Floor Statements

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I thank the gentleman for yielding to me earlier in the hour. I think an open dialogue is a good thing, and I hope the gentlemen will be here to hear the rebuttals that I am about to provide to the statements that they made in the previous hour, starting with the bill that passed out of the Energy and Commerce Committee and other committees, H.R. 3200, which is the foundational bill to the health care act, the national health care act that Democrats are seeking to pass.

And regardless of the statement that there is general language in the bill that says nothing in this bill funds illegals, the fact remains that the amendment that was offered by the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Deal), which was language that is tried and true, that existed in the Medicaid legislation that we have used for at least a decade that requires proof of citizenship, that amendment was voted down in Energy and Commerce 29-28, resulting in an open-door policy where there are no restrictions to keep the bill from providing access to benefits to illegals or to people who are here legally but are barred under the 5- year bar.

In fact, the standard that exists was a standard that required proof of citizenship. Democrats first took that apart when they passed an expansion of SCHIP, the State Children's Health Insurance Program. They took that from a 200 percent of poverty, and the first time it passed the House it went to 400 percent of poverty. Mr. Deal offered the same amendment in that bill to put in language that existed in law before it was struck out by the expansion of SCHIP, and it was voted down on almost a party-line effort.

We know if there are not provisions which require proof of citizenship, then there aren't provisions that are going to prohibit illegals from getting benefits under the bill. The Congressional Budget Office knows that. They scored that language in SCHIP as costing $8.9 billion to fund health insurance for illegals and to provide Medicaid to illegals because it removed the citizenship standard. Removing the citizenship standard, according to the Congressional Budget Office, on H.R. 3200, the health care bill, would provide for access to those benefits under the bill for as many 5.6 million illegals. And that's the score that came out from the Congressional Budget Office.

Another nonpartisan organization is the Congressional Research Services, and they also concluded there weren't restrictions in H.R. 3200, the health care bill, so that would result in those benefits going to illegals who would apply. And we know how fast the grapevine works and how effectively people can game the system, and no one should be in a position of responsibility in this Congress if they can't understand that equation, especially if they are on the committee.

And it is not just Steve King making this statement. It is the Congressional Budget Office on at least two different occasions, rendering a judgment on that specific language of the Deal amendment, and it is Congressional Research Services. And by the way, it goes on down the line and a number of other entities, including the President, who finally had to address it and say we are going to have to write something in the bill to protect us so it doesn't fund illegals. And it also includes the Senate, which took the position that they would address the language.

So why do you have to fix it if it doesn't fund illegals the way it is? And I believe that the President stood here and called a group of Members of Congress who were exactly right on their facts, I believe he accused them of not being honest. And directly, he said, We will call you out.

Well, I'm saying this: The President got it wrong. Maybe he has it right now, but these gentlemen have it wrong, and they need to go back and check their facts. The amendment was voted down 29-28. The Deal amendment required proof of citizenship. When you remove the proof of citizenship requirement, the Congressional Budget Office and the Congressional Research Services and every nonpartisan, objective evaluation comes to the same conclusion: We will be funding illegals if we don't have the language in there. That is the only language that is going to be satisfactory. And by the way, I don't think Senator Baucus has it in his bill yet, although he has pledged to do so, and we will watch that language very carefully as it unfolds over in the Senate.

So yes, illegals would get health care under this system unless we write the language in that sets the standard so that they don't.

The statement that was made by the gentleman, Mr. Altmire, with the public option there would be no subsidies. The facts of the health care bill don't support that. First of all, it is going to take capital to set up the public option as a national health insurance company. If you set up a national health insurance company, it is impossible to do so without putting capital in, without injecting some billions of dollars to jump-start a national health insurance program that would compete directly with the 1,300 private health insurance companies that we have.

That is not what you call a no-subsidy situation. That is called a subsidy situation. Putting capital in to compete against the private sector is subsidy.

What do we suppose will happen if we put $10 billion into the front end of this national health insurance program and we find out that it becomes insolvent? Do we then let it collapse or does this Congress at a later date decide we are going to have to put some billions of dollars in there to keep the national health care plan up?

Under these majorities, under this Pelosi Congress, I guarantee you they will borrow money from the Chinese, if necessary, in order to subsidize a national health care plan. It isn't going to go any other way. They have worked for 30 or 40 years to try to establish a national health care, and they are not going to allow it to go under because it falls a little short on some kind of promise that there won't be subsidies. Yes, there will be subsidies, and any rational person who understands history will know that.

The argument that a national health care plan will compete on a level playing field, a level playing field with referees that will be chosen by the government, not by the private sector, and I will make a point.

This, Mr. Speaker, is the formerly embargoed flowchart that actually depicts the language that exists in H.R. 3200, the national health care plan. We call it the Organizational Chart of the House Democrats' Health Plan. This is the government plan. This is the government option configuration. This creates at least 31 new agencies.

Now, down here at the bottom, I just direct your attention to these two purple circles at the bottom. This is where the crux of the matter is. The gentleman, Mr. Altmire, made the statement that the public option, there wouldn't be any subsidies and they would compete on a level playing field. Well, here is how this field is regulated, and it will not be a level playing field.

Oh, by the way, anything that is a white box is existing programs or agencies. There is Medicare, SCHIP, Medicaid. But the existing private insurers in this little box here, Mr. Speaker, once the bill is passed, these private insurers, this is 1,300 health insurance companies in this little box. That is how many private insurers we have. Those traditional health insurance plans, the policies, there are approximately 100,000 different varieties of policy combinations available across the United States. These policies would have to qualify to become qualified health benefits plans. Now, if there is going to be a qualification set up, I think it is not possible to presume that all 1,300 companies and all 100,000 policies will be qualified under this bill.

This bill doesn't define what will be required necessarily in the health insurance policies. It gives that authority to the Health Choices Administration. The Health Choices Administration commissioner would run that shop with his commission, and they would make the decisions then on what would be the standards for the health insurance companies--these providers here--what would be the standards for the 100,000 health insurance plans which would qualify to go into this purple circle here called qualified health benefits plans.

So for all of this, the rules will be set by the Health Choices Administration commissioner. The new Health Choices czar will write all of those rules. If he has to write the rules, you don't get to call it a level playing field because the rules will be written so the Federal Government can compete. That's the difference in the approach here, the idea that it is a level playing field. It's not. My question was, why are you afraid of the competition? Well, I'm not afraid of the competition. I think we have competition in our health insurance companies. I think that they're afraid of the competition or else they would support the proposal that almost every Republican supports, and that is, allow Americans to buy health insurance across State lines. That expands the competition dramatically, Mr. Speaker.

So there is a fear of competition. There is a fear of letting the free market provide that competition and giving people the portability that they need. There is a real fear also of addressing lawsuit abuse. Lawsuit abuse is the medical malpractice component of these costs that the industry places between 5.5 and 16 percent of the overall health care costs. The number that comes from the person whom I trust the most is 8.5 percent. If you multiply that 8.5 percent across the costs of providing health care in America, over the space of time, it's $203 billion or $2 trillion for the sake of the budget window of 10 years that we deal with. That $2 trillion would pay for everything they wanted to do, but every one of them will stand in the way and block the lawsuit abuse that could actually fund their socialized medicine because the trial lawyers are telling them that they can't address it.

So there are a lot of things that we would like to do. We would like to provide portability, and we would like to fix the lawsuit abuse problem, and we would like to be able to buy health insurance across State lines, provide full deductibility for everybody who pays a health insurance premium, provide transparency in the billing so we can actually have some real competition out there and allow people to expand the HSAs so that HSAs can transform themselves, under good management and good health, into retirement plans, pension plans when one reaches Medicare eligibility age. Those are some of the things on health care.

Mr. Speaker, I feel compelled to rebut some of the statements that were made in the previous hour. And as much as I get along with the gentlemen that were making their presentation, I clearly disagree with a lot of their conclusions. But they have their talking points down pretty well, given what comes out of the DCCC.

I came here tonight, though, to talk about the missile defense shield and the issue with Eastern Europe. I believe the President of the United States has bargained away a very, very important shield that was essential to the negotiations that were going on with Iran. And in their persistent and relentless effort to develop a nuclear capability, not only a nuclear weapon but a means to deliver it, and if they can develop that means to deliver it along with a nuclear weapon, they have said that they want to annihilate Israel, and they eventually want to annihilate the United States. This would put them very closely within the umbrella of being able to strike many places in Europe as well. In the chess game that is going on, in the poker game that's going on, and in the Monopoly game that's going on in the United States, it is something that is very high test. It's very high risk.

We have with us tonight one of the real leaders in this issue who understands the physics, the technology, the politics, the global approach to this, Putin's involvement in this chess game, of him seeking to reconstruct the vestiges of the former Soviet Union, the dynamics of the psychology of the mullahs in Iran, the necessity for the Israelis to defend themselves, and the necessity and the constitutional responsibility for Americans to do the same. I am happy to yield as much time as he may consume to the gentleman from Arizona, Mr. Trent Franks. Thank you for coming down, Mr. Franks.

I thank the gentleman from Arizona, and I look forward to the colloquy that we will have, and I know I've asked the gentleman from Missouri to add a broad view to this.

I just would recap the presentation that we've listened to here, which is precisely worded and is, I think, precisely accurate. It researches some conclusions that I don't think anyone who has followed this in a logical fashion can avoid:

As I understand this, we have been setting up the nuclear shield in Poland and in Czechoslovakia. It takes about 5 years to get it set up. The anticipation was that the Iranians wouldn't be ready for about 5 years. At about the time the President capitulated on this, we had a report that was leaked that maybe Iran could be ready a lot sooner, in maybe as soon as a year.

So I'll just direct your attention to The Wall Street Journal, to Mark Helprin's article. He has a unique way of observing what, I think, the gentleman from Arizona has articulated so well.

Helprin writes: What we have here is an inadvertent homage to Lewis Carroll. We're going to cancel a defense that takes 5 years to mount because the threat will not materialize for 5 years, and we will not deploy land-based interceptors in Europe because our new plan is to deploy land-based interceptors in Europe later.

Does the gentleman from Arizona care to comment on the accuracy of that statement?

In the gentleman's opinion, does this capitulation on the part of President Obama make it more or less likely that the Israelis will be compelled to strike at the capabilities of Iran?

Reclaiming my time, as I look at this and at the strategic location of Israel and at the 12 to 14 minutes that it takes for a missile to get from Iran to Israel and at the 12 to 14 months for Iran to have the capabilities to do so, the odds of being able to slow Iran's development down of nuclear weapons because of any diplomatic maneuverings that might come with regard to sanctions--economic sanctions, negotiations, blockades, threats of anything--have diminished dramatically because the club has been laid down by President Obama; the shield has been laid down by President Obama, and it sends the message to Iran:

Accelerate your efforts on the 17 to 200 centrifuges that you have.

So, from my view, it puts Israel in a position where they may have no choice. If they wait 12 to 14 months to make their decision, the decision may be coming too late at that period of time.

A third alternative, I might suggest, would be if the people in Iran could successfully rise up, could take that country over and could move towards peace.

I know the gentleman from Missouri has got an opinion on this subject matter. I would be very happy to yield so much time as Todd Akin will consume in laying out the parameters of the view of this as he sees it.

Mr. Akin, thank you for coming to the floor tonight.

As I listen to the descriptions that have been delivered here in ways by the three of us tonight, it takes me back to a memory that I believe 1984 was the year, if I remember correctly, that Jeane Kirkpatrick stepped down as the Ambassador to the United Nations. It wasn't a very big article. It was a little thing, about page 3 or 4, and it was in the Des Moines Register. I read that, and it stuck with me all that time.

I should go back and get it verbatim, but I am very close. She said we are in the middle of the cold war. If you remember, it was the height of the cold war at that time and Reagan's first term.

She said, what is going on in this cold war, this great clash of the two titan superpowers, is the equivalent of playing chess and monopoly on the same board. The only question is--remember the arms race? The only question is will the United States of America bankrupt the Soviet Union before they checkmate us militarily? Do we bankrupt the Soviet Union economically before the Soviet Union checkmates us militarily?

We know what happened as it unfolded. On November 9, 1989, 20 years coming up here in a month and a half will be the celebration of 20 years of the Berlin Wall come crashing down. That wasn't just the symbol of the Iron Curtain, that was the Iron Curtain. The Soviet Union's economy couldn't sustain this.

Well, Putin has said that's the greatest disaster of his time. Now we have watched him out on this chessboard seeking to checkmate the free world. It's very early in Putin's game, however, while he understands the monopoly game a little better, having actually built some wealth at least temporarily with the high energy prices that he has. We have watched Putin maneuver around the globe.

I would point out that the Russians went in and essentially made an offer in Kyrgyzstan that they couldn't refuse. They are in Kyrgyzstan. They cancelled the lease that we had on our airstrips that were there, which shut off our ability to be able to freight military supplies into Afghanistan. The Russians did that.

Then they had the temerity to turn to us and say, oh, never fear. We will be happy to haul that freight in for you for a price, and you can always trust us to do that in a reliable fashion. With a straight face, go in and interfere in our relations with Kyrgyzstan and make them a better offer than we are making, then turn around and say now that we have this under control, we will make sure that we will freight this equipment in, and you can trust your military operations are going to continue. That's one piece of the chessboard.

Another piece of the chessboard that Putin is playing is a little over a year ago he went in and invaded Georgia. He shut down the oil that went through Georgia. If I remember right, it's 1.2 billion barrels of oil a day that goes through Georgia on a pipeline. There is a train that hauls crude oil through Georgia. They have got natural gas pipelines that go through Georgia. The nation of Georgia is, if you are a chess player, it is the square on the chessboard that if you will notice, in a highly contested game, it almost invariably comes down to where you have a whole series of pieces that are focused on one square.

Someone will put some pressure on a square on the board, and the other--the opponent will have to put a competing piece to cover that, and then you back it up with another, another, another. That square becomes the whole game that is going to be fought out in that single square.

Georgia is the square. It's the square that energy has to go through from the energy that's on the east side of the Caspian Sea to get through Georgia to get over to the Black Sea where it can go on out and then into the shipping lanes in the rest of the world and go on around Europe and everywhere else. Natural gas and lots of it, oil, and a good supply of it, and Putin went in and controlled it. Now he has backed off a little bit, but he has said he can do whatever he wants to shut that oil off.

What do we hear from the Germans, for example? They say, well, of course a nuclear powered Iran is preferable to a military strike to take it out, as if that was an unquestionable fact. In reality, they haven't done the calculation what Mr. Franks calls nuclear jihad.

Additionally, the Russians shut off the fuel going through, the gas going through to Germany a year ago. It was a year ago January that happened. The Germans said, well, don't worry about that, that's only about 30 percent of our overall gas supply so it really doesn't put that much of a crimp in us. And, by the way, we have created some alternatives. We are going to build another pipeline that comes through in the north. From where? Russia, to make themselves more dependent on it.

As I watch Putin make these moves around the world and bring the resources into Iran that Mr. Franks has talked about, and we are naive enough, myopically naive enough to accept or even consider that there is a rational argument that somehow the President capitulated on missiles in Eastern Europe and he got a quid pro quo of some kind for it. I would pose this question beyond rhetorical: Is there anything in either one of your gentlemen's imagination that would be worth pulling the missiles out of Eastern Europe and capitulating and betraying the Poles and the Czechs and the rest of the region when they say that we have sold them out and stabbed them in the back, sold them out to the Russians and stabbed them in the back? How could a President get a trade, a quid pro quo? What could it possibly be?

I had one of the defenders of the White House say to me, well, it would be because surely the President got something for it. Maybe he got a promise that Putin would help negotiate with Iran to slow down their nuclear development capability.

Really. It's been expanded.

I am looking for some imaginary response. What could the quid pro quo be? What would be worth giving up a shield, a shield against the nuclear capability of Iran, and diplomatically, economically, tactically, strategically? Does the gentleman from Arizona have any ideas?

Reclaiming my time, I just contemplate sometimes the naivete that can take place when you look around the globe. I remember going up to Canada and picking up some of their history books and reading the things in history from a Canadian perspective versus an American perspective. That's the first time I realized that everybody doesn't understand history the same in the world. You understand it from your own perspective.

I took a legal trip down to Cuba and traveled there with a professor of Cuban history for several days, and he began to tell me about the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898. I never thought Cuba had anything to do with it. I thought it was the Spanish-American War. So there's a couple little snapshots.

I take you back to late February of this year, sitting in Moscow with former Prime Minister Gorbachev, who gave a lecture to me and a number of Members of Congress that he could still be ruling Russia and the Soviet Union and could have held the entire USSR together if he'd chosen to do so.

But he identified the German will for unity, and so he decided to go forward with glasnost and perestroika and open up the borders and bring about what was--let me say the ``devolution'' of the Soviet empire willingly. What a breathtaking view of history. He said the United States had nothing to do with it. And I'm sitting there listening to that.

He also wanted to know if there were any Republicans in the room, so he identified me right away. He accused me of going hunting with Dick Cheney.

In any case, the philosophy that the United States had nothing to do with ending the Cold War, that that clash of titans wasn't resolved in that economic and military tactical arena that Jeane Kirkpatrick talked about, but only because of the good will of Mikhail Gorbachev recognizing the desire for German unity, when you see that and you look at the European philosophy that dialogue is progress.

They came to this Capitol in September of 2003, the ambassadors to the United States from France, Germany, and Great Britain, to plead with us--wasn't quite a plea--to argue to us and try to sell us on the idea that we should open up dialogue with Iran to talk them out of a nuclear capability. At that point I said, What are you willing to do? They said, We want dialogue to open.

Okay, then what? Are you willing to go to the United Nations for resolutions, are you willing to do sanctions, are you willing do blockades? Are you willing to lay the ``or what'' line out there that says if you cross this line, then we will by force resolve this issue? And if that happens, where are you going to be on that day and with what? And they just backed away from that like they had seen a ghost. Their entire mission was, dialogue was progress.

Now if we've got a viewpoint, a European viewpoint that dialogue is progress and you can always talk away your differences, that's a philosophy that doesn't fit the American viewpoint. We don't go to the Neville Chamberlain School of Diplomacy, as perhaps Obama did.

Then you have to also put into that the mindset of Putin, the Russians, Gorbachev, the mullahs in Iran, the Islamic approach, the nuclear jihad approach. We can't measure this on the part of just simply the good will of the United States controls missiles in Iran. And I'm afraid the President has come to that conclusion--that his good will will control missiles in Iran.

The gentleman from Missouri.

Reclaiming from the gentleman from Missouri, I refer to a statement made by John Bolton, before I yield to the gentleman from Arizona. John Bolton, a former ambassador to the United Nations and a solid, very brilliant, tactical-thinking man, diplomatically tactical-thinking man.

He said that the President's decision not to deploy antiballistic missile defense is unambiguously wrong. It reflects a concession to Russian belligerence and an embarrassing abandonment of two of America's strongest allies and an appalling lack of understanding of the present and future risk posed by Iran.

``Worse, this unforced retreat of American hard power clearly signals what may well be a long American recession globally.''

That is a chilling analysis.

I yield to the gentleman from Arizona.

I appreciate the gentleman's coming to the floor and the background and the effort that he has put into this thing for all of these years and having emerged as one of a small handful of leaders on nuclear technology and the missile defense shield, as Mr. Akin has as well.

I want to reiterate a statement that you made: we put our security in their sanity. That being the Russian's sanity, not the mullahs' sanity because the mullahs have a different level of rationale if you would like to call it rational at all.

Mr. Speaker, I will include in the Record the two articles that I addressed in my statement.

[From the Washington Times, Sept. 22, 2009]

Erring on the Side of Incaution

(By John R. Bolton)

President Obama's decision not to deploy anti-ballistic

missile defense assets in Poland and the Czech Republic is

unambiguously wrong. It reflects an unrequited concession to

Russian belligerence, an embarrassing abandonment of two of

America's strongest European allies, and an appalling lack of

understanding of the present and future risks posed by Iran.

Worse, this unforced retreat of American hard power clearly

signals what may well be a long American recessional

globally.

First, Mr. Obama's capitulation was about Russia, not about

Iraq. Russia has always known that former President George W.

Bush's national missile defense project was not aimed against

Russia's offensive nuclear capabilities, neither in scope nor

in geographical deployment. To the contrary, our common

interests in defending against threats from rogue states

should have led to missile-defense cooperation, not

antagonism.

What has really agitated Russia was not that the sites were

for missile defense, but that they were an American presence

in former Warsaw Pact countries, Russia's now-defunct sphere

of influence.

Now, without anything resembling a quid pro quo from

Moscow, Washington has dramatically reduced its presence and

isolated its own friends. In Russia and Eastern Europe, the

basic political conclusion is straightforward and worrying:

Russia, a declining, depopulating power, growled, and the

United States blinked. This devastating reaction extends

worldwide, especially among our Pacific allies, who fear

similar unilateral U.S. concessions in their region.

``It is far better to err on the side of U.S. security than

on the side of greater risk of nuclear devastation. There is

no harm in deploying our missile defenses before Iran's ICBMs

can reach America, but incalculable risk if Iran is ready

before we are.''

Second, Mr. Obama's proposed new missile defense

deployments will not protect the United States against

Iranian ICBMs, for which the Eastern European sites were

primarily intended. Protecting Europe was only an ancillary,

although welcome side effect, one intended to help calm

European concern that the United States would abandon Europe

and embrace isolationism behind national missile defenses.

Western Europe, not surprisingly, seems largely content

with the Obama-projected alternative, which, if implemented,

would protect Europe, but would have few tangible benefits

for America.

Thus, despite Mr. Obama's rhetoric about replacing one

missile defense design with a more effective one, the systems

in question are aimed at two completely different objectives.

Of course, it also remains to be seen whether and exactly how

the administration will actually implement its projected

deployment, and what new risks are entailed.

For example, U.S. ships deployed in the Black Sea would be

fully exposed to Russia's naval capabilities, in contrast to

more secure bases in continental Europe. Failure to implement

the new plan aggressively will be seen as yet another failure

of American will.

Mr. Obama's public explanation omitted any acknowledgment

that the Eastern European deployments were never intended to

counter existing Iranian threats, but rather were to protect

against threats maturing in the future. Obviously, to be

ahead of the curve and ready before Iran's threat became

real, we had to begin deployment now, not in the distant

future. Instead, Mr. Obama's decision effectively forecloses

our ability to be ready when the real need arises.

Third, although purportedly based on new intelligence

assessments about Iran's capabilities, Mr. Obama's

announcement simply reflected his own longstanding biases

against national missile defense. He has never believed in it

strategically, or that it could ever be made operationally

successful.

The new intelligence ``estimate'' agreeably minimizes the

threat posed by Iranian ICBMs, thus facilitating a decision

to cancel that had been all but made during last year's

campaign. The assessment, as briefed to Congress immediately

after the president's announcement, involved no actual new

intelligence, but only a revised prediction of Iran's future

capabilities.

The new ``assessment'' also confirmed the administration's

often-expressed and so far frustrated desire to negotiate

with Iran over Tehran's nuclear weapons program. That

schedule has slipped badly, leaving Mr. Obama running out of

time for diplomatic endeavors.

Moreover, stronger economic sanctions, his fallback

position, are increasingly unlikely to be comprehensive or

strict enough to actually stop Iran's nuclear program before

completion. How convenient, therefore, to suddenly ``find''

more time on the missile front, thus facilitating a

diplomatic strategy that had been increasingly headed toward

disastrous failure. Moreover, whatever the available

intelligence, it does not determine what levels of

international risk we should accept. Mr. Obama has too high a

tolerance for such risk.

He is too willing to place America in jeopardy of Iran's

threat, a calculus exactly opposite from what we should use.

It is far better to err on the side of U.S. security than on

the side of greater risk of nuclear devastation. There is no

harm in deploying our missile defenses before Iran's ICBMs

can reach America, but incalculable risk if Iran is ready

before we are.

Mr. Obama's rationale for abandoning the Eastern European

sites ignores the important reasons they were created,

underestimates the Iranian threat, and bends the knee

unnecessarily to Russia. This all foreshadows a depressing

future. Our president, uncomfortable with projecting American

power, is following the advice of his intellectual

predecessor George McGovern: ``Come home, America.'' Both our

allies and adversaries worldwide will take due note.

