[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 11194-11198]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             AMERICA'S DEBT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2017, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend from Indiana (Mr. 
Hollingsworth).


                   Costly and Burdensome Regulations

  Mr. HOLLINGSWORTH. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Arizona for 
yielding to me. I promise to be brief.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise today to talk about something that Hoosiers back 
home are talking to me about every single day, and that is to rise to 
express my support for those struggling against burdensome and costly 
regulations, those costly regulations that are hurting Hoosier 
businesses from being able to get their products to market, from 
ultimately being able to grow their enterprises, and from ultimately 
being able to hire more Hoosiers.
  When Democrats passed the Dodd-Frank Act, they promised a success for 
Main Street. Instead, Dodd-Frank has become a nightmare for businesses 
on Main Street.
  Specifically, while I was back home just a few weeks ago, I met with 
two businesses working hard to do right by their customers and 
employees but confounded by section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act.
  Section 1502 requires businesses to disclose due diligence on the 
source and chain of custody of ``conflict minerals,'' as well as hire a 
third party to honor their due diligence and subsequently submit a 
report to the SEC on those measures. According to its Democratic 
authors, this provision would only affect the biggest of companies, but 
those companies have to bring in all of their suppliers, all of their 
vendors in order to comply, which affects many small businesses across 
Indiana's Ninth District.
  One of those firms is Best Home Furnishings in Paoli. They 
manufacture quality furniture across Indiana, and I was astounded to 
learn the lengths they must go through in order to comply with this 
regulation. They travel far abroad to verify the wood is conflict-free. 
And even after all that time-consuming and very costly travel, they are 
left wondering, despite all of their best efforts, if they are making 
any impact on those areas that are far from their plants, far from 
their customers, and far from their employees.
  Another such example is Key Electronics, a manufacturer that is 
working on electronics in Indiana to get through opioid withdrawals for 
many Hoosiers who are afflicted by this scourge on our communities. It 
is a laudable goal, but they are hamstrung by the thousands and 
thousands of dollars they pay to ensure the customers that they work 
with ultimately get this third-party audit on them and all of their 
vendors. This challenging business with very thin margins is being 
limited in what they can invest in innovative, desperately needed 
therapy for those addicted to opioids.
  For every dollar and every moment that a businessowner has to spend 
complying with this outrageous and unnecessary regulation, those are 
minutes and dollars that are not directed towards job creation, not 
directed towards investing in America's future, and not directed 
towards fulfilling their and, ultimately, their employees' dreams.
  Mr. Speaker, I look forward to working with my colleagues in this 
Congress to bring an end to the excessive job-killing regulations that 
stand between Hoosiers and their entrepreneurial dreams.


              Give Americans Back Their Healthcare System

  Mr. HOLLINGSWORTH. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to talk about how 
regulations and restrictions in healthcare space are preventing new 
innovations from being able to deliver better care to Hoosiers back 
home.
  I recently met with a local business just outside of my district, 
Mainstreet Health Investments, who is working hard to develop new rapid 
recovery centers that are truly better in matching patients' needs with 
services provided.
  For example, when a patient has knee surgery, they only need a 
hospital for a very limited window during their period of acute care. 
They need that hospital for such immediate recovery, but, hours after 
that, they can be transferred to a different recovery center, one that 
better matches their needs as a patient, enabling them to recover much 
more quickly and enabling us all to save significant dollars by 
matching that care with the needs that they have.
  Frankly, I have been amazed at the quality of these rapid recovery 
centers,

