Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this unfair rule and the underlying bill, and in support of the Republican substitute.

This bill is a tragedy, and to be taking it up a day after the unemployment figures were released that showed 10.2 percent, 15.5 million Americans out of work, the highest number in American history, and when you add in those who are underemployed, one out of every six Americans is looking for more work.

That means that the average American can look out from their home, their neighbor to their left, their neighbor to their right, and in their own home, and they will see at least one person who is looking for more work or who is completely unemployed. And the same day a report came out showing that this legislation will cost up to 5.5 million more jobs. It is an outrage. That is why this legislation should be opposed.

Don't let this 2,000-page, 400,000-word, job-killing, tax-increasing, bureaucratic legislation fall on your job.

Mr. Speaker, what's in this 2,000-page monstrosity that's costing the taxpayers over $1 trillion in costs? Well, we're going to see tax increases of $800 billion, and $500 billion in cuts from Medicare.

Well, take a look on page 94. Section 202(c) prohibits the sale of private health insurance policies beginning in 2013, forcing individuals to purchase coverage through the Federal Government.

On page 225, however, section 330 permits, but does not require, Members of Congress to enroll in government-run health care.

Page 122, section 233(a)(3) requires the commissioner, a new health insurance czar, to issue guidance on best practices of plain language writing. This from the same people who wrote this 2,000-page health care bill.

Page 183, section 305(a) gives the commissioner the power to enlist appropriate entities, like Planned Parenthood and ACORN, to engage in outreach to specific vulnerable populations about the bill's new programs.

Oppose this bill.

Mr. Speaker, yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak about the Democratic plan that will encompass 2,000-plus pages, 400,000 words, more than $1.3 trillion in costs, over $800 billion in tax increases, and the likelihood that it will kill more than 5 million jobs. Today, I would like to talk about the Republican alternative that will be offered when this legislation comes up for a vote, and I would like to contrast it with what we are talking about.

The Republican alternative lowers health care premiums. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the

alternative would reduce health insurance premiums by up to 10 percent for employees who get coverage through small businesses with 50 or fewer employees. According to the CBO estimates, all told, under the GOP plan, premiums for millions of families would be nearly $5,000 lower than Speaker Pelosi's cheapest insurance plan.

It guarantees affordable coverage for patients with preexisting conditions. The Republican alternative makes it illegal for an insurance company to deny coverage to someone with prior coverage on the basis of a preexisting condition. So, if you lose your health insurance because you lose your job, because you move or get divorced or just want to change plans, you are protected.

It protects seniors' Medicare benefits. Under the plan offered by Speaker Pelosi, there are more than $500 billion in cuts in the Medicare program at a time when baby boomers--those born after World War II--are starting to retire. We're going to need to have reforms of the Medicare program to achieve savings, but those savings are going to have to be plowed back into the Medicare program to pay for the millions of Americans who are going to become eligible for that program.

The Republican alternative has no tax increases, none, nada, zip, period, no tax increases compared to more than $800 billion in tax increases primarily focused on small businesses.

In fact, the Republican alternative encourages small businesses to offer health care coverage without taxing job creation. Unlike Speaker Pelosi's bill, which punishes small businesses with onerous mandates and exorbitant taxes that the CBO says will be passed on to the employees in the form of lower wages, the Republican alternative plan gives small businesses the power to pool together and offer health care at lower prices just as corporations and labor unions do.

It enacts real medical liability reform to cut down on the amount of defensive medicine, and the Congressional Budget Office says it will save the Medicare and Medicaid programs $54 billion alone, much less additional savings that will come to private insurance companies and hospitals and doctors in terms of the reduction in defensive medicine that will be practiced. It prohibits abortion funding, a serious problem in the Democratic alternative that has caused a great deal of turmoil on their side of the aisle.

There's no entitlement expansions, forcing Americans on to a government-run plan, and it reduces the deficit. According to the CBO, the Republican alternative reduces the deficit by $68 billion over the next 10 years and continues to reduce the deficit in the second budget window.