[From the Wall Street Journal, Sept. 23, 2009]

Obama and the Politics of Concession--Iran and Russia Put Obama to the

Test Last Week, and He Blinked Twice

(By Mark Helprin)

During last year's campaign, Sen. Joe Biden famously

remarked that, if his ticket won, it wouldn't be long before

``the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy''

on foreign affairs. Last week, President Obama, brilliantly

wielding the powers of his office, managed to fail that test

not just once but twice, buckling in the face of Russian

pressure and taking a giant wooden nickel from Iran.

With both a collapsing economy and natural gas reserves

sufficient to produce 270 years of electricity, the surplus

of which it exports, Iran does not need nuclear electrical

generation at a cost many times that of its gas-fired plants.

It does, however, have every reason, according to its own

lights, to seek nuclear weapons--to deter American

intervention; to insure against a resurgent Iraq; to provide

some offset to nearby nuclear powers Pakistan, Russia and

Israel; to move toward hegemony in the Persian Gulf and

address the embarrassment of a more militarily capable Saudi

Arabia; to rid the Islamic world of Western domination; to

neutralize Israel's nuclear capacity while simultaneously

creating the opportunity to destroy it with one shot; and,

pertinent to last week's events, by nuclear intimidation to

turn Europe entirely against American interests in the Middle

East.

Some security analysts may comfort themselves with the

illusion that soon-to-be nuclear Iran is a rational actor,

but no country gripped so intensely by a cult of martyrdom

and death that to clear minefields it marched its own

children across them can be deemed rational. Even the United

States, twice employing nuclear weapons in World War II,

seriously contemplated doing so again in Korea and then in

Vietnam.

The West may be too pusillanimous to extirpate Iran's

nuclear potential directly, but are we so far gone as to

foreswear a passive defense? The president would have you

think not, but how is that? We will cease developing the

ability to intercept, within five years, the ICBMs that in

five years Iran is likely to possess, in favor of a sea-based

approach suitable only to Iranian missiles that cannot from

Iranian soil threaten Rome, Paris, London or Berlin. Although

it may be possible for the U.S. to modify Block II Standard

Missiles with Advanced Technology Kill Vehicles that could

disable Iranian missiles in their boost phase, this would

require the Aegis destroyers carrying them to loiter in the

confined and shallow waters of the Gulf, where antimissile

operations would be subject to Iranian interference and

attack.

Interceptors that would effectively cover Western Europe

are too big for the vertical launch cells of the Aegis ships,

or even their hulls. Thus, in light of the basing

difficulties that frustrate a boost-phase kill, to protect

Europe and the U.S. Mr. Obama proposes to deploy land-based

missiles in Europe at some future date. If he is willing to

do this, why not go ahead with the current plans? The answer

is that, even if he says so, he will not deploy land-based

missiles in Europe in place of the land-based missiles in

Europe that he has cancelled because they are land-based in

Europe.

What we have here is an inadvertent homage to Lewis

Carroll: We are going to cancel a defense that takes

five years to mount, because the threat will not

materialize for five years. And we will not deploy land-

based interceptors in Europe because our new plan is to

deploy land-based interceptors in Europe.

Added to what would be the instability and potentially

grave injury following upon the appearance of Iranian nuclear

ICBMs are two insults that may be more consequential than the

issue from which they arise. Nothing short of force will turn

Iran from the acquisition of nuclear weapons, its paramount

aim during 25 years of secrecy and stalling. Last fall,

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad set three conditions for the

U.S.: withdrawal from Iraq, a show of respect for Iran (read

``apology''), and taking the nuclear question off the table.

We are now faithfully complying, and last week, after Iran

foreclosed discussion of its nuclear program and Mojtaba

Samareh Hashemi, Mr. Ahmadinejad's chief political adviser,

predicted ``the defeat and collapse'' of Western democracy,

the U.S. agreed to enter talks the premise of which,

incredibly, is to eliminate American nuclear weapons. Even

the zombified press awoke for long enough to harry State

Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, who replied that, as Iran

was willing to talk, ``We are going to test that proposition,

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 35 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, September 24, 2009, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, as always, it is an honor to address you on the floor of the House of Representatives.

I came down to get my material. I had prepared to rebut the gentleman from Florida, and I found myself a little bit void with major objections with what he had to say; in fact, I appreciate the tone of the gentleman in his presentation, his delivery. We will find places where we disagree, and it's important that we find places also where we can agree.

I would say, Mr. Speaker, that it did not contribute to bipartisanship to have the resolution that addressed Joe Wilson here this week. That dropped a partisan divide down between this Chamber. And if anybody thinks we are more likely to get a good solution for America on health care or anything else because of that, they would be completely mistaken, Mr. Speaker. So I make that point at the beginning of this.

I appreciate the bipartisan dialogue of the gentleman from Florida. We recognize that we come from two different places philosophically. The world looks entirely different if you look at it from the side of constitutionalism and free enterprise and individual responsibility than it does if you look at it from the standpoint that the government should be providing the resources to people for whatever reason might be their misfortune.

In fact, I serve on the Judiciary Committee, and I've been on that committee, between Congress and my time in the Iowa Senate, my 13th year. I'm one of those rare nonlawyers on the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Speaker, and so I tell the lawyers that that gives me a decided advantage in my approach.

In any case, this country is a country that is established on the rule of law, on our constitutional values and on personal responsibility. When we do those things that take away personal responsibility and when we punish the people who are the most productive among us and when we take away their incentives to continue to be more productive, they have more of a tendency than to slow down their productivity. Some of them stop. Some of them will decide, well, I can't keep funding this government that's asking for more and more of the sweat from my brow or is asking for the return on the capital that they have formed, so they give up or they move their companies overseas to places like China or India or they simply don't add onto the production line of the factory. Whatever the case may be, we get less growth in our economy when we punish the people who are producing.

Ronald Reagan had a way of expressing that, and I don't know if I can get it exactly right: If you tax something, then you are punishing it. If you subsidize something, you can expect it to grow because whatever you subsidize will grow, and whatever you tax will shrink. Reagan had a clear understanding of this, and we need to have a better understanding here amongst the consensus in the House of Representatives. There always is another story. There always is another anecdote. There always is another tear-jerking way of looking at an individual case or even at aggregating some smaller cases that may not represent the broader whole.

We need to be a wise body in the House of Representatives, a wise body that looks at empirical data and that understands the psychology of the people in this country. Our job is to improve the average annual productivity of the people in the United States of America. If we do that, we will increase then the average annual productivity, of course, and it will improve the quality of life, the standard of living, and it will expand technology and medicine--anything you want to address. Yet, if we turn the safety net into a hammock, if we take that net that keeps them out of the bottom and we crank it up to the point where it becomes a hammock, then people will lay in that hammock and will take it easy, and they won't be using their best skills. Their incentives go away as you raise the safety net up and as it turns into a hammock.

So we've had an intense health care debate going on here, and I'm very grateful for this. I'm grateful that we're able to have the time throughout the month of August to have town hall meetings all across this country--town hall meetings in Florida as the gentleman previous just said. There have been all kinds of town hall meetings in Iowa. In every State that I know of, Members of Congress have had town hall meetings.

Mr. Speaker, at this point, I want to thank my senior Senator, Chuck Grassley from Iowa, for engaging in the negotiations, in the debate and in the dialogue on the health care issue on the Senate side. It may well have been the single most important key factor that allowed for the debate in health care to be extended through the month of August and past Labor Day to get us to this point in September where we are. If it hadn't been for Senator Chuck Grassley's having negotiated these health care issues within that Gang of Six in the United States Senate, it's possible and maybe even likely that they would have found a way to ram a bill through this Chamber, to put it through the Senate and through the House and on President Obama's desk before the August break.

If that had happened, the TEA party people would have had a different reason to come to town if they'd come at all. If that had happened, the town hall meetings never would have taken place in that way. They would have seen that they'd gotten run over by Big Government. By the way, this getting run over by Big Government isn't something that has just to do with health care at all. It's the current issue of Big Government's seeking to run over the individual freedoms of the American people.

We have watched--and this would be the 17th of September, today. Now, the day after tomorrow will mark the 1-year anniversary that Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson came to the Capitol and insisted that we present him with a $700 billion check so that he could buy up the toxic debt that's on the financial markets and could avert a financial meltdown, a loss of confidence in our currency and in the financial institutions, which could have caused the global economy to crash. That's how it was presented to us by the Secretary.

He said, Give me $700 billion, and I can't have any strings attached. If you have any ideas, don't try to offer them, he said, because I've been working on this for 13 months, and you've only known about it for 24 hours. So, therefore, whatever you come up with will only make my good idea worse, so just be quiet, and give me the money. That was essentially it.

We advised him, when you ask for $700 billion in taxpayer dollars, you've stepped into the political arena. It isn't just a matter of being shielded in the U.S. Treasury, so it was a little harder for him. In the end, he got $350 billion with another $350 billion that was earmarked for the next year, which was to be approved by a Congress to be elected later and to be signed by a President to be elected later. This is what was going on almost a year ago today: Henry Paulson's trip to the Capitol at a time when he predicted that there was going to be a major financial meltdown of global finances, the U.S. economy being at the heart of it and leading it.

Now, he couldn't guarantee us nor could he predict that his effort and strategy with the TARP money, with the $700 billion in TARP money, would actually be successful, but he did predict that, if we didn't do that, we would have an economic meltdown at least to some significant degree. That was a year ago.

Since that period of time, by the way, President Obama flew into town

to meet with President Bush. We had the Presidential candidate John McCain who did the same. They sat around the table at the White House, along with the Speaker of the House, the Republican leader, John Boehner, and the leadership in the Senate. They came out of there with, I'll say, not quite a unanimous position but one that was to go forward with the TARP funding.

About half of the Republicans in this House voted ``no.'' Most of the Democrats voted ``yes.'' About half of the Republicans voted ``yes.'' It split the party over here. It didn't really split the party over here. Spending money doesn't bother those folks on that side as much as it does on this side, would be my view.

So the TARP money was released, at least half of it in the beginning last year, closer into October, and it was followed by an election. By the way, this TARP money was voted for and was supported by the then- Senator and candidate for President Obama, who certainly asked for the balance of that TARP funding as President and got it. So this TARP money is President Obama's economy. It's a component of his solution, and it's part of the negotiations, and it answers why they were taking place with the Presidential candidates in the White House. President Bush knew there had to be a handoff that went to the next President, and the next President was sitting at the table in the negotiation room of the White House. It could have been either John McCain or President Obama--they were both there--but the next President was sitting at the table.

So, as they bought into this, this responsibility for the $700 billion in TARP lays at the feet right now of the President of the United States, Barack Obama. He supported this program. He advocated for it. He voted for it. It's a matter of the Congressional Record.

Behind that, many argued, came the necessary nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored enterprises. The chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank, had argued just in October of 2005 that he would not support a government bailout or subsidy of Fannie and Freddie. Yet, just 3\1/2\ years later, that's what happened.

Additionally, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac received about $100 billion in taxpayers' money each. Plus, about $5.5 trillion in contingent liabilities went along with the deal of the Federal Government's finally nationalizing the balance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, formerly a private organization/quasi-government at the time but now nationalized, nationalized by the White House and by the leadership of this government.

With that came the large investment banks. Just a couple of days ago was the anniversary of Lehman Brothers' going under if you'll remember. Then we saw the nationalization of three large investment banks--AIG, which was the huge insurance company that was insuring the risk of the mortgage lenders as they packaged up and tranched and marketed these mortgages off on the secondary and tertiary markets. They broke them up, repackaged them--cut and shuffled them, so to speak--and sent them on up through the financial chain. The value of those mortgages and the risk of their default were evaluated by AIG. There really wasn't anybody looking over the shoulder of AIG.

There are other things that went wrong with the financial institution. There was the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and of three large investment banks and AIG. This was flowing along, the President having been engaged in this all of the way.

Then we saw a $400-and-some billion omnibus spending bill get passed off the floor of the House of Representatives without debate or examination. It was just simply: we've got to keep the government running, so we'll kick the can down the road, and here is a big stack of paperwork. In it is the spending of over $400 billion.

At right about that same time, we had President Obama calling on this Congress to give him $787 billion in the stimulus package. I remember that discussion as he came forward to our conference and was about to talk about and ask for $787 billion. He said that Franklin Delano Roosevelt lost his nerve and didn't spend enough money. I might be paraphrasing slightly here. It isn't exactly a quote. Yet the theme of it is very consistent with what the President said. He said that President Roosevelt lost his nerve, and got to worrying about balancing the budget, and didn't spend enough money.

The result was, in the second half of the decade of the Great Depression, we had a recession within a depression, which brought unemployment up again in the latter half of the thirties. Then along came World War II, which was the largest stimulus plan ever, which got us out of the Great Depression.

That's not just it in a nutshell. That's almost all of the nutshell that was delivered by the President that day. As I listened to that, I thought: Mr. President, you and I took a completely different lesson from the Great Depression. Wherever his economic studies came from and where he evaluated this--mine, among other things, came from reading a significant amount of material and analyses of the Great Depression. Of course, my parents grew from that and out of that, and the things that they learned also were branded within myself and within all of my siblings. They told stories about how difficult it was during the Great Depression.

I went back into the public library with the intention of writing a paper about how FDR's New Deal was a good deal and how it brought us out of the Great Depression. As I read through every newspaper that was published in my hometown newspaper--and that was twice a week, not a daily paper--from the stock market crash in October of 1929, I went through every paper, looking for the stories that had to do with the New Deal, with the CCC, with the WPA, and with the other programs that FDR brought through in the New Deal. I was preparing to write a paper that would show how the New Deal got us out of the Great Depression and how it moved America forward--how farms were saved, how businesses were saved and how jobs were saved.

As I read through each newspaper throughout all of those years, from 1929 up until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December of '41, I got ready to write that paper. I had all of these notes that came from story after story, and I looked at the ceiling, Mr. Speaker, and I began to wonder: How am I going to write this? I can't find evidence here in the contemporary works in the newspapers that support what I've been told by the people who talked to me in the classroom.

So I wrote the paper. I wish I had a copy of it today. I'd love to have that and introduce it into the Congressional Record and give some other people some insight into what I was thinking at the time.

I remember clearly that I couldn't justify that the New Deal was a good deal, and I've certainly looked at a lot of materials since those years--that's 40 years ago, perhaps. The conclusion that I drew was that the Federal Government spent a lot of money. They borrowed a lot of money, and they set up a debt that was hard to recover from. The government wasn't willing to tighten its belt, but instead, it got the idea that they could borrow money and could spend money and could stimulate the economy--the Keynesian approach to economics. I couldn't buy that. I couldn't submit to that.

I came with a different philosophy, a philosophy that, for me, grows out of The Wealth of Nations, the book that Adam Smith wrote, which is the very foundation for free enterprise. In the 1,057 pages, which I think were in my book, you go through them in a fashion to understand how Adam Smith articulated it, and you can see that, even though he doesn't use the term ``invisible hand,'' the expression is ``the invisible hand of the consumer makes those decisions.''

I talked about this last night on the floor, Mr. Speaker. Let's just say, if you're a bakery and if you're baking bread and if there's somebody out there who is selling bread for a buck and a quarter a loaf and it goes on the shelves in the store and if you can bake bread that is of similar or better quality and can sell it for a dollar, then you might get your little spot on the shelf where you get to put six loaves of bread, and the guy who has got the name brand has got two or three shelves, which are all full of his loaves at a buck and a quarter, and yours are at a dollar a loaf.

Well, then, in comes the consumer, and they look at that and they think, I can save a quarter if I just buy that other brand of bread that I have never heard of. Why don't I try that. I will take that risk.

So they bring home this new loaf of bread. Well, that's good. If it's good bread, they will go back and buy that same brand over and over again, especially if it's cheaper. Meanwhile, the store owner realizes he is running out of those six loaves of bread that he is selling that are going like hot cakes, and the other bread is sitting there getting stale on him. He widens his shelf space for the bakery that is selling a high-quality product for a competitive or lower price.

That's how the good bread takes over the bread that is not as good at a higher price. That's how free enterprise works. That's how the invisible hand works. It goes in and pulls that loaf of bread off the shelf. It will look at the prices and the quality and those decisions that get made millions, and, in fact, billions of times across the country and across the globe. That demand, created by the discernment of the consumer, is what drives the production signals into all of our production in the country.

That is, how many loaves of bread are you going to bake? Well, the demand is such if you can only produce, let's say if you can produce 10,000 loaves of bread a day, and now the demand has gotten so great that you can't meet that demand any longer as a producer, someone who is marketing, then you would make the decision on whether you want to expand your operations, perhaps double them and produce 20,000 loaves of bread a day.

Or you might decide, I am as big as I want to be, and I think I can get a little more money for the bread that I have. You can raise the price. Then the price of that dollar loaf of bread could go to $1.10, $1.15, maybe even $1.25, back to where the other competitors are.

Now you have a choice again, the consumer chooses on quality but not price. It can transition back and forth in a myriad of ways. This invisible hand is a wonderful foundation that has built Western civilization, free enterprise economy, and is often misunderstood by people that never got involved in commerce, didn't ever hire anybody, didn't ever make a capital investment or try to produce something, a good or a service that had value, and had to compete against somebody else that was getting up every morning and trying to figure out how to produce a good or a service that was of higher quality for a lower price than their competitor. That is a blessing to our country, to our economy, to Western civilization, the free enterprise economy.

This, the majority in this Congress, the President of the United States, and probably the majority in the United States Senate, see this world differently. They think they can manage an economy. They think they can go through and nationalize these entities that I have talked about, and a government can manage better than individual consumers and people can manage.

To me, that is a breathtaking concept. All of my training and my experience and my life goes back to if consumers can make the decision and people that are engaged in business can do so for a profit, and the selection process is what makes it all work, why would we inject government in to make decisions? Government can't make better decisions than consumers can or individuals can or individual patients can.

There is no history of that happening anywhere in the world that I know of--government making better decisions. Now, it's true, the government has to do some things. We have to take care of the broad utilities out of the common good. We have got to take care of the transportation links. We have got to do as Abraham Lincoln said, defend our shores, carry the mail. He also said, Do for people that which they cannot do for themselves and otherwise leave us alone.

We are a long ways away from leaving us otherwise alone, and now the government wants to engage in taking over roughly one-sixth of this economy, the entire health care system in the United States and perhaps replace the entire health insurance industry and perhaps, and likely, replace the entire health care delivery system, with the single-payer one-size fits all. That's what's going on in the United States of America.

Mr. Speaker, I am just going to ask your attention to a little flashback I am about to offer here that will take us back to 1993 and 1994. This, Mr. Speaker, in the flashback mode, takes me back to September 22, 1993, which was the last time that a President of the United States spoke to a joint session of Congress on an occasion other than a State of the Union address. Otherwise, most recently we could go to last Wednesday evening when President Obama spoke to a joint session of Congress and advocated his national health care act.

But this was September 22, 1993, Bill Clinton right back there in front of where you are, Mr. Speaker, and he gave a speech that was about the national health care act that they wanted to get passed. Then Hillary Clinton was engaged in often closed-door meetings to try to find a way to put out a health care bill that could be a single-payer plan that would set up all the health care in America and make it work.

This is the infamous poster that shows HillaryCare with the network of new government agencies all tied together. This is a real and legitimate flow chart. In fact, this is lifted off of the archives of The New York Times.

I had one similar to this, and probably identical to it, that hung on my office wall throughout the 1990s and on past the turn of the millennium. But this shows this massive growth in government, the government agency and programs here along this side, Mr. Speaker, shows patients and a global budget, the HMO provider plan, which doesn't have a lot of support these days. Here is an ombudsman, another ombudsman, so that we have liaisons between people and government, a regional health alliance, a corporate health alliance.

They took some existing and wired them together; accountable health plan here and accountable health plan there, wired through to a provider plan. It gets pretty complicated. Here is your HMO plan down here to the global budget and the patients.

Here are more government agency programs. Some of these acronyms I don't recall any more. But I remember that they were all quite a conglomeration of acronyms, and the growth in government is what scared the living daylights out of me as a man who was running a construction company, which I founded. And we had a number of families that worked for me, and we worked together. We provided health insurance for our employees and a retirement plan for our employees.

But I didn't want the government to come in and tell me what I could buy and couldn't buy. I didn't want them to take away my choices to work with my employees. I wanted to be able to offer them the best plan I could, the best employment package possible, because good people are good policy are good production, and a good product comes out of that. You simply cannot do a good job unless you have the right people in place.

We wanted the best people that we could hire. We wanted to provide them the best benefits package possible. I didn't want the government to limit that.

Yet here is this flow chart that I said scared the living daylights out of the me. This is HillaryCare. This is 1993 and 1994. This is the bill that brought Senator Phil Gramm to the floor of the United States Senate right down this hallway directly ahead of you, Mr. Speaker, to the other end of this building, when he stood on the floor of the United States Senate and he said, This will pass over my cold, dead political body.

This is what, again, scared the living day lights out of me, 1993- 1994, and it scared the living daylights out of the American people, who eventually shut down and killed this initiative that was brought to the floor of the House here by Bill Clinton, September 22 of 1993. They really thought that they had put the plan in place, they had the constituency base and a method to get this bill passed. But the American people rose up and said ``no.'' They have had enough, they wanted to maintain their freedom. They have done so with regard to health care for another 15 years or so, I guess I will say 16 years.

But, Mr. Speaker, things have changed. This is the old bill. The House has passed out of committees a new health care bill.

Now if you think black and white, all of these new agencies, the weight of government that a patient would have to wade through and the hoops they would have to jump through--we all know what it's like to deal with the government. That level of frustration with bureaucracy is ever present.

One of the reasons for that is the government ends up with a monopoly, and no one that works for a monopoly has the motivation to treat you--and to me there is no competition there to improve the quality or the service.

And so, here is the black and white HillaryCare flow chart, here is a new, modern, Technicolor, some call it the jelly bean flow chart, that comes from H.R. 3200, the main bill that has passed out of several committees here in the House, including the Ways and Means and the Energy and Commerce Committee.

This new flow chart shows a bill that's different than HillaryCare in some respects. It doesn't take it all with one giant bite. It takes a great big step towards a direction of socialized medicine, in my view. It doesn't guarantee that it ends up being socialized medicine, but it certainly will cause a significant concern that that is what it ends up being.

Each of these black and white circles or squares or boxes here are existing programs or government agencies. The color ones are new government agencies that have to be created in order to have the bureaucracy to manage this H.R. 3200, the government option plan.

The part of this flow chart, Mr. Speaker, that concerns me the most resides down here in the center bottom of this chart, this chart which is available on my Web site. If you are interested, Mr. Speaker, you can simply just Google Congressman Steve King. On the front page, the homepage of my Web site, is a link that will take you directly to this flow chart and one or two others that are quite instructive.

But on this flow chart, here is the part that I would ask attention to. The bill, and this is the vehicle that we are working with here in the House, this isn't something that's not been legitimized by committee passage; it has been. Here is a new agency, the Health Choices Administration. It creates a Health Choices Administration to determine what choices the American people might have when it comes to health insurance. A new government agency to determine what health insurance is legitimate, takes it out of the hands of the States and puts it into the hands of the Federal Government. I think the States take too much authority there myself.

The boss, the person that heads up the Health Choices Administration, is the new Health Choices Administration commissioner. Now, he is not named, and it could be a she. This individual is not named as a czar, because I believe the people that wrote this bill understood that America is full up to here with czars, we are over-full with czars. The President has at least 32 czars by most definitions and perhaps as many as 47 by other definitions.

They are circumventing the confirmation process that vets these candidates for Cabinet positions and other confirmation-level appointments. Instead the President is appointing people that circumvent and eclipse the authority of people in Cabinet positions.

How about the Middle East peace czar who has stepped above the Secretary of State when it comes to negotiating peace in the Middle East? How about the former, what do we call him, the green economy czar, the former czar, Van Jones? A lot of us had something to say about him when we found out that he was a self-avowed Communist, and he had some very radical ideas. Finally, when the Americans found out about Van Jones, the pressure that came caused him to step down rather than the President to dismiss him.

But, how about the executive pay salary czar? What is the White House doing with a position that doesn't exist in the Constitution, but someone who is going to look over the shoulder of executive pay for major corporations in America and determine if the CEO can be making a million dollars a year, but having no heartburn about what Michael Jordan made or, let me say, how about, how much money Tiger Woods makes playing golf? No heartburn over that, but a lot of heartburn over somebody that is actually making money and concerned that they are making too much and want to tax that. That's class envy.

