Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that Members who vote in favor of the establishment of a public, federal government run health insurance option are urged to forgo their right to participate in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) and agree to enroll under that public option.

I thank the Speaker. I also want to thank the minority leader and the leadership on the minority side for providing this hour for us to talk in some detail about health care and what is pending before this Congress over the next 3 weeks.

Mr. Speaker, it is ironic that as we sit here on the literal eve of the markup of this bill in the Committees of Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, and Education and the Workforce, all beginning next week when we return from our districts, as we sit here on the eve of that markup, there is no House bill. And it makes it very, very difficult. We're told, if you have amendments, let's get them all together because we want to have a good look at them before we start the markup. How do you amend a bill that you haven't seen yet? Well, that's the task that's before many of us on the committee and that's where we have been placing our efforts during this past week, but it is a task made much more difficult.

Mr. Speaker, I will just tell you, as someone who was involved in the campaigns last fall, I was a surrogate for Senator McCain. It meant that I went all over the country debating health care with surrogates for President Obama. It seemed a virtual lock that there would be a presidential directive for a health care bill that would come shortly after the election, and certainly by Inauguration Day. In fact, Senator Baucus convened a great group over at the Library of Congress at the end of last October and produced a white paper that for all the world looked like a blueprint for a plan for a health care bill.

Election Day came and went, President Obama won, no health care bill. We had the holidays, Christmas, New Years, no health care bill. The Inauguration, all the festivities that took over Washington, but no health care bill. And here we are, the week after the July 4 recess, still waiting for that bill. What happened to the promises on the campaign trail last fall? Were they really that ephemeral that they could not be condensed into legislative language and produced for the House floor? Well, that's where we find ourselves.

Now, in March of this year, the President did convene a group of us down at the White House. He spoke very eloquently. He said the words you've already heard spoken on the floor of this House tonight, If you like what you have, you can keep it. Let me emphasize that, he repeated it, If you like what you have, you can keep it. And of course he says if you like what you have you can keep it because polls show anywhere between 60 to 80 percent of Americans like what they have and want to keep it; 160 million Americans receive their health care through employer-sponsored insurance, another 10-15 million through individual insurance policies, and they like what they have and they want to keep it. In fact, their greatest fear is that something will happen to their employment or their ability to make those premium payments, and they will lose what they have because they like what they have and they want to keep it.

But the second thing the President said was, The only thing I will not accept out of this Congress is the status quo. But wait a minute. If you like what you have, you can keep it would imply if you like what you have, you can keep it. How do you do that? How do you keep what you have and not accept the status quo? And therein is the quandary that has been presented to the other side, and that is what has taken the incredible length of time.

Now, coupled with that are the beginnings of some bills began to leak out of the Senate side at the end of June. We got into the issue of cost and coverage. And the initial reports that came out of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions was a price tag of $1 trillion. That wasn't the whole bill because we hadn't quite figured out all the Medicaid parts, but $1 trillion for the opening salvo, and it would cover about a third of the reported uninsured. Well, that's not a great bargain. That's not great value for your dollar.

The Senate Finance Committee came up with another bill. Another score was given to that bill, and the cost was over $1.5 trillion. And they immediately went back and started to rework the bill to bring that price down to at least $1 trillion. That appears to be now the new high-water mark for health care legislation.

The House bill, as scored through the Committee on Ways and Means just this week, also scored at $1.5 trillion. No word, no word on the number of people that would be covered. If you like what you have, you can keep it right up until the time we tell you that you can't. And that apparently is the game plan, is the mission statement for the health care bill that will be brought to us from the Democratic majority.

Mr. Speaker, I'm joined by a number of other people who wish to speak on this very important topic, and I do want to give everyone the appropriate amount of time.

Just one housekeeping detail, the Congressional Doctors Caucus had an open forum during this past week down at George Washington University. Different from the White House infomercial on health care, this was an open forum. It was open to anyone who could come in and question Members of Congress who also happened to be physicians. It turned out all of us who were Republicans who showed up, but they could come and question the Republican House physicians on the issues related to what is going on with changes in the health care system. And we had a very lively hour and 45 minutes, a number of questions that were delivered by the staff and faculty there at George Washington and a number of questions that just came from the audience. But it was a lively hour.

The event was Webcast live at the time that it was carried out, and that Webcast has been archived and is available on the Congressional Health Care Caucus Web site. That's www.healthcaucus.org. Go to the appropriate tab for archived events, and the George Washington health care event has been archived on that Web site.

Well, again, we are joined by many Members of Congress. People are eager to speak about this. Goodness knows we're not going to get a chance to have a legislative hearing in our committee. But let us begin this evening, and we are going to hear from one of the doctors who was there at the forum at George Washington, an orthopedist from the great State of Georgia, a member of G-7, Dr. Tom Price.

Reclaiming my time briefly, for a mandate to work, there has to be a broad recognition that the mandate exists and there has to be a broad understanding of the penalty involved, and the penalty administered must be significant.

If we look at the number of the rate of insured in this country, it's about 85 percent of people voluntarily carrying health insurance and 15 percent do not. Well, where is a model for that broad recognition that there is a requirement that you do something and a very swift and severe penalty if you don't?

Certainly the IRS fits that bill. Everyone knows in this country you must pay your income taxes, that you must

file on time or face a swift and sure penalty. And I'm not even entirely sure what the penalties are, but I do know I don't ever want to experience those penalties. And what do we see with compliance rates with the IRS in this country? We see 85 percent comply and 15 percent do not. In other words, it is unchanged from the voluntary compliance that we have under health insurance.