[[Page 11195]]

where the patient is truly focused on, in a holistic manner, such that 
they can develop and have physical therapy right there in that 
location. It is innovations just like these rapid recovery centers that 
they are building that will help deliver better cures to more 
Americans.
  This is how we make a healthcare system that is not only more 
affordable, not only more accessible, but also better for patients in 
the long run. I want it to be just as effective, in addition to 
affordable and accessible.
  What stands in the way? What is standing in their way is certainly 
government bureaucracy, a government that is retarding a level of 
innovation, retarding their ability to grow and build more of these 
facilities across the country despite the demonstrated need and the 
demonstrated benefit to those patients.
  So I wanted to talk about those regulations and how they stand in the 
way of Americans and Hoosiers who are trying to get ahead, trying to 
get their companies get ahead, trying to help their fellow employees 
get ahead, and, ultimately, that will, together, help America get 
ahead.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, one of the reasons for taking this 
time--and it was only about 3 weeks ago we actually took the leadership 
hour and we did a series of presentations on what was happening in debt 
and the excessive spending in the Federal Government, what was driving 
it and what was happening with mandatory spending. Then the very next 
morning, CBO issued an update.
  Have you ever had one of those moments in your life where you just 
spent almost an hour on the floor walking through the numbers, and you 
get a document and you start digging into it, and you find out a number 
of the things you presented just 14 hours earlier were wrong? But, 
sadly, they were wrong in the wrong direction, if there is such a way 
to phrase it.
  Think of this: From January's Congressional Budget Office number 
until June's number, the U.S. debt deficit this year, the U.S. deficit 
this year, grew by $134 billion as our projection for the end of the 
year. So, functionally, the deficit for 2017, the fiscal year we are 
in, we will come very close to $700 billion this year.

                              {time}  1900

  It is going to be 693 is the projection. And if anyone saw--I think 
it was yesterday or the day before--Mick Mulvaney over at OMB, was 
projecting, from the White House's calculations, that the deficit this 
year was going to be about $704 billion.
  So we put together this slide next to me just to make it clear how 
much that is, to just sort of understand what is going on and trying to 
put this in perspective.
  Okay. So we are going to use the CBO number because, you know, it is 
the Congressional Budget Office. So $693 billion is going to be 
borrowed for 2017, the year we are in right now.
  Well, think about that. That is $1.89 billion every single day. That 
is $79 million every hour; $1.3 million every minute. And, what, $1,900 
every second? And that is what we are borrowing. So if I take up an 
hour here, you all get to make a decision if my hour here was worth $79 
million of borrowing.
  Why is this sort of devastating in the numbers when you really start 
to dig into this CBO report?
  Well, first let me give you one of the things that bothered me the 
most. This is a big deal when, from January to June, our excessive 
spending and borrowing number actually increases by 25 percent and it 
got almost zero press.
  We are living in a society right now where, if there is a shiny 
object, a tweet, another story, the press, even a lot of the Members of 
this body, run talk about that. And I will make you the argument that 
the greatest systemic threat to this society are these numbers because 
the fact we are going to borrow $134 billion more than we were already 
projecting, it is worse than that.
  If you were to step back 1 year ago, 1 year ago we thought this 
year's deficit was going to be about $450 billion. I mean, it is still 
outrageous. In a year's time that number now is kissing up to $700 
billion this year.
  To understand the scale of that, we are going to actually do some of 
our slides. And the first one we are going to put up is the slide from 
3 weeks ago, and the punch line on it is the numbers are worse than 
this. I just wasn't going to use up a whole bunch of ink and print a 
new one. But this is important to understand.
  So this is where we think we are going. This is what is in the CBO 
report. But do you see actually the blue areas? That is sort of 
spending that is on autopilot. When we say autopilot, it is by formula. 
You reach a certain age, you get certain benefits. You fall below a 
certain income, you get certain benefits. We borrow money, we pay back 
the interest. You have served honorably in the military, you qualify 
for certain benefits.
  But this is 2026, so this is functionally 9 budget years from now. 
Understand where we will be. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, other 
things that are formula driven, you fall below a certain income, you 
get interest on the debt.
  And you start to realize only 22 percent of all spending in 9 years 
will be things that functionally get voted on here. Everything else 
will be by formula. Your government is very quickly becoming a health 
insurer with an army, an insurance company with an army.
  What is fascinating is--think about this--this year we are going to 
kiss up close to $700 billion in borrowing. That is more than all 
discretionary spending on nonmilitary discretionary spending. So think 
about that. If you came to me and said, ``David, I want you to only 
spend exactly what you are taking in right now,'' you get to help me 
make a decision. If I am not allowed to touch mandatory spending, the 
entitlements, do you remove the entire military, or do you remove 
everything else you think of as government, the Park Service, the FDA, 
the FBI?
  Everything else is government because all of that is living on 
borrowed money. And somehow we desperately must find a way for the 
American public to understand the scale and how quickly these numbers 
are moving away from us.
  In 5 years, so those folks who are 60 years old today, they are at 
the peak of what we call the ``Baby Boom.'' So in 5 years from now, we 
actually hit the peak of our brothers and sisters who will receive 
their retirement benefits, if they take them at 65. And you start to 
look at the numbers. And we are going to--let's switch to the next 
slide. And you will actually start to see that curve steepening.
  We are going to show a slide in a couple of boards from here that 
starts to show you at what point we are running these trillion-dollar 
deficits.
  The next point I also wanted to make that was here in the CBO report 
is, when we borrow an additional $134 billion on top of what we already 
projected--so close to $700 billion this year--that is now part of the 
rolling debt. That is part of--now we are going to be paying interest 
on that for generations because our inflection point to pay down the 
debt is moving farther away from us every day because--you saw the 
previous slide--every day we are borrowing pretty close to $1.9 billion 
every single day.
  So why this slide is important is--just understand--in 9 budget 
years, if you said, ``David, I want you to deal with the debt. I don't 
want you to do it today because I don't want to lose any benefits. I 
don't want to talk about the complications of what happens if we had to 
deal with the reality of trying to make the combination of making the 
economy grow and having to deal with entitlement reform,'' but in 9 
years, only 11 percent of the budget would be nondefense, non-
entitlement.
  And the amazing thing is, that number will stay almost identical for 
the next 10 years. So almost all the growth, a trillion-plus dollars of 
growth in those 9 years is coming almost solely from Medicare, 
Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt, veterans' benefits, 
but mostly Medicare.
  It is really difficult to talk about, but if you actually look in the 
CBO

