[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 11145-11146]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               HEALTHCARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN of Tennessee. Mr. Speaker, yesterday, I received this 
message from a very respected businessman in Knoxville, Randy Greaves.
  He wrote:

       I just received a letter from Humana stating that they are 
     leaving the State of Tennessee next year.
       This leaves no one to write individual health policies in 
     the State. Aetna only writes group policies, and they may 
     withdraw, as well. Please let anyone with a vote know that 
     families are being failed miserably, as you already know.
       The insurance that Humana wrote for my family, in 2017, 
     required that we pay the first $37,000 between premiums and 
     the deductible before insurance would contribute only 50 
     percent.
       It was basically worthless, and now they won't even make 
     that lousy policy available because people on subsidies, 
     mostly with no personal accountability for their own health, 
     cost a fortune to the rest of us.

  ObamaCare may have helped 20 million people, but it has hurt 200 
million people in the process.
  About a month ago, The Irish Times, the largest newspaper in Ireland, 
reported that they had over 660,000 people on waiting lists for 
healthcare. That is in a country of less than 5 million people. If you 
multiply that times 60 or 65, you have got the United States.
  Medicare, when it started, when it was first passed, there was a CBO 
prediction that it would cost $9 billion after 25 years. Instead, it 
cost 12 times that after the first 25 years, and now it costs six times 
more than that, or about 70 times more than the original estimates.
  California, as liberal and leftwing as that State is, a few days ago, 
I read that they tried to pass a healthcare, or medical care for 
everyone, bill. They had to withdraw the bill because they found out 
that it would cost $400 billion for the first year. If you multiply 
that times 10 or 11, you are talking about the whole United States. We 
are having trouble affording the Medicare that we have now for 14 
percent of the population, so Medicare for everyone is not going to 
work in this country.
  We took what was a very minor problem, for very few people in the 
mid-sixties, and turned it into a major problem for everyone so that 
now only Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, and people like that, 
multibillionaires, can afford healthcare. And the reason is, is that 
anything the Federal Government subsidizes, the costs just explode 
because you remove the incentives and pressures to hold costs down.
  The American people don't want a Russian or Cuban type of medical 
system in this country. They don't want a totally federally run system, 
like they have in so many countries, with medical care that is not even 
a fraction of what we have.
  We are still under ObamaCare today, and it is not working. These 
insurance companies are pulling out all over the whole country, and The 
Washington Times reported yesterday, or the day before, that, according 
to the Department of Health and Human Services,

[[Page 11146]]

premiums went up 63 percent in Tennessee in 2017 alone.
  Mr. Speaker, this system is not working. We need to move more in the 
direction of a free market medical system if we are ever going to hope 
to bring down healthcare costs for the American people with the kind of 
healthcare that everyone is demanding and wanting and that we want to 
give to them.

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