Mandates are an anathema in a free society. Rather than trying to create the mandates and requiring people to do something that they are disinclined to do, what if we tried to build programs that would attract people just as we did with the part D part of Medicare where Dr. McClellan, to his credit, created the protected classes of drugs, created the programs that people actually wanted, and what do we have now? We have 92 percent of seniors with credible drug coverage, satisfaction rates in excess of 90 percent. So that's a success story from a government program that actually worked because the emphasis was put on delivering value to the customer, value to the patient in this case, value to the Medicare recipient in this case, rather than just simply you do what we tell you to do because we can. We are a free society, after all.

I would be happy to yield.

That is a very valid point brought up by the gentleman.

I want to now go to our other doctor from Georgia, a fellow obstetrician, Dr. Gingrey, who was actually the leader in bringing the Doctors Caucus together for that rather spirited and insightful afternoon down at George Washington earlier this week. I will yield him the floor for whatever time he will consume.

I thank the gentleman for his insight. I thank him for the passion that he has brought to this. I wonder if, just very briefly, I could go back to the gentleman from Arizona on the issue that he brought up in an earlier speech he gave on the House floor which wasn't part of this hour. I want to be certain that we have it for the DVD that's prepared, Mr. Speaker, if we were to prepare a DVD of this transaction.

But you have talked about an advisory panel or an advisory board. Health care czar is a term we've heard, commissioner or commissar of health care, putting someone in there to make a decision for us. I wonder if you would

briefly expound upon that again so we could have that as part of the Congressional Record of this discussion.

I thank the gentleman for his quick summation of that.

We've also been joined this evening, very fortunately, by the ranking Republican on the Committee on Energy and Commerce, one of the true leaders on our side on this issue who as I started this hour, I said, Here we are on the literal eve of the markup of this bill without a bill; and apparently the ranking member has some new information about when we might expect that bill and what we might find contained therein.

So I'll yield such time as he may consume to the ranking member of the committee, Mr. Barton from Texas.

We had, of course, a meeting of our committee this afternoon where we talked about amendments. We thought we had 3 or 4 days, which, in fact, seemed pitifully short in that context. I know our office had submitted 50 amendments. I think I saw a list of almost 200 amendments that was being discussed.

There is no way in the 10 to 12 hours that will be available to us to debate that bill to allow Members on our side, let alone if any Members on the majority have ideas about how the bill might be improved. It is a virtual guarantee that only a very limited number of voices are going to be heard, if any, to try to improve that bill in the time that we have allotted to us.

I will yield back to the ranking member.

Let me reclaim the time briefly. I appreciate the ranking member taking the time out of his evening and spending some time with us. There are a number of Web sites where people can go and sign online petitions. Americasolutions.com has a petition, galen.org has a petition, another group called Let Freedom Ring actually has a downloadable responsible health care pledge where you ask your Member of Congress or Senator to have at least read the bill in its entirety and have the bill available for 72 hours on a Web site so the public can view this bill prior to a vote being taken in the House of Representatives.

He has been very patient. He is a new Member. And he is probably more patient than I deserve him to be, but Dr. Fleming is from my neighboring State of Louisiana. He is one of two new Louisiana doctors who have joined the Republican Caucus. I want to thank him for his time tonight. He has a very interesting proposition that he wanted to share with us.

So I yield whatever time he may consume, bearing in mind we have 15 minutes left of the hour.

I yield to the gentleman from Georgia, Dr. Gingrey.

I also would thank the gentleman from Louisiana. I would also point out that in the last Congress I introduced a bill that would remove Members of Congress from the Federal employee health benefit plan and give them a $3,000 voucher to go out into the individual market and purchase insurance, figuring that if we became uninsured it would make us more creative about seeking solutions for people who seek this problem.

I did not get any cosponsors. I did offer it to then-Senator Obama through his surrogates at several points, but I never got any takers.

I also prepared an amendment, when we do get our bill in committee, and I have hesitated on this, because I don't want my more conservative friends getting angry at me for expanding an entitlement, but I have prepared an amendment that would make Medicaid available to every Member of Congress. In fact, to make Congress a mandatory population to be covered under Medicaid, so that again we could experience for ourselves firsthand the frustration that patients find when they go to find a Medicaid provider, because in many States, my home State of Texas, Medicare reimburses poorly, Medicaid reimburses abysmally. And it's very, very difficult to find a provider on Medicaid. But I think the gentleman is on the right track, and I thank them for bringing that to us this evening.

I would like to take a few minutes. We have two doctors from Georgia, two from Louisiana. I was only able to attract one doctor from Texas, which is me, but I do have a Texas judge. I yield to him if he has a few comments to make on the subject of the evening.

I thank the gentleman from Texas for his valuable insight. It brings up a valid point, Mr. Speaker, and the American people are going to be asked to undergo significant change in the way they receive their health care.

Yes, it may be change they voted for in November. Yes, it may be change they can believe in, but I don't know that it's necessarily going to be change they like.

So I do, Mr. Speaker, if I could, I know I must address my comments to the Chair and not to the public at large, but, Mr. Speaker, if I could address the public at large, I would tell

them they need to be very, very skeptical of what this body is doing, typically in the middle of the night, without much scrutiny and without much study of these bills and processes as they go through.

The individual Members of Congress do need to hear from their constituents on this issue. It's too important, too important for the American people to remain silent. There are Web sites out there where there are petitions that may be signed, AmericanSolutions.com, galen.org are two that I know have petitions up. This one that I was recently made aware of, Let Freedom Ring, which has a responsible health care pledge that they have posted online.

These are very worthwhile efforts that the American people can undertake and make certain that their representatives know how they want it to be, how they want to be represented.

And it is, I think, people got the message on cap-and-trade but they got the message a little late. We may, in fact, have been able to turn that vote had we been able to have one additional half day of debate on that topic.

Let me now turn to the doctor from Georgia, who we heard from briefly earlier. He may have some wrap-up comments that he wants to offer the body.

