Floor Statements

I thank my good friend from Iowa for yielding.

A number of the different words that you're using are so important to the foundation of the whole logic of how the American system works. You were talking about the idea of a rule of law, and that's one of those terms that sounds pretty straightforward. We believe in the rule of law.

What's the alternative to the rule of law? We have been seeing a whole lot of it this year. The alternative to the rule of law is special deals. If you recall, rule of law is depicted frequently by the marble statue of Lady Justice. And she has the blindfold across her eyes. She's holding up the scales. And regardless of who you are, man or woman or big or little or rich or poor, Lady Justice just simply says, Just the facts. So that's what is called the rule of law. People are equal before the law. But the alternative to that is, of course, rule by whims of mankind. It's special deals.

So we have the ``too big to fail'' rule. So we tax Americans, not so much Americans that live now but their grandchildren we're going to tax, and we pass these things like the porkulus bill, which is supposed to be stimulus, and we pass the Wall Street bailout. We take all this money and we give it to whom? Every small mom and pop shop that might fail? No. We give it to the ``too big to fail.'' So, therefore, you've moved from the rule of law to a special deals society. And that's the problem. Of course, that's really what socialism is. It's special deals administered by guess who, Big Brother government.

That's not what made America great. That's not what allowed our great Nation, my good friend Congressman King, that's not what allowed us to have a list of the different nations throughout the world that Americans freed from horrible dictatorships. That's a long list. I saw it actually listed on a cartoon. It had the list of all of these countries that American GIs and that American treasure through the ages have freed. Places like Germany. Places like Japan where you have some dictator, where we went in and we freed them from that. Places like Grenada, where our sons and daughters went in and took a risk and left a free country. That's not why we were able to do that because we're another socialist Big Government-run country. It's because we're a country that was based on a different set of principles.

The thing that strikes me the most, and I don't want to overuse the welcome that you've extended to me, is this. There was a country not so many years ago, and this is how their thinking worked: They said, look, if you've got somebody and they don't have a house to stay in and it gets cold in the winter, they're going to freeze to death. And if they don't have food to eat, they're going to starve to death. And if they don't have medical care, they're going to die of some kind of medical condition. So they ought to have a right to housing, a right to food, a right to health care. And if they haven't had an education and they can't read, they ought to have a right to know how to read and to study and be educated. So that government created those rights for its citizens, and they marched forward boldly into the future until they became bankrupt and were disbanded. And it was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. We call it the USSR. And we knew it wasn't a very good system because it was based on communism and socialism.

Yet here in America, we have heard, even as I have stood here on the floor with you my friend, Democrats say that you have a right to health care. So as a government, we are now saying that we're going to have the government get involved in housing. The government's going to get involved in food, in food stamps. The government is now going to take over health care. The government has now taken over most of the loans for colleges and education. And it's like how come we're repeating the same things that the Soviet Union did and anticipating that we'll get different results?

Instead, our Founders had a different concept. They said that our rights are basic things that come from God. In our Declaration of Independence, all are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If you'll note, those rights are not rights to something that somebody else has a claim to.

Those of you from Iowa do some farming. I think you grow some corn in Iowa. I know we do some in Missouri, but our next-door neighbor does a lot of wheat and corn. And when you have one of your Iowa farmers combine the sweat of his brow with the produce from the field, they own that corn. It is their corn because it was grown on their land. They worked hard and it belongs to them. We call that private property. We call that free enterprise. And because I'm hungry doesn't give me a right to something that belongs

to someone else. That's theft. That's stealing. And if the government takes someone's corn and gives it to someone else who didn't grow it, that's called stealing, except we just call it institutionalized theft. That's socialism. You never have a right to something that's the unique property of another person.

The Founders said you have a right to your life because God gives that uniquely to an individual. You see, you have a right to liberty because God gives you just one life and you can go choose a career of your choosing. Nobody else chooses your career. You get to do it yourself. But it doesn't say you own somebody else's career and should tell them what they should do with their life. That's what the Soviet Union thought.

So our system was based on freedom, was based on limited government; limited in the sense that it was the job of government to protect just those basic rights that God gives to all men. And we have been setting aside that formula that works, instead trying to adopt something that the Europeans have never made work, and, of course, it never worked in the Soviet Union. We're going in the wrong direction, and we need to go back toward freedom.

I didn't mean to get on too long a dissertation, but those distinctions between equal before the law as opposed to special deals, that's a very big part of what we're dealing with, Congressman.

I really appreciate your yielding to me.

One of the things that happens down here, as you're aware of, this legislative process gets a little bit complicated. Sometimes people pay attention to people like you and I on the floor of the Chamber of the House. People may even pay attention to what we're voting on here on the floor. But when you talk about this Nancy Pelosi health care/ socialized medicine bill, on the floor, you're not going to have an amendment that says, yeah, but the illegal immigrants can't get free health care here. They're not going to have that amendment out here because people don't want to vote that because that might not be very popular back home.

