Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Madam Speaker, it is an honor again to be here on the floor of the House of Representatives to talk about the issues of the day and talk about changes that have happened in our country over the course of the last year due to the leadership of President Obama and the Democratic Congress.

I know in today's world, in today's media-driven world where we like to talk about and have fights about different issues and let those fights kind of permeate society, sometimes it is very difficult for us as leaders in the country to talk directly to our constituents and to the American people about some of the changes that have been put in place.

If we look at just a little over a year ago, in the fall of last year, October of 2008, the difficulties facing our country, on the economic side, the collapse

of the stock market, the collapse of the job market, Wall Street run amuck, no regulations, no rules, fancy packaging of different accounting schemes and creative financial packages that ultimately led our country to one of the greatest crises we have had since the Great Depression. And were it not for the programs that were started during the Great Depression, it would have been the Great Depression. And if it weren't for extraordinary acts on behalf of the Federal Government to support the banking industry, and I remember getting calls from local businesses, local banks, community banks, saying we need to do something, things are collapsing, we had a vote here on the floor to pass billions of dollars worth of aid to the banks and the vote failed and the stock market dropped 800 to 900 points. Subsequently we came back and passed it and took a lot of political heat for it.

Months later, under the leadership of President Obama after he was sworn in, we passed the stimulus package. In January of last year, we had 700,000-plus jobs that were lost in January of last year. And every economist was saying, Presidential candidate McCain's top economist was saying, the top Democratic economist, were all saying there was a $2 trillion to $3 trillion hole in the economy, and we have to fill that hole. And the only entity left to put some money into the economy is the Federal Government. Thus, the stimulus package--which quite frankly I didn't think was big enough. We put the stimulus package in place.

Now let's fast forward a year. Nobody is happy, of course. I represent Youngstown and Warren, Ohio, and they have the worst unemployment rates in the entire State. A lot of that has to do with the manufacturing base and losing manufacturing jobs. But the bottom line is this: in November, we lost thousands of jobs as opposed to 750,000 jobs. And I think in December, the numbers are not completely official, but 70,000 or 80,000 jobs were lost in December. So from 750,000 in the month of January to only losing 80,000 in December-- nobody is happy with that, but we are clearly moving in the right direction.

When you look at the fact that the stock market is up 55 to 60 percent since it bottomed out, we are clearly moving in the right direction.

Now, a lot more has to be done, and I think we have got to make some tremendous investments, but one of the things that is strangling the economy right now is health care costs on businesses and health care costs on families. And so the health care reform proposal is here to say that even if you don't morally believe that we should cover every American, we can all make those arguments from a religious perspective or values arguments or ethical arguments that we maybe need to do that, let's set that aside and let's talk economics and let's talk about the fact that if we do nothing, health care costs will continue to strangle small businesses in the United States, will continue to further increase their grip around the throats of families in the United States, and all we hear when we go back to our districts is about the cost of health care.

This is President Obama's attempt and the attempt of the Democrats to try to fix this problem. By doing absolutely nothing, we are going to see an $1,800 a year increase in the average family of four's health care costs next year, and then another $1,800 the following year and another $2,000, and it will just keep escalating to the point where it eats up the whole family budget and you are paying more and getting less in coverage, really. So it is eating up the whole family budget. There is less money to spend on tuition or go on vacation or increase your family's quality of life, maybe move into a better neighborhood, a better school district. All of these things are not available to families because of the increased cost of health care.

So doing nothing allows that to continue because we are afraid to make tough political decisions. We didn't get elected to come to this body, Madam Speaker, to make the easy decisions. We didn't run just to make sure that we got elected in 2 more years. We got hired by the American people to solve very difficult, very complex problems. And we are attacking those problems because that's the mission that they gave us. We set out to do it with energy, and we set out to do it now with health care reform.

Let me just say finally before I kick it to my friend, who people all across the country now know of because of his heroic works in Haiti, if we do nothing in 10 years, $1 of every $5 in the United States of America will be spent on health care. And in 30 years, $1 of every $3 will be spent on health care in the United States of America. That is unsustainable. That is an unsustainable road for us to go down. People will look 10 years from now and 20 years from now and 30 years from now and they will ask, Who was representing western Pennsylvania when they had a chance to tackle health care reform? Who was representing Connecticut and who was representing northeast Ohio when the bell rang to step up and make these changes?

I yield to my friend from western Pennsylvania.

I would like to say that this just didn't happen. We didn't just end up here a couple of Octobers ago and all of a sudden things just happened. Our government was controlled by a conservative, neoconservative ideology for most of the first decade in this century. From 2000 to 2008 they controlled the White House, and 2000 to 2006 they controlled the Congress. They implemented their economic philosophy, hook, line, and sinker. It got implemented. They controlled all of the levers of government. They passed their supply-side economics. They cut taxes for the wealthiest, saying that will stimulate the economy and everything will take care of itself. Deregulate Wall Street; everyone will be honest with each other, no one would possibly do anything wrong if we are not watching them, and they will behave themselves. They forgot to factor in that people get greedy when you don't watch them, and that is what happened on Wall Street.

So my point on top of what the gentleman just said is this didn't just happen. We had leaders in Washington, D.C., who implemented an extreme ideology. That ideology got implemented here in the United States Congress. It was their ideology that was governing or not governing Wall Street. It was the lack of investments in jobs, education, health care that needed to be made.

And all of a sudden fast forward a few years, the Ponzi scheme ends, the house of cards collapses, and it is not just Wall Street that has problems, it ripples throughout the economy, and now we have in some cities 15, 20 percent unemployment. We have health care costs zooming out of control, energy costs zooming out of control, we continue to be dependent on foreign sources for our energy, which is a national security issue, because these problems weren't addressed.

And the initiatives that we have put forth over the last year have begun to shift the trends at least away from losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month to only losing 80,000, from 700,000 to 80,000. From the stock market ending up at 6,500 a year ago now up to over 10,000, up 55 percent. So things aren't perfect, but they certainly are moving in the right direction.

And if we can get the health care plan implemented, start reducing costs for businesses that they have money to free up to invest into their small businesses, into their capital, into their machinery, into their workforce, into their technology, then I think we can begin to really drive the economy forward and put the middle class back front and center where they belong.

I yield to my friend.

There is no question about it. No question about it. And I think one of the important issues that we need to talk about as a country too, along with the health care and along with a lot of the decisions that our friends on the other side made that put us here, we need to remember this in context not only of the last year, but I think of the last couple of decades. Because the arguments we are hearing today about socialism, and here comes big government and all these other things were the same arguments that they made against President Clinton in his initial budget that he passed in 1993 when he first got in. It was the same claims. And I think they passed it without any Republican votes in the House, and Democrats had to carry the water.

And look what happened in the nineties. And that is what I say even to my Republican friends who we like to tease each other back home in the district. I said how is your 401(k) doing now since President Obama has been in? Is it doing a little better than it was when President Bush was in? I think it was. So you take that number that Bush had, the same thing with President Clinton, 20 million new jobs created in the 1990s because of the Democratic economic proposals. You had the bottom 20 percent of people, their wages grow for the first time in a long, long time prior to that. You saw budget deficits turn into budget surpluses.

What we are trying to say here is there is always going to be a neoconservative Republican extreme faction that is going to say whatever we are doing is somehow going to make the sky fall. But the reality is these are sound economic principles, these are sound investments, sound reforms on health care, energy, and the like.

I yield to my friend.

We've got to make the investments that we have to make as a country. Our infrastructure around the country needs a huge shot in the arm. Trillions of dollars need to be invested in roads and bridges, high-speed rail all across the United States, airports. This all needs to be done. Our ports, waterways, those kinds of investments have been neglected for years and years and years, and we need to continue to make those investments here as well.

We have to ask those people who end up making tremendous profits from those enterprises to step up and help, who have been very successful over the course of the last few years. And I don't think we should run from the fact that we need to ask them. There has been a shift towards the middle class paying more and more of the share of revenue that's coming into the Federal Government. We need to reduce that for the middle class and ask those who are benefiting in a very big way.

I want to make one final point as we begin to close here and have a few minutes left on the issue of energy. I think it is important, as we talk about health care and health care costs, we need to also address the issue of how we are going to produce and generate energy here in the United States. This is our number one national security issue that we have in this country. We send $1 billion a day out of this country through our gas pumps into foreign countries, oil-producing countries who don't like us all that much and cause us tremendous geopolitical strife day in and day out and distract us from what we need to be doing.

We need to make sure that we create an energy system in the United States that takes that money and keeps it here in the United States of America to refurbish our homes, our businesses, our commercial buildings here in the United States, to make sure that we pump that money into battery technology, smart cars, smart grids, energy- efficient homes, energy management systems. This is the future of the United States of America.

Last week, we had a conference here where we met with several CEOs in these energy management systems now working for Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Costco, saving them 20 to 25 percent on their energy costs. Those are savings that companies like those can reinvest back into their business. But if you ask the CIA, you talk to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this is a national security issue. Why would we want to depend on foreign sources of energy to supply our

own military here in the United States? We address our national security issue, we create jobs here in the United States, and we help to address the carbon issue here causing global climate change.

These are the issues that we need to tackle as a country, and we can't be afraid to do it. We can't be afraid, Madam Speaker, to make the tough decisions, to push the tough policies, to make sure that 10, 20, 30 years from now when people look back and say, What did they do in 2010, 2009 in the United States Congress to try to address some of these problems, we can say we answered the call, we made the tough decisions, and the country was better off for it.

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

Mr. Speaker, we're happy again to kick off another edition of the 30-Something Working Group in which we will try to bring some facts and some analysis to the floor of the House of Representatives.

I can't help but get up after having to sit through what our friends on the other side were talking about a little bit. And it's interesting, Mr. Speaker, as we see some of our Republican friends have a very short memory as to what transpired here. And I have been fortunate enough to be here over the last 7 years and was able to watch President Bush with the Republican-controlled House, a Republican- controlled Senate, a Republican Supreme Court, many State legislatures and the State Governors' Mansions were controlled by the Republicans. In Ohio, I know that of course was the fact. Run up huge budget deficits, start wars, cut taxes for the top 1 percent, take their eye off Wall Street, ignore health care, continue to support and subsidize the oil economy, push globalization, not enforce our trade laws--all with a rubber stamp from the Republican Congress.

And then all of a sudden in 2008, 2009 the bottom falls out. Wall Street collapses. We see the stock market collapse, credit locks up. On and on and on. And our friends on the other side act like that just happened by happenstance.

And now, in order to try to address those issues, we have to make some very difficult decisions as a country and come together as a country. And we get people ignoring the previous 8 years, when anybody who is being realistic can see how we got here.

And all we want to do now is have a conversation about how we move forward and how we use this and see this as an opportunity to address some of the major structural changes that we have in the United States of America. And there are two major ones in our economy that have been like an albatross around the necks of small business people all over our country and big businesses all over our country, and that is health care and that is energy.

And so this Congress has stepped up to bat to address two of those major problems without a lick of help from the Republicans, not a lick of help. And at the end of the day, they're going to be on the wrong side of history, like they were for Social Security and Medicare and civil rights and a lot of the other major issues that really gave us things to be proud of in this country.

And so as we move forward with the House bill on health care--and now the Senate is opening up debate and having debate on the health care bill--we are trying to address the concerns of the American people.

And I want everyone, Mr. Speaker, to understand the issues that we have taken up here as a Democratic Congress. And this is all with the understanding that we know that the unemployment rate is too high, there are too many people out of work. There is a lot more work to be done.

But if you look at the previous 8 years prior to President Obama, you will see an administration that completely catered to Wall Street and Big Business in the United States of America, whether it was a trade agreement, whether it was immigration laws, whether it was health care, whether it was energy. You could bet your bottom

dollar that President Bush was on the side of Big Insurance, Big Pharmaceutical, Big Oil, Big Agricultural, right down the line.

And when we came in as Democrats, we began to change that. And all you have to do--and they say you can judge someone by their enemies-- the Democratic Party took on the Big Oil interests. The Democratic Party is taking on the insurance industry. The Democratic Party is the one party getting the banks out of the student loan business. And all of these sweetheart deals that were set over the last 8 years are on their way out the door. And President Obama got stuck with a heck of a mess, there is no question. A heck of a mess.

