Floor Statements

In July, Medicare will be 46 years old. This is an opportunity for all of us to take a look at history.

In 1965, 44 percent of Americans over the age of 65 had no health insurance. Many seniors were pushed into poverty by medical costs. In 1965, when Medicare was first passed, out of 200 Republican Members of Congress, less than half voted for it. Future Presidents Bush and Reagan called Medicare socialized medicine. So it should be no surprise that Republicans are still trying to end Medicare. Today, it's called saving Medicare--we should end it in order to save it.

Seventy percent of the public does not support the Republican plan to end Medicare. And so it is a sad fact that a month before the 46th anniversary of Medicare, Republican Members of the House are not celebrating the Nation's commitment to ensure that our seniors have health care but are instead trying to end Medicare before the 46th anniversary.

Mr. Speaker, it is my great honor to represent the people of California's 33rd congressional district, which is a microcosm of America. The cultural and economic vibrancy of the communities in our district is possibly matched only by its vast diversity.

I am proud that the 33rd district includes Koreatown, the home to many Korean-Americans and recent immigrants from Korea. By some estimates, there are more Americans of Korean descent living in this neighborhood than anywhere else in the United States.

It should come as no surprise, then, that my constituents and I have strong concerns about U.S.-Korean relations. We celebrate the military and diplomatic alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea that has entered its seventh decade. We encourage Korean students who come to American colleges and universities to pursue their educational goals, and we welcome Korean businesses that invest in the United States and engage in trade with American businesses and consumers.

It was with great interest that I was able to travel to the Republic of Korea last month through their Congressional Member Exchange Program. Over the short course of three days, I participated in a packed itinerary of meetings with Korean government officials, business leaders, American diplomats, and members of the U.S. armed forces stationed in Korea.

One truly powerful moment came on my first full day, when I visited the Demilitarized Zone, DMZ, including the Joint Security Area. Gazing out over the barren border area into North Korea was a truly eye- opening experience for me.

In addition to meeting with Korean executive branch officials-- including Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Sung-Hwan Kim, Deputy Minister for Trade Seok-Young Choi, and National Security Advisor Yung- Woo Chun--I was also able to meet with our legislative counterparts in the Korean National National Assembly, including the chairman of the Unification, Foreign Affairs, and Trade Committee (the equivalent of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs), the Honorable Kyung-Pil Nam.

All of these meetings were informative, productive, and educational. I learned so much about the history and the breadth and scope of the U.S.-Korea alliance partnership.

Meetings with business leaders were equally fruitful. It was my pleasure to attend a dinner hosted by AMCHAM, the American Chamber of Commerce in Korea, and I am grateful for the time I was able to spend with Amy Jackson, the AMCHAM president.

Similarly, a tour of the Hyundai Motors corporate headquarters and of the company's research and development facility in Hwaseong was particularly valuable. Hyundai has significant investment in the United States, including several engineering and design facilities in California, not far from Los Angeles, as well as in several other states. If one includes all their dealerships and repair shops, Hyundai employs over 30,000 American workers.

One of the topics that came up over and over during my visit to Korea was the much discussed trade agreement between our two countries. The Korean government officials and business leaders I met tried very hard to persuade me that the agreement should be ratified soon. It is an issue I continue to follow closely, seeking out insights and analysis from a wide spectrum of individuals within my congressional district and beyond. This visit to Korea further expanded my horizons and the knowledge gained was invaluable.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the Korean Government for the opportunity to visit their country through the Congressional Member Exchange Program. Prior to my departure, I had the opportunity to have breakfast with Korea's Ambassador to the U.S., Duk-Soo Han, and our discussion was very insightful with respect to all the challenges and opportunities on the Korean peninsula. As I represent the congressional district with the largest Korean-American constituency in the United States, I also look forward to returning to Korea to continue building on the relationship with our great friend and ally.

Madam Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to H.R. 3, which the House will vote on later today.

After voting last month to end Medicare, as we know it, for seniors, today the majority is attacking women's reproductive freedom. For the last 3 months, we have watched as the majority party has consistently attacked the right of women to receive comprehensive health care, and today is no different.