But the interesting thing is, gentleman, as you know, in various committees, they do take those votes. In fact, that very amendment was offered in one of the committees where the Pelosi health care bill was for some number of months, and they offered an amendment saying that there will be no one that's eligible for any of this insurance pool, any of these insurance pools that has not passed the eligibility of citizenship, and they spelled out what that was. That was an amendment that was offered.

The bill had said originally, we're not going to give this to illegal immigrants. But there was no enforcement mechanism. So in order to add the enforcement mechanism, that amendment was proposed. That amendment then went up for a vote in the committee. Can you guess on you how the voting went? It was supported 100 percent by Republicans and rejected by the Democrats.

So, is there a protection in the bill for illegal immigrants to be able to get health insurance? The answer is, of course they can get it, because that amendment was defeated. Now there were all sorts of protest. Oh, it's not our intent that illegal immigrants are going to get this free health care. But the fact of the matter is, if that were really the intent to protect that, there would have been an amendment in the bill to say, we don't mean for people to get this unless they pass the citizenship eligibility requirements. But that amendment was defeated by the Democrats in committee. They knew that. It came to the floor without that protection, and it passed this floor without that protection. And that says that the way the Pelosi health care bill stands now, that you've got illegal immigrants that come to this country and they're going to get health care. And guess who's going to pay for it? The U.S. taxpayers are going to pay for it, or their children or their grandchildren with the multi-trillion dollar bill that has been proposed.

It's interesting that what you're saying, a lot of people say, Well, I don't like this partisan stuff. The Democrats claim this. The Republicans claim this. Can't you all just get along? The fact of the matter is you put an amendment like that up in committee and you see there's just this polar division of opinion as to what should be in this health care bill. And what you saw was that all of the Republicans said we need to protect against illegal immigrants getting this health care. And the Democrats voted--I think there may be one or two that voted with the Republicans, but certainly clearly a great majority, so that that amendment failed, and that's the way that Pelosi health care bill is now.

And so I just thought it interesting because people don't know about what happens in committees.

Well, I think that's something we need to be paying some attention to, too. So we've got the illegal immigration question that's part of these uninsured. There were other kinds of amendments that were offered, too, in committees. I don't know if you wanted to talk about them.

I thought another one that seemed to me to be very important and, that is, what's the heart of good health care? It seems like to me that the heart of it is that when a doctor and a patient come to a decision as to what they should be doing medically, that other people shouldn't butt in and tell the doctor and the patient what should happen. That seems to be fairly fundamental to the way we work. Maybe you want to get a second opinion with another doctor to make sure what you're doing is right. But that doctor-patient relationship is something that is very important. Most of the doctors go into the field assuming that they're going to

have that relationship with their patient, and so we put some emphasis on that.

Now one of the things that we don't like is when some insurance company injects themselves into that doctor-patient relationship. I've heard the Democrats complain about that. They say, Those greedy insurance companies, they get in between the doctor and the patient. As a Republican, we don't like that either. And so one of the things we did was we put in the bill, as an amendment, that no government bureaucrat would insert themselves between the doctor and the patient. That was another amendment that was passed, was offered by a Republican doctor, I think it was Dr. Gingrey if I remember, from Georgia. Again, Republicans voted for it 100 percent. The Democrats, with maybe one exception, voted against it.

And so we have this Pelosi health care bill, and it has no doctor- patient relationship protection in it at all. Now there is something, believe it or not, worse than some insurance person coming between you and your doctor, and that's when it's a bureaucrat, a Federal Government saying, No, we're sorry, Steve. You're too old. You don't get to have this. You can take a bottle of aspirin home with you. But we're not going to do it.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

It's a pleasure to be able to once again join my colleagues and others who might be interested in listening in to our discussion on this compelling subject of health care, which has absorbed the attention of people political and the people who work down here at the Capitol, lo these many months. We are on the verge of perhaps taking a landmark kind of vote as to the direction that we are going to go in health care.

I was preceded by one of my colleagues, an esteemed colleague, who was asking the question, Why would we do something that would keep us from being a prosperous and happy and a nation reflecting leadership in the world?

The reason that America has been in the past prosperous and happy and has enjoyed world leadership is not because we have rushed headlong into European socialism but because, instead, we have adopted the path of freedom. Freedom has its drawbacks. One of the drawbacks of freedom is that people can fail and that there are responsibilities required of citizens.

When a government tries to insure everybody about everything that can go wrong, unfortunately, it's trying to repeal the basic laws of supply and demand; and we are no more effective in doing that or has any government in history been effective in doing that than repealing the law of gravity.

I was aware that there was an attempt one time--I was told it was in the State of Tennessee--where the teachers unions were frustrated at trying to teach students about pi, that little funny-looking thing with the number 3.1415 after it. They decided that it would be easier in terms of teaching to change pi from 3.1415, to just make it 3, to keep it simpler.