But in America, we have to live in reality. I know some people on the other side may not necessarily agree with that or like that, which is fine. But we are the majority party, and we have to deal with reality without illusions and deal with the facts that are at hand.

And here are the facts: if we do absolutely nothing with health care, the average family of four next year will have an $1,800 increase, $1,800. And then the following year it will be another $1,800, and the following year it will be another $1,800. That's reality. Everyone is agreeing on that

If we do nothing, human beings, American citizens in this country, will continue to get denied coverage by insurance companies because they have a preexisting condition. That preexisting could be you were involved in a domestic violence situation; that preexisting condition could be infertility, or as we even heard, spousal infertility. You're denied. Diabetes. Cancer. That's if we do nothing. If we do nothing, just in my congressional district in northeast Ohio we will have 1,700 families go bankrupt next year because of health care costs--if we do nothing. And on and on and on right down the line. An inhumane, costly, expensive, inefficient health care system.

And so we chose to take on the big fight. We chose to make a human decision to say this problem needs to be fixed, it needs to be addressed, and we know it's politically risky but we know we're going to do it because there are too many people in the country, Mr. Speaker, who need us to act and not sit on the sidelines where it is safe.

It would have been nice, we could have just said, You know what? We're going to play it safe. We're not going to do anything that's going to upset anybody or get FOX News riled up or Rush Limbaugh or Clear Channel, the right wing talk radios. We're just going to play it safe. But at the end of the day, history would not be very good to us because they would have said, What did they do in Washington, D.C., when this decision, these hard decisions needed to be made 10 years ago?

And our kids and our grandkids would say, Jeez, Mom. Jeez, Dad, you were in Congress during the very difficult time. We needed some big decisions to be made. What did you do when you were there? And you can look proudly at your kids and say to them, I did nothing. I played it safe. I sat on my hands because I wanted to get reelected or I was afraid that Rush Limbaugh would make fun of me.

The reforms that are coming out of this House of Representatives--as I have said when I am back home in Youngstown, Ohio; in Niles, Ohio; in Warren, Ohio; in Ravenna; in Kent and Portage County; Akron--these reforms are for our people, our people who have struggled and fought and got zero wage increases over the last 30 years, who've got to haggle with the insurance company, get denied, get ignored while they're on their death bed, lose their job, lose their pension. That is wrong, Mr. Speaker. Wrong. And we're going to do something about it.

So let's just take what happens when health care reform passes. There will be some time until the exchange gets set up and, you know, whether there's a public option and what it looks like. That may take a couple of years. But immediately what happens is that no longer in America will you get denied coverage because of a preexisting condition. Never again. If you have a child, a son or daughter, who is under the age of 27 years old, they can stay on your health care insurance. So all of those young people in their early and mid-20s who can't get health insurance or can't afford health insurance can stay on their parents' health insurance. That gets implemented immediately.

If you have a health care catastrophe in your family--and being a Member of Congress, we get these calls, and we are out in the public and we meet these people at the fairs, at the festivals, at the bowling alley, at the bingo halls, at the civic events--there will be a cap on how much you can pay out of pocket per year on health care costs so that we can eliminate people in the United States of America going bankrupt because they had a health care catastrophe. And all of our friends on the other side of the aisle who talk about family values and everything else voted against that. Voted against it.

So when you look at the health care reform bill, it is a values issue. It is a family values issue that we need to address. And our budgets and our investments speak to that, speak to our values and what we care about and what we stand for.

And when you look at it, AARP's endorsed it, the American Medical Association's endorsed it, the Catholic Bishops had nothing but good things to say about it. And even the Business Roundtable, the top CEOs in the country, said that the health care reform bill in 2019 will save them $3,000 an employee, $3,000.

Now, you can argue with me, you can argue and call people ``liberal'' and ``socialist'' and pull out all of the names that our friends on the other side have been using for the last 60 or 70 years in their rebuttals to policy initiatives by the Democratic Party, but you can't argue with the Business Roundtable saying that it's going to save them $3,000 per employee.

And aren't we tired of getting calls from small business people telling us about all of the increases, all of the rate increases? And I just got a call the other day from a health care provider talking about this issue and another from a health care business person who said he just got in the mail a 50 percent increase for his business. He had one person out of a couple hundred get sick. Pushed the number up. Next thing you know, he goes from paying $600,000 a year to next year he is going to have to pay a million dollars a year. And he said, Timmy, I may have to shut the doors. I may have to shut the doors. That's what we're trying to prevent.

How can we have any sustained long-term economic growth if we don't take care of the health care issue in this country? If we keep strangling our small business people? And I understand that there may be some small business people that maybe disagree with any extension of the role of government in any area. But there is nothing left to control the massive insurance industry in the United States of America unless we do what the people have always done when we needed to address a big problem in this country, and that is join together through our elected officials who we send to Washington to help us.

We need to ask them to get together and solve this problem, and that is what is happening. And we see the insurance industry and the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, the neoconservatives, continue to be offended. Nobody here wants to hurt anybody. Nobody here wants to destroy America. We are here to help, and we are here to address these problems collectively as a country.

We have people on the other side of the aisle, because Rush Limbaugh says they shouldn't, they won't even work with us. Getting rid of preexisting conditions, letting people be on their parents' insurance until they are 27, limiting how much out-of-pocket you can spend, making sure that they can't knock you off the rolls after you have insurance coverage, these are some basic things that we should all be able to agree upon. Mr. Speaker, we are doing it.

And the same issue happens with energy, to where we send in this country $750 billion a year in wealth out of our country through the gas stations that go to oil-producing countries: a $750 billion wealth transfer right out of our country. And a couple of years ago, Mr. Speaker, we spent about $115 billion out of the Defense Department escorting ExxonMobil and Big Oil ships in and out of the Persian Gulf. So if you do the math, the Persian Gulf oil that ends up in your gas tank should really

be $1.50 more because of the subsidies that the American taxpayer has paid to provide the security of these ships going in and out of the Persian Gulf. Now in addition to that, subsidies for oil companies, tax credits and tax cuts to go and continue to drill, so completely subsidizing Big Oil and the oil economy.

And what Democrats have said is, how do we put together an energy policy that will take some of the $750 billion and instead of letting it go offshore and out of our country, how do we direct it back into the United States, and at the same time reduce CO2 and at the same time resuscitate manufacturing in the United States of America through our windmills, through our solar panels, using natural gas that is here in the United States.

We don't have the kind of oil that some of these other countries do. And why do we prop up these dictators and these royal families who have no concern for our well-being, when we can use the need for energy and make it work for us and put together a system and a national policy that is pro-American.

There is not a bigger, more patriotic piece of legislation in the United States of America's House of Representatives right now than the energy bill that passed this House. What kind of national security plan is it for us to continue to send money that goes to these kingdoms that fund terrorist organizations that don't like us when we could be putting steel workers to work making the 400 tons of steel that go in the windmills or resuscitate manufacturing in the United States of America by making sure that our people manufacture the 8,000 component parts that go into a windmill. To me that makes a good deal of sense.

And both of these issues in the long term are jobs programs. Does anybody have a better idea, Mr. Speaker, on how to stimulate manufacturing in the United States? I can't think of one. We have tried to cut taxes on the top 1 percent and hope something trickles down, and that means they will invest back in America and will create jobs in the United States. That didn't work. It did not work. The Republicans had the House, the Senate, the White House. They implemented the whole George Bush economic policy, and it didn't work. And here we are today.

I know our friends like to be critical of the stimulus bill, but in January we lost 750,000 jobs. Now we are still losing a couple hundred thousand jobs a month, but it is not quite as bad. We are trending in the right direction, and we do need to put together a jobs program. We do need to invest in the transportation and put thousands and thousands of people to work. We need to do that. We need to make those investments. There is no question about it. And we need to get back to a moderate, balanced, prudent, wise, economic policy and tax policy here in the United States.

The old Keynesian economic theory that asked some of the wealthiest people in our country to pay a little more in the good times, cut taxes in the bad times and increase social spending to stimulate the economy and smooth out these rough edges, worked for a long time in this country. It led to the construction of a great middle class, balanced investments in education and transportation and roads and bridges. It is time for us to get back to that.

In the Mahoning Valley in the 17th Congressional District, we are putting together what is a very smart, balanced, economic policy locally where we are making the proper investments and laying the proper groundwork. What we are trying to do locally is to line up with where the national policy and the national trends are going. You had to be sleeping if you can't tell that the world is moving towards green technology, green energy. The hedge funds, the big money people are all moving in that direction. The scientists, the engineers, all moving in that direction. All of the research moving in that direction.

And so there is health care reform and what that will do for our local community, and there is energy. And so we have been fairly fortunate amidst all of the economic problems and the high unemployment, that we are seeing back home seeds that are beginning to sprout, and that once credit loosens up, we will see long-term economic growth.

But we need our national policies, Mr. Speaker, to shape us as a country and push our economy in the right direction. The big decisions that are being made here through the Obama administration are sound. I think we are making some smart long-term decisions, and it will pay off in the long run.

We see it in sports all of the time where you can start a game or start rebuilding your program, whether it is college football or basketball or the NBA or whatever the case may be, where you see a great coach start to implement the plan and you don't necessarily start winning all of the games right away. You saw it with Bill Walsh in San Francisco, and you see it with the Patriots and the Steelers. It doesn't always start off with the Super Bowl. And for the Browns, Mr. Speaker, it has been a rough road, but we are going to get past it. It has been a difficult time to have been a Cleveland Browns fan. But the bottom line here is we are in a rebuilding process. We are laying the groundwork. We are making the fundamental decisions necessary to allow for long-term economic growth.

When you look at health care and 30 million more people that are going to have health insurance, we are going to need docs, we are going to need nurses. There is going to be a total reinvigoration of health care information technology.

Just, for example, I was at the National College a few days ago in Youngstown, Ohio. They have programs primarily in health, health information technology and some business entrepreneur classes. The college opened up with 50 people. It now has 850 kids from Youngstown and Campbell and Struthers and Warren going to this school to learn health information technology.

Now here we have people, young and middle-aged, looking at where the economy is going and what they need to be doing. And so the huge investment in health information technology in the stimulus bill, the investment that we will be making in health care by making sure that everybody is covered and coordinating all of these different systems, is going to be an opportunity for many of these young kids who are doing what we asked them to do: Go to school and get educated and do the right thing, and you will be rewarded.

And so in 10 years, Mr. Speaker, in 2019, 2020, we will look back on these decisions that have been made in this Congress and we will see that we have eliminated a lot of human suffering because of what we have done with the health care system. We will see that we have reined in costs for the insurance companies, and that has allowed small businesses to reinvest back into their own companies and give pay increases to their workers as opposed to covering all of the health care increases. We will see people who believe that a compassionate government can exist to advocate on their behalf.

A lot of people say, I am afraid of the government. It is not the government you need to be afraid of; it is the big insurance company you need to be afraid of. It is the Big Oil companies you need to be afraid of. And we are taking them on. Ten years from now, it is going to be looked back upon as one of the turning points in our Nation's history, like Medicare and like civil rights, and like a lot of the great programs that have been established to help our people. Average Americans are getting represented in this government.

We will look back on our energy policies, and we will see that we have reduced our dependency on foreign oil. We have given people hope. We have reestablished America as an innovative leader in the world, and it will help with health care reform and lift up the middle class because we need to start making things again in the United States. We need to start making things again. And with windmills and wind turbines, these are things we can't ship in from China. We have to make them here. We are, and it is going to put middle class people back to work. So those two major issues are going to unleash the creativity needed, the American spirit needed, the American independence needed.

I am proud of what is happening here. I am proud of what is happening in the United States. I know it is difficult. I know it is tough. I know it is noisy,

Mr. Speaker, but these things are happening for us in the United States. When it is all said and done and that parent goes to get health insurance, or some young person goes to get health insurance, and they call the insurance company, and they have diabetes or cancer, the insurance company cannot deny them.