Compare this to the plan offered by Speaker Pelosi, which will raise premiums on health insurance for individuals. It will reduce health care choices. It will cause delays and denials of care. It will take $500 billion in Medicare cuts and $729.5 billion in new taxes.

Now, this new bill that has been offered by the Democrats is 2,000 pages long. You may recall that the last bill offered by them was only a thousand pages long and had 53 new government agencies and programs. In fact, many may be familiar with this diagram that shows what additional new programs were created under the 1,000 page bill. You might think this is pretty confusing and would cause a lot of difficulty for a lot of people. Well, guess what?

With a 2,000-page bill they added another more than 90 new programs and agencies to the 53 that are on the original chart. Here is the original chart. This is all of the bureaucracy and confusion and cost that has been added in this new bill. If anyone on either side of the aisle has any doubt about whether the simple proposals offered by the Republican alternative have broad-based public support, most of these proposals, 60, 70, 80 percent of the American people support. Certainly they do not support this kind of bureaucracy. Certainly they do not support the kinds of tax increases that could cost as many as 5.5 million jobs, according to one projection out today. And they certainly do not support this kind of government takeover of our American health care system.

Madam Speaker, I rise in opposition to the health care reform bill offered by Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic leadership, which we anticipate will be voted on possibly before the end of this week, and in support of the commonsense, practical alternative offered by Congressman John Boehner, the Republican leader in the House.

Madam Speaker, this legislation offered by Speaker Pelosi is over 2,000 pages long and contains about 400,000 words. To give you an idea of the magnitude of this government takeover of the health care system in the United States, this legislation uses the word ``shall'' 3,425 times. When you see the word ``shall'' in legislation, you should read a mandate, a requirement, that the government is requiring somebody to do something to comply with what people here in Washington know best, not in terms of what people know is best for themselves. This legislation contains that word 3,425 times. It is truly a remarkable, complex government takeover.

In the original bill offered earlier this year, which was 1,000 pages long, there was the creation of 53 new Federal Government agencies and programs. In the new improved revised version, there are now 111 Federal Government agencies and programs contained in this legislation, which will cost the American taxpayers and our senior citizens more than $1.1 trillion. That is the official government estimate. There are many health care experts who say that the implementation of this legislation will cost far, far more.

As an example, many have pointed to the projected cost of Medicare when it was enacted in 1965. It was projected that it would cost $10 billion to $12 billion 25 years later; but by the end of the 1980s, Medicare was actually costing the American taxpayers more than $100 billion. In fact, today it costs more than $400 billion per year; and the Speaker's proposal says, well, let's take out of that $400 billion per year. Let's take about $40 billion a year, or 10 percent of that, and divert it to other new government programs.

Well, Madam Speaker, the problem with that is that the Medicare program today is faced with enormous challenges. The projected unfunded liability for Medicare over the lifetime of the average American today is more than $17 trillion, here at a time when starting next year senior citizens will increase in their numbers dramatically because the baby boomers, those born in the years after World War II and up until the early 1960s, will be retiring, will be reaching eligibility age for Medicare, and year after year after year the number of Medicare- eligible senior citizens will increase dramatically.

At the same time that will be occurring, this Congress is suggesting that it will be okay to take $400 billion out of the Medicare program to spend on an entirely new health care program that is projected to cost $1.1 trillion over 10 years, and I suggest will cost far more than that. So Medicare is going to be jeopardized by this legislation, and senior citizens across this country are aware of that.

They certainly were aware of it in Virginia this year, my home State, when they turned out on Tuesday in very large numbers to send a message to Washington that this health care proposal and other dramatic government takeovers of sectors of our economy is unacceptable and it resulted in a sweep across the elections in Virginia. And in the only two States in the country where there were Governors races up this year, New Jersey and Virginia, Democratic Governors were replaced by Republican Governors. People are looking to Washington.