I'm not sure how the wagon wheels in Tennessee went after that legislative change was made. I imagine that mathematics continued to operate under the same set of laws in spite of what the legislature said. Now there are many things that Americans agree to on the subject of health care. It doesn't have to be particularly complicated.

One of the big problems is covering preexisting conditions. This is something that happens when people could be quite responsible, work hard at a job; but all of a sudden after a number of years, something comes up, either a child, a wife or a husband, someone in the family develops a medical condition which you didn't see coming, which is going to break the back financially of the house, and something which occurs in America too frequently. We must deal with that question. I think Americans agree that we need to deal with it.

Stopping the cost shifting and reforming medical liability law. The cost shifting, if you take a look at the problems in American health care today, you could think of American health care in a sense in two halves. The first half is the front half. That's the provider system. It's the doctors, the nurses, the hospitals, the many staff people and the fancy equipment that continues to provide Americans with the very best health care in the world. If you don't believe that, in spite of people complaining about American health care and talking about all these problems, if you are a multimillion-dollar sheikh from Bahrain or whatever and you are sick, guess where it is that you want to come get your health care? Yes, you've got it right--good old America. People vote with their feet and come to our country. That's the provider system.

The back half of that system is how do you pay for it, and that is the part of the system that is feeling increasing stress. If there is something broken, certainly the back half is the place where there are the most problems. From a macro level, if you take a look and say, well, what really is the problem? The problem is pretty simple; that is, two-thirds of Americans are paying for the system and one-third is not. As the people that are not paying anything for health care increase in number, it puts more pressure on the people that do pay, and that is creating a lot of cost-shifting and problems.

So one of the things we've got to do is stop the cost-shifting, and one of the ways that you can reduce the cost of health care in America is reforming medical liability law. Unfortunately, the bill that's being considered by the Democrat Congress, the Pelosi bill, goes exactly in reverse in liability and says that States that have already on a State-to-State basis passed medical liability reform are not going to be able to have those laws take place. We are going supercede the law of a whole series of States in order to raise the price of health care. This bill is going in the wrong direction if we are trying to save money. More on that later.

Making people sure that they can keep the insurance coverage that they like. Today, there are about 100 million Americans who have insurance coverage. They have relations with doctors, they are reasonably comfortable that they are getting good medical care, and they really don't want to change that. They don't want us, because there may be some problems in the system, to, in a sense, burn down the barn in order to kill a few rats, or, as another person has phrased it, to say, When you've got a leaky sink, you don't remodel your entire kitchen. Many people who have insurance coverage that they like are going to be affected by a plan that's thousands of pages long, trillions of dollars in expense, and essentially tries to remodel an entire kitchen or, if you will, burns down the barn.

And then preserving the doctor-patient relationship. If there's anything that I think is more personal or more important in the health care debate and discussion, it is this very question. I don't think anybody wants to be sick, but when they do get sick, they try to find a doctor that they trust.

Maybe, after getting a couple of opinions, they decide on some course of action, they and the doctor; the patient and the doctor decide on what is best for their health care. And whenever something gets in the way of that decision-making, it tends to be, by definition, a very bad outcome.

We want to preserve the doctor-patient relationship. There are several things that get in the way of that relationship. One that has been too common would be the fact that some insurance companies will try to second-guess the doctor, claim that they have some medical expertise, that the doctor is being too cautious, that we don't really need to spend this money. Insurance companies do that sometimes. We have found that in the Pelosi bill, there is even a section which preserves, under ERISA, the insurance company's right to second-guess the doctor-patient relationship and then, if something goes wrong, to avoid any financial or legal responsibility for that decision.

There was a press conference earlier today on that very same subject, pointing out the exact pages in the bill and how this section, which is pretty onerous, the fact that a patient can make a decision with a doctor and be second-guessed by an insurance company and when the decision goes wrong, the insurance company skates without any liability. That's part of the Pelosi bill. We don't want insurance companies coming between a patient and a doctor. That press conference was led by Congressman John Shadegg, who did a very good job and has raised some very serious questions in this regard.

There is something worse, believe it or not, than an insurance company coming between a doctor and a patient, and that is a Federal bureaucrat coming between a doctor and a patient. If the Federal Government decides, just like the auto industry, the insurance industry, the banking industry, the student loan industry and all these other places that it wants to get into the medical business, which the Pelosi bill puts them in that business, then in order to control costs, what's going to happen is you are going to end up with bureaucrats with nice big calculators and they'll figure out whether or not you qualify to get medical care.

Now we need to make a distinction between two very important things. The first thing is medical insurance; the other is medical care. In foreign countries, all of the citizens have medical insurance. That's wonderful. But if the medical insurance doesn't result in medical care, it doesn't do you much good. One of the things that happens in foreign governments, the whole idea of a government-run medical care, they can't provide Cadillac kind of medical care for everybody in their country because they can't break the laws of supply and demand. And so how do they

control costs? Well, they control costs with these bureaucrats with their calculators.