Their parents are going to say, Did you know there was a day 5 years ago where you would have gotten denied coverage? And 20 or 30 years from now, our kids will say, You've got to be kidding me. That really happened in America? And we look back on the civil rights movement today. Our generation says, You've got to be kidding me. White people and black people weren't allowed to drink out of the same water fountain?

That's how we're going to look back. Did we really, as a country, do that? And it is shameful that that happened in this country. Those are the same exact feelings and sentiments that we are going to have here in the United States years from now. And we will say, Did we really deny people health care? We really had people die because they couldn't afford health care when the treatment was available and the technology was available? We really let that happen?

This is a turning point in our country's history, and I'm proud to be a part of it.

Madam Speaker, it is my great honor to stand before you today in recognition of Technical Sergeant Robert E. Horner. Robert will retire this December after more than 34 years of service to our country.

Robert enlisted with the U.S. Navy in September 1975. He served aboard the USS John F. Kennedy as an Aircraft Bosun Mate in the Atlantic Theater. In October 1979 he transferred to the U.S. Navy Reserve. He continued with the Navy Reserve until he transferred to the Air Force Reserve as a Propulsion Mechanic in 1983, at the 911th Air Force Reserve, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His service to our country continued through the gulf war and the war on terrorism; from 1995 through the present he served as Propulsion Mechanic before moving to the Aerial Spray Maintenance with the 910th Airlift Wing, Youngstown, Ohio. Robert continued his military service even through heart surgery in 1992. His distinguished career is punctuated by over a dozen awards and decorations, including the Meritorious Service Medal, the Air Force Achievement Medal, the Humanitarian Service Medal, and the Military Outstanding Volunteer Service Ribbon.

Robert demonstrates an exemplary commitment to his community even aside from his military service. In 1993 he accepted a commission for the West Farmington Police Department, and served the village of West Farmington for 8 years. In 2002 he was made Police Chief, and he continues at this post today.

Robert's current responsibilities as Technical Sergeant with the 910th Airlift Wing includes supervision of 12 reservists in the maintenance and operation of the Modular Aerial Spray System, the only full-time, fixed-wing aerial spray unit within the Defense Department.

Madam Speaker, Technical Sergeant Robert Horner has dedicated his life to serving his country and his community. In recognition of his many efforts on behalf of the American people, I ask that you and all of my distinguished colleagues join me in commending him for his lifetime of service and dedication.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to try to clear the record here a bit and talk a little bit about our health care reform proposal that passed the House of Representatives a little more than a week ago and talk about the benefits to the American people.

I would like to respond to a couple of the concerns that were made by the other side over the course of the last hour. It's very interesting to me because I was here over the last 7 years and was here during the last part of the Bush administration. I was here 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and watched as our friends on the Republican side cut taxes for the top 1 percent, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, continued to spend money with a reckless disregard for the national debt, for deficits, started two wars, borrowed the money from China to pay for the wars, borrowed money from China to compensate for tax cuts that went to the top 1 percent of the wealthiest Americans. And here we are a couple of years later, and our friends on the other side are concerned about the deficit and the debt.

It was President Bush's appointees to the SEC that gave a blind eye to what was happening on Wall Street. Wall Street collapses, and the $780 billion and $800 billion that we had to spend to stabilize the economy was under President Bush's watch. It wasn't under President Obama's watch. We've spent the last 9 months cleaning up the mess that was made over the last 8 years.

Now, this is not to assess blame. We're all in this boat together. We're all in this together. I recognize that. But you can't cause all these problems, because the Republicans controlled the House, Republicans controlled the Senate, Republicans controlled the White House, Republicans controlled the Supreme Court. They pulled every lever of government, ran up the deficit, ran up the debt, started two wars, blowing money left and right, giving tax cuts to the wealthiest, and then we wonder why we ended up where we are today. No regulation of Wall Street. The economy collapses. Tax revenues go down.

Now, I'm not saying that what we have done over the last 8 or 9 months has been to wave some magic wand and all of these problems have gone away. I represent northeast Ohio. Our unemployment rate is at 15 percent in some of our cities. But we can say very objectively that the money that was spent going to Wall Street, the stimulus package has at least stepped us away from the cliff that we were on--and we were on a cliff ready to fall off as a country--as an economy we have been able to stabilize that.

Now, I'm not happy with what the banks are doing. I don't think anybody is. I think it's important to move more money back to community banks and let's stimulate lending at the local level. That's how we're going to recharge and revive our economy. And that would be the direction that ultimately we need to go in.

But you certainly can see that we were losing jobs at 700,000 a month and now we're still losing jobs, still too many; but it's at 200,000- plus a month. So we're at least trending in the right direction.

But I've got to tell you, Mr. Speaker, I get a real kick out of these fellows on the other side who caused all of these problems and then now complain how we're trying to fix them.

And make no mistake: this discussion about health care, as our friends earlier were talking about, their assumption and presumption was that the health care system is working just fine. It's not costing us a lot of money, not really hurting many people, everyone has access, no rationing today, all of which is not true.

We have health care growing at a 9 percent clip. We have the GDP growing at a 3 percent clip. You continue to do the math, and you'll find out that in 10 years, $1 of every $5 in our economy will be spent on health care. You will find out that if you take that out another couple of decades, 30 years, $1 in every $3 will be spent on health care. That is unsustainable. Unsustainable. And to think if we do nothing, which is basically what the Republican proposal was, to just keep kind of doing what we're doing, it doesn't cover more people, doesn't take care of a lot of the human rights issues that were involved here--if we continue doing what we're doing, the average family in America will pay another $1,800 a year in health care next year and then another $1,800 the following year and another $2,000 the following year. And we will continue down a road where this continues to eat up the whole family budget.

I have a member of my staff who has an Aetna 7-D health care plan. In 2007 his copay was $237 a month. In 2008 it went up 22 percent. In 2009 it went up 9.7 percent. And in 2010 it went up 80 percent. Now, this is a Federal employee; and this is happening all throughout our economy, all throughout our country. So from 2007 to 2010, a 142 percent increase for Gene Crockett from Niles, Ohio.

Now, our friends on the other side: just keep doing what we're doing, things are okay, things are fine, we'll get to it.

This is change. And this is obviously a difficult process, but we are moving forward, and it passed the House in a historic vote here a couple of weeks ago, and we will continue moving in that direction so that the Gene Crocketts of the world and the average people around the country who see this eating up more and more of their budget will get some relief.

I was amazed over the last week I was home when I'd be at a restaurant and people, real quiet, would kind of look at me and say, Thanks for your vote on health care, Congressman. You know, real quiet. And that's how this debate has been in this country. And the polls are bearing it out. The AARP poll that just came out showed significant support for this. Another poll I was just looking at a little bit earlier, significant support for some of these provisions, because we take care of the bread-and-butter issues of the health care situation we have in this country.

If you're a kid or you're 27 years old or younger, if this reform passes, if some of these provisions in the House version stay in, if you're 27 years old or under, you can stay on your parents' insurance. If you have ever been denied insurance coverage because you have some preexisting condition, this reform will end that practice. That will no longer happen to anyone in the United States of America ever again. And our friends on the other side voted against it.

I was getting my hair cut last week and was talking to the owner of the hair salon, and she said, you know, you need to pass this health care reform. We need help. I heard the story about her daughter who just started working with her and the daughter had asthma growing up, went to get insurance, and she had to sign basically an agreement with the insurance company saying that if she goes to the hospital because of asthma that the insurance company will not pay for that hospital visit. So the girl has asthma. She's paying a lot of money a month, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month, to get insurance. And the one thing that she is probably going to need her insurance for the insurance won't cover.

Now, does that make any sense, to continue with a system that takes your

money but will not cover you? That doesn't sound very fair. And that process, that provision, that practice will be eliminated. Done. No more. My friends on the other side voted against that.

Also in the House version, the 27 years old and the preexisting condition provisions happen as the bill is passed; so that will start immediately. The exchange and some other things start in 2013, but those two provisions start immediately. So the American people will see the benefits of that rather quickly.

Another provision in this bill says that there will be limits to the amount of money a person or family can spend a year. In the House bill it was about 12 percent of your income, which is still a lot. So if you make $50,000 or $60,000 a year, if you have a health care catastrophe in your family, after you pay $5,000 or $6,000 out of pocket in health care, you're done paying for the rest of that year. So families in America will no longer go bankrupt because they have a health care catastrophe in their family.

Now, if that is not a human rights issue, I don't know what a human rights issue is. And that is exactly what this bill does. So, no matter what, families in this country will not go bankrupt because of health care situations in their family.

And if you look at my district alone, 17th Congressional District, it stretches from Akron through Kent, Ravenna in Portage County, Warren and Niles in Trumbull County, and Youngstown, Ohio, in Mahoning County, the old Steel Belt. Just last year, in my district, 1,700 families went bankrupt because of health care, 1,700 families. And what this provision will do is eliminate that. That will no longer happen as it happens here today in the United States of America.

So, our friends on the other side are three for three now. They voted against extending insurance to kids or allowing kids to stay on their parents' insurance until they are 27 years old, they voted against that. We said that you can no longer be denied coverage because of a preexisting condition, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, asthma. We put an end to that practice. Republicans on the other side, except for one courageous soldier down in Louisiana, all voted against it. And those two provisions will start immediately upon this bill's going into effect. The limiting of 12 percent of your income that could be paid out of pocket per year on health care expenses, so that we don't have people go bankrupt, passed in the health care reform. Every Republican, save one courageous soldier down in Louisiana, voted against it.

Our friends on the other side were talking about small business, small businesses being affected by this. Eighty-six percent of small businesses will be exempted from this legislation. But they will be able to go in to the health insurance exchange and all of a sudden have a lot more bargaining power than they had before, because they would call their health care folks up and say, what do you got? What's the package? How many employees do you have? Ten, 15, 20. An average increase, or the increase over the last 6 or 7 years, has been about 120 percent increase for small businesses. This allows these small businesses, Mr. Murphy, to go into the exchange, to pool their numbers, to get better negotiating power, more negotiating power and better rates, because of their ability to pool with each other. And that will reduce health care costs for small businesses.

At the end of the day, it's going to be the small business folks who will see this health care reform as a real step into trying to help them control health care costs so they can reinvest back into their company.

I yield to the gentleman from Connecticut.

I appreciate that. The gentleman makes the point that what this is all about is jobs. This is an economic development bill. This is about allowing these businesses to reinvest back into their small businesses. It is not a coincidence that as health care is eating up more and more of the businesses' budget, that wages have been stagnant over the last decade or two because the small business owner does not have the ability to both eat

the increases in health care and give the requisite amount of pay increases to the workers. It's either or.

So over the last decade, it has been all health care, all the time. And sometimes they have passed on a smaller portion of that on to their employees where they are asking for more of a co-pay, higher premiums and the whole nine yards. But now, what we are saying is if we can get these costs under control, those small businesses can reinvest back into technology, back into the new machines, back into the wages, back into the training, back into more benefits and other kinds of benefits, maybe retirement benefits, for their workers instead of being stuck in this cycle of health care, health care, health care, health care and no reinvestment back into the business.

Yes. And it has all been fear-based. One of our colleagues on the other side said the tea baggers are beyond, they're beyond scared; they're terrified now. They are terrified because of the budget. Where were these people when President Bush and the Republican Congress and House and Senate were cutting taxes for millionaires and starting two wars and spending money left and right and running up the deficit? And now they're terrified because we're saying we want to help small businesses, we want to help citizens in the United States be able to afford health care?

We're taking on the insurance industry, Mr. Speaker. What is so difficult about this to understand? They have been ruling the roost in the country for how long? And we're stepping in after an election in 2006 where the American people were fed up, an election in 2008 where President Obama won, and basically, a huge election, and he talked as a centerpiece of his campaign about health care reform. And here we are.

I'm sure our districts aren't that much different, manufacturing, a lot of immigrants came over the last 100, 150 years to our States, and a lot of middle class people, and our people don't get on a bullhorn and scream about their problems that they have in their family. They have a lot of pride, but they just want to muscle through it. But they want an element of fairness in the system. And so they will, as I said, and I don't know if you were here or not, they will grab me at the restaurant and thank me for my vote and say, I hope it passes, or I hope it pulls through.