There is a story in today's New York Times entitled ``Democrats to Use Election to Push Agenda in Congress.'' Well, good luck with that, because I can tell you that the people who turned out at the polls in Virginia were not asking for this agenda to be pushed forward as a result of what they have been seeing going on in Washington, D.C. Instead, they want commonsense, bipartisan reforms of health care.

Health care is in need of reform. It costs too much, and not enough Americans receive it. The Republican alternative provides for that. The Democratic alternative does not.

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 836, I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. Speaker, the reviews are starting to come in on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's health care reform proposal, and those reviews are pretty serious.

In my home State, the Richmond Times Dispatch calls the bill grotesque; but perhaps the best description that I have seen, the most accurate description I have seen, is in The Wall Street Journal, that wrote an editorial on Sunday calling this legislation the worst bill ever.

How could anyone conclude otherwise? This 1,990-page runaway train of more than 400,000 words, creating more than 53 new government agencies and programs, is not the change that the American people asked for. This bill is going to raise the cost of health care to the overwhelming majority of Americans. It's going to make our health care system more complicated than it already is, more costly than it already is.

There are simple reforms that we could adopt if we would pay attention to what the American people want.

Mr. Speaker, somewhere in this Capitol, behind closed doors, the Democrats, by themselves, are writing a health care reform bill that is going to cost the taxpayers of this country more than $1 trillion.

Added on top of the enormous debt that we already have, this legislation is also going to include mandates that are going to risk millions of American jobs. At a time when we have nearly 10 percent unemployment and nearly 15 million people in this country looking for work, they're going to pass legislation that's going to cost millions of more jobs if they attempt to mandate on small businesses, which are struggling, an additional obligation of an 8\1/2\ percent payroll tax.

In addition, this is going to harm our senior citizens in a multitude of ways. Those of them who are on Medicare Advantage plans, like thousands in my congressional district in Virginia, are going to lose the opportunity to participate in those plans as they take $162 billion in cuts out of that portion of Medicare and $400 billion in cuts from Medicare overall.

Save our seniors. Vote against this bad plan.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to discuss H.R. 3548, the Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2009.

Madam Speaker, let there be no doubt that I understand that our economy faces historic and unprecedented challenges and I will remain committed to working with Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle to enact responsible legislation which puts money back into the hands of those who can really turn our economy around--the American people and small businesses.

However, H.R. 3548 extends the current unemployment benefits extension program, as established by the FY 2008 supplemental, and extended in two subsequent acts, by an extra 13 weeks for only those States with unemployment rates above 8.5%. Enactment of H.R. 3548 would cause individuals in States with unemployment rates in excess of 8.5% to be eligible for benefits for a total duration of 92 weeks.

Madam Speaker, like you, I believe that a key component of an economic recovery plan is assistance for the unemployed. Unfortunately, this legislation would only apply to unemployed individuals in 29 States with unemployment rates above 8.5%. To be clear, individuals in 21 other States would be ineligible to receive compensation under this legislation. Virginia's current unemployment rate stands at 6.5%. Thus, Virginia residents are not eligible for these benefits. I cannot support legislation that does not allow Virginia residents to benefit from the formulas adopted under this legislation

Even more egregious is that businesses in Virginia and other excluded States are required to foot the bill for these benefits via the extension of the Federal Unemployment surtax through 2010. This tax would otherwise expire at the end of this year. Madam Speaker, I cannot support legislation that imposes a tax on businesses in Virginia when funds generated under this tax will be of zero benefit to the residents of Virginia, or the remaining 20 States in the Nation.

There are many counties and cities in Virginia that have unemployment rates above 8.5% and yet citizens living in those areas who are unemployed will receive no benefits from this legislation even as employers in the same areas will pay taxes taking money out of the local economy and seeing it circulate instead in some other part of the country for the arbitrary reason that statewide unemployment is above a particular percentage. Further, the individual who is out of a job and can't find another is suffering through the same situation for themselves and their families no matter where they live. Madam Speaker, this legislation is unfair to my constituents and that is why I voted against it.