I thank the doctor for coming down and participating. It may be late on the East coast but it's early on the West Coast, and he has a perfect point to make--that your voices must be heard. Again, the Webcast of the Doctors Caucus meeting over at George Washington earlier this week. The open forum that was held on health care, The Web site www.healthcaucus.org has an archive of that.

Additionally, there are many, many interviews with other thought leaders and headline-makers in health care that have been accumulated on this site in the last 6 months. I do encourage, Mr. Speaker, people to consider going. Americansolutions.com has a petition, galen.org has a petition; and there is the Let Freedom Ring group that is available on your search engine that also has a petition. I would encourage people to weigh in with that.

Don't discount calling the Speaker's office. You can find that at www.speaker.gov, hit the ``Contact Us'' button and find the number to call into the Speaker's office to weigh in on this important issue. And finally your calls and faxes, Mr. Speaker, that constituents will make to their individual Member's office are going to be extremely important in this endeavor. I hear all the time from people back home, What can we do to help you? Now is the time. You need to make your voices heard on this very important issue. Whichever side you may reside, wherever your feelings lie on this, you need to make your feelings known to your Member of Congress. The time for that action is now. The markup starts next week. We will vote this out of the House of Representatives by the end of the month. Don't ask me why we have that arbitrary, condensed timeline, but that's what we've been given by the Speaker of the House.

So now is the time to make your voices heard on this very, very important matter. As the ranking member of the committee said, this is the ``one-if-by-land, two-if-by-sea'' moment. The American people need to make their voices heard on this very critical matter, which will affect not only their future, their children's future and their grandchildren's future.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for the time.

I anticipate we're going to have a seamless transition here this evening. It looks as though there wasn't anybody from the other side to appear down here to defend themselves or advocate for this policy. I'm wondering if some of the people haven't gone underground that have advocated for this national health care plan.

But as the gentleman from Missouri had said, we lost more jobs in the last 6 months than since the Great Depression. I think there's something here to illustrate.

I would make my point and then yield, and that is this is a direct contradiction to what the gentleman from Missouri has said. This is the White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, who said-- what day is today?

So it would be today. He said, ``We rescued the economy.''

That's the gentleman I intended to yield to. If we rescue the economy, lost more jobs in 6 months than we have since the Great Depression, unemployment has 14.5 million, 14.7 million people unemployed and there are another 5.8 million people who are looking for a job that have exhausted their unemployment benefits, that no longer qualify under the

definition of unemployed, which takes us up over 20 million people in America that are looking for work.

According to a study that was done by one of the lead thinkers in this, they went to 25 million effectively unemployed because many have had their hours cut down so they no longer are truly a full-time employment.

Rescued the economy? I don't think so. Let's hope they don't rescue health care the same way.

The gentleman from Michigan.

Reclaiming my time, I'd like to pose a question here that is at the bottom of this. And there are a lot of different numbers out there and we know this is a moving target, so we're trying to shoot at a moving target because we know, once it's completed, it's going to come through here like a lightning bolt and it's going to be over.

So I'm seeing numbers that show this as high as $2 trillion, but I can see CBO numbers that come to about $1.2 trillion and I can see tax increases that are in the area of $800 billion to $900 billion and deficits that are about $239.1 billion.

Now, whatever these numbers are, we know that the calculations and predictions are different than what it's actually going to be. Programs always cost more money in reality than when they're actually estimated.

But here's the point. President Obama has said we can't fix the economy unless we first fix health care. Health care is broken.

Well, if you have a company that's broken, you don't go out and borrow more money and lower your revenue stream and increase your deficit. So if health care costs too much money, why do we have to add $1 trillion or $2 trillion to it to fix the program? That's the rhetorical question that I ask. It's more than rhetorical. Hopefully, we'll be able to get to that.

I see the gentleman from Louisiana was leaning forward and I'd be happy to yield to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Scalise).

Reclaiming my time, and letting the gentleman from Missouri relax for a minute. I wanted to bring this up. We see the flow charts that are today in color, and when you look at the color flow charts, those that are in white are the old existing programs that are there; and those in color are the new programs that are laid on top of the existing bureaucracy. This is the HillaryCare flow chart from back in 1993; and this is the flow chart that is, I believe, a replica of what hung on the office in my construction office throughout that entire decade and probably past the change of the millennium. It hung there because it scared the living daylights out of me, as an employer who was providing health insurance for my employees and, of course, my family as well.

When I looked at this chart--I had an aversion and anybody who has ever been in business has an aversion to redtape--this was a redtape chart. This chart being put up back in 1993 was enough, I think, that added enough weight on that it sunk HillaryCare, because the people in this country did not want to create all of this bureaucracy and give all of this control and authority over to the government. They wanted to maintain their own independence, their own freedom. In the end, it was a freedom argument that won out, that killed HillaryCare.

Now we have ObamaCare. The difference is, it's in color. It probably takes not quite as much freedom as this one might have. But I would point out on the gentleman's chart that the part that concerns me the most are these two purple circles down here at the bottom. The white square is the existing private health insurance, traditional health insurance. All of those insurance policies of those 1,300 or so insurance companies that are competing right now for the dollar for health insurance would have to flow through and become qualified health insurance plans. They would only be qualified if right here the health insurance czar decided that he had written the regulations in such a way that the newly created public health benefits plan--the Federal health insurance plan that's designed to compete against the private sector--could stay in business.

So they will set the regulations and establish the mandates and determine what these private health insurance policies offer. Then when they write those standards, then they'd be competing directly against the public; and at some point the public swallows up private. This is where it gobbles it up right here. This is where you lose your freedom. This is where President Obama cannot make the promise that if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it.

