Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, the EPA is out to get you and crucify you. That's the message from one of President Obama's EPA appointees to our country's oil and natural gas companies.

Yesterday, we learned that an official at the Environmental Protection Agency based in Dallas used the Roman Empire to illustrate the kind of philosophy that he's followed at the EPA. Here's what he said:

The Romans used to conquer little villages in the

Mediterranean. They'd go into a little Turkish town

somewhere, they'd find the first five guys they saw, and they

would crucify them. And then you know that town was really

easy to manage for the next few years.

That's exactly what he did as an EPA official, going after a company that was safely using hydraulic fracturing to drill for gas. He led the charge to crucify this company with no proof that the company had done anything wrong in a case that was finally dismissed last month by a Federal court.

This is enviro-fascism at its worst; and if someone needs to be made an example of, it's this EPA official who disregarded science and facts to radically and negligently pursue the Obama administration's war on energy.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment that has been made in order.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

My amendment today maintains the State of Louisiana's ability to regulate hunting within its borders. In a decision announced March 1, 2012, the Forest Service Regional Forester located way over in Atlanta, Georgia, went over the heads of the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission to forever prohibit the use of dogs to hunt deer in Kisatchie National Forest.

Deer hunting has a long and important cultural history within the State of Louisiana. When French settlers first came to Louisiana in the 18th century, Louisiana was covered by thickets and dense timber. Most of these settlers had companion dogs with them, but the most treasured were the deerhounds. The use of dogs would help the hunter drive the deer out of the forest because deer were so plentiful and provided exciting races that provided sound nourishment.

Hunting in many forms has been for decades, and continues to be, a compatible activity on the 600,000-acre Kisatchie National Forest. Oddly enough, the Regional Forester does not prohibit the use of dogs for hunting raccoon, squirrel, rabbit, and game birds.

In 2011, the Kisatchie dog deer season was only 9 days and only applies to certain ranger districts. According to communication with the Forest Service, seven southern States allow hunting on national forests within their borders. They include Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina; but in this case, not Louisiana. However, this is the first time the Forest Service has issued a ban on dog deer hunting, or hunting deer with dogs, within a specific State.

According to the Forest Service itself, they indicate that revenue generated on dog deer hunting, including expenses to care for dogs, contributes to approximately 18 to 29 direct jobs and results in roughly $890,000 to $1.4 million of income. By their own assessment, it is likely that some economic benefits will be lost depending on whether hunting with dogs for deer leave the area to pursue the sport elsewhere. Now this is about to kill even more jobs in Louisiana.

I would also like to emphasize that the State of Louisiana, the NRA, and the Safari Club all support my amendment; and I urge support of this amendment.

I yield to the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would like to respond to some of the statements that were made.

I received a petition of thousands of hunters from Louisiana and several States who wanted this to continue. The State, not the Federal Government, is in the best position to make this determination. By October 6, 2009, the Forest Service had received 1,237 responses to its 2009 request for comments. Of these, 320 agreed with the proposed prohibition, but 917 were against it. That's a 77 percent majority of these respondents who were actually from central Louisiana where this Kisatchie National Forest exists. During October 2011, the Forest Service received over 1,300 more comments on the original proposal and environmental analysis. All but five letters--all but five letters, Mr. Chairman--were opposed to the proposed prohibition.

I reserve the balance of my time.

I just want to respond, again, the people of Louisiana, the State of Louisiana has full support of doing away with this prohibition. This was a decision made by somebody in Atlanta, a Federal person, that has to do with what is really a local issue. This is a tradition that goes back 300 years, and I think it's pretty obvious that the people of Louisiana support the continuance of hunting deer with dogs.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, in this hour, I and my colleagues who will be joining me very shortly--other physicians who are from the GOP Doctors Caucus, perhaps nurses, and other health care workers as well-- in this next hour we're going to be talking about our favorite subject, and that is health care reform. We're going to be talking about specific aspects, things that have actually come to light to us that I think are important. We're going to have other things that in the coming days we're going to learn about how ObamaCare was passed, what things were done by the other side of the aisle to make that happen, things that maybe some would call sausage-making, others would say it's improper. But we'll certainly spend some time on that as the days come.

I want to continue a theme that we've been discussing, and that is the broken promises of ObamaCare. Remember, to get ObamaCare passed, President Obama made a number of promises.

I'll start with the first one that is relevant to our topic tonight, and that is: Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. That was candidate Obama, Senator Obama at the time, who talked about all the number of things that were going to be good about ObamaCare; but in fact we see that virtually everything that's come up, with a few possible exceptions, has not been so favorable.

I think that taxes is really a very relevant subject to speak about this evening because here we are and today is the tax deadline for the IRS, and we all have that on our minds. It's interesting, whenever I file my taxes, the first thing I think about doing is projecting into the next year what the issues are going to be for me and my taxes. And so I think it's only proper and the timing is excellent that we talk about that this evening.

Remember, Candidate Obama pledged he would not raise any of your taxes and promised not to tax health benefits. His health care broke those promises at least 10 times. Here's just a lineup of some of the taxes that we're talking about.

Fifty-two billion dollars in fines on employers who do not provide government-approved coverage. Remember that under ObamaCare not only is there a mandate date for individuals to buy health insurance. There's a mandate on the employers, the business owners to buy it as well. And upon both is the burden to buy not health insurance but government- conceived health insurance, that is, health insurance that the government in its wisdom--our Federal Government--decides and deems is proper for us. And so you have to make two fulfillments in that mandate. One is to buy health care insurance and, number two, health care insurance that's approved by the government.

Thirty-two billion dollars in taxes on health insurance plans. The actual health plans are going to be taxed as well. Now, who is going to pay that tax? Do you think the insurance companies are going to pay it? No, it's going to be passed down to you, the subscriber, as taxes on business always make their way down to the consumer.

Five billion dollars in taxes from limits on over-the-counter medication; $15 billion in taxes from limiting the deduction on itemized medical expenses; $13 billion in taxes from new limits on flexible-spending arrangements; $60 billion in taxes on health insurance plans; $27 billion in taxes on pharmaceutical companies; $20 billion in taxes on medical device companies; $3 billion in taxes on tanning services; $3 billion in taxes on self-insured health plans; and $1 billion in new penalties on health savings account distributions. The health care law also includes a high income tax. Because it's not indexed for inflation, it will eventually hit 80 percent of taxpayers.

I draw my colleagues' attention to this slide: ``ObamaCare's Rising Tax Burden.'' You can see that the tax burden in 2012, the year we're in, is $190 for a family of four. That's $15 billion. You see that the burden goes up each year, and that in the out-years, 2022, it makes it above $150 billion. In 2032, the burden goes well above $250 billion. And it finally tops out at $320 billion total, and that's an average of $3,290 for a family of four.

So what am I saying? Remember that when you hear the rhetoric from the other side of the aisle, it talks about how we should be having more sacrifice from the wealthy and more sacrifice from those who make more. Folks, we've been down this road before.

Remember the luxury tax that came out some years ago? What did it do? It killed the companies that made boats and luxury items. It created a lot of job losses. The people who were hurt were the working class people, not the wealthy. They can still buy those things anyplace they want to.

We also came up with this silly idea of an alternative minimum tax to make the wealthy do their fair share.

Well, we have the AMT today, and where has it gotten us? Because that was never indexed for inflation, middle class people are being hit by the alternative minimum tax. So it's no longer a tax on wealthy. It is a tax on the middle class, the people that our colleagues on the other side of the aisle talk so fondly of.

That's an important point, and that is that every time we come up with a tax on the wealthy, it always makes its way to the working class and the middle class.

Now, why is this? Is this by accident or is it by grand design? Well, folks, we all know that inflation occurs every year at an average rate of about 3 percent, but it's been as high as 16 percent in our history. And so any time we have a tax law that affects people in a certain income, we know that automatically, over time, people with lower and lower incomes, because while their absolute dollars in value are going to go up, the truth is, the purchase power of those dollars goes down. So that pushes more and more people of lower and lower income levels into higher and higher tax brackets.

So, again, our colleagues on the other side of the aisle love all of these taxes on the wealthy, but they can never make enough money. We've heard in recent days about the infamous Buffett tax, the Buffett rule that would require superwealthy people to pay some additional tax. And their own side agrees that would only add about $4 billion per year, not even a drop in the bucket, less than 1 percent of the annual deficit.

So why is that important? It's important because if you're going to get more income from taxes--and I would argue that you never really get more income from taxes, but if you think you can, you can only do it when you spread it out among the middle class and the working class. And the way you do that, kind of the silent way, the camel nose under the tent, is to pass it on the wealthy first, and then, through inflation, it's passed down to albeit a lower income level but a much larger group, because you simply can't get enough tax revenue by putting a lot of tax on the wealthy. There just isn't enough wealthy people out there to do it. The way you have to do it is push it down where there's a lot of people, and that's the middle class and the working class.

Another slide here, rhetoric versus reality on premium cost, the average annual cost of family health insurance premiums in the U.S.

Here we are 2012. This is what President Obama in campaigning for ObamaCare said would happen, that you would follow this blue line down, and the costs would go down by 2,500. And what are we hearing from all the actuaries, the CBOs and others? Not only will it go up by $393, but we already have a differential of around $4,000 from where President Obama said we would be today and where we actually are. It hasn't gone down; it's actually gone up.

Let's talk about a couple more taxes, and then I'm going to introduce a colleague here and give him some sharing time as well.

The surtax on investment income, $123 billion, which begins this past January, the creation of a new 3.8 percent surtax on investment income earned in households making at least $250,000 for a couple or $200,000 single. Now this is the homeowner real estate tax that you've heard about. It was, again, passed in the dead of night. Folks, this is a terrible tax, 3.8 percent on investment income.

Now, when you sell your home, it may or may not be classed as investment income, but it can be, it just depends on the situation. But it's not just that. If you own any type of other property, if you own stocks and bonds, mutual funds, whatever, they could be easily subject to this, and it is not indexed to inflation.

Again, let me reemphasize this. Yes, it's a tax on people who make over $200,000 a year, but if you make $50,000 a year, over time, this will affect you, too, because inflation will bring those dollars up in real terms because of inflation, and your buying power will stay at the $50,000 level, but you will show on paper that you're making $200,000, and this tax will affect you.