If you're a certain age, and you want to get this particular test, ``Sorry, Bub, here's some aspirin. Go home and sleep it off.'' Now that's called rationing. If you are a more political government and you don't want to get your citizens quite as mad at you, instead of just telling somebody to go home and die, what you can do is you create these waiting lists; so you can say to some woman who's pregnant, You can have your C-section in 14 months. She might start scratching her head saying, I don't think you're doing me any favors with that. But we also see that in the socialized medicines of other countries, these long waiting lists.

The result of that, of course, is that in certain kinds of illnesses, the waiting list is very dangerous. Certainly in heart disease, which is a leading cause of death in America, if you have a long waiting period, that's not a good thing.

Likewise, in cancer, cancer is something that you want to catch early. If you do, you can have some very good outcomes. If you don't, the outcomes are far more gloomy. And so timeliness is very important. And when you are trying to keep your costs low, with the government trying to manage their budget, what they are going to do is create waiting lists which then have bad outcomes. And that is what the record shows of survival rates in cancer, for instance, in the U.K., which is a socialized system as opposed to a more free enterprise system in America.

Now these are things that Americans agree to. The question is what is being proposed, will it help these things and what is the cost?

In fact, when we take a look at the issue in most any department of the Federal Government, when the government does something, or particularly if it does too much, we see some outcomes that are pretty common, regardless of what area of government that it is. We see bureaucratic rationing, which I was just talking about, inefficient allocation of resources, degraded quality, and excessive expense. All of these things come when the government does too much.

Well, would the government takeover be something that would qualify as the government doing too much? I think the old adage that ``if you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it is free'' might apply here.

Is the government doing too much with the Pelosi health care proposal? The first thing to understand, and this is actually a chart that was drawn up on the earlier Pelosi bill, which I believe was only about a thousand pages, the new version of this plan, which is very similar, is 2,000 pages. So this chart may not be completely accurate. In fact, it may be too simplified.

What you have here, every one of these colored boxes is some new bureaucracy, some new moving part that is created by the Pelosi health care proposal. You can see, trying to take a thousand-page bill and putting it on a chart, it is going to look a little complicated. But if you think about it, we are going to be taking one-sixth of the U.S. economy and then we are going to turn that over to the Federal Government to run with this proposal.

So you have the consumers. It is almost like a maze. Can the consumers get over to the doctors, or not?

So one of the things that you run into when the government does this is tremendous complexity. That is why when the President last July came here to the Congress and said we need to get this done, none of the other Presidents before me could get it done, but I am determined to get it done, so you need to put a bill together and I would like to have it done before the end of July, he was asking for a pretty tall order. In fact, he was asking for the impossible because trying to put this together, even if you buy the assumption that the government should take over health care, is not a simple procedure. This gives just a little bit of the sense of how complicated that is.

Now one of the other things that you have to associate with a high level of complexity is also a high level of cost. We have a number of statements that were made by the President, and certainly he has the bully pulpit. Everyone listens when he speaks, and he makes a number of different statements which I would take a look at those and see how really accurate are they.

This is one of his statements before the Joint Session of Congress that was on August 9 before the summer break. ``Most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system, a system that is currently full of waste and abuse.''

This sounds pretty good on the surface. We can simply take the health care system that we have, and there are pockets of waste and abuse, we tap into that like unused oil, and we can all of a sudden come up with something that the Federal Government runs which is going to be less expensive because we can pay for this government-run system by using waste and abuse. It is almost as though waste and abuse are a line item in the budget and we simply pull money out of the waste and abuse account and we stick it into health care, and we have everything taken care of financially.

Unfortunately, the government running various entities does produce a tremendous amount of waste and abuse, but it is not so easy to squeeze that fat out of the system. It is not a simple line item. The place where he is looking for this waste and abuse turns out to be an area that is politically highly controversial, particularly taking it out of Medicare.

Let's take a look at this efficiency that he is talking about that he can create by having the government take the system over. We do have some experience. We have experience of two other government, Big Government entitlement programs in the area of medicine. One is known as Medicaid; the other, of course, is Medicare. The other big entitlement is Social Security.

If we look at Medicare and Medicaid, if we look at the history of those two government-run medical systems, what we find is when the Congressional Budget Office scored those bills when they were passed by Congress some many years ago, it was found that their estimates were extremely optimistic and very low. In fact, in the case of one of them, the estimates were more than four times too low and the other one, as I recall, even many times more than that. So we are not saying a couple of percentages off, not 10, 20, 30 percent off, we are talking about 4, 5, 600 percent, that these things were estimated to be lower in cost than they were going to be. And worst, what we see with this chart, we see that the cost of these programs is rapidly expanding. In fact, they are expanding so fast that people, both conservative and liberal alike, will say that these three entitlements will destroy the financial solvency of the United States in a period of time. This chart shows that being somewhere in the 2052 range.