[[Page 11196]]

numbers, you understand, we have a couple of our key trust funds that 
start to run out of money within the 10-year window. So let's actually 
switch slides and try to--and a couple of these are going to be 
repetitive for a point, so it starts to become more absorbable of what 
is actually really going on in these underlying numbers.
  So we put this one together just to sort of have a sense of what has 
happened. What happened from when we were estimating in 2016, the 
Congressional Budget Office gave us a number, so this is a year ago. We 
were building our budgets. We were building our projections. We were 
building our cost analysis on how much interest financing, these 
things. This is a year ago. We thought we were going to borrow $544 
billion, still an outrageous amount of money.
  Here we are a year later and we are going to come close to $700 
billion. Then in January, from a year ago--so this last January--it 
moved up to, hey, we are going to borrow $559 billion. Not a lot of 
movement. And then 6 months later, it blows off the charts. And now all 
of a sudden, we know from the CBO number, it is $693 billion of 
borrowing this year.
  The OMB number, I know the chart over here I think is saying 702. I 
could swear I saw 704, but let's just call it $700 billion.
  This is an intense frustration because, if you actually listen to 
many of us as we get behind these mikes, we will argue and fight and 
fuss often on things that, when you actually add them up, are pretty 
small, sometimes bordering on petty, that don't really have a 
multiplier effect into the future.
  Yet, how much discussion have you heard behind these microphones in 
the last 3 weeks, since the CBO report came out, the update came out 
that, hey, from January to June, somehow the number just grew by 25 
percent; we just added another $134 billion of borrowing this year?
  This isn't way off into the future. It is this year. And guess what. 
We are going to be financing that for as long as anyone who is probably 
watching this or listening to this in this room is alive.
  Can we go to the next slide. We are heading toward a time where the 
growth of this debt, the growth in mandatory spending is moving to 
crushing everything else we care about. So if you happen to be someone 
who is a Member of this body and you care passionately about education, 
you must understand that the mandatory spending is going to crush it.
  If you care about the environment and other programs, the finding 
resources to pay for those things is gone.
  If you care desperately about defense, defense is going to be 
competing for scarcer and scarcer dollars because those dollars are 
promised in our mandatory spending, our entitlements.
  So the only reason I threw this one up was just getting a sense that 
just the movement from January to June--the chart may not look like a 
big deal, but we are dealing with hundreds of billions of dollars here.
  You see that little separation between the red line and the blue 
line?
  That separation is 6 months. This isn't a game. It shouldn't be 
partisan. The numbers are the numbers, and Congress cannot continue to 
exist in a math-free zone.
  So--and I am sorry. This is actually--I have toned down my charts 
because I was getting made fun of by making too many of them, and, 
actually, I was. I think I killed one of the big printers here on 
Capitol Hill, but that is another discussion.
  So let's actually sort of look at this one. This is functionally 2017 
to 2027. So the 10-year window, which we use constantly around here. 
Just understand what this constant growth of the debt does in the mix 
of our priorities that we are able to pay for.
  Where is the money? Where does it ultimately come from? Where does it 
go?
  So if we are here right now, the first bar is spending. The second 
bar is revenues or pay-fors or mechanics. You know, some of it is 
borrowing, some of it is payroll taxes, and other things. Then the same 
thing for 2027.
  So let's first take a look at where we are at right now, and this is 