But they are not going to call Rush Limbaugh and call in and talk about how their daughter is sick and the problems they had and go on and on. But when I stood at the Canfield Fair or, this weekend, going into a restaurant or getting my hair cut, whatever the situation was, they would grab me and they would quietly say, thank you. God, is this going to pass? Is this really going to happen? That's what average people are saying here today.

These situations that go on all across our country, and to turn a blind eye to it, and the Republican proposal doesn't even cover everybody. It was like, here is our proposal. Great. You cover another million people. Boy, that is really going to bring down the pressure on the emergency rooms.

And this is pretty simple. I talked about the reforms. If you make $89,000 a year or less, you are going to get credits, subsidies, to help you pay for your insurance so that family will have more money to spend in other parts of the economy. Instead of health care eating a huge chunk of the economy up, they will have money to pay for their kids' college education, to make investments to buy a new car, to keep the auto industry going, buy a new refrigerator, buy a new house.

Literally, if you think about just an $1,800 increase next year in health care bills, if we get health care costs under control, imagine the amount of money these families and small businesses are going to have to spend in buying durable industrial goods.

It's not just Chris Murphy from Connecticut or me or Nancy Pelosi. Here's from the Business Roundtable. CEOs of the Nation's largest businesses released a report on the impact of health care legislation moving through Congress and that, ``Key components of health care reform could slow the growth of health care costs and offer real savings for companies and their employees.''

According to the Business Roundtable Hewitt study, many of the legislative reforms currently in the health reform bill could reduce costs by as much as $3,000 per employee by 2019. This is the Business Roundtable. This is not the Democrats. This is the CEOs of the Nation's largest businesses.

As you said, CBO, Business Roundtable, this is what we're trying to fix. And when you have the CEOs of the Nation's largest businesses saying that this reform will save us $3,000 per employee by 2019, and you have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of employees, that money is going to go to wages, investments, technology. On and on and on these investments will be made, not sit around and do nothing.

Republicans just came--in the last week, finally, they had a proposal. We've been debating about health care for all this time and they were in control of every major branch of government from 2000 to 2006. Didn't do anything about health care. Now we're coming to try to fix it.

I'd be happy to yield.

Reclaiming my time, litigation has been projected to have only 1 percent effect on the costs of overall health care spending.

Over 10 years.

One percent of cost. And there is no real way to quantify--reclaiming my time--no real way to quantify this number. But when you're talking about billions and billions and billions of dollars, again, that's to my point, is that the Republican plan is to just kind of nibble around the edges and maybe we'll try to do this a little bit here and a little bit there, but at the end of the day here's the reality.

Since we have gotten in office and with President Obama, but before that, we took on the banks and yanked them out of the student loan business because they had a sweetheart deal. As you said, with Medicare part D, where all of this money is going to the pharmaceutical companies, we are reforming that provision as well. Now we're taking on the insurance companies.

With the energy bill, we took on the oil companies, where they're getting subsidies. And just a couple of years ago we spent $115 or $120 billion dollars in escorting ExxonMobil ships in and out of the Middle East so that they would be safe to further supplement and subsidize the oil industry. We took on the oil industry.

Increased minimum wage, increased Pell Grants. We made steps to make investments. But the bottom line is this health care reform bill is about economic development in the United States of America.

Think about it. Just in the 17th Congressional District, 14,000 small businesses will now be better off because they're going to be negotiating with more and other small businesses to try to bring down prices. And 12,300 small businesses in my congressional district will be getting tax credits as an incentive to compensate for this; 43,000 people will now have insurance that didn't have insurance.

We have, in Youngstown, a hospital that just filed bankruptcy. Now all of a sudden every single person that walks through that door will have health insurance instead of that cost being passed on to everyone else.

I can't help but to think about the gentleman that you were just talking about who had to spend through his kid's college fund. If these reforms were in place, that person's amount of out-of-pocket expenditures would be limited to 10 or 12 percent of that family's income. So they wouldn't have had to go into the college fund. Our friends on the other side voted against that.

So we have got to go back to our constituents and defend every vote that we have made here. And that is, to me, significant. The preexisting condition, not being kicked off your insurance because you get sick, being able to stay on your parents' insurance until you're 27 years old, all of those are significant steps in the right direction, not to mention on Medicare part D by extending and having consistent drug coverage throughout the course of the entire year instead of interrupted coverage, which is happening now.

I got a letter from a doctor this summer who was telling me about a patient that he had that met her limit on part D. And I can't remember at this point exactly what the issue was with her, but they had to take her from the drug of choice to a cheaper drug because she couldn't afford it. So, in June or July when she met her cap, they had to switch prescriptions because she couldn't afford the one that he had her on. She ended up getting sick. They switched prescriptions again and again, and she ended up in the hospital for a week or two.

It's the perfect example of why would you not just--how much cheaper would it have been for the taxpayer to consistently pay for those prescriptions throughout the course of the year instead of her going into the hospital for a week or 10 days or 2 weeks and having Medicare pay for that? It just doesn't seem like a very smart investment on behalf of the taxpayer.

The idea here is that this is how this bill will extend Medicare's life an additional 5 years, in part because of cost savings and a variety of others. But we are going to have healthier people going into the Medicare program. Right now we have people that are 55, 60 years old, and we see a lot of them in our communities, the older manufacturing communities. You work until you're 55, you work until you're 60, and then all of a sudden, the company goes bankrupt or they lay you off or they move the factory to Mexico or to China or whatever the case may be.

I have met several of them, have talked to them on telephone town halls. One woman I remember in particular was 60 years old. She did not lose her job, but lost her health care coverage. The company could no longer afford it. So now she is 60. She makes $32,000, $35,000 a year, can't make it, can't afford health care coverage. She said, I'm going to wait until I get on Medicare. So here you have someone who is 60 years old, probably has some issues because everybody at 60 has issues. Now a physician won't manage those problems that she has. She is going to go without any care, any treatment, any kind of management whatsoever. So she is going to go into Medicare at 65 much sicker than she would have went in if she had decent health care where her problems could have been managed and not become chronic to the point where they could cost the Medicare system thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands possibly, depending on what the issue is.

So you have a healthier person going into the Medicare program that's going to extend the life of Medicare. What kind of system is this, 60 years old, you have worked your whole life, and they say, Sorry, you're on your own; we will pick you up at 65. Thanks for everything. You lost your health care. That is not right. That is not right, Mr. Speaker, and that is what this whole program is trying to fix.

The bottom line is this, the Business Roundtable, the top CEOs in the United States, say that our provisions in this bill will save them as much as $3,000 per employee by 2019. The top CEOs in our country are saying that this is going to be the case.

But as we wrap things up here, Mr. Murphy, let's use some good common sense here. We're going to take 30 million people who wait until they get absolutely deathly sick and then go to the emergency room off and out of the emergency room rolls, get them preventive care, solve problems of $20 prescriptions instead of nights in the hospital, and reduce health care costs overall. Eliminate costs for preventive coverage so people in Medicare and others actually get preventive coverage as well.

Help by raising taxes on millionaires and take some of that money to give health care credits and subsidies to middle class people so that they can afford their health care, get preventive care, stay healthier and become more productive. It all makes a great deal of sense. We're saying to parents that your children can stay on your insurance until they're 27 years old. We're saying that you can never be denied insurance coverage because you have a preexisting condition. You can't be kicked off your insurance because you get sick. You can only spend out of pocket 12 percent of your annual income so that you don't go bankrupt like 1,700 families went bankrupt in the 17th Congressional District of Ohio last year.

Extend prescription drug coverage to seniors throughout the year, not any

kind of stoppage in the middle of the year, and make sure that we extend the life of Medicare by 5 more years because of these reforms. This is basic bread-and-butter commonsense reform. This is not the radical kind of reform our friends on the other side want people to believe. It's not what Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and all the scare tactics, ``The government is coming to take you over.''

It's not any of that. It's basic reforms that the American people want. And, lastly, let me just say that people still continue to talk about this being an issue of freedom, and our friends on the other side keep saying that this is about liberty and freedom. You know what, I agree with them. The person that goes bankrupt because they can't afford health care is not free in the United States of America, and the person who pays tons of money into the insurance industry and doesn't get any coverage, that doesn't seem like you're very free. When you're sick and you can't afford a doctor, you are not free.

Let's talk about freedom in 2009 and 2010. It means being healthy, productive, getting what you pay for and being able to support your family and your business. That's freedom. How free is a businessman who has got to pay a 30-percent increase in health care costs every year? It doesn't seem very free to me.

So, Mr. Speaker, we'll continue to talk about this and jobs and other issues that are facing this country. We appreciate the opportunity to be here.

Mr. Speaker, there has been a lot of talk about freedom and liberty over the last couple days in Washington, DC, but the question really is: The person who is sick and can't get health care, are they really free? If you keep getting sick because you can't access a doctor, you can't get better, so you can't go to work, so you can't make money, is that person really free?

In 2009, we need to redefine freedom. Freedom in America in 2009 means being healthy and having access to a health care system that isn't just for the elite, but it's for everybody.

Now, our people are going to get a 15, 20, 30 percent increase. Businesses are going to get a 30 percent increase right now. This is what we're trying to prevent, an $1,800 increase for the average family of four if we do absolutely nothing.

We're going to wake up in a few weeks in America, no more denials because of preexisting conditions; no more people in America or families in America will go bankrupt. We're going to fix this health care crisis that we have in this country.

I thank the gentlelady, and I think that is a perfect articulation of what has happened and why that tomorrow and this weekend has become such a monumental day.

I know our friends on the other side have been trying their best to try to undermine and scare. I just was hanging in my office just answering the phone with people calling in with complete misinformation about what this bill is going to do.

This is very, very simple. When you look at what happened with Medicare, there was a gap in the capitalistic system. Insurance companies couldn't make money off of insuring our grandparents and older parents because there was no money to be made there. So the government had to come in and establish the Medicare program, which I am sure our friends on the other side of the aisle would not want to get rid of right now, and now they are actually sticking up for all the slowing of the growth and all the changes we are making.

But the bottom line is this: We have two issues here. We have an economic issue where health care will bankrupt our country if we do not start reining in the spending. In the next 10 years, one of every five dollars in our economy will be spent on health care. In 30 years, one of every three dollars will be spent.

If we do absolutely nothing, which up until two days ago our Republican friends wanted us to do, but now they know something is going to pass so they have to hurry up and hustle and get some plan together, but if we do absolutely nothing, the average family in our country will pay $1,800 more a year next year in their health care costs. That is if we do nothing. And keep projecting that out, $1,800 the following year, $1,800 the following year. Compounding is a very powerful thing. So we must for economic reasons get our health care house in order, and this bill does it. It reins in the spending for Medicare and makes it stronger and more efficient by closing the doughnut hole.

In addition to that, we have human rights issues that we are dealing with in this country. American people who are sick, who go to the insurance company and get denied coverage, as we heard the other day at our press conference, because of infertility. You get denied coverage. Then the kicker was that spousal infertility was a reason to deny coverage and diabetes and cancer and all of these issues that insurance companies use to deny coverage.

To me, that's a human rights issue; and we cannot, as a country, look ourselves in the mirror anymore as of tomorrow, hopefully, and at the end of this year and not say, Health care is a right in the United States of America. If we all collectively, through investments in NIH and private investments and premiums and money, have come up with ways to make someone healthy, but we, as a society, say, You know what, sorry, you can't afford this one, and just those of us in the club are going to be able to afford it, you can't.

So, you know, you're going to have to get sicker faster, and you are going to have to die earlier than everyone else because you can't afford it. That is unacceptable. I yield to my friend who has been such an instrumental part--I just watched you in the Rules Committee--and continue to defend what we're trying to do here. To explain to the American people how important this is, I yield to my friend from New Jersey.

There are a lot of issues here.

Earlier in the evening, I was watching someone, one of our friends on the other side, in the Rules Committee explain the Republican plan. And one of the questions from one of the committee members was, Does your plan cover everybody? And after dodging that question for quite some time, the answer is no. And then he went on to say that, Well, our plan is incremental.

