Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlelady from North Carolina.

In response to this point, I have stood here on this floor for hours and hours over several years listening to many, many Members of the Democrat Party, then the minority in Congress, plead that if they would just get the majority, give them the gavels, that the economy of this country would be brought back on track again. That happened in January of 2007. And it happened prior to any economic decline that anyone can describe on any flow chart that they can bring.

So they claimed that they would fix the economy if they could just have the majorities. They won the majorities partly on that claim, and the economy went south, and it really tanked in the anticipation of the President we have today. And it is getting worse. So I don't think that point can be made empirically.

I came here to rise in opposition to this rule. I rise in opposition to this rule for a number of reasons. I wanted to support the gentleman from Utah's statement about not having an opportunity, a legitimate opportunity, to make his case before the Rules Committee. And it is clear that that didn't happen. In a 1-hour window, he got an amendment in and filed. That was great staff work. But we have other things to do here other than sit outside the door of the hole in the wall on the third floor.

This process has got to change. We need to bring it to the floor where the American people can see what is actually being talked about in almost legislative code here.

I also want to point out that this legislation is not legislation that comes here because it is well thought out or needed by the American people. This is driven by HSUS, the Human Society of the United States. They have hundreds of millions of dollars, and they have an agenda. They are seeking to take meat off the plates of the American people and all around the globe. So we just dance to this tune in this Congress because they say so.

Nobody came from my district and said, what are we going to do about too many horses? HSUS contributed to this problem by helping to block the harvesting of horses for human consumption. And now we have what will accumulate to be 1 million extra horses in the United States. And barely do they get that over with and they come back to us and say now we need 700 billion American-taxpayer-borrowed dollars to take over more public lands in order to put more horses. This will only continue. Those horses are eating 1 billion gallons of my ethanol every year.

I thank the gentleman from Washington for yielding.

I come to the floor to address a subject matter that seems a bit surrealistic. We have a love for horses in this country. Most of us in this Chamber would agree with that, and I am among those. I can think of a lot of happy times around horses, on horses and working with horses. We also have a responsibility to manage the resources of this country. There seems to be a conviction to try to pull this globe-- under the climate change legislation or the cap-and-tax legislation and many other pieces--back to what would have been pre-Garden of Eden before man supposedly desecrated the planet.

And the default position, amazingly for me, is what was nature like before man began to compete as a species with the other species on the planet? And so that default position that comes from the environmentalists from consistently out of the political left would be this natural balance of our environment.

I have just heard the gentleman state that these horses were native. But they were not native. They are not indigenous. No surviving species of horse was indigenous to this continent nor this hemisphere. They were brought here by the Spanish in the 1500s and beyond. The horses got loose and began to roam the range, and they competed with the existing species that were there.

So if, really, our default position is back to whatever it was Mother Nature gave to us before we competed as a species, then we should look at this not as horses as a natural component of the habitat, but an unnatural, feral component of the habitat.

When I hear about the discussion about the millions spent on these helicopter cowboys herding these horses around and putting horses into holding pens and buying up hay to feed them, I think of visiting the National Bison Reserve that is out there in, I have forgotten exactly where that was, whether it is in southern Montana or up in Wyoming. I remember going there to visit. And I was fascinated. I drove a long way to get there because I wanted to see what it was like when the buffalo roamed the plain. I have walked into the virgin timberland and stood there and imagined what it was like for the pioneers and the settlers to walk through that forest. I wanted to be out there to see what it was like for the native buffalo.

What I saw were paddock-style pastures. In order to manage the bison, the Federal Government has built a great big old pasture and divided it into four quadrants, and there we manage the buffalo by herding them into one corner of the pasture and then another and then another, harvesting some for slaughter. We sell them for breeding stock and we eat them. We do that with buffalo, but we can't do that with horses, because somehow a horse has been raised to another level of species.

This is an amazing thing to me. And as I read through this bill, I don't think I have ever been so taken aback by reading through language. There is much of it that has been produced in this Congress.

I listened to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran) talk about this contraception that is here.

I thank the gentleman.

I think it is important for us to actually read the language on this horse contraception. It says: ``Research, develop, and implement enhanced surgical or immunocontraception sterilization or other safe methods of fertility control.'' Now let that soak in for a little bit. This is enhanced contraception for horses. I don't know what that is. I think it could be about anything that human beings might use. But I suspect that it doesn't include horse abortion for one thing. And so I'm implying that there is a different set of standards for a horse species than there is for a human species, given the debate we have had in this Congress.

It is a breathtaking step to think about what enhanced contraception is for horses. It is one of those things that I don't think will be described here on the floor of the House. It is kind of an imaginary thing. It is difficult to manage these horses. And I would say that abstinence will not be part of this; that is also part of the debate.

So as I watch what is going on, there has been a real effort here to block the humane harvesting of horses. And the HSUS has been successful in doing that. There are no horses slaughtered in America that are going off for human beings to eat anywhere. Some are being hauled, I think against the law, maybe across the border to be slaughtered elsewhere; but to manage all of our livestock, all of the species in our country, we have to be smart about it.

What has happened is they have, through legislation and litigation, blocked the responsible harvesting of horses. It has taken the market of them down from 5 to 600, down to essentially nothing; and the result is we have a lot more horses than we need. And now they have the audacity to come to this Congress and say, we are going to have to hit up the American people for 700 million more dollars in order to take care of these extra animals that we decided now we want to keep around as national pets.

I did the math on this. And if you calculate how the increase in the horse population because of the restrictions in the harvesting, never mind the value of what has happened to the property of the horse owners, they will eat up enough hay from enough ground, there will be 1 billion gallons of ethanol we could produce off of that horse pasture.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate being recognized to address here on the floor of the House of the House of Representatives. This has often been described as the world's greatest deliberative body. And here, in these Chambers, we engage in this debate and this dialogue.

But the dialogue that comes to these Chambers is a dialogue that's designed to be filtered through our committee system, through our subcommittees, through our full committee process, whether it be the appropriations subcommittees and committees and on to the floor, or whether it be through our standing committees. And what we've seen happen instead is that this process is under the process of a wrecking ball that's been taken to the traditions of

this House. And each day that goes by, it seems that there's another one of those opportunities to expand this deliberative body and, instead, it's diminished by order of the Speaker, by order of the Rules Committee; shut down the process to the point today where we had the gentleman from Oregon brought a privileged resolution to try to be heard on an amendment that would have otherwise been in order under 220 years of tradition of this House, but, instead, it was shut down by the Rules Committee, the committee that serves up here in this little hole in the wall in a room so small that a few Members can come in. Once in a while there's room for their staff. I have never seen press in the room. There is no camera in the room, and there will be no tourists that are allowed to go in there and watch the real debate that takes place, if it takes place at all in this Congress, in the Rules Committee. It's been changed that way in order to avoid the light of day, the press, the C-SPAN cameras and, in fact, even some of the recordkeeping that is a little bit different there than it might be if it were up in front of everybody in front of the television cameras. And it is of great frustration to most Members of this Congress to see what's being done to this debate and deliberative process.

So these debates that take place here on the floor, we used to have some good debates, some engaging debates, some times when people actually changed their minds when they heard the other side of the argument. That's what makes this the greatest deliberative body in the world. But now the debate's been reduced to something that takes place behind closed doors, I believe, by order of the Speaker, and amendments are shut down time after time after time. At least a dozen of mine were struck through just in the last couple of days. And I have sat up there waiting my turn to testify in the Rules Committee to the extent where I really want to bring up a laptop and some other kind of book work so I can make my time count. And if you get up and go to get a bite to eat or something to drink, then you might lose your turn altogether.

So I have, Madam Speaker, introduced legislation that, if the business of this House is actually going to be conducted by the Rules Committee, then let's move the committee to the floor of the House of Representatives. If you're going to change and usurp the genuine authority of the franchise of all 435 Members of Congress who have a constitutional right and duty to express the will and the wishes of their constituents by amending the process, offering amendments, seeking to improve legislation, if the rules are going to be such that they usurp the authority or the franchise of each Member and put it up behind closed doors--and the doors are closed. And as I sat there waiting my turn, last week, well, it's still this week, I had two of my own staff people waiting out in the hallway. They couldn't even get in to hand me a piece of paperwork. I have to send them an e-mail on my BlackBerry and they'll pass the paperwork in because there wasn't room.

The business of the Congress is being conducted either in the Rules Committee, or behind the scenes, behind the Rules Committee, but it's not being conducted on the floor of the House.

So when Members are denied amendments that would be in order under the 220 years of the tradition of the House of Representatives, but the ones that are allowed will be a whole series of amendments offered by the gentleman from Arizona to strike a little funding here, to strike a little funding there, most of which I voted for, by the way, Madam Speaker, it gives the image to the public that there's a legitimate debate going on here, but it is not the legitimate debate. And, in fact, if you listen to the debate, there's no exchange of ideas. There's no clash of the contest of competing ideas. There's not an exchange of dialogue. It's rare to have a Democrat yield when asked to yield by a Republican who simply wants to clarify a fact or make a point that would better bring out something in the debate that would be good for the American public to know.

This process has devolved down to where it can't be called any longer a deliberative process. And the American people do care about whether their voice is heard in this Congress. And it's not being heard in this Congress.

As we've watched things be rushed through, the cap-and-trade bill, which I call the cap-and-tax bill, rammed through here to where a bill was hurried up and rushed, and then, to have an opportunity to amend the bill didn't exist for Members of Congress. It did exist for the manager, apparently, because there was a 316-page amendment that was brought down here and dropped into the record at 3:09 in the morning, to stack that on top of a 1,100-page bill that nobody read.

And the most colossal mistake in the history of the House of Representatives was the passage of the cap-and-trade bill. And it was done so with no Member of Congress having read the bill, not one. And no Member of Congress read the amendment, not one. And if they'd read them separately, they couldn't understand the composition of the bill because the 316-page amendment that was dropped on us at 3:09 in the morning was not integrated into the overall bill. It was impossible to do that. You've got to page forward and back and go back into the code and verify the references and rewrite to get this 316-page amendment blended into and integrated into the overall bill.

And when the question was asked of the Speaker during the debate, is there a copy of the enrolled bill here in the House, there was no copy, Madam Speaker. There was no bill. We were debating something that didn't exist yet. And we passed something that didn't exist yet. And Members were required to vote on a bill that was 1,400-plus pages in its aggregate form, not having ever had it integrated, but that anybody understood the complete context, within the context, the complete content of the overall bill and the amendment. But Members voted anyway. And even though the Speaker said that she was going to provide for sometimes 72, otherwise 48 hours to be able to fully evaluate the consequences or the merits of the legislation that would come before the floor, that didn't happen. It seldom happens.

This place is being run with an iron fist, not with the open kind of a process that was promised when people put their trust in the current majority to run this Congress in a legitimate fashion. It's not legitimate. We can't even put up the front that it's legitimate if we are debating a bill that no one, and I mean no one on the planet, has completely read, and an amendment that no one understands completely how it integrates with the overall bill, and to be able----

We stopped the process here for over a half-hour while we tried to get a copy of the language that was being voted upon. And we never got it done. To the credit of the Clerk, she was actively trying to integrate the amendment into the overall bill, but it could not be done within the time that was available. And even if it had been, it was only symbolic because still, no one would have had a chance to read it.

And I'll even take this to this wild outrageous step of we ought to understand the things that we are voting upon. We should be able to get our hands on it. We should have time to read it, deliberate it, consider it, and pass it out to our constituents, and they should have access to it over the Internet, and they should be able to give us input on how it affects their lives. We can't bring the wisdom of Solomon with us, everyone in here, and instantaneously make a decision and a snap judgment on something there's no opportunity to read.

And it was an embarrassment, I know, for the majority to be debating a huge bill, a colossal bill, a cap-and-trade bill, and not even having one single, not even a symbolic version for somebody to point to and say, This stack of paper is what is going to save the planet--I think, is the position that the Speaker took.

And so the question was asked by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert), Madam Speaker, can we message this bill over to--if this passes, this bill that was before us, if it passes the House, if we don't have a bill, can we still message it over to the Senate? Or do we just tell them we sent you over a bill that we passed but it's not ready for anybody to review. It's not been reviewed yet.

That's the fact of what we were dealing with when the cap-and-tax bill was passed. And now it's messaged to the

Senate. Presumably, somebody's put it all in its proper form. But I'm confident that not one Member of this House of Representatives has yet read that bill because now it doesn't pay. They can't shut themselves up and invest the time in reading the cap-and-tax bill because it's already passed the House, nobody having read it and no version of it in its complete form being available to any Member; messaged over to the Senate. I don't know if it was the stack of the bill and then plus the 316 pages in an amendment separately, or if it got messaged over there integrated in a fashion that they could say that they received a complete bill in the Senate. We don't know. And it doesn't really matter to the House Members because we now have another bill that's coming at us so fast and so hard that hardly anyone has a chance to read it, although I do know a couple of Members that have burned a lot of midnight oil and tried to get through it. They have to break it apart and assign it to their staff and read the parts they can as fast as they can, and others will read it and write their little memos on it. That's this health care bill. Oh, my. You should see what we have here now that's been cooked up by the staff.

This work was done urgently and, I think, effectively off of the components of the bill that were available, and I think this might actually be representative of what we have today.

This is the flowchart, Madam Speaker. This is the schematic of what is created by this idea of a public plan for health insurance and to provide health care for the people in America. I have to point out that these white boxes on this schematic flowchart--in places like Australia, they would not call it a ``flowchart.'' They would call it a ``scheme.'' I'll stop a little short of that one; but the white ones are the existing agencies and programs that are there, and the colored ones are the new ones.

So you'll see a number here that's, maybe, oh, about an equal number of new agencies matching up with the equal number of existing agencies. As you read down through this, there are all kinds of components to this that ought to scare any freedom-loving person, but the one I'd direct your attention to, Madam Speaker, is down here at the bottom, these two circles that are in purple in the blue background.

Now, the left-hand circle is this: It takes the traditional health insurance plans--the white that's existing--and now they'll have to qualify, and they'll have to qualify so that they'll meet the Obama standard for new health insurance companies. So, if you're an American citizen with a health insurance plan that you like and if you want to keep what you have for a little while, you can keep what you have, but the insurance company will have to comply with the new standards that will be written by the existing or future health insurance czar. Surely, we have one or will have one. We have 32 czars. We couldn't have nationalized health care without a health insurance czar.

So that czar will be writing the rules--it's not in the bill--on what it takes for the traditional health insurance plans to qualify to become the qualified health benefits plans. That's the private side. That's your health insurance if you're an American citizen--a person who has a plan that's not either Medicaid or Medicare. They have to qualify. It changes every one of them, potentially meeting a new standard that would be set by the health insurance czar. The health insurance companies, the ones that survive, will be fewer than the 1,300 we have today, the 1,300 competing against each other, the insurance companies that are providing different models to try to get the investment dollar in there, the premium dollar, from the people of whom 70 percent are happy with the health insurance plans that they have. We won't have 1,300 when they're done complying with the White House health insurance czar standards. We'll have less. I don't know how many less, and nobody knows, because we don't know what the standards will be; but these private companies then will have to compete with the newly created, if this bill passes, public health plan. The public health plan will be the Federal health insurance plan that is there to compete against the private plans.

Now, why would they want to do that? Why would they create a whole plan for the government to run with taxpayers on the hook if they've got 1,300 health insurance companies today that are more than happy to get out there and to continue to compete in the marketplace? What would be the merits?

Well, the only ones that I can determine are--if you really wanted to establish a national health care plan that didn't have competition, if you wanted everybody on a single-payer plan, if you wanted to have nationalized health care, if you wanted socialized medicine, you can't do that without first creating some kind of a public health model, and that is what this new public health insurance model would be. Over time, it would, I believe, compete and would push out of the marketplace every one of these health insurance programs that we know today because the government would subsidize.

I'll give you an example of how this works. Since we don't have insight into this in the United States on Federal competition against the private sector with regard to health insurance, here is a model:

Flood insurance, the flood insurance that we used to have that was property and casualty insurance for people who were living in flood plains or for people who were afraid that they'd be flooded. They would buy their insurance in years back and would pay the premiums. If they got flooded, the flood insurance companies would come to their places and they'd take a look at the damage. They'd write them checks and they'd settle it out. That's how it works in the insurance industry in a lot of different ways. In the property and casualty at least it does.

The Federal Government decided that there wasn't enough competition in the flood insurance business, so they set up Federal flood insurance years back to compete against the private-sector flood insurance plans that were there. Actually, yesterday I checked into this, and I was not able to discover a single company in America that is selling flood insurance in competition against the Federal Government. The Federal Government has established a monopoly now in flood insurance. Now, two things can happen if you have a monopoly. You can price it way out of the marketplace, and if you have a captive market, you can do that, or if you have a marketplace that you're trying to market to in your government, then you can undersell your costs by lowering the premiums below the actual costs, which is what the Federal Government has done.

So, today, the Federal flood insurance program, the only existing flood insurance program in the United States of America, is the flood insurance program that's $18 billion in the red. That's $18 billion in the red because it's government. We should not be surprised at this. The government came into the marketplace subsidized by tax dollars, and it lowered the premiums for flood insurance, but by lowering the premiums, they took the private sector competition out of the marketplace. They went off to do other property and casualty. They cleaned the field out and became the monopoly holder of all of the flood insurance of America. Yet they still couldn't set the premiums at the risk. They set the premiums at, apparently, what their bureaucrats thought they should be at, and they're $18 billion in the red.

Now, imagine what that would be like if it were the post office and if everybody had to go and buy a stamp. We are critical of the post office when they can't hold their balance sheet in the black, and they are marginally in the red today.

That's the government program flood insurance, running in the red at $18 billion, and that, Madam Speaker, I predict, is what will happen with our health insurance in America.

So, when President Obama says, If you like your health insurance, don't worry; you can keep it. You can't keep it if it doesn't exist. How could anybody have kept their flood insurance if there are no companies selling flood insurance except the Federal Government's flood plan?

What if the health insurance czar writes the specifications for these companies to qualify at such a standard that they can't compete with the public plan? Why would the health insurance czar not write those regulations

so that they would be at an advantage to the newly emerging public health plan? After all, they have to find a way to compete in a marketplace that is competitive.

So the model is there. If people think that I just pulled off the shelf a model that happens to make my case, I would make the point of: show me a model where government has gone in and has taken over where they didn't squeeze out the private sector.

Should we talk about crop insurance, for example? That would be another model. How about student loans for another model? Students loans used to be private. Then the government got into the business, and now they've taken the student loan program down to where only about 25 percent of the student loans are private and the rest of them are government-brokered student loans. We have now the chairman of the Education and Labor Committee and many others who simply want to eliminate any student loans except what are government student loans.

When government steps into the private sector, a number of things happen: The quality of the service goes down. The cost of the service goes up because you get inefficiencies that come in with government that would be automatically erased by the competition from the private sector. Then you either get rationing or you get rates that go up or you get taxes that are increased. In the case of flood insurance, it is that taxes have increased to pick up the $18 billion shortfall that is there. So we know the pattern. We know the drill. We should know what this is. We've been through this before, Madam Speaker.

To make the point that we've been through this before, here is my ``deja vu all over again'' chart. The ``deja vu all over again'' chart is the schematic, the flowchart--as the Aussies would say, it's the scheme--from back in 1993. This is HillaryCare. I remember this coming out during that period of time. I have a chart that must exist in my archives, a chart that hung on the wall in my construction office during those years. I would stand and look at that and study it when I would be on the phone while I would be pacing back and forth. I would walk by and look at this chart of HillaryCare. I would look at all of these created agencies and at the interconnectivity of them. It was something that chilled me and that galvanized me. It was one of the significant stepping stones along the way for me to go from the private sector of 28 years in the construction business into the legislative arena because I was so appalled by what I saw them doing to create more government that would be oppressive to the freedoms that I so love and enjoy.

This is about freedom. This is about whether we are going to keep and maintain our freedom and expand our freedom or whether we're going to trade that off for a dependency and accept the dependency that comes from a government plan that has a bunch of, I want to say, elitist, liberal-thinking people who think that the American people can't make their own decisions, so they have to make the decisions for us.