by gross domestic product. So they tell me this is a much more elegant 
way to sort of understand how much of our society's economy is going 
into finance government--is going into finance government's debt. And 
none of these numbers have State and local. This is just us at the 
Federal Government level.
  So take a look. This year, hey, about 1.4 percent of our GDP, of the 
economic muscle of our society is going into financing our excessive 
spending, our debt. In 10 years, it is 2.9 percent. So it is the entire 
economy, close to 3 percent of it is going to be grabbed just to pay 
for debt.
  But when you also start to look at--you see that black portion on the 
top? In 2017, the excessive spending here, without revenue--so it is 
borrowing--is 3.6 percent of our entire GDP went to borrowing. In 10 
years, it is 5.2, and it keeps growing, and it really starts to take 
off.
  Remember we had the comment ``in 5 years, we hit the peak of the Baby 
Boom moving into retirement.'' And if you see the curve, it steepens 
and, over the next couple of decades, it blows off the charts.
  So you actually start to look at the mix of: What are our resources? 
What do we have?
  Well, let's just go to the 2027. So that is this. So, functionally, 6 
percent of our entire economy will be going to Social Security; 6.9 
percent of our GDP will be going to healthcare programs. Another 2.5 
percent of our society's GDP will be going to other mandatory programs.
  Only 5.4 will be going to everything we call discretionary, and part 
of that is also defense. So about half of that will be defense and half 
of that will be other discretionary programs.

                              {time}  1915

  This is where we are moving prioritywise. The growth of these 
programs consume everything in their path.
  One of the things we actually talked about 3 weeks ago when we were 
behind this microphone--look, there are demographic changes, but when I 
was a kid, $4 were spent for young people for every dollar that was 
spent for our, what we will call, seniors. Today, that is reversed. 
Today, we will spend $4 for seniors for every dollar spent for young 
people, and that curve continues to move away from us. So just 
understand, that is the decision this body, this society, has made as 
our priorities.
  Now, why this slide is so incredibly important to understand, if you 
see the blue there--and, look, I am blessed to be on the Social 
Security Committee in Ways and Means. We just had the actuary report, 
and Social Security has problems, but it is not a crisis. It is 
fixable. As a matter of fact, any well meaning people, a handful of 
them could get in a room and in a day fix the unfunded liabilities, 
which I think is 22, $24 trillion over the 75-year window for Social 
Security.
  What should terrify you are the numbers I am about to point out that 
are actually within Medicare. Let's actually just sort of reach over 
here, and forgive me for leaning over. Let's say you are 50 years old 
today. We are going to use 65 as the benchmark for retirement. You are 
going to be retiring in 2030. You see the gray here? Over your career, 
over your work life, the average person who will be retiring in 2030 
will have put in $179,000 into Medicare.
  But do you see this side? They are going to receive $621,000 in 
benefits. The person who is 60 years old today, in the average, and 
these are means, the person who is 60 today, retiring in 5 years, will 
have paid $179,000 in part of their FICA tax going to Medicare. Over 
their years of retirement, because of longevity, because of healthcare 
costs, because of a series of different things, they are going to take 
out $621,000.
  Now, I need you to start to multiply those types of differentials 
where we put in this, we are taking this out, and multiply it times 76 
million of our brothers and sisters who we define as baby boomers.
  Do you see the math problem?
  This slide isn't from some conservative group. I believe it is from 
the Urban Institute. This is just reality.