H.R. 3 has outrageous provisions that would end comprehensive private health insurance coverage and reduce women's access to abortion care in many ways. H.R. 3 manipulates the Tax Code to restrict access to comprehensive care. The bill raises taxes on individuals and small businesses with insurance plans that cover abortion, forcing them to drop their health insurance plan.

H.R. 3 is an unprecedented attempt to deny access to full reproductive care. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this radical antichoice bill.

Mr. Chairman, on behalf of our seniors, I rise in strong opposition to the Republican budget that ends Medicare.

The Republican budget ends the Medicare guarantee in 11 short years. In 11 years, reliable care for our seniors will be replaced with the risky voucher scheme.

The Republican plan supposedly generously gives senior citizens a gift, an $8,000-a-year voucher. Seniors then must identify an insurance carrier that will take it. This is called choice. Since the Republicans also want to repeal the Affordable Care Act, there is nothing to protect seniors from being excluded from coverage if they have a preexisting condition. This is called choice. I don't know too many people 55 years and older who don't have some health-related problem.

There is nothing that protects seniors from insurance companies canceling their coverage if an illness becomes too expensive, so I don't know where the choice is. There is nothing that will protect taxpayers from incurring massive costs when uninsured seniors show up in emergency rooms around the country with untreated diabetes leading to kidney failure and heart disease, and untreated hypertension leading to strokes. This isn't much of a choice.

We are simply fooling ourselves if we think all seniors will be able to just write a check and pay the difference. A more likely scenario is seniors will simply not have medical coverage.

I often say that you can judge a society by how it treats its elderly and its children. And the Republican budget plan kicks our seniors to the curb while the wealthiest Americans will continue to get wealthier.

I urge my colleagues to vote against the Republican budget and protect the Medicare benefit.

Thank you very much, Mr. Yarmuth, for your leadership in this effort.

You know, as a new member on the Budget Committee, we had an interesting week last week. We really just completed a week where we saw the far right of the Republican Party take their party off the ledge and way out of the mainstream. They've declared war on seniors, on the disabled, on the sick, on children, and on the underserved by

proposing to end Medicare and Medicaid as we know it. They've championed the budget, entitled the Path to Prosperity.

This is a plan that simultaneously ends Medicare while giving billions in tax breaks to Big Oil and the wealthiest Americans. Mr. Tonko called it the ``path to ruin''; I thought about the ``Ryan-to- ruin'' plan.

It generously gives senior citizens a gift, and that gift is a voucher to purchase health care. The senior citizen then has to identify an insurance carrier that will take the voucher; and if the person is lucky, the voucher will cover all the cost. I do think that this would be rare. And I don't know what happens in this plan if after a couple of years or a couple of illnesses the insurance company decides to drop the person or raise the rates. You know, under the Affordable Care Act, of course, they couldn't do that, but if the Ryan plan does what he wants, he wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, so all of that would come back into play. The person would have to pick up the rest of the cost under the Ryan plan.

Now, I believe that we are simply foolish and we are fooling ourselves if we think all seniors will be able to just write a check and pay the difference. That's what is said, they will just pay the difference, they will just have to absorb more cost. A more likely scenario is that seniors will simply not have medical coverage, and we will be sent back in time to when seniors did not have coverage because insurance companies didn't want to cover them. I often say to people that you can judge a society by how it treats its elderly and its children. The ``path-to-ruin'' plan hurts both populations.

What I wanted to do today was to share a story, but just talk for a moment a little bit about the Ryan plan. When it takes effect in 2022-- that's only 11 years from now--the average senior would receive an $8,000 voucher to buy insurance. What I wanted to share with you was the years that I spent working in the emergency room. I worked in Los Angeles County, USC--one of the largest emergency rooms in the United States. And the emergency room is so large, it is divided into different sections. One section that I spent a couple of years working in is called ambulatory care, but we used to call it the ``walking wounded'' because, frankly, the people that came to that section of the emergency room shouldn't have even been in an emergency room, but the reason why they were there was because they didn't have health insurance, they didn't have access to care. And what typically happens is that if you don't have access to care, by the time you eventually see someone, you are much sicker than you would have been.