And that's the slow walk that our friends on the other side want to do here. They want to kill this and go back to the original political memo that was given: How do we kill health care reform? How do we not give Barack Obama a victory on health care? And that's all this is is playing the politics of it and to say, Well, our plan doesn't cover everybody. Our plan doesn't bring down costs. Our plan is not going to reduce costs for small business by allowing them to go in and do all this negotiation.

I mean, think about what our friends on the other side of the aisle are going to vote against when we take this vote in the next couple of days. They're going to vote against everyone in America being protected from being denied insurance because of a preexisting condition. They're going to vote against that. They're going to vote against our saying that no one in America will ever go bankrupt again because of a health catastrophe in their family. Our friends are going to vote against that. Subsidies to help middle class families afford health care, they're going to vote against that. Extending COBRA until the exchange gets set up, they're going to vote against that. Increasing the age to 27 years old so that people can stay on their parents' insurance, they're going to vote against that. And giving small business people an opportunity, instead of swimming with the sharks in the current insurance market, to go in and negotiate with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of other people to drive costs down, they're going to vote against it.

So we are sitting here telling you, Mr. Murphy, here is what we are for: the exchange, competition, choice, the public option, eliminate preexisting conditions, no more bankruptcies, stay on your parents' insurance until you are 27, here are some subsidies, close the doughnut hole on Medicare part D so our seniors can have consistent prescription drug coverage. They are going to vote against it.

We are here saying, this is what we are for, this is what is going to pass, and this is what is going to help the American people. You can call it whatever you want. Our friends like the socialized transportation system we have here when they fly into Reagan Airport and back to their own airports. They like socialized Medicare for their parents. They like socialized public schools. They like socialized roads, socialized ports, and socialized defense. They like all that. But the one thing that is not socialized, they try to label it as being socialized. It doesn't make any sense.

Mr. Speaker, the Republicans controlled this Chamber from 1993 until 2006, they controlled the Presidency until 2008; and now, 11 months into a national health care debate, they are just figuring out that we have a health care crisis in this country. How long will it take them to shake the grip of the insurance industry before they even come up with a realistic plan?

Let's look at what our friends on the other side of the aisle are going to vote against. They're going to vote against us increasing the age to 27 where kids can stay on their parents' insurance. They're going to vote against citizens of the United States not being denied health care coverage because of a preexisting condition. They're going to vote against us saying that no one in America will ever go bankrupt again because of a health care catastrophe in their family. That's what they are going to vote against.

It's very simple: once again the Republican Party is going to be on the wrong side of the vote, on the wrong side of health care reform, and on the wrong side of history.

Madam Speaker, it is with deep sadness that I inform the House of the death of Mr. David W. Troutman of Akron, Ohio.

David (Dave) William Troutman, 67, passed away on October 26, 2009.

Dave was born on February 16, 1942 in Wooster, Ohio to George and Ruth Troutman. Most important to Dave was his beloved family.

He is survived by his lovely wife of 40 years, Janet L. Troutman. He was a loving and devoted father to Michael (Danielle) Troutman and DeAnna (Thomas) Donaldson; a doting grandfather to his precious grandchildren, Luke Donaldson and MacIntyre Troutman. He is also survived by his sisters, Hannah Onderack and Florence (James) Castner through whom his family legacy extends through his nieces and nephews, Alicia, Nicholas, Jennifer, Daniel, Katie, Chelsea, Aleem, and Sufia.

Dave's life was dedicated to serving his community, state and country. His accomplished career in law enforcement spanned over 40 years. He served as a soldier in the U.S. Army Reserve, Summit County Sheriff Deputy for 10 years, Barberton Chief Probation Officer for seven years, Summit County Sheriff for 14 years and finally served as U.S. Marshall for nine years at the request of then President Bill Clinton. From his early years attending high school in Barberton, Ohio and college at Miami (Ohio) University, Dave was committed to serving his community and helping others. Throughout his lifetime, he served in numerous appointed and elected public offices to include Coventry Township Trustee, Coventry Country Parks and Recreation Board Member, Summit County Sheriff, OPOTA Council Member, Ohio Organized Crime Commission Member, Ohio Athletic Commission Member and Kiwanis to name but a few. His leadership role in so many offices was not for public recognition as is typical of so many, but for his belief that he could serve others from such a position and lead others to public service. Because of his generosity and outstanding servitude, an exhaustive list of recognition and awards were bestowed upon him including the Cliff Skeen Award and Sheriff of the Year.

To have known Dave was to know a man of integrity, honesty and service. His love for people and community was shown daily as he always helped others when often no one else would. To say Dave personally touched the lives of thousands would be an understatement. His legacy of service and love for others and his lifelong example of honesty and integrity is priceless and inspiring to so many. How would Dave have us honor such a lifetime of example? By following that example and becoming great through helping others. Dave will be missed, loved and never forgotten. Ohio has truly lost one of its most beloved sons. We love and miss you Dave!

Just to continue on as you were saying, one of the key components of this legislation is to help small business people, and I think in the long term this is going to be part of long-term strategies in the

United States. We are working on the stimulus package and other job- type programs, but if we don't have and put in place long-term, systemic changes to health care, we are going to continue to impede long-term growth in the United States.

What we are saying here is, why are all of these small businesses putting so much of their budgets into health care when that money should be going back into buying new machines, hiring new employees, paying their employees more? It is because the cost of insurance keeps eating up more and more of their budget, so wages have been stagnant. So what we need to do is continue to reinvest back into these companies, and that is what this bill is all about.

Over the course of the last couple of days, we heard our friends on the other side, Mr. Speaker, time and time again continue to talk about we are removing choice. That couldn't be further from the truth. We are trying to increase choice. The idea of the public option is to increase choice.

Our friends on the other side, boy, if it came to a trade agreement, if you would pull up the Congressional Record and you would listen to these folks talk about trade, choice, increased competition, lower prices, it will have all these great effects throughout the market. But now when we say we want to introduce choice into the health insurance reform package, giving more options, maybe even a public option, a Medicare-style option for people to be able to go into and buy into, all of a sudden they are against it, Mr. Murphy. They are against choice.

The fact of the matter is that this bill in the long term has a human rights component to it, as you stated, with eliminating preexisting conditions, making sure that people don't go bankrupt. I think those two in and of themselves would be transformational reforms to the health insurance program.

Our friends yesterday in their long line of speakers, they were all talking about being scared. I think at the end of the day, our friends on the other side are going to be most scared when in November or maybe even early December we have a vote on health care for America, and when they are really going to be scared is when they vote against health insurance reform and they wake up the next morning and they look in the mirror and they say, I just voted against eliminating preexisting conditions; I just voted against having a cap on how much an American can spend per year as a percent of their income so they don't go bankrupt. I voted against it. I voted against subsidies to make sure that people could afford health insurance.

That is not going to be a good holiday season for a lot of folks, waking up realizing they did that. I think it sounds good now to be against this and appeal to the radical fringe of the Republican Party, to appeal to the tea baggers, to appeal to those people who are completely anti-government. It may sound good. It may be comfortable right now to be in that position. But at the end of the day, history will look back and say who was pushing this reform to make health care more affordable and to address these human issues, and there are going to be folks on the wrong side of that.

I love when our friends on the other side, oh, my God, they're going to start rationing care. Like, are you breathing in 2009 and hearing and seeing what's going on with the current private insurance market? It's unbelievable the rationing that's going on. And what we're saying to the insurance companies is no longer will you be able to tell an American citizen you can't cover them because they have a preexisting condition. Now, that is a transformational step in the private insurance markets. But right now we have our friends on the other side of the aisle and across the dome saying that somehow this system is okay.

And you know what? This will be a Democratic bill when it passes, and we're all going to have to live with the consequences. But I will tell you, I'd much rather be in Niles, Ohio, in December telling my constituents that they will never be denied because of a preexisting condition, the 1,600 families that went bankrupt in the 17th Congressional District in Ohio, that that won't happen anymore. That's a pretty good holiday gift, a pretty good Christmas gift for a lot of people in my district. And to go to a small business person and look them dead in the eye and say, You know what? Last year your insurance went up 15 percent and now they're projected to go up another 15 or 20 percent as far as the eye can see. And that's the thing we forget to talk about is this isn't, Oh, my insurance went up 15 percent in the last 5 years. No. It went up 15 percent a year every year for the last 5 years, or whatever the case may be, and the projections are, in 30 years, $1 of every $3 in the United States of America will be spent on health care. Now, to me, we have a responsibility to do something.

And when folks say, well, you're going to bust the budget, we're not going to do anything. The budget is on its way to getting busted. We're trying to fix it. That's what this is all about. And when you have 45 million people a year without health insurance, and the numbers can be disputed, 10 million, 15, 20, 30, 40, we all hear, there are millions of people in the United States of America who go into an emergency room and call that their health care plan. And then you follow in after with your insurance card and you wonder why you're paying $10 for an aspirin. Well, because three people just walked in and didn't pay anything for an aspirin, so you've got to pay for it, and the people with insurance. So those costs get pushed off. That is unsustainable.

Let's get these people in the tent, get them preventative coverage. We can give them a $20 prescription, Mr. Altmire, instead of letting them 2 weeks later show up in the emergency room and spend a week in the hospital costing us $10,000 or $15,000. Now, this is not rocket science, but the trick is taking on the special interests that have controlled this town over the past 8 years and trying to wrestle control away from them and trying to give it back to the American people.

Now, just think about it. Since the Democrats have taken over, we've taken on the oil industry. We've taken

on the banking industry and got them out of the student loan business. Now we're taking on the insurance industry. Whose side are you on? These are the people we're taking on, and the American people, I think, once they hear the story, are on our team, recognizing we're taking on these big interests.

And the idea with Medicare, as well, is now we have in many areas across the country where people are 55 or 60 years old. They lose their job. They don't have health insurance, or they don't have very good health insurance. So I hear a lot from people in northeast Ohio that say, Well, I'm going to wait until I get into Medicare. I'm not going to get anything now. I will get some real basic coverage, if anything at all. I'll wait until I get into Medicare.

So we have people who now basically don't have insurance that are 60 years old and wait years before they go into the Medicare program who end up with very small problems not getting addressed and they become very big problems, and sometimes chronic problems by the time they get into Medicare, which is very, very expensive. But if everybody has health insurance, then you will get the kind of preventative care, the kind of screenings that you need, the kind of preventative treatments that you need to prevent you from going into Medicare and costing a lot more money.

So, overall, when we talk about slowing the rate of growth to Medicare, it's because there will be a healthier consumer, a healthier patient going into the Medicare program, which is going to have significant savings over time.

But that's not brain surgery. That's just a smart way to run it.

I mean, I think that if you would ask somebody to draw up the worst possible health care system for costs and efficiency, they'd say, Well, let's wait until you get really, really, really sick and then you go to the emergency room and get in line with everybody else who waited until they got really, really sick or had a major accident and you get in line with them. That's the worst way to do it. So we're trying to fix that.

Madam Speaker, it is with deep sadness that I inform the House of the death of Mr. Joseph A. Manente of Girard, Ohio.

GIRARD--Joseph A. Manente, 74, died Sunday, Sept. 20, 2009, at St. Elizabeth Health Center in Youngstown.

He was born June 13, 1935, in Girard, a son of Carmen and Gabriella Carson Manente.

He was a veteran of the U.S. Army and a member of St. Rose Church, Girard.

He retired from the Girard Post Office.

He is survived by his wife, Betty Miller Manente; two children, Lisa Manente Leschinsky of Girard and Greg of Hartford; two brothers, Anthony Manente of Austintown and Sam Manente of Mineral Ridge, and three grandchildren.

He was preceded in death by five brothers and sisters.

Calling hours will be from 5 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at McClurkin Funeral Home, Girard.

A Mass of Christian Burial will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday at St. Rose Church with prayers at 10:30 at the funeral home.

Interment will be at Girard City Cemetery.

Madam Speaker, it is with deep sadness that I inform the House of the death of Mr. Michael J. Bonasera of Warren, Ohio.

Michael J. Bonasera Sr. was born April 13, 1915 in Buffington, Pa., the son of Pasquale and Ninfa Danca Bonasera.

Michael was a 1934 graduate of Hickory High School and came to Warren in 1942 from Sharon, Pa., where he had lived since 1920.