Why would that be? Well, part of it is that the actual revenues that the Federal Government takes in are to a degree limited. That seems like an odd thing to say because you think, can't we always crank up the taxes? If 24 percent, or 28 or 18 percent tax rate isn't enough, let's kick it up to 50 percent. The problem is that the mechanisms that the Federal Government has to try to increase taxes, what happens is they can increase the tax but the government revenues don't go up. Now that might seem like a really odd thing. Let me stop and explain what I am talking about.

You would say if you raised taxes, you are going to get more money. So aren't you saying that water is running uphill or something to say that raising taxes doesn't generate more money? Well, in fact it does not at a certain point.

Let's use the illustration that you are king for a day. Your job is to put some taxes onto a loaf of bread and you think about Americans buying loaves of bread. You think, well, I can raise a certain amount of tax if I just put 1 penny on a loaf of bread. But then you think to yourself, or I can raise a whole lot more if I put $100 on a loaf. But nobody would buy a $100 loaf of bread. So common sense tells you somewhere between a penny and a hundred dollars, there is some optimum point where people will still be buying a lot of bread, but if you raise the tax more, no one will buy bread any more. So there is this sort of optimum taxation.

What this chart in actual Federal revenue shows is what that point is. So what happens is you can raise taxes

above it, but what you do is stall the economy. Therefore, even though you have a high tax rate, you end up getting less money in the government.

Just to give you an example of how that principle worked, when I was first elected in Congress in 2001 and 2002, we were in a recession. If you took a look at the Federal budget, there were a lot of liberals and Democrats complaining about the large tax cut that President Bush and the Republicans passed. They said, that is costing us billions of dollars. Actually, we were following President Kennedy's model, Ronald Reagan's model, and Bush II followed that same pattern, realizing that if you reduce the taxes, you can actually increase the Federal revenues because the economy pulls out of a recession and gets going.

But if you were to add the supposed cost of those tax cuts to the cost of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, add that all together, it was less money than the cost of the recession. So when the economy gets flat, it not only hammers mom and dad back home, it hammers the States terribly because many of them are balanced budget, and it also affects the budget of the Federal Government.

So as these programs grow out of control, what is going to happen is there is going to come a real financial breaking point.

So we are told that the government taking over all of health care is not going to follow this pattern, this is the government taking over some of health care, but in fact if we take over all of it, my goodness, we are going to have all kinds of savings. Well, if you believe that, I think there are some people that sell swampland in New Jersey.

So this is the track record of government control of health care. Now that is not the only example. There are other examples such as Massachusetts and Tennessee, and they have tried this government takeover and the government providing insurance for health care, and it hasn't worked for them and it has raised their cost of medicine in those States to the point that it has threatened the provision of good medical services.

So you have in response to the Pelosi health care bill, the Democrat Governor of Tennessee calling it ``the monster of all unfunded mandates.'' So in order to keep the cost of the Pelosi plan under $1 trillion, guess what, they are cost shifting costs to the States and even the Democrat Governor of Tennessee, who has had experience with this type of program, is saying that this is the monster of unfunded mandates. In other words, the Federal Government makes the State do something which is going to cost the State a whole lot of money.

Let's go on here. This is a statement by our President. ``Here is what you need to know. First, I won't sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits, either now or into the future, period.''

Boy, do I feel better when I read that. The President is telling me he is not going to sign a bill that adds one dime to our deficits, either now or into the future, period.

This is one of those things you better make sure that you know what ``is'' is and what is this really saying because in a technical sense he can make the statement that he is not going to add one dime because it appears that he is going to add over a trillion dollars, and even that doesn't show the accurate cost. So let's be careful when we take this statement. Does he really mean that this is something that is going to be financially solvent and is going to really work well? Or is he just being a little bit cute and saying he isn't going to add a dime, no, he is going to add a trillion dollars.

Well, it turns out that the Pelosi health care plan is going to cost over a trillion dollars.

Well, we have taken a look at how serious is the President since the beginning of the year. How serious is he in worrying about excessive spending in the Federal Government. Well, certainly President Bush was accused for overspending. But it turns out he was merely a piker because this year isn't even over yet, and the total spending from the Obama administration and the Pelosi administration is $3.6 trillion. Now, the worst year that President Bush had was when the Democrats controlled Congress, and it was about somewhere in that $400-plus billion of deficit. And here we have $3.6 trillion in less than a year.

So when he says he is not going to add a dime, we have to say, wait a minute, I am not sure that passes the sniff test. Here we have the Wall Street bailout, half of that was under this administration. That is $350 billion. Then we have the so-called economic stimulus, I call it ``porkulus,'' it didn't have much stimulus in it at all. That is why unemployment is high.