You don't get to keep it. You don't get to keep it because the people that make the decisions, those who are employers that are providing health insurance, are going to look at the premium that's here, the rules that are set by the government; and they will decide whether you keep it. You will not, even if you're a happy employee.

I yield to the gentleman from Georgia who has a statement to make.

Reclaiming my time, and as the gentleman raised the issue of about who will be making the decisions on health care, whether it will be the doctor and the patient or whether it will be the bureaucrat, we have on record, before the committee in the markup 2 days ago, an amendment that was offered by Republicans--and I believe it was Dr. Gingrey from Georgia who offered the amendment. I happen to have the text of it right here handy; and it is this, Nothing in this section shall be construed to allow any Federal employee or political appointee to dictate how a medical provider practices medicine. That was a simple amendment that preserved the doctor-patient relationship and cut the bureaucrat out of it.

It failed. It failed on a party-line vote, save one. Only one Democrat would defend the doctor-patient relationship in the entire committee. It was shot down as a partisan vote, and that would be a clear principle that you would think Democrats and Republicans could agree upon.

That's correct.

The gentleman.

The gentlelady from Minnesota.

If the gentlelady will yield to a question.

Reclaiming my time, if I could just make the point that President Obama might have told the truth tonight when he said that he wasn't going to increase the deficit with his national health care plan. We already know there are $800 billion or $900 billion in tax increases that are written into this, and they're only about, maybe, $239 billion from making their books balance. Imagine that. It's $239.1 billion by one set of measure. It might be a lot more. So all they really need to do is raise taxes another $239 billion and accept the estimates they have--and they might have already arrived--and he just simply uses his little rhetorical trick of giving you a definition. Well, he gives America the definition, and people hear what they want to hear. He speaks in a way that people hear what they want to hear. Again, I think that's the deal.

I yield to the gentleman from Louisiana.

9.5.

Well, let me take us back to that original question again, which is, when the President says that the economy is a disaster and that we can't fix the economy unless we first fix the broken health care system in America and that the only way you can fix the broken health care system in America is to add to the spending by $1 trillion or $2 trillion, depending on how you want to evaluate the proposal, and to add to the taxes by $800 billion or more. If we end up with a huge deficit of $2 or $5 or $7 or $800 billion created in all of that and if something is broken and if you have to fix it, how can it be, if we're spending too much money on health care today, that we're going to spend more on health care tomorrow and add to the deficit and to the unemployment and fix the problem?

This proposal exacerbates the problem. That's the flaw in the President's logic. So this is similar to the things that came out a couple of generations ago on another continent. If you repeat the same thing over and over again and if after a while people are afraid to challenge you, then some begin to believe it's true. It can't be true.

First the gentleman from Georgia and then back over to Louisiana.

Could we direct the attention down here to the Chief of Staff for the White House? ``We rescued the economy,'' said today, Rahm Emanuel.

I'm emphasizing the gentleman's point.

Under President Obama's health care proposal, somehow I just can't imagine ladies waiting in line to get an abortion. I just can't imagine they're going to do that.

The gentleman from Louisiana has been patiently waiting.

Reclaiming my time, in recognizing there are folks that are lined up to speak, the gentleman from Louisiana mentioned ACORN as one of the huge machines that drives the Democrat turn-out- the-vote effort that has produced over 400,000 fraudulent voter registration forms that seems to be behind a lot of the things that are going on that are pushing the hard-core, left-wing agenda.

And by the way, they are registered--I have it as a 501(c)(3) not- for-profit, nonpartisan organization. This is a picture of their headquarters at 2609 Canal Street, New Orleans. And there I stood across the street right before the Fourth of July, put my little camera up there, and here's a picture of the window at the headquarters at New Orleans where there is at least 174 or 175 corporations affiliated with ACORN, and here are the Obama posters inside the glass. This is your not-for-profit organization. Here's the ACORN logo hanging and the flag outside. You can draw your own conclusions, but there is the get-out- the-vote machine that's funded by your Federal tax dollars, funding abortions with your tax dollars.

I would like to kick this over to Louisiana. I yield to the gentleman.

I thank the informed gentleman from Louisiana.

I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.

The gentleman from Michigan, he's absolutely correct. And the people that generate these kinds of flowcharts--and they are liberal elitist utopianists, but they believe they are smarter than your average person. They don't believe the average person is capable of taking care of themselves. They believe they can devise the perfect flowchart that will make everything work out perfectly.

And the only thing that gets in the way of all of this is because there are some people in the world that try to give people their freedom, and they will always trade off American freedom for security. It happened in Western Europe.

I took a trip down to Cuba here a few years ago, a legal trip to Cuba. This is what occurs to my mind. As I listened to Mr. Hoekstra speak, how in the world do we ever balance a budget if we swallow up the private sector by growing government to eat up the private sector. Eight huge entities have been swallowed up and nationalized by President Obama. A large percentage of our GDP is now run by the government, by the White House, some of it directly, some by Rahm Emanuel.

If the Federal Government continues to take over huge sections of the economy, like this 17 percent or whatever that number is, I don't know how you balance the budget. You do like they do in Cuba. You take a cut out of all commerce, because Castro has an investment in all things, and that's where this Nation is heading if we don't get a grip and get our freedom back.

The best thing we have going for us is these government bureaucrats aren't always on the job. Sometimes they're on the job but they're not always paying attention to the job.

This is the President's economic adviser Larry Summers, who back about the turn of the administration--which seems eons ago around January 20 of this year--made the statement that what we need to do to bring the economy back around was everybody's got to go out and spend, spend, spend. And some of us, myself included, said, Wait a minute. Saving this economy is about increasing our production. You can't spend your way into prosperity. You have to go out and produce something that has value and marketability and you can earn your way into prosperity.