So the bottom line here is that ObamaCare has many taxes, and certainly they are Trojan horses by any explanation; and, yes, they don't raise a lot of revenue at first, but down the road they raise a lot of revenue, but not on the wealthy folks, on the middle class. That's who's getting hurt by ObamaCare.

A medicine cabinet tax, $5 billion beginning this past January, Americans are no longer able to use their health savings accounts and flexible spending accounts and all those other types of accounts on over-the-counter drugs. So that means if you want to use your health savings account to pay for your cold medicine or medicine you're taking for a headache like Aleve or Motrin or something like that, if you want to pay for it through your health savings account, you're going to have to go get a prescription from your doctor. And the doctor is going to say, Look, I'm overwhelmed with all these people wanting me to do this. We're going to have to charge something for that, so that means more cost. Ultimately, more bureaucracy, more paperwork, more cost, and up until now, prior to ObamaCare, that was not the case. You could write that off or pay for that out of your health savings account.

An HSA withdrawal tax hike, $1.4 billion, that began in January 2011. It increases additional tax on nonmedical early withdrawals from an HSA from 10 to 20 percent, disadvantaging them relative to IRAs and other tax advantage accounts. So, you see, if you have an early withdrawal from your IRA or some other type of retirement plan, you've had a 10 percent penalty, and that was true of HSAs. So that's been doubled. So ObamaCare has limited the use of health savings accounts, but at the same time has made the penalties even steeper for using it.

And I can tell you, in my own case, in my own companies, apart from my own medical practice, we have used health savings accounts to tremendous benefit to our employees because it has lowered their cost and taken a lot of the anxiety and the fear away from their cost in being caught in some sort of illness that would bankrupt them otherwise.

An excise tax on charitable hospitals, that's immediate, $50,000 per hospital if they fail to meet new community health assessment needs. Section 1411 increases the Medicare hospital insurance portion of the payroll tax, so this provision will increase the employees' portion from 1.45 percent to 2.35 percent for families making more than $250,000 a year or individuals making above 200. Combined with the employers' portion, the total rate will increase by 3.8 percent on every dollar of income over $250,000.

And, again, I implore you, I realize, hey, I don't make $250,000, I don't make $200,000, but because of inflation--and trust me, with the monetary easing and the monetary policies that are coming out of this administration in half of the last 3\1/2\ years--when inflation gets going again, which it will quite soon, you will be driven up into those income levels, but your buying power will be the same as it is today. So, trust me, you're not getting by with anything. You're going to get hit with this tax just like everybody else.

The reality is--and I'm going to be recognizing my good friend, Dr. Gingrey, here in a moment. The reality is ObamaCare includes tons of new taxes and tax hikes. Heritage has a list of them that shows an increase in revenue of more than $500 billion in 10 years. Two examples that clearly hit consumers are the 10 percent tax on indoor tanning services that will raise $2.7 billion between 2010 and 2019 and, beginning in 2013, the 2.3 percent excise tax on manufacturers and importers of certain medical devices that will raise $20 billion between 2010 and 2019.

And I'm just going to just throw in a couple of more things.

Remember, this discussion began with this being the April 15--April 17 deadline for your taxes and the Internal Revenue Service.

Remember that under ObamaCare as many as 16,000 new IRS agents will be hired. Estimates vary, of course, and that many have not been hired yet. But there's no question about it that the IRS will be beefed up to the tune of billions of dollars in order to make that happen.

So, with that, I've been joined by my colleague, my good friend, Dr. Phil Gingrey, an obstetrician/gynecologist

from Georgia, someone that I look up to very much, who's been a great mentor to me and a role model; who was here as a physician in days past when there weren't many doctors in the House of Representatives, and has helped facilitate, in fact helped start, the GOP Doctors Caucus, which is speaking here tonight, and helped grow our numbers from just a handful of physicians and health care workers to now over 15 MDs and upwards of around 20 total health care workers that we have in the House of Representatives that I think are making big, big differences in particularly health care policy overall.

I yield to the gentleman, Dr. Gingrey.

Well, I thank my friend and colleague. I'll certainly be returning back to you for some more information that's very valuable information.

I want to get back to and sort of recap some of the things I talked about, and that is that the taxes are tremendously increased under ObamaCare. Well, let's talk about the financing of ObamaCare. I'm just going to stick with the basics. There are a lot of ways it is theoretically financed, but I'm going to tell you maybe the three major ways that it's supposedly paid for.

Well, number one, you heard my friend, Dr. Gingrey, say that ObamaCare actually takes over $500 billion--that is, over a half- trillion dollars--from existing Medicare and uses that to subsidize the middle class health plans for people below a certain income level. We're going to get to that in just a moment--I'm going to draw your attention to this chart and talk about those subsidies. But not only does it do that, but as my good friend says, it's used to extend the life of Medicare.

So this is basically how it works. The idea of the bill is it takes money out of Medicare and theoretically makes Medicare last longer-- because it's running out of money--by taking the same money out of the middle and putting it at the end. I don't understand how that can work, but that's the way it works. That would be sort of like taking money out of your paycheck in the middle of the year and somehow living on nothing for about 3 months, and then going back to what you took out and paying at the end. It makes no sense.

Not only that, but it takes the same $500 billion--and we've really honed down on this in our committees, and Secretary Sebelius had to admit that this was true--it takes the same $500 billion that's used to prolong the life of Medicare to subsidize middle class health plans. I don't know--where I come from in Louisiana, we can't spend the same dollar twice. You can spend it place A and place B. If my kids want to go to the movies or they want to do some entertainment, or maybe they need money for their education, I can give it to them, and they can spend it one time. They don't get to use the same dollar twice. And folks, neither can your Federal Government. So that is really smoke- and-mirrors accounting. We've called them out on it, and they've really basically admitted that's true.

But then another way that ObamaCare is paid for is by over $800 billion in taxes in 10 years, which I've gone over a number of these, and I'm going to get back to them. It really is not paid for. And we know, we're getting estimates now showing that as much as 300 to $500 billion is going to be added over the next 10 years in deficits, total debt in that period of time. So it is not paid for. All of these steep taxes, all of these smoke-and-mirror types of accounting are not going to work.

Furthermore, half of the people who are going to get health care coverage cards that they wouldn't otherwise get are going to be on Medicaid. Today, Medicaid pays on average about 60 percent of what Medicare pays to health care providers, which is already too low. So what is the chance that 15 million Americans are going to come newly on the rolls, and they're going to carry a card around that pays less than what the doctor can afford to accept to even cover the cost of that care, or otherwise go out of business, what's the chance they're going to find doctors? So what we'll have is a drop in the number of physicians, a steep rise in the demand in health care. And so these people will all end up in emergency rooms.

To my colleagues, it's one thing to have coverage in health care. It's another thing altogether to have access to health care. All you have to do is look at other countries that have socialized health care--Great Britain, Canada, and many others, and even go to the extreme steps of Cuba and North Korea--they all have coverage, and it's free. The problem is there's no access to it. There are shortages. There are waiting times, as much as 1 year, 2 years to get a CT scan. People are dying as a result of that, and they show up in their statistics.

The death rates, for instance, from breast cancer and prostate cancer in the United States are much lower than they are in Canada and Great Britain. They have access to the same medications and the same quality physicians. The only difference is their health care systems themselves.

So let's get back again. I want to really focus on this topic for a moment before I yield time to my friend. And again, back to this idea that many of the taxes are going to be placed upon wealthy Americans in order to pay for ObamaCare. And I'll just step back through them again. There is a 40 percent excise tax on so-called ``Cadillac'' health plans, which would be health plans valued in excess of $10,200 for individuals, $27,500 for families. Those thresholds will grow annually by an inflation rate of 1 percent, which is about a third or less of what it really is.

So what that means is that, as ObamaCare unfolds, having an expensive gold-plated Cadillac health care plan, you're going to get taxed 40 percent more for having it. Well, maybe that's justified. But remember that after a few years, that will not be an expensive, gold-plated plan; that will be an average plan, and you will again have to pay the same 40 percent excise--bracket creep is what they called it back some years ago, and I think it applies here today.

Now, again, increases in Medicare hospital insurance. That's a payroll tax on people who make $200,000 a year individually, $250,000 as a couple, again, only applying to people who are in that $200,000- plus range. And then, of course, I told you the 3.8 percent tax on your investments that are sold for those who, again, make $200,000 or more.

Again, we go back to it. Remember the alternative minimum tax. Remember the luxury tax. Remember the tax that was placed on oil, the so-called ``windfall'' taxes. Ultimately, those taxes all fell to the middle class and below. Those are the ones who were burdened with them and why most of them have been repealed. We would repeal the alternative minimum tax if we could find a way to actually pay for it now because we're spending at a level that we can't afford to repeal it, unfortunately.

So here is this chart, which is very important in this whole discussion. Under ObamaCare, there is an income threshold for receiving subsidy. So if your income is just below $100,000 for a family, a married couple--and I believe that is a family of four total--if you make less than $100,000, or about $95,000 here, you'll get some kind of subsidy beginning in 2012, 2013. However, that subsidy, that line continues out all the way indefinitely, well past 2062 and before. Now, if you make $90,000 or less than $90,000 today, with inflation in those out-years--5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years--you will break through this threshold. So you will not get the support, the subsidy in your health plan in those out-years. You'll get it early so that you think you're getting something, but ultimately that's going to basically go away, and you will not get that subsidy.

Now, also, if you make $200,000 or $250,000 a year, you will be the one paying in for those who need this subsidy. But you see this line comes down because people who make $200,000 today, in 2022 they will still get a check that will say $250,000, but it will be more like $180,000 in today's dollars. With each year, it ratchets it down until finally you get to about 2042, or 2050, in that range. So a check today that says $200,000 on it will buy equivalent to something like $90,000 in those years because inflation devalues the actual currency that you hold.

So what you get is a crossover point where you see the subsidy threshold gets higher and higher. You've got to make more and more money to get that subsidy. But even though your income is the same, or going down, you actually drop out, and you get a crossover point. Where here, even though you're making $200,000 or $250,000, you're making too much for the subsidy, but you're not making too much to be taxed. And that is the problem.

Ultimately, over time, ObamaCare begins to take the subsidies out for those who are middle class and lower, and it begins to add taxes on those who are middle class and above. That is very destructive, my friends. That's the way you end up with socialized health care and with the kind of system that is working so poorly in many other countries.