He was a veteran of WWII, having served in the Army Transportation Corps., and attaining the rank of Sergeant. His military service included tours of duty in England and the Philippines.

Michael retired in 1980 from American Welding, where he was a machine operator for 32 years. He was an award-winning machinist, and was one of the first machinists to machine parts for jet and rocket engines. He was a great teacher and was able to pass on his vast knowledge to future generations of machinists.

He was a member of St. Mary's Church, and enjoyed traveling, golf, tending to his garden, and music, and had taught accordion lessons for 45 years. Most of all, he enjoyed spending time with his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Survivors include his wife of 67 years, Lena R. Maggiano Bonasera, whom he married Oct. 10, 1942; a daughter, Janet M. (Charles) Richards of Warren; two sons, Michael J. (Susan) Bonasera Jr. of Seattle and Atty. Thomas J. (Julie) Bonasera of Columbus; 14 grandchildren; seven great-grandchildren; and a son-in-law, Dan Matthews of Coos Bay, Ore.

He was preceded in death by a daughter, Mary Lee Matthews; a brother, Charles Bonasera; and his sisters, Constance LaMagro, Grace Ciolfi, Sunda Sebastian, Josephine Roman, Rose Russo and Mary Welch.

Calling hours were yesterday from 4 to 7 p.m. and this morning from 9 to 9:30 a.m. at the Peter Rossi & Son Memorial Chapel.

Burial will be at All Souls Cemetery.

The family requests that memorial contributions be made to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, 26210 Emery Road, Suite 307, Cleveland, OH 44128.

I thank the gentleman. I would like to also thank the ranking member. This is a good conference report. This is a good piece of legislation. I think there are some sound investments in here. I wish some were more, but I think given the stimulus and everything, we are moving in the right direction. We send about $750 billion a year to oil-producing countries. A couple of years ago the Department of Defense spent about $115 billion escorting big oil ships in and out of the Persian Gulf. We have got to get away from our dependency on foreign oil. We have got to get away from our dependency on these foreign countries that get us into all of these political entanglements.

I think the investments that are made here on solar energy ($225 million), biofuels, vehicle technology, hydrogen technology, energy- efficient buildings--for those of us who represent manufacturing States in the Midwest, this green economy is opportunity for us. We have manufacturing. We have great research and development institutions. This is an opportunity for us to revive the middle class in the United States of America through these green jobs. There was a report that was just done for the Midwest Governors meeting that is coming up, and it says, ``Regional Report Endorses Clean-Energy Economy for the Midwest.''

``Midwestern States should use their abundant natural resources and manufacturing base to build an economy based on clean energy.'' And we have the opportunity to do that if we continue investing in research and development, especially coal.

There is one last point that I would like to mention. I hope that next year we can continue to push these energy hubs. Secretary Chu has made this a top priority. They're modeled after the old Bell Laboratories. A variety of different universities are going to be involved in the research. They're going to be able to collaborate and focus on the technologies that are working, not focusing on just getting money so you can have a budget for next year. So I hope as we continue to move, we continue to push, these energy hubs are going to be nothing but opportunity for us to get into the commercialization and continue to create jobs.

Again, this is a good piece of legislation. I want to thank the chairman. I would also like to thank the staff. I know a lot of work went into it.

I thank you, Mr. Speaker. This is our traditional 30-something hour. We will be talking about health care and try to rebut some of the claims that have been made earlier here tonight. But before we do this, we have had several situations going on in the Pacific, and we wanted to yield as much time as the gentlelady from Guam may consume to talk about the circumstances that are going on in her district.

I gladly yield to Ms. Bordallo.

Tsunami in American Samoa

Mr. Speaker, we also have the Representative here from the Northern Mariana Islands, Mr. Sablan.

I yield to the gentleman.

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman and extend the condolences from the people of my district in Ohio and the rest of the House. Tsunamis and hurricanes and all of the natural disasters that we watch on TV, I think it's important that the Representatives come here today and share with us kind of the human side of it, and we realize that these are human beings that have been hurt and families that have been displaced. And we want to just extend our condolences to the gentleman and the gentlewoman and also the gentleman who couldn't make it here from American Samoa.

Our hour tonight, Mr. Speaker, what is left of the hour, is to talk about an issue that is pressing for the country. It has been the topic of conversation here in the United States Congress for several months. It's been a topic in the country for decades going back to Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, upward and onward to Truman and Johnson and as of late, in recent history, President Clinton in the early 1990s and now President Obama to try to deal with the situation of health care in the United States of America.

This is an issue that we hear as elected Representatives day in and day out where we get letters from constituents who have problems with the insurance industry, who have been hurt, displaced, not covered. The coverage that they have doesn't necessarily work.

I think this whole debate breaks down into two separate categories. There's the financial aspect of health care reform and bending the cost curve and making sure that our country doesn't go belly up because we keep going down the same road and we don't muster up the courage to have change. And then the other track is the social justice track, the idea that the way that human beings, the way that American citizens are now getting treated by insurance companies is unfair, not right, cruel, and something that needs to stop.

So collectively as a country in the past election, the country overwhelmingly voted for change, and they overwhelmingly voted for health care change. And one of the major planks in President Obama's platform was health care, health care reform, bringing some justice to the system, and helping to bend the cost curve in the system.

I think everybody recognizes the social justice side. I think everyone has heard stories. It has happened to them. It has happened to family members. It may happen to somebody that they know where someone is denied coverage because they have a preexisting condition or a family goes bankrupt because of a health care catastrophe in their family.

And what this reform does is it eliminates those two major problems that we have in our health care system, where we are collectively as a country saying it is not right for a human being, a United States citizen to have to file for bankruptcy because they got sick or someone in their immediate family got sick. Now, I hope we can all agree upon that.

When some of our friends on the other side talk about liberty and freedom and they cue up the patriotic music to try to destroy health care reform in the United States, I would like to ask the question, How free is the person that just had to file bankruptcy because they got sick? How liberated is the person who has to file bankruptcy because they got sick? Is that their idea of freedom, Mr. Speaker? Is that the TEA baggers' idea of liberty, Mr. Speaker? I don't believe that it is. But that is the great debate we are having in this country.

There are people in this country who will end up on one side of that fence or the other. And the side that President Obama and the Democrats have been pushing is to say that when you go bankrupt because you got sick or someone in your family got sick, you are less free. You have fewer options.

There are others who are trying to kill health care reform, who say if you go bankrupt, tough luck. We'd rather have the concept of liberty, the concept of freedom.

But our job when we come to Washington and make laws and reforms is to actually take these ideas that the Founding Fathers have given us that are written all over these buildings, all over Washington, D.C., in State capitals all over the country, and that our kids read about in the history books and on the computer that when they are implemented, those definitions mean something. And this health care reform will make American citizens more free. It will allow them more opportunity, more options. It's bad enough you've got to deal with being sick and you're sick enough that you have to spend so much money that you go bankrupt; then you've got to be bankrupt, which is not a pretty process. It strangles your ability to be free.

So I have to laugh, if it wasn't so sad, when we hear about people in this debate talk about liberty and freedom. You're doggone right it is. And we are trying to enhance liberty, enhance freedom, actually make it work for people. In my congressional district, if we do nothing, we will have 1,600 families go bankrupt because of health care concerns, 1,600 just in my district.

Half of the bankruptcies in the United States of America are because of health care issues. Now, to me that doesn't sound like the principal of freedom. And we're going to fix it.

The same with preexisting conditions. So you're in a job and you have health care and you or your spouse has some kind of condition that you know if you get out of the current pool that you're in, you're going to end up in the shark tank, basically, right now and you're not going to be able to get health care coverage. So you want to start a business or you want to go somewhere else where maybe you could make more money or you could express more of your talent, more of your ability. You could grow. You could learn new things and maybe provide more for your family. But you don't do it because you know if you leave your job that you won't be able to get health insurance.

Now, I ask my friends who talk about freedom and liberty, is that person more free? Is that person liberated to pursue happiness? I don't think they are.

So I will have the debate all day long, Mr. Speaker, with the TEA bag groups and the TEA baggers and everybody else who wants to have this debate about freedom and liberty because this reform bill and the insurance reform components of this are about increasing people's freedom. It's about protecting them in a market in which they need some consumer protections in order for them not to be strangled, not to be strapped, not to be forced to go bankrupt.

I yield to my friend from right across the border in Pennsylvania.

If the gentleman would yield. The issue coming from the other side is interesting, because just a couple of years ago, our friends had control of the entire government. They had control of the House, and they had control of the Senate. Your class came in, and we had a great year. But prior to 2006, there were 6 years that President Bush, the Senate and the House were all Republican. They could have implemented some kind of health care reform. It didn't have to be necessarily what we are doing, but really, not to do anything to try to bring some justice to the system and, in the process, spend $2.5 trillion over 10 years on the Bush tax cuts that went to primarily the top 1 percent of the people in the country.

Now we're talking about a bill here that is deficit neutral, that will be paid for, that is $900 billion over 10 years, a little more than a third of what they spent on tax cuts, and we'll start bending the cost curve and bring some justice to end these stories. I think it's important to talk about that, because we all run into the business person you talk to who says they don't have health care any more, from the example you used earlier.

So let's track those 12 families. Now they are out, and they are swimming with the sharks. Hopefully no one has a

preexisting condition so when they go out now on their own, out of the plan that they were in, and they try to get some coverage, hopefully they don't have a preexisting condition. But what if they do?

And I bet that there is somebody in that group, some family, some spouse, some worker there that probably does, and they are not going to be able to get insurance or they are going to have insurance that is going to cost so much that it is going to be really not helpful. And so they may go without. Now, not having gotten any treatments, they may go 1 year, they may go 2 years, but now all of a sudden a very small problem turns into a very, very big problem, so that at some point, this person ends up in the emergency room. If they are older they end up in the Medicare program. In both instances, they cost us a heck of a lot more money than they would have if they were able to stay in that plan, get preventative care and get consistent treatment. They could have dealt with a sickness that they may have had so it doesn't become chronic and costly.

That's what's happening all over the country. Our friends are scratching their heads saying, How in the heck does this get so expensive? Well, it happens every day. We see these situations happening all the time. A lady called in to one of my telephone town halls about a month ago. She is 60 years old. She makes $32,000 a year. She works. And her company, same situation, just dropped her health care. She basically said on the call, I may just wait until I get into Medicare. So here you have someone that is working, 60 years old, and can't get health care in the United States of America.

That is a whole other topic of how bad and wrong and cruel that is, but just from the sheer numbers standpoint, this person is going to go 5 years without health care? And then when she goes into the Medicare program, she will have how many different problems that could have been prevented in those 5 years? You wonder why Medicare is going to go belly up.

Well, part of the reform is to make sure that those people that are that age, all Americans, but people that age will have some basic level of health care.

And why do the programs even exist? Because you can't make money off of sick people. I mean, how disingenuous to walk around saying, boy, look how expensive Medicare is. No kidding. Everybody is 65 and older. Yes, that's expensive, but no one was doing it. So we decided as a country that it may be a good idea to protect those senior citizens and provide them a little bit of dignity.

Well, you think about how a game started like basketball or football or just of any sport; right? At some point, you know, Naismith puts up the peach basket and starts throwing a ball and they decide, well, we'll cut a hole and the ball will fall through. That will be good. But then you start getting teams, and at some point someone threw an elbow at somebody's face and hit them with an elbow in the face and they couldn't play anymore. And the people organizing the game said, you know what, that's not really fair. That's not what the game is. So that's illegal because here's the game. You each get five people. You put it in the thing, but whatever the rules are, and then rules consistently evolve to make the game more fair.

And so here we are in the United States, well, we're saying that government is not going in to run anything. What we're going to do is create new rules, and one of the rules is you can't be denied for a preexisting condition because it's unfair. We are all agreeing as a country, and our friends on the other side, we will see how they vote when they have an opportunity to vote for this, because it's unfair. Going bankrupt in the United States for a health care reason is unfair. We want to change that rule. That rule no longer applies. And so what we're trying to do is make the game of health care more fair.