We were promised if we didn't pass stimulus, why unemployment would get as high as 8 percent. We passed it, and it is 9.7 percent and rising. That was $787 billion. That is a chunk of change, it really is. In fact, as we went through the year, we had already spent all of the money that the Federal Government was going to collect this year by March or April, as I recall.

SCHIP, another $66 billion. And here are these appropriations at 410, and then we have these other tax bills that are coming along trying to compensate for this incredible $3.6 trillion level of spending.

So when the President says I am not going to sign a bill that adds one dime, we say maybe not a dime, but you are talking over a trillion dollars and that is not even talking about what is being shifted to the States.

I would like to take a look at some of the other comments that have been made because I think trying to get a little bit of truth into this debate and kind of balance things out, it is very helpful tonight.

This is a very nice promise. I really like this promise. First, and this is the President again, ``First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have.''

Whew. That is good news. Do you know there are a hundred million people in America who have health insurance. They have doctors, and they are very pleased with their health care and they are not so sure that they want the Federal Government to come in and stir it all up and change it.

So if we can assure those hundred million Americans that already have insurance that they like that everything is going to be okay, then the idea would be let's just try and fix the--however many, people argue about it--10 to 20 million who do not have insurance that could have insurance that don't, well, then that would be okay.

Well, the question is is this true. We heard the last one the President said, that he's not going to add one dime. Now he's saying that you can keep what you've got. Well, that's a great promise. I wish that one were true because I think that's really nice, a lot of people would like to keep what they have.

Here is an MIT health economist, Jon Gruber. He said, in reference to this claim, With or without reform, that won't be true, said Gruber. His point is--that is, the President's point is--that the government is not going to force you to give up what you have, but that's not to say other circumstances won't make that happen. In other words, what's being said here is, yeah, the plan doesn't specifically say you can't have your current insurance and your current doctor, but it does say that all of these insurance plans have to be just like the Federal Government's insurance plan at some time in the future. And that being the case, the insurance company is going to change the plan that you have or go out of business, or quit offering it, or whatever a whole series of alternatives might be. Therefore, this statement is not true either.

In fact, what's going to happen is, just as we've talked about, this is the government takeover, either slowly or rapidly, of one-sixth of the U.S. economy. And so the idea that you can keep what you have and everything is going to stay the same, you could say that, and maybe it will stay the same--for today and tomorrow and next week and next month, but next year, maybe not; 2 years from now, certainly not; 4 years, very, very different. So, yes, can you keep what you've got and enjoy your insurance and your doctor? Yes. For how long? No promise on how long.

Then we have another promise here. There are those who also claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms I'm proposing would not apply to

those who are here illegally. Well, I think a lot of Americans should think, my golly, you're going to spend another $1 trillion charging all kinds of Americans a lot more money to have this government-run health care plan, and they're thinking to themselves, I'm not sure I can afford to pay for people who come here illegally over the border to try to get free health care off the back of the American workers.

So there is a legitimate concern, and of course that's already happening around some of our borders. It's very hard to get into emergency rooms in many hospitals because people come here from other countries and just walk straight to the emergency room and get care. And of course all that cost is being shifted to other hardworking Americans.

And so, this is a good promise that the President made. I wish this one were true, too. This would be really good if this were true; like the other ones, it would be nice if they were true.

There are also those who claim that the government will insure illegal immigrants. Well, okay. So what's the truth here? Well, one of the ways to check on whether that's true, we have an organization here in the Congress called the Congressional Research Service. They're a bunch of people who are experts at researching things. They're expert at law. And they're not Republican. They're not Democrat. They're not particularly biased. Their job is just to say just the facts, ma'am, just the facts. Here's what they said about this statement. This is the Pelosi health care bill before it was beefed up by another thousand pages, but the section that's in the bill is the same, relatively speaking, in dealing with this problem.

This 3200 health insurance exchange would begin operation in 2013 and would offer private plans alongside a public option. H.R. 3200 does not contain any restrictions on noncitizens, whether legally or illegally present, or in the United States temporarily or permanently, participating in the exchange. So what this is saying is, well, you know, the President can say the illegals won't get the service, but the fact of the matter is the way the bill is written, people who are here illegally can sign up and get the service on the backs of the hardworking American taxpayers. And so what the President said again is not true.

Now, there are other ways to try to tell whether something is true other than just something like the Congressional Research Service. One of those means of telling if something is true or not is to offer amendments. Now, because of the great transparency that we've been promised, there will not be any amendments here on the floor; if there are, it's going to be one or two.

Members who are concerned about, for instance, illegals, making sure that they have to prove their citizenship before they sign up for free health care, people who are concerned about that might offer an amendment. The amendment might say, hey, before you get into this exchange and get this insurance, here's the deal. What you have to do is you have to prove your citizenship. And so an amendment such as that was offered in committee. It can't be offered on the floor because of our procedure. The Democrat Party does not want to have a lot of those amendments on the floor. And especially with a 2,000-page bill, it's true, we would be here a long time.