It's the same kind of thinking that would take the deliberation of the House of Representatives up in the hole in the wall in the House Rules Committee and let the Rules Committee take the orders from the Speaker's office and not allow it to come down here to be heard in the light of day. They think they know. They think they're smarter than you. They think they can draft a proposal that is a utopian model of health care for the United States of America, and they will tell you they can save money. They don't actually tell you that you're going to get better service, because this is the best health care system in the world. We don't wait in line. We don't have to take a number. We don't get hurt and lay around waiting for somebody to come along and take care of us. We don't stand in line. Americans should not stand in line.

I can think of the times I've had to do that, and it grates on me. I don't like standing in line at TSA to get on a plane. I remember who brought that about. That's the terrorists. We ought to always blame them. I don't like to stand in line with my credit card in order to pay a bill, and the retailers know that. They don't allow lines out there, because you won't make the purchase. You don't want to stand in line either. We will stand in a line sometimes for a concert or for a ball game when we're trying to cram 50,000 or 100,000 people through those gates in a short period of time for a definitive time when something starts. That's about the only time that Americans stand in line.

Canadians, the British, the Europeans, they stand in line for health care. It's appalling the standing in line that they do. Russians stand in line as a matter of course. It's part of their culture. It's the living that they make, apparently. I think they wander around Moscow looking for another line to stand in. They've been so conditioned to stand in lines. They hunch their shoulders, look down, wander around, look up once in a while, find a line, go get in it, and then find out what the reason is.

Americans don't do that. We have freedom. We are a freedom-loving people, and it's our free markets and our free enterprise and the entrepreneurial nature of this and the innovativeness of it. It's also the property rights and the patents and the trademarks that we have that make this country go, and we are the economic growth engine for the world.

Here is an example of the Canadian model--and they're our neighbors, and we love them, and we get along great with them, but the Canadian model would be this, and this came out from Senator Mitch McConnell from the Senate side: The average wait time for someone who needs a knee replacement in Canada--a knee replacement--is 340 days. Can you imagine? Finally, your knee wears out, and you're using a cane or you're on a crutch or you're in a wheelchair or you're sitting around the living room or you're not going back to work. You go to the doctor, and he takes a look at your knee and schedules you for a knee replacement. He looks on the calendar and turns the pages--1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 months, 11 months. He turns the page 11 times on the calendar to find the date that he can write your name in. You have to go 340 days to get your knee replacement in Canada.

Yet we would just leap into the abyss of socialized medicine because the President's idea is that the government can do it better than the private sector can? We just have to learn how to do it better than the Canadians, the British or the Europeans?

How about the average time for a hip replacement in Canada? According to Mitch McConnell, the average time is 196 days for a hip replacement. So your hip socket wears out. Now, that's a little tough to do that always with the cane, although it happens. You're on a crutch or two crutches or you're on a cane or you're in a wheelchair gimping around for 196 days. You know, I don't know if you call that ``elective surgery.'' I don't think it is. I think, at some point, for the quality of your life and for your productivity, the necessity is to get the surgery done.

That's rationed health care. I don't know the numbers of how many people died of something else while they were waiting to get their knee joints replaced or their hips or how many of their lives were altered because of it or how much was diminished of the quality of their lives, of the people who had to wait in those lines. That's just joint replacement.

I had a meeting last night with a doctor who does orthopedic surgery in Canada and in the United States. He goes back and forth across the border and does that work. He told of the case of a patient who had come in who had torn up his knee. He said a torn meniscus, and I believe he said an ACL, an anterior cruciate ligament, those two things. It was a knee wreck--swollen and badly painful. He was up there, and he did the examination, and he said, Fine. We'll get you into surgery right away, and we can fix you. We'll patch up that ligament, and we'll patch up the torn meniscus, and we'll fix you.

In America, that surgery would happen, oh, the next day. They might elect to allow the swelling to go down--that could happen--but it could happen also that the surgery could be the same day or the next day if the surgeon decided that was the best thing for the patient. And that would be the criterion, by the way.

But in Canada, he did everything he could to schedule him with the proper

surgeon, and this man had to wait 6 months to be further examined before they could evaluate whether they would schedule him to repair his knee.

So they put him in a brace, sent him out of there on crutches, and 6 months later he showed up at the specialist who examined him and scheduled him for surgery 6 months later. A torn knee, a year wait, almost a year to the day from the date of the injury to the date of the surgery. And then, of course, he has the rehab time on that before he's back and limbered up before he can go back to work.

This individual wasn't productive for more than a year, lost more than a year's wages. Why? Why would we waste this human collateral that we are? The most precious resource that we have in this country is our people. And we need to become the most productive people on the planet.

One of the jobs that we do here in the House of Representatives--we should be doing here--it would be enhancing the overall average productivity of all of our people in this country. And if we do that, we'll also increase the quality of life for everyone in this country.

When we diminish it by disrespect for life, whether it's the unborn, whether it's someone who was injured that would be allowed to lay off over on the sofa or sit in the living room chair and not be going to work when they could be fixed in a short period of time and back into it again, that's what happens in countries that have socialized medicine, national health care, a Federal public payer plan which has been devised in those countries that I mentioned, but not in the United States, in part because the American people from 15 or 16 years ago saw this schematic and they were as appalled and animated by it as I was.

And they got on the phone. They called their Congressman; they called their Senator. And they came to Washington, and they jammed the offices full of people. And they went to the offices of the Members around the country.

They wrote letters to the editor and letters to their Members of Congress. And they got on the radio programs that existed at the time-- and some of them did--and the American people had a dialogue about how they wanted their health care to look and what they wanted to maintain.

And they completely rejected this model, this old model from the early 1990s, this alarming model of creating all of this growth in government that nobody can completely understand, maybe Hillary understood what she wanted to do. And look at this: the government agencies and programs interact. Some of these I recognize, Department of Labor. I don't know what PWBA is or NGFSHP, NQMP. I think I knew at the time.

But all of these government agencies created or interacted--look at this. The global budget. This is part of the HillaryCare plan. And I will submit this scary HillaryCare plan is not as scary as the 3-D technicolor modern plan, the ObamaCare plan, that has emerged in this Congress that has the idea that it's going to squeeze out the private health insurance in America.

How about the Bureau of Health Information? They will aggregate your health information. The Health Choices Administration, HCA. Health Choices Administration Commissioner.

We know what's happened. America has run out of patience with czars so we're not going to see very many more czars, I don't believe. I mean, 32 may be like our threshold, the political threshold of the number of czars that we can have in America. So we start naming them ``commissioners'' instead. Commissioners aren't as alarming as czars. Commissioners weren't the precursors to Marxism in the Soviet Union. So we're not as alarmed when we call them ``commissioners.'' So we have the Health Choices Administration Commissioner.

Health choices. What does that mean? That means if the doctor doesn't make the choice that's consistent with the directive of the Health Choices Commissioner, they are going to find the doctor. And we don't know what that amount is yet, but it will be hefty. And if the doctor then doesn't comply a second time--not defies necessarily--but just doesn't comply with the Health Choices Administration Commissioner, the second time the bill provides that he face jail time.

Now, are we going to lock up doctors because they keep their Hippocratic Oath and they do no harm and they order the kind of services that protect people? Are we going to ration health care? Are we going to let the government set this entire standard for the entire United States of America? And why would we do that when we realize that in Canada there are whole companies that have sprouted up in Canada. Just think of them as travel agencies that merged with health care services.

And they realized that the Canadians--there is a law in Canada that prohibits a person from jumping to the head of the line when it comes to health care services. So if you have a bad knee, you're going to wait 340 days. It's against the law to move ahead in the line, jump ahead in the line. Nobody wants to be in a line that's getting longer while you are standing in the back of it.

If you hurt your hip, a 196-day wait. But there are people in Canada that can't wait. They can't wait for a hip. They can't wait for a knee and certainly not for heart surgery, and many do.

So some of the companies, Canada, have a policy that's set up as part of their employment policy. And when they recruit some of their employees, the package will be, Here is your salary package, here's your retirement plan. And by the way, we have this plan for you. If you need heart surgery, we'll package this thing up and we'll fly you down to Houston for heart surgery or Ann Arbor or maybe Rochester, Minnesota, at the Mayo Clinic. This happens on a regular basis.

The travel agencies that merged with the health care-providing agencies provide the turnkey operation. Let's say you need heart surgery in Houston. Companies will set this up for the individual that can't wait in line, can't live for the line to get short enough that he can get the treatment, so they package this up and it will be, Here's your round trip plane ticket from Toronto to Houston. Here's a hotel you will go to, here's your transportation on the shuttle bus from the airport to the hotel. And the clinic is next door. You'll go over for the examination at X time on this morning. If all of these things hold up and they are comparable, then you'll go forward with the surgery at such and such a time at this location.

Here's what it will cost for all of the items: the surgeon, the anesthetic, the operating room, the list of all of the incidentals that go into this. They package it all up, you write one check, and American health care saves your life. So does the entrepreneurial nature that sets up those businesses in Canada to access American health care.

But what a cruel thing to do to the Canadians to adopt their plan or a plan similar to them. ObamaCare health care, where then do the Canadians go when they need health care that's urgent, that's life saving, or turns them back into productive citizens again? They've got their relief valve of the United States today. This scary, multi-color, technicolor--we'll turn this into 3-D I hope one day--model says to the Canadians it could be the end of their options. They could say to the American people that it's a whole series of different things that we've never had to think of before

Why would we give up our freedom? Why would we give up our freedom when 70 percent of us like the health care systems that we have and the health insurance plans that we have? And the argument that comes from the Democrats consistently is there are 44 or 47, or they will often say almost 50, million people that are uninsured in America. Well, I guess if there is a plan for Canadians and they don't have to sign up for it, just show up at the emergency room, if they're not signed up, they're uninsured, too.

If you've got a program that takes everybody, whether they're signed up or whether they're not--I wonder how many people are actually signed up in Canada--but if the number is let's just say 44, maybe on the outside 47 million, I can take you this way, Madam Speaker, and that is that out of those 44 or so million people, you've got to subtract from that the illegals that are here in America.

I don't think anybody seriously wants to provide a health insurance program for people that jump the border illegally and sneak into the United

States and that are working here illegally and violating our laws. I don't think we want to fund that. I don't think we want to give them the Cadillac of what would be left of our health care program. So I would subtract those out of that list.

We can debate what the size of that number is. Some say 11 million. I've been here now--this is halfway through my seventh year. We've been saying 11 or 12 million illegals in America since I arrived here in this Congress. I have gone on down on the border and watched them pour across the border at night, participated in catching a few of them, including a significant supply of illegal drugs that come with them. The number of border crossings that we have had on average since we've been here, the illegal border crossings where we catch them average more than a million a year since I have been in this Congress.

So we've caught over 6 million, probably closer to 7 million who were trying to cross the border and get into the United States.

The Border Patrol, when you ask them what percentage do you catch, some will say 25 percent. That's actually the official line in the testimony before hearings, from the Border Patrol themselves, but when I ask them that question, they will laugh at me. They will say, Oh, no. Not that many. Perhaps 10 percent.

Well, I'll take the 25 percent number and multiply that times the 7 million illegal crossings that we've caught and just say that's three times that number that have actually gotten into the United States successfully if we're intercepting only one out of four.

You've got four, three get across, one we caught. He goes back. That's how that works. And I guess it's three times the number. Three times 7 million is 21 million. That's 21 million that came in. Some died. Some went back. But that's one way to measure how many illegals have come into the country as soon as I have been in Congress. And if you add that number to the roughly 12 million number, now we're up in the 30-some million category.

And it's easy, Madam Speaker, to understand why I think the numbers of illegals in this country are probably greater than 20 million. And we know that the numbers of those working in this country is a number that's over 7 million working in this country at least, and that is a Federal data point number.

But if we cut the illegals out of that list of 44 million of the uninsured, and then if we subtract from that number those that are just in transition between one health insurance plan to another, then we get down to a number that's a little more understandable. And it's a number that comes from two Penn State professors who did a study some years ago. And if I remember correctly, their number was that there was about 10.1 million Americans that are part of the chronically uninsured.

Now, we should be addressing not the illegals, not those in transition between their health care plans because they're going to find another one and they're going to likely stay on that one. There is always that happening while people are looking for the best plan.

But if we really have something to fix, we should be fixing the chronically uninsured, that 10.1 million. And I think I took that and divided it by the population and rounded it up to the nearest percentage point. Take 10.1 million, divide it by 300 million and you end up with a number that's a little over 3\1/2\ percent.

So let's give the benefit of the doubt to the liberal utopian people who draw up these schematics that we're trying to fix something like 4 percent of the problem. Four percent of the population is chronically uninsured, and we would tear apart the entire system to try to fix this 4 percent. And what percentage of the 4 percent will be fixed?

Well, according to one of the estimates on how the result of those that would be recruited by this plan would work out, this plan pushes tens of millions off of their own private insurance plan. Puts them on the government plan. And in the end, the result would be such that they ended up--by one measure, 97 percent of America would be insured. But I don't think that includes that--I don't know how they address the illegals.

Well, we have now 96 percent. By the time you take out the chronically uninsured and the illegals, 96 percent of America is now insured. Now, I don't want to argue that of the chronically uninsured, this plan would only get 25 percent of them enrolled. It may not be. But if you want to look for a measure on what's likely to happen, one need go no further than the Medicaid rolls in America. There it is, if you qualify. Sign up for Medicaid. It's a free program. You don't have any responsibilities except to sign up, and you will be covered if you meet the standards of the lower income that's necessary.

But of those that are eligible for Medicaid in America, just slightly over 50 percent of them are actually enrolled. So why would we think that we could enroll the part of that 4 percent of the chronically uninsured; why would we think we could get a higher percentage of them to enroll in a government plan, or furthermore, if they're no more responsible than that, why would we want to? What is the upside?

Aren't there other solutions and better solutions? And the answer to that question of course is yes and yes. There are many better solutions than what's being proposed in this particular outrageous and scary schematic.

We should do many things. We should expand our health savings accounts. One of the best things we did with health care in this Congress in this last decade is to pass health savings accounts, and if a young couple in that year, say at 20 years of age, had invested the maximum amount in their health savings account that year and done so each year--first year was $5,150 and it's indexed for inflation, moving on up. I don't know the number today any longer; I've lost track. But I did do the math on this and build a spreadsheet to do the calculation.

If that couple at age 20 invested the max in their health savings account and did so each year until they reached Medicare eligibility and spent $2,000 of real dollars out of that account in legitimate health care costs for each year, and you accrued that at about a 4 percent rate, which was legitimate at the time I did the math--and it will be legitimate--again, that couple arrived at retirement age with more than $950,000 in their health savings account.

Now, why wouldn't we as a Nation take a look at that, utilize that, and give them a reward for their responsibility and see if we can find a way to make a deal with them that will get them off of the entitlement roll and because they have the assets to take care of themselves? And I would argue this, Madam Speaker.

I would say to that couple, take your $950,000 and buy a paid up Medicare replacement policy and keep the change tax free. Right now, the intent of this Congress is to tax those health savings accounts when either they are spent or when the people that own them die. They want to tax that. I say, if they will take themselves off of the Medicare entitlement rolls, I want them to have the balance of that tax free.

We can work out some formulas where we can actually help them buy that out, but today, let's just say if a couple, similar couple, arrived at age 65 today and they wanted to do an altruistic thing and not be part of the Medicare entitlement, they could buy a Medicare replacement policy for right at $72,000 per patient. So, say, a husband and a wife, for $144,000, could buy a replacement policy. That would be the cost, I should say. I don't know if you can actually buy the policy these days because government has monopolized health insurance for people past the age of 65, but that's the risk, that's the average risk for the health care costs. From 65 until natural death, it would be $72,000 per individual.

So it's reasonable to think that we could set up a Medicare replacement policy that people could buy and let them cash the difference tax free. That would be a great incentive for a lifetime. It's one of the things we can do.

Another thing that we need to do is increase the amount that can be deposited into the health savings account; in addition, medical malpractice. You can look through all of these schematics, this Technicolor schematic of the modern day ObamaCare version or one can look through this black and white

older version of the HillaryCare health care schematic, and you can't find anything in here about the reform of the unnecessary, punitive malpractice litigation that's taking place all across this country.

We all know about the lady that spilled a cup of coffee from McDonald's in her lap, and she was awarded in the initial decision--I forget the number now--$3 or $7 million or whatever outrageous number that was, and I know it went back under appeal, and it lowered the number down, but it surely intimidates people.

A case here in town, it wasn't medical, but it was a judge that sued a cleaners and took one or two of their stores out of business because they lost his pants. And we see businesses out because of litigation that's brought about in that fashion.

How many tests are done in America because the doctor is paying a very high malpractice premium? In order to protect himself from a suit, he has to run a bunch of extra tests because that's what you do in the industry to protect yourself from the lawyers. First, take the oath to do no harm, go out to serve people in a profession that has great honor, and have it be framed by fear of litigation instead of doing the right thing. That's the medical version of a good Samaritan watching someone get run over on the street and not going to help them--well, a formerly likely good Samaritan that's afraid they will get sued because they will reach outside of their profession in an effort to help somebody and they get sued. And doctors run tests every day by the thousands to protect themselves from litigation.

And yet, nothing in the old schematic and nothing in the new Technicolor schematic addresses the medical malpractice insurance. Now, we addressed it in the Judiciary Committee a few years ago, and we put a cap on noneconomic damages of $250,000. That is what they have in California. Not a lot of good things happen legislatively in California, but that's one that did. Proposition 209 was another, just to toss an aside into this dialogue. But we capped it at $250,000 noneconomic damages and let people be made whole. If they were injured by malpractice, they would get the cost of their medical care. They would get real economic loss of income. They would even get a little pain and suffering, but the punitive damages, the things we consider to be punitive damages that were defined in the bill as noneconomic damages, would not be awarded beyond $250,000.

Why would you pay a lady millions of dollars for spilling a hot cup of coffee in her own lap in order to send a message that McDonald's shouldn't serve hot coffee? How many things in this life do we no longer have access to because a trial lawyer's figured out a way to make a living and then the other lawyer's figured out a way to write the rule so that we could avoid that kind of litigation?

How many of us have climbed into a vehicle and gone down the road and decided, I want to program my navigator, and found that your navigator doesn't work while you're moving because some lawyer decided you might get in a wreck for programming your navigator, and then sued the manufacturer for being distracted from your driving? Why is it their fault if you don't have responsibility? But instead, they put the failsafe in so you have to pull off on the side of the road, and a lot of it, they defeat the intent of having that kind of a device.

That's what goes on with health insurance as well. That's what goes on with health care providers. A very high cost in health care in America is because of unnecessary tests that are being run in order to avoid litigation.

So maybe if we had all doctors that were paid by the government, then they would have the sovereign immunity that would come from being Federal employees so they wouldn't be sued. Now, that might be a way where Obama might save some money on health care. I don't want to go there, but it might be the only thing that actually might be legitimate as far as saving money, and then they will argue that they will reduce some of these costs down by providing efficiencies through technology. I will support that.

Let's have better records. Let's have those records be easily and quickly available to qualified people so if you live in Kansas City and you end up in the hospital in San Francisco, they can do a quick bar code off of your driver's license, for example, and access your health care records so they know what you're on for prescription drugs; they know what kind of treatments that you had. You may not be conscious and there may be no one with you. Even if they are, they may not know what you're taking for medication. Let's do that technology.

Do we have to do this in order to utilize more modern technology? We are moving in that direction with the technology anyway. I suppose the health care czar will tell us just what technology we can use and set some mandatory parameters on how we get there. I am nervous about that.

So there are some efficiencies. There are wellness plans that can be incorporated into health insurance programs that are incentives, and if we have those incentives there, people will do the right thing. If you lower my health insurance premium, I'll lose a few pounds and I'll exercise a little more and I'll go in for a checkup a little more, and they will diagnose the problems earlier, and we'll live longer and healthier as a people. That's the free market. That's not a one-size- fits-all socialized medicine plan.

These are the things that we should be looking at to improve our health care systems here in the United States, but going down this path, going down this path of creating the huge bureaucracy, the Health Benefits Advisory Committee, imagine what that is; the Public Health Investment Fund, oh, how they manage your dollars while it's in there. What else do we have? We have the mandate by insurance that goes down to the consumers, the Health Insurance Exchange Trust Fund, the Clinical Preventative Services Task Force. So that's going to be preventative services.