[[Page 11197]]

  Let's say you happen to be my most liberal constituent, and you care 
desperately about the preservation of these entitlements and of 
Medicare. You should be the first one lining up with me and others 
around here from both sides of the aisle saying: We must do two key 
things. We must adopt policies that maximize economic growth, because 
whether it be tax reform, whether it be regulatory reform, whether it 
be immigration reform, all these things, but primarily tax reform, we 
must do those policies that drive economic growth, because a growing 
economy solves a lot of problems, but it doesn't come close to dealing 
with these types of shortfalls.
  So the second thing that must be done, and it is going to take fair-
minded people on both sides of the aisle, we are going to have to do 
entitlement reform. It is just the math.
  When someone gets behind one of these microphones or is running for 
office and they say, ``Well, if we just get rid of waste and fraud, or 
if we just get rid of foreign aid, or if we just get rid of this,'' I 
am sorry, they need to go out and invest in a calculator. That is not 
what the underlying numbers say.
  And to try to double down on a couple of these points, to understand 
how fast these numbers are moving away from us, in 2022--it sounds like 
a long time from now, but, look, we are working on the 2018 budget 
right now. So, what, four budget years from now? Every year, we are 
going to be running a $1 trillion deficit, and it grows and grows. That 
$1 trillion of borrowing in 2022 has to be financed.
  We are working on this chart. It is a little more complicated, so you 
are not going to see it for another month or so. As you are borrowing 
more money and interest rates go up, you do understand it is not just 
the money we are borrowing this year. When we move up the interest 
rates because we are out there in the markets sucking up the capital, 
pulling the capital in, when we raise interest rates, there are about 
$2.5 trillion of our $14-plus trillion of publicly held debt that is 
refinanced every year. So it is not just the interest we pay on new 
borrowing. Like, right now, almost $1.9 billion had to be borrowed 
today. It is not just the interest we are going to pay on that, but it 
is the effect on everything that is refinanced every year, every day, 
every month, every quarter, because as those interest rates move up, we 
have to change the financing.
  Just understand, when you look at this chart just how fast--and this 
is just the borrowing number--how it explodes away from us. So in 2027, 
10 years from now, annual deficit, $1.463 trillion of just borrowing. 
That is 9 budget years from now.
  You realize, if you add that up, I believe that is more than all 
military and all other discretionary spending we are spending today. 
Please understand how fast these numbers are moving away from us and 
start demanding that we, as Members of Congress, toughen up and do 
those things that are really difficult, really hard, and the 
willingness to tell the truth of what is driving these debts and 
deficits.
  My primary reason for putting up this chart is that I am a huge fan 
that we have to do sort of this holistic approach, that it is now 
incumbent upon us as policymakers to do everything and do everything at 
once. You can't just have us say we need to do healthcare reform 
because almost no one in the country who is outside that world is 
paying attention to what it is doing to the debt and deficit, blowing 
them off the charts.
  Then we have those of us who are focused right now on doing tax 
reform. We talk about our book of specialty, and people who care about 
immigration, care about this, care about that. The reality is we have 
to do it all. We have to do it all at the same time to maximize 
economic growth.
  The GDP indicator today from the Atlanta Fed, we call it GDPNow--it 
is a wonderful website. It is a great app--I think has us at 2.5 
percent GDP. Okay. That is better than we have been.
  The new CBO baseline built into this next 10-year projection is 
saying 1.9 percent GDP growth. That is unacceptable because these 