Just this week this gentleman woke up and said we need to produce now; the spending era is over. It's time to produce. I don't know if he went back to sleep or not, but he was right the second time, not the first time.

I yield to the gentlelady from Minnesota.

Twenty years ago this coming October 9, the wall in Berlin came crashing down. It was literally the Iron Curtain crashing down. And when it crashed down, within a few short months, almost bloodlessly, freedom echoed across Eastern Europe and all the way to the Pacific Ocean. We all knew what that was. That was free enterprise, capitalism, destroying a managed economy. The Soviet Union couldn't keep up. Ronald Reagan kept raising the stakes, and the question was, Will the Soviet Union checkmate us militarily before we bankrupt them economically?

That was the equation, and nobody wondered in 1990, 1991, 1992 what was the dominant economy, what had proven, without any question, was the most powerful civilization in the world based on free-market economics.

And here we are not quite 20 years later, the stock market takes a dip, and the people over here on the Democrat side of the aisle begin the chant: That proves capitalism has failed. Reconstruct the Soviet Union and tell me that.

Dr. Broun.

Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman from Georgia, I would point out that as I saw our President stand next to Hugo Chavez in that photo-op, that glad-handed, double handshake that took place down there, it occurred to me that in the last month, our President had nationalized far more businesses than Hugo Chavez had. He had only taken out one Cargill rice-processing plant in the previous 30 days, and President Obama took over billions in our national economy in the same period of time.

So they are going in the same place, and if anybody would like to know what the strategy is, they just need to go to www.dsausa.org. That is the Democratic Socialists of America dot org, the socialist Web site. There they will tell you their legislative arm is the Progressive Caucus here in the House of Representatives. It has 75 Members, and they say on their Web site we want to nationalize. It is happening under our very nose. And in the last minute, I yield to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Akin).

And reclaiming my time, and just to briefly conclude, and that is I would like to thank all the Members that have come here tonight and made this 2-hour special order primarily on health care, on this national health care plan, this socialized medicine plan, and our budget and our economy. You are leaders in this Congress, and you are all to be commended.

Madam Speaker, I thank you, and I yield back the balance of my time.

If the gentleman would yield for just a second as you get your chart ready.

The 22nd.

Will the gentleman yield?

Just before you took over and joined us in this Special Order, my colleague was saying that this doesn't do much for the unemployed. I think we have to recognize that it does. For those people that are in the unfortunate circumstance today of being unemployed, one of the things that they are concerned about is that they don't have access to health care. That plan may provide it.

But the other thing that I think has been pointed out, this plan will hurt the economy and hurt more jobs, and what these people want is they want the opportunity to get back to work. And I think under the Republican proposals that we have out there, we have ways for people who are in that unfortunate situation of being unemployed there a tax credit or whatever to be able to go out and to buy and to have the freedom to choose a health care plan.

I think that's now becoming a selling point of this new plan. It says if you're unemployed--and they're creating a lot of them--we're going to be able to provide you health care. But the Republican plan will do the same thing because we do believe it's important that everybody have the security of having access to health insurance. We just don't think you have to create this bureaucracy to do it.

So let's not forget about the people who are hurting, who are unemployed. But just because they're unemployed doesn't mean this system is what they need. There are better alternatives.

I will yield.

And we want to be able to provide them with that opportunity because we believe that is a more effective and more cost- efficient way and a better way to get health care to Americans. And so that is one proposal to do it. But Republicans also have a proposal and ways to make that available that move away from this extraordinarily expensive and job-killing bureaucracy.

Before you go there, can I just add a point?

There will be some people who keep their health care. Who will that be?

It will be Federal employees and Congressmen and Senators will keep their health care. I believe in the Senate there was an amendment that was voted on, and I hope we have the opportunity to vote on this in the House. In the Senate there was a vote that said, We're going to put all Federal employees, including Members of Congress, into the public health plan, the plan that we will force millions--what was the number, 73 million in the first 5 years or something?

We're going to force 100 million people into the public health plan. I'm not sure if they had a vote in the Energy and Commerce Committee on this amendment yet, but I think it's coming. When that vote was held in the Senate, the Senate said, We're not going into the public health plan. We're going to keep what we have. So it's fascinating for the Senate to say, We're ready to force 100 million people in the public into the public health plan, but we ain't going there. That tells you what the Senate thinks of what will be the public health plan. I thank my colleague for yielding.

Can I offer a little history lesson? I'm not sure any of were you here in 2001. One of you was here in 2001.

You know what this reminds me of, remember we passed a bill--I'm thankful I voted against it--No Child Left Behind.

Why did we vote ``no''? Because what it did, it put the Department of Education between a parent and their local school and their local administrators. That thing passed with all of this promise because the promise was, We're not going to leave a single child behind.

Well, you and I felt passionately. We don't want to leave a child behind. But the way to fix that isn't to put a government bureaucracy in charge of that kid's education. Guess what, here we are 8 years later; and who now agrees with us? A lot of folks on the other side of the aisle; and most of the folks on this side of the aisle who voted for that bill now recognize that No Child Left Behind was a huge mistake because what it did is it took local control, parental control of your child's education away from parents, away from local administrators and moved it here to Washington. We're leaving more kids behind, even though we're spending more money than ever.

A lesson from history from those of us that saw that No Child Left Behind wasn't going to work; this is a monstrosity that is 10 times bigger and will have 10 times more impact than No Child Left Behind will because No Child Left Behind only impacted our kids. This will impact every single one of us. It is the same model of moving away from the concept of freedom, which my colleague talked about earlier, the concept of freedom, freedom to raise our kids, freedom to choose our health care, freedom to make our own health care decisions, moving them to Federal bureaucracies and bureaucrats who don't know the names of our kids, who don't know the names of our doctors, and who don't know the hospitals that we want to go to. That's the problem with the approach that we are seeing today.