But there's a point that I wanted to just touch on for a minute. One of the points I wanted to touch base on that Mr. Murphy just made is how the insurance industry has acknowledged that this will be a level playing field for all the different insurance companies, and if we do preexisting condition, making sure that no one can pay any more than a certain percentage of their income out of pocket per year to prevent bankruptcies, those kinds of things. There's an important point that I think we need to acknowledge and talk about more.

If insurance companies have to cover everyone, if they can't play the game that they're playing now--the game now is how do I get sick people off of my rolls so they don't cause me a medical loss and how do I not get people on my rolls that I know are going to cost me money, and those people are going to be diabetics and heart disease and cancer patients.

And I had one cancer patient come to a roundtable I had who said, you know, she had cancer and then she lost her job and then was out with another job trying to get insurance on her own. She was denied. Her cancer had been gone for years and years, but it hadn't been gone 10 years, so insurance companies would continue to deny her coverage.

And so what we're saying here, if everybody is covered, if insurance companies can't deny anybody coverage, they will have to take you. There is a new business model that will be created within the insurance industry, because the game of keeping people off your rolls, or getting sick people off your rolls, is over. The new game for the insurance company is going to be how do we keep the people that are in our pool under our coverage healthy.

So you are going to see them investing money into wellness, prevention. They're going to be very interested in what the kids are eating at schools. They're going to be very interested in the pesticides that we're putting on our food that may cause cancer. They're going to be very, very interested in obesity rates. They're going to be very interested in what physical education programs look like in our schools.

We can have a real ally among the insurance industry to partner with us, with nutritionists, with dietitians, with, you know, preventative and wellness groups. We will now have an ally. Instead, the insurance companies are now the enemy because they don't want to make these investments.

Now they're slowly starting to because I think they're reading the tea leaves here is that they're going to be slapped down and they're going to have to cover everybody, and because of that, they are going to be able to make investments, and I think it's going to end up being a very, very good thing.

And so you go to this exchange that's going to be-- there will be an essential benefits package that will be set by the Surgeon General and a group of experts who will decide what the essential benefits package would be, you know, dental, maternity, hospital, all the basics, and every insurance company that goes into this exchange, that will be the bare minimum. So there won't be any of this, I'm paying a lot of money out of pocket but my coverage is terrible, or, I don't have any to begin with. There will be this essential benefits package which will be the baseline coverage for every single private insurer that comes to the exchange.

Then they can build on that with premium plans, Cadillac plans, however high they want to go, so people who have a lot of money, there are still going to be plans up there because insurance companies will be making money.

What we're asking here in the House side now is, in addition to all of these private insurers, we put in, basically, a Medicare program, a Medicare program that will compete with all of the other private insurers. Everyone, 80 percent of the people who have Medicare like it. Sixty-five percent of the American people say this is a good idea. But that Medicare that would be in the exchange with all the other insurance companies would compete with all of them, but they wouldn't have to put money into marketing. They wouldn't have to pay a CEO $100 kajillion a year or, turns out, like $200,000 a minute or an hour, whatever it is nowadays and would compete. And by not having to put all that money into advertising and all those other things could help bring costs down, and everyone else in the exchange would now have to compete with that.

So you want to talk about choice, that public option and the way we're setting up the exchange is all about choice. And if you're a family of four making less than $89,000 a year, you're going to qualify for some health care credits, some subsidies. So you will get the subsidy from the government based on your income, and then you go to the exchange and pick any plan you want. No government bureaucrat's telling you what--no, you've got to pick this plan; no, I mean that one; you pick this one. There's none of that.

You get the credit and then you go to the exchange. And if you want the public option, you could pick it. If you don't want it, you don't have to pick it.

And how do our friends who talk about freedom and liberty want to deny the ability to basically buy into a Medicare-type program? That seems to me like it's limiting the consumers' choice, limiting freedom. And what we're saying is they have all got to compete. They have all got to be there. We're going to help you pay for it because we know if you don't get insurance you're going to go cost us a heck of a lot more money in the emergency room and this is all about choice.

And you know, if you like what you have, you keep it. That's fine. So you know, this is good. I think about the 1,600 families in my district that go bankrupt because of health care. I think of the people that will have opportunity and options because of what we're trying to set up here and reform this system.

But as we close, Mr. Speaker, I would just like to say, if you look at what we have tried to do and what we have done over the course of the last 7 or 8 months, we've taken on the oil industry; we're taking on the insurance industry. Since we've been here, we've raised the minimum wage, increased money for Pell Grants, taken the banks out of student loans so that people can afford to go to college, make investments back into the middle class, infrastructure money, stimulus money, thousands of teachers are at school right now because of stimulus money that is coming out, invested in the green technologies, green energy.

If you look, issue by issue by issue by issue, everything that we have done has been sticking up for the middle class and taking on the special interests that have been driving down wages, driving up health care costs, making it difficult for small businesses, making it difficult to go to college, cutting every business in on the deal, no matter what; and it's important to recognize that this reform proposal and this reform bill is all about giving the middle class consumer protections, choice, and affordable health care in a system that has justice.

So I want to thank my friend from Connecticut, I want to thank our friend from Pittsburgh, western PA, who was here. And, again, our condolences out to people in the Pacific who are going through a very, very difficult time who shared with us earlier in the hour.

With that, we yield back the balance of our time.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be here. I will be joined shortly by a colleague of mine from Ohio (Mr. Boccieri) and maybe several others to talk about a variety of issues that I think are pressing the country right now and that we want to inform our constituents about and speak to the House of Representatives about. You know, I think it's important for us--and I think every time I've been on the floor in the past year or two, I follow some of our Republican colleagues, and I feel the need to just kind of clarify the record as to how we ended up getting to the spot we're at now.

I realize that in a democracy like this, we always have the opportunity to criticize each other, and I think that the beautiful thing about this democracy is that, you know, we do have the opportunity to come to the floor of the House of Representatives and speak directly to the American people, live on TV, live to all of our other colleagues, and speak in a way that is pretty straightforward. That's a beautiful thing about this country. But if we look at where we are today, and if we look at where we were just 7 or 8 months ago, our economy was on the brink of collapse. Unemployment rates were climbing at unprecedented rates, where we were losing 600,000, 700,000 jobs a month. The stock market had crashed. The housing market had crashed. Our budget deficit just ballooned. And all of this was because of the policies, Mr. Speaker, that we had in this country from 2000 to 2008.

And if it weren't for an election in 2006, we would have went further over the cliff. Those are the facts of the matter, and the facts of the matter are that during that time, the House, the Senate, the White House were all controlled by Republicans. And we got the Milton Friedman, supply-side, Ronald Reagan, cut taxes for the wealthiest 1 percent of the people in the country and hope that health care would get fixed, energy would get fixed, and the economy would get fixed, and then people would get jobs at some point.

Well, it's important for all of us to recognize that we don't have to go to some theoretical schoolbook to figure out if the supply side Republican neoconservative domestic and foreign policy program works. It has been implemented, and it has been an absolute failure on all accounts, by all measures. Our friends on the Republican side now who say, Oh, my God, this health care bill that the Democrats are trying to push is going to cost $800 billion, $900 billion over 10 years. But it's important for us to recognize that it was the Bush tax cuts, that went to primarily the top 1 percent of the people in the country, that cost $2.5 trillion over 10 years. So don't come to us about a health care bill that costs $800 billion or $900 billion, that would end up saving the country a bunch of money in the long run, end up fixing the health care problem, because you were the ones and they were the ones, Mr. Speaker, who were walking in lockstep, following George Bush right over the cliff, $2.5 trillion in tax cuts, primarily to the top 1 percent over 10 years, bankrupted the country.

Now all of a sudden everybody's concerned about the budget deficit. All of a sudden, everyone's concerned about borrowing money from China. What we're saying is, the investments that we are going to make are going to stop health care projections from growing at 9 percent a year and try to bring some justice to the system so that average people can afford health care, so that average people don't get sick and then try to go get health care and an insurance company says, We can't cover you. You have cancer. But my cancer's fixed, the patient says. But it hasn't been gone for 10 years, so we can't cover you.

Or when we attempt to change the energy policy in this country--which my friend Mr. Boccieri has become an expert on because of his position in the military and his recognition of this as a national security issue--when we send $750 billion a year from the United States of America to Middle Eastern countries and foreign countries to buy oil-- countries who don't traditionally support our views, our values or our Democratic principles--we send this every year to them, money that goes out of our economy into these OPEC countries. Then a couple of years ago, Mr. Boccieri, we spent $115 billion or $120 billion out of our defense bill to escort Exxon-Mobil ships and big oil ships, coming into and out of the Persian Gulf.

So all these tea baggers who want to stand up like they're the most patriotic people in the United States of America are saying, We shouldn't change our energy policy, We should just continue sending $115 billion a year out of our defense budget to escort these big oil ships in and out of the Persian Gulf. Is that pro-American? I don't believe it is. Is it pro-American to allow health care to grow at 9 percent when our GDP grows at 3 percent so that insurance companies can make money hand over fist and deny American citizens coverage?

I'm going to ask you a question: Where are the family values there, Mr. Speaker? That we want the government out. The only entity left to protect people who are getting screwed to the wall by the insurance companies is the government. We need to make rules to make sure that these people, these insurance companies stop hurting people. They're hurting people.

Now I'm sorry, but we had to listen all August about all this nonsense that's going on. In Ohio's 17th Congressional District, we will have 1,600 families go bankrupt next year if we do absolutely nothing about health care. Now I'm sorry. That's not right. And if

we have to act and maybe take on the insurance companies, then so be it. Let's clean this up, what's happened in this Congress and with this new President over the last 7 or 8 months, let's clean this whole thing up.

We've taken on the big oil companies. We're taking on the big insurance companies. We're taking on the big pharmaceutical companies. Today we extended unemployment benefits for another 13 weeks so that average people who can't find a job will have a little peace of mind for 13 more weeks. That's what we've been doing. Our policies have been clear, Mr. Boccieri. We're not hiding behind them. We're trying to reduce our dependency on foreign oil, bring that investment back to the United States, take money out of the hands of the insurance companies, bring it back to the average people so that they have better health care, and transform our country, get us ready to go.

We recognize that there are going to be some powerful interests that aren't going to be for this. But tough. Tough. You can't make money on the backs of human beings, of American citizens, and think it's okay because it's not. And we are going to do something about it. You can scream and yell. I want to just ask one question. These people talk about, where's our liberty, where's our freedom? Well, first of all, we're giving you more choice in your health care. But where's our liberty? Where's the liberty and where's the freedom of the United States citizen that's sick and can't get health care? How free of a citizen are you? You're not free at all because you're sick. You're in your home. You're in a hospital. You're in a nursing home. There's no freedom there. So you can talk freedom all you want.

I stood at the Canfield Fair, the biggest fair in Ohio, for 4 hours. For 4 hours I talked to every single person that came by that wanted to chat, and I had two people in 4 hours tell me they were against health care reform. Some wanted some clarification, some wanted to know exactly what was going on. But the people were for it. If we pass this, the people are going to recognize that we wanted the reform, the people voted for the reform, and the people got the reform.

I yield to my friend from Canton, home of the Football Hall of Fame, the National First Ladies' Library.

Reclaiming my time, I think it's important because we tell our seniors and they hear that there are going to be all of these cuts in Medicare. There's going to be savings in Medicare. There's actually going to be an increase in the benefits.

I want to say two things, one about part D, which is the drug program. Right now if you qualify for Medicare and then you get part D up to like about $2,700, you're covered, and then coverage for your prescription drugs completely falls off and then it picks back up at $5,000 or so. I got a letter from a doctor in Warren or Howland that said, I have a patient. She used up all her $2,700. She now fell into the doughnut hole, so they had to change the drug that she had. I think it was diabetes. It was a diabetes drug. They had to change the prescription. They changed it after she got into the doughnut hole because they had to go to a cheaper drug. There was a reaction because of the change. They changed it again, changed it again. She ends up in the hospital.

So what we're trying to say is by filling in this doughnut hole and paying just in this one instance, this woman, covering her for another thousand dollars or two would have saved the Medicare program thousands of dollars because she went from not qualifying anymore for part D, falling into the doughnut hole, to into the hospital.