numbers continue to remain incredibly ugly if we grow at that speed. 
But if we were to be at 3, 3.5, the numbers get much easier to deal 
with. But this chart is really important and a little tough to absorb, 
but it basically demonstrates, even with additional growth, we are 
still going to have to do entitlement reform, and it is going to have 
to be on a fairly large scale.
  Growth makes it just a lot easier and makes it so we can do a much 
longer onramp for our brothers and sisters who are right now planning 
for retirement or other benefit programs that are out there.
  So in this next slide, I wanted to show it because I wanted to 
actually use it to talk about--I know right now there is a lot of 
consternation of what is happening over in the Senate in regards to 
healthcare, and I think constantly there is a lot of misinformation 
about the healthcare bill we did here in the House, what I have read of 
what has been worked on in the Senate.
  So let's first get a couple things very clear. If you hear a 
commentator, if you are someone behind one of these mics, talk about, 
``Well, it is one-sixth of the economy and that is what is in this 
bill,'' they didn't read the bill.
  The ACA replacement is almost exclusively about the small portion of 
our society that is in the individual market. They don't get their 
healthcare from an employer. They don't get their healthcare from 
Medicare. They don't get their healthcare from the VA. They don't get 
their healthcare from Indian Health Service or TRICARE or all these 
other ways. They are the plumber. They are my wife and I when we were 
running our own business.
  In my congressional district, it is only 2 percent of my population. 
In my State, it is only 4 percent of my population. That was the 
population that was having great difficulties if they held a 
preexisting condition. Well, this society now, we have all come to 
terms, we are a guaranteed-issue society. That was in our bill when it 
passed. But that is still a tiny portion of the society that is in that 
individual market. In a State like mine, Arizona, you have a single 
choice, huge price hikes, and none of that was what was promised.
  When you start to look at the math on the deductibles and then the 
price, so many of our brothers and sisters out there who should be in 
that individual market are basically saying: I would rather pay the 
fine; let them try to catch me. Because we have already talked about 
them. We did a whole presentation, I think, about 6 weeks ago, 2 months 
ago, that were in this ratcheting problem. Half of our population who 
should be in that individual market, let's just call them the healthy, 
50 percent of that population who only use about 3 percent of the 
healthcare dollars, they basically said: It is too expensive; I am not 
buying.
  But every time someone who is a part of that healthy portion of the 
curve says ``Yeah, you have mandatory purchase, but I am still not 
going to buy'' and doesn't purchase, you end up in this ratcheting 
effect. And the ratcheting effect, it gets more expensive, so more drop 
out; gets more expensive, more drop out. And that has been the crisis 
that is the ACA. Most people know it as ObamaCare, but to be 
respectful, let's call it the ACA.
  It has an actuarial, structural death spiral. So our attempt was: 
Could you do a series of things that would lower the premiums enough 
for that 50 percent of the population who only uses 3 percent of the 
healthcare dollars to get them to actually buy? Mandatory. Hasn't 
worked. Maybe really well-priced coverage would work, because when they 
participate, the curve flattens out. Because right now, it looks like a 
hockey stick, and we know there is functionally a tiny percent of our 
population, I think it is like 5 percent of the population, equals 
almost 50 percent of all the spending.
  So the reason this chart is up here, we were trying to find an 
elegant way to try to say those of us who, like myself, I have fairly 
severe asthma, but folks with chronic conditions, diabetes, 
particularly if it is not managed, other things, that is actually 84 
percent of all healthcare costs.