Remember if you are making less than $250,000 a year you don't have to worry, because this President won't raise your taxes. That's clearly a class envy statement, and Joe the Plumber drew the line really clear. He did that in a way that I know it wasn't planned in advance, it just came from his heart; he wants freedom. I am looking forward to maybe sharing the stage with Joe the Plumber next week in St. Louis.

But these czars, we have too many, and we shouldn't have any. There should be congressional oversight over these high-level positions.

But the President of the United States can appoint Cabinet-level people, and they go through the confirmation process, according to the Constitution in the United States Senate, and that happens. That's a good thing. But when he appoints people that have authority over czars that aren't subject to congressional oversight, that's a bad thing.

This Health Choices Administration commissioner would be, for all intent and purposes, a czar, a czar with authority to be able to write all kinds of rules. A commissioner is what they call him. I sometimes call him the ``commi-czar-issioner'' to be able to describe it a little more accurately. This commi-czar-issioner, the Health Choices Administration commissioner, would make the decision about what private insurance policies would be approved. These are the private insurers right now in this white box. In order for them to become--and they are traditional health insurance plans, these are the companies here in this little box, 1,300 health insurance companies are in the United States. There are 1,300 separate companies selling health insurance in the United States.

Remember when President Obama said we need more competition in the health insurance industry? Did he say he thinks the appropriate number for health insurance companies would be 1,301, because that is really what he is talking about conceptually. There are 1,300 private insurance companies selling, in this white box here, policy combinations; so the variety is extended to approximately 100,000 different policy varieties that are offered by 1,300 companies. And the President's view is we need to put some competition in place.

I think we can do that in some easy ways, but I want to make sure that we understand what this means. The Health Choices Administration commissioner would write the rules. The commission would approve them. But they would write the rules on what health insurance policies would qualify under this bill to be sold in the United States.

So I could guarantee you that if this bill passes in this kind of form, then there will not be 100,000 policy varieties for people to choose from because the Health Choices Administration commissioner would regulate them in such a way that a number of them would become disqualified. They couldn't become qualified plans. We know that is true otherwise there would be no reason to create the Health Choices Administration commissioner, and there would be no reason to have language in the bill that establishes the qualified health benefits plans.

That is this purple circle. The qualified health benefits plans. So that 100,000 plans number would be reduced I think by a significant number. I think that the health choices commissioner would write regulations that would chop those 100,000 policy varieties down dramatically and reduce the numbers that are offered. They would argue that it confuses the consumer. So, therefore, we have to consolidate that and offer something that the consumer can understand.

Over here in this other circle is the public plan. The government option is over here in this health insurance exchange. So the government option then has to compete with what is left of the private insurance companies and the private health insurance policies, those that aren't regulated out of existence by the new health insurance czar.

Now let's just pick a number here. I don't think anybody has any idea; but if these 100,000 policies that are available today become 50,000 policies almost at the beginning of the new regulations, and as the competition from the government option begins to take hold, those 100,000 policies that became 50 are reduced to 25, and maybe 10,000 policy varieties; and then you can divide that by the number of States, and you get one-size-fits-all for all of the States, and you can reduce your 10,000 again to maybe a thousand. And then if you divided by five again, you end up with 200 policy options maybe, if you took the 10,000 policies and divided by the 50 States.

I believe that is about the 200 policy opportunities that one can buy. You reduce the number of companies as well. Companies would consolidate and they would merge and they would start writing policies that were at the direction of the Health Choices Administration commissioner, the czar.

So the Federal Government would write new regulations for two reasons. In the end, it would be so they could compete with the private sector that has been decimated by the new rules. They will then set the premiums of the government option. Those premiums will have to be competitive with what's left of the private health insurance. They will set their premiums, and then they will write the regulations so the private health insurance has difficulty meeting those standards so that the Federal Government can compete in this business. And in the end, this purple circle here with 1,300 companies and 100,000 policies gets shrunk down to a tiny circle of its former self.

This circle here created by the bill, the public health plans, the government option grows bigger and bigger and bigger until it encompasses perhaps all of the health insurance in America.

Now, some will say, Mr. Speaker, this is radical reactionary talk. I will submit that it is not. There are patterns that have gone before us that we can learn from. In 1968, the Federal Government passed the Federal flood insurance program. There were private property and casualty companies that were selling flood insurance at that time. There wasn't as much demand in the marketplace as there is today. We had had a number of floods and natural disasters that had taken place over the previous generation that had brought this to a head in Congress, and so they passed legislation that set up the Federal Government in direct competition with the property and casualty insurance companies that were in the private sector selling flood insurance to people in the floodplains.

Now this is complicated, and there are lots of ways you can make this argument on either side, whether the Federal Government should or should not have engaged in flood insurance. But they engaged in flood insurance; and when they did, they also directed that national banks that were writing, loaning money on mortgages on real estate that were in a floodplain, those loans had to include flood insurance as part of the loan. So if you went out into a floodplain--and by the way, I have one county that I represent that is 40 percent floodplain, the Missouri River bottoms area of Monona County is about 40 percent floodplain. To invest in anything in that floodplain, you had to buy flood insurance. That was a Federal law.

So over time, and a shorter period of time than one might imagine, from 1967 when there wasn't any Federal flood insurance available but only through private until a few years after that, the bill passed in 1968 and it took a while to get it implemented, a few years after that, there is no private flood insurance left in America. The Federal Government squeezed out all of the private and took it all over for themselves. Not only that, they created a market by setting a mandate that if you are going to borrow money from a national bank that goes into real estate in a floodplain, you have to pay the premium, their premium for flood insurance.

Now the Big Government people will argue that is a good idea and that it provided flood insurance for people that didn't have it and it took us somewhat out of the business of sending disaster money. Well, guess what, it didn't get us out of the business of sending disaster money. We sent, the first round was $10.5 billion down to New Orleans after Katrina. The second round was $51.5 billion to New Orleans. There were several other bites at the apple, and I am confident that the total is over $100 billion, and there are still requests to go to that area.

So the flood insurance that existed in that area didn't solve the problem completely. I think it has helped. But that is an example. Flood insurance is an example of what can happen and probably is likely to happen to the private health insurance market in the United States.

When the Federal Government engages, they write regulations that favor the Federal Government and disfavor the private sector and set their premiums so that this purple circle shrinks, that is, the private plans. This purple circle, that is the government plans, grows.

Oh, and by the way, the Federal flood insurance program is $19.2 billion in the red with no way to pay for it except to come back to this Congress and ask for that $19.2 billion, which we have to borrow from the Chinese.

So wouldn't we be better off with a private sector solution? And maybe if the premiums that were paid on flood insurance would have reflected the real risk, we might have built a lot more buildings up above the floodplain so they didn't have to pay the flood insurance premium or they could afford a premium at a higher elevation.

I know these things because I have spent my life working in a floodplain and with drainage projects and hydrology.

That is what can happen with health insurance, and this ought to scare us. It should scare the living daylights out of us. If it begins to scare us at all like it did during HillaryCare in the early 1990s, the American people will continue to do what they did, come to the town hall meetings, fill them up, write letters, get on the radio. Go see your Congressman. Let them know that you are intense about maintaining your freedom. That is a portion of this.

Now, the President of the United States has made the argument that we have to fix health care before we can fix this economy, this economy, by the way, that has had 30 percent of its profits nationalized by the Federal Government within the last year. That is again the components of the nationalization that took place in between the TARP and some of it that came out of TARP when they started buying up and nationalizing large investment banks.

But $700 billion in TARP, three large investment banks were nationalized. Lehman Brothers went down. AIG, the large insurance company, nationalized. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, nationalized. General Motors, Chrysler, all nationalized. You add that all up, we are looking, Mr. Speaker, at 30 percent of the profits of the private sector in the United States now under the control of the Federal Government. And that is nationalized.

On top of it, there is an attempt here, right here in this chart, H.R. 3200 or the Senate version of the bill or whatever you would like to look at, that seeks to nationalize eventually another 17.5 percent of our economy. When you round that to the nearest percentage, that becomes, at least by one analysis, 48 percent of the private sector nationalized by the Federal Government. And when the private sector is nationalized, the freedom of the American people is diminished. That is what is going on, Mr. Speaker.

And the President has said health care costs too much money. We have to fix an economy that is in an economic crisis, and we can't fix that economy unless we first fix health care because health care costs too much money at 14.5 percent of our gross domestic product. The average of the industrialized world is about 9\1/2\ percent of their GDP. We don't know that they are comparing apples to apples because there are many government-sponsored enterprises and the nationalization that has taken place in those other countries, we are a different people, Mr. Speaker. We are a Nation that lives and breathes freedom. We want our choices. We want our freedom. We are willing to take some risks. We want to reward people that take risks and succeed. But if we spend too much money on health care, let's have a debate on how to fix that. Perhaps I will come back to that in a moment.

But I want to take us to the next point, the President's next point,

which is the other big problem. The first one is we spend too much money on health care. The other big problem is we have way too many that are uninsured: 47 million Americans are uninsured. Well, I happen to have a little poster that helps illustrate that, Mr. Speaker.

This poster illustrates the universe of the 47 million uninsured. It says that the uninsured are not all the same and you have to break it down. The 47 million number is not on here. The other poster that I had last week does. This data is produced by the Republican Conference in the United States Senate. Down that hallway, not out of this shop, but on their side. That is the source of it. This is 47 million. Now do we want to cover all of the people in this 47 million? We would believe that the 47 million are all middle and lower-middle class working families that are working for some--they want us to believe this, I don't believe it, that are working for some miserly employer that is pocketing the profits but won't provide health insurance for his employees.

First, I will say that many employers do. They do so to be competitive because they want a high-quality standard of people that will come to work for them. We all want the highest level we can, and so we want to pay as much money as we can and the best benefits as we can. The 47 million that are uninsured at any given time, that is a snapshot, Mr. Speaker, and aren't comprised 100 percent of the middle- and lower-income working poor. To some degree they are, but we start with 47 million and we start to subtract.

First, those who are in the United States illegally, this chart says undocumented, noncitizens. Those are illegal aliens in the United States. This chart says 6 million. The other data I was looking at which comes from the Senate Conference is 5.2 million. In any case, the next level of immigrants here are noncitizens who may not be eligible for government-sponsored health care. They are probably not eligible because the law in the United States, if you come to the United States, you are barred for 5 years from receiving welfare benefits. We don't want to be a magnet for people who come in here and see the United States as just a giant ATM that they can cash in on. So this is 4 million. In any case, the old chart was 5 million. So we are at 10 million people. We don't want to cover this. We don't want to reward illegals to come to the United States and cash in on ObamaCare. We would rather say to them, why don't you wake up in your home country and go build the economy in your own nation or get in line and do it the legal way behind the people who are in line waiting to come in the legal way right now.

So we have 10 million people of immigrants that don't qualify. They're part of the 47 million. Then we have, of the people that are earning over $75,000 a year, we have 9 million of those. They could presumably find a way to write a check and take care of their own premiums.

Then we have those eligible for government programs but are not enrolled. Generally, that's those eligible for Medicaid that didn't bother to sign up. That says 10. It's 9.7 million. We've got to split a couple hairs here because we're going to get down to decimal point, Mr. Speaker.

Also, of those that we don't want to insure--at least I don't--are those eligible for employer-sponsored insurance but not enrolled in it. They turned down their employer's policy or didn't bother to sign up. That's 6 million.

So, of 47 million--and when I say I don't want to insure them, I think that they should take their own responsibility to do that. They have affordable options or they're disqualified because they're illegally in the United States or barred by law.

Those left, the Americans without affordable options, aren't 47 million. They're 12.1 million people. Now, that's still a lot, but it's less than 4 percent of the population. It's a little larger than the population of Iowa. But here they are right here in orange.

Now, there's one more point to make. Out of these 12.1 million people, the Americans without affordable options, what the people who are proposing ObamaCare would like you to believe is 47 million and a crisis now become a little sliver of the American society, and I'll show you how.

This is the population of the United States, Mr. Speaker. This bluish circle represents about 306 million, perhaps as many as 307 million Americans. These people that are in--well, all this whole circle does. This big chunk of the pie, the blue chunk of the pie, represents 84 percent of the population. Those are the Americans that are covered by a plan, whether it's a private plan, employer-provided plan, Medicaid and Medicare. Americans that are covered by a plan, 84 percent of the population. Sixteen percent are not. The number is around 15.5 when you start splitting the hairs.

But here are the categories that they come in. Yellow are the illegal immigrants. Now, we already know that the President has said even that he's not going to support funding illegals in the health insurance exchange. It's pretty interesting. It really did infuriate a lot of the open borders people in the country. But the President has said so, and we're going to hold him to his words that we're not going to fund illegals.

Another 2 percent of those are under the 5-year bar. That's the black. Those are legal immigrants that are barred by law. Now we're at 4 percent. Here's 3 percent, which are individuals earning more than $75,000 that didn't take the trouble to get insured.

And here's another 3 percent in green. Those are those that are eligible for the government programs. These are the Medicaid eligibles, for the most part, that didn't bother to sign up. And in blue are those eligible for employer-sponsored, those 6 million, but they didn't bother to sign up or they opted out.

So when we look at this chart, we're trying--I think this is where the bipartisan outreach comes in. We're trying to fix a problem of the Americans without affordable options who are not insured and they don't really have an option, affordable option. That's that orange. That's the less than 4 percent that I mentioned when you start to subtract the others.

So think of this chart as everything but the orange is covered in one way or another or else they can take care of themselves and are, by law, with the case of illegal immigrants, required to do so. We're only down to this original sliver, less than 4 percent of the population.

Now I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that this bill, this jelly bean chart, H.R. 3200, scare-the-living-daylights-out-of-someone-in- technicolor chart right here is designed to completely transform 100 percent of the health insurance that exists today in the United States and 100 percent of the health care delivery system in the United States, the best system in the world being transformed completely by H.R. 3200. Thirty-one new agencies and a new health choices insurance czar who would write regulations and wipe out a lot of health insurance in America, all of that, a hundred percent transformation by this flowchart bill, to address this little less than 4 percent of Americans without affordable choices.

Mr. Speaker, I will submit that that is a radical approach to a problem that isn't nearly as bad as the people who want to have a socialized medicine plan would like to have the American people believe. And I'm going to list the things that the Republicans want to do about it, and then I want to yield to the gentlelady from Minnesota.

We want tort reform on this side of the aisle. We're not on the side of the trial lawyers. We want people to buy health insurance across State lines everywhere in America. We want portability so you can take your policy with you.

We want to expand health savings accounts so they can become retirement accounts if you have a healthy life and you manage your health. We want to have full deductibility for everybody's health insurance premium. We want electronic medical records with protection of people's integrity of their record so it doesn't leak out.

We want to have expansion of associated health insurance policies so groups of professionals can join together to buy insurance. And we want transparency in billing so we can see who's charging who what. And, again, the consumer can make those decisions. And we need to also take a look at long-term care so people can manage their lives in a more efficient way.

That's what Republicans want to do. That's what I want to do. And now I want to do something else, and that is I'd love to yield to the gentlelady from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, who is always in here fighting for truth, justice, and the American way.

I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota. I couldn't have asked for a better composite rendition of what we're looking at here from the health care industry and what's being driven on one side of the aisle versus that of the other and the choices that we have and the options that are there.

I think, Mr. Speaker, the things are that are not considered are that good ideas don't get debated when the wrong people hold the gavel, and I'm not speaking of you. I know my time has run out.

I appreciate your indulgence, the gentlelady from Minnesota, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 13 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, September 21, 2009, at 4 p.m.

Mr. Speaker, as always, it's an honor to address you on the floor of the House of Representatives. Having listened to some of the dialogue of my colleagues that have been here just prior and hopefully will join me in the next hour, I think it's important that the American people return their focus again to the values that made this a great Nation.

We're a country that needs to be cognizant of our history. And that's why we teach it in our public and our private and parochial schools. It's why we teach it in our families. We pass the lore of the American Dream and history of the United States of America on down to our children, and we ask our children to pass it to their children, and on and on. And to make sure that there is a consistent continuity, we teach the history of the United States in the context of the world.

And so something that seems to be missing from the awareness of the people on this side of the aisle that are advocating a national health care act, a socialized medicine plan, is the foundation of the greatness of America. And I could go off into a lot of different tangents about the pillars of American exceptionalism, but central to those pillars is the idea of freedom--the freedom and the free markets and the freedom of the markets to make a decision on what they want to provide to the consumers.

And so this is Adam Smith. This is Adam Smith that laid this out. Even though you can read through all 1,057 pages of The Wealth of Nations, you'll not find him use the expression ``the invisible hand.'' But it's the invisible hand, indeed, that best describes the vision of Adam Smith in 1776, having printed and published his book The Wealth of Nations.

It's the very foundation of free enterprise. And centuries later we come up with Keynesian economics. The idea that there is no basis for the economy. That the economy is just a great big huge national or global chain letter. And that if the government would just print a lot of money and spend the money a lot of ways and maybe go drill some holes in an abandoned coal mine--this is according to Keynes--and bury that money in those holes and then fill the abandoned coal mine up with garbage and turn the entrepreneurs loose to go dig up the money, he said he could solve all of the unemployment in America.

I know, it sounds bizarre, Mr. Speaker. I am not making this up. This is the characterization of John Maynard Keynes and the difference between the Keynesian approach, President Obama's approach to economics, and this approach from the free market side of this, where the consumer makes the demand by pulling with its invisible hand the loaf of bread off the shelf.

Let's just say there's a good loaf of bread for a buck. And the invisible hand will pull that good loaf of bread for $1 off that shelf over and over again and the shelves will be bare. And somebody else comes in and they say, Here's a loaf of bread that's not quite as good for a buck and a quarter.

Well, they might just pass up that purchase, even though they need the bread, and wait until the fresh ones come from the bakery that provides the good bread for a dollar. And so the bakery that provides the good bread for a dollar is filling the shelves up with their product and selling a lot of volume. And the bakery that sells the not quite so good bread for a buck and a quarter doesn't sell very much bread, if at all. And, over time, the company that's being out-competed with the higher-priced, lower-quality bread either learns how to make good bread for a competitive price or they give up the market to the company that makes the good bread for the competitive price. And it isn't the end of the world if we end up with one company producing bread in that fashion.

What if we get down to where only one company is baking bread, and it's for a dollar and it's a good price and it's high quality and it's a value to the consumer. Not so bad. But if that company realizes that they are running a monopoly and they decide to jack the price of their good loaf of bread up to a buck and quarter, buck and a half, $1.75, maybe lower the quality, pull a little wheat out, put a little something else back in there, then what happens? The consumer gets dissatisfied. And the dissatisfied consumer then either bakes their bread at home to get the quality and the cost that they want, or they open up their own little bakery.

Maybe they bake that bread at home and they decide, I'm going to provide a little bit for my family. Then it's so popular that you provide a little for your neighbors. And then the family and the neighbors decide, I want mom to keep baking bread. So they want to pay her so she keeps baking that bread.

Now, high-quality bread that was now a buck and a half because you had a monopoly. The price of that is competitive because the homegrown business begins to compete into that volume and quantity and the cost of the marketplace and pull the cost back down.

That's the difference between the free enterprise system and central command, central planning, the 5-year planning, the Federal Government deciding what's going to be made and what the price will be. And if it doesn't work, you subsidize the people making. And if that doesn't work, you subsidize the people buying it. Sound like the car industry? Yes, it is, Mr. Speaker.

This is the difference between the philosophy on this side of the aisle. They think that they are smart enough to make all of these calls for all of the consumers, except for perhaps the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker.

A moment here before I yield. On this side of the aisle are the people that believe in free enterprise, the invisible hand, Adam Smith's vision, Adam Smith's dream, and the idea that you cannot manage an economy. You have got to let the supply and demand manage the economy. That's the difference. We believe in free enterprise. You folks do not. And if you disagree, I will certainly yield to you, but not one of you is going to stand and take this argument on.

I yield to the gentleman from Missouri.

Reclaiming my time, the statement that was made on the floor of the House the night before last by the gentlelady from Minnesota, Michelle Bachmann, the analysis of a lead economist in the country that had done the analysis, what is the percentage of the private sector profits that now have been nationalized by the Federal Government? If you add that up, if you add up the three large investment banks that have been nationalized, if you add up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, AIG, General Motors and Chrysler, look at the profits that come from that, roll that up, and compare that to the net profits of the private sector overall, this Federal Government--most of it under the administration of President Obama--has nationalized 30 percent of the private sector profits in the United States.

Thirty percent of the private sector profits have been nationalized, most of it by this administration, of those corporations that I have mentioned, those eight entities.

When you add health care to it, that's 17\1/2\ percent of our overall economy, round it up to 18 because I can do the math--30 plus 18 is 48 percent. If they succeed in passing socialized medicine, 48 percent of the private sector profits in the United States will have been nationalized, most of it by this administration. This free country, this country that has built upon free enterprise, in part--and one of the pillars of American exceptionalism is free enterprise--will have had almost half of it swallowed up by an aggressive appetite of the White House without justification but only because we are in a time of an economic crisis. Magically, the solutions that have been advocated by the President and the hard-core, left-wing, jump-off-the-cliff liberals in this Congress and across the country, those solutions that they've been advocating for 20 years magically become the solution for the economic crisis that we have been in over the last year.

Well, in reclaiming from the gentleman from Missouri, I will go further, Mr. Speaker; and that is, I recall those years when they had collective farming in the Soviet Union. They had a 5-year plan for the production of the entire nation. They would sit down and decide, Okay, here's what we're going to do. We are going to set up our factories and hire our workers and provide--to the extent that they can manage it--the raw materials necessary to run all that out. And here's where we're going to go in 5 years, doing that with farming, for example.

Can you imagine, we have farmers that are making crop decisions right up to the moment that they plant, and then they are cutting-edge on fertilizer and herbicide, et cetera, and equipment to get efficiency out of a GPS control of our equipment so that they can apply fertilizer according to the soil types and yields that they get back out of it. All of these things are going on in realtime.

I actually have seen the corn planter parked--not in Iowa, but the State south of me--when people went fishing, but it's pretty rare. So what we saw instead in the Soviet Union was that farm workers, when it was time to harvest the crop, their 8-hour shift would end. They would park the tractor, park the combine, and a crop could rot in the field or be hailed out or rained out or frozen out. Because they were hourly employees, they didn't have an interest in the actual product result. They just had an interest in--remember, the old saying was that the workers in the Soviet Union will pretend to work, and the Soviet Union will pretend to pay the workers. That's what happened, that's where they went, and it is a big difference.

By the way, this would be the 16th of September. We're 3 days away from the 1-year anniversary of the first time that I had heard Members of Congress say to me in the years I've been here, See, this proves capitalism doesn't work. They said that on the day that Henry Paulson came to this Capitol and demanded $700 billion to try to stop what he predicted was a free-fall in the financial industry; and they said, Well, see, free enterprise is the cause of this, it's the problem, it doesn't work, and it's proven. They said so September 19, almost a year ago today.

The gentleman from Missouri is referring to, I believe, the Community Reinvestment Act that passed this Congress in 1978, signed into law by Jimmy Carter. It was brought about because of the allegation--and there's a basis of it in truth--that there were large lending agencies that were doing home mortgages in particular but writing real estate mortgages that drew red lines around districts, usually in inner cities, because the real estate values were declining because of crime and other activities in those areas. The real estate wasn't being kept up, so nobody wanted to buy real estate in those neighborhoods. They drew a red line around them and said, We're not going to loan money into these neighborhoods.

They passed the Community Reinvestment Act as a means to try to address that, and that planted the seed. Even though the motive was probably pretty good, that planted the seed for organizations like ACORN to come in and seek to intimidate, let me say, intimidate them into making bad loans in bad neighborhoods to people that didn't have the means to pay the loan.

You jumped into government-managed regulations of lending institutions that were trying to comply with the letter and intent of the law.

It was not a failure of free enterprise.

I think I can't embellish that a lot more and be more accurate than the statement the gentleman has made.

Would the gentleman repeat that date again?

Why does the gentleman remember that?

So 2 years from the date you had the now chairman of the Financial Services Committee coming to the floor, resisting regulation and increased capitalization on Fannie and Freddie--they're a government-sponsored enterprise that had the implicit guarantee of the full faith and credit of the Federal Government behind them in 2003, September 11.