We still have time to discuss some of these issues further, so I would ask my good friend from Georgia, Dr. Gingrey, to elaborate on some of his points tonight.

Would you touch a moment, Dr. Gingrey, on the fact that while we're trying to expand coverage and all of those things that there will actually be people who will be pushed off their coverage of the health care they have today, such as by their employers. Would you expound on that.

Yes.

You say that the threshold is 50 employees and that they lose certain subsidies or certainly face more penalties or costs after 50. What is the chance that a small business that has 49 employees will dare hire another employee?

I thank the gentleman. Again, great points.

Estimates are as high as 20 million Americans who are on insurance today through their employers, happy and satisfied with the coverage they have,

that will be pushed off. Why? Because the employer, the business will find it at least financially reasonable and perhaps beneficial to just pay the fine, push the employees out into the marketplace, make them go into the exchanges and force them to have to deal with the realities of ObamaCare.

I know that people hearing me say this would say, Well, that's coldhearted. If you really love your employees--and I have a small business and we employ considerably more than 50 employees, and I love my employees and I want them to have the best possible coverage. But look, if I have a competitor out there who can lower his cost by pushing his employees out and paying a penalty and then I go and do the right thing and pay that, then he's going to be able to sell his product at a lower price than me. That puts me out of business. Now not only do my employees not have health insurance, they don't have a job.

Back to this 50 threshold. Any time you have a law in the United States that penalizes an employer for hiring above a certain level, that is a terrible law by itself. It is disincentivizing an employer who is going to say, Well, I'm not going to grow my business. If I can't grow it by leaps and bounds and take tremendous risk and in the process bring in so much money to cover that incremental cost of health care, I'm not even going to try it. In fact, I may just close my business down altogether.

In the remaining moments we have--and I'll be happy to give Dr. Gingrey even further time to add some additional comments--I just wanted to go back again to this broken promise that was mentioned before both by Dr. Gingrey and myself, ``I will protect Medicare,'' President Barack Obama, September 2009. He promised he would protect Medicare.

Where are we today? The Republicans, through the Ryan plan, a very good plan, a very good budget, have a solution that will make Medicare sustainable for an indefinite period of time. The Democrats in the House say, No, we're not in for that. We're not in for anything. We have no ideas.

I'll remind folks in this body that the actuaries, the CBO, and all of the authorities tell us that Medicare runs out of money, becomes insolvent, becomes bankrupt in 4 to 8 years. So it's time that somebody comes up with a plan. We have a plan. We had one this year. We had one last year. We modified it a little bit to make it one that, I think, Democrats could accept, and they still have not signed on to it; although, we have one Democrat in the Senate who has, so it is bipartisan. But the President made the promise and the Republicans in the House are trying to keep it, and Democrats will not go along with that.

Again, to recap: ObamaCare cuts as much as $575 billion from the Medicare program; $200 billion from Medicare Advantage, which is a private form of Medicare that many Americans enjoy and love. It forces over 7 million seniors out of their current Medicare plan. Fifteen percent of hospitals, nursing homes, and home health will close because of Medicare paying less under ObamaCare.

Again, you can't cut out over $500 billion without cutting out reimbursements for something, and that's where it's going to be. It's going to be hospitals, nursing homes, home health agencies, and many other types of services that Medicare provides.

The CBO estimates that Medicare prescription drug coverage premiums will increase by 9 percent as a result of ObamaCare. Mr. Speaker, this is not a tax. It's not an expense just on the wealthy. It hits the middle class and the poor as well.

Finally, the CMS actuary projects the Medicare program could be bankrupt, as I mentioned before, as early as 2016. Medicare costs are projected to grow substantially from approximately 3.6 percent of the size of our economy, the GDP, in 2010, to 5.5 percent by 2035. That's the Medicare trustees.

The physician payment formula in Medicare needs to be fixed or seniors may lose their doctors. It costs $316 billion. We're hearing all over America about physicians who are beginning to back away from seeing Medicare patients. Not because they don't want to, not because they are not willing to sacrifice, but because if they do, they go out of business and they can't make it. Already access is an issue because of money problems. Twelve percent of physicians stopped seeing Medicare patients due to the broken physician formula that we have and that cannot be resolved and our friends on the other side refuse to address.

In our closing moments, I would be happy to yield to the gentleman, if he has any comments.

That's very important, because what I'm understanding you saying is that if the trust fund becomes insolvent and there are checks going out to physicians across America, we can't just connect a line over to the general budget and say we're going to cover the bills. No, they don't get paid. Checks will bounce. This is a problem that must be solved.

So to recap in the final moments that we have--and I want to thank my good friend, Dr. Gingrey, for joining me this evening. We really have a strong group of physicians and nurses and other health care workers in the GOP Doctors Caucus. We hope to be joined by some more next year as a matter of fact. We feel like the physicians are a strong force in the U.S. Congress, not just because they know and understand the health care economy, which is very unique, but also because physicians are unique in a way that we want to make a diagnosis and we want to treat and we want to cure. We're not about kicking the can down the road. We want to cure the disease or solve the problem and move to the next one, and so the more physicians we have here, I think we will.

But again, I want to just reiterate for my colleagues that just because you have a card that says you are entitled to care in the United States does not mean you have access to it. I want to reiterate that. Just because you have a card, just because you have coverage does not mean that the doors will open for you, and this is where our colleagues, I think, are misguided on the other side.

ObamaCare is all about giving coverage, all about giving cards to people, but it does not protect their access to care. Because, in fact, under their system, which is basically based on a socialized model, the only way that the government will be able to afford it, and taxpayers in general, will be to create long lines, create shortages, and say ``no,'' to be traffic cops to people.

And you know what? The parts of our health care system today that are government-run, already before ObamaCare, we are already seeing spot shortages; chemotherapeutic agents, injectable drugs, that are otherwise not expensive, but because of the quirks of this socialized, government-run, highly bureaucratic system, we're finding that the manufacturers can't make them because they don't get enough reimbursement to cover their cost.

So what happens is they slow down, or stop making them altogether, and we have diseases and cancers out there today where physicians are scrounging around looking for the correct chemotherapeutic agent which would cure their disease, and it's very inexpensive and has been around for many years, and we have to even look to other countries to supply that.

With that, I look forward to our next GOP Doctors Caucus. I always enjoy this. I hope that those in this Chamber

who listen to this find it at least somewhat informative.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It is indeed a pleasure to come to the floor today to speak to this Chamber about a subject that I think is very important on the minds of the American people, and that is the 2-year anniversary of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as PPACA, and certainly more commonly known as ObamaCare.

I want to give you a little context, Mr. Speaker, of where I come from. I'm a Congressman from Louisiana in the 4th District, centered in Shreveport Bossier. I have been a family physician for 36 years. I still see patients when I have the opportunity. I also have businesses on the side that are not related to health care.

So in my world for many years, and in raising a family, the responsibilities of meeting payrolls have included not only running a small medical practice but also a growing business dealing with all of the regulations, the taxation, and the many different issues--personnel problems, human resource problems--that we must deal with. And certainly providing health care has been a great challenge over the years. And there's no question that the system has not been what it should be prior to this time.

In fact, one of the reasons why I ran for Congress--and many other of my colleagues who were physicians--we have 15 just in the Republican section alone, and I think we'll have more next year--the reason why we've become so activated, if you will, when it comes to Federal policy on health care is because of all the failures that we've seen over the years and the problems with government trying to micromanage health care.

So what I want to talk about today is broken promises with regard to ObamaCare. You may recall that Candidate Obama, Senator Obama, says you will not have to change your health care plan if his health care plan is brought into law. For those of you, he said, who have insurance now, nothing will change under the Obama plan except that you will simply pay less.

Another quote from him is this. This is President Obama in June of 2009:

And that means that no matter how we reform health care, we

will keep this promise to the American people. If you like

your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. If you

like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your

health care plan.

Well, what is the truth of this? By the administration's own estimates, new health care regulations will force most firms and up to 80 percent of small businesses to give up their current plans by 2013. Grandfather plans would be subject to the costly new mandates and increased premiums under the President's health care plan.

Again, my own business is back home. We still cover our employees, and we would fall under the grandfather. But here's what we're up against. If we change just one dotted ``i,'' one crossed ``t,'' that totally nullifies the grandfather rule that applies to our plan. So what that means is if we change anything--the cost structure, anything--then simply we will fall into the government-mandated plan in which we have to choose among the three specified, certified government plans that would be chosen for us.

Now you could say, Well, we could keep exactly what we have without changing one scintilla of it. The problem is, what if the cost continues to go up--and it will--and we say maybe let's raise the deductible, raise copayments, cut some coverage someplace, change the way we cover pharmaceuticals, do something to lower that cost so we can afford it as a company and our patients can afford it. No. It then nullifies the grandfather clause and then it activates, of course, ObamaCare, and we will be required to be in it.

Let's go to broken promise number two. I have many broken promises but I'm going to focus on six today.

Broken promise number two. President Obama in September of 2009 says:

First, I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our

deficits either now or in the future. I will not sign it if

it adds one dime to the deficit now or in the future.

Well, is that true? An honest accounting of the health care plan finds that it will increase the deficit by hundreds of billions in the first 10 years alone. For instance, the law double-counts the Medicare savings.

It's interesting the way we have something in Washington, in Congress, called the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office. It uses a scoring mechanism. It works out of a 10-year budget window. So whatever we do, it either costs more or costs less, based on what happens for it in the next 10 years.

And so this was a big challenge for the Obama administration to get this bill passed because they saw what we saw, and that is it will add billions of dollars to the deficit. So what did they do? They manipulated the budget window to make it look like it paid for itself. And how did they do that? Well, for one thing, the way the bill is set in motion and the way it's implemented is that for the first 4 years-- you've noticed that even though it passed in March of 2010, it hasn't been implemented. Why? A very good reason. Because the costs don't begin until it's implemented. However, the revenues already began soon after the bill passed. So the way it was scored is we have 10 years of revenue--that's income--and 6 years of costs.

Well, Mr. Speaker, I could run any business profitably that way if I have 10 years of revenue and only 6 years of cost. That's precisely what happened here. However, the law has been rescored and in fact what was supposed to be a $900-some billion bill over 10 years is now rescored at $1.75 trillion. And next year, which will then stretch it out the full 10 years, it will be well over $2 trillion.