Now, let's use, as my grandmother used to say, our ``medulla abingatta,'' the Italian version. But let's use our brains. This makes no sense what we're doing here. It makes no sense and it's hurtful to the patient and it wastes money.

But one of the main ways how we're going to save money and start to bend

the cost curve on Medicare is in areas especially like ours in northeast Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan, the older industrial States, we have people 50, 55 years old and they lose their job. So they lose their health care or they just lost their health care and they keep their job. We had a lady on one of our telephone town halls who kept her job and lost her health care, 60 years old.

So when you're 60 or 55, you start saying, I don't know if I can really get insurance or afford it, so I'm going to wait this sucker out. I'm going to wait until I get into Medicare because they'll pay for it and then I'll be good. I can maybe get a supplemental, but most of it will be covered. So we have a population of Americans who are getting into the Medicare program sicker than they need to be and sometimes chronically, which is really driving up the cost of Medicare.

So what we're saying is we're paying for these people anyway because they're going into the Medicare program. But if we want to save money, wouldn't it be smarter to make sure that these people have some basic health care before they get into Medicare, because it will save us money because they'll get preventative care. They may not have cancer as bad. They may catch breast cancer early or cervical cancer early or prostate cancer early as opposed to letting it develop and then getting dumped into the Medicare program and costing everybody a bunch of money. This is basic ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Can I make a point on your second P there?

When you talk to people, when you talk to educators that are talking to our kids that are going to high school, going to college, guidance counselors, what they tell these kids today is that you are going to have seven, eight, nine, ten different jobs throughout the course of your life. You need to have skills that are mobile because it's not going to be like the 1960s where you're going to go to a General Motors factory or you're going to go to Youngstown Sheet and Tube and you're going to work there for 40 years, get a retirement and you're done. It's over. You work for one employer your whole life. Our educators are telling our kids how many different jobs they're going to have to have.

So does it make any sense to have a health care system that locks people into their employment because they have a spouse or they have a condition that some insurance company, some jerk that a doctor calls up to try to get coverage and the person at the insurance company says, Nope, sorry, we don't cover that? Well, it's in my policy. Sorry, we don't cover that. You are preventing people from going out and starting businesses because they're afraid they can't get any health care coverage. You're locking people into work that they may not like or enjoy when they have another opportunity elsewhere but they know they can't move because of this.

The health care system needs to reflect the dynamism of the economy, and it doesn't now. So it's stifling creativity at a time where we need people to be out creating jobs and creating work.

Keep talking.

Exactly. And right now we spend four cents of every

health care dollar on prevention when we know that's the big saver.

But there's a point that we all need to remember. We are fighting for the public option and whatever. Some people are for it, some aren't. I don't know if it will be in. Who knows. But we have to remember that if we have everybody covered and everybody is going to be covered by primarily private insurance, then the whole dynamic of the system changes. So we say to the insurance companies, as you said, and I like that analogy that we set the ground rules basically. And States regulate insurance now, so we're going to say, Here's the goal line. Here's the end zone. Here are the goalposts. Here are the rules. And the rules that we want to change are that you can't be denied because you have a preexisting condition. If you have diabetes, heart disease, the insurance company has still got to cover you. There will be a cap on how much you can spend a year so you're not going to go bankrupt over a health care crisis.

But the dynamic that changes when every single person can have health care insurance and the insurance companies have to cover you where they can't shake you any more, because now the insurance companies are spending money saying let me see what you've got, and I shouldn't have called somebody a jerk because they are just trying to make a living, and so I apologize for that. But you call up and the game now is the insurance company tells you, sorry, you have a preexisting condition. They spend money hiring bureaucrats within their organization to deny people coverage.

But this all changes if now I am the insurance company and I have to cover you. So now all of a sudden it is in my interest to make you well. So I'm going to spend money and time and energy and effort working with your employer, creating incentives for you to go work out, stop smoking, do things that are going to reduce your stress level, because I know stress is a killer. I am going to do things from an insurance company perspective to make you healthier. That is something that we have failed to talk about.

Once everybody is covered and we all get married to our insurance company and they can't get rid of us, their incentive changes from denying you coverage and getting rid of you to making you healthy. That is part of this whole preventive thing that you are talking about.

Part of this prevention component is training our physicians in a way, first and foremost, having policies, and part of the rules of the game need to be making sure that physicians don't have to practice defensive medicine. That is one thing. Another is to make sure that our physicians are trained. The average physicians spends 7 minutes with a patient. I think there are a lot of ways in which physicians can stop spending a lot of money on things that maybe they see as an opportunity that they need to cover their own rear ends, but also to spend some time and figure out that people have life-style issues that need to be changed. And that doctor and that patient should both be rewarded for improving their health.

That is in this bill to make sure that you are not just getting rewarded for the tests that you run and paid for the tests that you run, but you are getting paid for making sure that the patient is healthier, comes less often, and doesn't come back to the hospital. All of these are incentives built into the system.

But let's look at energy and health care in America in 2009.

I think it is important for us to recognize that it may be easy to go over, Mr. Speaker, and bury our heads in the sand; and if you look at what our friends did when they were in control here, they basically continued to subsidize Big Oil to the tune of a couple of years ago $117 billion to protect Persian Gulf ships coming in and out of the Persian Gulf. So our carriers and our battleships are protecting these oil ships coming in and out of the Persian Gulf. Our money. So let's look at this.

If we want to be competitive in the 21st century, we need to get that investment, that $750 billion that is going to these oil-producing countries, and get it back invested into coal, nuclear, drilling in America, oil shale, algae, the whole nine yards. Instead of the investment being somewhere else, we want the investment here. Instead of hiring oil workers in Saudi Arabia, we want them hiring coal workers in Ohio. And the technology in Ohio, the scrubbers and everything else getting manufactured in Ohio.

So you take the energy investment back into the United States. You take all of the venture capitalists that sit in my office and say that they want to put money into this and that, private money, you take the energy money, $180 billion that we are putting into coal in the energy bill that passed here, along with a health care bill that will reduce costs for small businesses and allow them to reinvest back into their business, you have the recipe and the

strategy for long-term economic growth.

I know that may be hard to believe; but some of our friends, who will remain nameless, supported policies that said if we cut taxes for the top 1 percent, that that will lead to long-term economic growth. That if we deregulate Wall Street, that will lead to long-term economic growth. And all those things did was lead to an economic collapse that if we didn't have the social programs from the Great Depression in place, that would have led to the Great Depression, the second Great Depression in the United States.

So, fortunately, we have moved off that track into a track of responsibility, sound fiscal policy, sound investments in the future, and a strategy to let businesses grow as we reduce their health care cost burden.

I had an interesting conversation with someone from Babcock the other day. They're in Barberton, Ohio. They're in your district, Congressman. They do a lot of defense work and a lot of work with the military.

I asked the guy, What portion of your employers work on these kinds of ``green'' technologies?

He said that half of their workers are employed, the engineers and other workers, on the issues of cleaning up the air--the scrubbers--the technology that goes into power plants and into other facilities to help clean some of the poison out of the air that was causing all kinds of health problems.

There are industries that pop up to clean the air. These are economic development opportunities. Now, that $750 billion that goes abroad will come back to the United States. The money will be invested into windmills, into solar panels, into batteries, into new autos, into all kinds of different things.

The other day, we were in Kent, at Alpha Micron. They're making a liquid crystal-based technology that is film on windows. It darkens when the sun comes out to keep the house cool in the summertime. They just opened up a manufacturing facility in Kent, Ohio. They have 45 people working there now. Once this product catches on, there will be hundreds of people working there, making this special liquid crystal technology film that will be going into the homes to conserve energy.

The economy will adapt. People will find ways to make money and to make profits off of these things. Yet, when you go to the gas tank, you might as well send the check to the OPEC countries. Now, let's be honest with each other. What we're saying is, when you stop at a gas station or whatever kind of station there's going to be in the next decade or two, we want that money staying in Ohio--in the Midwest, in America. So you send the $750 billion off. Then you pay your tax bill at the end of the year, and you send money to the Federal Government. Then you find out that the Defense Department is sending $120 billion of your tax dollars to escort oil ships that are going in and out of the Persian Gulf.

Does this make any sense to anybody? This makes no sense what we're doing here. We've got to stop it. Then we send subsidies to the oil companies so that they can keep going. This doesn't make any sense. I'm sorry. I don't know any other way to say it. We need to stop doing this. It's going to have some disruption, and everyone is going to have to figure this out, but we have smoothed this over for over 20 years, and no one is jamming this down anybody's throat.

These manufacturing facilities have all kinds of credits. We're holding harmless a lot of manufacturers, a lot of consumers. We'll see infinitesimal increases 10 years from now. It may be $100 a year, but the benefit is that $750 billion is going to come back to the United States and is going to get invested here. The Defense Department

won't be spending money escorting oil ships in and out of the Persian Gulf.

I mean let's stop this. This is insane. It doesn't make any sense. It's wasting all kinds of money. It's polluting the air. It's empowering countries that are on sand. Then they hate America, and we get tangled in all of these geopolitical problems that we don't need to be involved in. Let's invest the money back into the United States. I mean, do you want to talk about a pro-American position? There couldn't be a bigger one. You know that. You've been to Iraq four times, five times.

This young man has flown in and out of here. By ``young,'' I mean 5 years older than I, but he has flown in and out. He has flown soldiers back over here who have died while serving their country, and he's saying we can't keep doing this. John McCain, who served the country so nobly, said the same thing, that we can't keep doing this. Stop. That's what this is about.

It's about leadership. It's not about just going down the same road and about doing what's comfortable. That doesn't get you anywhere. This is about leading. There is going to be a transition; but at the end of the day, you're going to provide a safer country for your kids, a less entangled geopolitical situation for our country, and you're going to create jobs in the United States. This is a win-win-win.

The thing is, too, with this manufacturing, this green manufacturing, we have Thomas Steel in Warren, Ohio, is now making the specialty steel. About 300 steelworkers signed a contract with a solar panel company from Toledo, a very exciting proposition, because when the solar panel industry takes off, a local steel company in Warren, Ohio, with United Steelworkers of America that have good health care benefits and a decent pension are going to benefit from this.

And the more solar panels happen, the more steel they are going to buy from Warren, Ohio, the more steelworkers that are going to go to work. Ohio Star Forge on Mahoning Avenue, they make a bearing that goes into the windmill, 4,000 component parts. No, 8,000, 8,000 component parts that go in the windmill. That's what we do.

Does anyone else have a better idea how to revive manufacturing in the United States of America than to have us supplying 8,000 component parts and 400 tons of steel that go into a windmill? Does anyone have anything better? Cut taxes for the rich people and hope it trickles down? That's not a manufacturing policy in the United States of America.

But what we are doing here with the Volt at General Motors, with the new battery storage, the hybrids, we drove in a car the another day, Congressman Inslee and Israel and I, that went from California to Washington, D.C., on algae, on algae. Do you know how you grow the algae? You pump a bunch of CO2 in it and it grows the algae.

So here you have an opportunity to learn, make cars that run on algae, grow the algae in places like Ohio that, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, at some point, give off all this CO2, grow the algae, put it in cars, and we have a clean economy, and it's a new economy.

And, let me tell you something, there is not a lot going on manufacturing-wise in the United States anymore. But if you take the $750 billion that we keep sending abroad to oil-producing countries and that money comes back to the United States, that's a heck of a lot of investment here to go into companies that are going to make these 8,000 component parts that are going to go into the windmills, that are going to make the 400 tons of steel that are going to go into the windmills and the cars and the solar panels and the biodiesel facilities. I haven't heard a better idea.

It's nice to be against everything, but does anyone have another idea on how to get 750 billion that's going right out of the country back here?

Come on, let's be smart. Let's keep our money in America. That's what this is all about. This is the most pro-American, pro-independence, pro-freedom, pro-liberty bill you could ever get your hands on because it directs investment into the United States of

America and puts Americans back to work.

You know, if you are refitting homes with insulation, with special roofing to capture rainwater, those are sheet metal workers. Those are carpenters. Those are building tradespeople that you and I live and work with every single day. Put them back to work. This is great.

I don't see it, other than being against it.