Another thing that happens when you have socialized medicine--I will tell this in a narrative the way I heard it. When this plan went in in Canada, at that time I had a good number of business relationships with friends in Canada, and they gave me the unfolding narrative. One of them--his name was Peter actually--said to me, here's what's going on. They passed a national health care plan in Canada, the socialized medicine plan, and they said you need to be responsible and go to the clinic for your checkups and don't overload the emergency rooms and treat your health care in a responsible fashion and only go when you're sick, don't go when you don't need to except for your regular checkups, be a responsible consumer. That's how it was sold. And by the way, they did the actuarial projections on the cost by expecting Canadians to be responsible consumers.

And he said, so, the first year of the national health care plan in Canada worked like this. People were respectful. They did go to the clinic. They didn't crowd the emergency rooms, and it went along pretty good for the first year. And by the second year, the third year and the fourth year, people weren't willing to take time off from work to go to the clinic when it was convenient for the doctor. So, on the weekends and at nights when they did have time in their schedule, they just went to the emergency room and abused the privilege.

And so Peter explained it to me this way. He said, it was just like a company that for the first time was having a Christmas party and they invited all the employees in to have a dinner and a few drinks and to celebrate Christmas together. And everybody comes and they have one or two drinks and they tell good stories about the boss and pat him on the back, and everybody was just nice and full of love and responsibility and grateful that they'd had a Christmas party that they could celebrate together as a working family, or a family of workers to be more correct.

But he said by the second or third and the fourth year of the socialized medicine plan in Canada, it was like the second, third or fourth year of the company Christmas party. They abused the privilege. They drank too much. They told nasty stories about their boss. And they expected their Christmas party and the bonuses to be an entitlement rather than a bonus.

And so that was the attitude that he described of the Canadians: jamming the emergency rooms when they went

at the times that was convenient for them, not going to the clinics, not being responsible, and that they had abused the privilege. And the costs went up and the service went down and the lines got long and people died in line. That's the tragedy. That's the tragedy of socialized medicine.

I met a man a few months ago in a home improvement center, and he was an immigrant from Germany. And he told me about his hip surgery. It wasn't a sad story. It was matter of fact the way he delivered it. He had to wait about 6 months to get a hip replaced as a German, but he wanted it done badly because it was painful and it limited his options on how he could move around and what he could do. And so he had to travel from Germany down to Italy where the line was shorter, and he was operated on in fewer days than if he had been waiting in line in Germany.

And I listened to that story, and I thought, what would it be like to have to go to another country to get your health care because the lines are shorter? What would it be like to get your health care because there's a line? We're Americans. We don't stand in line. We have freedom. We have fought for that freedom. We have worked for that freedom. We've paid for that freedom. We don't stand in line. We don't make ourselves dependent upon bureaucrats to make decisions on what's better for all of our lives. We go out and make our lives better. That's what we are. That's who we are.

And this color-coded schematic threatens our freedom. It threatens your freedom. It diminishes the spirit and the character of the American people and turns us into dependents. It takes the safety net that we have today and it cranks it up a few notches and turns it into a hammock. And we take less responsibility, and the psychology of who we are as a people are diminished. What about that American spirit, that can-do spirit? That idea that we can do anything?

The idea that we can go to the Moon, if we decide we can go to the Moon. What about what happened when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor? We took on a national mission and a two-front global war and put 16 million men and women into uniform and came out of the other side a global power and the only surviving industrial power in the world.

We set the pace with our economy, with our politics, with our culture, with our faith and our values, and an inspiration for the world. The rest of the world looks up to us. They do see what's been accomplished here. And we have taken the talent of every culture in the world and rolled it together in this great melting pot and come out of it with something that is a unique vitality, a unique vitality that doesn't exist in any other people in the world, in part, because we've skimmed the cream of the crop off of every Nation in the world.

The people that came here, came here because they wanted to have a chance at the American Dream. They wanted to have an opportunity to become an American and an opportunity to be independent economically and carve out and pull themselves up by their bootstraps and provide for their own family and sit down at the supper table at night and be proud of what they have accomplished for their day, for their week, for their month, for their life.

And we should be proud of what's been accomplished in this country by the lives of all of those that have gone before us. This is not worthy of their effort and sacrifice. This isn't worthy of a proud and independent people that should be reaching for more freedom instead of giving it up in exchange for dependency.

This is dependency. It goes the wrong way. It takes us to the left. It takes us to a dependency. It takes us to a myopic image of a utopian version where they have always thought--and let's just say in that part of Western Europe your utopian thinkers have emerged. They have always drawn these kind of schematics to come up with a better way to be able to find this utopia on Earth.

They completely and diametrically are opposed to the philosophies of Adam Smith and the philosophies that emerge in the Old and in the New Testament.

The independence that we have to have, the personal responsibility that we have to have, the moral standards of the core of who we are as a people, diminished by this color-coded schematic.

And I pray, Madam Speaker, that the independence of the American people, the spirit that's within us, the inspirational responsibility that we have for the world, will cause us to rise up and reject this model, this model that's not for Americans.

It's not an American thought process to always be taking responsibility away from people and diminishing their freedoms in the process. We need to be about expanding freedom, not diminishing freedom. And when we do that, our spirit rises up to the top. Our energy and our work ethic rises to the top. And we are stronger economically. We're stronger as family. We're stronger as faith. We're stronger as a culture and as a people, and we need to do that to set the inspiration for the rest of the world.

Somebody's got to lead. This is our time, and I challenge the people in this Congress and this country to do the right thing by this policy.

With that, Madam Speaker, I thank you for your indulgence, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 4 o'clock and 33 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, July, 20, 2009, at 12:30 p.m., for morning-hour debate.

I thank the gentlelady for yielding. I come to the floor and I rise in opposition to this bill. I do so for a number of reasons, but the reason I take this opportunity to express that is, the longstanding policy that blocked the compulsion that was delivered to American taxpayers to fund abortions through the District of Columbia has been dropped from this bill, and it was refused to be allowed as an amendment here to the floor. So the constituents of America will not know how their Member would vote and where their Member stands on compelling public funds to be used for abortions in the District of Columbia.

We've gone through this debate here before. This debate has gone on back and forth, but it was established back in the early nineties. The process of funding public abortions in D.C. were established in the early nineties, and

that was rolled back, and still the District of Columbia violated Federal law for 2 years and continued to fund abortions.

Now, here's the image that I have in my mind. Two of them. One of them is to compel anyone who has a moral objection to funding abortions is wrong. The second thing is the memory of the vote on the Mexico City Policy. When we lost that as a pro-life coalition here in Congress, I saw people over on that side of the aisle jumping up and down, hugging, clapping, and cheering. And why? Because we were going to compel taxpayers to fund abortions in foreign lands.

How could anyone be that delighted about such a policy? But I think it was because those who were cheering and clapping and hugging believe they had landed a blow against the convictions of the people who they could just consider be wearing a different jersey on the other side of the aisle.

It is bigger than this, it's deeper than this. This is life. This is unborn, innocent human life that doesn't have a voice here on this floor. If we could hear their scream for mercy, we would at least hear the Tiahrt amendment and have a real debate here on the floor, as we would have had in any of the two previous centuries this United States Congress has operated under open rules.

I oppose the bill and I advocate for open rules.

I thank the gentleman, the doctor from Louisiana, for organizing this Special Order this evening, and I thank my colleagues who have come to the floor to stand up for life and to make this argument, Mr. Speaker, before the American people tonight here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

I think, first and foremost, Dr. Fleming made the point of this profound question, of this question about: When does life begin? It's a question that I will not hear answered from over here on this side of the aisle where we find so many people who are promoting the idea of compelling all Americans, including pro-life Americans, to fund abortions in this country under all circumstances and also in foreign lands. Many of those votes have gone up on this floor.

I'll lay out how I deal with this from time to time when I've gone into a school auditorium to visit with students and when I've had the principal hand me the cordless microphone and say, They're yours for 50 minutes or for whatever time there might be.

In that conversation, I'll ask them to ask themselves two questions. I'll say, You're young people, and you're establishing your principles and your values for life, and these are profound questions that you'll be asked. So the first question I'll ask is:

Is all human life sacred in all of its forms? Do you believe in the sanctity of human life?

They'll look at each other a little bit. Some will understand it instantly, and some of them won't understand it at all, and for others, it will soak in a little bit. Then I explain it:

Is your life sacred? Is the life of the person next to you sacred? Are the lives of your families, of your brothers, of your sisters, of your parents, of your aunts and your uncles, of the people in your classes, and of your closest friends sacred? Do you believe in the sanctity of human life?

They come to a unanimous position. They look around and say yes. They realize that their families, their friends, their neighbors--that every human life on this planet is a sacred, unique creation from God. When they come to that conclusion--and it's always unanimous in the gymnasium or in the auditorium or wherever it might be--then I ask them:

Now that you've answered the first question of whether you believe in the sanctity of human life and now that you've all said ``yes'' and ``amen,'' the next question then is: At what instant does life begin?

Dr. Fleming has said, and I agree, that life begins at the instant of conception and that you have to choose an instant because, otherwise, it's a moving target, and otherwise, it's guesswork with sacred human life. So it's throughout that 9 months of gestation, and it came to me this way:

When my first son was born, my first child, I held him in my arms, and I just looked upon a miracle, and I thought, How could anyone take this child's life at this moment, at this moment shortly after his birth? But then I asked myself the question, What is unique about this? What would be different about his life the moment before he was born? He's still a child. He's still a unique creature from God. So I just quickly rationalized back through that period of time of those 9 months that he'd been forming, and there is no instant there that you could pick as the time and say, well, he was a human being, a sacred human being at this point, but not a moment earlier. So you have to choose an instant that life begins, and the only instant that exists in the whole process is at fertilization, conception.

So I asked those students then another question, which was: What if someone walked by the door to this gymnasium, which was full of these students, and stuck a gun through the door and looked the other way away from them and pulled the trigger and ran down the hallway and the security people chased him down and captured him outside and cuffed him? Now you'd all be safe except for what might have happened.

Did he kill somebody or didn't he?

They looked at each other, and they said, Well, we don't know. I said, That's my point, but if there is a dead body in the gymnasium, he killed somebody. Whether he knows or whether you know, it's still a fact, and he's still guilty of murder, of premeditated murder.

So it isn't a matter of saying, Well, I don't know for sure, so I'm just going to go ahead and err and have an abortion. It's a matter of that precise line and of thinking of that precise moral question. I'm not casting aspersions or blame or guilt on anyone. I'm just asking young people to think about this. I'm asking adults to think about this. I have never found anyone who I've debated this issue with--and there have been many--who can respond to those questions. If they're asked the first question--is human life sacred in all of its forms?-- and if they say ``yes,'' as we all do, then there is no escaping the fact that that human life begins at the instant of conception. That is at the core of this debate.

Here we have a Congress that seems to have political power and support and campaign contributions that flow into the coffers of, at this point, a majority of the Members in the House of Representatives. I've watched Members gravitate towards their power base and put up the votes that flatter the people who show up at their fund-raising events.

I will never forget the night we had the vote here in early 2007 on the Mexico City language. The gentleman from New Jersey, whom we'll hear from in a moment, offered that amendment. I was over about that far back, and as Chris Smith said, We won the debate and we lost the vote. Over on this side, there were 30 or so who were jumping up and down, clapping, cheering and hugging each other. If I'd been closer, I could have told you whether they'd had tears of joy, but they were elated that they had defeated our effort to block Federal funding for abortions in foreign lands.

I looked at that, and I thought, How could anyone have it in his heart to exhibit such joy at funding abortions and at the end of life of innocent babies in foreign lands? First, I don't think that was their joy. Tonight, I did. As I think it over, no, it was more that they believed that they had landed a blow against the political opinions of the people here of most of us on this side of the aisle and of about a good 30 pro-lifers on the other side of the aisle. Political opinions? These are profound, deeply held moral convictions that are tied and rooted in our religions as well. That's what this discussion and this debate are about.

When I see language that comes out that sets up, essentially, a mandatory national health care plan that has no exemption in for abortion or for the funding of abortion, if it's not an explicit exclusion, as the gentleman said, then we know by deep and long experience that there will be federally funded abortions.

By the way, I don't believe there's a conscience clause in all of these hundreds of pages in the bill either, and President Obama would not allow a conscience clause. He has opposed that along the way. He has appointed as his Office of Legal Counsel a young lady who has been a strong advocate for abortion and who has argued a number of cases for the National Abortion Rights Action League. It looks like the Senate is poised to confirm a justice to the Supreme Court who has a fairly

significant record in advocating for or in coming down with decisions that enable more and more abortions.

We need to draw a bright moral line. Laws that we pass in this Congress are laws that are rooted in the moral foundation of our people, and if we see that 51 percent of the people in America characterize themselves as pro-life--and that's the number that we're looking at here tonight--and if you slice and dice that and if you go on up the line and if you define ``pro-life'' as, maybe, someone who makes an exception for the life of the mother and then as someone who makes exceptions for rape and for incest and maybe as someone who makes an exception and says we should not do partial birth abortion, you get almost up to 100 percent. Hardly anybody believes that you should take a baby who is almost born and draw their brains out while they're struggling for life. We put an end to that in this Congress, and it was a struggle to do so, and it was twice before the United States Supreme Court.

I've seen numbers that take us all on up into the 70th and higher percentile of self-professed pro-life people, depending on how you define it. Yet when we have 69 percent of the people in this country that argue you should not use taxpayers' dollars to fund abortions--and certainly I'm among those, and I think we're unanimous in that--that is big debate. It's a profound debate. It goes to the heart of the moral core of the people of the United States of America. I am grateful that the gentleman from Louisiana, who has demonstrated a lifetime as a practitioner in the health care industry and who understands this clearly, has brought this issue to the floor, and I stand united with you.

I yield back.

Will the gentleman yield?

The gentleman made an allegation, and I would be very happy to respond to that. I appreciate it if the gentleman would yield.

That's what I hear, and that challenges the integrity of some of the Members. I asked the gentleman to kindly yield. It's a courtesy that's commonly offered.

Parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. Speaker, is it inappropriate under the rules of the House to challenge the mendacity of any of the Members in this House?

Mr. Speaker, I made a proper parliamentary inquiry.

I'm sorry, Mr. Speaker. I can't hear you.

Further parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Speaker.

The gentlemen from Ohio alleged intentional misinformation on the part of members of my conference, and that, I believe, challenges the mendacity of Members of this Congress.

Further parliamentary inquiry.

Is it the ruling of the Chair that the gentleman from Ohio can challenge the mendacity of a Member provided he doesn't name them specifically?

Mr. Speaker, I think everybody gets the message here.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized here on the floor of the House. I would remark that the common courtesy here is to yield. And I'm happy to yield to the gentlemen who are here if we could carry on this dialogue with or without that particular yielding. I know it is only four to one, so it would be an interesting engagement that could take place.

I have to correct a few things on the Record. One of them is, as the gentleman from Ohio challenged the mendacity of the Republicans, who had said that there is a $4,000 increase on a payroll, that is exactly the number you get if the payroll is $50,000 and you tax it at 8 percent. That is in the bill, Mr. Speaker, and that is a precise number, and that is what I sought to offer that could have been injected in for an open dialogue.

But we do deal with the facts. It is hard to get those facts when you have a bill that is drafted and a bill that has to be drafted to match a CBO number. The Congressional Budget Office came out with an estimate of a $1 trillion health care plan, and we found out that the Congressional Budget Office came out with that number without having read the bill, Mr. Speaker.

So we are poised to go down a path by tying a blindfold around our eyes and charging off into the abyss of socialized medicine with a $1 trillion price tag, a little less than that, that is slapped upon a bill that nobody has yet, well, I suppose some now have completely read, but the Congressional Budget Office did an estimate on the cost of this socialized medicine policy over the telephone with the staff of the committee of the Democrats, not even a bipartisan staff.

And that is how we make policy in the United States of America? And it is adequate to stand here on the floor and utter platitudes about what your political philosophy might be?

I think it is interesting that I get to hear the quotes from Republicans, John McCain, on cap-and-trade. Well, I can think of the time pretty recently that would have been after this particular quote that we saw a few moments ago, the time I most emphatically agreed with John McCain, and that is when he said that President Obama has more czars than the Romanovs. That was something that I think illustrated part of the big picture that we should be talking about.

This is a government that is out of control. It is overreaching. It is creating the nationalization of industry after industry in this country. It is breathtaking, the scope of the reach of this White House that is supported by the Democrats in the House and in the Senate. And who would have thought--let's just say if we just roll back in our memory and our mind's eye back to election day in November of 2008, what if somebody would have said, now you're ready to go to the polls, think about what you're going to do. Because if you elect President Obama, he is going to go in and nationalize three huge investment banks, the large insurance company, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, General Motors and Chrysler. All of these huge eight entities all wrapped up together will all be controlled, if not controlling interest, in the hands of and in control of the White House.

Then he is going to manage those by appointing 32 czars, and this will be hundreds of billions of dollars. And the idea will be that the economic stimulus plan is going to be FDR's New Deal on steroids.

And now, never mind that if one goes back and reads the data from the 1930s from that Great Depression--there was nothing great about what people had to go through during that decade of the 1930s. But if one goes back and reads the data and tries to index it back to the actions of the New Deal and this Keynesian economics of borrowing money and trying to actually replace private sector jobs with government jobs is what was going on in the New Deal--the CCC camps, the WPA, and the list of these acronyms went on. But what it did was it created a lot of debt, and it delayed the recovery that would have come from the private sector of the economy. It competed directly with the private sector.

One of those examples would be the Tennessee Valley Association where there was private-sector investment that was prepared to go in and develop just what the TVA turned out to be. And FDR went in and stomped on the private sector and grew a government instead.

This is what was the model for President Obama.

So he set forth--and he told us on a day on or about February 10, 2009, he said that FDR didn't go far enough, that he lost his nerve. He got worried about spending too much money. If he hadn't gotten worried about spending too much money, the economy would have recovered. But he didn't spend enough money and, therefore, along came World War II first and became the largest stimulus plan ever.

I don't take issue with the last part of that statement. I just take issue with the prediction that the New Deal would have worked if FDR would have spent a lot more money.

This President hasn't lost his nerve. He is spending a lot more money. And if there is any doubt in anybody's mind about whether Keynesian economics and spending borrowed money to dump it in and grow government at a time of economic crisis actually heals up the economy-- there isn't any doubt in my mind because I've read the data. In fact, I went through every newspaper from the crash of the stock market in 1929 until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, reading for the economic news so I could understand what people were living through during those days of the stock market crash and the deep, long trough of the Great Depression and then the shock of the attack on Pearl Harbor that launched us into a world war.

I wanted to understand what that was like for the people that lived during that period of time. But I couldn't find evidence that the New Deal was a good deal on any kind of a broad scale, small little place as it was. It bought some friends, sure, but I couldn't find evidence that the New Deal worked. And economists that have gone back and studied that era can't show you the data that indicates the New Deal worked.

But if anybody wonders, they can study this era 25 years from now when it will be clear--there won't be any question about, no more arguments can be brought up. No future President will be able to say of President Obama, Well, his stimulus plan would have worked but he just lost his nerve and didn't spend enough money.

This President has not lost his nerve. He has spent way too much money, and he has nationalized eight huge entities. He's landed blow after blow against the private sector, the free-market economy that is the engine that drives this economy, and it sets the economy for the world, blow after blow.

And they'll look back at this and they will say, $700 billion in TARP, $787 billion in the stimulus plan, untold

hundreds of billions of dollars shoveled out the door of the U.S. Treasury to prop up businesses that don't necessarily go through the appropriations process here in Congress, the blank check of Tim Geithner is being spent. And all of that going on, and this President has the audacity--remember, he wrote a book with ``audacity'' in the title. This is a President with a lot of audacity. And the audacity now to float the trial balloon to call for another economic stimulus plan when this one is only partly spent and less than half of it--and we don't really know what those numbers are. It's being trickled out and it doesn't impact on our economy, and sometimes strung out over a number of years.

But yet it was an act of desperation to get it before this Congress and pass it quickly because they had to have it to save us from a financial meltdown. But they didn't really use the bill in the fashion they said. Neither did they use the TARP bill in the fashion that they said.