Some of those amendments are kind of important, but they don't want to take those votes. But those votes occur--although the public doesn't see them as much--in committees. That amendment to make sure that illegals didn't get health care was taken in committee. The vote was just about a straight party line--Republicans for it, Democrats against it. And so, with that amendment failing the way it did, it doesn't give people any comfort that what the President has promised is true, or that perhaps it almost seems as though it is disingenuous.

A similar criticism and complaint--there's a lot to talk about in a 2,000-page bill, my goodness. This is another statement that was made by our President, and it is, he says, a misunderstanding. ``And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up--under our plan, no Federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and Federal conscience laws will remain in place.''

Well, this is a pretty controversial question. Most people know that America is deeply divided on the abortion issue. There are many good- meaning Americans who believe that abortion is the killing of an innocent child. And there are good-meaning Americans, I suppose, who think that abortion is a choice question and a mother should be able to kill her child. Well, people are going to disagree on that. But this is, in a way, a different question.

And it's interesting that the people who want to have abortion rights say that people should have choice, and yet in this particular question there is no question of choice at all, because when it comes to paying your taxes, you don't have any choice. The tax man comes to your door. If you don't pay your taxes, you go to the free hotel. And so paying taxes is compulsory, there is no choice involved in it. And is it reasonable--at least you have to acknowledge, or some people think it's wrong. Is it reasonable to tax them and have their money go for paying for abortion services for people all over the country? And so this is a very big ethical question. In fact, the National Right to Life and some of those groups would rate this as one of the biggest decisions on the abortion question since Roe v. Wade or Doe v. Bolton.

So these questions are something that is percolating within this overall health care bill of thousands of pages. And the President's saying, hey, don't worry about it. We're not going to use taxpayer money to fund abortions. The only trouble is that, like the illegal immigrant question, an amendment was offered in a committee--it would never be allowed on the floor, but it was offered in committee--and that amendment said that we're not going to be using any of these Federal dollars and that we will not be funding abortions with Federal money. Again, that was close to but not entirely a party line vote. That amendment failed.

So as it fails, it leaves you with the irrevocable kind of conclusion that we're not going to have protection. In fact, the bill--or even if the bill doesn't do it, under Federal rules and regulations, you will have people getting abortions using taxpayers' money. This is something that actually quite a number of pro-life Democrats are hung up about, and there is a big argument about this subject. I've never been invited to those meetings. I'm a Republican. But it is interesting to note that again the President says one thing, and yet in fact, when you look at the committee votes and the amendments offered in committee, this is not true.

One of the things that's interesting to look at, you can look at health care from so many different angles. One of the angles that's interesting is what is it that women want, because it turns out in families, many times women are the ones that are involved in the details of the family health insurance, making health insurance decisions for families. And here is a survey that's just been conducted October 19-25, 2009. So this is a very, very recent survey, independent women for a nationwide survey. So they were polling people from all over this country.

Let's see, what did the survey say? Well, first of all, 64 percent of American women would rather have private health insurance than a government-run health insurance plan. You know, it's interesting. In the political world, you can ask questions in several different ways. One thing you could say is, ``Would you like the government to buy you a house?'' And you think, hey, that sounds pretty good. The government would buy me a house, really? ``Hey, Congressman Akin, I would really like it if the government bought me a house.'' So if you said, ``Would you like the government to buy you a house?'' probably a lot of people would say, ``Well, yeah.'' You could ask the same question a different way, ``Would you like to live in government housing?'' I don't think you would find as many people that want to live in government housing. Well, this is a situation here like that.

They're saying 64 percent of American women, that they would rather have this private health insurance than a government-run health insurance plan. And that's actually kind of common sense, because, for one thing, if you like the idea of having some flexibility and choices, if you don't like your private health insurance, guess what you can do? You can go try and find somebody else. What happens if

your only choice is a government-run plan? Well, that's just like Henry Ford. You can have any color car you want as long as it's black. And the nations that have health plans that are run by the government, when you get some sour and unresponsive and underproductive Federal employee running a hospital and the hospital care is terrible, what are your alternatives? Are you going to call your Congressman and say, hey, they haven't mopped the floor and changed the sheets in X, Y, Z hospital? How much good is that going to do you? So these women here, they weren't born just yesterday. They would rather have private health insurance than government.

Sixty-six percent of them described their insurance as excellent or good. So you have a great number of Americans, that's that 100 million, or at least a good number of them, that are saying their current health insurance is excellent or good. What that means is that, as I was saying as we started our discussion on health care, that that provider network is, in America, still pretty good. You don't find so many Americans going to Canada for health care or to Mexico for health care, but you do find a fairer number of Canadians coming to America for health care or Mexicans coming to America for health care. So it's not surprising that we find two-thirds of these women saying that they think their health care is excellent or good.