Now there is another date that sticks in my mind. Two years and a little more than a month later, October 26, 2005, an amendment was brought to the floor of the House of Representatives that would require Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac to be capitalized, comparable to that of other lending and competing institutions and to require them to be regulated in a similar fashion. That amendment was vigorously resisted by the now chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank, and yet Barney Frank came to the well on the Thursday before we broke for the Easter vacation this year and set up a 60-minute period of time to explain to Americans in that little lull--everybody else was going home but me and a couple others--that none of that was his fault. That it went outside of him, that the regulations were not necessary, the capitalization was not necessary.

Well, we know the answer. The implicit guarantee--and by the way, the gentleman from Massachusetts said on the floor of the House of Representatives on that day of October 26, If anybody thinks I'm going to vote to support a capitalized guarantee of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they're wrong. I won't do that.

We ended up with a nationalization.

I yield to the gentleman.

Reclaiming briefly from the gentlemen, I would point out that October 26, 2005, went the other way. The gentleman from Massachusetts, now the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, succeeded in convincing this body that Fannie and Freddie didn't need to be capitalized and regulated. And that amendment failed here on the floor of the House of Representatives in 2005, and it has gone in that direction since more support for Fannie and Freddie, who spent tens of thousands--in fact hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying this Congress so that they would be exempt from the standards that were required of other lending institutions.

And that is part of this package, the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, ACORN asserting themselves as a broker in the middle of this and brokering bad loans in bad neighborhoods, intimidating bankers to give those loans, and then passing those along in the secondary market to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and getting blocks of loans from the lending institutions for them to underwrite themselves and give the authority on loans that would be approved.

And as you mentioned an ACORN location, the gentleman from Missouri, I happen to have an ACORN location here. This little picture is taken not off the Internet, not by somebody that slipped in surreptitiously. This is a picture I personally took the weekend before the 4th of July, I'm going to guess the 2nd or so of July, 2009.

I went down to ACORN headquarters, Mr. Speaker. This is at 2609 Canal Street, New Orleans, and this building is ACORN's national headquarters--for all I know, the international headquarters of ACORN. It is the most fortified building in the neighborhood.

The door, itself, is mostly bars and so is the ground floor, the second floor. And you can see through these bars it's a four- or five-story building. And if you look, Mr. Speaker, you can see this huge Obama picture right inside the window at the national headquarters of ACORN.

Fifty-three million at least, and I think significantly more, actually.

Well, I don't know that it all goes for advertisement, but the law says not one dollar can go for advertisement, that they cannot be involved in partisan political activity.

Now, I am an objective observer here. I know a little bit about partisan activity. When you put a poster in your office window--in my construction office, for example, if I put a poster in my office that says Bush for President in 2004, if I were a 501(c)(3) corporation, I would be in direct violation of the not-for-profit, nonpartisan requirements of the IRS. I would be in violation of the tax laws. If I put a poster in my window, I am also in violation of some of my customers that are of a different political persuasion. So I'm a little sensitive to this, although I've been fairly bold. I follow the law. This cannot be following the law.

ACORN should have its not-for-profit status removed immediately for them and every one of their affiliates. They should be taxed. The IRS should go in and audit every dollar that's coming in to ACORN and their affiliates. There should be a Justice Department investigation. There should be a congressional series of investigations done by a number of committees, including the committee chaired by the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank). Financial services should investigate. Judiciary should investigate. Government Reform should investigate. Ways and Means should investigate. If I could find a way to get the Ag Committee investigating, that's what we need to do with ACORN.

As a Republican? Run for Congress as a Republican?

I didn't either. I heard run for Congress as a Democrat. That must have been the measure of plausibility that they had to inject to get ACORN to bite on the rest of the bait would be my speculation.

It is, for me--and reclaiming from the gentleman from Missouri, it is astonishing to get a look inside the offices of ACORN in four cities in America. And I ask the question, is this the culture of ACORN? And I don't know how you argue that it's not. But each of them were so willing and so eager to be complicit in helping to set up a house of ill repute, as the gentleman from Missouri said. I have different names for it. A brothel would be another one. For them to go in and pick out this outrageous--I think it was really a far- reaching scenario. I'm the pimp and this is the prostitute and we want to set up this house of ill repute and bring in 13- or 14-year-old girls from El Salvador so that they can turn tricks and we can take the profits and use some of the profits to put into the political campaign so that the pimp can run for Congress? I mean, I don't know. I would have a hard time holding myself in if somebody came into my office and said such a thing.

But in each of those cases that have been published--in Baltimore, in Washington, D.C., in Brooklyn, in San Bernardino--in each of those cases, Mr. Speaker, ACORN reacted as if that was the business that they were set up to be in. We will help you facilitate a loan for the house of ill repute and we can get you good terms. And furthermore, don't report more than about three of those illegal girls that are illegally here, and that are most likely illegally here and in the business of child prostitution, a slave sex ring before their very eyes. They also advocated that they could provide the childcare tax credit and qualify for that, that's $1,000 per child per year, and the earned income tax credit as well.

So the numbers work out to about this: ACORN being complicit in drawing down, fraudulently, Federal dollars while helping to facilitate evasion of income taxes and child prostitution. But the Federal taxpayers, if they're successful in what they proposed at least in Baltimore, then the child care tax credit and the earned income tax credit would add up to, for a family of--let me say a family of five, if the prostitute is the mom and the pimp is the dad and three of the underage 13- or 14-year-old girls were qualified under the child tax credit, that would be about $6,000 from the taxpayers that goes in to subsidize the house of prostitution. And this doesn't cause anybody to bat an eye at ACORN in four cities in America. That's the culture of ACORN. That's this right here.

I would yield.

Reclaiming from the gentleman from Missouri, I so appreciate the analysis and the way that you've delivered this. I think that this goes deep. And I think because I've had to live, and I know the gentleman from Missouri has had to live, and been fortunate to live with the underpinnings of what has been the greatness of America, these checks and balances that come in not just between the three branches of government, the checks and balances that come in between our moral values, our values of faith, the laws that we have passed that reflect the moral values of our faith and the reverence for the rule of law, the letter and the intent of the law that is so necessary if we're going to have a civil society.

And then we've watched, if we go back to Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Great Society, they made a decision that they were going to take from one economic sector and they were going to pass it along to another. I remember seeing a film of hungry children in Appalachia--I don't know that they were actually hungry, but they needed some dental work. That's what I remember was in the pictures. They weren't dressed all that well. Some were barefoot. Some didn't have a shirt on. It was summertime in Appalachia. But they kept running these images over and over again. And we passed the Great Society right into the middle of the Vietnam war and we set up a dependency class of people, this dependency class of people that rewarded mothers that had children that didn't have fathers in the home.

And if you will pay mothers to have babies if they don't have fathers in the home, women will have babies to become mothers without fathers in the home. And if you punish them if there's a father in the home, the father won't be around anymore. He might stop by and visit, but he's not going to be a resident, not one that can be caught there because it will cut the government welfare check. And slowly over time, we created a dependency class of people that was dependent upon the Federal welfare check to come in.

And now I look at the inner cities in the United States of America and I ask the question, when I see the film within the offices of ACORN and I think, what wealth is created in these cities? What is coming out of the inner city that is rooted in new wealth? I know what it is that comes out of the land. All new wealth comes from the land. You can mine it out of the earth in gold or platinum or gravel or limestone, or you can raise it out of the soil in corn or beans or--I'll say rice or rutabagas. You can actually sing some fish out of the sea. You can cut some timber. But all of those resources that I've talked about become the foundation of new wealth, that wealth that's necessary if you're going to provide the essentials of life that we've long called food, clothing and shelter.

Food, clothing and shelter comes out of the soil. And we do that as productively as we can and we value add to that as many times as we can, and that's the wealth that pays for--the adage is the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. It pays for the accountant, the doctor, the lawyer, the school teacher, the pastor. Everything that grows out of this economy in a legitimate productive sector can be traced back to our land, our earth, our soil.

But in the inner city, their new wealth doesn't come out of the soil. Their new wealth comes from the taxpayers of the United States of America, and it's brokered by ACORN. And the benefits are distributed back out through the city, and some of it goes into prostitution, some goes into illegal drugs.

The culture that you saw in ACORN is a culture that promotes and supports, as a matter of fact, illegal behavior, including prostitution, child pornography, and helping to enable bringing in illegals into the United States to commit illegal acts. And no one batted an eye.

So the astonishing thing to me----

I will yield to the gentleman.

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman.

I would point out my view on this that you'll never get the people on the other side into that particular debate. They don't want to go down that path because, first of all, they don't like the result that one logically gets. The other component of it is that I think they actually hide their own eyes from the result of what they're seeking to do. I think that their endeavors are incremental endeavors to expand the power base and to expand the political base, which is the power base, and I don't think they've gamed this thing out to what America will look like if they succeed in these endeavors--if they expand ACORN, if they succeed in writing into law cap-and-trade, if they succeed in writing into law a socialized medicine plan or if they succeed in writing into law a comprehensive amnesty for illegals.

In the end, what does America look like? They can't bear the thought of having to admit the logical conclusion of the policies that they propose, but they're certainly for the things that give them a short- term power base.

I put the poster of ACORN up here because, I think, they are the largest cancer America has ever seen. They're in over 100 cities in the United States. They have divisions within the cities. They've drawn down over $53 million. They qualify into pots of money of up to $8.5 billion. They won't draw it all, but they do. It's the pressure that has come from the houses of prostitution that they're seeking to help fund, from the criticism that has come from the Community Reinvestment Act, from shaking down lenders, from over 400,000 fraudulent voter registration forms, from the prosecutions and convictions of ACORN people--up to 70 in the United States, another 11 indictments in the State of Florida with six of them arrested and five they're on the hunt for, and convictions of, or I'll say at least indictments of ACORN as a corporation in Nevada, from their policies of directly violating the election laws, and from setting up quotas for people who are registering people rather than hiring them by the hour or by salary.

Now, here is the latest news flash. First, before I do the news flash, I have to tell you, Mr. Speaker, that there has been some backing off from ACORN, and it's the vote that took place on the floor of the United States Senate. There were seven U.S. Senators who

voted to defend ACORN. Two of them are from Illinois, by the way--the President's home State, Rahm Emanuel's home State and David Axelrod's home State. Those two Senators continue to defend ACORN. It is Rod Blagojevich's home State, I might add, and he has also been a beneficiary of ACORN's work. They defended ACORN. The other Senators voted not to fund ACORN through ACORN housing.

Then we know about fraudulent votes and about a whole list of things that are going on. We also know that the U.S. Census Bureau finally announced a couple, 3 days ago that they were not going to continue with their relationship with ACORN and that they'd already signed off a month or two ago. I don't believe them yet.

This is a news flash that came while the gentleman from Missouri was speaking, and this is an article that tells about it. It says: Days after the Census Bureau announced it would cut ties with the organizing group ACORN and barely 24 hours after the Senate voted to withdraw funding from the lightning rod activist group, the White House, which is speaking for the President of the United States, expressed support for measures to hold the group accountable for unacceptable behavior.

Mr. Speaker, listen to this. This is a Jeremiah Wright moment. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs alluded to video taken by the conservative site biggovernment.com showing ACORN employees giving advice to individuals posing as sex traffickers. We've just talked about this.

The quote from Robert Gibbs: Obviously, the conduct that you see on those tapes is completely unacceptable. I think everyone would agree to that. Gibbs said, The administration takes accountability extremely seriously.

That's good because I will tell you I want to make sure that is the case with the President.

Then it goes on and says, Characterizing the Census Bureau's decision as a move based on a lack of confidence in ACORN's ability to perform its expected duties, Gibbs said he was not sure whether the President would ask Democrats to pull back from any campaign year collaboration with the group.

A quote from Gibbs: I don't know that I've had any discussion with him about that, Gibbs said.

So, Mr. Speaker, what we have here are a few more platitudes, a little more word processing that's going on here that would indicate that the President is a little concerned and that maybe Robert Gibbs is concerned about some fraud and corruption and blatant violation of a whole series of laws that seem to be apparent if you watch the film of ACORN, but we have yet to hear the President do, let me say, a mea culpa. I have not heard the President say, Even though I played for ACORN as a young man, even though I coached ACORN employees, even though I headed up Project Vote, which is indistinguishable from ACORN, even though I'm part and parcel of ACORN--and where is the ACORN logo on his shirt? Oh, by the way, I happen to have a little visual of this, Mr. Speaker.

Even though this is all the case and it's a fact, we still don't have the President saying, Well, let's do what we did with Jeremiah Wright. Let's get ACORN out of our lives. Let's go investigate them with the FBI, with the Department of Justice and with every possible committee in the United States Congress, giving them a complete forensic analysis and coming back for every dollar that flowed through ACORN and all of their affiliates to the extent where we can purge the poison from that corrupt enterprise, ACORN.

That needs to happen, Mr. Speaker. It needs to be directed by the President, or this ACORN albatross hangs around his neck until he does.

In reclaiming my time from the gentleman, I have to agree. I don't know that that money is in that fund, but if one were going to do a search, I'd look for the number $1.6 million. That seems to be the number that I recall. I'm not sure which bill that was in, but that sticks in my mind. I remember numbers better than I do names.

Thanks to Congressman Darrell Issa from California, who is a ranking member of an Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee, they produced a nonpartisan report that came to a whole series of conclusions about ACORN. In that report, they list 361 ACORN affiliates. Now, I don't know that all of those are live, active ACORN affiliates. I suspect some of them are defunct at this point. The pattern looks like whenever ACORN had a new project, they created another corporation, but many of them--I can't say all of them--a majority of those corporations are housed and reside in this place on Canal Street in New Orleans.

Now, can you imagine as many as--and probably not quite that many-- but as many as 361 different corporations and affiliates inside these doors? This is a four- or a five-story building. It's not that big. In there, the finances that come are commingled through one single corporation that handles all of this. Now, money is fungible, and if there's a single Federal dollar that goes into any of these and it goes into a centralized account and gets redistributed out of that central pot, you can't sort that. There are not firewalls in that. It is a fact that there are not firewalls in that, which means that any of the money that's used in any of the 361 corporations is used for political purposes, and it's a violation of Federal law.

This, itself, is a violation of Federal law, Mr. Speaker--``Obama '08'' right in the window of a 501(c)(3). There it is blatantly for all to see.

We do need to do a complete investigation. We need the President of the United States to come forward and to come clean. This is what the President has been. He is the consummate community organizer. He has risen to the top of his profession. He has done it through the path of ACORN, through the path of Project Vote and through a series of other organizations, all of them affiliated within. This isn't a man who has come up through the free enterprise system, who has signed the front of the paycheck. He has signed only the back and has worked within these community organizers who are sitting there; and Chicago politics, Chicago politics that are steeped in the Rod Blagojevich and steeped in the Rahm Emanuel and in the hardball politics where he would tell the supporters during the campaign, Get in their faces.

He stood here at the rostrum in the House of Representatives and said, ``We will call you out,'' because he disagreed with what turns out to be the fact that is in the bill H.R. 3200.

This country has never been to this place before, Mr. Speaker. We have never seen this level of audacity, and we've never seen this level of a criminal enterprise that's so pervasive tied up into the United States of America. We haven't even gotten to the SEIU and to a number of other affiliates that are part of all of this political agenda. It is something the American people are going to have to spend a lot of time working at studying and understanding and being outraged about because, in the end, we can't sustain it here on the floor of the House of Representatives if

we don't have the support outside in America, Mr. Speaker.

I yield to the gentleman from Missouri.

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Missouri.

In about, oh, the 8 or 9 minutes that, I think, we have left, Mr. Speaker, I would seek to just transition this just a little bit and take the segue on the ``government that we can't afford'' and address this issue.

The President has laid out an argument. The argument is that we have to fix health care before we can fix the economy. The economy is in crisis, but it can't be fixed without fixing health care.

When answering the question of What's wrong with health care in America?, he came back with two responses: one is it costs too much money. The other one is we have too many uninsured.

Well, costing too much money, we can discuss that. It costs about 14.5 percent of our GDP. In other industrialized countries, by their analyses, it costs about 9.5 percent of their GDP. So half again more for health care in the United States. I'm not sure we're half again richer than they are. We are richer than they are, and we can afford a little more, but we can have that discussion, and we can take a lot of it out if we would just simply do tort reform. Buying insurance across State lines and having a full deductibility for health insurance premiums could deal with some of this.

I want to, Mr. Speaker, make this point, which is, those uninsured-- that being the biggest situation that is not resolved here by Democrats or Republicans. Democrats want to do socialized medicine, and Republicans have some other solutions. So I began to ask the question: Of the 47 million uninsured--that's their number, not mine. I don't know that it's high or low. You hear lower numbers but not higher, so take the higher number.

This number is supposed to be here. It's not on my chart, but I can tell you, this is 47 million. I know that. And, as you subtract from those lists of those that are uninsured in America, you start with the undocumented noncitizens, that's the illegals.

Well, this is a new chart, so it doesn't say the things that I remember. I am going to go off what I remember, and these are new numbers, 5.2 million illegals are part of the 47 million. This number has been 4 million who are here that have arrived recently that are under the 5-year bar by law.

These two categories of immigrants, the illegals and those disqualified legals becomes 10.2 million. This number shows 10.

And those that earn more than $75,000 a year, Mr. Speaker, presumably they could resolve this out of the their own checkbook. Then you go for the Americans that are eligible for a government program but not enrolled. Now I see what's going on, this software has rounded it out to even millions. That number is 9.7 million. Those Americans that are eligible for government programs but not enrolled, usually Medicaid, didn't sign up. That's this number.

Now we are subtracting from 47 million. This number is those eligible for employer-sponsored, but didn't bother to sign up or opted out. That's 6 million, and that is the actual decimal point. This number here comes down to 12.1 million Americans without affordable options.

Now, we have too many uninsured in America, 47 million, according to people over on this side. But 47 million includes all these categories that we don't want to include in a new bill. They don't either, for the most part, or at least they won't admit it. So you are down to 12.1 million people, and that's less than 4 percent of the population.

Now, what does that mean? We are going to try to solve the problem by transforming 100 percent of the health insurance in America and 100 percent of the health care delivery system in America to try to reduce a 4 percent number down to something less.

Now, what is 4 percent, 12.1 million, that's these people right here, these are the whole uninsured. This is the whole population of the United States. We are a lively bunch of people in the United States. It's hard to get a handle on us.

But you can get a handle on this. This is 306 or maybe 307 million people. These are the categories in that other pie chart that includes the coverage for those eligible by employer in blue; those insurance- eligible for government programs, usually Medicare, Medicaid, in green; the orange are those earning over $75,000; and the black, those are legal immigrants that are on the 5-year bar and are not eligible. And the other 2 percent are the illegal immigrants. This is the 12 and 1.1 percent right here. This little orange sliver, that's the percentage of the population that we want to address, because they are Americans without insurance who do not have affordable options.

And the proposal is to transform all of the rest of this, the best there is in the world in insurance and delivery of health care, in order to reduce this sliver of 4 percent down to something, maybe around 2 percent.

Now, I think that Einstein would have a way to define this thing, and I think it would come down to something such as, if you have a flawed premise, you will have a flawed conclusion.

Let me conclude. I reflect upon a pair of auto mechanics that run a repair shop in my hometown of Kiron called Sandberg Brothers. They have a sign behind their counter that says, ``Complicated, difficult, technical nearly impossible jobs are our specialty. Simple jobs are beyond our comprehension.''

I think that's what we have here. We have taken a simple job and turned it into a complicated, technical, difficult problem. And I think it falls back to the wisdom of Congressman Tom Cole, who said one day that highly intelligent people will always overcomplicate things. If they didn't, there wouldn't be any particular advantage to being highly intelligent.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 7 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, Sept. 17, 2009, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor today to make the point that last Wednesday night during a joint session there was a very brief breach of decorum here by Congressman Joe Wilson, someone who is a true consummate Southern gentleman, an officer and a gentleman.

He immediately called the White House, the White House immediately accepted Joe Wilson's apology, and that must be the end of it. A gentleman that conducted himself as a gentleman immediately in the aftermath, without putting his finger to the political winds, he did the right thing.

No one has a claim to any further redress if the President of the United States accepts an apology, and he did.

So I stand with Joe Wilson. Let's get on with the business of this House, and let's start running this country instead of doing cheap political points, which I expect will be coming to the floor of this House sometime about tomorrow.

I thank the gentleman and the judge from Texas. I thank you, Judge Carter, for your leadership on this issue. And I know that it's hard for a lot of Members to come down to the floor and raise an issue that has to do with the ethics of any other Member. Whatever party they might be, if they're a Democrat or if they're a Republican, there's a certain restraint that exists in this House Chamber. And sometimes it's because Members are afraid that they or their agenda will be punished by a powerful committee Chair who holds a gavel.

There are some, though--as you have done for 12 or 13 or more weeks-- that have stepped up here and stood on principle and talked about real ethics and talked about the standards of this House and the standards that we need to hold the other Members to--and ourselves to for that matter--regardless of the consequences that might come along within this circle of people that work together every day. We've got to be the ones that raise the standard of this House and hold it up.

Now, if you have someone who is in charge of the IRS who doesn't pay their taxes, immediately they lose the moral authority to claim anyone else's tax money. That's the case with Tim Geithner. And it's a point that I think has been alluded to at least by the gentleman from Texas. And if you have the chairman of the most powerful committee in the House of Representatives, the Ways and Means Committee, and the lists of these questions, the ethical questions and the problems with his own taxes gets longer and longer after this--happy birthday, Chairman Rangel--a year since The New York Times called for the chairman to step down, Charlie Rangel to step down as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

And I can remember the excoriation that took place when Republicans were in the majority and Democrats were looking for anything that they could fabricate to allege against the people in power on this side. I remember constant attacks on Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who had something like 74 charges brought against him; every one of them specious, none of them substantive, and none of them stuck during all that period of time. But it was designed to focus on the person that held the most power here in the House of Representatives.

And so that taints this. And people think that it's purely a political battle that's going on. Well, it's political in a lot of ways. Judge Carter talked about how political it is with 119 Members of the Democrat Caucus in the House of Representatives having received a campaign check from Charlie Rangel. When you have a majority--close to it anyway--near the majority of your own caucus that you've contributed to their campaign, somehow they just magically, over time, lose their conviction to stand up for pure ethics.

And it's a shame, but the reality of the political world today is that it isn't just a matter of altruism, it isn't just people that come here--and many do come here to do the right thing; many come here because they want to help America; many come because they believe-- they're either liberals or conservatives or someplace in between, but they believe in what they do and they stand up and speak out about it. That sense of conviction, that sense of altruism is something that should be applauded and honored and respected whatever that judgment is, whether they're liberals or whether they're conservatives.

I think a lot of America believes that that's what drives this House. I'd like to think it is, it's part of what drives this House. But another part that drives this House is political power, political patronage, campaign contributions. The influence that comes from being able to direct policy as chairman of a committee is a powerful thing, it's an influential thing. And why does Chairman Rangel have all that money to give to 119 Members of his own caucus? Because he controls the tax-writing committee. He controls a lot of the regulations that control the economy of the United States of America--at least the free market economy and what's left of it.

And so there are those who disagree with the philosophy and the policy that Charlie Rangel drives as the man who holds the gavel chairing the Ways and Means Committee. And there are many people in this country, many companies, many corporations, many entities that will find a way to get checks into that campaign fund because they don't want to be punished. And that money gets delved out to Members of their own caucus. And the chairman forgets to pay his taxes and underestimates his liabilities and assets by more than half, including forgetting to report the income off of his villa property in the Dominican Republic and forgetting to report that he is receiving rent subsidy on apartment houses for years in New York City.

The failure to report and pay taxes on rental income from the villa in the Dominican Republic is as clear as it can be. And was it an attack of conscience that Chairman Rangel had when he finally amended the statement? I think not, because to falsify those statements is a felony. But when the issue was raised by Judge Carter, by The New York Times, by a number of others, then the chairman stepped forward and amended his returns, and then amended them again--I actually don't know how many rounds it's been that those ethics reports or financial reports have been amended.

But they're not, I can't envision, being amended because of an attack of conscience; they're being amended because the news media, John Carter, other Members have stepped forward and laid the facts out before the American people. They're being amended to avoid the embarrassment and perhaps the prosecution in order to comply with and hopefully avoid an Ethics ruling when it comes out of the dysfunctional Ethics Committee in the House of Representatives.