And so this urgency to prevent a meltdown was more what I see in the pattern of legislation brought through this Congress. It's the urgency of bringing this thing through this Congress before the American people figure out what's going on, pass it quickly and get it out of the way so it comes out of the public eye. And while that's going on, load up another one, put another round in the chamber and fire another one down through the floor of the House of Representatives and on over to the Senate, another destructive missile that brings down the economy in this country, the culture in this country, the spirit of the people in this country. This has been an all-out assault on Americanism that I have seen in the months that we have had here.

The statements made on this floor that need to be corrected, other than the erroneous statement that a Republican had made a--just implied at least a willful misstatement. This President's plan and the health care, health insurance plan that's being debated in this Congress today and tomorrow, has in it an 8 percent tax on payroll, on the employer, on the employer's payroll, if he doesn't provide health insurance for his employees.

So, an 8 percent tax. When you just think about how that works, let's just say there is an employee that's making $50,000 a year and there is not a health insurance policy. You can talk about the question of whether that's right or wrong. But in any case, there is not a health insurance policy.

Under the Obama plan, there would be an 8 percent tax on that payroll, 8 percent of $50,000 is $4,000, precisely the number that the gentleman from Ohio objected to applies perfectly to a $50,000 payroll, which is not that unusual in the United States, and it's becoming far and far more common.

So to take issue with a statement that's clearly factual I believe is misinformation itself.

And the argument that we are sending--the other gentleman from Ohio, Mr. Ryan, said that $700 billion is going to those other countries. And the real number--and he's referring to the importing of petroleum products from foreign countries. And there were statements made last year that we were sending $700 billion to foreign countries to buy their petroleum.

Well, those statements that were going out over the media caused me to be curious enough that I actually ran the numbers to find out, and the real number is this: that over that period of time, over--this was the middle of last summer in about July, and in fact July 11 would be the date that this statement was initially made. The actual moneys expended to purchase imported petroleum, that's natural gas and oil and other products that come from oil wells, in their entirety, the actual money that we sent overseas during that period of time from July 11 of 2009 to a year prior to that, that 12-month period of time, was $332 billion, Mr. Speaker. Not $700 billion. $332 billion.

But we know July 11 was also the peak day for the highest price for oil and gas. That's when our gas hit the highest price at the pumps, and that's about the same time that crude oil by the barrel hit the highest price.

So one could then, last July 11, a year ago July 11, extrapolate what we would import if we imported the same number of gallons: $700 billion. If you work it out and take the gallons and multiply it times the highest prices we had, which was on July 11 of 2008, and carry that forward, you come with a number projected of $726 billion. But we never imported $726 billion because the oil prices plummeted some weeks after that and we saw our gas prices go from $4 and change a gallon and they dropped to nearly $2 a gallon in a short period of time. That was moving up to the election in November.

So at this point, if you look at the most recent data, the number hasn't quite reached $400 billion in the amount of imported petroleum that we have paid for.

It's still too much, Mr. Speaker, and we can be independent with our energy. And we should work in that direction and build the infrastructure that allows us to be independent. But we should also do it on real data and real facts.

And as the other gentleman spoke about two wars going on--this is pretty interesting to me--the lament is still there that we're engaged in two wars. These are conflicts that were--let me say this: Afghanistan was certainly thrust upon us. And the Iraq situation is this: President Obama was elected--at least in part--because he aggressively criticized President Bush for going into Iraq and for not having an exit strategy.

Well, Mr. Speaker, this House needs to know and the American people need to know that Bush had an exit strategy. It was a strategy that said we're going to provide victory and we're going to establish a stable government in Iraq that reflects the will of the Iraqi people. That's what's been achieved there. It really can't be argued today, Mr. Speaker, as to whether who won the war in Iraq. Al Qaeda is defeated in Iraq. They can't mount a military operation that's there.

American deaths in Iraq, as sad as they are, and every one of them is an individual tragedy and every one of them is an honorable patriot, and we need to keep them all in our prayers, as well as their families. It's been a high sacrifice, but it's also been a noble endeavor, and those that we have lost in Iraq in the last year through accidents have been almost exactly equal in number to those that we have lost to combat, which says that a soldier, sailor, airman, marine that's serving in Iraq today has roughly an equal risk of being injured or killed in the rollover of a Humvee on one of the Iraqi roads as they do at the hands of the enemy. And those numbers are getting--it's looking better and better each week that goes by, more stability in Iraq.

And the exit strategy that President Bush devised in Iraq was what I said: win the war; establish a stable, moderate government in Iraq that reflects the will of the people. And so when we listened to the criticism that came from the other side of the aisle here and when Speaker Pelosi first was sworn in and received the gavel as Speaker of the House of Representatives, that was the 110th Congress. We're in the 111th now. That took place in January of 2007.

From that moment on, there commenced a series of votes here on the floor of the House that were designed to unfund, underfund or undermine our troops in Iraq. They, had they passed, and some of them singularly, but many of them in their aggregate portion would have brought about a defeat in Iraq as opposed to the victory that's been achieved.

That's what's taken place in this Congress, efforts that undermine our troops. Still, our troops prevailed and still President Bush had the will to order the surge, and still after the surge was executed to the fashion that it brought about the result we see today. President Bush negotiated this so that we could not be giving up a victory that has been so costly and so nobly earned.

And I did look him in the eye on this subject matter, and I know that he was preparing this country to sustain the victory that was being achieved at the time. And President Bush negotiated the SOFA agreement, the status of forces agreement, and it was signed last fall. The Bush status of forces agreement was signed last fall, and we find ourselves in the ironic situation today, Mr. Speaker, of having a President of the United States who was elected, at least in part, for criticizing

his predecessor for not having an exit strategy in Iraq.

But President Bush had an exit strategy, and it's on paper and the irony is President Obama is executing President Bush's exit strategy to the letter of the SOFA agreement. It's on paper. It's there. It's a matter of fact and a matter of action, and it can't be argued. It's just simply ignored because these are the people over here that wouldn't acknowledge that President Bush could do good unless they could put a quote up there that they might think would support their cause.

So the quotes from John McCain come up in the same way. They criticized John McCain all last fall. Now they put his quote up here on the floor and they argue, why don't Republicans listen to John McCain. Well, Democrats wouldn't listen to John McCain. If they had, they would have voted for him and we'd have a different situation in the world today.

Let's see, the Tehran situation and the nuclear endeavor of the Iranians is another thing that just befuddles me. As I listened to the debate in the previous hour, how it is that they're arguing that we have, let me see, we're on the cusp, as the gentleman from Virginia said, we're on the cusp of a great economic revolution. This economic revolution, the green revolution, I guess, all of these green jobs that are going to be created because they passed cap-and-tax on the American people out of the House of Representatives.

And we think they're going to get their jobs back after the next election. The American people know better than this. They understand that when you call it cap-and-trade that it is truly cap-and-tax. What they do is cap the amount of energy that you're able to access in the United States and identify which forms you can and can't have, and they tax the living daylights out of what you do get.

All energy in America will be more costly because of cap-and-tax that passed out of this House, and how anybody can think that we're on the cusp of a great economic revolution because we're taxing energy is way beyond me.

The basic principles of business are things that I had to learn when I started a business, Mr. Speaker. And so just think of this as a legal pad, and you sit down with a little calculator and you draw a line through the middle of the paper, top to bottom. On one side, you list all of your expenses. On the other side, you list your income. You add up your expenses and you add up your income. You take the total income and you subtract the total expenses, and that's your profit. Probably never heard that described here on the floor of the House before, that simple accounting principle of total income minus total expenses is profit. On some of your expenses, of course, are taxes and the overhead and the things that people don't think about that people in business have to do.

So if any business that you have, if you're running a flower shop, a barbershop, an ethanol plant, if you're manufacturing wind generators, if you're running a gas station, if you have an operation with a dozen carpenters working out of there with hammers and wheelbarrows, all of these things going on, this energy tax is going to make your business-- it's going to cost you more.

So over on that column on the pad that you write down on your business expenses, when you see that they have passed cap-and-tax on you and you look at the cost of your electricity and your heating gas-- and let's see, the natural gas you might use in your manufacturing and your diesel fuel you put into your trucks and your heavy equipment and the fuel oil that you might heat with and the cost of the coal that might be generating the electricity, all of those things add up, and they're all part of the expenses of a business. And so if energy gets more expensive, so does the cost of running your business get more expensive; and the more energy intensive it is, the higher the increase as a percentage of your overall expenses and the harder it is to find some profit on the other side.

And we are on the cusp of a great economic revolution because this Congress can increase the cost of our energy? It takes energy to do anything that we want to do. It takes energy to heat a cup of coffee. I go over to my office and push the button and make a pot of coffee, they're burning natural gas to generate some electricity to create enough heat that I can have a cup of coffee. It was coal, but Speaker Pelosi switched that around in our power plant here, and because there was a real concern that the coal that was burning was putting carbon dioxide up into the atmosphere and contributing to global warming and she became Speaker, she concluded that we would get away from that and we were going to be a carbon neutral Capitol complex.

So Speaker Pelosi ordered that the power plant be converted over from coal to natural gas, and so that was done. And some reports show that it doubled the cost of our energy, and I haven't actually analyzed the numbers. I have to take that at face value. It's a summary report. It may or may not have been doubled. It could have been more or less. But the cost of our energy went up, we do know that; and still the calculation was that we were putting too many tons of CO2 in the air annually.

So the Speaker, being true to her commitment to saving the planet, true to her commitment, she then went on the board of trade to purchase some carbon credits. These would be like, well, selling intentions I guess, or indulgences is a better word for it. So you could go on the board and buy carbon credits and they're indulgences for the carbon CO2 you put into the atmosphere, and it's supposed to be offset by somebody else's behavior because you've reached your limit of being able to limit the CO2 emissions you have here.

So I tracked that; $89,000 spent on the board of trade to pay indulgences for the CO2 emissions that take care of this Capitol Building, and somebody had to go sequester some carbon that they weren't sequestering before, change their behavior to help the planet. This is the equation. Some of the money went to no-till farmers in North Dakota, farmers union farmers. In fact, I think that was the exchange that was used. Now, we don't have any evidence that these farmers just started a no-till because they got a check that was a contribution to encourage them to do that.

It's more likely they were with no-till farmers and they were just simply rewarded for something they were doing anyway. So we can't determine that there was any carbon that was sequestered out of that behavior.

And then the balance of the money went to a coal-fired generating plant in Chillicothe, Iowa. Now that's a curious thing, Mr. Speaker. Think about how this works, that the Speaker of the House concludes that there is too much CO2 emitting in the atmosphere because of the coal-fired power plant that feeds this Capitol complex, and so she switches it over to natural gas because there's less emissions from natural gas.

At the time, she said that because natural gas is not a hydrocarbon. Well, that didn't last but a day or so, and she finally discovered it was.

So I'm not quibbling with her lack of technical understanding of how this works. Her conviction is clear; her understanding is not. The power plant was converted from coal to gas, and then still the emissions of CO2 continued, and we had to get to this zero emissions because we were going to be a model for the country.

So that money went to Chicago, $89,000, and they brokered it through the exchange and paid some no-till farmers in North Dakota and the balance of the money went to Chillicothe, where we're really interested to find out what happens at a coal-fired generating plant that you can pay them to sequester some carbon, or let's say diminish the effect of carbon in the atmosphere.

So I went to visit that plant. It's a well-run plant run by good people. It's an outstanding company. I've met with their CEO and had engaging conversations. When I visited that day, I stood in the shed that had big bails of switchgrass in it. And there was expensive equipment that was in there that was designed to pick up and put these big round bales--these are 1,500-pound bales--so that high in diameter, 7 feet or so in diameter.

And there was designed--I didn't see this actually happen: Put them on a conveyer belt, run them through a hammer mill, blow them out through a tube, and blend this ground-up

switchgrass in with the coal that they were using to generate electricity.

That was the plan. And what I saw was--well, switchgrass hay that had sat there for 2 years--and nobody had burned any switchgrass in 2 years. They had tried it, experimented with it. They didn't have any data on what they'd learned from burning the switchgrass. But, in any case, they stopped doing it so it must not have been a particularly lucrative endeavor.

But they got a check cut by the taxpayers and signed by Speaker Pelosi--this is figuratively, we understand--because they had diminished the CO2 in the atmosphere sometime a couple years earlier.

That's what cap-and-trade is. That's brokering these imaginary credits that don't create anything exception imaginary sequestration of carbon, which in somebody's imagination turns a thermostat down on planet Earth.

And of the people that advocate this, the aggressive, vocal proponents of cap-and-tax that think the Earth is going to be destroyed if we don't go through with their legislation, not one of them can explain the science. Not one of them can debate the science on the floor of the House. I'd be happy to do that. I have offered that many times. If somebody is convicted on the science and they want to come down, I'd be happy to yield. Schedule some Special Orders from now until the cows come home so we can talk about this science. But it is an embarrassment, the science that's underneath this.

I don't take so much issue with the science as I do with the economics. They're wrong on the science. They're completely wrong on the economics. And people that can get it that wrong, it should be no surprise they could get it so wrong when it comes to a health care plan.

But here's a couple of things I want to run through as I observe the gentleman from Texas has arrived to lend a hand with this endeavor.

What do I have that's entertaining here? Let me just pull this one out. There's so much material in this Congress, it's amazing that one can get this done in a few short hours of Special Orders.

This mouse has been kind of hard to hold down. He stands on his head once in a while.

This is, Mr. Speaker, the saltwater marsh harvest mouse. He has been decreed to be a species that needs special help from the taxpayers of America. We need to have a stimulus plan that's going to jump us out of the deep hole we're in. So, of all the places that we could put money to grow this economy, where could it do the most good?

I allege, and others alleged back during this process of the stimulus plan, that Speaker Pelosi had set up an earmark in there of $32 million. Well, the allegations came back, No, that's not true. That can't be. There isn't any earmark there. The Speaker wouldn't do that. There's a statement that was put out by the Speaker's Office that said no.

So what we really end up with now is, we find out yes, it is in there; it's just not $32 million. It's $16.1 million. The saltwater marsh harvest mouse.

This little pet project right here, this cute little guy, has finally arrived to get his particularly special earmark.

And if we look at what Speaker Pelosi said, she said, I don't want to have legislation that is used as an engine for people to put on things that are not going to do what we are setting out to do, which is to turn this economy around.

I don't think I want to read the rest of that.

You're going to turn the economy around by dumping $16.1 million into the salt water marsh harvest mouse, this pet project that everybody promised that I made this up. It wasn't in the bill. Now it's there and no one can refute it, this cute little earmark.

So think of this little guy here. The least they could do is just notch his ear a little and put an earmark in that little pet project, that salt water marsh harvest mouse. It's going to get $16.1 million taxpayer dollars.

That's not as wise an investment as the $89 million that was wasted buying the carbon credits to be the little microcosm model of what they're doing with the cap-and-tax bill on us. We've got a great big model on what they're going to do to us, all Americans, on this socialized medicine plan that looks to me like it took HillaryCare and wrote in large, in Technicolor, and in 3D.

So, as I take a deep breath, I'd be very happy to yield to my good friend, the judge from Texas, Judge Gohmert, so much time as he may consume. I know he will use it wisely.

If the gentleman will briefly yield.

Reclaiming my time, there is also a number out there of about 6.8 million people who no longer qualify for unemployment who are still looking for jobs. So, of that 14.7 million, we can add another 6.8 million to that. The number is well over 20 million people who are looking for work in the United States of America. The direction is going the wrong way.

I'd again yield to the gentleman.

Reclaiming my time, I just can't go on further with this thought process until you can go into a little more detail on what that means. I am totally confused on that legal language in the bill.

I would yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Reclaiming my time, would there be a reason why just regular contraception wouldn't be adequate?

I would yield.

Being from Texas, the gentleman has ``enhanced everything'' in Texas. Do they have enhanced contraception in Texas?

Reclaiming my time, and I'm adding to the cause here. There are some things that need to be known about the wild horses before we have the great wild horse debate here in Congress tomorrow. One is, I feel like it may not be a good idea to read these bills if it brings out this kind of thing, but we have to talk about it, and there is some data that we need to think about. That is, there's been a concerted effort to determine in a way that we couldn't sell any horses any longer in the United States of America that might end up on the dinner plate of somebody in Belgium or France. So what that does is, it took the price out of horses; and it took them from $500, $600 a head on down to them being essentially worthless. So the people that have horses that I know say, If you have three horses in your pasture, you'd better lock your gate because if you don't, you might have five in there tomorrow morning. People are dumping horses, turning them loose on the range. The population of horses are going up because there is not a market to cull those horses out of the herd to manage them. So you end up with hungry, starved horses wandering around; and it takes an act of Congress to deal with the horses because they wouldn't allow the horse owners to manage them. They took the asset value out of horses in a very large way. I did the math on this. I can't go back and memorize the whole formula; but I can tell you the conclusion of it, which would be extra horses are in this country because they have been barred from being sold and sent off for human use. Those numbers of horses, if you figure the half-life of a horse at about 10 years, it accumulates an extra million horses in America, a million horses running around here; and we're going to count them every 2 years, which seems really ridiculous to me. But if you calculate what a horse will eat and how many acres it takes to feed a horse--not everybody can have a horse. They don't have enough acres in order to do that--but it works out to be those extra million horses eat enough feed to consume what can be grown on enough acres that we could, instead, produce a billion gallons of ethanol on the acres that those million horses would be chewing the grass down to the nubbins on.

So it is going to be an interesting debate tomorrow. I think I had better go back and read the bill tonight myself. I find it an incredulous piece of language that has been brought up. I've got myself vetted on--we've done horses. We've done the salt water marsh harvest mouse here, the $16.1

million earmark for the Speaker to take care of her neighbors by San Francisco with these little earmark pet projects.

There is another project here that is a huge project, and that is this new health care plan that has emerged. I came prepared to talk about it a little bit. This big, huge health care plan that--it was too expensive when the first estimates came out, and so the Speaker was critical of the Congressional Budget Office's estimates, and those estimates miraculously were reduced somewhat, we think, because some language got changed in the bill. This $1.5 trillion or so CBO estimate went down to just a little under $1 trillion. Well, now we can afford this. You know, I always thought too, if I want to buy something, if I can get it down below $1 trillion, it's not so bad. It is like buying a loaf of bread. If it's $900-and-some billion, it isn't nearly as bad as $1-plus trillion. So I find out that that CBO estimate, made by the Congressional Budget Office, these professionals that calculate the costs of the legislation, they usually either do it for committee Chairs first and somebody else over months and months, if you can get it done. But the Congressional Budget Office had not read the bill either. We have a score on this massive growth of bureaucracy that takes over one-sixth or one-seventh of our economy, and the costs that are projected from it that come from the nonpartisan, highly professional Congressional Budget Office come out of there not with them reading the bill and analyzing it and a putting formulas in place that can be tracked back, but by being on the telephone with the Democrat committee staff to negotiate down to a number that would be low enough that they think they could fund the bill and sell it. We think that this bill is going to cost two or three or more times higher than the estimate that's there. But the part that hits me the hardest and the most is this piece down here.