Former CBO Director Douglas Holz-Eakin has written that:

Under a realistic set of assumptions, the law will increase

the deficit by at least $500 billion in the first 10 years

and more than $1.5 trillion in the second decade.

Mr. Speaker, let's go back to where we are with government health care pre-ObamaCare. Back in the nineties, the last time that we balanced a budget was under President Clinton and after, of course, a Republican-controlled House and Congress in general sent a balanced budget three times in a row. He vetoed it twice and finally signed it the third time.

How did they do it and we can't do it today? Well, one reason is very important, and that is that at that time 30 percent of the budget was made up of mandatory spending, that's entitlement spending, which would be Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other forms of mandatory spending such as welfare, section 8 and so forth. So that meant that 70 percent was discretionary spending, which means that you could cut budgets out of certain departments and agencies and you could begin to balance a budget once again.

Well, today it is 60 percent of the budget that's mandatory or entitlement spending--and growing--which means that we have certainly much less to work with in order to balance the budget, and it continues to grow. The largest piece of that is Medicare itself.

Mr. Speaker, I guarantee you that most Americans do not realize that today Medicare is very much a subsidized and entitlement program. Even though its recipients and those of us who are in the workforce paying into it, even though we pay premiums into it, the return on those premiums are threefold; that is to say, for every dollar you put into Medicare, you get $3

back in benefit. And that applies no matter what your income. Warren Buffett is old enough to be on Medicare, and as a result of that, Warren Buffett, with his $40 billion, gets the same subsidies as the little lady who barely gets by each month.

So it's important for us to understand that we already have a government-run health care system--that is, Medicare--that actuaries, the CBO and everyone says becomes insolvent, runs out of money in 4 to 8 years; it just depends upon which estimate you believe in. And to be honest with you, with each year that estimate comes closer and closer rather than farther and farther away.

So, I hate to say it, but promise number one was broken. The President promised that there would be nothing to change about your health care plan or your doctor. We know that not to be true.

Broken promise number two is it would not add one dime to the deficit. And we know now that it's going to be at least $500 billion, perhaps as much as $1.5 trillion over the coming decade.

So let's move to broken promise number three. President Barack Obama said in September 2009:

And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up. Under our plan, no Federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and Federal conscience laws will remain in place.

Well, is that true? There was a whole lot of drama around here during the debate, the original ObamaCare bill--and, by the way, I want to point out something about the term ``ObamaCare.''

I'm often asked in my town halls, Why do you call it ObamaCare? Isn't that being derogatory or in some way denigrating to the bill itself or to the President? Of course the rhetorical response I have is, Well, if it's a law or a bill that you can be proud of, then why are you ashamed to name it after President Obama? If it were a bill I was proud of, a law I was proud of, I would love it if it were called FlemingCare.

But, quite honestly, I don't think even the President is proud of this bill. And how do I know that? Because on the 2-year anniversary, where are the cakes and the candles? Where's the celebration? Remember that Speaker Pelosi, when she was Speaker right here in this Chamber, said that we have to pass it to know what's in it.

Well, Mr. Speaker, we now know what's in it, and we're not happy about it. Fifty-seven percent of the American people say we want it repealed, and only 38 percent--and these are consistent numbers since the passage of the law. In fact, they've actually gotten a little worse over time. The vast majority of Americans do want it repealed.

But back to this. What about the funding of abortions?

When the bill first passed this House, we had protections and guarantees. We had a few pro-life Members from the Democrat side, we had a vast number of pro-life Members on the Republican side, and we came together and said, okay, they're not going to vote for this bill. No Republican voted for it. But the Democrats who were pro-life said, We're not going to support this bill unless it has protections not to prevent abortions but to prevent taxpayer funding of abortions.

Today we're in a divided Nation when it comes to the question of abortions. About half of Americans, 51 percent, are pro-life. They do not believe that we should take innocent life. Something near that say, Well, we think it's a woman's right to choose. But by a margin of around 75 percent, Americans say we do not want to pay for--through our taxpayer money, we do not want to pay for abortions.

And so we were given certain guarantees that that wouldn't happen. However, when the bill came back to us from the Senate, all the protections, conscience clause protections, protections against taxpayer funding of abortions, all of that was stripped away.

Now, the President would say, even today, and many Democrats would say, there's not any taxpayer funding of abortions. Well, again, is that true?

Just recently, the Department of Health and Human Services, under Secretary Sebelius, issued a final rule on the State health care exchanges providing for taxpayer funding of insurance coverage that includes elective abortion. The rule confirms that abortions on demand will be included in publicly funded insurance plans. This means that it is absolutely required that insurance companies provide abortion services.

Now, even among the pro-choice Americans, they would suggest to you and admit to you that while they think a woman should have the right to choose, they also would agree we need to reduce the number of abortions whenever possible. But while making abortions more and more convenient, more and more available and cheaper and cheaper, that's not going to be the case. Even though abortions have been coming down year after year because young ladies have been deciding for life instead of against life, we're going to be seeing those numbers go back up again because of the wholesale subsidy of the industry.

What do I mean by that?

To comply with the accounting requirement of ObamaCare, plans will collect a $1 abortion surcharge for each premium payer. The enrollee will make two payments, $1 per month for abortion and another payment for the rest of the services. As described in the rule, the surcharge can only be disclosed to the enrollee at the time of enrollment. Furthermore, insurance plans may only advertise the total cost of the premiums without disclosing that enrollees will be charged a $1 per month fee to pay and directly subsidize abortions.

Now, that's kind of technical jargon. What does it mean?

It basically means that in the most technical sense, the premium dollars will not be used to fund abortions. What will happen is that you, as Americans, will be charged an extra fee, a surcharge, if you will. It will be booked separately, but it still flows directly to abortion services. You'll be required to do that.

Under ObamaCare, all insurance plans must cover, at no charge--to the patient, that is; charged to the taxpayer, but not to the patient-- abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptives, sterilization, and patient education and counseling for women of reproductive age. Religious employers such as Catholic hospitals, Christian schools, and faith- based pregnancy care centers will have to provide and pay for such coverage for their employees regardless of their religious beliefs.

Now, Mr. Speaker, that is a direct violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. The First Amendment to the Constitution provides that government shall establish no religion and that you should have the freedom to practice religion in any way you see fit. And we've seen this played out over the many years of this country.

For instance, the Amish are against war. It's against their conscience to fight in a war. And if, indeed, an Amish person is asked to join the military, to pick up a rifle and go fight, if he declares that it's against his religious conscience, then he is not forced to fight. And that is a well-respected and a well-observed tradition, and it's certainly right down to the very beginning of the core of the Constitution.

But for some reason we're suspending that constitutional right. That is to say that a hospital owner, an insurance company owner, a physician, even, or nurse who may choose not to provide abortion- inducing pills, certainly provide abortions themselves, or perhaps for whatever fundamental religious reasons, such as in Catholicism it's against their religion to practice sterilization or even provide birth control pills, that they cannot refuse to provide those. Now the question, of course, comes from Democrats on this, well, that means that those services will be cut off from Americans.

Well, today these institutions are not required to produce that. And does anybody have a problem finding these services and in an affordable way?

Every State has a program--it's funded both by the State and federally--to get free services with regard to obstetrical, gynecological care and prevention of pregnancy. So it already exists today. It's completely available. There's no reason that we have to force health care providers to participate in something that is against their religious or moral convictions.

Now, we recently had a mandate, a rule provided by the President that said, look, doesn't matter who you are or where you are or what kind of religion you practice, you're going to have

to provide the abortion or abortion-related services that we dictate to you. Then, as a result of the pushback of the Catholic Church, they said, well, we'll make an accommodation. But, Mr. Speaker, that accommodation never occurred. That was only a statement made by the President. The actual rule that was propagated is still the rule today and, in fact, it's now been finalized. Nothing was changed. It was certainly just spin put on the entire discussion of the rule.

Let's move along to broken promise number four.

President Barack Obama, September 2009, in an address to a Joint Session of Congress--and I was here--says: ``I will protect Medicare.''

Now, did he protect Medicare? Well, the first thing that ObamaCare does is it cuts $500 billion--a half a trillion dollars--from Medicare itself. I repeat, ObamaCare, the first thing it does to finance the services that it provides, it cuts $500 billion from Medicare. Part of that is taken out of the so-called Medicare Advantage program, which is a private part of Medicare where private plans like Humana Gold are provided funds. But half or more of that is simply taken out of direct services, such as home health, hospice services, many other kinds of services. So I don't see how you can remove $500 billion from Medicare and begin to say that you're going to protect it.

In fact, we Republicans have been criticized in the last year that for some reason we want to end Medicare. Nothing could be further from the truth. Republicans want to save Medicare. But because Medicare--you heard me say Medicare will become insolvent in 4 to 8 years, the experts tell us. Don't take my word for it. Go to the experts, the actuaries and the CBO. They tell us that the system runs out of money, the checks start bouncing in 4 to 8 years.

So what have our Democratic colleagues done to save Medicare? Whenever you ask them, all you hear is crickets. What is the Republican's answer to that? Well, we submitted in 2011 a budget that would not only protect Medicare, but sustain it indefinitely by the use of premium support, means testing, and many other things, and opening up Medicare to market forces so it would drive costs down and increase services. So whether you like the Republican solution or not, we do have a solution. Our Democrat friends offer no solution.

So their plan is no plan. Their plan is sticking your head in the sand. And, therefore, their plan is the one that would end Medicare.

On to broken promise number five. Senator Barack Obama, Candidate Obama, said: ``Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase.''

Well, is that true? Well, let me go down the list and you decide for yourself, Mr. Speaker:

$52 billion in fines on employers who do not provide government- approved coverage;

$32 billion in taxes on health insurance plans--not a penalty, just, simply straightforward, an excise tax which adds up to $32 billion. Mr. Speaker, if you think that your premiums are going to go down when the taxes on those companies go up, then we need to sit down and talk about it;

$5 billion in taxes from limits on over-the-counter medication;

$15 billion in taxes from limiting the deduction on itemized medical expenses--and that's to everybody, not just people who make over $200,000, $250,000 a year;

$13 billion in taxes from new limits on flexible spending accounts;

$60 billion in taxes on health insurance plans;

$27 billion in taxes on pharmaceutical companies;

$20 billion in taxes on medical device companies. We already hear of medical device companies either going out of business or moving their business overseas;

$3 billion in taxes on tanning services;

$3 billion in taxes on self-insured health plans; and

$1 billion in new penalties on health savings account distributions.