So I think it's pretty interesting that there is an alleged--this is one of the list of things that have emerged in the last year--an alleged quid pro quo of trading legislative action in exchange for donations to a center named for Charlie Rangel at City College of New York. I remember one of our Members, John Campbell from California, in particular, came down to the floor and offered an amendment to strike $1 million out that was earmarked for a center that was named after Charlie Rangel. And he asked Mr. Rangel, would you really ask that they name a center after you? And the answer was, essentially, I wouldn't want it to be named

after you, Mr. Campbell, but yes, I've been here a long time, it's okay, I think we're allowed to do that.

House Members don't do that. There are posthumous names for Federal buildings for Members of Congress, but it's very rare to find a Member of the House of Representatives to ask for real estate to be named after them; kind of a self-glorification. Quid pro quo? Possibly. It certainly raises a question.

But trips to the Caribbean, this is something that's fairly astonishing. The gift rule violation, the trips to the Caribbean that were sponsored by the Carib News Foundation in 2007 and 2008, raised all kinds of questions. Now the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee--which, by the way, shouldn't be in the business of trying to direct the IRS to examine anybody; he should be worried about national policy and how that affects on a broad perspective, not micromanaging and focusing on an IRS investigation. But he had the audacity to push for a crackdown on U.S. taxpayers who make honest mistakes on their own returns, and then on the heels of Secretary Geithner's crackdown of UBS depositors for failing to pay their own taxes. The timing of this couldn't be worse.

And it goes on. The statement that I thought was really interesting was the Democrats' House of hypocrisy. They made a lot of allegations, but the House of hypocrisy--the IRS should investigate both Charlie Rangel and Tim Geithner. And the problem is Tim Geithner controls the IRS. And so if you control an entity, it's pretty unlikely that they're going to do a vigorous job of investigating the people that actually decide what's going to go on within the operation.

The House Committee on Standards hasn't produced anything yet--that's the Ethics Committee. It's been dysfunctional for a long time. It took place that the former ranking member of the Ethics Committee, who is now the chairman of the Justice Appropriations Committee from West Virginia, funny--under investigation himself. And he holds the gavel that controls the appropriations to the people that are investigating him and he controls their purse strings, Alan Mollohan.

Interesting. House of hypocrisy: Geithner controlling the IRS; Charlie Rangel controlling the Ways and Means and the tax code; the House Committee on Standards can't seem to move; the chairman, Charlie Rangel, has given campaign donations to three of the five Democrats on the Ethics Committee. Now, it should be unethical to make contributions from the House to Members on the Ethics Committee because, after all, especially if you're under investigation, surely that would turn the focus on him.

And the other interesting thing--this is one that really stands out-- we had a little investigation going on on these Caribbean trips that are in question that Mr. Rangel was on. Well, it turns out that the chairman of the investigation of the Caribbean trips was also along on the trip, so he knows what was going on there. If he would have thought there was a problem, he would have blown the whistle at that time, one would think.

This isn't the America that the people in this country pay for, that they want to have. It's not the America that the people I know deserve. This country is full of hardworking, honest, decent people, white collar and blue collar people, people that get their hands dirty every day, people that keep their hands clean and use their brain and their fingers and their computers or calculators, their telephones and their steering wheels, people that are down in the trenches, people that are in the meatpacking plants, people that are producing a product every single day, and they give up time away from their families and their homes and they pay their taxes and they comply with the regulations. And they fear the IRS coming into their kitchen or their office and doing an audit of them. And they respect the government.

And we have a House of hypocrisy here where the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee can't seem to get his own filings right on his own accounting forms, the rules that he writes, and has the audacity to turn up an IRS investigation on people that may not be.

119 Democrats have received money from Charlie Rangel. Funny, the Ethics Committee can't move. Three of the five Democrats on the Ethics Committee seem to have received money from Charlie Rangel.

So I would just say this: that we've got to clean this House up. We've got to end this House of hypocrisy. If anyone is under investigation, under question, and if the chairman of a committee and if the Speaker of the House can't see fit to bring the right kind of decorum and the right kind of decency and when a liberal newspaper like The New York Times is indignant at this House of Representatives--the House of hypocrisy run by Speaker Pelosi--and is thumbing its nose at the people of the United States of America, if The New York Times can see it, I guarantee you the people in my district can see it. They know it in Iowa. They know it in Texas. They know it in the heartland of America. They know it across the red zones of America. Everybody who gets up, who goes to work, who punches a time clock, who earns a salary, who pays his taxes, who carries his weight, and who contributes to this country understands that we've got to have a Nation that's a rule of law.

You can't write enough laws to make a decent people out of an indecent people. You can't cure hypocrisy by covering it up. At some place, at some time, somebody has got to dig up that rotting corpse, and it's going to have to have the light of day shine upon it. When that happens, we'll learn the truth, and there will be a day when the American people rise up again as they did last Saturday, when they came into this city by the hundreds of thousands.

Hundreds of thousands of people came to Washington, D.C., on Saturday and registered their rejection and their contempt for the profligate overspending that has taken place in this Congress, for the corruption that's here and for the House of hypocrisy that it is. They want clean, decent people, like they are, representing them in this Congress. Between them, they have the solutions to everything that's wrong with America. They aren't all good ideas, but among them are all the ideas that we need to solve the problems that we have.

We need to listen to the American people. We need to listen to the Founding Fathers. We need to be re-anchored back to the Declaration and to the Constitution. We have got to reform our fiscal responsibility. We have got to take this IRS out of our lives and get back our freedom. We have got to give people school choice. We have got to make sure that the younger generations learn it right and that they learn about God and country--our true history--and about our Founding Fathers, about personal responsibility and about the price for freedom and what freedom is and about the pillars of American exceptionalism.

This House of hypocrisy is not a pillar of American exceptionalism. It is a corrosive entity that undermines the pillars of American exceptionalism. We must clean it up. It needs to happen now. Why not on the first anniversary of The New York Times' calling for the resignation of Charlie Rangel as the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee? As my father always said, there is no time like the present.

I thank the gentleman from Texas, and I yield back the balance of my time.

I thank the judge from Texas.

And listening to the dialogue here on floor, I have to also rise in defense of the individual that everybody knows here is a true gentleman, a true Southern gentleman, and that's Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina. Anybody that knows Joe knows that he is the consummate officer and a gentleman.

He comes from generations of military personnel. He has four sons that have served in the military. And Joe spends his life and his time respecting others, respecting our military people who serve this country. And I have never known Joe to be anything other than a respectful, polite, gentleman, and, yet, duty, honor, country.

He was offended by what he heard here in the House of Representatives. And, for me, so was I.

The President of the United States came into the House of Representatives, as our guest, and stood here at the podium, here in the well, from the rostrum of the Speaker, and he threw the first stone. And he said, the prominent politicians had lied, and he began to tell how. That's how this was set up.

The President threw the first blow in here as a guest of the House of Representatives. And Joe Wilson, a man of honor, was offended at that, instantaneously. It was an instinctive thing, if you know the man.

And, also, so was the instinct to go to the phone immediately after the speech and call the White House and do what he did. That's enough. There doesn't need to be more, and the people in this House that are seeking to gain a partisan advantage and turn this into a circus over two words that probably were said a lot of other times that night here in the House of Representatives too, but they were covered by the other chatter, that happened to be two words that went into a pause of silence, and the timing of it really was unfortunate.

But I don't think Joe Wilson was unique in his emotion. It just happened to be made clear and embellished by the press. And so I don't make excuses for that and neither does he.

But if the President of the United States accepts an apology, no other person has any grounds to request redress beyond that point. And this House of Representatives shall not be turned into a circus to deal with minutiae because Democrats in this country have decided to run this country over the cliff into socialized medicine. And they can't sell it to the American people, so they want to change the subject. That's what it is.

And, by the way, the President of the United States injected himself into an incident that took place up in Boston when a professor at Harvard was breaking into his own house and the neighbors, out of good will, called the cops and Officer Crowley showed up, and the President himself made intemperate remarks.

They were emotional, they were knee-jerk and they show his bias--no really bias in Joe except duty, honor country, truth, justice in the American way. That's not a bias; that's an altruistic belief system that's in the gentleman Joe Wilson.

But the President injected himself and injected race into that situation up in Boston with the professor and the police officer, and he invited them out to the White House for a beer. And so it became a global story about how the President's masterful diplomacy brought everybody together at the White House. And we all knew what kind of beer everybody drank sitting there at the picnic table sitting outside--I actually don't know if they drank any. We know that they served it.

Well, so the President has accepted Joe Wilson's apology, and we are watching, through the majority whip, drive a resolution towards the floor tomorrow to try to excoriate a Southern gentleman.

And the President is sitting there now, having accepted the apology, and all he has to do is tell Rahm Emanuel, pick up the phone, call up there and talk to Clyburn or Pelosi or Steny Hoyer, the majority leader, and call off the dogs. We don't need this circus on the floor of the House of Representatives over something that may or may not have offended the President of the United States.

But that's over because he has accepted the apology. So now if we have a circus on the floor of the House, and the President doesn't come in and be a referee--and maybe call for a beer summit, so invite Joe Wilson out to the White House, that's what I would like to see happen-- if the President doesn't call for that you have to wonder if he isn't secretly sitting there watching the fight, enjoying it, enjoying the circus that they are staging for tomorrow.

The circus itself will bring disgrace on the House of Representatives, and it's designed to cover this House of hypocrisy that we have. But instead it will illuminate it. And as the judge was saying about the rule of law, when I write rule of law, I capitalize it. Rule of law, R and L, capitalize it, in everything I write. Sometimes the staff slips by, but I get it in there, because I have such reverence for the rule of law.

And if we are going to be a Nation that functions, we all have got to have reverence for the rule of law. And if you look at some of these other countries that have some gifts and some blessings that look like they might be comparable to that of the United States and you wonder what's wrong, why can't Russia get their act together. Why can't Mexico get their act together and go there and look.

I can go almost anywhere in the world and tell you what I think we ought to do at least to fix it. But I can go to those places, and I can't tell what you ought to do. Because I don't know how to fix corruption.

When corruption is endemic in the culture of a country, you cannot have enough law enforcement officers. You cannot clean it up. It's got to be something that is a habit of the heart of the culture of the people.

We have had that throughout these centuries in the United States of America. And the things that threaten it, it isn't just a reflection of the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee that has this whole list of ethical problems, including tax avoidance, and that's the nicest way I can say that. It isn't just that. It's the culture that supports it.

It's the Speaker of the House that enables it. It's the majority leader that backs it up. It's the fact that we are dealing with this House of hypocrisy while we are trying to set standards for the people of the United States of America and saying be altruistic, pay your taxes, follow through and do your part. And if you do that, we are a greater country.

But if people decide to take the Charlie Rangel/Tim Geithner route, we can't have enough enforcement officers out there working for the IRS to go out and collect enough taxes to go out and run this government. It's got to be because people have great respect and reverence for the rule of law, and it should start here. This should be the highest standard in the House of Representatives.

But if I go to Mexico or if I go to Russia, I see there are natural resources, I see a good labor force, people that are pretty good workers--more so I think in Mexico than Russia from my observations, but they also were used to payola. They are used to payoffs. They don't think they can make a difference. They don't think their voice matters.

And when it gets to that point in the country where people don't believe any longer that their voice matters, and if they don't believe in the people that are making the decisions for them, and if they don't willingly comply with the laws and pay their taxes, then it all becomes a whole nation of gotcha, and who was the victim of enforcement, and who knew how to pay somebody off that had influence so they can avoid doing the right thing. And that might be paying taxes. It might be completely violating it in a violent way, just plain out and out theft.

If they can get by with it, if they have influence, the rule of law. The rule of law is the central pillar of American exceptionalism. Without it, we would have never become the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world.

But we are, because of that central pillar, the rule of law. Now, there are many other pillars, but the central pillar is a rule of law, and we have got to respect it.

And if you don't like the law, we will run for office or support somebody that does and ask them to change it. That's why we have this system. We have amendments to the Constitution. We don't like the Constitution, find a way to amend it.

If the people speak, we are supposed to listen here. Hundreds of thousands

showed up in Washington D.C. over this past weekend. And we need to hear what they have to say.

But they want to respect their elected Representatives. They want the rule of law to adhere to. They don't want to see this country flooded over with the level of corruption that we have seen in places like Mexico and Russia, or I go there and I think, what can be done?

I can prescribe the solutions that I think are very constructive to those countries, but if you could snap your fingers and get rid of the corruption in those countries, that would be the biggest thing that could be done. And then the people would have hope; they would have faith again. They would believe again that their government was responsible and responsive to them.

But the rule of law--and I think about how important it is to comply with the letter and the intent of the law, not just avoid prosecution, not just find a way to skirt around the edge of it, respect and revere the law and comply with the letter and the intent of the law.

And I had this little thought that popped up into my head--I was listening to the judge talk about this--this little phrase recurs back to me: no controlling legal authority. Do you remember that?

The Vice President of the United States, Al Gore, said, well there is no controlling legal authority. So, therefore, if there isn't any way that you can control his activities by enforcing a law that one can point to, therefore, whatever he might do apparently is acceptable or maybe even moral.

In the absence of prohibition, things become moral in this era of morals relativism.

I reject that. We have got to have high standards, high standards of conscience, high standards of morality, and our laws uphold those standards. And the people on the left will constantly argue you can't legislate morality.

Well, but if you de-legislate the morality that others legislated, now you have, now you have lowered the standard. Now you have lowered the bar. And now people believe it's acceptable, and it has happened over and over again. Our legislation is morality. Our legislation, the laws of America, the laws of our States and our local subdivisions uphold the moral standards of the people that pass them.

It's often our faith; our Judeo-Christian values are what shaped this country. The Declaration and the Constitution are infused with Judeo- Christian values. And those values are part of the culture reflected in the documents, not the documents that drove the culture.

And if we lose our culture, the documents will become meaningless to us. That's why we have got to stand up for the rule of law here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and everybody in America has to stand up for the rule of law, the letter and the intent of law, and the moral and ethical foundation that underpins it, or we lose our way, and we lose our country.

Mr. Speaker, as always, it is an honor to have the privilege to represent my constituents here on the floor of the House of Representatives and convey the thought process for myself and a good number of my colleagues about the issues of the day. And hopefully we will be able to cap off this evening and send some people to bed with some thoughts that they'll wake up in the morning supporting or else have good reasons to oppose.

A lot has transpired here since the August break began, and we only have 1 week behind us here in the House of Representatives since we have returned. That deep tradition has been that Members of Congress would leave Washington, D.C. in the hot, humid month of August. This tradition began before air conditioning. It's a good tradition, and I think we should keep it because we saw something phenomenal in America this past August, and it seemed like a never-ending series of townhall meetings that took place in community after community. Nearly every congressional district held something. Some held many, many meetings. I don't know the record on the number of the townhall meetings that were had, but I'm sure it fell in the dozens of meetings for a single Member.

For myself I represent 32 counties in western Iowa, the western third of the State, that's sliced from Minnesota down to Missouri, 32 counties, 286 towns. I held a good number of townhall meetings, and it was a very rewarding experience.

The thing that I take away from it, Mr. Speaker, and there are many-- I got some ideas on the health care issue that are on my list that I will talk about here in a moment, Mr. Speaker. But the thing that I will remember the most, it isn't a single issue or a single individual or a way an argument was phrased or worded or how compelling they were, and there were many that were compelling arguments, but it was the image of town after town, meeting after meeting, rooms full of people, often people in standing room around the outside, some people standing and looking in the doorway. We always found a way, I think, though, where everybody could hear. If they wanted in, they could get in. We couldn't always hear the comments of everyone because there were just too many.

But the dissenters had their say. And they actually had, I think, a disproportionate amount of voice within the meetings that I had, but that's all right. We got to hear from both sides of the argument. We got to hear from more of those that oppose a national health care plan than those that support it. Those that supported it were a distinct minority in my district, but they had more than their fair share to say.

So I weighed those issues, and I watched their reaction. But the thing I remember the most were hundreds of attentive people sitting there with focused attention, listening to every word, listening to the words that were spoken by their friends, their neighbors, their family members, listened to the responses that I gave, and weighing this and putting it into their calculator for what America is going to look like.

I will never forget those faces, those eyes looking up to the front of the room, paying attention to every word, taking notes. Some of the questions were so well worded, so carefully phrased, you could tell that there was a deep amount of research that went into the questions. I wondered if some of them didn't stay up nearly all night long to be ready just for their chance, their chance to have that moment to have their say.

And I'm so encouraged by their commitment, and I wish they had more voice. I wish we could hear them now, Mr. Speaker. I wish we could fill this Chamber up with the people that filled up these townhall meetings, and especially the leadership, but the rank and file of all of us that have the privilege here to serve in the House of Representatives could hear those voices again in here.

I hope when we debate a health care bill here on the floor of the House that this gallery is full of people. I hope the C-SPAN camera, Mr. Speaker, represents millions out there that are watching every move, listening to every word, people that are taking notes, people that are tape-recording our actions and our words and carefully analyzing, and I hope we're held accountable for the decisions that are made in committee where generally it doesn't get the press that it gets here on the floor.

But when the day comes, the American people need to know that they have been heard, that we went home, that we traveled our districts, we did our townhall meetings, and that we came back and conferred with each other and arrived at a decision that's the right decision for the long-term best interests of our descendants, our progeny and their descendants as well, Mr. Speaker.

So I hope that's what happens. And I don't know that it will. I don't know that it will because there are forces at play, and some of the people, especially in the majority, have voiced this, that their townhall meetings with their constituents are just one of the places where they get the information to decide. Other places might be the lobby. It might be their coffers. It might be their leadership. And it could be just simply a deeply entrenched philosophy that favors Big Government over freedom.

So for me in my townhall meetings, if there was one position that I took that I was clear on that had the most support of all, it was I will not support a bill that diminishes the people's freedom in the United States of America. That's my pledge, Mr. Speaker. I will not diminish our freedom. It's my freedom too. And I have taken an oath to uphold this Constitution, and it's our Constitution and it's about freedom. It isn't just about individual freedom. It's about the 10th Amendment. It's about the freedom of the States to control those things which are not specifically designated and enumerated for the Federal Government. This Federal Government has reached across the 10th Amendment and violated at least the spirit and I will say also the letter of the Constitution over and over again.

And if this United States of America passes a health care bill that looks anything like H.R. 3200, it will be a violation of our Constitution consistently in several different ways.

So I'm very concerned about where we go with this: the disregard, the cavalier attitude that many Members of Congress have towards the Constitution, towards their oath to the Constitution, towards its meaning and towards its content.

And this drive to create this single-payer system, you know, you just couldn't drive the wooden stake in the heart of HillaryCare back in 1993 and 1994. When Senator Phil Gramm stood on the floor of the United States Senate right down this hallway where I'm faced right now and he said this health care bill, this national health care bill will pass over my cold, dead political body, a lot of people thought that Senator Phil Gramm was going to become a cold, dead political body and that HillaryCare was going to pass. But it has not. It's been 15 years and more since Phil Gramm made that statement, and he has held off this nationalized health care, this socialized medicine juggernaut. He has and many others have too. It has been a national effort.

Yes, there are people out there that think that they'd be better off if somebody else would take the responsibility for their health care, and they are large in number but small in percentage, Mr. Speaker.

Now, I will make this point that we have constantly heard the words and the statistics that are over 40 million people that are uninsured in America, that we have got to do something about the uninsured. And this number of 40 million usually rounds up to around 44 million. Now it has kind of crept up to 47 million and probably the most reliable number is close to 46 million people uninsured in America. Now, that's a pretty large percentage of our population. We have about 306 million Americans, and if 46 or 47 million are uninsured, that's, let's see, one-sixth or a little bit less of our population.

It's funny that the uninsured is about the same percentage of our population as the GDP is consumed by health care.

But if that number is 47 million, and that's the highest number that's consistently delivered by the other side, and sometimes they stretch it and round it up to 50 million, but if the uninsured in America are 47 million, they would have us believe that these are chronically uninsured people that are stuck on these uninsured rolls year after year after year.

Well, that's not the case, Mr. Speaker. A lot of these people are just temporarily uninsured and they're in transition between policies. So as those policies change, occasionally they find themselves without coverage.

But I began to ask this question a little more carefully, and that is, Who are the people with affordable options? If somebody's uninsured and they're making a million dollars a year, I'm sorry, my heart doesn't bleed for them. They have decided that they don't care to have a health insurance policy and they're willing to take the risk with their equity. So that's not my concern. In fact, the United States Senate Republican conference staff set the bar at $75,000 a year. If you make $75,000 or more a year and you don't have health insurance, we are not going to put you in the category where you get a lot of our governmental compassion to extract dollars out of somebody else's labor to provide that person making over $75,000 a year with health insurance.

Now, the President has decided to do class envy at $250,000; but let me just say that if you're making more than $75,000, you can find a way to pay for your own health insurance even if you just buy catastrophic, and you should get a health savings account and grow that health savings account and buy a major medical policy, a catastrophic health insurance policy, take care of your own incidental health care bills. But 47 million uninsured at any given time, the biggest number that we get.

Now, to boil this down, Mr. Speaker, to who are the people without affordable options, you take the 47 million and you subtract from it those that we really don't want to provide health insurance for out of the taxpayers' pocket at least, and that's going to be those that are in the country illegally. Even the President of the United States doesn't insist that we insure illegals under this policy. It was a new position that he took the other night. I'm not sure that he's as serious as we would like, but I was encouraged that right back here a few feet behind me, the President of the United States said, no, we are not going to fund illegals. Well, H.R. 3200 does. The Congressional Budget Office thinks so. The Congressional Research Service thinks so.

The vote that took place in the Ways and Means Committee that voted down the citizenship standard requirements in order to qualify for under H.R. 3200, this health care bill. That partisan vote. Or Democrats voted down the language that would require proof of citizenship that's tried, tested and true, and used to be part of our Medicaid policy from the beginning, was voted down by a vote of 29-28 in the Ways and Means Committee. Democrats then wanted to leave a door open, at least in committee, so illegals could be funded under that newer policy.

That also was the case in the Ways and Means Committee, right down the party line exactly. They voted down the effort to try to raise the standard and require proof of citizenship. But the President is now taking the position he doesn't want to fund illegals in this. I think he got pushed into that pretty hard.

So 47 million uninsured at a given time minus 5.2 million illegals, this is according to the Republican Conference in the United States Senate. I think there are a lot more than that, Mr. Speaker. They use 5.2 million. I'll use that for the sake of our discussion. Subtract that from 47 million.

We also do not want to--and cannot under current law and should not-- fund those who are new immigrants here. They're under the 5-year bar; no welfare until you've been here 5 years, take care of yourself for half a decade, and then you can qualify if you come legally. Under the 5-year bar, another 5 million.

Now we're adding this up. So you have 5.2 million illegals, 5 million new immigrants, but legal, under the 5-year bar, now we're at 10.2 million. Those making $75,000 a year or more, I mentioned those, there are 9 million of those. Those who qualify for government programs, all part of the 47 million, 9.7 million Americans qualify for government programs but don't sign up, mostly Medicaid, Medicaid eligibles but not enrolled. They don't know that they didn't enroll in anything--and if we take it and hand deliver it to them. So we're adding up some numbers here. Then, those Americans who are eligible with their employer but they've either opted out or not bothered to opt into the employer- offered health insurance.

So those numbers, 5.2 million illegals, 5 million legal here under the 5-year bar, 9 million making more than $75,000 a year or more, 9.7 million eligible for government programs, mostly Medicaid, but not signed up, and 6 million eligible for employer programs not signed up. That comes to 34.9 million Americans of the 47 million that we don't want to cover with this new policy under H.R. 3200, this health care plan.

There is a consensus out there that says we're not really worried about these categories. The one we're worried about are the Americans without affordable options. That number is not 47 million any longer. If you've done the math, Mr. Speaker, you will have subtracted each of these categories from the 47 million. All these categories add up to 34.9 million. Take that from 47 and you come to 12.1 million Americans without affordable options. That is the universe we're trying to fix.

The President has said we have two problems with health care in America; the first one is the economic crisis that we're in--it's a year long now, still a crisis--well, it's a problem; the stock market was good today, I might say. And he says we can't fix the economy unless we first fix health care. In fact, the cost of health care is the problem with our economy. And he would tell us if we could fix the health care problem, we would fix the economy.