Now when you look at this flow chart, all of these that are white are existing bureaucracies. The colored ones are newly created by the bill that are linked in with existing bureaucracies. There is much to be said about each one of these because they are huge and intimidating. But this one here is the one I would ask, Mr. Speaker, that the American people focus on. These are the traditional health insurance plans. They exist. And there's some number I saw the other day, it was around 1,300 different companies selling health insurance in America. That's a lot of competition. Those that survive the insurance czar--I don't know if he actually exists today, but there are 32 of them, and it doesn't take long to create another one--these existing insurance companies that have 70 percent of the people pleased with the health care plan that they have, these qualified health benefit plans would be the plans that are approved by Obama's insurance czar. So we wouldn't have the same competition that we have today, not the same policies we have today. We would only have the policies that are permitted under the bill, policies that would require that they fund abortion, policies that would require mental health, policies that would require little or no deductible and little or no copayment plan because they have to be written in such a way that the newly created government plan, this public health plan over here in the second purple circle, that the government could compete. So what we would have would be all of these private plans here that exist today. When President Obama says, ``If you like your current plan, don't worry. You get to keep it,'' well, you get to keep it for a little while; but if it doesn't exist any longer or if it changes because the government has said that these insurance companies can't write their preferred policy in the way they want, but they have to write it the way the insurance czar says it would be written, or if we subsidize this insurance plan over here, the newly created public health plan, if the government subsidizes that, the premiums will be lower than they will be in the private sector. The premiums won't reflect the risk, but it will push out and crowd out and kill the private insurance market. It's just a fact that that's what happens, Mr. Speaker. I can give the clearest example of how this will and can work. There was a time when people bought flood insurance in this country from a private provider, insurance companies created, in part, for the purposes of that property and casualty insurance. So if your home was flooded, you could be compensated, and you would pay the premium according to the risk. The government decided to get into the flood insurance business. Now they're in the flood insurance business. They sell flood insurance. They actually require you to buy flood insurance in some cases before you can get a mortgage on a property. The flood insurance program that exists now has a couple of unique things about it. First, it has crowded out all of the private sector. As near as I can determine, there is not a single company in America that's selling flood insurance. I asked the question today at a conference, What if I want to start out a company and sell flood insurance to the people that are out there in the lowlands that need that coverage? I asked the question rhetorically; and I got the answer, There is no prohibition towards starting a flood insurance company or an existing company from expanding their services into flood insurance. The prohibition is, the Federal Government is in the business. They have cornered 100 percent of the market. There isn't anybody competing against them, and we know that government can't do anything as efficiently as the private sector can--or hardly anything. So the circumstances are this: The flood insurance account is $18 billion in the red. That's a deficit that comes out of the taxpayers, and that represents how much below the cost of doing business the flood insurance is. That's what government does. So if we can have a viable and relatively healthy flood insurance program in the private sector that existed years ago and the Federal Government comes in and competes directly, like it did with crop insurance too, by the way, they crowd out the private providers, and they put in the government program, and pretty soon there's nobody there but government.

That is what will happen here. And if anybody thinks that the President's promise that if they like their insurance plan, their health care plan, they get to keep it, they just don't lose it the day the bill is signed. And they won't get to make that decision because the insurance company may have to fold up and sack up their bats that day or a month or a year later.

Even those private providers that will last for a while will still have to adjust their premiums accordingly. And when they do that, they won't be able to compete with the federally subsidized plan, and you will see employers that will drop the private carrier here and adopt the public plan here because it will be cheaper.

We saw Walmart take a position this past weekend that they supported an employer-mandated health insurance plan. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean they support this monstrosity here. But is President Obama going to tell Walmart thanks for the support of the concept that he is promoting, but you can't sign up on the public plan because some of your employees might want to keep the policy they have?

The President can't make that promise, and we ought to know it, just like he couldn't promise that he was going to create or save X million jobs. The language about ``saving'' always was the word that let him slip away. You can never prove that somebody saved 3.5 million new jobs unless you get down below 3.5 million existing jobs, then he didn't save the 3.5 million anymore. This is a big crux in this problem.

Also there is a tax that goes on the payroll of 8 percent. I spoke about that earlier. We need to understand what is in here and what this does. It tears asunder the private sector and replaces it with a public sector. It is socialized medicine. It is HillaryCare writ large.

I will be happy to yield to the gentleman from Texas if he is in a position to vent himself a little further in the next 5 minutes.

I thank the gentleman from Texas, and I thank the Speaker for his indulgence this evening and for recognizing us. I just point out that we disagree with the philosophy that is being driven by the White House. We are free-market people that believe in constitutional rights and the spirit of the American people. We will emerge triumphant, however long it takes.

I thank you, Mr. Speaker, 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 11 o'clock and 55 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, July 17, 2009, at 9 a.m.

Madam Speaker, pursuant to the Republican Leadership standards on earmarks, I am submitting the following information regarding earmarks I received as part of H.R. 3183, the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010.

Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King

Bill Number H.R. 3183, the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010

Account: Bureau of Reclamation, Water and Related Resources

Amount: $6,000,000

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Lewis and Clark Regional Water System

Address of Requesting Entity: 401 E. 8th St., Suite 306, Sioux Falls,

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the privilege of being recognized here on the floor of the House. And I would be happy if I could borrow the poster from Mr. Ryan with all of the question marks on it, because I have the one with the Democrats' answers on it. And I think what he has done is perhaps looked at these question marks and created, I'm not sure who actually comes up with these things, and decided that he would produce government solutions for all the question marks that could be produced on the poster that he has delivered here earlier in this hour.

And so I have here something that looks to me like the basis of it, which is HillaryCare, and I believe if I go back to my office in Iowa and I dig through my archives from my construction company that was seeking to thrive during the Clinton administration, I have in there the very poster that was laminated that showed the entire flow chart of HillaryCare which was presented to the American people and rejected by the American people. It has got to be, once I compared the two to the template, for what we have here that is produced off of this bill.

There really aren't question marks with what Republicans want to. We have more ideas than we can agree upon. I will concede that much. We have sought to improve health care, but we fought Democrats every step of the way. Now it is clear that when you look at the differences between the proposals that we have and what it is that they are poised to vote for, here is what will happen. You will hear all kinds of platitudes about how we can't stimulate the economy and grow our way out of this situation that we are in unless magically the solution that arrives is ``let's go to socialized medicine and that is going to fix our economic woes.'' Somehow when I hear that said, I can't connect it, Mr. Speaker.

I'm listening to the dialogue that comes out, and with such great self-confidence it flows. Let me see. I wrote it down. I was listening to Mr. Murphy from Connecticut, and he said, let me see, I see no way to get this economy back on track unless we fix health care. Fixing health care means nationalizing health care. It means turning into socialized medicine. And what goes on, if we look at the flow chart here, is the Health Choices Administration, HCA, just a moment, I will get this back where I can read it too, Mr. Speaker, the Health Choices Administration, HCA sets up a commissioner. There is a health insurance exchange that would presumably broker health insurance through this exchange. It's kind of like where you might trade on the Board of Trade for a commodity like corn oil or beans or gold. And they want to trade traditional health insurance plans that would be in there and then a public health plan matched up against it. Now that is the center piece of this proposal.

And what it really says is that they want to establish a government health insurance program that would compete directly with the private health insurance programs that are out there. And we have hundreds and hundreds of those insurance programs that are out there, and if I remember correctly, the number that I have seen was 1,300 different companies competing in health insurance and the health insurance business. That is a lot of competition. It is not a little competition; it is a lot of competition.

If you believe competition brings out the best in us and the markets that are driven because of the competition and the demand that is there, then you have to know that there are a lot of different models that have been tried, and there may be some good models that weren't marketed very well, and there may be some bad models that were marketed well, and there may be some other alternatives out there.

But this I can guarantee you, Mr. Speaker, if there is a better idea in how to insure health care in the United States of America, it will not come from government. Government doesn't provide solutions. The creativity is not there. And this proposal that comes from the Democrats that was just unleashed on America yesterday has within it a series of presumptions on how they are going to save money on health care.

One, if we listen to the gentlemen that made their presentations here within the last hour, they would tell you they are going to squeeze the profit out, that there are people that are actually making money by providing us the very best health care in the world, and we surely couldn't have that. We couldn't have people that are making money doing this.

I don't know where people get incentive. We have good hearts. We are altruistic people. But it is nice to have a little profit so that you can justify going to work. Otherwise you might just stay home and raise the kids and work in the garden, go fishing, golfing, mow the grass, whatever you do. If you squeeze the profit out, people are going to quit going to work. And that is what they suggest is going to happen. Squeeze the profit out, take it out of whatever might be there for the insurance companies, take whatever might be in the profit for the health care providers, our doctors and our nurses and our administrators and all the people

that work so well in the health care industry--and by the way, let's acknowledge the volunteers, the EMTs that are out there on a daily and nightly basis. They deliver more regularly than the mail does, rain or snow or sleet or hail. Nothing stops them from going out to save people's lives and increase the quality of our life.

But into all of this mix, they propose that we upset the very, the largest and the best health care system in the world. To what purpose? Fix the economy? Mr. Murphy would have you think that because he says that he can't imagine getting our economy back on track unless we fix health care.

Here it is: ``I see no way to get this economy back on track unless we fix health care.'' This is something that was amazing to me, Mr. Speaker. I listened to, at the time, it was Senator Obama, Candidate Obama, arguing to the American people that they should elect him President because he is going to fix all of these things that aren't functioning with government and that the economy will work better if we just simply nationalize our health care plan.

Now, I will concede this point: this Nation spends too high of a percentage of its GDP on health care. It is too high if you compare it to other countries in the world. But it is not too high when you are someone who needs that care, when you have cancer in the family, when you need some emergency heart surgery. We are not a country that waits in line for health care. But the countries that are mentioned here do wait in line. Canadians wait in line for health care. The Europeans wait in line for health care. Those in the United Kingdom wait in line for health care.

One of the gentlemen, I believe it was Mr. Ryan from Ohio, said that people delay getting health care services until they qualify for Medicare, then the cancer spreads and presumably it is a bigger problem. ``The cancer spreads because people wait until they qualify for Medicare'' was what the statement was.

But it is a fact that if one is diagnosed with cancer in the United Kingdom, your life expectancy is, on average, 18 years less than if you are diagnosed with cancer in the United States.

Now I wonder how the gentleman that gave the presentation the last hour would reconcile that, and I will use that, that dirty little secret, about how much better our care is for cancer patients here in the United States and how much longer our life expectancy is than it is in a place like the United Kingdom. Presumably they have a similar health care plan to those in the European Union. And their answer will be, the life expectancy of Canadians and Europeans is 1 or 2 or 3 years longer than the life expectancy of those in the United States.

Well, that is typical liberal logic, Mr. Speaker. They would look at one statistic, and if that statistic could support the argument they want to make, they don't look underneath that to ask the question, why would the life expectancy of a Canadian be longer than the life expectancy of an American by 1 year, I think that data was. I didn't get to see the chart.

The first thing you need to do when you hear some data like that is ask some other questions like why? How could it be if one is diagnosed with cancer and lives to 18 years longer in the United States than if you are under the socialized medicine program of the United Kingdom, then how can you then equate that the life expectancy of someone in the United Kingdom is going to be longer than that of the United States because they have access to health care when that health care supposedly cures their cancer, but they are dying 18 years sooner?

Could it be, Mr. Speaker, that there are other factors involved that reduce the life expectancy here in the United States? How many of us die violently in accidents, for example, compared to those in Canada? How many of us die of addictions like abusing illegal drugs or from alcoholism? What are the ratios of that? How many die of suicide? I wouldn't think that is a situation that's going to be solved by a socialized medicine program, except I'm just willing to bet there's something in the flowchart here to expand the mental health that I might have overlooked in this nasty-looking, modern-day, technicolor, expanded and exploded version of the former Hillary Care.

It is here somewhere, I'm confident, how they would address the mental health situation. And that is an issue, and it is an issue we can certainly talk about how to address. But when you carve all of these things out of the statistics, I'd be willing to take the stand at the life expectancy of Americans who take care of themselves similar to the ways that Canadians take care of themselves is equal to or better than that of Canadians or Europeans.

And otherwise, what is the variable? If they're dying 18 years sooner from cancer in Europe than they do in the United States, then would there be some other illness that counterbalances that? Maybe it's diabetes here in the United States because we may tend to be a little heavier, and I believe we do tend to have diabetes more often. Put those factors into place, but don't just throw a blanket number out here and tell us that you have to upset the best health care system in the world because you've got one data point that you can point to without looking underneath that data point to draw a legitimate conclusion from that data.

This is a typical approach.

Let's see. If I go on, the dirty little secret from Mr. Murphy. There is a secret limit to what insurance will spend on you. You know, I don't know that that exists, and it implies that exists in every health insurance policy in the United States. I expect it exists in some of them. I'm confident it doesn't exist in all of them. But here is the real little dirty secret that is in this bill and this broad, exploded, technicolor floor chart that's built off of the foundation of the former Hillary Care plan that came out in about 1993.

Part of the secret is this. They intend to tax the middle class workers in America and some of the working poor in America--in fact, probably all of the working poor in America--to fund this outrageously high-priced socialized medicine plan. And how will that work, Mr. Speaker? And here's how it will work.

There will be a surcharge, according to this bill, that will be imposed upon the payroll of employees. Now, the employer is asked to pay the tax, 8 percent that would be put upon the payroll. It would be calculated off of the wages of the employer's workers in order to fund the health insurance plan for those employees if the employer doesn't provide the health insurance for them.

Now, to make it simple, they want to tax the employer who doesn't provide health insurance for the employees. Now, that may sound good to people who don't have health insurance. It may sound good to someone who a little begrudges their boss and maybe the lack of generosity on the part of their boss, but here's what happens. And I will just draw this comparison so we can think of it in relative terms.

The Social Security that we pay, the payroll tax that we pay, all of us on our payroll, up to whatever the cap is, is considered by economists to be--even though it's 50-50, and I've many times sat down and done the math formula making out payroll for my own employees. I would multiply .0765. That's half of the payroll tax, and that came out of the employee's side. And then that same .0765, which adds up to 15.3 percent, employer's half came out of my side. I would look at that and I would say, that 7.65 percent out of the employer is something I'm actually paying to the employee. It's the cost of hiring that employee. It's a fixed cost that comes with it.

So regardless of whether I take it out of his check or my check, it's all money that I would be paying that employee if it weren't going to the government. It is a tax on his earned wages, his or her earned wages. And so I've always viewed it that way, as the payroll tax being a tax on the earned wages of the employee and the limiting factor on how much I can afford to pay the employee.

Let's say you can afford to hire someone who will return for you $30 an hour, and if you pay them in total cost of their wages, their overtime wages, the payroll tax, the benefits plan that you have, whether it be health insurance, retirement plan, whatever else it may be, all of those costs--including the lost time that's in transition, the lost time in production in coffee breaks

and all of those things that have to be added in, the inefficiencies are added in. Let's say all of that adds up and it costs you $20 an hour to have this employee hired and you can make $30 an hour off of having that employee. Now, there's a little margin there to work with. And of course you have other factors involved to take that profit to apply to, such as the overall overhead of the company, and the list goes on.

But let's say it costs you $20 an hour to have this employee working for you and he's making $30 an hour, and you can make that work and have a little margin for profit and apply some of that overall margin to your overhead, your own administrative costs, and along comes the government and says, Well, I'm going to tax you $10 an hour for this employee.

Now they've taken entirely all of the cushion that was there and the necessary profit that you have to have to fund other parts of the company from that and the profit that you have to have to build enough capital so you can offer somebody else a job, and government takes it all away. Now, what's an employer to do? I will tell you exactly. He has to lay off the employees that cost him more money than they are making. You can't sustain yourself that way. You can bridge these gaps over time and things go up and down, but over time, this will all be reduced down to can you afford to have the employee or can't you.

And one of the ways that you adjust that affordability is if the Federal Government adds $10 on to the cost of keeping the employee. You have to look at that in terms of, then, if that eats up all that you have to work with, then you have to look at lowering the employee's wages, or more often it happens, you simply don't offer the raises at the same time you might have otherwise. This comes off the backs of the worker.

Democrats want to tax the working poor and the working middle class and the middle and upper class Americans to pay for a health care plan that I believe is completely misguided, that doesn't fix what it's designed to fix and surely will not fix this economy.

We have to know that their approach to the economy is so far off that more of the same is not going to solve the problem. These are a bunch of Keynesian economists here that are in charge of the country today in the White House, in the House of Representatives, and in the Senate, and they believe, like FDR believed, that if you could just borrow enough money and pour it into this economy and replace jobs in the private sector with government jobs in the public sector, that somehow you could stimulate this economy and get the engine or this economic engine running again.

Mr. Speaker, I can find no empirical data out there that consistently supports the idea that we can borrow money from our children's and grandchildren's future, and actually borrow it directly from the Chinese and the Saudis, while we're at it, and dump that money into this economy and stimulate the economy so that it grows.

Back to the 1930s, I thought--and I believe there's been a definitive experiment that's taken place with Keynesian economics, this borrow money and dump it in in government jobs and grow government to compensate for a shrinking that has taken place in the private sector.

And if we go back to Henry Morgenthau, who was the Treasurer for FDR back in the 1930s, he objected and he said, What have we to show for this? We borrowed money. We spent money like nobody has spent it before, and we haven't created any jobs. We have nothing to show for all of the money that we have spent. And he was the believer, he was the mouthpiece for FDR's Keynesian approach to the New Deal. The New Deal that I was taught was a good deal when I went to school--and, of course, I went back and actually studied the data and came to an informed conclusion rather than just simply a cursory statement that reinforced FDR's New Deal program.

The father of this, of course, was John Maynard Keynes, the father of Keynesian economics. And he--throughout those years, he was very influential in the 1920s and 1930s and less so in the 1940s, although America was distracted from economics during that period of time. But Keynes said that he could solve all of the unemployment in America. All we needed to do was go find an abandoned coal mine and go out there and drill a lot of holes down in that abandoned coal mine and fill those holes full of American cash, greenbacks, the dollar, drop cash down into those holes, fill them up again, and then fill the old coal mine up full of garbage--this is his story--and turn the entrepreneurs of America loose to go dig up of the money. It would create all these jobs in digging through the garbage, digging down through the holes, finding the money, keep everybody busy, and the entrepreneurs would find that money eventually--and probably all of it somehow--and it would keep everybody busy and they would all have a job and they would all have money.

And I know that it was a facetious model. I know that he drew that description as, let's just say, a facetious model that would illustrate how ridiculous it can be. I think he began to realize this later on in his career how ridiculous it can be to put government in to make work and to put government into the business of intervening between the private sector. That's what's going on here in America.

But the dirty little secret, to use the phrase used by Mr. Murphy from Connecticut, is not that there is a limit on what an insurance company will provide and that they will shut off their health care. What the dirty secret is, Democrats have committed to taxing the working people in America to fund their trillion-and-a-half or more health insurance plan that is designed to crowd out the private sector insurance companies in America, the hundreds and hundreds of them that are providing such a good job and such a highly professional service. And it comes down to the health insurance exchange and those qualified health benefits plans that exist today competing against a proposed and newly created public health plan that would crowd out our private health insurance here in America as we know it.

We have a model we can look at to learn from this. Otto von Bismarck established a national health care plan in Germany before the turn of-- into the 20th century. My guess is 1898, but I suspect it was actually before that. I know that it's the oldest national health care plan in the world. And then it didn't cost very much because medicine hadn't developed very far. But they do have private health insurance in Germany, but what it is, it's 10 percent of the market. And the national plan, the required plan has crowded out all of the private health insurance in Germany except for about 10 percent. And the people that have that 10 percent are those who are self-employed, that run businesses, that have found a way within their business to go out into the marketplace and buy some health insurance that provides them perhaps a little better care than they get out of the government plan.

So that's what we can expect to happen with the insurance companies here in the United States should the Democrats in this Congress, in the House and in the Senate, and in the White House get their way, Mr. Speaker. We will see these proud, important, independent health insurance underwriters, their companies, these people that are doing this business, this service on Main Street in many small towns in America and across this country, we will see them shrink down, drop off one by one, companies dropping off one by one. Some will go in one fell swoop. But they're looking at almost the death knell of their industry if this socialized medicine plan gets passed by this Congress.

And yes, they will try to find a little niche in the market, but it isn't going to happen in the end. Some will find their way, but they will be narrowed down like they were narrowed down in Germany.

And we won't have the people that are answering the phone at 7 o'clock at night going over to someone's house to sit down and talk through their health insurance plan with them, helping to nurture them and helping inform them as to the situation. It will be a government bureaucrat that punches the clock, and there will be a lineup outside the door. We know how this works in government agencies. There will be a lineup outside the door.

And that bureaucrat will take the appointments at the appointed time, usually. And when it's time for the coffee

break in the middle of the conference, they will get up and go off into the break room. They will have their little coffee break and it will last all of 15 minutes, and when it's time for the lunch hour at noon, the ``closed'' sign goes on, the bureaucrat walks out the door and goes off down to the bistro or wherever to have lunch with his other bureaucrats. He or she shows back up again at 1 minute to 1 o'clock and opens up the door again and starts through this process.

And the American people will not be able to compete. They will not be able to go someplace where they're treated like a real human being customer. They will be treated by a government bureaucrat.