That passed, right?

I was going to talk about the rationing.

I used to be in the private sector, and I used to be in the marketing world. We all know that these forecasts aren't actual numbers; they're predictions. One of the things that we have learned from these predictions is that--what? Does government forecast conservatively where, you know, if everything goes bad, we're going to be $800 billion short? No. The government forecasts optimistically.

I think it's pretty safe to say that, if you take a look at the assumptions and the predictions that the deficit or that the amount that this program will add to the deficit over this period of time, it is probably at least double what the CBO is predicting.

Yes. It's what the CBO is predicting.

The other things it is based on are reimbursements to the States. To get people and some of the States to buy off on Medicaid reimbursements, what they do is they bump them up in the first 3-4 years of this program, and then they cut them dramatically. We all know that those cuts will never take place in future years, so the deficit, most likely, of this proposal will be significantly higher than the numbers we see today. I think that has been true for just about every Federal program we've seen.

Well, actually, I hate to take the lead on that, but we're at 15.2 percent. We have a lot of people hurting.

I think we've had a pretty good discussion about, you know, people want to help. This is hard. But what's the real motive for moving this all under a government health care? And the gentlelady from Minnesota helped point out this moves $250 million into ACORN. Because what it does is, when you move all of this spending from the private sector to government, we have control. That bureaucracy has control. The President has control to direct policy.

And what many of us would think is a personal policy that is between me and my doctor, our family and our doctor, and all of those kinds of things, and what we're doing when we move that amount of money-- remember, we're moving basically 20 percent of the economy. With one vote we're going to move it from the private sector where we each have some influence--and we don't like more control, and that's what the Republican proposals do is give us more control in that equation.

But instead of us having more control, we're going to give it up or there are people in here who, the American people I don't think know they're giving it up. But there are people in this House, in this Senate, and in this town who are willing to take it and want to take it because they want that kind of control over social policy, health care policy, economic policy in this country, because they don't trust the American people to make those decisions for themselves. They believe that the economy, they believe that everything begins in Washington.

And as Republicans, we know and we believe that it begins with the people at the grassroots. They are the ones that drive America. They are the ones that drive our communities, our States, and our country; not this town and not our State capitals. And that's the fundamental difference. We're uncomfortable taking that responsibility or moving that responsibility to Washington. We're not only uncomfortable with it, we think it's wrong. My Democrat colleagues think it's right, it's appropriate, and it's necessary

We know that markets are imperfect and that markets are tough but that markets correct themselves and that they do that because people are provided with freedom to innovate and to be creative.

I think one little last lesson from No Child Left Behind. In 2001, when that was passed, it said we're going to measure this year's third graders versus last year's third graders in the same school. And you say that makes no sense. But in 2001, that was the measurement tool that they were going to use.

It's now 8 years later. And for 8 years, for the last 5 or 6 years, people said that doesn't make any sense because this group of kids this year could be very different than the very group of kids last year. So why measure the performance of those kids? We have the tools to be able to measure the individual achievement of every child every year, and that's what we should be measuring from the first day of school to the last day of school, how much learning took place. But because it is in a bureaucracy, and to change that, we have to pass a law. We have to pass a law through the House and the Senate, and the President has to sign it to change that.

So our schools in our local communities are still being judged as being what? They are a failing school--that's the label that the Federal Government puts on them--a failing school because we are using a failed measurement which everybody understands is a failed measurement but we can't change it.

In a market system, in a market dynamic, it would have changed a long time ago.

Mr. Speaker, we are pleased to be here. We call this the Doctors Hour because there is a fair number of us on the Republican side who are physicians or in some way health care providers, optometrists, a practicing psychologist, or in some other way connected with the health care field. So we give our own perspective.

Now, my own bio, if you will, aside from being a physician, I have worked with the uninsured in my State of Louisiana for the last 20 years.

That's almost 90 percent of my practice, working with the uninsured in a public hospital. And so, when I speak of what we need to do to help the uninsured, it is purely flowing out of my life experience. I think that as the others come up I'll give them a chance to speak as to it what they're about. I'll start off with a couple of comments. I've learned in my 20 years of, whether private practice or public practice, that the only thing that lowers costs is if you make things patient- centric. If the government is in charge, or the insurance company or a bureaucracy run by anybody is in charge, it becomes something that doesn't work for the patient. The patient's separated from costs. They have a harder time accessing benefits. It just doesn't work.

On the other hand, if you put the patient in the middle, if you tell that woman, listen, you can go see the physician you wish to see and when you go in there there's minimal administrative hassle. And if you don't like that physician, you can go see another physician. It really works. The patient's satisfied, and typically, the patient/physician relationship is stronger. And key to getting good health care is having a strong patient/physician relationship.

Now, frankly, I think the only thing innovative that we've heard from the other side, although their plan kind of is changing on a day-by-day basis, is in one sense, the only thing about that plan which is radical is that it nationalizes health insurance. I was a little amused by my Democratic colleagues earlier who were saying, Oh, my gosh, Republicans are defending insurance companies. No, actually I think they're defending insurance companies. They like insurance companies so much they want to nationalize it and have a national insurance company.

Now I'm thinking, now we have an insurance company run by the private sector that, if it doesn't work, constituents call Congresswomen, Congressmen, we pass a law that changes that, changes that so that the private insurance company plays by better rules. Now, though, it's going to be both the referee and the player. Now the government will make the rules, but also compete. And as it does that, in some way, we're supposed to expect that the government-run insurance company is going to be kinder and gentler, more cost-effective, higher value product than is the private insurance company.