Remember that one of the most useful tools in limiting cost that has been well received by beneficiaries of private insurance has been health savings accounts, which allows you to keep your own money and spend your own money and save the first dollar expenses to insurance companies, which ultimately lowers your premiums. I know that because we instituted that about 7 years ago in our companies; and instead of having 15 percent increase year over year in our premiums, they flattened out and have never been above 3 percent per year. That means more money we can pay our employees and more benefits that they can enjoy.

But here's a couple of really important ones I think everyone needs to understand, Mr. Speaker.

In 2013, the payroll tax will increase .9 percent going to Medicare for those making $200,000 to $250,000 a year--that is to say, single filers, $200,000; a couple, $250,000.

Now, Mr. Speaker, most people hearing this might say, Well, that doesn't apply to me because I don't make $200,000 a year. But this is not indexed, which means that in a few years, through inflation, Mr. Speaker, everyone will be included in this, virtually; certainly the middle class would be.

Already today we have a similar problem called AMT, alternative minimum tax. It was designed years ago to hit the wealthy, the high- income earners. Who is it hitting today? It's hitting the middle class because it hasn't been indexed.

But that isn't the worst of it when it comes to taxes. There is a 3.8 percent tax on the sale of your assets--again, for people who make $200,000 for singles, $250,000 for a couple. Again, the question is, Well, what do I care? I sell my house, I make some money on it, but I don't make $200,000 a year. I sell my stocks, maybe I sell a business, I sell some other sort of asset. Should I worry about that? Well, maybe today you don't. The average American doesn't make $200,000, $250,000 a year. But in a few years, through inflation--and the way we're printing money these days, that should be very soon--average Americans will easily be making $200,000, $250,000. As a result, they will be captured in that. The middle class will be hurt the most by this tax.

The law also forces people to buy insurance. Then the Federal Government taxes employer-provided plans at a 40 percent rate. This tax will hit middle-income families especially hard.

So, you see, Mr. Speaker, we have a bevy of taxes, at least 10 or more that I've listed here. The vast majority of them hit the middle class and even lower than that. There's no way that this promise was ever kept, and, in my opinion, it was ever intended to be kept.

Broken promise number six, Senator Barack Obama, February 2008-- again, Candidate Obama--said in Columbus, Ohio: ``If you've got health insurance, we're going to work with you to lower your premiums by $2,500 per family per year.'' I think this is perhaps the cruelest promise of all.

What has actually happened?

The annual Kaiser Family Foundation survey of employer-provided insurance found that average family premiums totaled $12,860 in 2008, $13,375 in 2009, $13,770 in 2010, and $15,073 in 2011. Premiums have already risen by $2,213 since President Obama took office, and much of that increase was as a direct result from ObamaCare. Why? Because the mandates create more cost.

Oftentimes, Mr. Speaker, folks will say to me, Well, look, if you Republicans want to repeal ObamaCare, will you keep coverage for preexisting illness? Will you keep coverage for folks who are up to 26 years old and living in their household? My answer is this: We certainly can, and, in fact, we could have been doing that all along.

But if, Mr. Speaker, we add more mandates, we take caps off, all that does is raise the premium. The marketplace has to deal with that one way or another. So you have to decide for yourselves, as consumers, do you want more benefits, less caps, or do you want less benefits, more caps? You're going to have to pay for it either way.

So I would say, Mr. Speaker, yes, we would love to keep those. But what we'd rather do, more than that, is to make it a choice for the American citizens. They can choose whichever one they want. If you want a plan that, for instance, has no lifetime caps, fine. But you are going to have to pay incrementally more in your premiums in order to receive that benefit.

The CBO projects that the law's new benefit mandates will raise premiums

in the individual market by $2,100 per family. The increase is because people will be forced to buy richer coverage, which will encourage them to consume even more health care.

So, you see, Mr. Speaker, the President, when he was a candidate, promised that the cost of premiums would go down by $2,500 per year per family. It has already gone up that much, so that's a spread of about $5,000 per year, and it's expected to go up even another $2,100 as ObamaCare fully kicks in.

Mr. Speaker, these are the main six points that I wanted to bring out today. In closing, I would just like to say that we'll be posting, Mr. Speaker, on our Web site these promises and the others that have been broken. And I pledge, with many of my colleagues here in the House, that we will, hopefully, the beginning of next year fully repeal ObamaCare and replace it with something that's common sense, that's market-driven, that re-establishes the doctor-patient relationship and puts the choice back into the hands of the American citizen.

Mr. Speaker, we now have reached a landmark, 2 years since the passage of ObamaCare. More and more, the American people have been hearing about something called IPAB, the Independent Payment Advisory Board--the centerpiece to ObamaCare and its inevitable rationing of health care.

This is a board of 15 unelected, unaccountable and not necessarily health care-experienced individuals who will have more power than even Congress, itself, when it comes to deciding what care every American will receive. The board members will not be under congressional oversight and will not answer the phone when you call to complain. Americans agree by 57 percent to 38 percent margins ObamaCare and IPAB should be fully repealed.

So far, Democrats have been unwilling to listen to the outcry from the American people. They will have yet another chance to respond to ``we the people's'' unhappiness with ObamaCare by voting with Republicans this week to repeal IPAB. And, hopefully, they will be willing to vote to repeal ObamaCare, itself, in its entirety when it is brought up for a vote sometime in the future.

Mr. Speaker, President Obama's mandate on abortion- inducing drugs and contraceptive services has not gone away--I repeat-- has not gone away. It has not been settled. There is no compromise. The administration's assault on the First Amendment continues. The deeply held beliefs of people who oppose abortifacients are still under attack.

Let's be clear. The President remains as determined as ever to force insurance companies and their customers to pay for services which defy the moral fiber of their beings and which are contrary to religious beliefs and sacred teachings.

Let me be clear. Despite what you have heard, no rules have changed. There has been no accommodation. President Obama is simply hoping to cover this issue with a smokescreen to push it past Election Day so he can still get his way.

That's why this Congress needs to act--and act right now--to put in place conscience protections that the administration cannot violate. We need to safeguard our religious liberties against these attacks by the Obama administration.

Mr. Speaker, for 50 years, the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital has been one of the leading facilities for researching and treating catastrophic diseases in children. Every year, nearly 8,000 children are treated at St. Jude. That's why I'm proud of a group of friends back in my hometown who, for 36 years, have been raising money for St. Jude through an annual auction.

When the auction started, the first goal they set and reached was $10,000. Well, that has long since been eclipsed. This year was another record-breaking year. The Minden, Louisiana, St. Jude auction held earlier this month raised $1,065,235 to help the ongoing work of saving children's lives.

So thank you to Melissa Brown and Christie Ruple, the cochairs of the Minden St. Jude auction. And thank you to Pete Treat who, after suffering the terrible loss of his 5-year-old daughter to leukemia, started the Minden St. Jude auction and now has had the privilege of watching that auction raise more than $1 million for the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

Mr. Speaker, once again the GOP Doctors Caucus comes together to discuss important matters regarding health care. Tonight we're going to focus on saving Medicare. This has been a very interesting discussion going back to the days of the ObamaCare debate where we talked about how we would finance ObamaCare. And lo and behold in the middle of the debate, we find out that the Members of the other side of the aisle decide that they're going to help finance ObamaCare by taking out over $500 billion--half a trillion--$500 billion from Medicare over the next 10 years in order to help finance ObamaCare.

Now if you think about this, the CBO states that Medicare may become insolvent as early as 2016. So I think the focus right now with regard to Medicare, an important part of our entitlement program, has got to be how are we going to save Medicare. I have an array of colleagues here this evening that are going to help me develop that issue.

Again, I'll go back to the financing of ObamaCare, and that is cutting out over half a trillion dollars from Medicare in order to help finance ObamaCare. And there are some other pieces of the financing as well--the individual mandate which is soon to go to the Supreme Court. And if that is struck down, that will be another piece of the financing that won't be available. Tax increases, increases of taxes, excise taxes, taxes on equipment, taxes on tanning beds, many different new taxes, as much as $800 billion over 10 years of new taxes in order to finance ObamaCare.

Then there was the CLASS Act, which was long term health care, which the actuaries said from the beginning would not work. It would not finance anything.

And then last, but not least, is the student loan program, which was nationalized in order to siphon off profits from that in order to help finance ObamaCare. And we hear talk now about forgiving those loans which means that it'll probably be another bailout, like the mortgage.

So, Mr. Speaker, I have to speak out tonight on the fact that ObamaCare is going to bankrupt this country if it is actually fully implemented. But more importantly, Medicare will become insolvent as early as 2016. We're going to be talking about how that's happening, how we're seeing skyrocketing costs. And some of the things perhaps that will be discussed tonight will be how we can save Medicare.

Again, in closing my initial comments here, I will have to emphasize to you that our colleagues from the other side, inasmuch as they somehow want to blame us for ending Medicare, which not a single Member on the Republican side wants to do, of course, but they accuse us of this, but in fact they have yet to submit a plan that will save Medicare, will prevent it from becoming insolvent by 2016 or 2022, depending on whom you believe.

So with these opening remarks, I would like to open the floor to my good friend, Dr. Harris from Maryland, and would love to hear some of your comments about saving Medicare and other matters having to do with health care.

I thank the gentleman from Maryland, my good friend, who is an anesthesiologist, a practicing anesthesiologist for a number of years and very experienced.

Before I recognize my friend from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey), I did want to point out a couple of things. Remember I said a moment ago the CMS actuary in this case projects the Medicare program could be bankrupt as early as 2016. This is 2012. That's 4 years, Mr. Speaker.

Where is the Democrat plan to save Medicare? Republicans, on the other hand, we've already passed a budget last year. We're working on another one this year that would do that. We just could not get Harry Reid to even salute it, much less have a vote on it.

Also, Medicare costs are projected to grow substantially from approximately 3.6 percent of GDP in 2010 to 5.5 percent by 2035. The physician payment formula in Medicare needs to be fixed or seniors may lose their doctor as it costs $316 billion. And that's what Dr. Harris was referring to, that it's already very difficult for doctors to make it on what they're paid, and they're looking at a cliff of a 30 percent reduction in their pay. If that goes into effect, Mr. Speaker, a lot of seniors out there will not have access to health care.