Well, what's the problem with health care? According to the President of the United States--mostly as a candidate, but also as a President-- we spend too much money. Health care costs too large a percentage of our gross domestic product. There's a problem. We have to fix it, otherwise we can't fix the economy; the President's position.

The other position that he has, the two points on health care, is that we have too many uninsured. Well, let's deal with the big problem first. We spend about 14.5 percent of our gross domestic product on health care in America. That's premiums and the care and the litigation and all of those things. The average of the industrialized world is about 9.5 percent of their GDP on health care. Well, we spend a high percentage on recreation and a high percentage on other things too. We are a rich nation. One of the reasons we spend that kind of money on health care is because we do have the wealth in order to distribute it to the health care industry, to that one-seventh of the economy that is our health care industry.

So we have wealth, and we decide to spend it on health. It's not the worst thing, but we should examine it objectively. I do think we spend too much, too large a percentage, but by the same token I don't think they get very good health care in those countries that spend a lot less. But we spend about half again on health care in the United States as a percentage of our GDP as they do in other countries, but we produce more per capita than most of those countries too. And I need to pull that back and equate the two, and I haven't done that yet. I hope somebody does and gets me the information, otherwise I will sit up some night and do the doodling, Mr. Speaker.

But we spend too much money on health care. What would you do about that? If you have a problem in your family budget and you are spending too much money, you don't solve the problem by going out and spending a lot more money. The score on this bill is someplace between $1 trillion and $2 trillion; on the low side it's $1 trillion. The most consistent number that has been produced, the analysis of it is $1.6 trillion.

So according to the President, we spend too much money on health care. And I don't necessarily disagree, but his solution is to spend another $1.6 trillion on it. That's not a solution. It doesn't solve the family budget to spend more money when you're spending too much, and it doesn't solve the

government problem to spend more money when you're spending too much. And so even if the President identifies the problem correctly, he has the erroneous solution to apply to it: Voila, we spend too much money, therefore, the solution is spend more.

This was the approach he brought to this economic crisis to demand more money through the stimulus fund, too, when we came to our conference and said, FDR lost his nerve, he should have spent a lot more money. He convinced us that the President of the United States wasn't going to make that mistake, he was going to spend a lot more money. He was going to be FDR/Keynesian economics on steroids. And that's what we got, Mr. Speaker. And the White House made a $2 trillion mistake on their projections, $2 trillion.

I remember when the junior Senator from Iowa, Tom Harkin, made the statement that $6 billion was just pencil dust. And his opponent here walked around with a man-size pencil to talk about pencil dust. Well, I don't know that $6 billion was pencil dust--in that context it can be questioned. But I can tell you that $1.6 trillion is not pencil dust. Getting within $2 trillion of the target is not pencil dust. That's real, huge money.

But if we're spending too much money on health care, then why wouldn't we address the things that fix the problem? Why don't we come at this in a different way and go after those most obvious things that we can use to fix the problem? Now, for example, how much money does defensive medicine cost? What does it work within the macro economics of the health care equation? And there are some numbers that will rattle on down to around 5.5 percent of overall health care costs. The health insurance underwriters, the top legislative officer gave me a number of 8.5 percent, the cost of medical malpractice premiums and litigation and defensive medicine. Those three things together, 8.5 percent, are overall health care costs.

If you take the 8.5 percent and you apply it to the 14.5 percent of our GDP, you can come up with a number of about $203 billion a year that's going all for defensive medicine and malpractice premiums and trial lawyers and litigation. In other words, it isn't being spent on good health care; it's money that's being churned up in the system to pay other people to do other things other than deliver a product to people for the benefit of their good health.

Defensive medicine. Some of the providers got together and advised me in one of my meetings that their consensus was between 20 and 28 percent of the tests that they do are for defensive medicine purposes. In other words, get the test, get it on the record to protect them in case somebody files a malpractice lawsuit against them. They can always roll out the test and go to court and say, Well, I did this and this and this, and I ran this test, and these were all negative, so therefore our medical conclusion was thus. And of course we all know there are anomalies when it comes to health.

Defensive medicine. Twenty to 28 percent of the tests, the unnecessary costs in health care that have to do with malpractice and premiums and in litigation and in defensive medicine, perhaps 8.5 percent, I see numbers to 10 percent, numbers up to 16 percent of the overall health care bill.

I'll settle on that 8\1/2\ percent number--perhaps it's slightly less--but if it's the 16 percent, as a number of doctors have pointed out, then you're looking, roughly, in the area of $400 billion a year. Over 10 years, there's the $4 trillion, Mr. President.

I remember his speech, and I know there were some folks who saw the humor when the President of the United States said, If you adopt my policy, over time, it will save $4 trillion.

Over time. How long is ``over time''? Is that right before the end of infinity? Is it 1 year? 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? a generation? a half a century or a century? a millennia? Over time, his policy would save $4 trillion. Now, there is an ambiguous statement. You know, if you'd invest a penny and drop it in your passbook savings account, over time, you'd be worth $4 trillion, too, Mr. Speaker. I think you wouldn't want to wait that long.

So, as to the high cost of health care, if it needs to be addressed-- and I think it does--let's go where we can get the most money, the best results the quickest. Let's do lawsuit abuse reform. Let's adopt the California policy. Let's adopt the Texas policy. We passed it out of the House of Representatives about 4 years ago. We passed it out of the Judiciary Committee, where I sat; brought it to the floor; passed it here; messengered it over to the Senate. The wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trial Lawyers Association decided to kill our malpractice reform, our lawsuit abuse reform, that passed this House under the leadership, at that time, of the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Jim Sensenbrenner. So it's the simplest thing we couldn't do, the most effective thing we couldn't do.

If you do the scoring on this--now, I don't think we're going to get it all. I don't think we'll fix all of those problems, but if we did, it would be around $203 billion a year, just by my little back-of-the- envelope calculation. Over a decade--we do our calculations here on a 10-year budget--that's $2 trillion. We could save as much as $2 trillion from health care just simply by cutting the trial lawyers out, still letting people get whole and letting the doctors do their doctoring without having to do defensive medicine, and it would reduce dramatically their malpractice premiums. As I say, they passed medical malpractice reform in Texas, and the doctors who had undergone an exodus from Texas began to come back to Texas again. It's interesting.

So, if health care costs too much, why don't we address the problems of costly health care? Why don't we put more competition in it?

In some States, as much as 80 percent of the health insurance that's available to them is offered by one company. One company so dominates the market that it's 80 percent. In my State, one company dominates the market up to 70 percent. Why don't we let the people in New Jersey buy health insurance in Kentucky? Why don't we let the people in New York buy health insurance in Texas? Why don't we let them buy it in Iowa for that matter? We have pretty good policies available in Iowa. If we'd let people buy insurance across State lines, that would solve another allegation of the President of the United States.

He has said that they need to inject competition into the health insurance industry because too few companies dominate the market so much that they can dictate premiums, and that probably is true in localities. In fact, I just won't take issue with that statement. Yet the solution is not to establish a Federal government-run health insurance policy. We know how that goes. Many of us have made the argument:

If you do that, if you set up Federal health insurance, it will swallow up the rest of the private insurance companies in the country. We have 1,300 health insurance companies in the United States today that are selling a possible combination of 100,000 policies. If we get ObamaCare, we're going to get a national health insurance system that will be subsidized by the taxpayers, and all of our private insurance companies will also have to meet new standards written by the new Health Choices Administration, czar-issioner. That's what we'll see happen. The result of that will be the pattern that is out there for us. Here is one pattern:

In 1968, they passed National Flood Insurance. Yes, there were private property and casualty insurers in the business of selling flood insurance to people who lived where they could be flooded. That happened. It wasn't a great big market back in those years, but we didn't have a great big infrastructure to protect either back then. We do now. The Federal Government stepped in and passed the National Flood Insurance Act, and in a short period of time, all property and casualty flood insurance companies dropped the selling of flood insurance, and today, you can only buy one kind of flood insurance. That is the Federal Government's. They have the monopoly now. They dominate the market. They have squeezed everybody else out, and they have destroyed the private market in flood insurance. Well, you don't have to just buy that model. You could think that's an anomaly.

We could look at another situation that's going on. How about the student

loan program in the United States with all of the private companies, the private banks and the lending institutions that manage the student loans and the good competition that we've had? Now we have George Miller, who's deciding that he wants to replace it all with Federal. A smaller and smaller percentage of our student loans are provided now through the private sector. They want to eliminate it all. If George Miller has his way--and I'm confident the President would sign whatever George Miller puts on his desk--you won't be able to go to a bank and borrow money to go to college. It will all be through the Federal Government. The Federal Government will control it all.

Oh, by the way, Federal flood insurance is a monopoly. The only flood insurance you can buy in the United States is from the Federal Government. The owned, operated, managed, marketed premium is set by the Federal Government. Federal flood insurance is $19.2 billion in the red, and there's no way to get it back. So do we want more of this?

Let me throw another concept out here. Here is another interesting thing that comes out in listening to people at townhall meetings. Mr. Speaker, some proponents of ObamaCare would say, Well, listen. We have Medicaid and we have Medicare and we have Social Security, and they're all government programs. You like those, don't you?

Well, yes. The people who are receiving the benefits like them better than nothing, and some parts of them are pretty good, but there's a big difference between what they're proposing here and Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. In all three of those categories that I've mentioned, of those government programs that we have, the people receiving the benefits are predominantly not the ones paying for them at the time they receive them. They are the beneficiaries of someone else's labor and largesse. The highest producing people in America are paying the most taxes, and now the President and the liberals in this Congress are determined to tell the freedom-loving, top-producing Americans that not only are they going to have to continue to fund somebody else's Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, but now they're going to have to fund a whole lot of other people's health care, those who are in the most productive years of their lives, and by the way, you're going to fund everybody else's, but your choices are going to be diminished because the Federal Government has to be able to compete and push out a lot of the private providers. I guarantee you, if they pass this bill, there will not be 1,300 health insurance companies any longer. There will not be 100,000 possible policy combinations any longer. That number will diminish overnight and over time, and we'll see how long it takes before there's the same number of private health insurance companies in America as there are property and casualty companies that are selling flood insurance.

I see my friend from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, has arrived at the floor--persistent, relentless and ever on the ball. I would be so happy to yield as much time as she may consume to the gentlelady from Minnesota.

I thank the gentlelady from Minnesota.

I was just listening to the General Motors part of this discussion, and I am thinking about the components of General Motors, Government Motors, and how this all transpired. And it first came about with the first little dialogue going on. And some of us said put them through chapter 11. We are not going to be without cars. Somebody will take up those assets and turn them into a competitive company.

Speaker Pelosi said, I am not going to get the unions--I am not going to let the car makers get bargaining leverage over the unions. So you had the bond holders, the secured creditors involved in this.

And then the President effectively fired the CEO of General Motors.

And hand-picked his own guy to go in there as the CEO of General Motors and over, close, near that period of time, picked, hand-picked all but two members of the board of directors on General Motors. And the Federal Government ended up with 61 percent of General Motors. That's the U.S., the Federal Government, the Canadian Government, 12.5 percent, the unions, 17.5 percent. Now I didn't do the math on what's left. It's not much.

And then on top of that you have Cash for Clunkers that goes out and buys these cars or puts the down payment down. And the Federal Government guaranteeing some of the loans for the cars, it is the perfect circle of socialized economy. It's astonishing to me.

Now what do you do if you are out here making a car that you can't sell, and you need to pay the scale for the workers that didn't give up anything if we pass a national health care act? The unions didn't give up anything in this deal, but they got 17.5 interest in a company.

I thank the gentlelady. I believe it says in the book of John that if you forgive men's sins, they are forgiven them. If you hold them bound, they are held bound.

President Obama said he accepted the apology. That's forgiveness. Because the President accepted the apology from the officer and the gentleman, Joe Wilson, no one else in the country has a claim to any other redress whatsoever.

Let me just roll this question back across your analytical accountant, CPA, tax lawyer mind, and that is, if 30 percent of the private

profits today are controlled by the Federal Government, and if another 18 percent would be swallowed up in a national health care plan, taking us to 48 percent of the private, what if all private interests were rolled up in shares, and you could buy derivatives of those shares of the private sector? What if you could do that?

And what if the Federal Government then controlled 48 percent of all the shares of the private sector? Because that would be the equivalent, I would think. They would almost be to the point of having controlling interest over the private sector of the economy of the United States of America. Is that how the equation works out?

Reclaiming my time, you triggered something in my memory here, Mrs. Bachmann, and that would be the hearings that we held before the House Agriculture committee. This would have been March 13, 2007. It has to do with what people should be eating and what is healthy, and how we're going to legislate that from the Federal level.

There were those on that committee that thought that we should increase food stamps substantially. In fact, they were pushing to increase food stamps 46 percent. For the most part, they got that job done.

But, how do you justify that when you can't find people that are suffering from malnutrition or people that are actually hungry, chronically hungry. There are people that miss meals. I'm among them. But we don't have chronic hunger in America.

In order to justify the expansion of food stamps, they brought before us the president of La Raza, that's the organization that stands for The Race. Her name is Janet Murguia. And in that testimony she said this--and this is a quote, ``There is also mounting evidence that the overweight and obesity trends in the United States are due, in part, to high levels of food insecurity.''

So we have a situation where the argument is being made to the United States Congress that we have fat people in America that are overweight because they were worried about some meals that they might miss one day in the future, and they tended to overeat in the present tense. So if we would just give them an unlimited supply of food stamps, then they would eat less, lose weight, and live healthy and happy thereafter, that's what she's telling us. Food insecurity.

So I'm wondering, Where has this world gone, George Orwell? How did we get to this place? And I remember walking down along Franklin Delano Roosevelt's monument and looking at the symbols that he has of the speech that he gave that is sort of the idea of the four freedoms. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion--I'll stand and defend those. They are rights. They are freedoms. They are guaranteed.

But freedom from want and freedom from fear can't be guaranteed by anybody but God. And I'm not sure it's healthy to have freedom from want, because want is what drives us to produce and be better. And then our philanthropy that comes from the times we're short causes us to help other people that are short.

Mrs. Bachmann, why didn't you do something about it?

Yes.

Did you offer an amendment in Financial Services?

Did Chairman Frank vote for that amendment?

Why isn't it law?

Could that be interpreted to mean that ACORN talked to his staff after the committee meeting and advised him that he should come to the floor and change the language?

Here is an image. In fact, this poster is not here tonight, but I will try to bring it down later this week so everybody can see it, Mr. Speaker. I thought it would be good for me to go down to the headquarters of ACORN to see what it looked like. So I went on down there to 2609 Canal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana. That's the national headquarters and, for all I know, the international headquarters of ACORN. In there is where they process the paperwork for many of--probably most of--and probably not quite all of their affiliate corporations. But inside those doors, the most fortified building in that neighborhood--I yield back.

Yes. But it's a four- or five-story building. I would have to look at the picture to count the stories. But the first two are all bars, and it's fortified. Then above that, it's high enough so that the crowds can't get in. But behind the glass in ACORN's national headquarters on the street side, there's a huge poster: ``Obama for President '08,'' and hanging right next to it is an ACORN flag. I have that picture. I have turned it into a poster. I brought it down here on the floor.

ACORN is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. It is unlawful for them to engage in partisan politics, and yet they are a get-out-the- vote organization for Democrats. They are taking Federal tax dollars, and they're pushing it through to run political campaigns, and then they boldly advertise it in the front window of their national headquarters in New Orleans with an Obama poster.

Mrs. Bachmann, you have raised a lot of children, foster children, your own natural born children. It is a phenomenal thing. Have you ever caught any of your children with their hand in the cookie jar?

Did any of them ever call for a hearing to clear their name?

I think that is the case. Clearly, it's a partisan get-out-the-vote organization. They're everywhere in America, in over 100 major cities, and then subdivisions within the cities. Their reach doesn't just go into politics. We saw what was going on with the-- what's the nicest word--subornation of prostitution, child prostitution, the encouragement of what appears to be illegal immigration, saying that they're going to help with a child tax credit, the refundable tax credit which is a transfer from the taxpayers to the pimp and the prostitute out of the pocket of the taxpayers, enabled by

Well, it's circular, and it's incestuous. The statement that was made about investigating ACORN was made by Chairman John Conyers, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. I was sitting in the room when that was going on. We had a hearing before the Constitution Subcommittee, the subcommittee chairman is Jerry Nadler from New York. Chairman Conyers said, I think there's substance here. I think we should look into it. Chairman Nadler said, When I see something substantive, then I will consider hearings. There was plenty of substance. There is plenty more substance here now.

But since that time, John Conyers has said, Well, the powers that be--not necessarily the higher-ups--but the powers that be have decided that there wouldn't be hearings. Now who could ``the powers that be'' be when you are the chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the House of Representatives? You really only look up and you think, well, the powers that be are either the Speaker of the House or the President of the United States.

Well, what we do know is the President of the United States used to work for ACORN. That's irrefutable and not arguable. He not only worked for ACORN but he also was a trainer for ACORN, and he headed up Project Vote, which is part and parcel of ACORN. The President wore an ACORN jersey. He was a player and a coach, and now he is an alumni who has hired ACORN to help facilitate hiring people at a minimum on the Census and now they've backed off of that. I'm not all that optimistic that that will stick. But we have a President of the United States with a chief of staff named Rahm Emanuel who used to serve in the House of Representatives. He is known for hardball, hard-core Chicago-style politics. And we're going to have to wonder if we can actually get hearings and investigations.

Here's what needs to happen, Mr. Speaker: this Congress needs to have multiple committees with bipartisan hearings and investigations on every aspect of ACORN. The Department of Justice has to deploy an entire division to go in and do a complete forensic audit of every dollar that comes and goes from ACORN and every one of their affiliates. They have to bring the IRS into this so we can track every dollar, and we've got to see indictments. We've got to see the perp walk. We are going to have to see people put in prison for what they're doing to the American taxpayers, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, did I hear a gavel? Does that mean my time has expired?

Okay. I thank you, Mr. Speaker. Then I will just simply conclude. I didn't pick up the sound very well.

I appreciate the gentlelady from Minnesota coming to the floor to engage in this discussion and dialogue that we have. I'll appreciate it when this Congress steps forward and does the investigations of ACORN and multiple committees, the Finance Committee, the

Ways and Means Committee, the Judiciary Committee, the Government Reform Committee, those, among others. And when the Justice Department steps up and instead of shutting down an investigation of voter intimidation, which was an open and shut case of intimidation in Philadelphia, if they will step in and really do an investigation of ACORN, let's give the taxpayers their due, let's represent the American people, let's clean this place up, and let's have the high standards that were envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

Mr. Speaker, a Rasmussen poll found that 83 percent of voters believe only U.S. citizens should be eligible for health care subsidies. However, H.R. 3200, the health care bill, gives coverage to illegal immigrants, despite what the President says.

Although language in the bill purports to prevent illegal immigrants from getting coverage, even the Congressional Research Service confirms that there are three major loopholes that render the language meaningless.

Number one, there is no method to verify eligibility. An amendment to include it was defeated by Democrats in committee.

Item number two, illegal immigrants are not prohibited from using the ``public option,'' better described as the government mandate.

And, number three, all members of families including illegal immigrants may be eligible as a group, and language indicates so.

So if Congress wants to represent the wishes of the people, including the 70 percent of Democrats and 87 percent of Independents, they should add citizenship verification of eligibility to any health care legislation. But they have voted it down in committee 29-28. False claims about not covering illegal immigrants are hollow.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. And having had an opportunity to listen to some of the dialogue that went on previously, I'm glad that I have a chance to raise these issues.

On the front of everybody's mind in this country is the situation of our health care and our health insurance for 306 million people in the United States. And I would point out that if we look at the size of this economy and the size of this population, it is a huge endeavor to think that we would take 17.5 percent of the American economy, 17.5 percent of our gross domestic product and switch it over to a government-run plan, and do so in almost the blink of a legislative eye, and do so without the full deliberation of the floor of the House of Representatives or without the American people having an opportunity to weigh in.

I am glad that this process has been slowed down--however great the price has been--so that there is an opportunity now for some of the legislation that has been more closely refined, shall we say, in its 1,100 or so-page form to be available to the public, a public that has more access to this information that is going on in the House than ever before because of being able to access this information now by the Internet. And all of us in this Congress have Web sites, and I would think there is at least one link on every Member of Congress' Web site that will help you access this information on where we are with bills that are being deliberated here in this Congress.

And as I look at where we are today and what's out there, I'm very interested in the entire month of August and I'm very interested in the first week of September. Those are the times when the American people will have had a chance to read the bill, talk to the people within their profession or whatever their interest group is that have read the bill, weigh their ideas, do this across the backyard fence and do this at the coffee table at work, and be able to give us the benefit of the wisdom of the American people to weigh in on all the components that have been created here that are promised to come at us and perhaps have a vote on a final passage; not here, not any longer this week or next week or in the month of August, but perhaps in the first or second week in September, and something that--this will decide the fate, if it's passed, of the health care system of the United States, I believe, at least as far as we can look into the future. And it is a national health care plan. It is a government-run health care plan. It is a model that transforms the entire health care system in the United States.

Today we have more than 1,300 private health insurance companies competing for premium dollars, And they do so by providing the best value for the dollar and marketing that best value for the dollar and trying to adjust those policies to meet the demands of the American people. Over 1,300 private health insurance companies, and among them they offer, in the aggregate, perhaps as many as 100,000 different health insurance options. And the President of the United States has said he just wants to offer one more option, 100,001 policies now for everybody in America to choose from if this bill should pass.

And this extra government option that he would offer, as if there wasn't enough competition out there among the 1,300 health insurance companies and the roughly 100,000 policies that are there, how can anyone presume that one more policy that would just compete with the other policies out there would result in anything other than one one- hundredth more options for the people of the United States?

I would submit that there is a lot more afoot here, Mr. Speaker, there is a lot more afoot here. The people that are advocating for this public option, the people that are advocating that the Federal Government should run their own health insurance policy in order to compete against the private sector are the people who sometimes they will leak it into the media, sometimes they will shout it out in a private meeting, but in their soul they want a single-payer, government-run, socialized medicine, one-option government plan for everybody. And they want to run every private health insurance company out of business and take the 100,000 options that the American people have with them. That is their agenda.

And I can put together a string of quotes from the very liberal Members of this Congress that find themselves in powerful positions in this Congress, gavels in hand, that are determined to take away the private health insurance options and turn it into one government plan.

Even the President of the United States believes in that, however much lip service he has paid to the idea of telling the American people, well, if you like your health insurance that you have today, then you get to keep it. That's one thing that I cannot accept that the President believes when he says it. He is a very smart man. He's got to understand that if it says in the bill--and it does, section 102 of the bill--that every private health insurance policy has to be rewritten in the first 5 years of the passage of the legislation that's proposed, that means the American people's individual policies will all change within 5 years and they will have to accommodate themselves to the new qualifications that will be written by a health insurance czar to be appointed by the President later, and regulations that are not in the bill, but regulations that would grant that health insurance czar the power and the authority to set the standard.

So he might rule that every health insurance policy in America has to pay for abortion. He might rule that everyone has to pay for mental health. He might rule that everyone has to pay for all pharmaceuticals, or maybe only generic pharmaceuticals.

Whatever he may decide, he'll be looking at the costs of the premium, the percentages of copayments, and the regulations will be written so that the public option, which is so carefully defined and that language that's determined to be defended by the Democrats in this Congress--so that the public option can compete with all of these 1,300 private health insurance companies that have competed in the marketplace for years and found their niche in the market and done it the American way.

Now, if somebody thinks that there's too much money in the health insurance business, why don't they get in that business and provide that health insurance and lower the premiums and cut down on the administrative overhead and take some money and take some profit out of it?

That's how this works in the free market system. If there's something out there in the marketplace that has too much profit in it, you don't need government to come in and do it for you. You need to take a look and determine is it a monopoly? If it's a monopoly, then Teddy Roosevelt rides again. Let's bring him in and let's bust the trust. But if you have 1,3000 health insurance companies and 100,000 health

insurance policies, you don't have anything that looks at all like a monopoly. You see something that looks like the maximum amount, or nearly the maximum amount, anyway, of competition in the marketplace.