I think it's the triumph of hope over experience. We hope it will be better. We know Medicaid and Medicare don't work as we wish; in fact, they're going bankrupt, and their bankruptcy is what's driving this plan. And so we're going to believe that the third try is going to be the charm and that this time we get it right. Well, without going further, I'll yield to my fellow physician from Louisiana, John Fleming.

Now, Congressman Fleming, how many Democratic cosponsors do you have?

Now, reclaiming my time, because we heard a presentation prior to this that, by golly, this is the best thing since sliced bread; this is the plan that's going to fix everything, and why wouldn't you be on it. So I'm kind of asking you, Dr. Fleming, why wouldn't they want to be on it.

Now, reclaiming my time, and I appreciate that because, again, what we've heard before is that this plan does not put government between the patient and their physician. And yet, I would have to think, if that weren't the case, why wouldn't anyone agree to your bill? I think your amendment was proposed in our committee, and it was defeated on party line votes. So I think Dr. Roe, from Tennessee, may have some thoughts as to what would come between the patient and the physician. I keep emphasizing that because if something's patient- centered, we know the closer it is to the patient, the more likely it works. So let's ask Dr. Roe, a physician from Tennessee, what might come between the patient and the physician. Dr. Roe.

Dr. Roe, can I reclaim my time?

Can you show me up there where there is a Washington bureaucrat on that chart? Where might there be a bureaucrat on that chart? Show me where the patient is and show me where a bureaucrat is.

So unlike the Republican plans, which are patient- centric, what you're telling me is this is kind of a top-down, let's figure it out from Washington and lay it on the rest of the country.

Of course we don't want this to be a partisan issue. Now frankly, as far as I know, Republicans have not been invited into the discussion. And there are actually some things in that Democratic plan, those thousand pages, that I think are very good. But there's other things, and I think they kind of general concept top-down. But it's not just us.

David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times. You see him on TV, a very thoughtful man. I have a quote here. The health care system is as big as the entire British economy. There's no way something that big and complex and dynamic can be run out of Washington. We have to set up a dynamic system, not trying to establish a set of rules to be imposed by fiat. Now, I think what you're telling me is that this is a big, complex plan run out of Washington, and not the dynamic system, but rather a set of rules, and whoever that really powerful person is in that purple box, that person will be establishing the rules by fiat. Is that a fair statement?

Hang on. Hold that thought. Let me give one more David Brooks quote and call on our colleague, Dr. Fleming okay? Another David Brooks quote talking about the CBO report, speaking about how much it would cost. This is devastating. The plan was sold as a way to bend the cost curve to reduce the rate of health care cost growth. Instead, the cost of the plan to the Federal budget would rise by 8 percent a year, and there wouldn't be anything close to offsetting revenues to pay for it.

Now, Dr. Fleming, can you sustain a health care system which has out of control inflation, if you will?

Reclaiming my time, part of this plan is to increase Medicaid eligibility, i.e., put more people on to Medicaid. Yet what we've just heard is that Medicaid is bankrupting States, or causing them to raise taxes.

So going back to my question, if you cannot control costs, can you sustain a health care system?

I will yield.

Reclaiming my time, let me just praise the motivations of the people in Tennessee. They clearly cared about the uninsured, as our Democratic colleagues, are. But it was a flawed model and couldn't be sustained, and we know that those patients were now uninsured again, probably worse off than before the experiment.

Dr. Boozman, I would like your opinions on this. You're an optometrist from Arkansas.

Reclaiming my time, 10 percent in Medicare, a generally accepted figure, is in waste and fraud. So we hear from our colleagues across the aisle that Medicare has lower overhead costs. If you include in that the 10 percent, which is a common way to define ``overhead,'' actually, that 3 percent becomes at least 13 percent. A fair statement. I think an economist would say, if your overhead is so meager that you can't watch out for fraud and abuse, then you need to lump the cost of the fraud and abuse into your overhead.

Thank you.

Dr. Broun, you've joined us. May we have your thoughts on this, please?

If I can reclaim my time, let's give credit where credit is due, because the advocates for a public option plan--I'm not an advocate of one, though--will point out that there's a decrease in administrative costs.

So, Dr. Roe, will you look up at that chart once more--or maybe you will, Dr. Boozman--and give us a sense of what will be the administrative costs, do you imagine, with this publicly run health insurance plan.

I thank you for offering that.

Reclaiming my time, Dr. Boozman, John, when you look at that, some patients aren't as sophisticated as others. Let's face it, some folks don't have the same education. Maybe they've had to struggle a little bit to get through life. Imagine if a patient had a problem with that and didn't have a counselor coming to them, as Dr. Broun mentions, but, by golly, they just have a doctor they don't like, don't get along with, and they want to complain to someone. Where would they complain?

Reclaiming my time, I know there's supposed to be an ombudsman. In the 1,000-page bill, I've found one page that spoke of an ombudsman whom you would call up if you had a complaint.

I guess the point I'm making about administration--I read an article in the McKinsey Quarterly. They said there are three things you absolutely have to do if you're going to control costs. You've got to decrease administrative costs. I look at that and it just gives me a migraine.

If I can reclaim my time, Dr. Broun, as far as you know with the bill, how does the bill address tort reform?

I'm sorry?

We just heard from our colleague from Arkansas that that's a critical thing to do.

Will the gentleman yield?

Well, I'd like to tell you, my dear friend from Michigan, Mr. Hoekstra, that everybody in this country has access to health care. Today. Everybody, whether they're employed or unemployed. The reason they have access to health care is because anybody can walk into any emergency room anywhere in this country and they can get evaluation and treatment for any problem that they have.

I used to work full time as a director of emergency services at Georgia Baptist Hospital in Sylvester, Georgia, and anybody that walked in the door for any problem was evaluated and treated, whether they had health insurance or not. And that's true all over the country.