Don't we have 300 million Americans who have experience with bureaucrats? Don't we know what that does to the attitude? Bureaucrats have an attitude. It's the nature of it all. It's because they have a monopoly. People that have a monopoly have an attitude, and whether they're in the private sector or whether they're in the public sector, if it cashes out the same for being nice as opposed to being not so nice, to being the same for providing happy, friendly service, compared to providing that grumpy, reluctant service, we know the result. People like that often gravitate towards the government.

We'll create this great big massive technicolor flowchart of interrelated government agencies. And by the way, the ones in color are the new ones. The ones in white are existing. Medicaid, SCHIP, Medicare, they're existing. Go on down the line, through the private insurers, they're existing. Traditional health insurance plans, they're existing, but they get shoved into the qualified health benefits plan, but they have to write a plan that actually qualifies, too, which takes some of these people out.

These are existing government. Here are the departments: Treasury, Health and Human Services, Veterans Administration, Defense Department, Labor Department, here's Congress, the President. Institute of Medicine exists. There's the National Health Service Corp., they're there. States, all these programs.

And the ones in white are existing. The ones in color are created new. All of those that are in color, that's thousands and thousands and thousands, Mr. Speaker, of new bureaucrats, new bureaucrats who will be handed this monopoly, and they will be in the business of not only taking customers in and writing their insurance plans in the pace that they see fit, because they're government after all--what government office stays open after 5 o'clock on any working day? What government office would ever think of coming in on a national holiday? What government office would take a look at how they're going to retool their service so they could compete with higher competition, so they could expand because they could compete better? They won't do that because they're handed a monopoly, and if they can't compete, then they will be subsidized more by the taxpayers in America.

And we will be trained as a people to line up outside the door, patiently wait our time, take what we can get, not be able to shop around because these qualified health benefits plans that come from our traditional health insurance providers will be squeezed out. And by the way, that squeeze-out that will come will not be an accident; that's the result of people who really didn't think through what they were doing to the American people. It will be the willful, premeditated result of the people who happen to have the gavels in this Congress now and the power in the White House now who believe in socialized medicine.

They want to adopt a policy that's a socialized medicine policy, and they want to kill the private sector because they don't believe in it. They believe that government provides better than individual competition, free markets and people provide, and that's the great divide in our two approaches here, not a chart with question marks on it. Those must be things that were confusing to Mr. Ryan, the chart with all of these new bureaucracies on them.

And I would say, Mr. Speaker, that it's a chilling thought to think that my children and my grandchildren and their children and every generation beyond them might be receiving their health care standing in line in front of a government agent who hangs the closed sign the minute the clock ticks past the appointed hour, regardless of how long the line is.

We're a people that will be conditioned to a lot of things, but standing in line is not one of the things that Americans do well. We have to do that when we get on an airplane now to go through the security at TSA. And I look at that and I watch that, the security line, and sometimes I wonder how do they ever get Americans to stand in line like that. We don't do that. We'll stand in line to get into a ball game. We will stand in line to get into a concert. We'll stand in line to vote. And now we will stand in line to get on an airplane. And if this broad exploded Technicolor Hillarycare expanded plan gets passed by this Congress, you know it will be signed by the President. He wants a bill to sign, and I don't think it matters what's in it. Americans will be standing in line for their health care, not just in the offices to get signed up to be part of the public health plan but lined up in emergency rooms, clinics, hospitals, all across this country or in a queue that doesn't show up so much, not one that you can see that's clearly tangible until you look at the long lists that will be there because it's an inevitable result that socialized medicine produces rationing of care. It's been a fact wherever it's been tried. It's a fact today wherever it exists, and it will become a fact in the United States of America should this program that was unleashed on us yesterday be made law.

Here's another place where they think they're going to save. They're going to save money by rationing care, getting you in a long line. Places like Canada, United Kingdom and Europe, people die when they're in line. There are plenty of examples of that.

I listened to the gentlelady talk about some anomalies that justified to her socialized medicine. Well, they would describe those who die in line in Canada or the United Kingdom or Europe as being just simply anomalies, that somehow the system let them fall through the cracks. The families that lose their members don't think that it is just the system that fell through the cracks. It's a real life, a real loved one.

Someone whose health care is rationed by formulas that are created by bureaucrats, the bureaucrats that will close their door at the appointed time, could be the health choices administration commissioner; could be coming from the bureau of health information; it could be the ``national priorities for performance improvements''.

When I see national priorities, we know that some of the national priorities will be they want to spend less money on certain types of care. That will mean that people will die because they weren't a high enough national priority. They've already got it here in the bureaucracy. National priorities for performance improvements, it says. Well, here's how they want to improve their performance, and by the way, I endorse some of these things as being good ideas. I just don't think that government can run it and make it work.

They want to expand the information technology in their health care. I agree with that. I think we ought to have interconnected health--the health records so that if someone gets sick from my district who happens to be in Speaker Pelosi's district in San Francisco, they can put their health care card into an Internet-connected security database and find out what prescription drugs a person might be on, find out what they've been treated for and be able to save lives accordingly and provide efficiencies accordingly. And I think it could reduce the numbers of those people that are going around and shopping for prescriptions if we had a central database. And I believe that is being developed within the health care industry and not fast enough to suit any of us, I don't think, including the people that are developing it.

But info tech is a good thing, and it can be used in a lot of good ways, and you don't have to have socialized medicine to have information technology.

Second item that they would save money with would be comparative research. Good, we're doing a lot of comparative research. They're earmarking

comparative research. We're earmarking comparative research although you don't see it much because this place has been--this floor, there's not really legitimate debate on this floor because this House has been shut down by the Speaker and the Rules Committee. I have to inject that in. Special Order and 1 minutes is about the only place where you've got an opportunity to have these kind of discussions, Mr. Speaker.

Comparative research is good. The other countries can do a little more research and that would be great. But what happens is we do the research in this country. All of the progress--I put it this way--much of the progress that has been produced by the pharmaceutical companies and the innovations that have come on to the health care markets within the last generation have dramatically transformed the way we provide health care in this country. The research and the development is predominantly paid for by American users of pharmaceuticals, and the beneficiaries of that research are the people in the countries like Canada, United Kingdom and Europe where they do negotiate for a cheaper rate and where here in the United States we're paying too much of that. We can fix that without socialized medicine, and I'd like to see them pay a greater share of the costs of the research and development that goes into making these wonder drugs that we have today that do extend people's lives.

And I would add that those people in those countries that have a longer life expectancy are probably using American research and development pharmaceuticals. They might be made in a foreign country, but a lot of them are produced by the R&D here in the United States, and they're the beneficiaries of it as well.

Third thing they would do to save money on health care is more prevention and wellness. Mr. Speaker, you don't need to socialize the health care system in United States of America in order to have more prevention and wellness. That's something that is emerging. It's emerging in our culture. It's emerging with some of the health insurance providers we have in this country who are packaging up proposals in different ways to provide incentives for the insured to live a healthier lifestyle, to get regular checkups, to go across the scales and watch their weight and, let's say, avoid some of the vices that shorten our life expectancy, and letting that be reflected in the premiums that are being paid.

But I can guarantee you, Mr. Speaker, that this public health plan of the health insurance exchange is not going to have those incentive nuances in there. It's the private sector that's going to produce those things, and we need to encourage them to do that.

So they have borrowed some ideas from the private sector, but the idea that they've borrowed that is the centerpiece of this is the idea of expanding Medicare to reaching across the generations and reflecting the model of socialized medicine that exists in Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe. We could keep going further east I think, Mr. Speaker, and might end up with something that's a little closer to what they're talking about.

So we're a country that has thrived on free enterprise. We need to continue to thrive on free enterprise, and the idea of socialized medicine is an idea that's abhorrent to Americans. The idea of standing in line waiting for a bureaucrat to approve your health insurance premium is also abhorrent to Americans.

I went over and visited Russia earlier this year, and as I traveled around Moscow, Mr. Speaker, I saw something there that was kind of a phenomenon that exists in Russia that I'm afraid might exist in the United States if they pass this socialized medicine. And that is, that if you watch the Russians walk around Moscow--I didn't go much beyond Moscow--so they walk around out there with their shoulders hunched, looking down at the sidewalk. And I see people on the streets of Washington, D.C., do that all the time, but they're looking out for all the cracks and bumps and holes that we have. It's a matter of survival here. Where I come from we look people in the eye when we walk down the sidewalk. We bid them good day, good morning, good afternoon, nice to see you. We're friends and neighbors working together.

And it doesn't happen in that country. They look down and their shoulders are hunched, and they wander around, and if you sit and watch them, they will wander around. You can follow one of those fur coats and a hat, and it will lead you to a line, and they go get in line. They stand there. And then the line moves slowly. And I stood in line for nearly 2 hours, even as a Member of Congress, to walk into their legislature, the Duma, and they knew we were coming. And I see the other Russians standing in line a lot longer than I was. It looks to me like they go find a line and stand in it, and then they get to the front of the line and find out why they're there, do whatever it is, buy their toothpaste or whatever, and then go find another line and stand in it.

It looks like the Russians, to me, are conditioned to go to from line to line, standing in line. It reminds me of that story of where you see someone will go out in the street--it's a comedy routine from back in I think the 1950s or 1960s--and stand on the street in New York City and look up into the sky and just stare into the sky. And someone else would come along and look, and someone else would come along and look. And after a while, there's a whole crowd of people looking up into the sky, and the original person that was looking at nothing, steps back, smiles. Well, he's drawn a crowd by doing that.

Just standing in line in Russia draws a line behind you. It doesn't really--I mean, without regard to what's in front of that--and I know they have to talk to each other and figure out if they're wasting their time. Human nature is human nature.

We're going to create line standers in America, people who capitulate to the system, submit themselves to the system. And I will argue that the health care system we have in the United States, some of the problems we have is because we have too much government and we submit too much to the system, and the individuals who are receiving the health care don't have enough vested interest in, not enough skin in the game, to be able to use their incentives that should be there to do a better job of evaluating the costs.

So what should we do? And I will provide some answers here, Mr. Speaker, on what we should do for health care.

First and foremost, take a look at our health savings accounts. We did that. We put that in place as Republicans, as a Republican majority in the House and in the Senate, and it was signed by President Bush. And who comes out against health savings accounts today? Well, they don't comport very well with socialized medicine, Mr. Speaker. So that's something that's probably going to go.

Probably not going to be in this flow chart here that--I don't see the health savings account. Now I've not read the whole bill, and I don't know that I'm going to put myself through that.

But we passed health savings accounts. And it stands today this way: if you are a young couple at age 20--I do this because round numbers, I can figure--at age 20, and you put in the $5,150 for a couple into a health savings account, tax-free, first year. And then that groove being indexed to inflation grows each year since then. And we're in about year 6, I think we are. Maybe year 5.

You put that money, the maximum amount in the health savings account every year and spend $2,000 out for reasonable health care costs and grow this account at around 4 percent, and when I did the math on this, that made sense. Today, it doesn't quite make sense. It will again.

Grow that at about 4 percent. If that couple would work and put the maximum into their health savings account every year from age 20 to age 65, they arrive at Medicare eligibility with about $950,000 in their health savings account. Now that's a pretty good deal.

But I can tell you what the Democrats in this Congress want to do with that if they get their hands on that money. They want to tax the $950,000 in the health savings account. They'll tax it then, before you can take it out, because you won't really need much of it, if any of it, anymore. Or, they will take it out of you in inheritance tax when you die.

You are not going to be able to avoid Democrats increasing taxes on you. And that's one of those dirty little secrets, is your health savings account will be taxed, by the ideas of Democrats, either when you die or when you try to take the money out when you retire.

Here's what I propose: let's increase that amount. Let's increase that amount to the point where that couple can arrive at age 65 with enough money to buy paid-up Medicare replacement insurance policies, policies that they own. Or maybe a transition policy that they have owned throughout their working lives that's theirs, that is transportable, that can go with them, a policy that they own, and let them transition into a lifetime health insurance plan and be able to use their health savings account to purchase that full up.

That's one thing we should be able to do to give people back some freedom. And I can tell you what it costs today if you wanted to buy a Medicare replacement policy at age 65. The liability--the present value of that liability of Medicare replacement at age 65 is around $72,000 this year. That's about where we are.

So it gives you an idea if that $950,000 were in a 65-year-old couple's health savings account today, they could write a check for $144,000 and buy a paid-up Medicare policy and take the difference-- let's just call that $800,000--and I would want them to have that tax- free and go off and retire, travel the world, will it to their children, buy a new convertible, whatever they want to do, and give them their freedom because they've earned it by being responsible.

But the problem that we have is the Democrat plan takes away the responsibility of the insured, of the individuals in this country, and puts it on somebody else. It puts it on the employer that says regardless whether your employee wants to sit down and market his way through a health insurance plan--his or her--regardless of that, if they don't have health insurance provided by you, then we're going to tax you 8 percent on that payroll. And I said earlier that comes out of the worker. That's wages he is not going to get. The employer has to crank it out of the worker because he is paying all the market can stand on the wages that are there. So, we tax small business, we're going to tax workers.

There was the issue raised of preexisting conditions. We can do some things with preexisting conditions without adopting socialized medicine.

But here's a point that was made by the gentleman from Arizona yesterday, John Shadegg, who is a leader on this health care policy that we have. He said, If you like your health insurance, and over 70 percent of Americans like the health insurance that they have, if you like it, then get ready to lose it, because you will lose it under this Democrat plan.

In this flow chart is the trap that you will be sucked in from here, over here to the public health care plan. And when President Obama says, If you like your health insurance, if you like the plan that you have, don't worry, you get to keep it.

Well, Mr. Speaker, you get to keep it for the first minute that President Obama signs such a bill, and probably the first hour, day, month, maybe even a year. But maybe not. Maybe not. Because most of the health insurance in this company is provided through people's jobs through their employer who brokers it. And there are long, deep reasons for that that I won't go into tonight.

But the President can't say you get to keep your health insurance plan because he doesn't make that call. If the government model, this public health plan here, if that model is financially advantageous for the employer, if the policies that the employer are paying for cost the company more than the policy that's offered by the public insurance plan, an employer will almost always then drop the private-payer health insurance plans, these that are in this circle, which would become the qualified health benefits plans, drop them and adopt the public health plan.

Now how is President Obama going to tell some company they can't do that? And if you don't quite follow this yet, Mr. Speaker, I will put it this way.

Walmart announced last weekend that they are supporting an employer- mandated health insurance plan. They announced that policy over the weekend and I thought, Why would Walmart do that?

I have the press release here. Let's see. I'm going to say this. They would do that because it looks like it would help their bottom line. Here's what they said. The company says it supports the employer mandate because all businesses should share the burden of fixing the health care system. Well, I don't know what the basis is for that statement except that there must be some advantage to this.

So are we to believe that a huge company, a company that I applaud for the business model that they've creatively put together, but are we to believe that a huge company like Walmart that is everywhere would propose and support--an employer-mandated health care system is the language that they used--would Walmart support that and then not adopt the public health plan, because they already have the traditional self- insurance plans provided to 52 percent of their employees? Would they then move into a qualified health benefit plan for all of their employees because of the mandate that they have endorsed, or would they opt into the public health plan option?

Would Walmart still support the President's proposal, which is basically what has been presented here in this Congress? Would they still support it if they had to guarantee they were going to keep the qualified benefits plan? Would they still support it if there was in the bill that they couldn't drop the private provider and could not opt into the public plan, into the government plan, into the socialized medicine plan?

I think not. I think they want the best option of the two. They will fight to preserve that. So will a lot of companies. But I think this is about something that puts pressure on some of their competition that doesn't provide as much health insurance for their employees as Walmart does for theirs. Less responsible employers, some might call that.

But there still remain a lot of uninsured in that group. Some are on Medicaid. That's true for a lot of companies that are more entry-level wages.

I don't take so much issue with that. I just point out that the idea is this: the employees of Walmart won't get to decide that they get to keep the private plan that they have today, the traditional health insurance plan in this white box that will transition into a qualified health benefit plan, most likely, if it does qualify, unless a bureaucrat says it doesn't. They'll write some new rules for that. Those employees won't make that decision. Walmart will make that decision.

So when the President says, If you like the plan you have, don't worry, you get to keep it, in truth, you should worry. John Shadegg is right: if you like your plan, get ready to lose it, because you will lose it. The public plan will crowd out the private plan and everybody will fall under the same category, and we will have health care that is rationed in America. We will have lines, and we will have bureaucrats with their nose in the air making life and death decisions on the health care that will be provided to the American people. It is inevitable. It's resulted in that every time that it's been found.

Now, I draw another comparison. The Canadians are forbidden by law to jump ahead in the line. Now if they didn't have a line, you wouldn't have to have a law that forbids you from jumping ahead in the line and accessing health care.

So when you need a hip replacement--and I have seen the data on this. I actually have to guess, but I believe what I saw for a hip replacement number was 171 days of waiting. Something in that category is pretty close, anyway. I don't know how long you wait in the United States. Not at all, if you're in a hurry. Somebody will get you in. They'll find a way to schedule it. We have that kind of service here in this country.

I talked to an individual in my district a year and a half or so ago who had immigrated to the United States from Germany. And he had had hip surgery over there under their socialized medicine plan, a German; but he didn't get his surgery in Germany. He had to go to Italy to get his hip surgery.

The European Union has queues--longer lines in some places, shorter

lines in another place is--certain times that you get into a line and move closer to the front of the line. I suppose you try to get yourself in as many lines as you can.

But this individual happened to be--I ran into him when he was out picking up some things for home improvement, as I was, and he told me the story about how long he had to wait in line and what he had to do to go from Germany to Italy, get in that line and then get his hip replacement, hip surgery.

Here in the United States you're not going to have a measurable line. You might be able to get in one if you're not in a hurry and get it scheduled for convenience. But if you want that surgery, you're going to get that quickly.

Now, Canadians have an innovative thing. One is it's against the law to jump ahead in line. Those are not enforced equally across the provinces in Canada. So some people with more money, some people with more influence get ahead in the line.

Mr. Speaker, if you have ever had the experience of standing in line--and one of the easy ways to think of this is in the airport. If you're standing in line waiting to try to make a flight and you see one or two or three flight crews arrive late and they go get in line in front of you and they start going through the security--now they're actually pretty efficient at it and I know I want to get them on the planes and get these planes going. The lines would be longer if the crews don't show up.

But I stood in that line and had to back up. And the result is this: when someone gets in line in front of you, you have to back up. The line gets longer. Have you ever stepped in a line and watched the line get longer? You know that it isn't paying your time very well to stand in that line.

Well, the lines get longer in places in Canada and in Europe because you have people who have money and influence and power that get preferential treatment over those who don't have the money, influence and power.

So, in Canada it's resulted in this: some of the employers who offer a good employment package pay the wages and the benefits to their employees, the employees who have full access to the Canadian socialized medicine plan. But also as part of the package, let's just say, for example, if they need heart surgery and you're working in Toronto--just say you're wearing a suit and tie, working in a company in Toronto who puts together a good health care package, a good employment package. Here will be the wages, the vacation time, the retirement benefits. They don't get to say the health care plan for Canadian, but they do get to say, You can opt out and go to the United States.

And in their employment package will be an insurance plan that will put them on a plane in Toronto and fly them to Houston for heart surgery so that they can cut ahead of the line. They don't have to wait.

Now, what kind of a country has a health care plan that we would want to emulate that would have employment packages that fly people all the way across the continent to give them heart surgery quickly because the line is too long in Canada?

And it's worse than this, Mr. Speaker. There are companies that have sprouted up in Canada that turnkey these things. Sometimes within the health insurance plan that's part of the employment, that says, We will opt you out of the country to get you fast health care services to the United States. And sometimes it's someone in Canada who can't wait in line to get the service.

And so there are companies there like tour companies, travel agencies, travel/health care agencies that put together the package. So let's just say that you are in Quebec and you want to go to, let's say, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to get a hip replacement, and the hip replacement line you're in in Canada is long.

Well, the travel/health care agency in Canada that's sprouted up because of entrepreneurs, you can go contact them and they will set it up. They will say, Here, let me see. You arrive at the airport here in Quebec at this time and this is your flight number and here's your ticket. And you can fly down to the Mayo Clinic and here's the hotel that you can go check into. You'll arrive at this time. Transportation to the hotel is a shuttle bus from the airport to the hotel that you'll be staying at.

