House of 
Representatives spent the last 10 days back in their districts. I 
suspect, like me, they had a chance to meet with their constituents to 
talk about the issues of the day and to see America's real

[[Page 16877]]

progress, the progress that is taking place in our communities.
  I would like to share some of those experiences that I had over the 
last 10 days with the Members of this House because they are 
instructive about what we ought to be doing here in the House of 
Representatives.
  Every person I talk to, probably more than 30 meetings, many of them 
public in nature, townhall meetings, meetings at manufacturing plants 
with the workers, meetings at the universities, all of those people had 
the same agenda. Frankly, it ought to be our agenda because it is 
America's agenda.
  They want this economy to grow. They want this economy to provide the 
job opportunities that Americans must have. Those good hardworking 
American families, they want to go to work, they want to have a decent 
wage, and they want to be certain that when they are sick they have an 
affordable health care policy.
  We hear a lot of rhetoric here about the Affordable Care Act and 
ObamaCare, but back home people are trying to figure out their 
insurance programs, just like they do every time at this time of year. 
Every year it is time to renew your insurance policy and people look at 
new policies. They put aside the old policy. They get a notice that 
their old policy, the cost has gone up or the coverage has changed.
  Now they are in the same situation, but we have a name for it now. We 
call it ObamaCare. Americans always in the fall have a high level of 
confusion as they try to figure out what to do with their health care 
for the coming year.
  At one meeting I attended this last week with a group of doctors and 
administrators, they said: This will work it out, this is no different 
than we have seen every year. We know that at the end of this process 
the health care insurance will go on and people will have coverage. 
Then they added: But this year, there will be far more people with 
health care coverage, and in our hospital there will not be as much 
uncompensated care, that is, people that don't have insurance. So they 
said: Just keep working at it, let this thing settle down, let it go 
forward because we know that in California millions of our citizens and 
our neighbors will finally have health care insurance.
  But hey, this is a place of rhetoric, this is a place where we create 
problems like the new crisis that is going to come up in just 2\1/2\ 
months. Oh yeah, we have manufactured yet another crisis. On January 
15, we are going to have to go through our quarterly funding of the 
strongest government in the entire world. Hello, you said. You mean you 
are actually funding the United States Government once every 3 months? 
You don't have a full year funding? That's right, we don't. So we have 
yet one more manufactured crisis.
  Be aware, January 15 is coming. Is there another government shutdown? 
The American people, my constituents in my district, said: Don't let it 
happen again, don't let it happen again. It hurt us, it hurt us. In our 
businesses, we had to lay off people. But Mr. Congressman, what we want 
is a steady, steady policy out of Washington. We want to know what the 
long-term looks like. We want to know what the long-term tax policy is. 
We want to know what the funding programs are going to be for the 
military, for the social welfare programs. We don't want to have to--as 
one constituent told me as I visited their Head Start program--we don't 
want to have to lay people off, we don't want to have to tell the 
children, the 600 in my district that are no longer in the Head Start 
program: Oh, I am sorry, you can't come to school next week because 
funding from Washington was cut.