So that argument is specious, the idea that we need to create one more company, unless it is the intent of the proponents to create socialized medicine--one size fits all, take away the American people's individual policies and give them a government policy or a facsimile of a government policy that would be their former private health insurance company that has had to adapt to the new rules written by government and offer a qualified plan.

Now, why am I suspicious of this? I am more than suspicious. I'm convinced that this is the initiative: to wipe out all private health insurance and force everybody into a public policy and a public plan. One of the reasons is because there has been such an indignation about those of us who have said that this is a government-run health care plan that they're proposing.

They have tried to censor us here in the United States. They have actually effectively to a degree censored Members of Congress who wanted to simply mail out the flow chart, the schematic, if you will, of what this proposed health insurance plan or this health care policy looks like.

And I would take the people in this country back, Mr. Speaker, to this little chart right here. This is a chart that hung on my office for probably a decade starting in 1993, when Hillary Clinton came to town and became the secret master of the reform of the health care and the government takeover of health care in the United States. A lot of people remember, as I do, those were intense times. I was watching my freedom being marketed away day by day in secret meetings. I don't know if they actually kept minutes, but I know they weren't available to the public. I know the press wasn't allowed in the room. The public wasn't allowed in the room. There weren't Members of Congress representing their constituents. There were people like Ira Magaziner and others who were handpicked by Bill and Hillary Clinton to devise a plan.

And the idea of this was, put these smart people in a room, have them devise a plan, don't let anybody weigh in on that, no kibitzers on this plan, because if that happens, then the American people would start to grumble, and if they start to grumble, they might start to talk out loud, and if they talk out loud, they might start to yell, and if they start to yell, they might come to town and tell us that they don't want to have a government-run health plan in the United States, that they don't want to have their private plans taken over.

Well, that's what they finally did. They finally said they are not going to tolerate it, and the American people scared enough Members of Congress and enough United States Senators that they were going to lose their seat if they supported this monstrosity that this monstrosity finally was pulled down. This was a time when United States Senator Phil Gramm said that this health care policy will be over his cold, dead political body if they pass something like this. He stood there. He meant it. They held their ground. People in this House held their ground. And people like Dick Armey held their ground. In fact, Dick Armey was instrumental in helping to form this chart, this black and white chart that is the schematic that shows all the government agencies that are created by the old plan back in 1993, which I will at least give Bill Clinton credit for. He wrote a bill. He presented a bill to Congress, and he asked Congress to pass the Hillary plan. And, of course, Congress liked their job. They didn't pass the Hillary plan.

And when I call it a ``schematic,'' I don't know that one might think today that that's pejorative, but in here they actually do call their own plan a ``scheme.'' Someplace in this chart it addresses at least some of the components in it as a ``scheme.'' Well, I call it a ``schematic'' or maybe more appropriately a ``scheme-attic,'' Mr. Speaker.

But it has here an ombudsman who is supposed to broker the deals between government because people can't get through government bureaucracy; so you create an ombudsman. Well, we have to change the name of that because now people know what an ombudsman is. We have the HMO provider plan that doesn't show up in the other chart that I can see. HMOs have slid down in their popularity.

Here we have the global budget. In 1993 a global budget for a health care plan. All of these squares and boxes are created as new affiliations with the exception of the executive office of the President. A few others, but generally speaking, this scheme, and they call it a ``scheme,'' does scare the American people.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I would point out that as scary as this chart looks, we have another chart here that is far more scary. This is the color-coded, modern-day, software-driven, packaged-up plan that is a very accurate facsimile of what actually is taking place in the Democrat bill here in the House of Representatives. This is 31 new agencies, and there are subagencies and other responsibilities that are behind it.

But just to look at the chart, Mr. Speaker, one can look at all these white boxes here. If they're not colored, if they're white and they have black letters in them, they're existing government agencies. These are already hoops that people have to jump through. And then when you look at the colored boxes, the orange and yellow and the green and the blue and the purple, those are all new agencies. These are all new hoops for the American people to jump through. These are untried. They are untested.

When you create new government agencies, you run a little beta test because you don't know how it's going to act, how it's going to function, and you don't know how people are going to react. All you can do is guess how people will react. And you don't know if you can actually manage this.

But I will suggest this: We don't do that good a job of managing the health care that we pay for out of this Federal Government today. Right now the Federal Government is paying 80 percent of what the cost is to deliver Medicare services. And if I look at my State, where we have a high percentage of Medicare patients because we have a very high percentage of senior citizens, then the percentage of that Medicare that they're providing is less than 80 percent, and one of the reasons is because we have some of the highest-quality care. In the State of Iowa, if people go there, Mr. Speaker, they can expect that they will receive quality care in the top five of all of the States in the country year after year after year. And with that high-quality care, Iowa sits at the lowest Medicare reimbursement rate.

So we're looking at this and wondering if it is the majority's, and that means the Democrats' and that means the President's idea, that we are going to fund the cost of this $1 trillion to $2 trillion health care ``scheme-attic'' that we have here, and we're going to fund it, in part, by reducing the funding that is going to Medicare by roughly $500 billion when Medicare funding that is already inadequate at best pays 80 percent of the costs, and they're going to cut these costs and fees going into the States to come up with enough money to pay for this?

So what it means is, Mr. Speaker, is this: If you take $500 billion out of Medicare in order to fund a national health care plan, that means you're taking it right out of the health care for the senior citizens in the United States of America across the board. The health care access for senior citizens will be diminished. The services will be diminished. Presumably the quality will be diminished because the doctors and nurses and providers will have to spend less time per patient, accelerate their time with them, and that means less quality care. And it means fewer services to our seniors.

So this $500 billion, a half-trillion dollars, taken out of Medicare, right out of the Medicare services, the health care services for our senior citizens, in order to find a way to do a pay-for for a $1 trillion to $2 trillion National Health Care Act. And President Obama has said we're going to pay for all of this. We're going to find a way to pay for it. Well, that's the problem that Charlie Rangel has run into in the Ways and Means Committee. But it looks like some of it comes out of not the pockets of our senior citizens that

are accessing their health care; it comes out of services to them.

And the arguments I've heard were behind closed doors, the derogatory comments that have been made about doctors and nurses and providers and the allegations made, for example, by the President of the United States that we have doctors that are removing tonsils because it pays rather than because they need to be removed. I think that needs to be documented and it needs to be quantified. And, yes, there are people in every industry that don't meet the highest standards. But to paint the whole industry with anecdotes like that without any data to back it up just further clouds this debate and makes it harder for us to make progress.

This chart, by the way, this chart that we have called government-run health care, we have called this--well, it is. It's the organizational chart of the House Democrats' health plan, and this ``scheme-attic'' that has 31 new agencies, I would just direct, Mr. Speaker, your attention and the public's attention down to these boxes right here on the bottom:

This white box here that says ``traditional health insurance plans,'' that's where the 1,300 companies are. That's where the 100,000 policies are, in this square box right here; 1,300 companies, 100,000 policies in traditional health insurance plans. According to the bill, section 105, all of these plans, every single health insurance plan in America, would have to run through--they would be here in this white box. They couldn't function after 5 years unless they met the qualified health benefits plans here in this purple circle right here. In order to be qualified, they would have to meet the new government standards that are not yet written. These new government standards would be written by the Health Choices Administration right here.

Health Choices Administration would be run by the HCA, Health Choices Administration, Commissioner. Now, he's a commissioner, or she, because America is up to here with czars. We have 32 czars. We do have more czars than the Romanovs, and they're less accountable than the Romanovs. They're not held up to any kind of confirmation. They're not answerable to Congress. I don't know that we have subpoena power to even bring them before Congress to ask them what they did when they were managing the car industry, for example. We know we had a Car Czar that had never made a car nor sold one. I presume he'd driven one, probably never fixed one.

But he was running the car business in America and on the phone sometimes multiple times a day with President Obama's appointed CEO of General Motors. The Car Czar wasn't doing too well. He got replaced. Now we have a new Car Czar, and that new Car Czar says, well, the Federal Government would like divest themselves eventually of General Motors and perhaps the Chrysler stock, but there's no definitive plan, just kind of a general goal. Well, it looks to me like the general goal has been to nationalize huge industries in America rather than divest the Federal Government from those and let the free market prevail.

So if this bill passes, we will end up with a health insurance czar. He will be running the Health Choices Administration, and he will be called the Commissioner of the Health Choices Administration, but he'll be the czar. Commissioner. I don't call him commissar. Maybe I'll call him ``commi-czar-issioner,'' but he will be calling the shots for all of these 1,300 health insurance companies that exist today and writing the regulations so that they could become qualified health benefits plans coming out of there. So 100,000 qualified health benefits plans from 1,300 companies would have to qualify under new standards written by the new ``commi-czar-issioner'' of the Health Choices Administration.

Now, if you had a few million dollars invested in a health insurance company, Mr. Speaker, would you really be interested in investing more money in that company on the odds that that new ``commi-czar-issioner'' would write some regulation that lets you stay in business, when the people that are writing this regulation want to take you out of business and they say so, people like the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank, who on tape says that he believes there has to be a public option? The public option is this purple circle right here, the public health plan. Chairman Frank believes there has to be a public option.

This is because that public option is the path to a single-payer plan. A single-payer plan is code word for socialized medicine, one- size-fits-all, the government runs it all, and every one of these plans here that were in the private sector will all be swallowed up, they will all be squeezed out, and eventually this purple circle becomes the whole and everything else is swallowed up and diminished.

I think this happens if this bill happens, because it is the goal of the liberals in this Congress to end private health insurance and eventually end private health care and eventually have every doctor working for the government or else for a government pre-fixed price, and the nurses and the clinics doing the same thing. They might be billing fee-for-service or fee-for-patient, but they won't be running their own clinic; they won't be working competitively anymore.

When I look around the world, I will give you examples of why I believe this. The oldest example is Germany. Now, Germany has had its ups and downs over the last century, but the last century and a decade, about that far back, they passed their first national health care plan. That was back before we had modern medicine and certainly didn't have anything that looks like modern medicine today.

But the German plan was passed under Otto von Bismarck. And as I read history, he did so in order to consolidate a political base in order to expand his political power. But it got established then.

Of course, there will be Germans that will defend their policy. And it probably has helped and it has no doubt helped millions of them, and other millions have stood in line and they probably at this point don't have a concept of what it is like to have the freedom we have to go out and purchase a policy or be an employer to negotiate and select from the policies we want and do the best we can working with our employees and being an agent for our employees to put the best packages together, or for individuals to purchase individual policies.

In Germany it works this way: you can buy a private plan there. They are pretty proud of being able to have private plans in Germany, even after more than a century of socialized medicine. But today it is this, Mr. Speaker: ninety percent of the plans in Germany are the public option. Ninety percent. And the 10 percent are the private options.

Now, the private options, they only exist as the company is functioning and selling health insurance in Germany in order to cater to those people who are reasonably well off, those that believe they can get a little bit better quality of care, even though they have to pay a premium for that better quality care, because they don't want to be in the government line. They want to try to find a way to take care of their care and health means too much to them to let the government run it.

That is the bottom line in Germany. Ninety percent on the pubic option, 10 percent on the private option, mostly self-employed and independently wealthy people. Not regular common people, very rare, not people that are generally working for someone else for a wage, not punching the time clock, not paid a salary so much. It is self-employed people and often independently wealthy people that carry their private health insurance in Germany. That is about 10 percent. Ninety percent the public plan, 90 percent socialized medicine. That is Germany.

The United Kingdom passed their National Health Care Act in 1948. There they were recovering from the Second World War. They were a nation that was nearly broke. Nobody had any money, their industrial base had been destroyed by the bombing from Germany, and they had used all of their resources to save their country.

God bless them, they were a great ally and it is a great thing for the world that the Allied Powers were successful in World War II and we turned back the level of tyranny that was threatening to swamp the world.

But Great Britain was broke post-World War II, and they were looking

for anything that provided them security, and they believed that they could manage health care in Great Britain if they just took it over and they could do better in government.

If we remember, this nation was in peril in World War II, and we grew government in a great big way. There was a threat to take over the steel industry in that era as well. We managed to provide private sector industry that turned out bombers and battleships and the things that we needed to be successful in that war.

But if our industry had been destroyed, if the spirit of the people had been hammered as hard as it was on a percentage of its population as it was in Great Britain, we might have been looking for security. We might have decided that we needed to do something with government to supplant what was being so efficiently provided in the private sector.

For whatever the reason, Great Britain passed their National Health Care Act in 1948. And I read, Mr. Speaker, through a whole stack of Collier's magazines from that era, and each of them featured the socialized medicine that was being implemented in the United Kingdom at that time. And they showed pictures of long lines at the doctors' offices, lines that went outside the clinic, and they interviewed doctors and showed doctors that were haggard and frazzled and tired, and they lamented that they could not do that doctor-patient relationship in the fashion that they had before, that they had to limit the time per patient and they had to move from room to room and they had set up more rooms so they could get the patients in the room and get them ready for exams so they could walk in, do the exam, order what was to happen and go on to the next one.

And doctors that are hurried like that make mistakes. So does any human being. But a human being should not be treated like they are on an assembly line. That was already what was taking place in the United Kingdom in 1948.

The stories that are in those Collier's magazines from that era are the same stories that we hear in the modern version of socialized medicine that exists in the United Kingdom today. They are not a lot different than the stories you read and hear about in other countries in the European Union, including Germany.

For example, I ran into an immigrant from Germany, actually it was in a Menards Store some months ago, and he told me that he had a hip replacement done. It had gotten very bad and he could hardly walk, and he had to wait, and he waited a long, long time in line. Finally he decided that he would try to get himself in more than one line so that he had the best chance of getting it over with so he could get on with his life. And so he got in a line, and the shortest line that he could get into was the line in Italy.

So he queued himself into the line for a hip replacement in Italy, and some months later he was able to go to Italy to have the surgery to replace the hip. And now, good surgery, good job, he is healthy, moving around and enjoying life.

But to have to go to another country to have the surgery done, it begs the question. It must be a lot of what it is like to be a Canadian, to go to another country to get your surgery done. And thinking of the Canadians and those kinds of surgery, I could give an example on that.

We had a presentation done that was a little over a week ago by a doctor from Michigan, and this was at the Policy Committee on a Thursday night, a week ago last Thursday, if I recall.

He has practiced medicine in Canada and in the United States. In one of his earlier forays into providing medicine and services in Canada, he was working in the emergency room and a patient came in, a younger man, who had torn up his knee playing sports. He had a torn meniscus, a torn ACL, an anterior cruciate ligament, and his knee was a mess. This doctor in this emergency room in Canada examined the knee and said, You need surgery and you need it right away. I will schedule you for surgery in the morning.

Apparently the doctor wasn't familiar with the standards of qualifying for reconstructive surgery care, and he found out after he made that promise to the patient that he had to first get him scheduled for the specialist who approved the surgery. So he did his best to get that patient covered, because the patient was in a lot of pain. They had to put him in a knee brace. He was on crutches. And they scheduled him finally to be examined by the specialist who approves for the surgery, and he was examined 6 months later.

He was not operated on the next day, not operated on 6 months later, but on crutches and with a knee brace on, unable to work, 6 months later examined by the surgeon, the specialist, who approved the surgery. The surgery was approved. Well, that was an obvious thing to the doctor who looked at him the first night, and 6 months later they did the surgery.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I have to go back and reiterate, because it sounds implausible. A young man with the knee torn up, a torn meniscus, a torn ACL. He needed surgery the next day. In the United States of America he would have had surgery the next day. Instead, the exam to approve his surgery, which is required in Canada, took place 6 months after the injury, and the surgery itself took place 6 months after the exam.

Almost a year to the day the surgery took place to reconstruct the knee. And we know what happens. He lost more than a year's work because the rehab was another couple of months, and that leg will atrophy because you are not using it, and all of that loss of quality of life, the things he could have been doing, his entire lost productivity gone, because bureaucracy is calling the shots, not the doctors, in Canada.

Now, that sounds like anecdote. Well, it is a real live human being case, and I am confident that I could trace that back and name the individual, and I am confident I am likely to get that individual to come here and try to talk to the thicker skulls that exist on this side of the aisle.

But suffice it to say that here is the data that supports this individual that some might allege is an anecdote. And it is this: the average waiting time for hip surgery to replace a hip in Canada, the average waiting time is 196 days. Once you are approved for surgery, you wait in the line, in the queue, 196 days. A lot of people with bad hips are on crutches--196 days.

If you are waiting for a knee replacement, Mr. Speaker, you wait for 340 days on average in Canada. Outrageous delays, loss of human productivity. And there isn't anybody's chart that calculates the loss to the GDP, the gross domestic product of Canada, lost work time, the loss to their economy, because people who would otherwise be productive are hobbling around on crutches or sitting in a wheelchair because they can't get the services until that delay is over.

Mr. Speaker, that is what goes on in Canada.

Furthermore, there are companies in Canada that when they offer their employment, they set it up as part of the employment package that the worker has an opportunity to come to the United States if he needs reconstructive surgery.

If, let's say, for example, it is heart surgery that would be necessary, it is written into the policies. In some of the policies in Canada, if you have a good job and you have a good benefits package, they will have it set up so they will package it up. Say you need bypass surgery, they can put you on a plane, fly you to Houston for heart surgery, and give you the heart surgery, get you back on the wellness side of this thing, get a little rehab, and then send you back home again and set that all up, and it is turnkey. It is turnkey provided there because they know that people can't wait in line in Canada. Everybody is not going to be alive at the end of their waiting period.

But in the United States, it is a different story. We get people in immediately. We bring them in immediately because it is lifesaving. In Canada they make provisions to get out of the country and come to the United States.

There are companies that are set up in Canada for the very purpose of packaging up health care access into the United States. And so let's presume this, and this is not a documented story, but let's just presume it this way.

Let's say you live in Toronto and you need hip surgery and you don't want to wait the 196 days. You want it done. You want to get on with your life. So

let's just say travel agency companies are a natural to tie up together with health care providing companies, people that know things about health care.

You might be able to go into a company in Canada and contract to come down to, let's say, the Mayo Clinic at Rochester, Minnesota, and they will turnkey that. They will say, we have got you an airplane ticket. Here is the hotel you go to. Here is the shuttle bus, the transportation from the airport to the hotel. You will up show up at the clinic tomorrow morning or on the morning following your flight. You will be examined that morning. If it is what I think it is, you will go right into surgery the same day or the next day.

They will give you the rehab that you need, take care of you to get you back out to the airport, fly you back home to Toronto. All of that for, write one check, hand over your debit card or your credit card, and have access to the best health, reconstructive surgery in the world, right down here in the United States of America.

Why is that? Do the people on the other side that propose this scary schematic, this color-coded, it will be quotas. There will be 31 new agencies, do they think that the best health care in the world that brings people from not just Canada, but all over the world to access this best health care, do they think that it just kind of randomly spawned itself out of American society? Or do they think that there is real reasons that we have the best health care system in the world? I think there are reasons for that.

One is health care is important to us and the American people are willing to pay for high-quality health care because our health is the most important thing that we can protect with the capital that we have in this country.

We're a country that's comparatively very, very wealthy. We've demonstrated our commitment to health care by committing a lot of our wealth to health care. We should not begrudge the people that are making our lives longer and more enjoyable for making a profit at it. We should not begrudge them for that. If we think they're making too much money, we should get in the business, compete against them, gather in some of that profit, and then lower our prices. Competition lowers prices. That, we know. Adam Smith wrote about that in 1776 in Wealth of Nations; and it's been true well before he recognized it; and it's been true every day since; and it always will be true.

This schematic, by the way, that is here is not something that the Democrats in this Congress want to see out in the public eye. It's something that they want to censor, in fact. Here's the model of what they have done. This chart shows 31 agencies. It shows how every American who has a health insurance policy will have to watch as that policy submits to the new regulations that are written by the health insurance czar and qualify under new rules that will be written by that Health Choices Administration commissioner. They will watch every policy change in America or else watch the qualifications be adapted to a few policies in America that the Federal Government wants to allow to compete. People understand this chart.

But here's what's going on over the head of the Franking Commission, I believe. It's been prohibited for Members of Congress to send this chart out in our mail to the American people, Mr. Speaker. I don't think there's ever any comparable job of censoring Members of Congress than what's going on here. They have decided this chart can't go out in the mail, paid for under the franking privilege that any other chart can go out. We saw mail go out under President Obama's stimulus plan that advocated in a partisan way for how the stimulus plan was going to solve our economic problem. Democrats in this Congress used the franking privilege to try to convince the American people that the stimulus plan was the only way to go, and it's clear to everybody in America today that the stimulus plan has failed, with the exception of the gentlelady from Texas who I heard a little bit ago say that it had succeeded, and it had created jobs. She hasn't shown me where they are yet. So I will reserve my judgment on the accuracy of that statement until I actually see some jobs created by the stimulus plan.

Mr. Speaker, my point is, in a partisan fashion, Democrats in this Congress used the franking privilege to put the virtual stamps on their mail to tell the American people that the stimulus plan was necessary or the economy was going to collapse. That went on. This chart is not pie-in-the-sky threats that scare people. This chart is just stomp-down accurate, and it has withstood the test of the criticism of even the Democratic staff in the Ways and Means Committee, the Energy and Commerce Committee and the Joint Committee on Taxation. They've tried to blow holes in it, and yes, there's a little tweak there, but it's not substantive. It's simply specious to make that single little point, and it doesn't change the score of this bill.

Bottom line--31 new agencies, other obligations that are behind these squares, added to all of these white boxes that are existing programs or agencies, it creates all these hoops that the American people would have to jump through, and Democrats don't want this chart shown to the American people. So I thought, Okay, if they don't want us to show this chart, there must be a lot of truth here that they surely don't want to have to face, and they surely don't want to see the American people come to their town hall meetings and fill up that room and ask them how they're going to defend swallowing up 17.5 percent of America's gross domestic product, our health care, and turning it into government run.

Have we done that good a job with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Have we done that good a job running General Motors and Chrysler? Have we done that good a job with anything the government is doing other than, let's just say, our military, for example, who's done a great and fantastic and noble job and has achieved victory in Iraq? Does anybody have confidence that the Federal Government can run health care better than the American people, working with their private health insurance companies, negotiating for their own policies? I say not, Mr. Speaker. I think the American people understand what this is. I think they understand that when something is censored, it's not profane. Democrats want to fund the National Endowment for the Arts, which is funding millions of dollars to produce profanity in America. They're not offended by all of the profanity that goes out from the National Endowment for the Arts. They're offended by the truth about their bill about health care; and so they censor it because they have the majority here in this Congress, and they decide which staff people get a paycheck and which ones don't, in some cases. They also have the benefit of the President, I believe; and there are people in this Capitol building and in this complex of offices around who are more interested in pleasing the President, I think, than they are in preserving the fundamental integrity of the franking privilege or objective debate. This is objective debate.

