Mark E. Souder

Madam Speaker, yesterday I was unable to vote during rollcall No. 226 because of illness. If I would have been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

I thank my colleague from Colorado.

Apparently, our ground rules here are: We praise the vets on Saturday and punish them on Sunday. To my friend from New Jersey, this afternoon we did a supposed fix for TRICARE, because the Senate bill, basically, unless you're 65 and over, triples TRICARE. We did this Band-Aid thing----

I have 4 minutes, so let me do mine.

We did a Band-Aid this afternoon. Now, the challenge is that as we debate tomorrow, apparently we're going to have separate votes on the Senate bill. And the Senate bill is the problem here because it could become law. So it doesn't really matter what we're doing in the House right now. The question is: Are our veterans covered in the Senate bill, and is TRICARE going to be gutted in the Senate bill? And the veterans who took this risk during the Cold War would rather--as much as they appreciate a flag being raised, they'd rather have their TRICARE. So the fundamental question, if any Member votes for the Senate bill tomorrow in the rule, if we're not going to do this deeming bill and instead do a separate vote on the Senate bill, this is really going to be the vote for veterans.

A second category. When it says there's no harm for veterans, or no job killing, I happen to represent the orthopedic capital of the world in Warsaw, Indiana. It has DePuy, Biomet, and Zimmer. They are getting a tax clobbering in this bill, particularly in the Senate bill, and that tax clobbering equals half of their R&D.

Now, who uses hip replacements and elbows and shoulders more than anybody? Our vets. Because, particularly as we've developed body armor, they're getting hit in those places where they used to die, they're now alive, and a big percentage of them are doing hip replacements.

Now, R&D is critical, particularly as they're 18- to 22-year-olds, those who are retired vets from the Cold War era are looking at trying to get quality hip and joint replacements. One of the questions is is that if you reduce half the R&D, only one of two things can happen: either future vets are not going to have as good quality and advances like we've been having or the jobs will go offshore to reduce the costs so they can do the R&D. There's really not a way that this isn't going to affect vets. It's indirect.

Then, as we all know, veterans health care in general, just like Medicare and Medicaid, pays for variable costs and a little bit of mixed costs. The way the government runs through buildings is that, if we run through those in one year, we don't do amortization and depreciation; therefore, in health care costs, private pay funds most R&D and innovations. So if you're going to keep the quality of care that you're going to have in veterans, you may have your veterans hospital, but the new drugs that are being invented, the new hips that are being invented, the new things that were there that were funded by private pay are going to be squeezed out of the market and, therefore, veterans will be indirectly hurt by that.

A third category this bill hurts in veterans and these Cold War people that we're paying tribute to is, as it goes through and addresses--even in second home sales, by the way. I have a hundred lakes in Steuben County, a hundred lakes in Kosciusko County. These aren't big, fancy kind of western lakes. These are often where retired vets have a mobile home--it's their second residence--that we've now airdropped in a tax on the second residences. It's going to punish many of them who are banking on this either to cash it out for the retirement or to maybe retire there. They're going to get taxed. They didn't have the margin for their homes. We have whole lakes that are around different veterans groups and age groups and people were police and firemen. They aren't all million-dollar homes. Many of them are $20,000 and $30,000 homes that now are suddenly valued at $100,000, $200,000, and they're going to get hammered.

The fourth category where they're going to get hit, and they're very used to in the veterans systems, and it may not directly affect them, but they're going to watch with everybody.

Veterans get ping-ponged back and forth. Right now in Indiana, we're online in this budget to get a new hospital in Fort Wayne. We haven't had investment since before World War II. But they get ping-ponged down to Indianapolis because of utilization. You know what this bill says? In the Medicare reduction it says: Higher utilization of equipment. Higher utilization of equipment is being interpreted and they're now going to cardiologists, oncologists, and others in my district, saying, 80 percent utilization.

That does great for the Federal savings in Medicare, but what it means is everybody's going to get ping-ponged like the veterans are getting ping-ponged, because only Indianapolis in the State of Indiana can reach 80 percent utilization.

So they're telling Fort Wayne, South Bend, other parts of the State that they aren't going to have oncology equipment, heart equipment. And just like the veterans who see their records are often lost; when their appointments are canceled, they have to get a motel. They have to pay for their own gas. This is a nightmare for the rest of the citizens.

So, once again, I would say, We praise them on Saturday. We're punishing them on Sunday.

I'm sorry. I don't have the details in front of me. I have it down. You know the details of the bill far better than I do.

It's based off the capital gains. Right now--I had one person with a $40,000 house, and the capital gains on that made the difference of his retirement on an annual basis. The question is they have planned nothing----

In an earlier bill where I was talking about the veterans health care parts of this bill as we paid tribute to Cold War veterans, Chairman Andrews and I had a follow-up discussion about two of the details which shows the difficulty of this bill. He believes that the partial fix that was done this afternoon on TRICARE was not needed and that it was duplicative. We believed it was absolutely needed. Members who read the same bill can come to different conclusions. Now, my friend from New Jersey actually wrote much of the bill, he is a very detailed guy, and I appreciate his knowledge. But we feel that we needed the TRICARE fix.

On the question of the second home, I said $30,000 and used an example of $200,000. By not going to $230,000, I have missed the tax portion. And he also agrees that it depends on what your income is. If it is $80,00 or above, the example I gave of somebody who had a mobile home whose lot is now worth $230,000 and if they have a job as a teacher and work at a gas station they will have $80,000 in income, which means they will now have taxes on a home that they never thought were taxes. So there were disagreements. You can look at the same question, but clearly it is a tax increase on veterans.