So I remember a case where a diabetic patient, who was not 65 and, therefore, he couldn't access Medicare, he came into the walking wounded area or the ambulatory care area with a sore on the heel of his foot. He told me in the history that he was a diabetic. But he had tried a series of home remedies and he finally came to the ER when his heel started turning purple. Well, as I interviewed the patient and I asked about his medical history, he told me that he had been diagnosed with diabetes years ago, but he couldn't afford his medication. So he was trying to watch his diet and do the best he could. Well, for those of you who don't know, a patient with a history of poorly controlled diabetes who presents to an emergency room is likely to have a series of complications. Well, this man ended up as an amputee because the sore on his heel--that he didn't realize--had developed into gangrene, and that's why his foot was turning colors.

So just thinking about the cost of this, the total cost of this visit was $12,000 and his leg. That bill included a $2,000 charge for his emergency room visit and lab tests, a $6,000 charge for an amputation, and a daily charge of $1,400 for aftercare. If this patient had had access to routine preventive care, he would still have his leg, and $12,000 would be saved.

So why do I share this story with you? Well, we're fooling ourselves if we don't understand that turning Medicare into a voucher and leaving seniors to fend for themselves is simply denying adequate health care that in the end will cost us so much more in suffering and in hospital costs that will ultimately be borne by taxpayers.

Today in my office I met with representatives from several hospitals who were describing the challenges that they face now. So there is an area of Los Angeles County where 600,000 people live--and the last time I checked that was around the entire population of the State of Vermont, 600,000 people--where there is not one trauma center, there is not one emergency room because all of the four hospitals in that area have closed. Now that's today.

Under the Ryan plan, vouchers for seniors and vouchers for States-- because that's the bottom line as to what a block grant is, it's a voucher; instead of a voucher for an individual, it's a voucher for a State. The hospitals they represent that all border this area--that has no trauma center in it and has no emergency room and has no hospital because they're all closed up--they would essentially have to absorb-- and they have been absorbing--the population, these 600,000 people. So they were concerned, and they came into my office today concerned that they could potentially face closure now, given the situation.

If we were to adopt the Ryan plan--the ``pathway to ruin,'' however you want to describe it--I think we would be setting the stage for hospital closures to continue, for more patients to come into the walking wounded area of emergency rooms, for there to be more amputations, for people to be sicker and eventually come to the emergency room--which is so incredibly short-sighted because in the end it winds up costing taxpayers so much more money because these people are going to be cared for. So we are fooling ourselves if we think that seniors are just going to be able to meet what the voucher doesn't cover.

Thank you very much for your leadership in this.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to the majority's spending plan that would cost jobs and threaten our economic recovery. Republicans have held the majority for 11 weeks now, and we have yet to see a jobs plan. Instead of focusing on jobs, which is the number one priority of Americans, the majority is pushing spending cuts that destroy thousands of jobs.

Mr. Speaker, the majority is ignoring the warnings from economists that the sharp cuts they propose would guarantee major job losses in the public and private sectors. The Economic Policy Institute shows that the majority's plan would destroy more than 800,000 jobs. Mark Zandi, John McCain's former economic adviser, puts the job loss figure at 700,000. No matter who is right, the number is far too high.

Mr. Speaker, I know my colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't particularly like public employees, but we do need to ask just who are these public employees. Just one example is the staff at the tsunami warning center. Under the majority's plan, the National Weather Service, the agency that houses the tsunami center that issued alerts after Friday's earthquake--and there was significant damage in California after the tsunami--would be cut by $126 million. These cuts would result in furloughs and office closures affecting the center's ability to issue future warnings.

The type of cuts proposed by the majority does not create jobs; it destroys them. I urge the majority to work with us on a responsible spending plan that drives economic growth and job creation.

Mr. Speaker, California was ground zero of the foreclosure crisis. At one point, 40 percent of all foreclosures nationwide were concentrated in the State of California. Today in California, nearly one in eight homes is in foreclosure. By far the majority of my constituents who walk through the door have received foreclosure notices or are on the brink of foreclosure. They have been shunned by the banks and have turned to my office and the Federal Government for help.

Mr. Speaker, the two programs on the Republican chopping block this week haven't even been fully implemented: the Emergency Mortgage Relief Program and the FHA Refinance Program. The Emergency Relief Program provides no-interest loans to those who lost their jobs, which is the main reason homeowners fall behind in their mortgage payments.