Here is your examination from the doctor and the surgeons, and they'll do that examination, and later on in the day, or overnight, they'll start the surgery, give you the hip replacement. Here's the package on the rehabilitation therapy. Here is your trip back and your plane ticket back to Quebec. Turnkey. I don't know how long it takes, I'm guessing three to four days turnaround, give you a little therapy, send you back home again. All of that, you write one check to the travel/health care agency that's sprouted up to meet a demand that exists because of the lines and the rationing that necessarily result in government-run plans and always have.

And, Mr. Speaker, I'll go back to 1948 and 1949. I had a World War II vet hand me a stack of Collier's magazines. And he fought in Europe, the Second World War. He'd saved these Collier's magazines all of those years, from 1948 and 1949. Now, 1948 was the year that the United Kingdom established their national health care plan, their socialized medicine.

And in the magazine, each issue of the magazine had a story about the health care that was unfolding in Canada. And you can just range through some of them. I can remember pictures of people lined up outside doctors' offices, nurses that were frazzled, doctors who were speaking into the record quoted saying, I have to see so many more patients now in order to provide enough income because I'm being paid so much less per patient, I have to spend less time with the patient, and I have to run them through and see too many patients an hour. I'm missing diagnoses. I'm not able to treat these patients the way I should be. The relationship between us is so fast that there is no doctor/patient relationship.

People are leaving the health care industry because the stress was turned up and the margins were turned down. And we have a good lot of highly talented people in this country that stepped forward to go into the health care industry, good doctors and nurses and other providers. And they're highly educated. It takes a long time to train a doctor, roughly a decade to turn one out that can start to take charge and teach others. That takes time and money. They need to be paid what it's worth to attract them into the profession and to be able to be on call in the middle of the night and on weekends and all the things that they do. And that isn't going to happen in a country that rations health care and squeezes down the prices, Mr. Speaker.

So, I would just suggest that we should think long and hard before we leap into this abyss. As I listened to the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Murphy), I would suggest that he should know this, if anyone does, and that is, when you turn government loose to do something that the private sector should be doing, Murphy's Law always applies. Murphy's Law, of course, is what can go wrong will go wrong.

The incentives will not be in place to provide the quality of care, the timely service. And we don't have rationing of health care in the United States today. We don't have lines that exist in a measurable way. We don't have long lists on paper of people that are waiting their turn to get their service.

We have the best health care system in the world, and it's getting better, and we can do more with competition. We can do more with addressing the medical malpractice litigation that we have in this country that they don't have to a measurable extent in the other countries. We can do better with health savings accounts. We can do better with bringing in competition. We can allow people to expand their health savings accounts, and we can allow them to have enough money in that they can bargain down a higher co-payment and a higher deductible in order to get a lower premium.

And you roll all of this together. If you give people freedom, if you give them responsibility, if you believe in the free market system and you let the markets do what they will without interference, without the intervention of some fraudulent medical malpractice suits that are driving up these premiums and causing doctors to do tests that are unnecessary, except to protect them from litigation, we can bring this

health care down, and we can see the quality of it go up, and we can also be an inspiration for the rest of the world.

And creating socialized medicine is not a solution for an economic problem. That will make the problem worse, not better. And we are, on one side of us, we are Adam Smith free-marketeers on the Republican side of the aisle. These are the Keynesian economists on the Democrat side of the aisle, those who want to grow government, nationalize eight huge entities in America; that all happened on the watch of President Obama, the nationalization of eight huge entities.

And with that in mind, nationalization, there is no exit strategy there. There will be no exit from socialized medicine, and cap-and-tax will crush this economy as well. We must draw a line. This is it. This is the Rubicon. I'm not going across into the irrevocable policy. And those that do, I believe, will regret it the rest of their life.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your indulgence, and I would yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 20 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, July 16, 2009, at 10 a.m.

I thank the Speaker for recognizing me to address this.

While we have so many stellar experts here on health care, health insurance and on the destiny of America with regard to this large percentage of our gross domestic product, I'd ask for any of you who are willing to stay here and to continue imparting the knowledge base that you have to continue in this seamless transition over into the second hour of the Special Orders here.

It turns out that the Democrats don't have enough confidence to show up here on the floor to defend their position nor to rebut ours, and so I would point out something that I would add into this equation.

That is that, first, we have the most successful health care system in the world, and it has produced the best results in the world. Even though we have a Secretary of Agriculture who, as the lead person on health care, said that Cuba had the model for the world. No, it's the United States of America. She got the right hemisphere, and she was close to the right continent, but it's the United States of America.

I'd point out also that, by the time you reduce down the numbers of the uninsured, that 44-47 million, which is a number that is arguable, and by the time you take out of that those who are illegal and by the time you take out of that those who are in transition between health insurance policies and by the time you just boil it down to the chronically uninsured--and this is according to a study done by two professors at Penn State University that was reproduced by the Heritage Foundation--it comes back to about 4 percent of this population that is chronically uninsured. Yet we would upset the entire system of health care in America to try to reduce that 4 percent number down to--what?-- 3 percent or 2 percent or not even 1 percent in their wildest aspirations.

So, rather than my venting myself completely on the things that I have in my head and heart on this health insurance and health care program, I am looking at a series of established experts.

I would like to yield to the gentleman from Missouri to pick up where he left off before the clock ticked out on that first hour.

I will reclaim my time, and will yield to the gentleman, to the doctor from Georgia.

I am happy to yield, but let me pose a question as you expand upon that thought.

If you are a man, are you better off or, if you are a woman, are you better off if you live in the United Kingdom versus the United States of America when it comes to cancer diagnoses?

If the gentleman will yield, I pose this question: If you are a woman in the United Kingdom, are you worse off than a man in the United States? And vice versa. I will yield.

It is an inappropriate comparison to compare across gender when it comes to cancer because there are different survival rates because of different types of cancer.

Reclaiming my time, I happen to have had a World War II survivor and veteran hand me a whole stack of Collier's magazines that came from 1948 and 1949. It was a fascinating thing to read through the yellowing pages of those magazines where they had gone in and written these--I want to call them cameo articles on the emerging National Health Care Act of the United Kingdom, 1948 and 1949. I remember in the same magazines there was a picture of a GI sitting at the square in Berlin by Otto von Bismarck's victory statue, which was in the background of Obama's speech there when he was in the campaign. He was sitting there among the shattered trees with his helmet off, eating some K rations in that same magazine. So we're back to just post-World War II when the United Kingdom decided that because of the insecurities--and they didn't know if their economy was going to collapse. It had been so burdened because of World War II--that they would provide this National Health Care Act to supposedly fix their economy with the same psychology that President Obama has today. We're in this economic crisis, and magically the crisis that happened after the election brought about the necessity to provide the same solutions they advocated before the crisis. In any case, the United Kingdom, they then established the National Health Care Act. As I read through that, month after month, story after story, cameo appearance after appearance, the same problems that we have today were the problems they had within the first year of establishing that National Health Care Act in the United Kingdom. Long lines, rationed care, doctors and nurses and providers whose compensation had been ratcheted down by the government from the necessity then of increasing their volume to make up for the difference in their compensation. Increasing their volume, yet they spent less time per patient, which meant that they were less able to diagnose and care for their patients, which brought down the quality of the care and the threat of the rationing that came then was manifested very shortly thereafter. I intended to go to the gentleman from Arizona, but I see the gentleman from Michigan has something to add. I yield.

Reclaiming my time, I just would suggest that of all of the 32 czars--do we have a czar that deals with this, the failing czar? What about the failing czar?

I happen to remember that the aftermath of the czars was actually the Marxism that arrived with the Leninism in that period of time and, yes, the commissioners and the lists of those people. Language makes all the difference. But I would like to know how they identify the failing czar or the failing commissioner.

This is a lot of pages of gobbledygook. I will yield to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Shadegg) who can add some clarity to this issue.

Can I reclaim my time before we yield over to Georgia?

I would like to know what that fifth point is. I think I have four down.

Reclaiming my time, I would add that the central philosophy here is the difference between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives: our understanding of human nature and what inspires human nature and the things that fail to inspire human nature. They believe they can create a managed economy, a utopia that's managed by smart liberals on top who are taking care of those people who can't take care of themselves.

We believe that the markets drive the best decisions. It's the difference between free enterprise and central command. And it's a philosophy that's been laid out here from Mr. Shadegg of Arizona.

Driven by the best of human nature.

And I yield to the gentleman from Georgia and then to the gentleman from Louisiana.

Reclaiming my time, I think it's clear that if this bill sits out there over the August break until after Labor Day, they understand the American people will rise up against it.

And I would like to yield to the gentleman from Louisiana.

I'm not ready to endorse that statement that's been made by the gentleman from Missouri.

If I could reclaim my time before I yield back.

I want to point out this 9.5 unemployment rate, it equates into real people. That's 14\1/2\ million that are unemployed; and when you add then to those who are looking for a job that have exhausted their unemployment benefits, you've got another 6.8 or 6.9 million. You round that down to 20 million people looking for a job in America, and that's the stimulus plan.

I yield to the gentleman from Missouri.

Twenty million that are uninsured. By the time you take it down to the chronically uninsured, according to a Penn State study by a couple of professors at Penn State, that's 10.1 million chronically uninsured, and that equates to a little bit less than 4 percent of the population of the United States of America. That's what we've got.

But if the gentleman from Georgia--reclaiming my time, and I would pose the question back to the panel that's here of the experts. This was President Obama's economic development plan. This economic crisis that we're in commands that we establish a socialized medicine program. So the gentleman who's lived for that--or excuse me, the gentleman who's lived with that in Tennessee--the doctor from Tennessee, Dr. Roe, if you could tell us what you learned in Tennessee with the plan that was similar to that that Obama has proposed.

Reclaiming my time from the gentleman from Tennessee, I am watching the gentleman from Michigan reading through his thousand-plus-pages bill here, with his exemplary model of concentration in the middle of all this. I think you could do this under fire.

What have you learned since the last time you imparted some knowledge? And I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.

316 pages.

Reclaiming my time and appreciating the facile information that will, I think, rather than put a person to sleep, cause insomnia if anybody reads this, and I appreciate the effort to do so. It can be a selfless act of intellectual scholarly patriotism to read some of this, but I've heard enough of the gobbledygook that came out of it from Mr. Hoekstra's reading it, the requirement that it be and required to be in plain English catches me a little bit off balance, having heard the language that's in the bill, not having read it.

And I yield to the gentleman from Missouri.

Reclaiming my time, when the gentleman refers to plain English principles, you aren't talking about the United Kingdom principles of a national health care act. You're talking about the things we understand in the language which we refer to as the plain English language that we all should understand, and I would yield back to the gentleman for a response to that clarification.

Reclaiming my time, there's a philosophy here again, this dividing philosophy between the people that are right on the right side of the political spectrum and the people that are wrong on the left side of the political spectrum.

And I remember when the wall went down on November 9, 1989. The Iron Curtain came crashing down, and it came crashing down because free enterprise trumped central planning in the 5-year plan. And the difference is because we're in the business of seeking to enhance and improve the overall annual average productivity of every American. If we do that, our economy thrives, and when our economy thrives, our quality of life goes up in proportion to the way our economy thrives. That's the part of human nature that is at the core of the difference in this philosophy.

And they, the people who don't show up down here to carry on this debate because they cannot carry out this debate in the face of the logic and the plain English that they're faced with, they believe in central planning. They believe they can put together a plan and a model and the inside that will tell everybody what to do at every moment. And there will be a rule written and a law written and some contingency plan for everything that might go wrong, and somehow they can put together the master utopian formula that's going to improve and strengthen--actually, the plan is to strength them politically, not to improve the lives in America so much.

But their idea has failed because they don't believe in human nature being competitive, and they don't believe that there's goodness in the heart of all of us as well as evil in the heart of all of us. We legislate against the evil and we enhance the goodness. They just simply say the reason people don't succeed is because conservatives got in

their way, and that's the cynical approach.

I yield first to the gentleman from Georgia and back to the gentleman from Arizona.

Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman from Georgia, and it references me to the health care providers that have dropped out, gone out of business or failed to expand or diminished their operations because of having to provide free health care to, let me say, free health care to illegals.

And I'm thinking of the gentleman from Arizona, and I think of Arizona whenever I think of losing access to health care because of having to provide free health care to illegals. At a time that I stopped down in an unannounced surprise visit at Sasabe, Arizona, at the port of entry, and there as I was talking to the shift supervisor, whose name I remember and decline to put in the Congressional Record, he got a call on his cell phone. He said, Just a minute. I'm going to take care of something. I'll come back to you.

He took care of it. He came back to me in a few minutes, and he said, Well, you're going to see a Mexican ambulance come across the border, and then I've already called U.S. ambulances to come down and do the handoff, and I've called the dust off to come--he said Life Flight--to come and pick up this patient who has been knifed in a knife fight in Mexico, and this ambulance and their care won't take care of him, so we're going to do that.

So, anyway, I had a medical officer with me and I asked him to look in on this and see what you can do to save this fellow's life, and it turned out to be this. They came across the border. The ambulance had no oxygen in it, no medical equipment in it. It only had a little bit of gauze and a few surgical gloves and that was really it. So the U.S. ambulances showed up, put oxygen on him and triaged him, and we loaded him in the helicopter and flew him off. I went to visit him in the Tucson University Hospital the next day. He survived, and it cost us $30,000.

But it caused me to sit down with the CFO, who told me that it costs them annually an average of $14.5 million to provide health care there for illegals and that Tucson University is the most southerly trauma center in all of Arizona, and that a bus full of illegals had been wrecked near Tucson and in it were 25. Fifteen went into intensive care. Their IC unit was tied up, and so the people from Tucson that paid their premiums were taken up to Phoenix where the family had to drive up there to visit the patient.

That is what I saw. The man that represents a good chunk of Arizona knows it for a fact. I'd be happy to yield to the gentleman, Mr. Shadegg.

Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman from Arizona. I just think about when I listen to you talk, that's--I think--the most inspiring dialog that's flowed out in the last hour and a half or 2 hours.

I think of hundreds of millions of individual Americans who are addressing their own individual health care issues and their health insurance issues, knowing their particular problems, knowing their cash flow, knowing what the options are and making an informed decision, each one individually as an individual or a family, working in conjunction often with an employer who has a series of policies out there that can be offered, that individual intellect that's there, and having faith in the individuals, as compared to an almost one-size- fits-all plan that competes directly against the private sector and takes away that individual initiative and put us down into this thing that they would call safety net of government, which clearly has a lot of holes in it, and has in every government that's tried to produce this plan.

I'd be happy to yield to the gentleman from Tennessee, the one who's illustrated the TennCare issue and also his professional expertise as a doctor.

Reclaiming, I pose this issue here, but it isn't true for all Canadians. And I say this because even though there's a law in Canada that prohibits one from jumping ahead in the line or having a policy or a plan that gives them preferential treatment, they want everybody down at the bottom.

There are provinces that don't enforce it equally. So there are places where people carve out their own special privileges so that those who are better off have an avenue to better health care, even though the law says not. But that's within the Canadians. And let them do it.

But it's what happens in America. I would yield to the gentleman from Michigan. I know you're on the border.

Reclaiming my time, in the brief moment that we have left I want to make the point that if the Canadians were protected by constitutional rights that we have as Americans, they would be protected, because it's cruel and inhuman to ask the Canadians to give up on their access to good health care here in the United States of America.

You can go on the Web site and you can find companies in Canada that have been formed by entrepreneurs that turnkey the package. If you need a hip replacement in Canada, you can find a tour company that will set you up and say, Here's your flight to Seattle or Detroit or wherever it might be, or maybe Houston for heart surgery. Here's the surgeon, here's the hotel, here's the transportation.

Let me conclude by simply saying that this Obama care is cruel and inhuman to Canadians. And I would yield back the balance of my time and thank my colleagues for being here.

Mr. Speaker I appreciate the honor and privilege of addressing you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. As I gather here in my preparation for this discussion, I understood the remarks made by the gentleman from Minnesota that he would be glad if I would, perhaps, address the health insurance and the health care issue here in the country, and I would be glad to do that. And I believe also my friend from Texas would be glad to do that.

What stands out in my mind is this: That the President of the United States campaigned on a promise that he wanted to deliver. It looks to me like a national health care act. It's what I would call socialized medicine. That's what we called it when it was Hillary Care, and I think that's what we will call it if it becomes Obama Care.

But the American people are for the most part very satisfied with their health insurance program, and they are almost completely satisfied with the health care that they get when they do, when they do require that kind of care. The kind of care they get in clinics, the kind of care they get in hospitals, the kind of care that's provided by our doctors and our nurses and our various practitioners is number one in the world.

And, for example, the Canadian people that have an Obama Care plan come to the United States when they really need medical care. And I happen to notice that the people that have a socialized medicine program in the European Union, where sometimes their queue is longer in France than it is in Italy, longer in Germany than it is in Spain. And people that need care might have to move all around the European Union and get in the shorter queue to try to get in to get their hip replacement or their surgery or whatever it might be.

It's not the kind of care that I want to see in the United States of America. We don't have people waiting in line. We don't have people sitting outside the emergency room in a long queue, and we don't have people that are coming to the emergency room for care because it's more convenient to them--unless, of course, somebody else is paying the bill.

Because we have at least the incentive and a component of the free market system. Even though the Federal Government pays for a large share of health care, the reason our health care system in the United States is so good, and the biggest reason that our pharmaceuticals have raced so far ahead in their research and development of the rest of the world, and the reason that we have so much technology, and such high- quality health care, one of those reasons is because of the altruism of the practitioners that are there, they are in the business for the right reason. They want to help people. They want to provide good health care services.

But on top of that, there is at least an incentive for profit. And if you dial that out, if you take it away, it discourages people from going off to med school and discourages them from developing their skills and education, and it discourages the entrepreneurs and the innovators from producing more and more innovation when it comes to health care.

And so the rest of the world's opportunity to benefit from the innovativeness of the United States would be diminished if we adopted socialized medicine here in the United States.

And what are we trying to go fix. I would suggest this: The argument is that there are 44 to 47 million people in America that don't have health insurance. Now, no one should be very alarmed at that when they understand that everyone in America has access to health care. And, yes, it might be in the emergency room and it might not, and it's more often than not covered by somebody else's contribution, or there would be, through their workplace sometimes, or through some kind of government program or Medicare or Medicaid. But they all have access to health care. And a large percentage of us have health insurance.

And the number of 44 to 47 million that are uninsured, according to those who, on this side of the aisle who never come down here to ask me to yield and rebut my arguments, they just simply, apparently, are bewildered by the truth--so I would be happy to yield if any of you have an argument that you would like to make that would add some substance to this argument, but you don't--44 to 47 million uninsured by your numbers. But when you start carving out of that those who are illegally in the United States, if ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, were to deliver a voucher that were to provide for about half of these uninsured, pay for their insurance premium, they will be compelled by law to deport them rather than hand them the voucher check.

So you can cut that number down substantially, you know that to be true. Then if you take out of these 44 million, the numbers of people who are in transition from one health insurance policy to another, and if you take out of that also the young people that just haven't gotten into a program yet because partly because they don't want to pay the premiums for people who have higher health care costs, that 20-to-30, early 30s area, you are down to this number. They are chronically uninsured; according to a recent study, totals about 4 percent of the population.

Now, if we establish socialized medicine, we are going to maybe get covered 99 percent of the population, and we are at this point now where the chronically uninsured are only 4 percent of the population. So why would we upset and completely transform the best health care system in the world to try to narrow down the 4 percent chronically uninsured and maybe, if they would just sign up or participate, we could get them down to 1 percent.

For that 3 percent, we would upset the entire system. It does not make sense to me, and you cannot, you cannot save money in this health care program by turning it all into government unless you ration.

And what's happening now is Medicare is driving down the costs and pushing the costs over on the private carriers. That's the real circumstance.

And I want to also say, Mr. Speaker, to you, I want to make sure the American people hear this.

When President Obama says, don't worry if you like your health insurance program that you have, you get to keep it, he is only the President of the United States. He doesn't get to promise Americans they get to keep their policy. He is setting up and wants to set up a national health care act, a socialized medicine program, an insurance program that competes directly with the private sector.