Mr. Speaker, Representative Joe Wilson's outburst at the joint session of Congress last week was inappropriate. However, Representative Wilson has already apologized for his actions. He was right to apologize, and President Obama graciously accepted his apology. Now it's time to move on to the substance of the health care reform bill.

Even President Obama has called for an end to the partisan bickering over the health care bill. However, with the introduction and consideration of this resolution, it is clear that the Democrat leadership has rejected this call.

A majority of Americans oppose the Government-run healthcare plan that the House Democrat leadership is pushing. However, instead

of debating the substance of the bill and addressing the concerns of the American people, it is clear that the majority would rather reopen old wounds with this resolution and divert attention back to an incident that is over.

What is it that the Democrats are trying to divert attention away from? Is it the fact that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has declared that their current health care reform proposal, H.R. 3200, ``Does not contain any restrictions on noncitizens--whether legally or illegally present, or in the United States temporarily or permanently-- participating in the [taxpayer-subsidized health insurance] exchange?'' Is it the fact that Republican amendments to make clear that no benefits would be given to illegal aliens were defeated by the Democrats on party-line votes?

Regardless, Speaker Pelosi and the Democrat majority's insistence on demanding an apology from a man who has already apologized is a waste of time at best and a purposeful diversion at worst. The American people deserve better.

We do not have time for these partisan tactics when we should be addressing the grave concerns of the American people about the merits of the current health care reform proposal.

I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. I thank her and the gentleman from Oklahoma for their leadership in attempting to address this issue, even though we bring a bill to the floor under a closed rule, with no opportunity, not only on the floor of the House, but also in the House Agriculture Committee, to mark up a bill that proposes to make food safer. Unfortunately, this bill does little, if anything, to enhance food safety.

The legislation does not require the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to spend one additional penny on the inspection of food; yet the legislation imposes significant regulatory burdens on small businesses without properly holding the regulatory agency accountable. The bill contains an expanded

registration requirement that effectively creates a Federal license to be in the food business.

Like the Democrat stimulus bill, cap-and-trade, and the proposed health care bill, this is another example of broadening the size and scope of government, raising new taxes on small businesses, and intruding in the private lives of Americans.

On-farm performance standards: New language added to the bill would exclude row crop producers from FDA regulatory authority over growing and harvesting of crops. Language was also improved that would relieve livestock producers from some of the burdens of the law. Although these are needed changes, they do not go far enough to make the bill acceptable. This bill still leaves our Nation's fruit and vegetable producers subject to objectionable regulatory burdens. We can still expect to have an agency of the Federal Government telling our farmers how to do their jobs.

Registration of food-processing facilities was originally envisioned as a commonsense way of helping the FDA identify facilities under the bioterrorism act in 2002. This provision turns registration into a Federal license for any food business to operate by charging exorbitant fees, making it unlawful to sell food without a registration license and allowing the FDA to suspend a company's registration.

Traceability is another issue. It does not make food safer. Traceability simply adds enormous regulatory burden without even knowing if it can be done in the first place. There is no requirement that the system developed by the FDA be feasible or affordable.

Recordkeeping: Broad recordkeeping authorities will impose significant regulatory burdens. Minimal consideration is given to risks associated with the product produced at the regulated facility when developing the recordkeeping requirements. The language lacks protections from disclosure of proprietary information.

The issue of quarantine authority. The bill's quarantine authority allows the Food and Drug Administration to quarantine a geographic area if there is credible evidence that food poses a health risk. No consideration is given to economic losses suffered by food producers, processors or distributors in the quarantine area. It's my understanding that the ranking member of the Agriculture Committee will offer something that will help to correct that later on, and I hope everyone will support that measure.

In particular, if the FDA ultimately lifts the quarantine for lack of confirmatory evidence, the agency has no obligation, authority or means to indemnify producers for their losses. Conversely, under the authority of the Animal Health Protection Act and Plant Protection Act, the USDA, which has jurisdiction over other sectors of our food safety and has done an outstanding job, must indemnify producers who have incurred such losses.