Here are some of the subject matters that the Democrats don't want us to use when we describe this national health care plan. Mr. Speaker, these are all objectionable phrases, the seven dirty words or phrases you're not supposed to use to describe the leading Democratic health care proposal. It says, ``you can't use,'' but I'm going to use them. These are the words that, in part, brought about the censorship of this color flow chart of the 31 new agencies that swallow up people's private health care in America. We can't call it a government-run plan. They want to amend that. They have another word for that. I think it is the public option, rather than the government-run plan. It is a government-run plan. I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that you could walk down the streets of America, and you could ask those good, well- educated, commonsense people that I have the privilege to represent in western Iowa and in many places across this country, and go to them a month ago and say, Explain to me with regard to health insurance what is a public option. I can only imagine what kind of answers we would get if we asked people what that meant. But I will suggest that most of those answers would not have been accurate. They would not have said, Oh, a public option. Let me see. That's what President

Obama wants to make sure everybody has. That would be government-run health care. If they were going to describe what a public option is, a regular man or a woman on the street with common sense couldn't describe what a public option was, if they understood what it was, without describing it as, Oh, government-run health insurance. They would have to describe it as government-run or they couldn't even describe it at all. This phrase is far more descriptive and honest than public option. Public option is Orwellian gobbledygook for the eventual Federal Government monopoly on health insurance. We just say government-run. The President wants us to say public option. They want to censor government-run. I say, I'm going to say it over and over again. It's government-run. Don't say single payer. A single-payer system means socialized medicine. So we can't say single payer. How do you describe that? Ask a commonsense person on the street, What is a single payer for a health insurance public option? Well, let's see. They would have to say, A single payer is when only one entity pays for all of the health care that an individual might receive. So let me describe how that works. Mr. Speaker, let's use that hip replacement because that's an easy thing to describe. Somebody went into the clinic and said, I'm in terrible pain here. I don't think I can hobble along any longer. What can you do, Doc? A doctor would do that examination. He would likely do an x-ray. He would evaluate the x-ray. If he was satisfied that he knew what was there, he might prescribe that there be reconstructive surgery done that would put a new hip joint in that individual, put him through some rehabilitation and hand him a cane that could be handed away later on and get him back out to the square dance. All of those things are going to take place. There would be billing that would come from the clinic, billing that would come for the service of the surgery, billing for the anesthesiologist, the operating room, the hospital bed, the gauze, the Tylenol, and whatever else there might be. Who would pay for all of that? Well, it might be the patient today, and it might be Medicare, and it might be a private health insurance company. But when they say single payer, that's code for--the only entity that ever pays for it all--I shouldn't actually say that because there are private individuals that will pay for it all out of their pocket. So the entity they're talking about is the Federal Government paying for all of the health care services. That is socialized medicine. That's taxpayer-funded government doing it all single payer. But if you're not versed in the vernacular of the Orwellian gobbledygook, when they use the term single payer, you might think something entirely different. I don't think a normal person on the street can describe what a single payer means. We say single payer. Democrats think it's pejorative, that it is biased against the single- payer plan, for example. So using the terms that describe what they want to do is pejorative, and they are, presumably, forbidden, and it shouldn't show up on a color chart. We shouldn't send it out and can't send it out on our frank mail, otherwise they will bill us back for the costs out of our own pockets. We can't say socialized medicine. I already slipped into that in describing single payer. Socialized medicine does describe what they're talking about, maybe not in the first phase because they won't do like Canada eventually did and outlaw the health insurance policies of everyone in America. If you apply the Canadian plan today, the Canadians outlawed private health insurance. They did so incrementally in the provinces over the years, and then they did so in a Federal fashion. I would have to guess, but I think the year was 1964 when that happened. It may have been after that. So Canadians have socialized medicine. They have single payer. They have government-run.

We know what's going on up there, don't we? There is a 196-day wait for a hip, 340-day wait for a knee. They have government-run, single- payer socialized medicine. They just don't have ObamaCare. You can't say ObamaCare because that aligns the President with a policy that is becoming ever more unpopular. We use shorthand around here to describe things, and this is why the American version of the English language has been such an effective language to communicate because it's fluid, and it picks up new meanings, and it conveys those meanings. I think that we can paint the picture of this society and this culture very effectively because our language adapts, it flows, and it moves. This is one of those words in our language that--back in 1993, everybody knew what HillaryCare was. HillaryCare was the black-and-white schematic that we had then. No one wondered. It wasn't pejorative then. This chart got mailed out by franking mail, by Members of Congress in '93. It was devastating to those that wanted socialized medicine. We just simply called it HillaryCare, and this chart was in the minds of millions of Americans as they went in and filled the offices of their Members of Congress and said, I don't want that. And I don't want this thing to be run over the top of Senator Phil Gramm's cold, dead, political body either. I don't know who has put a stake out there in the United States Senate that's taken that kind of stand, that's gotten that much press out of it. But I hope they're there, and I hope they're strong, and I encourage them to speak up.

This was HillaryCare in 1993. We are not supposed to declare this to be ObamaCare in 2009 because this has been censored by the Democrats in this Congress who think that these terms that are on this chart are pejorative. Pejorative terms, government-run. What about a government- run United States Marine Corps? That makes me feel good. I like government-run Air Force. I like government-run Navy. I like government-run Army. We cover those four branches. Government does some things good. Government-run is not pejorative. But it tells you what is going on if they are going to run health care. Single payer--hmm. Single payer does tell you that government will be calling all the shots because of the golden rule. Whoever has the gold makes the rules. The government will have all the gold, and they will write all the rules for everybody's health insurance policy in the United States of America. That's in the flow chart that's behind here that's been censored. And if it's single payer, it is socialized medicine. To declare it to be ObamaCare, it is pretty accurate. I haven't heard whether the President disagrees with the liberals in this Congress or the liberals in the United States Senate. I have heard the President talk about all kinds of socialized medicine programs. All he has said that defends the private market is if you like your policy, you get to keep it. That is simply not true, Mr. Speaker. When you look at the chart, when you look at the language, and you understand that every single policy would have to qualify under rules yet to be written by President Obama's appointee, the health insurance, czar-issioner.

Would we get rationed care? Indeed. We're only paying 80 percent of the Medicare today of what it costs to deliver it.

They propose to take $500 billion out of the Medicare funds that are streaming there now. How are they going to do that? They're going to have to cut down on services, cut down on surgeries for seniors, cut down on access to health care in order to come up with the $500 billion. All of that spells rationed care.

Care has been rationed in every Nation that has a single-payer, socialized medicine, government-run plan. We can't believe it's anything else. It will be rationed care. ObamaCare will be rationed care. We're on a path, if we pass this, to single-payer, socialized medicine, because there will be government-mandated care for everybody, whether you can hang on to your private plan or whether you can't.

Government-mandated care is another term that we're not supposed to use because they think it's pejorative, but this chart, the color-coded chart of the 31 new agencies schematic is full of all kinds of government mandates. That's what they are. They're mandates, Mr. Speaker, almost all of them. You're not even supposed to say keep your change care. Well, I don't know that you get to keep your change. I don't use that phrase very much, but it's one of the things that they've raised as objectionable.

So in the end, in real summation of this issue of the national health care

plan that is almost completely crafted here in the House of Representatives and probably poised to go before this House on a vote sometime after Labor Day, presuming that there are enough Members of Congress still standing after the public shows up at their town hall meetings, at their offices, at their house, wherever they might be able to encounter their Member of Congress or their staff, presuming that there are enough Members of Congress still willing to walk this path, we're likely to see a vote here on the floor, and the result will be all of these things that we're not supposed to say now.

If it passes, it will be a government-run, single-payer, socialized medicine, ObamaCare, rationed care, government-mandate care. If not the first day, it will be over time when everybody's health insurance has to requalify and be run through the qualifications that will be drafted by the new health insurance czar, the commissioner, the comiczarissioner of health insurance in America. That's where we are, Mr. Speaker.

And so I will quote Congressman John Shadegg who articulated this as well as anyone in this Congress when he said, if you like your health insurance that you have today, get ready to lose it. That's what will happen. The American people understand that it is their freedom, that their discretion is at risk, and there are people who want to create a complete nanny state, who have privatized--excuse me--who have nationalized eight huge entities here and moved us on a leftward lurch off the abyss into socialism in the private sector; three huge investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors, Chrysler, all now under the control of the White House. And this White House now wants to take over all the health care in America, eventually. And we understand that was President Obama's original policy. He has just moved to try to set up health insurance in such a way that he can promise you you get to keep it.

And I promise you that it will not look like anything you have today if the government's going to write new regulations that it has to qualify for. And I will submit that Republicans have good solutions to this. I'll submit also that what we're trying to fix here is this. Here's where I agree, Mr. Speaker.

I believe that we have a very, very difficult economic situation to work our way out of. I believe that it may be as serious as anything that we have seen since the Great Depression, but I'm not certain of that because I lived through the eighties during the farm crisis and the other, the housing crisis that we had and the banking crisis that we had during that period of time. We lost 3,000 banks in the eighties. Those were tough times. I want to measure this after it's over and look back before I would commit that this is the worst time since the Great Depression. But it's not a very good time. It's a bad time.

And we have our challenges ahead of us, and we have to fix this economy. With that, I agree with the President. But the President says that health care in America is broken. I don't agree. I don't believe it is broken. I believe that we can improve it, and we should. But the President declares that we can't fix the economy without first fixing health care.

Now, if health care--and that encompasses health insurance and the health care that's provided through our clinics and our hospitals and the whole breadth of the health care that we have. If health care is broken, there must be a service out there that's not adequate compared to some other country in the world.

I'll submit health care is not broken. We have the best health care in the world. It costs too much money. I'll agree with the President on that. About 14\1/2\ percent of our GDP, and some of the costs that you see in the rest of the industrialized world are around 9\1/2\ percent of GDP. They ration health care. They have socialized medicine. They don't have the research and development that we have. We have the best in the world.

We lead the world in development of pharmaceutical and surgery techniques, and we lead the world in survival after cancer diagnosis. And we also lead the world, I believe, in the diagnosis of cancer itself. All of those things are at risk today. But if we have to, according to the President, change 100 percent of the health care system that we have in order to declare we have fixed it so we can declare we're fixing the economy, I will submit that that statement cannot be valid. It cannot be defended or sustained in open public debate or any kind of analysis because they want to spend $1 trillion to $2 trillion.

Now, if we're spending too much money on health care in America, and we are, why do we need to dump another $1 trillion to $2 trillion into it to fix it? If we're going to fix it, we should be able to fix it and save money, not fix it and dump trillions of dollars into it and raise taxes and cut funding that goes into Medicare and deny health care services to our seniors, all of that wrapped up in the name of fixing something that's not broken, just changing and transforming America.

We socialized three large investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors and Chrysler. They're nationalized today. This is about the nationalization of the best health care system in the world, and 17\1/2\ percent of it, and taking away the freedom of the American people to go out and purchase a health insurance policy that they choose.

I want to expand the health savings accounts and I want to provide 100 percent deductibility for everybody's health insurance premium. And I want to reduce the medical malpractice liability that's out there by capping the liability claims so people get whole again but trial lawyers don't get rich. We can do all of those things and more, besides.

And by the way, there's only 4 percent of America that are chronically uninsured, 4 percent, 10 to 12 million people, depending on whose study you look at. That's 4 percent. And we would upset 100 percent of the health care system in order to fix an expensive health insurance program only if you compare to other countries that don't have the quality that we have. I think that would be a colossal mistake, and we could never get back from that colossal mistake because it creates 306 million people that would be dependent upon the government-run, single-payer, socialized medicine, ObamaCare, rationed care, government-mandate care. And I reject it. I hope the American people do.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Concurrent Resolution 172, 111th Congress, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 5 o'clock and 54 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until Tuesday, September 8, 2009, at 2 p.m.

I thank the gentleman from Oklahoma for yielding, and I rise in opposition to this food safety bill, as it's labeled. It will provide some more food safety. I won't dispute that. But the point is that it grows government regulation, and it broadens the FDA's regulations over what I think, if it's going to be regulated, should be

Mr. Speaker, President Obama, in part of his campaign to be elected to office and part of his campaign after he had been inaugurated as President, said that we have an economic calamity, and we can't fix it unless we first fix health care, and that health care is broken.

Well, if you have a business that's broken, it doesn't take a $1 trillion to $2 trillion program to try to fix it. If the problem with health care is we're spending too much money on health care, why do we have to spend $1 trillion or $2 trillion more to fix it? I mean that is the number one question that doesn't seem to be answered by the administration.

And the second one, a statement that is not believable to the American people, is the idea that when the President promises if you like your health insurance program, you get to keep it. In fact, if they pass this legislation, they will take it away, and it says in section 102 of the bill that they're going to take it away. The American people are not going to be able to decide if they get to keep their health insurance program because the government will write new rules for every health insurance program, and the employers will decide whether the insurance is cheaper under the public plan, the government- run plan, or the private.

Vote this down.

I thank the judge, the gentleman from Texas, for organizing this Special Order, bringing this point up, and for getting the media out so that the American people understand what is going on.

I'm looking at the two charts that the judge has put down there. One of them is the HillaryCare chart that was black and white that you will remember from a few moments ago, Mr. Speaker. Back in 1993, the black- and-white HillaryCare chart was enough to sink the National Health Care Act. HillaryCare went down because the American people saw a chart. They saw all of those government commissions that were created; and every time you create a government commission, they knew intuitively that some of their freedom was going to be gone, some of their choices were going to be gone, taxes were going to go up, services were going to go down, lines were going to get longer, and the quality of health care was going to be diminished, all in the name of leveling this thing down to the lowest common denominator, would be how I would describe it. That was when that flow chart in '93, 16 years ago, was in black and white.

This flow chart is in full technicolor. Mr. Speaker, when you look at this chart--and I hope you have studied this chart thoroughly and understand all of the 31 agencies that are created here in this full technicolor chart and the maze of government bureaucracy that is created by it, the loss of quality that would result from it, the increasing cost that will come from it, and the dependency that will be brought about because this safety net turns into a hammock; and in the end, no individual will really have an incentive to take care of their own health insurance because they will be crowded out by the public option. This is a national health care plan. This is socialized medicine. Mr. Speaker, I'll say socialized medicine real clearly to you here in this House of Representatives. If I had the notion to put it on frank mail, then we would see how that works too. Public option is the President's words and the national health care plan. Government-run insurance is what it really is.

Now we know a little bit about government-run insurance. A lot of western civilizations have government-run insurance. They have government-run a lot of things that have crippled them to the point where they couldn't compete with us. When you get down to the extreme in this, there's a reason why we won the Cold War--because we didn't have government-run, we had private sector-run, private sector- motivated, a whole mass of worker bees that went out and contributed; they were entrepreneurs; they were creative; and they sparked this economy. The vitality of the American free enterprise system not only created the best health care system in the world, the highest-quality medicine in the world, it created the most dynamic, the most competitive economy that tied together with strong political, military and cultural country. And in the end, the Soviet Union imploded because they couldn't keep up with us economically.

Here we are looking at the rest of the world having failed in their central planning models, whichever side of that great Iron Curtain they originated from. We can look at western Europe; we can look at the plan in France, in the United Kingdom; we can look to our neighbors in the north in Canada and see what they have created when they started down the path of trying to produce a substitute for the private sector health insurance models. We have over 1,300 health insurance companies in America. That's not policies. That's companies, and companies with multiple policies, Mr. Speaker. The President has this idea that we need one more competitor, one more injector of good ideas supposedly into this health care debate. I would submit that of all the people that have spent their lives creating good ways to provide a more competitive model of health insurance, the President's not going to think of a better idea than they came up with.

I think he proved himself here just a couple of days ago on the Cambridge issue. The President doesn't always come up with good ideas. Sometimes his ideas are not so good. But to look in on an industry and decide you want to create a government-competing industry so that you have more competition when you have more than 1,300 health insurance companies, there are only two things that can happen with this. That is, this circle on the chart and down at the bottom in the purple circle on the side that would be the left hand of those who are watching on television is the white square that shows all the traditional health insurance policies that are there. They have to flow into qualified policies. Qualified policies will be policies that will be qualified when the newly appointed health insurance czar decides what kind of rules to write for these private insurance companies, these 1,300 that will have to change their policies to conform with the new rules that will be written by a person yet to be named by the President of the United States. There will not be 1,300 that qualify. They all won't qualify. Some will decide, they can see the writing on the wall, they'll know what's happened, and they will just pull the plug--pull the pin, as we say, and drive away from the wagon they have and decide to get out of the business because they know the government's coming. The government's coming with your tax dollars, and the government is determined to build--this administration at least and the Democrat majority in this Congress--is determined to build a health insurance policy to compete with 1,300 private insurance policies, which means they're going to do two things in some combination. I could say one of two things. I think they'll do both things. The new health insurance czar, who is the guy in the blue box with the

yellow letters above the two purple circles dead center up about a third of the way. The new health insurance czar will write new rules. There will be compliance rules; and those rules will be things such as: They will mandate. They will mandate mental health coverage, which it is good to cover mental health. Some of the States have mandated it, and some have not. They will mandate mental health coverage. They will probably mandate contraceptive coverage. They will probably mandate anything that you can imagine; and additionally, they're going to mandate--they will not step away from this so we know they're going to mandate that this policy fund abortion in America. And they will trample over the top of more than 50 percent of Americans' deeply held convictions that life begins at the instant of conception, and that it is sacred in all of its forms. They're going to ram this policy at us all, and some of these companies will decide out of moral reasons that they are no longer going to be in business in a country that is going to compel abortion, for example, or compel mandates, for example. All of those mandates that are on there will drive the premiums up.

Now if the newly appointed Obama health insurance czar, which is the guy in that rectangular box in that schematic there, the blue box with the yellow letters on it, if he will write those regulations tough enough, a lot of companies will drop out, and the others will have to raise their premiums.

When they do all that, then the Federal Government can compete with their public plan that they want to have, just one entity out there to compete with the private sector. And they will be able to compete more easily and still be able to have premiums that are competitive for a time, and then when we find out that the competition is not working that way, they will subsidize the premiums in the public plan, and that will drive the private sector insurance companies.

And we know the model in Canada. They started out with a similar proposal. I actually think that's where President Obama got this idea. The Canadians don't have any competitive health insurance plan today. There are no two purple circles, one of them the public options, the collection of them, and the other is the private. They have one circle, one size fits all, and everybody has to submit to one health care system in Canada. And they have to stand in line, and the result is rationing.

And so, for example, if you're waiting for a knee replacement in Canada, the average wait is 340 days. When you're waiting for a hip replacement, the average wait in Canada is 196 days. If you're waiting for heart surgery, I'd like to think it's not as long a wait. But we know this: If people have to wait for health care, if they have to get in line for health care, they will die in line. Some will die in line. We've seen numbers that are pretty stark, and I'm going to hesitate on quoting them.

But I will tell you that a week ago Thursday night, we had a speaker in the Policy Committee that Mr. McCotter, who just spoke, from Michigan, chairs, and it was a doctor from Michigan who has practiced medicine on both sides of the border, in Michigan and in Canada. He told a story of going up there to work in the ER in the hospital in Canada, and they brought a patient in that had a knee that was all torn up, a torn meniscus and a torn ACL, anterior cruciate ligament. And so this knee was a mess. And the doctor examined the knee, did what tests he could within the ER, and he said, You need surgery. You need surgery right away. I'll schedule you for tomorrow morning.

Well, it must have been the doctor's first real foray up into Canadian medicine working within the system because he found out that he couldn't schedule the surgery the next morning. He had to schedule another exam and another approval from a doctor who was a specialist. And by the way, this doctor is a specialist.

And so he couldn't get him scheduled, not for that night or the following morning or the day after, which would be a real stretch in America. Can you imagine laying around in a hospital for a specialist to come along, your knee swollen up the size of a cantaloupe, and waiting for a doctor to show up 2 days? And I'd say, Mr. Speaker, no. We wouldn't wait 2 days for a doctor to show up to look at our leg. If he couldn't be there that night, he would be there the next day, probably in the morning.

And he would do the examination and they'd find a way to schedule the surgery, and they would do that surgery as quickly as they could because they care about recovery and quality of life and service and they want to make sure that you're not in an ambulance going to a hospital somewhere else telling them that you couldn't get in at so and so memorial hospital because there was a long line. They don't want that to happen.

But in Canada, in this patient, this real case that was related to us before the Policy Committee a week ago last Thursday night by a doctor from Michigan, it took 6 months for that young man with that torn-up knee to see the specialist to be diagnosed in order to be approved for surgery that this doctor would have liked to have seen done the next day.

And then 6 months later, they actually did the surgery. A knee torn up, a man who's in the productive time of his life, on crutches for 12 months waiting for surgery. And then we know that the leg atrophies and the recovery and the rehab gets to be longer.

So he was out, I think pretty close, I believe the doctor said 15 months he was off work, when they could have had him back to work in a couple or maybe even less if they could have just had the surgery right away. That's an example of Canadian health care.

And I recall reading through a stack of Collier's magazines from 1948 and 1949. These magazines were--they featured the United Kingdom's socialized medicine plan that they passed in 1948 in Britain. And there they showed pictures of long lines outside the clinics and doctors that were just frazzled that they had to see so many patients in order to hold their economics together. They didn't have time to be a doctor with a patient relationship. They just ran through them as fast as they could do so, and it just was wearing everybody down.

All the predictions, the things that we see today were even predicted then. They saw them. They were real in the first year of the socialized medicine plan in the United Kingdom. And here we are where we can't even call this government-run health care, government-run system. Well, who will be running this system if it's not the government? Who is poised to pass this legislation if it isn't the Democrat majority in the House of Representatives and the Democrat President in the White House? And it will take a Democrat majority in the United States Senate to pass this schematic that is in full technicolor today that takes away the American people's freedom to purchase their own health insurance policy and access to their own health care, all in the name of trying to provide for the people that are not insured and blurring, intentionally, the language between health insurance and health care.

If we had a billion dollars for every time somebody on this floor had blurred the language between health insurance and health care intentionally, I believe, Mr. Speaker, we would have enough money to fund this monstrosity. People are being confused, I believe, intentionally. I've seen this language unfold for at least 2 years now. People don't have health care. It gets said over and over again. Every American has access to health care. And we can have the argument about whether going to the emergency room is the right way to do it or not, and we know it's not the cheapest. But if they have access to health care, we should not tell the American people they do not. We need to tell them every American has access to health care. Not every American can afford their own health insurance policy.

But when you break the numbers down, we're around 306 million people, and if you start subtracting from that those that are in America that are here illegally, if--let's just say this great gift of automatic government health insurance had to be delivered to these illegals in this country by the Department of Homeland Security, they would be obligated to deport those people rather than reward them with a

government-owned and run health insurance plan. Subtract them from the 306 million.

Subtract those that are here legally that are immigrants. They're supposed to take care of themselves. We don't hand people entitlements when they come to the United States. That's by law. Subtract them. Subtract the people that make over $75,000 a year. They can find a way to take care of themselves. And if you subtract the people that are eligible for Medicaid but are not signed up--and by the way, Mr. Speaker, almost half of those eligible for Medicaid just aren't signed up. And I don't know why we would think that if we would just give everybody free access to health insurance that they will sign up. But you subtract the Medicaid people that are not signed up. Then you subtract the people that are eligible for an employee-run option but they don't sign up for one reason or another, and you get down to a study that is this.

One was by a pair of Penn State professors that does the math down to 10.1 million Americans are the chronically uninsured. And there's another study that one of our government agencies, I think it actually was CBO, but I'm not certain, 12 million uninsured. So, in any case, between 10.1 and 12 million Americans are chronically uninsured. That's the universe that we're supposedly trying to get to, about 10 to 12 million Americans. That maps out to be about 4 percent of this population, 4 percent of the population chronically uninsured.

And we know that the people that are, let's say, chronically not covered by Medicaid just simply don't show up. So why would we think that the chronically uninsured are any different type of personality or any different kind of person utilizing the health policies that we have.

So I will submit that even if we handed them a free policy, probably not more than half of the 4 percent that are chronically uninsured are going to sign up. The rest you'd have to chase them down and impose it on them. Staple the policy to their shirt collar on the chance they'd show up at the emergency room, in which case we're going to take care of them anyway. The administration cost of providing health insurance for the 4 percent of the chronically uninsured when you can't get probably half of them to actually sign up, so we get 2 percent of a population of 306 million people at the price of $1.5 trillion and a raising of taxes of $800 to $900 billion and a deficit of $239.1 billion, at the low side, and maybe a deficit of $500 to $600 billion on the up side.

I wonder if anybody wants to censor those numbers? I mean, I'm always open to that debate. But I found out that when I put numbers out here, some will say, You're wrong, Congressman. And I say, What's your number? And they don't have a number. If they don't have a number, they don't have any right to challenge my numbers. I'll put the numbers out here.

But this is about access to health care. This is about our freedoms. This is about whether 1,300 private health insurance companies in America can do a better job of providing the options that are suitable to the American people and the creativity and the research and development and the innovativeness and the modern health care system that sets the standards for the world. And the rest of the world, by the way, poaches on the innovativeness of the American health care system. We create more pharmaceuticals and more techniques and surgical techniques than anybody else by far. And they're available to the rest of the world for a really cheap price, if anything at all is charged. We set the standard. The Americans pay the price, and still they can't keep up with the results we have here in America.

I could go on, Mr. Speaker, but I think I have made my point, and I thank the gentleman from Texas for bringing this up. And I'll just say this. Can I say this like a Texan, Judge? This is our chart. Kevin Brady of Texas put that chart up. It is accurate. It shows 31 government agencies, new ones. It is accurate and it shall stand. It shall not come down. And like that first flag down in Texas with that cannon on it, if they think that this should not be something for the public to see, they can come and take it.

Thank you, Judge. I yield back.