                              {time}  1930

  It is time for us in the House of Representatives to settle down. It 
is time for us to put aside all of our rhetoric. We know we have to 
work together. It is time for us to come up with some long-term 
solutions for America's problems. Tonight I would like to talk about 
how we can build jobs here in the United States, how we can rebuild the 
manufacturing sector of the United States economy, a sector of the 
economy that just 15 years ago employed just under 20 million Americans 
with solid jobs, where the wife or the husband could go to work each 
day knowing that they would bring home a paycheck sufficient to pay the 
mortgage on the house, to buy a car, and they had a health insurance 
policy provided by their employer. Now, we are somewhere near 11 
million Americans in manufacturing, and many of those health insurance 
programs have disappeared.
  What we need to do is go back to the basics. We need to go back to 
those critical investments, both public and private, that have created 
this incredible economy. Even though manufacturing is smaller, 
nonetheless the economy of the United States remains the biggest in the 
world. But if we continue with this 3-month funding of the Federal 
Government, if we continue to withdraw the critical public investments 
and the critical inducements to the private sector to make their 
investments, we will see our economy slip away. We will see the 
strength of this Nation ebb, and we will wonder down the line what 
happened.
  Well, there are several things that allow America to build these 
kinds of things. That's a modern locomotive, an electric locomotive 
destined to be on the Amtrak lines here on the east coast. It was the 
first modern locomotive made in America, 100 percent American made in 
probably the last 60-70 years. How did it come to pass that this 
locomotive and about 77 other locomotives just like it will be on the 
tracks here on the east coast, 100 percent American made? How did that 
happen?
  Well, it happened with government policy. And so the men and women 
and children who ride the trains here on the eastern corridor are going 
to have a new system available to them. Critical investments were made 
over the years, critical investments in each one of these issues, and 
these are the ways in each of these areas, in international trade, in 
tax policy, in energy policy, labor relations issues, education, 
research, and infrastructure. Oh, by the way, none of this is new. 
These are not new things. These have been in place in America since 
George Washington's time. Indeed, George Washington reached out to 
Alexander Hamilton shortly after he was inaugurated as the first 
President of the United States, and said, Hey, Alex, I need some help 
here. I want to build the American economy, Alex, so what can we do?
  Well, Alexander Hamilton said, Let me work on it.
  He came back about 2 months later with a report. Our reports are 
usually 2,000 or 3,000 pages. His was maybe less than 50. He said there 
are things that we can do at the Federal level to grow the American 
economy, to build the manufacturing sector of America. He called it 
manufacturers, and he said trade policy. We need a trade policy that 
protects American manufacturers against cheap imports coming into the 
United States, against those who would subsidize their businesses to 
the detriment of American businesses. He said trade policy. We need a 
trade policy that protects American manufacturing.
  That was Alexander Hamilton in his report to George Washington in the 
first months of the first administration of the United States 
Government.
  Tax policy was also there. He said that in tax policy we shouldn't be 
taxing ours, our manufacturing products. We should be taxing those 
products that are coming from overseas. Those are called duties, and so 
tax policy was part of it.
  Actually, energy policy wasn't on the list at the time so we can kind 
of put that aside, although that is an extremely important discussion 
for today; but for the purposes of today, we will let that go.
  Labor at the time was not such a good thing. There were no laws 
protecting the men and women who worked, and certainly there was 
slavery and all the horrible things that went with that; but labor 
policy was also not part of what he talked about.
  But he did talk about education. This was probably a conversation 
that I'm not sure Hamilton and Jefferson had, but education was very 
much a part of the early effort in the American Government to stimulate 
economic growth, manufacturing and the like.

[[Page 16878]]