The language allows the FDA to act on suspicion to require a producer to cease distribution of food. Once again, no consideration is given in this legislation to indemnification for economic damages, particularly if the FDA was wrong.

From a public health and safety point of view, end product testing offers little protection or assurance. HAACP was introduced as a system whereby the manufacturer evaluates their process and institutes site and process specific controls, rather than attempt to detect problems by testing the finished product. That is the better way to go.

Mr. Speaker, I would urge my colleagues to oppose this rule, this closed rule, and this bad bill.

Mr. Speaker, it is a real honor today to welcome our guest chaplain, the Reverend Jonathan Falwell, the senior pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, one of the largest churches in America, which has a tremendous outreach to the community in Lynchburg and across Virginia, across our Nation and, indeed, across the world helping people in need. He also serves as the executive vice president of spiritual affairs at Liberty University, the world's largest evangelical Christian university, with over 40,000 students, both on campus and online.

I very much welcome not only Reverend Falwell, but his entire family who is with us in the gallery today, and we are delighted that they could be with us to share in a full day of activities here at the United States Capitol and to meet as many Members of the House and staff members and others who work so hard here on behalf of our country.

I hope Members will take the opportunity to come by and say hello to him at the various places he'll be during the course of the day. I'm honored to call Reverend Falwell a constituent and, most importantly, a dear friend; and I offer the thanks of this entire body to him for delivering today's morning prayer. He is joined by his wife, Shari, as well as their four children, Jonathan Jr., Jessica, Natalie and Nicholas, as well as his mother, Macel. Thank you all for being with us.

Mr. Speaker, where are the jobs?

They're certainly not in the so-called ``stimulus package'' that passed this Congress and that hasn't created any jobs. In fact, we've lost millions of jobs since that package passed. They are certainly not in the cap-and-tax legislation that passed this Congress 6 weeks ago. That legislation will cost millions of American jobs. Mr. Speaker, they most certainly are not in this so-called ``health care bill'' that the Democrats are offering today, which will cost an estimated 4.7 million jobs as employers find they can't pay the taxes being imposed upon them and as we see those jobs going overseas to countries where they can afford to do business.

This is not the right way to preserve the choice for the American people in their health care. This is not the right way to make sure that our health care in this country is available to the many, many hundreds of millions of people who receive it today. We need to reform our health care system with legislation that deals with medical malpractice reform, with association health plans, with things that cut down on the cost before we address this massive tax increase.

Well, I thank the gentleman from Tennessee, my good friend, for yielding me this time and for organizing this excellent discussion about what we need to do about America's energy policy and about creating those jobs because we know we have the ideas. We have been talking about them for well over a year now in terms of the American Energy Act and things that we have been doing to try to bring this Congress in the right direction on the creation of new jobs by creating an America that is not dependent upon foreign sources of energy.

I have had the privilege of traveling to the gentleman's district in Tennessee to talk about one of those areas. We held a conference down there, talking about renewable fuels, particularly fuels generated by switchgrass and other forms of agricultural production other than corn, which has been such a problem in our country today. That is right there, and that is something that we can do.

We all support developing other forms of new technology. We want to find a cheaper way to build solar cells. We want to find a less expensive way to generate electricity from wind or to generate power from geothermal and other new technologies. We also want to encourage as much energy efficiency as we possibly can. All of those things will help our families and help our businesses. It will help them remain competitive and preserve and create jobs.

But we also know that it is absolutely important, if America is going to create new jobs, that we have to utilize the resources that we have in this country, that we have been dependent upon for a long time. And until you have new technologies, you don't raise the cost of the types of energy that people are dependent upon.