So everybody in this country, whether they have health insurance, whether they're employed, whether they're unemployed, whether they're legal immigrants, whether they're illegal aliens, whether they're American citizens, whether they're taxpayers or nontaxpayers, everybody in this country today has access the health care system.

The thing that they don't have, the 45 million or 47 million, is they don't have a health insurance card or policy in their pocket to pay for it.

You're exactly right. We have been, as Republicans, by our Democratic colleagues, have been described as the Party of No, N-O. But the reality is we are the Party of Know, K-N-O-W, because we know how to lower the cost of health care. We know how to get those uninsured people so that they can be insured.

In fact, even the ObamaCare plan, the director of the CBO said that even in 10 years there's still going to be millions and millions of people uninsured even under the Obama plan.

So we are the Party of Know to know how to solve these problems, to put people back to work, to give them lower cost for insurance. We have multiple plans on our side. I hope the American people understand that.

Well, Mr. King, I am glad you brought this up because the American people have been promised by this President over and over again. He's saying, if you like your insurance, you can keep it. But nothing could be further from the truth. It's not factual. It's just totally falsehood. If you like the policy that you have today, you will not be able to keep it under ObamaCare. The other thing that you're talking about there--let me just tell you what happens to me as a physician with Medicare payments.

You bet.

Congress.

It was over 100 million nationally.

Let me tell you where I was going to begin with. Say a Medicare patient comes in with some chest pain, and I decided that they needed an x-ray of the chest or an MRI of the chest, I have to call a Federal bureaucrat to get permission for that patient to have those studies done right now today. In fact, even with a lot of the HMOs that are privately administered, if I prescribe an anti- hypertensive, something to control blood pressure, I have to call a pharmacy benefits manager to get permission and approval to prescribe a medication, which I am totally against that.

In my office we're writing a health care reform plan that will put patients in the position where they make the decision, not a pharmacy benefits manager, not a Federal bureaucrat. It's one of the plans that's going to be offered as a bill. But right now today, that Federal bureaucrat tells me, as a doctor, what kind of x-rays that I can do on my patients if they're on government plans, Medicare and Medicaid. It's already a broken system. Care is already being rationed in the government-supplied insurance programs today, in Medicare and Medicaid. It's going to get a lot worse under ObamaCare, a lot worse. We'll have more rationing of care, more denial of care. There will be longer waiting periods.

Would the gentleman yield?

I would like to tell you a story that I recently heard about a patient that actually helped my friend from Michigan's economy. Mr. Hoekstra, you might be very interested in this because it actually provided some funds into your State, from what I understand.

A patient in Canada had severe knee pain, such severe knee pain that he required narcotics. He went to see his family doctor, the gatekeeper to the health system up there. The doctor told him that he was just going to treat him with some physical therapy and give him narcotics. This went on for over a year before he could get in to see an orthopedic surgeon. It took him over a year to be on the list to see the orthopedic surgeon for evaluation of this severe knee pain.

When he finally got to see the orthopedic surgeon after a year--of course here in this country if a family doctor, like me, wants to get a patient to the orthopedic surgeon, we can do it within a matter of days and certainly weeks, if the orthopedist is extremely busy. But it took him over a year to see an orthopedic surgeon that was mandated by the government. He had to see this particular one. It took him over a year to see him. The orthopedic surgeon finally did some x-rays on him and told the patient, Yes, you've got such and such a condition in your knee; and you need an operation.

This patient said, Fine. Let's go to the hospital. I want to get rid of this pain. I want to get off the narcotics. The orthopedic surgeon said, No, no, no, no. You can't do that. We'll have to put you on a waiting list to get in the hospital for your surgery. The patient said, Well, how long is that going to take? We don't know, is what he was told. So the patient left Canada and came to the United States--I think to Michigan--to get his much-needed simple knee surgery that was denied immediate care, may even have made him a narcotic addict because he was put on those narcotics that he had to take for the severe pain. So he had to deal with that too because the government delayed his evaluation and his treatment.

That's exactly what's going to happen to people here in America under this plan that's being presented by the Democrats.

No.

Tell me it's not so.

It's almost 14 percent in many of my counties in Georgia.

Well, I want to bring up that we hear all of these grandiose promises from the President, but I want to remind the Speaker and my colleagues here in the House--I can't speak to the American people--but if I could speak to them, I'd remind them, too, that the President just recently said that his non-stimulus bill is working just like he thought it would. Yet we have more people out of work today, and the promises made have been broken, and I was coming to that very point. The Chief of Staff of the President, Rahm Emanuel, who used to be a Member here in this House--

The point being that the President and his administration give us all of these grandiose promises, and they use all this sleight of hand, shell game of words to try to tell people what they want to hear, but the reality is what they say is not factual. It's just absolutely not factual, and the American people need to understand that.

I would like to come back to something that my friend, Mr. Hoekstra from Michigan, was just saying about the government bureaucracy. And I want to remind all my colleagues that Mr. Hoekstra was talking about that putting the bureaucrats in charge of this gives us more power. But we won't have any control because the commissioner, or the health czar, is going to be making these decisions, and we won't.

As Members of Congress, as the duly elected representatives of each of our districts, we won't have any say whatsoever on what that commissioner does. And coming back to what my friend, Michele Bachmann, was talking about and my friend Steve King was talking about, we have got a clear picture of what is going on here, about taking over the economy by this President. Because he is doing exactly the same thing that his Marxist buddy, Hugo Chavez, is doing in Venezuela. We have a very clear picture long term of where that leads.

And that leads to what another one of our President's good buddies, Fidel Castro, has done to Cuba. We are headed down that same road. The American people can look at Cuba, at their health system, at their economic system, and see that that is exactly the direction that this administration is taking us. I'll yield back.