  Interestingly, research wasn't specifically called out; but while 
they didn't use the term ``research,'' they used the word ``patent,'' 
``patents,'' and ``patent policy'' which was also part of this report. 
While they didn't say ``research'' formally, what they did say was out 
of the innovative and inventive mind of Americans would come new ideas 
and there needed to be a patent policy to allow those new ideas to 
mature and inure to the benefit of the inventor and the entrepreneur.
  So way back at the very beginning of this Nation's economic future, 
certain policies were laid in place that actually led to the 
extraordinary growth in infrastructure. Hamilton specifically said, and 
George Washington agreed, that there needed to be a transportation 
policy for the United States. We are calling that infrastructure today. 
Then they called it canals, ports, roads. Today we call it canals, 
ports, roads, airports, we call it Internet, we call it 
telecommunication systems. It is the infrastructure upon which the 
economy then grows.
  Way back in the 1780s, these ideas were presented to the Congress of 
the United States, some of them enacted by the Congress, some of them 
enacted by the various State governments. And over the years, as 
generations have gone by, as new men and women have come to sit here in 
the Halls of this great Congress and in the Senate, and new Presidents, 
there has been a constant drumbeat of critical investment by the United 
States Government in the foundation of economic growth.
  And today, in the debates that are occurring here on the floor of 
this House and across this Nation, there is a debate about the role of 
the Federal Government in the future economy of the United States. You 
just heard part of that debate from some of my colleagues who preceded 
me here on the floor saying that the United States Government really 
ought not be involved in health care too much. Okay, they didn't like 
the Affordable Care Act. They want it to disappear, repealed, defunded 
or otherwise gone. Well, okay. But there is this thing called Medicare. 
I don't hear anybody on the floor saying--well, they actually did call 
for the repeal of Medicare, but that hasn't gone very far.
  But the Federal Government is involved in many, many aspects of 
American life; and in those things that create economic growth, you 
will find us now involved soon in a debate about trade policy. Should 
we have unlimited free trade in which the American businesses are open 
to unfair competition from around the world, from workers that are paid 
virtually nothing in some of the less developed countries of the world 
where there are no laws about working conditions, where factories 
collapse? Should American businesses have to compete with that kind of 
competition? I think not. So I would use the words ``fair trade,'' not 
free trade, but fair trade--trade policies that are fair to the 
American worker, that give the American worker a chance to compete in 
the world markets rather than having our business simply run away 
chasing the cheapest wage rate in the world.
  So trade policy is going to be discussed here with the Trans-Pacific 
partnership program and perhaps a similar one for Europe. We must be 
very careful, very, very careful as we analyze this that the American 
worker is not put in a disadvantageous position and situation where 
they will lose their job to competition, unfair competition from around 
the world. So it has to be fair trade.
  Let me move down here to the infrastructure issue. My district is 200 
miles of the Sacramento River Valley. I probably have 1,000 miles of 
levees that protect farms and ranches and cities from floods. We have 
had disastrous floods in California over the years and over the 
centuries. Those levees are critical, a critical infrastructure to 
protect not only human life and property, but to allow businesses to 
grow. Right now without proper levees, farmers who want to put in a 
feed mill, farmers in my district who grow rice who want to put in a 
rice drying facility and a silo in which to store that rice, or even a 
cow barn for their dairy, find it difficult and in many cases 
impossible because the levee that holds back the floodwaters from their 
farm does not meet the 100-year flood standard set by the Corps of 
Engineers and FEMA. Therefore, they can't build unless they get 
insurance, and the insurance program is unaffordable.
  So we see right here that the growth in the agricultural sector in my 
district is retarded from lack of investment in the levees, upgrading 
and maintaining those levees so they meet the minimum standards. This 
is something the Federal Government has played a role in forever, it 
seems. Certainly for the last century and a half, the Federal 
Government has been involved through the Army Corps of Engineers in 
building levees to protect cities, whether it is on the Ohio River, the 
Mississippi, the Missouri, or in California, the Sacramento and the San 
Joaquin Rivers in that central valley and beyond.
  So what are we doing today? Well, we passed a Water Resources 
Development Act a couple of weeks ago. Good for us. The Senate has 
passed their bill. We need a conference committee. I understand the 
Senate has named conferees. The House of Representatives has yet to do 
so. All of that is good. We will set out a good policy, I hope, one 
that sets proper controls, provides for prioritization, a policy that 
would make sure that there is no waste, fraud and abuse, and that 
efficient and effective policies are the ones that would be funded by 
the American taxpayer. All good. But there is a problem. The problem 
is, where is the money to pay for this? It is not there. Why? 
Sequestration and severe budget cuts.
  We are actually seeing a very rapid decline in the amount of money 
that is available for infrastructure investment and for other programs 
that the Federal Government has carried out over many, many decades.
  So we can put the best policies in place; but unless we have the 
money to build these structures, then those farmers that want to 
improve their operation are not going to be able to do so. So we ought 
to think seriously about infrastructure investment, in this case 
protection for floods. The same thing goes for the cities in my 
district and across this Nation. We know there is a big brouhaha going 
on around here about the increasing cost of flood insurance. Yes, it is 
a real problem: like quadruple, in some cases there is a ten-fold, 
increase in the cost of flood insurance in certain communities around 
the Nation. Everybody goes, We didn't mean to do that. Indeed, we 
didn't mean to do that; but it did happen. Now we have to back that 
off. As we back that off, we need to consider the fact that it is not 
just flood insurance; it is the protection from floods.
  And so when Superstorm Sandy comes again, will the east coast be 
prepared with the necessary flood walls and facilities to repel the 
flood? Only if we adequately finance the infrastructure investment in 
this case for flood protection.
  Highways and bridges, well, I don't know, there is probably several 
thousand bridges in the United States that you want to cross very 
quickly, or you don't want to be on that bridge with a very heavy 
truck. We have deficient bridges in every part of the United States. We 
have seen those bridges collapse with catastrophic results, people 
losing their lives, cars into the rivers, trucks into the rivers. These 
bridges have to be repaired. And drive on any highway in the United 
States, you will see some new asphalt, some new concrete, but you are 
going to see a whole lot more new potholes. You are going to see the 
deterioration of the highway system in the United States. There is 
insufficient money even to maintain the repair and good state of those 
highways. It goes on and on.