More than half of our electricity comes from coal, a resource which we have in tremendous abundance in this country. Twenty percent of our electricity comes from nuclear power, another area that the gentleman from Tennessee and I share a very strong common interest in, he having Oak Ridge in his congressional district and I having Lynchburg, a major nuclear power center in the country, in my congressional district.

The legislation that we voted on a month ago here in the Congress did nothing to promote the most greenhouse gas-reducing form of electricity generation, nuclear power. That, to me, seemed to be something that was completely and totally neglected in that legislation.

Coal, on the other hand, wasn't neglected. It was thrown out in a way that will raise the cost of electricity to my constituents and anybody in the country from areas that are heavily dependent upon electricity generation from coal, which, by the way, is most of the country.

So that was the wrong approach. The right approach is the American Energy Act. Many of us--I think everybody who is here this evening-- came back here to Washington last August when gasoline prices were $4 a gallon and oil was $140 a barrel. We took the floor in a darkened Chamber day after day after day to talk to the people who were touring the Capitol. People around the country were aware of what we were doing to tell the story of what needed to be done.

We came back into session in September, and that was completely ignored. And we never have revisited the need to have a comprehensive energy act where, if we really made this a top priority of our country, we would become free of dependence upon foreign

oil and other foreign sources of energy in 15 or 20 years. And even more importantly, we would create millions of jobs, exploiting those resources that we have in this country.

This is not a new idea. This is how America came to be a strong Nation, a competitive Nation, a Nation with millions of jobs. The reminder of the importance of doing this is right there above us on the wall, above our Speaker's rostrum, above the American flag, above our Nation's motto, ``In God we trust,'' at the very top of the wall, a famous quote from Daniel Webster that says, ``Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.''

That saying, more than 150 years old, is every bit as important today as it was back when Daniel Webster said it. That's what we have to hearken to; not the idea that somehow government will solve all of these problems, that government can provide people with all the health care they need, paying for it with taxes on small businesses and losing jobs, mandating all kinds of new agencies and institutions, more than 30 to run this crazy program; not with the cap-and-tax proposal that will cost American jobs, raise the cost of living for every American, make it harder for manufacturers and farmers and others to be competitive with other countries around the world that have no intention of engaging in a practice that raises unnecessarily the cost of the basic ingredient for manufacturing and agricultural success and really enjoying a good standard of living for anyone's life, and that is having access to affordable sources of energy.

It is certainly not going to be solved by having this government spend through the roof. We saw back in January the most amazing single appropriations bill ever, the so-called stimulus package to create jobs. Now here we are 6 months later, and the question is being asked day after day after day, not just by those of us here in the Congress but by people all across America, ``Where are the jobs?''

Well, you don't get them by government spending. You get them by returning to the ingenuity of the American people, their hardworking spirit, their knowledge that it is the free enterprise system that will bring this economy back. But we delay day after day after day and dig the hole deeper and deeper and deeper when we pile up debt like this-- $1 trillion. That is a stack of thousand-dollar bills 63 miles high.

And then in March we went on to pass the budget for next year. We said, ``Ooh, I'll outdo that.'' I voted against it. Mr. Wamp voted against it. Others here talking tonight voted against it. Every Member of our party voted against it, but also a lot of Members in the other party voted against a budget that has a $1.2 trillion deficit for next year. That's a stack of thousand-dollar bills 75 miles high, which reaches up into outer space, and we don't see any end to it.

The 10-year projection for the budget passed by the majority party and the President never sees it going below--the highest deficit ever before this year was $450 billion. It never gets below $600 billion ever again as far as the eye can see. That will cost jobs. That will raise the cost of living. That will raise interest rates and inflation. It is devastating to our country.

We need to return to sound fiscal responsibility. We need to return to an opportunity to have an American energy policy that creates millions of jobs here by drilling for oil offshore and on Federal lands; by extracting the huge resources we have of natural gas; by building new, safe, more modern, latest-technology nuclear power plants; by using clean-burning coal technology and advancing that and developing new technologies. All of these things coupled together will lead to a bright future. But the path we are on now worries all Americans, and we need to turn off of it as quickly as possible.