So I want to show you, before I recognize my good friend, what this means in graphic form. And as you can see, the purple aspect of this is Social Security. The green is Medicaid and other health care. You see it rising very fairly steadily, but plateauing. But look at the red. That's Medicare. That is Medicare.

And in out-years, going all the way out to 2080, it just goes straight up. Of course, that's largely due to an aging population, baby boomers like myself getting older. But everything about this program has way outdistanced any projections of what those costs are. So this really takes it up to a point where Medicare alone, if not dealt with, not reformed and saved, will eventually displace all of our budgetary spending, that alone. And of course that means no defense, no nothing else, no running government whatsoever.

With that, I would like to recognize my good friend, Dr. Phil Gingrey, a gynecologist-obstetrician from the great State of Georgia.

I thank the gentleman from Georgia, my colleague and physician.

Let me say parenthetically here that what are some of the things that we in this Chamber, we Republicans from the Doc Caucus--which, by the way, is 23 strong, which includes three nurses, two dentists, and one psychologist.

So what are some of the things that we agree on moving forward that we really need in terms of saving Medicare?

Well, I can tell you one thing that everybody agrees on, and that is that we need robust competition among providers--doctors, hospitals, insurance companies. There is no reason why they shouldn't have to deal with the competition of market forces. And why? Because everything in America that we see improves improves because of the marketplace; that is that when you compete, it makes you work harder; it makes you try harder; it raises the level of effort; and, ultimately, you end up with better quality service products and you end up with lower cost to the consumer.

We also agree that we want choices for Americans. Today, there are a lot of choices even for Medicare recipients that just aren't there, and we want that to occur.

We also want to move away from a top-down bureaucratic system where, again, a 15-member appointed board of bureaucrats--nameless, faceless, unelectable, unaccountable people who are selected and who will not be there to answer your call. We all agree that that is not a good thing. Instead, we want a program, a system in which you can change health care systems, you can change hospitals, doctor, insurance companies, whatever you want to do, and there's lots of transparency in order to do that. That's going to make the quality of care improve and the cost go down.

I would now like to recognize another gentleman from Georgia. Georgia, like Louisiana, is flush with physician Members in Congress, but we'd like to have a few more, in fact. So I would like to recognize my good friend Dr. Broun, the gentleman from Georgia.

I thank the gentleman, my good friend from Georgia, a family physician of note, and also one who has actually reentered the U.S. Marine Corps as a reserve physician as well. I admire him for that.

Before I recognize my friend from Tennessee, also another physician, I want to point out something about Medicare that is very important for everyone to think about.

Medicare was started in 1965 with a lot of promises, and the promises have been fulfilled to those recipients who get the benefits of Medicare. However, this big, beautiful apple, if you will, of Medicare, unbeknownst to a lot of people, has been slowly rotting and decaying from the inside financially in ways that the public can't see, in a way that is very soon going to be evident. And why? The reason is because even though folks pay their premiums into Medicare, they do not nearly cover the cost of Medicare. In fact, they only cover about one-third. The other two-thirds come from the providers themselves, and also from the taxpayers.

And that's all well and good. There's nobody we would rather do more for than those who are from the Greatest Generation, those who lived through the Great Depression, World War II.

But the fact is, we cannot continue the same way. It will totally bankrupt the country. And therefore we have got to heal this patient and, that is, we've got to save Medicare.

I want to recognize my good friend from Tennessee, also an OB GYN, one who came here in 2009, as I did. We've grown to be great friends. And certainly, the best doctors are from the South, mostly from Louisiana and Tennessee, I think you would agree.

With that, I yield to my good friend, the gentleman from Tennessee, Dr. Roe.

I thank the gentleman, Dr. Roe, for his very insightful

comments. And we're beginning to pull the cover back on what some of the solutions are.

I will point out this evening that, you know, it's interesting the way physicians are trained. We're trained to be problem solvers. We're trained to look for solutions. And sometimes it's like mixing oil and water up here in Washington because there are a lot of people who've been up here a long time who don't think in terms of solutions.

So we're committed, all of us, our physician colleagues and nurses, psychologists, dentists, to continue to apply the pressure to move forward in solving problems for the American people.

I'd now like to yield to another physician from Louisiana. He's actually a hepatologist. And I know that some who may be hearing me speak right now may not know what that is. It's basically a specialist, a physician specialist in liver disease, and also a gastroenterologist as well.

With that, I will recognize the gentleman from Louisiana, Bill Cassidy.

This is the only graph I have.

If the gentleman will yield.

By Medicare Part D, you're referring to the drug program, which is the last piece that was added where there was a lot of debate about top-down, government commanded pricing or a market- based system. They ended with a market-based system, and that reduced the cost by 40 percent.

Just to reiterate, we in Congress, despite what a lot of people think, we don't have any kind of special health care plan. We have the same plan as all other Federal workers, and that is simply to go on a Web site or in a booklet and choose from hundreds of excellent health plans that are competing with each other for our business. We pay part of the premium; our employer, the Federal Government, pays the other part, and that is precisely what we want for everyone in America to have.

But in order to do that, you've got to take down the walls from one State to another, the State borders, when it comes to insurance. You've got to make sure that all of these providers of services--doctors, hospitals, insurance companies--are competing with each other, driving up the quality and driving down the cost.

With that, I would like to recognize one of our freshman members who's really come on fast, again another physician, a family physician, Mr. DesJarlais from the State of Tennessee.

I thank the gentleman.

Did you hear that? Did you hear what the gentleman said? The gentleman said that he's never treated a patient that was either a Republican or a Democrat. It doesn't matter to us who we're providing care to.

We've got three wonderful nurses here, and we all appreciate what nurses do. Often times, the nurse is the first health care worker you encounter when you open your eyes after whatever has happened to you. So we appreciate our angels so much.

But again, we providers, we don't care, we don't ask whether you're a Democrat or a Republican. All we care about is that you have a need.

I would now like to recognize Congresswoman Ann Marie Buerkle from the great State of New York. We're actually moving above the Mason- Dixon line this evening, and we're talking to folks from New York.

I thank the gentlelady from New York.

I would now like to yield to another gentlelady, to a person with whom I've become good friends, who is also from New York State. She is a person who has a vision for America. Not only that, she is someone who has been taking care of the vision of other people as well. She is an ophthalmologist, and she has come to Washington to apply her vision to what she feels--and we agree with her--the future of health care should be like as well as many other things in life.

With that, I yield to the gentlelady from New York, Nan Hayworth.

I thank the gentlelady from New York, Nan Hayworth, for all of her contributions both here in Washington and certainly back home.

We've saved the best for last here. We have Dr. Benishek, the gentleman from Michigan, who actually managed the time for our last Special Order and did a great job. As I understand it, he is a wonderful surgeon.

So I would like to yield to the gentleman in the last few minutes that we have tonight.

I thank the gentleman from Michigan, the physician.

In the closing moments here, what have we learned? We've learned that we have a Medicare system that's highly bureaucratic, highly expensive and, as the graph showed, is going to be insolvent as early as 2016. That's 4 years away. And we desperately need a solution to that. We've got this side of the aisle which has already come up with a solution, a premium support plan that basically offers to Americans the same opportunity we, in Congress, have, an excellent health care plan. And then we have got this side of the aisle, Democrats, who absolutely have come up with no solution. As the gentleman says, they bury their heads in the sand and offer nothing.

I would submit to you, Mr. Speaker, that we can't continue going this way. We have got to move forward. We've got to find solutions by, again, putting health care providers in the arena, having them compete with each other, always doing that. If it's a level playing field--and that's our responsibility in government--the quality of care goes up while the cost goes down.

I want to thank my colleagues here tonight. We have had a great discussion, and I look forward to doing this again very soon.

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

I thank the gentleman, Dr. Benishek. That was an unexpected recognition there. I thank you, sir, for that.

I'm just going to give a brief top-level overview of where we started with health care in this Nation and why we are here today.

I have to take you back to post-World War II, where we began to have the indication of a crisis protection form of insurance; that is, insurance that is there just to keep the family from going bankrupt over medical bills. That seemed to be well received.

Over time, it became obvious that there were other people, the people who were poor, people who were elderly, who could not get coverage in the normal marketplace of insurance. As a result, Congress in the mid- 1960s, created Medicaid, health care coverage for the poor, and Medicare, health care coverage for those who are 65 and over.

That was all well and good; however, this was the first real foray of the government managing health care, that is, the financing of health care. The promises were great to the doctors to get them to go along with it. The promises were great to the patients. It has rocked along for a while pretty well.

People who receive Medicare benefits enjoy them. The problem is that we know in government that the cost has risen and risen and risen, and now what

we have is a situation where Americans who are on Medicare enjoy very good health care benefits, but the explosion in cost and the pressure it is putting on the rest of the health care system is becoming unsustainable. In fact, if left alone, Medicare will totally displace all discretionary spending in the government today; therefore, something has to be done about it.

We got about halfway through government-run health care, and our friends on the other side of the aisle have had this vision for many years of having government totally control health care for everyone. They attempted to do that with the passage of ObamaCare, which took us, I would say, to about 95 percent complete government control of health care.

What was the promise? The promise was that your insurance rates would go down, your coverage would go up, that your choices would go up, and things would be fine and dandy.

What have we found thus far? And it hasn't even been nearly fully implemented. That is that the cost of insurance premiums have gone up.

We now have a board called IPAB, which is 15 bureaucrats who will be appointed by the President, not necessarily health care workers. Everything that may affect you in your life with regard to health care may well rest in the hands of this 15, even usurping Congress itself when it comes to decisions such as what doctors you can see, what it will cost you, and certainly what the health care system itself will be paid.

What I would submit to you tonight is that any time government runs a system of economy--which certainly it has done in education, and we see the failures in secondary and primary education there, and now in health care--that costs skyrocket. They become very inefficient and they become unsustainable.

Remember that when it comes to Medicare that, for every $1 that a recipient puts into the system in the way of premiums, they get $3 in benefits.