Not only does this response from the majority ignore the basic economic principle that the housing sector is a key component to economic recovery; it also comes without any alternative to reduce foreclosures.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support struggling homeowners and vote against H.R. 830 and H.R. 836.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to the reckless spending plan in H.R. 1.

Mr. Speaker, it has been 43 days since I joined the new Congress, and my colleagues across the aisle have not offered one job, let alone offered a jobs plan to put Americans back to work. While hardworking Americans struggle to keep a roof over their head, food on the table, and the heat turned on, my colleagues have not taken one single action to create jobs for the unemployed. They have completely abandoned the number one issue for the American people right now--jobs and the unemployment rate--and in fact, they are blatantly destroying, instead of creating, good jobs.

In fact, the Speaker recently said, ``Over the last 2 years since President Obama has taken office, the Federal Government has added 200,000 new Federal jobs,'' greatly exaggerating, citing a number 10 times greater than what has actually been reported. He said, ``If some of those jobs are lost in the spending cuts, so be it.''

Mr. Speaker, under the Republican plan, jobs are the target of the cuts. For example, the largest cuts ever in history for education programs under H.R. 1 would result in more than 26,000 K-12 teachers and support staff, 14,000 Head Start teachers, and 7,000 special ed teachers all losing their jobs. This is just the education budget alone.

According to the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute, the Republican continuing resolution would cost the Nation almost 1 million jobs. Included on the majority party cut list are 25,000 new construction jobs from infrastructure projects, 1,300 police officers by eliminating the COPS program, 2,400 firefighters by terminating SAFER grants, and 16,000 private sector construction jobs lost from cutting $1.7 billion to the Federal Buildings Fund.

The spending plan would also slash in half all job training funds-- dollars used to help workers obtain the skills they need to compete in the global economy.

Mr. Speaker, reducing the unemployment rate is the most important challenge facing this country. The most promising new source of economic growth and job creation is in our public infrastructure system, from roads and bridges to broadband and air traffic control systems to a new energy grid. I commend President Obama for his leadership in crafting a budget proposal for fiscal year 2012, for his leadership in crafting this budget proposal that focuses Federal dollars on rebuilding America's infrastructure, which USA Today describes as ``a massive job creation engine, with plans to generate millions of jobs by repairing and expanding highways, bridges, and railways.''

Mr. Speaker, the President's budget addresses the real sources of our deficit and makes tough but careful choices needed to reduce the deficit. With cuts of $78 billion, President Obama has taken the first step in curbing the massive defense budget, and I want to work with my colleagues and the President to find additional savings in the defense budget by closing permanent bases overseas that no longer serve a strategic value.

For example, I believe we need to examine why we still have over 200 military bases in Germany 65 years after World War II and many years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The President also makes necessary sacrifices to sustain the maximum Pell Grant award for all students by eliminating the summer Pell Grant program. These are hard cuts to swallow but are necessary.

The Republican bill, on the other hand, prefers to arbitrarily make shortsighted cuts; for example, cutting funding from programs that affect

women and their children, like $758 million from the WIC program and $1 billion from Head Start. The long-term impact of these cuts is clear: prohibiting access to family planning services. So guess what happens? Then denying food for the child and denying access to preschool.

Mr. Speaker, H.R. 1 recklessly cuts spending at the expense of our economic recovery and job creation; nor does the Republican plan put us on a sustainable path to deficit reduction.

I urge my colleagues to vote against this job-cutting, fiscally irresponsible spending bill.

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 36, had I been present, I would have voted ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to H.R. 2.

In survey after survey, the number one issue facing our country is jobs. Last year, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle said the number one issue we should be working on is jobs. Well, the health care reform act is a jobs bill.

In the seventies and eighties I worked in several hospitals in the Los Angeles area. During those years, there was such a severe shortage of health care providers that hospitals recruited nurses from Canada and the Philippines. Right now, there is an estimated shortage of 400,000 nurses nationally. Right now, there is an estimated shortage of 50,000 doctors. Right now, there are waiting lists of several years to get a slot in nursing schools and other allied health professions.

So if there is a shortage of medical personnel right now and health care reform expands coverage to 30 million people, then can someone explain to me how health care reform is not a jobs bill?