And when you use taxpayer dollars to subsidize funding directly against the private sector, you necessarily will shrink and outcompete the private sector because it's going to be subsidized from--without the public--the government insurance program, will be subsidized by taxpayers.

And if it is, it can outcompete that of the private sector. It's just a matter of the formula.

And so if you are an insurance company that has to have your costs all added in, your administrative costs added, a margin for the profit, always competing for the best kind of bargain that is out there, which adds to the efficiencies, I will add. And the government comes in, and they say we are going to take you head to head, but we are going to pump in 25 percent of our costs out of the taxpayers here to funnel this in. That means they will be able to lower the premiums down and take these private health insurers out.

I can tell you what happened in Germany. Otto von Bismarck established a national health care plan there more than 100 years ago, sometime in the late 1800s. And today 90 percent of Germans are covered by the public plan, the government plan, the taxpayer subsidized plan. Everybody is required to have a plan, about 99 percent do have a plan. But about 10 percent of them are covered by private insurance. That's all that's left.

They pushed out all of the private carriers except for about 10 percent. That 10 percent are for people who are self-employed who can opt into that, who want a little bit better health care program. That's what's kept that little 10 percent margin there. I don't think 10 percent is a legitimate competition.

And when the government owns and runs everything in the United States, what do you think happens to your prices and your efficiencies and your service? Price goes up, service goes down. Health care gets rationed. President Obama cannot promise the American people that you get to keep your health insurance plan because they are going to drive the health insurance companies out of business.

And even if they don't, the employers who control those policies and the employee providers of health insurance will be making that decision on whether they want to opt into the government plan or whether they want to maintain the same or a different private plan for their employees. Yes, you can weigh in with your employer, you can make a request with your employer, but your employer will have to make a decision on the bottom line. The bottom line will be, is it cheaper to use taxpayer-subsidized health insurance for the employees, or cheaper to provide for the unsubsidized health insurance premiums from the private insurance companies?

That decision will be made on a dollar-per-dollar basis in what looks like it's the best thing for the mid term, short term and long term. And it won't be a decision made by President Obama; it will be a decision made by the employer.

So if the government offers a government plan, and the government plan saves the employer money, and you are an employee that is covered by your employer-provided plan, you can kiss it goodbye. It will be a government plan. It will be a national health care plan. It will be socialized medicine, and you will have one-size-fits-all medicine in the United States of America eventually under President Obama's proposal.

That's a fact. It really is logically irrefutable. No matter how many times they repeat the same mantra over and over again, it comes back to the same conclusion, which is: The American people won't get to decide that they keep their own plan. Employers, if they provide that insurance, will decide. And the government will subsidize the competition to the point where it drives out the private sector providers, and then it's all one-size-fits-all, all one government plan, all socialized medicine, all Canadian model, all United Kingdom model, all European Union model.

And what a cruel thing to do to the Canadians, Mr. Speaker, what a cruel thing.

A good Canadian company today will hire people and promise them this: you have to accept the Canadian one-size-fits-all plan with its rationing and its long lines and its inefficiencies and people waiting in line, dying in line. You have to accept that because it is against the law in Canada to treat somebody without an order of processing. You have to get in the queue. They enforce it differently province to province, but the law exists.

So let's say you need a hip replacement. You get in line with the people who need hip replacements and there is written criteria on what the priorities are. So you are standing in line. No matter how badly you need the hip replacement, you can't cut in front of the line; you are just stuck in that line. So employers, they want to offer a good package to their employees, will package up with this a health insurance plan that flies them out of Canada into the United States so they can get American health care. Now that is a nice plum. Let's say you have two people of such tremendous skill that you

want to hire them because that is what it takes to keep your company. That is what the President thought about Tim Geithner, by the way, who will be before our committee tomorrow, that he was such a valuable person, the fact that he had not paid his taxes was not a large enough factor to weigh against him. If you have those kind of people that you can hire in Canada, you offer them this nice package, which when it is convenient for you, use the Canadian plan. But when you need the health care, we will fly you to Houston and give you heart surgery. Your heart gives you trouble today, we will operate on you tomorrow. Maybe even today if it is early enough in the morning.

That is what happens in Canada: people are flown to the United States of America for their health care because it is rationed in Canada.

Now that is not enough, Mr. Speaker. Would anybody go out and go through the Web sites and the Yellow Pages in Canada and look at the travel companies that package up health care trips to the United States?

Hip replacement is easy to figure out. Let's say you live in British Columbia. No, how about Calgary in Alberta. You have a bad hip, and you finally get into the government doctor and he looks at you and says your socket is burned out, you have to have a hip replacement.

Yes, I stood in hours or days to have you tell me that. I want it fixed.

Well, we have a line over here. Let's say it is 400 long; we do a couple a week. So 52 weeks in a year, about 4 years or so. And I don't know that these are real numbers or hypothetical. But you understand you are in a long queue in Canada. So you understand you can go on the Internet, do a little search and come up with a nice little travel health care company, and there are a number of them in Canada who are in the business of packaging up the health care services.

They will say, you don't want to drive because we will do this surgery in Seattle. We will set this up. We will set up your transportation, fly you down to Seattle, and then here is your transportation.

You can get to the airport?

Yes, I will drive my car.

Park your car here; get on this plane. We will fly you from Calgary down to Seattle, and you can pick up the shuttle to the hotel, the hotel is next to the hospital, check into the hotel, go over to the clinic, the doctor will look you over and schedule you for surgery, which will be the following morning at 8 a.m. You go under the knife. You get your new hip socket. They give you a day and a half of therapy. We will bring you back to the hotel, and from the hotel they will shuttle you back to the airport and you can fly back to Calgary and you can go back home.

All of that for what, turn key. They will cut you a deal turn key so you know what it will cost you to pack it all up from transportation, hotel room, doctors' visits, surgery costs, all of things that you get, including the therapy, the physical therapy on the tail end, and get you back home again, write one check or put it on your credit card. There is a company for you. They are the entrepreneurs that have survived in Canada in the face of socialized medicine because it created a demand for people to come to the United States.

Do we shut that all off? Would we destroy the opportunities for the entrepreneurs in Canada that have so adeptly found and met a market demand? I say, no, we should not do that in this Congress. And I don't know if there is anybody in this Congress who knows that better than Judge, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert). I would be very happy to yield to my friend from Texas.

Will the gentleman briefly yield?

I thank the gentleman from Texas. And I would point out that, yes, Federal law is that a health care provider can't deny health care to illegals in their locale, and because of that there are no trauma centers in southern Arizona south of Tucson. They have all gone broke providing free health care for illegals that are flowing across our border. But it goes beyond that. We are even providing free health care for people who get injured in Mexico and are brought into the United States for free health care services.

And I point this out, it's not something that you see in any of the data that we have here in Congress, you find these things out by doing things like dropping in on a surprise visit down at Sasabe, Arizona, at the point of entry where I stopped a couple of years ago. I went in and I thought I would introduce myself, it was a surprise visit, but I said, I'm Congressman Steve King from Iowa. And the first officer said, I can't talk to you. So I went to the next officer and said, I'm Congressman Steve King from Iowa, just dropped in to see how things are going. Can't talk to you. Talk to Mike over there; he's the shift supervisor, and he's ready to retire and he has terminal cancer. He'll talk to you.

Okay. That much fear in place about simply divulging what's going on.

So I was standing there talking to Mike, whom I pray is still alive and doing well, but I'm not very confident that he is, and as he began to tell me what was going on at Sasabe at the port of entry, some of that discussion about how many illegal ports there are

east and west of their crossing the border, he got a phone call and he said, Excuse me a moment. He went away for a minute or so and he came back and he said, Well, I got a call. There's been an emergency that has been created on the Mexican side of the border in this town where they stage illegals, and it looks like there was a fight there. He didn't know if it was a drug fight or a booze fight or both, but there was an individual that was knifed. So he said they'd be bringing him across the border pretty soon in a Mexican ambulance, and I have called the helicopter to come down from Tucson and U.S. ambulances to come in with oxygen because we can't really stabilize the patient with what's on a Mexican ambulance.

I happened to have a paramedic with me, so I asked him, Mike, will you take a look at this man when he comes? I want you to get in there and help save his life if you can, and I also want to know what's going on.

He went in and went to work. And actually the Mexican ambulance came over the border, and the paramedic with me jumped right to work to try to save the fellow who had been stabbed right underneath the ribcage, into his liver it turned out. There was no oxygen. There was nothing in the Mexican ambulance except a little bit of gauze and some surgical gloves. That was it. Nothing else. No other medical supplies. So it was an ambulance that looked like an ambulance, but on the inside it was just simply an empty chamber.

So he did what he could to stabilize him until the two U.S. ambulances showed up. Then they put him on oxygen. Then they stabilized him. Then we loaded him into the helicopter, and he flew off to Tucson University Hospital. Stabbed in the liver in Mexico, brought into Mexico in a Mexican ambulance, transferred out of that onto the care of two U.S. ambulances, and then put on a Life Flight to go up to Tucson where the next morning I stopped to visit to see how our guy was doing. And, by the way, he was covered with tattoos and all kinds of signs of being a bad hombre, and he'd been in a nasty fight and stabbed with something that looked like it was a knife about 3\1/2\ inches wide, apparently, was the blade and deep enough to go into his liver.

I went to the hospital and asked to visit him. And as I went up there, I found out, and here's a short version of it, the net cost to the American taxpayers was $30,000, roughly, for the helicopter, for the medical care that he got. He was on parole into the United States to get health care, and he would be escorted back to the border when he was stabilized. All of that paid for by American people, American taxpayers, or American health care, health insurance premium payers, out of those pockets.

So I sat down while I was there with the chief financial officer of Tucson University Hospital. And there they rolled out some numbers where their annual cost was, and this is my recollection, around $14.5 million of health care that they provided to illegals. They told of a circumstance where there had been a bus full of illegals that had been in a wreck and about 25 in there that were injured, and 15 of them were so badly injured that they were brought into the intensive care unit. ICU was packed full of 15 illegals. No room for any people in Tucson who had been paying their health insurance premium to provide for that kind of emergency care. So they were Life Flighting the residents of Tucson up to Phoenix to go into the ICU in Phoenix, and then their families had to drive there to visit because the ICU in Tucson was full. And that is the only and the most southerly trauma center in Arizona.

Another situation where there was a mother that was pregnant with multiple babies, five of them. So in order to avoid the high cost of multiple births in Tucson, and she was from Mexico, lived in Mexico, but they found out about this. They had been sending people down there to train the health care providers in Mexico. They trained them on how to deal with a multiple birth, set it all up so they didn't have this high cost of these anchor babies coming into the United States. Five new American citizens created to go on the rolls of the burden to the taxpayers.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to extend the time for the duration.

Mr. Speaker, the multiple births that were to take place in the home country of Mexico where they had sent American health care workers down to train Mexican health care workers, in spite of all of that investment to prevent the extra costs and five new anchor babies, as soon as she got ready to go into labor, she sneaked into the United States and they had her there anyway. That was $125,000 for that little turn.

This is a thing that's going on because of this law, and I wanted to inject that in. We aren't just providing health care for everybody in the United States, legal or illegal. We are also providing it occasionally for people who are injured in other countries and brought into the United States because we have such a good health care system here. And our taxpayers pay for it, our rate payers pay for it, and the people in the communities pay for it.

I yield back to the gentleman from Texas and ask him to carry on with the thought process that I interrupted.

Reclaiming my time, and looking at the list of housekeeping that I have to do, I'd like to conclude this discussion on health care. I would just point out that Judge Gohmert from Texas anticipated the item that was on my mind and flowed into the transparency of the costs of health care. As far as I know, we're the only two people in this Congress that are talking about transparency on health care costs. How this works is this: If Medicare doesn't pay the costs of providing the services, if other providers don't pay or if other insurance companies, like the largest ones, they will drive that down, they'll track Medicare reimbursement rates down. That means that somebody else has to pay the difference. It's like pushing on a balloon one way or the other, and that's the transparency that's necessary.

I keep going back to the hip replacement because that's a simple one to understand. If a hip replacement costs somebody on Medicare-- let's put a number on it just to pull it out of the air. Let's say it costs somebody on Medicare $7,500, and it costs somebody that's going to write a check out of their billfold $10,000, and somebody who is covered by a good private health insurance company maybe is going to cost them $9,000. Why is that? It's because the government has pushed down the reimbursement rates under Medicare; and because of that, the losses have to be made up somewhere else.

I will go another step beyond the complete transparency that Mr. Gohmert calls for, and I will say this: If Bill Gates pulls into a gas station and the sign says $2.49 a gallon, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and the other rich people in the world buy their gas at $2.49 a gallon. The poorest person in the world has a rattle-trap old car, and they went out and scraped together enough money to go buy 10 gallons of gas to put in their rattle-trap car. They are going to pay $2.49 a gallon, sitting at the pump right there with Bill Gates in his Lexus or Mercedes or whatever it might be and Warren Buffett, who probably doesn't drive that nice of a car, actually. Well, why would a gallon of gas be the same price for the poor and the rich but have a hip replacement be different prices for people, depending on whether it's paid for by the taxpayers under Medicare or a private payer who is, let's say, self-insured who has a nice big checkbook and decides not to pay that premium or somebody who has a private health insurance premium? Why three or more different prices? The reason is because the government has pushed down those costs, and they get averaged out through balanced billing and cost shifting from the health care providers. That is one of the root causes of the problems we have with our health providers today. It's kind of like the elephant in the room. Nobody wants to talk about it because it's too hard to fix.

I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Reclaiming my time, and I thank the gentleman from Texas. I say, but, Mr. Speaker, we have a stimulus plan. We have a $787 billion stimulus plan that is going to jump-start this economy and get us out of the doldrums and solve this problem with unemployment and put Americans back to work and get the Dow Jones back up above 8,200 or somewhere and make America feel good again and give confidence in the venture capitalists that are out there and in the markets and in the Dow and in the entrepreneurs.

Well, all of that was part of a stimulus plan. I came down on this floor while that was being debated, and I put up a poster that looks a lot like this. Only it didn't have $16.1 million on it. It had $32 million on it. And it had the quote from President Obama here rather than the quote from Speaker Pelosi. And the quote from President Obama was: ``We are not going to do earmarks. We are not going to do Member- sponsored initiatives. And I'm not going to sign any bill that has earmarks in it.'' Well, it depended on how you counted it. It seems to me that the number of earmarks in that bill came to around 9,000, maybe a little less, 8,500, depending on how you defined the earmarks.

This is a picture of this cute little guy. I don't know if it is a girl or a guy. Do you see how cute he is? He is a pet project. This is Speaker Pelosi's pet project, her pet mouse project. This is the not quite yet infamous--and here is what he is. He is the salt water marsh harvest mouse. Now that is SWMHM for short. This little mouse lives out there in the marsh near San Francisco. And he has been a special project of the Speaker. For years, she has tried to get earmarks for this mouse.

Now, take a close look there. You don't see it, but there is an earmark there. Even though I said that this stimulus plan had an earmark in it for the salt water marsh harvest mouse, everybody that spoke for the Speaker and the people on this side of the aisle said, oh, no, that is radical reactionism. There aren't any earmarks in this bill. And, furthermore, the salt water marsh harvest mouse is not going to be one of those earmarks, because that would be a pet project--a pet project--for the Speaker, and that would be inappropriate given that the President has ordered that there will not be pet projects.

Well, this is what the Speaker said on January 25, 2009. After the beginning of this 111th Congress, she said, I don't want to have legislation that is used as an engine for people to put on things that are not going to do what we are setting out to do, which is to turn this economy around. I have the most to prove with this package. The most to prove. The choices we are making are those that will work, that must work. Our economy requires it. America's families need it. This is urgent.

Well, the mouse family may need it. Maybe it is a good thing, $16.1 million for this little old mouse that couldn't quite rise high enough in the priority scale in any previous process of the United States Congress. But here in the desperate straits of 14\1/2\ million unemployed and another 5.8 or 9 million looking for a job, 20 million people out there who would like to have an opportunity to fend for themselves, we are going to drop not $32 million any longer, it has been carved down, we are going to put $16.1 million into the salt water marsh harvest mouse earmarked in this little pet project. This little pet project is earmarked now for $16.1 million.

All the people over there that said, oh, Steve King is a reactionary and a radical. He is making up things that aren't in the bill. It isn't going to happen. We wouldn't do a thing like that, including the Speaker who has defined that she won't do a thing like that now has $16.1 million going into the marsh for the salt water marsh harvest mouse. His viability--I presume he is doing okay without this earmark. If we need jobs and an economy that works, we don't need to be dumping money into the salt water marsh harvest mouse.

By the way, that is an earmark. It is a pet project. His ears are notched. That is what we do. And that is where the name came from.

I wanted to point that out, Mr. Speaker, while this microphone is still alive here on this day, that this is the day that there was confirmation that the people who pointed this out back then in about this period in time in January or early February were right, and those who defended the Speaker and said it will never happen were wrong; $16.1 million was dropped in to the salt water marsh harvest mouse.

And that should give a person a little bit of pause.

Now I want to put something else into the Record here this evening, and that is you have had a couple of votes this week, one today and one the night before last, that I think are important. On the night before last, we had a vote on a resolution that would place a stone in the Capitol Visitor Center that honors the slaves that contributed to the construction of this Capitol Building. They did do that. They contributed to the construction. We ought to acknowledge that. But, you know, we had the huge room over in the Capitol Visitor Center that was designated as the Great Hall. Now the Great Hall brings to mind the Great Hall in Ellis Island. It would honor all of the immigrants that came to America, those that came voluntarily and those that came involuntarily. And it is an image that is very, very moving when you walk through the Great Hall in Ellis Island. I was very happy to name the room over in the visitor center the Great Hall.

But it had to be changed because of the objections of the Congressional Black Caucus that wanted a higher acknowledgment for slavery in this country. So the Great Hall's name was changed to Emancipation Hall.

Okay. No objection here. Emancipation was a big thing for the world when we put an end to slavery here in the United States. At great cost, however. A resolution to do so was traded off in a quid pro quo, and for those people who didn't go to law school like myself, I have to tell you, there was a deal made. The deal that was made was this: the Architect of the Capitol who has been trying to scrub every reference to faith from anything that's developed from this point forward around this Capitol complex and even refusing to allow when a flag is flown over this Capitol, the certificate that certifies that it was flown, if you want to say, July 10 in the year of our Lord, 2009, he wants to scrub ``the year of our Lord'' out of there because that's a reference to religion. Never mind above the Speaker's seat: it says, In God We Trust. It's been there for a long time, that is our national motto, and the Architect of the Capitol sought to block our national motto from being displayed in the Congressional Visitor Center along with the Pledge of Allegiance.

So in order to require the Architect to recognize our national motto In God We Trust and ``one nation under God'' in our Pledge of Allegiance, there had

to be a quid pro quo, a deal made, that in addition to Emancipation Hall, there would be an extra monument put up to recognize slavery.

All right. I'm fine with recognizing slavery. I would have been an abolitionist if I had been born back in those years prior to the Civil War. It's an article of faith, it's an article of Christian fundamentalism that slavery is a sin against God. And a good thing that happened when this country put an end to it, at great cost in blood. But if it's going to be the kind of devil's bargain that if you're going to have a reference to God in the Congressional Visitor Center you first have to pass another way to recognize slavery, in order to pacify the Congressional Black Caucus, a separatist organization in this Congress, in order to get a reference to God, the quid pro quo was, pass this resolution first and then we'll bring up the resolution that lets you vote on whether there's going to be In God We Trust in our visitor center. That took place today. The vote 2 days ago was 399- 1. I voted ``no'' on the slavery marker because it was making a deal with requiring that to pass before the word God could go up in the Congressional Visitor Center, even though it's a direct replica of what's right behind me above the Speaker's chair right now. That resolution passed tonight with eight Members of Congress voting against putting our national motto up in the visitor center and against putting up the Pledge of Allegiance in the visitor center because there's a reference to God in each one. Eight voted no. Two voted present. Ten couldn't bring themselves to acknowledge that God's a great big part of what formed this country and those words will stand no matter who stands against it.

Mr. Speaker, I thank you for being recognized, 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 11 o'clock and 50 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, July 10, 2009, at 9 a.m.