That means that even the very wealthy--even the Warren Buffetts of the world--actually get subsidized health care. We just simply can't afford it. We'd love for our recipients--our voters--to get this, but we can't afford it. So now what do we have? We have ObamaCare, which is a fixed top of Medicare and Medicaid, and we have nearly a 100 percent government-run system.

You just heard my colleague from Georgia talk about the fact that one of the ways to fund it is by this CLASS Act, which is long-term health care. It's unsustainable. It will collapse. Actuaries tell us it's not going to work, so we're in the process of repealing it. We know that there is an amazing number of taxes that go with this--a tax on the sale of your home as an investment--and many other pieces. Another big piece toward funding it is by taking out a half a trillion dollars from Medicare, which only makes Medicare go out of business even faster. Right now, we're looking at about 10 years for that to happen; and our friends on the other side of the aisle, the Democrats, have no solution for that whatsoever.

So I would say, Mr. Speaker, that we have gone from the frying pan into the fire when it comes to health care by way of government. There are those who say, Well then, what is your solution? Mr. Speaker, our solution is very simple. Our solution is: Let's re-invoke the marketplace, the forces of the market--economic freedom and patient choice--back into the system, and let's get government out.

Government has a role. Government's role is to protect its citizens and to ensure there is an even playing field. Yet we know that no way will costs go down in any open economy, in any free economy, unless there is robust competition. But we do not have that today, not among insurance companies, not among large, vertically integrated governmental systems. It's not there--it never will be--and we will continue to have waste. No matter what any politician says that he's going to do to get rid of fraud, waste, and abuse in the system, he is incapable of doing that. Only a free market can do that.

I will refer you back to Paul Ryan's budget, which actually gives Medicare recipients a free market choice, which is the same kind of choice that we in Congress have today. That is: We can go to a Web site or we can go to a book, and we can choose from one of hundreds of excellent health care systems out there by which we can be covered.

Why can't Medicare recipients and why can't Medicaid recipients have exactly the same thing? Why can't we tear down the State walls that exist that make, in most cases, one insurance company totally control the market in an entire State? Why can't we do this?

The answer is: This body right here has not allowed that to happen.

Mr. Speaker, that is what I submit to you this evening: Should we repeal ObamaCare?

I am convinced now that we will; that perhaps it will be H.R. 1 in 2013, the full repeal of ObamaCare; that we will quickly replace it with piecemeal pieces of legislation that do many things, including reforming liability insurance, re-invoking the free marketplace, patient choice; and that we will get on with making this a much more efficient system, one that is much more user friendly and one that we can all be proud of.

I thank the gentleman, and I thank my fellow physicians in the GOP Doctors Caucus. It is always an honor to serve with these ladies and gentlemen. It's not only physicians, but nurses and other types of health care workers. There are truly great things that are happening in this body.

I thank the gentleman. I will just briefly respond to that.

The point I would like to make on that very question is that coverage is not the same thing as access. There are countries around the world that have 100 percent coverage, yet they have no access to care. And I'm not just talking about communist or socialist countries. Look at Canada today. It takes a year to get a CT scan; but yet everybody's covered. So that's the fine point that we need to understand and take away.

I will also add in response to the gentleman just a moment ago talking

about the Independent Payment Advisory Board is that it will have more power than Congress itself. It will take a two-thirds vote from both bodies to overturn their decisions, and I don't think that Americans are ready to put all of that power in the hands of 15 bureaucrats who may or may not be physicians.

I thank the gentleman, Mr. Smith, not just for the introduction, but for the fine work you've done for so many years, sir, as well as Joe Pitts, our good friend and colleague.

Mr. Speaker, I speak to you this evening as a physician of over 30 years, a father, and a grandfather. And I have delivered, myself, many hundred babies and have found that that is one of the most important and intimate times in a person's life is taking part of and in some way delivering a baby.

Nonetheless, we have today a problem since Roe v. Wade that we are in great grievance about.

You heard Mr. Walberg so eloquently talk about the passages from the Bible that describe about knitting me in the womb and knowing me even before being born. But do you realize that the DNA of every conceived life is unique in history? There will never be another like it. In my opinion, that is God's opinion, that that is a separate and distinct human being and a person upon itself.

Let me share some facts with you. Do you realize that the heart begins beating at 23 days after conception, that the fetus begins to feel pain as early as 20 weeks and maybe even earlier? We are still waiting for some studies on that. Certainly any abortion that is committed in the middle or third trimester is obviously extreme agony for any type of fetus.

Some other important facts. While there were approximately 744,000 abortions in 1973, the time of Roe v. Wade, that actually peaked in 1990 at 1.6 million. It has come down. It has come down today to 1.2 million. Not nearly low enough. Do you realize also that over $487 million of taxpayer money is used each year to go to Planned Parenthood, which is the number one provider of abortions in this country, committing over 320,000 innocent lives to death each year?

There are things we are doing that are effective. You heard me say that we are down from a peak of 1.6 million down to 1.2 million. What are some of the things that we can do and have done? My home State, Louisiana, which was chosen by AUL to be number one in abortion law, has done the following: A mother-to-be must wait at least 24 hours after notification to actually have an abortion; she must be provided with information so she can read about this and have a cooling-off period before making that final decision; she must receive information about fetal pain, what I mentioned just a moment ago; and that she must be allowed, if she chooses, to view a sonogram to see what that fetus actually looks like, her potential baby. And Louisiana has declared that the unborn child is a human being and is therefore a person.

Mr. Speaker, there is a lot that we have done. There is a lot more we can do. Although I want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, there are still many good laws that we can produce that I think--certainly defunding of organizations that provide these abortions that can sharply lower these numbers. There is much more we can do.

We shouldn't just hold out for overturning Roe v. Wade. We should act today.

Mr. Speaker, as a family physician for more than 30 years, I've had the privilege of delivering hundreds of babies. I have witnessed the miracle of life itself firsthand, and I believe that every human life at any stage is unique and fully deserving of my protection as a physician. The authority of our government should stand behind the protection of human life.

I am proud to be from Louisiana, a State recently ranked number one on life issues by Americans United for Life. Louisiana has implemented some commonsense protections, including a requirement that any woman seeking an abortion must understand how that unborn child is developing, the pain her child will experience during the abortion, and the facts about risks and the alternatives to abortion.

Louisiana has banned partial birth abortion and prohibits abortion providers from getting taxpayer dollars to pay for abortion services. We are making progress.

But abortion still happens. In the last 39 years, there have been more than 54 million babies terminated. This is a heart-breaking number, and it is past time to end this scourge and protect human life from conception to natural death.

I thank the gentleman, and I thank the Speaker.

The reason why we're here today is because of the Balanced Budget Act of last year, which was a flawed bill, one which I voted against. Why? It set spending limits way too high. It guts defense by $1 trillion in a time when the world is becoming even more dangerous than ever. It cut funding to Medicare providers in a time when patients out there need access to their physicians and hospitals. And it finally creates a sham, this resolution that we're debating today, which is just that, a sham.

All the President has to do is veto our vote of disapproval and it automatically goes into effect. We just basically handed the President, in a time when we have crossed that threshold, $15 trillion of debt more than our GDP, our gross domestic product, which puts us up there with Greece. We have now handed the President a gift of another spending of $1.2 trillion, which now brings him increasing the national debt.

This brings the President from a point which all Presidents, all the way through George Bush 43, bringing us to $10.6 trillion, increasing that national debt by 70 percent, just in one term under President Obama.

I urge my colleagues to vote for the disapproval.

I thank my friend, the gentleman, Mr. Camp, for giving me time to speak.

I just want to say, Mr. Speaker, that this boils down to one of two choices here today. We're going to be either voting for a 2-month extension of the payroll tax or a 1-year extension of the payroll tax. We'll either be voting for a 2-month fix for reimbursement for physicians, health care providers in general, or we'll be voting for a 1-year fix. Now, for my money, it should be 1 year versus 2 months. I don't understand really what the problem is.

But having said that, let me also mention to you that this affects me and many of my friends back home in this way, and that is: I'm a physician myself, have many friends in the health profession. They're asking me: John, why in the world do you keep us upset like this all of the time? Why is it that we can't predict what our reimbursement rates are going to be from one month to another?

They're desperately begging for us not only to extend that for a year, but for 2 years and even beyond that. They're desperately asking for a fix. And we've been promising them that we would try. So that's a lot behind what we're here today about, and that is to have a long-term solution to physicians.

I also come from the small business sector, and I can tell you that when you do your tax deferrals or the income tax for your employees, that's usually done on a quarterly basis. In fact, it's always done on a quarterly basis. Well, how do you do it on quarterly basis when you only have an extension for 2 months?

So we have the Associated Builders and Contractors and many, Mr. Speaker, that say that this is just absolutely, flatly untenable.

So I encourage that both Chambers vote today to be in favor of sending this back to the Senate, have the conferees get together. Let's do it the way the Constitution asks us to do it.

Mr. Speaker, nearly 3 years ago, the President of the United States stood in this Chamber and said we need health care reform to address ``the crushing cost of health care'' and to ``strengthen Medicare for years to come.''

Well, we got the President's type of health care reform. Seniors had to help pay for it, however, by removing $500 billion--a half trillion dollars--from Medicare in order to subsidize ObamaCare. But guess what. That has made Medicare even weaker.

Today we're trying to find billions of dollars to pay for another temporary fix to Medicare reimbursement rates to ensure access by patients to their physicians. Last year it cost $19 billion, and it will cost more in future years.

ObamaCare did not bend the cost curve down as it was promised; it just pushed the issue down the road.

Republicans are committed to getting the doc fix done and finding a permanent solution; but Medicare is running out of money, and these fixes are getting more expensive. It's time to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with reforms that truly strengthen Medicare for years to come.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I come before this House tonight to talk about a very important issue--it's been important for years, and it's going to be increasingly important and increasingly a part of the debate--and that is health care, and particularly health care for our seniors. We've got lots going on. ObamaCare, of course, was passed in 2010, and we're running into all sorts of problems. Of course, I and my Republican colleagues here tonight voted against it.

I'm joined tonight, by the way, by two of my colleagues, Dr. Phil Roe, an obstetrician from the great State of Tennessee, and Dr. Scott DesJarlais, who is, like me, a family physician.

I thought I would just give a brief introduction about Medicare and how that fits into the budget. I know that Dr. Roe is going to talk in more detail about that.