                              {time}  1945

  Where will we find the revenue? We are continuing to see a decline in 
the willingness of the Federal Government, us, Members of Congress, to 
fund these programs.
  Infrastructure, critically important in many ways, and I have only 
dealt with two of those issues here tonight.
  I want to pick up the one that is really the genesis of economic 
growth, and

[[Page 16879]]

it is research. I mentioned earlier that George Washington, while he 
didn't use the word ``research,'' used the word ``patent,'' which comes 
from research being done by some individual or group that created a new 
product. They got their patent on it so that they could then use that 
in the commercial marketplace and hopefully make a profit.
  Research has been around a long time. Most of the research in the 
early days was probably mostly in the area of the military, done in 
part by the military, dating way back, in trying to upgrade their 
weapons. But beginning in the 1860s, Abraham Lincoln signed a law 
called the land-grant college program and established, across the 
United States, a series of colleges and universities who had a specific 
function of researching for agriculture.
  Over the years, that has grown into an extraordinary research 
capability within the United States. And now, not only do we have the 
agricultural research--and I must say, with some pride, that I 
represent the University of California, Davis, which is the largest, 
most successful, most advanced in total--I am not putting down anybody 
else--agricultural research program in the world. There are a lot of 
other great programs out there, but in terms of size and reach, the 
University of California, Davis is way out front.
  What other kinds of research are there funded by the United States 
Government? The National Institutes of Health. How do we keep people 
healthy? What about disease? What about heart conditions, cancer? The 
National Institutes of Health; the National Science Foundation; NOAA, 
dealing with oceans and atmosphere; NASA, dealing with space. All of 
these research projects are fundamental to economic growth, and all of 
them have Federal funding. Some of them have partnerships with State, 
some with private funding, but these partnerships have created the 
foundation for economic growth.
  I had the pleasure of being at the University of California, Davis 
earlier this last week, meeting with the heads of four departments, 
each of them engaged in a different kind of research--earth science 
research in some cases, water research in others. Everybody knows that 
California has its water issues, and right now we are in the early 
stages of what I hope and pray is not a drought.
  We have these researchers out there and other research on health 
issues. All of them are saying that the sequestration and the budget 
cuts of the Federal Government are severely impacting critical research 
that was about to mature into a solution for a health problem, into a 
new way of conserving water or a new energy system using hydrogen or 
solar. But those projects that they were working on have been stalled 
and, in some cases, set aside, so the opportunity for economic growth 
coming from that research is slowed or stopped. We can't allow that to 
happen. Not only is it immediate jobs, but that is the research that 
will create future jobs.
  I want to give one example of the way in which research actually 
works out together with regulations, regulations to protect our air, 
regulations to protect our water--the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water 
Act, and other regulations. Some of them are now dealing with the issue 
of climate change.
  I am a member of the Safe Climate Caucus, and there are many of us 
that belong to this caucus. We are trying to say we have got global 
warming. Whether the tragic typhoon in the Philippines was directly 
caused by global warming--I think it is no accident that we are seeing 
stronger storms just as predicted. Anyway, our Safe Climate Caucus is 
concerned that many here in Congress are trying to shut down 
commonsense Environmental Protection Agency guidelines that are 
designed to keep our air and our water clean and healthy and to reduce 
the disastrous consequences of climate change.
  These regulations can actually drive technological development and 
they can strengthen our economy. When those policies are paired with 
the entrepreneurship, the inventiveness of the individuals and 
businesses out there, some really interesting things happen and jobs 
are created.
  Last week I visited one such program in California. It is a program 
put together by Recology, which is a company that operates in my 
district and in San Francisco. They are a recycling, a composting, and 
a landfill company, and they have a landfill. They are involved in some 
very interesting and innovative ways to separate the waste, to recycle, 
all to the good.
  But they have another project. They have teamed up with a company 
called G2 Energy. It has put in place a facility to take the methane 
gas that comes off of the landfill that at one point went up in the 
atmosphere--do keep in mind that methane gas is around a 20 times more 
potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. They put in a project to 
capture that methane gas, take it out of the landfill, put it in a pipe 
with a vacuum, run it over to a Caterpillar engine manufactured in 
America--actually, it is a big marine engine that probably was driving 
some very large ship, but it now is sitting there next to the landfill, 
attached to a generator, and producing an extraordinary amount of 
electricity.
  That is innovation, and that is the kind of things that can be done. 
That methane coming off the landfill into the Caterpillar engine and 
into the generator will replace more than a million gallons of diesel 
fuel that was once used to run that very same kind of an engine. That 
is the kind of innovation that can occur when coupled with research and 
wise public policy.
  There are so many other pieces to all of this, and we will talk about 
it in the days ahead.
  One of the things that I want to just kind wind up with is why it is 
important. So, do keep in mind trade policy, tax policy, energy, labor 
policy, education, research, and infrastructure. These are the 
foundational investments that any economy must make if they want to see 
sustained economic growth. Unfortunately, we are falling off the power 
curve on many of these policies.
  Here is why it is important. Here is why this discussion is 
important. Here is why manufacturing and growth in the American economy 
is important. These are words that Franklin Delano Roosevelt put 
forward. He said:

       The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the 
     abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide 
     enough for those who have too little.

  We know that after the great meltdown in 2008 and 2009 that millions 
of Americans lost their jobs. We also know that, in the last 5 years, 
the economy has come back, that additional wealth has been created. We 
do know that the gross national product of the United States, which is 
its wealth, has grown. What most people don't know is where that wealth 
went. That wealth went to the top 10 percent. About 95 percent of the 
wealth generated over the last 5 years has wound up in the hands of the 
top 10 percent, the most wealthy people in America.
  So the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt come directly back to a 
manufacturing and jobs policy for the United States. If we make the 
critical investments to grow the economy, to provide the 
infrastructure, to do the research, to deal with the international 
trade, to think back to what George Washington had in mind as a 
Founding Father, then we can begin to establish policies that grow the 
American economy, that reestablish America as the mightiest 
manufacturing country in the world, and, in so doing, create those jobs 
for hardworking Americans that go to work every day, want to pay their 
bills, want to pay their house mortgage, buy the car, see that their 
kids get an education, see that they have an adequate health insurance 
program. If we do those things, then these words of Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt will begin to ring true, and we will begin to add enough for 
those who, today, have too little. That should be our challenge.
  It is not our place to make sure that the superwealthy and the 
billionaires and others get even more. It is our place that those who 
struggle every day, many in poverty--and the poverty rate in California 
is 25 percent or more--that those who struggle every

[[Page 16880]]

day to provide for their family, that they have a chance of a good 
education, an opportunity to get that job, that middle class job. If 
they have that, then this country will prosper and the kinds of 
divisions that sometimes rake us over the coals and cause us great 
consternation and trouble will be abated. They will never disappear--I 
have no illusions--but they will be abated, and they will be less. That 
should be our goal.
  As we approach the next fiscal crisis, just 2 months away, we should 
think about those men and women out there that I saw--and I suspect 
many of my colleagues saw as they returned home and went to their 
districts and went to all their meetings--who said: Can you just give 
us certainty? Can you stop the interminable fighting and the chaos that 
is causing us such concern, that is causing me not to invest in my 
business? Just give us certainty. Give us a program that builds a 
foundation so that my business can grow and prosper. Give us the tax 
policy that has the proper incentives, not just for those who have 
great wealth, but for those who are trying to grow their business. Give 
us a trade policy that is fairer to the American worker, fairer to the 
American business, that doesn't just give away this great country's 
wealth to some other company around the world, that doesn't encourage 
our businesses, our American corporations to go offshore. Put those 
policies in place so that we can grow the American economy, so that 
Americans can have a decent job and fulfill their own personal vision 
of the American Dream. They can get on that ladder, leading wherever 
they want it to lead, climb as high as they can, that the impairments 
and the impediments are not there. That should be our goal.
  We have about 2 months to avoid yet one other crisis. As we avoid it, 
I hope we keep in mind those things that create real wealth and real 
opportunity for all Americans.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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