I thank the gentleman again and hope that the message that sits on our wall, let us develop the resources of our land--not Venezuela, not Nigeria, not Saudi Arabia. Let us develop the resources of our land. That will lead to the creation of the jobs that people are looking for and the restoration of our economy. I thank the gentleman.

Last week, Democratic leaders in Congress introduced the ``America's Affordable Health Choices Act,'' which sets the tone for a Washington takeover of the health care system, one defined by Federal regulation, mandates, a myriad of new big government programs, and a significant increase in Federal spending. A recent poll, which was released at the beginning of July, indicates that Americans by a margin of 2-1 think a government takeover of health care would be a bad thing. Unfortunately, the Democratic leadership is not listening to the American people and they are pushing legislation which only offers more of what is wrong with the current system.

At least two different independent analyses of the House Democrats health care legislation estimate that more than 100 million Americans would lose their current health care coverage. In addition to losing their health insurance, Americans are going to lose control over their health care decisions. Under the Democrats' vision, Washington would have ultimate control over what is best for patients, what treatments are acceptable, and how long patients wait for needed care. Additionally, this misguided health care legislation is estimated to cost the

Federal Government as much as $1.5 trillion. In fact, Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf testified before the House Ways and Means Committee that the coverage proposals in this legislation would expand Federal spending on health care to a significant degree. He went on to say that in CBO's analysis so far, they didn't see other provisions in the legislation reducing Federal health spending by a corresponding degree.

To pay for this massive new government expansion, the legislation contains $820 billion in new job-killing tax increases imposed on certain income filers, a majority of whom are small businesses, even while the country remains in a serious recession. Struggling middle class families need jobs and small businesses cannot afford to hire more workers while paying higher taxes. It's simple. People want to focus on creating jobs, not raising taxes. For this reason, the National Retail Federation, which represents the employers of one in five American workers, the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents over 350,000 small and independent businesses, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers all strongly oppose the current health care reform legislation.

Rather than creating a massive government-managed health care bureaucracy that will dictate medical decisions from Washington, we should be concentrating our efforts on making health care more affordable for all Americans and giving them the freedom to choose the health care and health insurance plans that best fit their needs. Some important first steps toward real health care reform include creating health insurance tax credits, which will increase the affordability of health care for those who do not have access to employer-based health insurance, expanding health savings accounts, creating association health plans which allow employers to band together to purchase insurance coverage at lower rates for their employees, medical malpractice reform, which would discourage the practice of defensive medicine, and encouraging the establishment of a nationwide health information technology network which can reduce medical errors, save time, money and, most importantly, save lives.

While we can all agree that our current health care system is flawed, there are many different ideas about how to fix it. Republicans have solutions that will empower patients with choices, make high quality coverage more affordable, and protect and preserve the doctor-patient relationship. The most important principles in health care reform are holding down costs and preserving consumer choices. We already spend far more per person than any other country in the world. Reform must mean using the health care dollars we now spend in a smarter, more effective way. We should be preserving and enhancing the ability of people to choose the plans that are tailored to their needs and the doctors that they trust to guide them, not putting more power in the hands of Washington bureaucrats.

Mr. Speaker, let me ask a question. I don't know if it has been asked yet today. The American people want to know, where are the jobs? We have a Congress that has gone off the tracks. A trillion- dollar stimulus package, that's thousand-dollar bills stacked 63 miles high. Did we get any jobs? No. We have a budget with a $1.2 trillion deficit built into it. Are we going to get jobs? No. We are going to get inflation and higher interest rates.

We have a cap-and-tax bill that is going to kill American jobs by raising the cost of our traditional sources of energy, coal, nuclear and oil. We have a health care bill on the agenda before the Congress today that is going to kill jobs and raise the cost of health care to the American people rather than contain the cost and create more choice and more competition for the American people.

This Congress is out of control, and the American people want to know, Mr. Speaker, where are the jobs?