No speaker would be complete without a chart, and I have several tonight. This is one I think that's important for everybody to understand. This pie chart breaks up spending for the Federal budget. If you will notice, the vast majority of this pie is in what we call permanent mandatory or so-called entitlement spending and interest. What makes up a large part of mandatory spending is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The size of this pie, this section of the pie, is growing. In fact, if you recall, back in the nineties we actually balanced the budget. The last time we balanced it, I think was in the late nineties. It was a lot easier to do back then because entitlement spending, permanent spending, was not in place to the extent that it is today. It was growing, but not as big.

What is the difference between mandatory spending and discretionary spending, which is the other two pieces of this pie? Mandatory means that if you qualify for a certain type of service or payment, whether you're on Medicare, Medicaid, whether you earned it or not, if you qualify for it, the government must pay. No matter who shows up or how many people show up, the government must pay. So, therefore, the government cannot per se control that cost.

Discretionary cost, on the other hand, is split into two: defense, which is around $600 billion to $700 billion a year; and nondefense discretionary, which is what we run the government on. That we can adjust, although we've not done a good job in controlling this. In fact, that's increased probably 25 percent just in the last 2 years under President Obama.

But I want to illustrate for you what the problem is, and that is that the entitlement spending, which we don't control, with an aging population and the fact that it's dependent on government spending, is growing at a much faster rate than our revenues and inflation.

This is a chart that outlines where we are today with Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, the part of entitlement spending. Now, let me say, first of all, Social Security is down here in the purple, and you notice that it slants upward and then it flattens out. Social Security is not our problem. Let me repeat that: Social Security is not our problem.

And people who are on it or will be on it, in my opinion, have nothing to worry about. Now, we may have to tweak it, we may have to adjust it, but you'll notice that the cost really rises relatively slowly, and that's just a matter of demographics. And we can adjust this, as we have in the past, and make this sustainable. There are other ways to do it, in terms of allowing Social Security recipients to invest some of their money and so forth, but that's beyond the scope of discussion tonight.

The next group in green is Medicaid and other health care. You'll notice it's going up faster. And Medicaid is health care for the poor. And then finally in red you see Medicare, and you see how that explodes and it goes up continuously. Medicare alone will completely displace all the budgetary spending eventually if we don't bring that under control. And that would mean we'd have to give up on government itself, we'd have to give up on a national defense--everything--unless we begin to control that.

Now, at the rate things are going, Medicare will run out of money, become insolvent by 2020. And that is straight from the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office. Another way to look at it is that our spending is now equal to 15 percent of the total Federal spending is Medicare, blowing out of control. What has made this worse is ObamaCare actually cut $500 billion, that is, half a trillion dollars, out of Medicare to use for subsidies for middle class health care plans.

So let me repeat: Medicare is running out of money; it's exploding through the roof. And what does ObamaCare do, the Members who voted for it, it actually cuts money out of it and depletes it of money in the future so that it becomes insolvent. And here's where the cuts are: $135 billion for Medicare Advantage, which is the private health care version of Medicare, $112 billion, which was taken from hospitals, $39.7 billion from home health, $14.6 billion from nursing homes, and $6.8 billion from hospice care. These are very real cuts.

And the only explanation that the other side gave us, our Democrat friends, is that somehow we'll cut out fraud, waste and abuse. Well, let me warn you, any time a politician tells you he's capable of doing that, watch out, because I've never seen it done and I don't expect to see it done in the future. Because, you see, in order to cut out the massive fraud, waste and abuse, you have to spend even more money to find all the bad actors. The best way to do away with fraud, waste and abuse is to make the system much smaller, perhaps even privatize it, and make the system accountable rather than a Big Government bureaucracy, which wastes money, whether we're talking about the Department of Defense or Medicare. So that should give you kind of a beginning of where we are with Medicare.

Let me just close my opening remarks by saying that there's basically two options when it comes to making Medicare again solvent and available for us in the future. There is a Republican plan, which would allow you, if you are currently on Medicare or 10 years from becoming on Medicare, to keep Medicare as it is. And it is sustainable, as far as the CBO tells us, indefinitely.

However, we would have to reform that for younger adults today who will be senior citizens by opening up the insurance system, creating a marketplace for seniors to buy insurance, and then let government help them with what we call ``premium support,'' and allowing competition in private care to drive the cost down and raise the level of service. In fact, what we in Congress have today is the very same thing.

The Democrats, their plan is this: goose egg, no plan whatsoever. Under their plan--or non-plan--Medicare runs out of money in 8 years. And they've failed to present an idea, much less a bill, as we have, that would even solve that. Well, that gives you an idea of some of our opening discussion.

First tonight, I want to introduce my good friend, Phil Roe. Dr. Phil Roe, as I said, is an obstetrician. I think he has some comments about the financing of Medicare and other things as well.

I thank the gentleman.

We have also been joined, in addition to Dr. Scott DesJarlais, by Dr. Phil Gingrey, also an OB-GYN; Nurse Ann Marie Buerkle; and Nan Hayworth, an ophthalmologist from New York. So we've got a full cadre. If anybody here has a headache or, certainly, a heart attack, I think they would be very well taken care of on the floor of the House.

With that, I'm going to ask Dr. DesJarlais to talk to us a little bit. I think you have an interest in some of this discussion on IPAB and perhaps other things, so I'd love to hear what you have to say, sir, on that.

If the gentleman will yield on that point, I want to be sure that that's not missed, and that may be the most important statement made tonight. I believe you said that, through a lifetime, a Medicare recipient will pay in an average of 100,000 or so dollars but will take out, on average, $300,000.

So what we really have with Medicare is somewhat of a subsidy system which does not subsidize according, necessarily, to need. My point in saying that is: Warren Buffett, today, because he's over 65, qualifies for Medicare, and if he gets care, I assume would get the same subsidized care, subsidized by whom? Taxpayers--middle-class, working- class people who pay the private insurance rates.

In some ways, Medicare has become not just help for the poor and the elderly, but just subsidy for people over 65. And so we're going to have to look at: Is there a way in the future that we can even this out, where we're not necessarily subsidizing for those who are capable of paying some of their own costs?

Absolutely. I thank you for the wisdom of your experience, Dr. DesJarlais.

I'd like to turn to Dr. Gingrey here. He's joined us and, of course, has conducted a number--I can't even count the number that I've participated in with Dr. Gingrey with respect to Special Orders that we've had.

And before doing that, just to follow up on what Dr. DesJarlais said about the 100,000 in, 300,000 back, I can recall one day in my own practice sitting there and thinking about the three patients that I just saw. In Room 1, I saw a little lady who's on Medicare who could barely scrape by by the end of the month, and she's on Medicare and getting the benefits of Medicare, and God bless her, she was getting them. And then I thought about the second room where there was a gentleman who's a multimillionaire. But you know what? My charge to both of them and what Medicare did for both of them was precisely the same.

I just couldn't quite understand that, especially when I thought about the little mother in Room 3 who's on private insurance, two- paycheck family, baby, barely scraping by, paying far more in their premiums than someone in Medicare and having to raise children. It was her insurance premiums that were subsidizing both the little old lady who was poor and the multimillionaire.

We're going to have to do something about that to make the economics of this system work. It is unsustainable, as we know.

Dr. Gingrey, I would like to ask you if you could give us a few words, sage wisdom on what your perspective of where we are with health care, ObamaCare, Medicare, and all the other cares that we're talking about.

I thank the gentleman. Dr. Gingrey serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a committee that has oversight and jurisdiction in this area, very important, looking at a lot of legislation.

Next, I want to turn to another of our freshmen. We've had a wonderful cadre of freshmen we appreciate so much and a wealth of physicians and dentists as well bringing in their years of experience, training, and education.

Next I would like to recognize Dr. Hayworth, Nan Hayworth from New York, and would be very interested to hear what you have to say this evening.

If the gentlelady would yield, I think Dr. Gingrey has something he would like to add.

Since we are beginning to run a little short on time-- and I want to make sure we get to all of our doctors and nurses--I'm going to recognize Ms. Buerkle, a very excellent nurse and a wonderful addition to our freshman class.

I thank the gentlelady for a very compelling discussion, both as a health care provider and nurse, but also as a daughter of an elderly mother. Those words are very heartfelt, and obviously it means as much to you that we protect Medicare and health care in general as it would anybody. There's no reason why, just because you're a Member of Congress, that you would love your mother any less, so I think those are important words.

We're going to move now from a nurse to a surgeon. Dr. Benishek from Michigan has joined us this evening, and let's hear from you, Doctor, and see what you have to tell us.

I thank the gentleman from Michigan.

Again, we're getting a world of experience here tonight, all the way from OB-GYNs, ophthalmologists, family physicians, nurses, so much in the way of words of wisdom, and we have so much on our side of the aisle with Republicans, as my friend points out, a dearth of available physicians, health care workers on the other side of the aisle. It seems a shame that we were completely closed out of the creation of and passage of the health care reform act, which certainly suggests that we need to go back and do it.

We also are joined tonight by our colleague from Arizona, Dr. Gosar, who is a dentist and a very valued member, as well, of the conference. I would love to hear from you this evening.

I thank the gentleman, Dr. Gosar. I'm just going to make a couple of closing comments; and in the few moments we have left, I'm going to allow some of our other physicians to give closing comments.

One of the important things we have learned here tonight is under ObamaCare, $575 billion was cut out of Medicare. Medicare is going broke, becoming insolvent, according to the actuary in 8 years. The Republicans passed a budget earlier this year that would have fixed that for good. And the Democrats have yet to even talk about it or even acknowledge that it exists. But they do know it. So I want to be sure that we leave here tonight with an understanding of the seriousness of the challenges that we have before us.

Now I would like to recognize Dr. Roe for some parting comments.

I thank the gentleman. Before I recognize another Member in the last minute or two that we have, I would just like to say that we are going to be having a lot more of these sessions. So we've just started. We've just scratched the surface. We're running out of time, so just to wrap things up, we have just barely scratched the surface. And these are not all the physicians or health care workers we have on our side. There are others here who could have been here, but had some other commitment tonight, but will be here next time.

I would love to talk more on IPAB. Even many Democrats see that was a very big mistake. It will be one way that you can get the door closed on your health care and getting the right sort of care in the future.

I thank everyone for being here tonight, and I look forward to doing it again very soon. God bless you all.

I yield back the balance of my time.