[[Page 11198]]

  When we did the risk-sharing amendment for the ACA replacement bill, 
we were trying to fixate on that continuity of care. How do you finance 
that continuity of care for our brothers and sisters, particularly 
those who have those chronic conditions, to make sure that is 
continuity of care between themselves, their doctors, their healthcare 
institution, the insurer? I thought we did a fairly elegant job of 
drafting that and then putting real resources behind it.
  But this is important to understand, the outlier of our brothers and 
sisters out there, those of us who have preexisting conditions or who 
have chronic conditions, end up being the cost drivers in our 
healthcare.
  So our ability to be creative, our ability to say: If you have one of 
those in your pocket, can this actually be part of your healthcare 
management? Are we going to accept the reality that someone with a 
chronic condition should be allowed to pick up their phone and use 
FaceTime to talk to their doctor?

                              {time}  1930

  Should a poor person be allowed to use their phone to consult their 
doctor? Should they be allowed to wear sensors and other things? There 
are some incredibly creative things rolling onto the market there to 
help our brothers and sisters with chronic illness. This body needs to 
be prepared to adopt them, because here is the punch line: whether it 
had been the ACA, whether it had been a replacement, had almost nothing 
actually to do with healthcare. It had to do with who pays. This was 
about the money: who pays, who gets the money.
  Because remember, it was in 1986--31 years ago--a piece of 
legislation was passed basically saying you cannot deny someone medical 
services. You show up to the emergency room, you show up in the 
hospital, you are getting your medical services, and you can actually 
see this in the data. For the last 30 years, the number of procedures, 
particularly the stuff it costs, has been laid much the same.
  So when you have people saying, ``Oh, you are not going to be able to 
get healthcare,'' we have been a society for 30-plus years that has 
sort of a guarantee of delivery of health services. The great battle is 
who pays.
  Do you remember a few years ago when we had the great consternation 
of dispro share, uncompensated care. I worked on those issues. And now 
all of these years later, we are basically trying to make an argument 
of who pays, how do we pay, how do we get more healthy--that is 20-, 
30-, 40-year-olds who are healthy, how do we get more of them, 
particularly in the individual markets, to participate?
  Then the second half is Medicaid. This is a strange city because it 
is one of those cities, when you actually look at the dollars, even 
though the dollars are going to continue to grow and grow and grow, so 
many people define that as a cut. But remember, we were looking at the 
exploding deficit debt numbers. We have to deal with the reality. We 
are in real trouble, and we are going to have to step up and start 
being honest with each other about what is happening in the underlying 
math here.
  So I know this is a little diversion from what was in the CBO report, 
but once again, you saw on the charts that the healthcare and 
healthcare entitlement numbers were substantially driving the deficits. 
Now you actually sort of see what is in the underlying part of that 
population.
  We will go back to the beginning again. Hopefully, I haven't spoken 
for a whole hour, for your sake and mine. But one more time: this year, 
according to CBO, 3 weeks ago--and you have heard lots of talk about 
it, right? That was me being sarcastic--$193 billion of borrowing this 
year. We are going to borrow almost $1.9 billion every day, $79 million 
every hour. I have been here an hour. Has this been worth $79 million 
to you?
  But think about it--and I know I misspoke earlier, so that is one of 
the reasons I wanted to put this board up. It is $21,900, $21,900 every 
second of borrowing.
  I have a 21-month-old. It is the greatest gift the good Lord has ever 
given my wife and me.
  I pray for the birth mother every night, saying, ``Thank you.''
  But if you look at the charts, when she hits her peak earning years, 
her tax rates are going to be double, maybe even more, of what I would 
pay today.
  The economic growth is probably crushed by the amount of debt; and a 
lot of the calculations, if we step out 30 years, the computers can't 
even model them anymore. Because, understand, there are some amazing 
numbers in here that functionally, in 9 budget years, we are at 91 
percent debt to GDP on publicly held debt. That is not the money we 
borrowed from the trust funds.
  So the question I ask--I love my little girl. How many of you love 
your kids? How many of you love your grandkids? How many of you love 
this country? How many of you want this country to have an amazing 
future, because it can. This is all fixable. Just every single day we 
wait, we make it so much more difficult.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________