Seventy-four percent of them describe their health care as excellent or good. Let's see now, what's the difference here? Health insurance. Oh, health care. This is health insurance; this is their health care. So while they weren't quite as crazy about their insurance, they said their health care, 74 percent of them--again, this is the case of the old sheikh that's sick. He wants to come to the USA to get his health care. These women are saying the same thing. Seventy-four percent of them said that actually their care is excellent or good. It doesn't make too much difference what you think of your health insurance in a way if you're getting good care.

On the other hand, you can have wonderful health insurance, but if you don't get any medical care, it's like paper Monopoly money. It doesn't do you any good.

Then here is 75 percent want few to no changes made to their own health care. So this, again, is where a lot of people are. They would like to keep what they have, they're comfortable with what they have, and they don't want us to remodel the kitchen when the drain in the sink is stopped up. They just want to fix the plumbing, but they don't want to remodel the entire kitchen. That makes a whole lot of sense. And actually, from a legislator's point of view, it also makes a lot of sense.

What you're seeing going on politically right now is an attempt to move a bill, to nationalize one-sixth of the U.S. economy. That is a very ambitious project. While I think the Democrats are wrong in trying to do that, I will take my hat off to them at least in the fact that they're doing something that is incredibly ambitious and probably more than what the legislative process can handle in a short period of time.

So part of the problem is is that you just have a whole lot of people that like things the way they are, and so trying to change that for everybody is particularly difficult. And this is kind of a women's perspective on what they're seeing and what's going on.

Now, there are a lot of other perspectives on this bill, and that's part of the problem that this bill has, which is that a lot of people don't like it.

One of the groups of people that really doesn't like it is seniors. Seniors have gotten used to and are dependent on Medicare. Of course, Medicare costs are going up a lot, but they don't like the fact that a lot of this bill is going to be paid for through cuts in Medicare. That's something that tends to antagonize older voters, and many of them are very consistent voters. So this is a group of people that doesn't like it.

Another group of people which particularly does not like this government takeover is going to be that of the people who run small businesses or who own small businesses, because what this bill is going to say is: You must insure all of your employees, and you've got to do it in this, that or the other way. Therefore, it's going to raise a whole lot of costs for your employees if the government is going to be taking over health care and is going to be demanding these things of small business.

The result is that what we've been doing to the small businessman is hammering him just like a giant sledgehammer in some kind of circus tent. We're hammering him down into the dirt. First of all, we're going to let the dividend capital gains tax cuts expire, so he's going to get a tax increase from that. Next, we passed a bill here in the House, which is called cap-and-trade, or cap-and-tax, which is the biggest tax increase in the history of the country supposedly to take care of the dangerous gas CO2 and global warming. That has a very huge tax increase. That is going to also raise the energy costs to small business.

So now they're not only getting the tax increase of the expired capital gains dividends, which is the money they use to invest in new plants and equipment, but also they're going to get hit with an energy tax. Now, on top of that, we're going to try to balance the books of this health care plan on the backs of the small businessman.

The trouble with doing that--and this was tried by FDR in the Great Depression--is that you can drive the small businessman so far into the dirt that you make him close his business down, and that has some effect on employment. In fact, small businesses in America employ--if you call ``small business'' 500 or fewer employees, 80 percent or 79 percent of Americans work for these smaller sized companies. So, if you hammer them into the dirt in terms of taxing and taxing and taxing, what is going to happen is you're going to have increased unemployment. It's not a big surprise to see what we've got going.

Hey, we're joined here in the Chamber by a good friend of mine. There is so much going on in health care, I would just encourage you to join in like it's a dinner conversation, my friend, and just share what you're thinking. We're even talking about a vote here within some days.

Well, that's a very important fact. Don't go too fast. What you're saying is your district is the ninth largest manufacturing district in the country?

You've slipped to 15th?

So what is your take on manufacturing? Because we were told old people don't like this bill because it's cutting Medicare. Small businesses don't like it because they're getting hammered one more time into the dirt with tax increases. Let's talk about manufacturing because, in a way, that's the backbone of American industry.

What is your take on this? How does this work?

Let's get back and get those numbers. We were just talking about this last night.

We've got small business and even manufacturers that have been hammered so hard now that they're struggling for breath.

We're going to nail them with another, possibly, 8 percent cost. This is 8 percent.

Also, what's going to happen to the dividends and capital gains? That's going to go up through this bill, too. So, not only do we have additional taxes on top of the other taxes, on top of the ones that are going to expire and go up--you've got all of that coming down the pike. Also, they don't see any end in sight.

So we have created an environment where there are a lot of unknowns. If you don't know what's going to happen the next month, when we get done with this tax, we're going to go to another one. What you're going to do is you're going to try and play it safe and see if you can survive. Am I on the right track?

I need to just thank you. Congressman Latta is from Ohio, and he is really an upstanding young Member. Your opinion is very important, and Ohio is a very important State, particularly because of the manufacturing base.

You know, a wonderful part of America are these different expressions. There is such a diversity of people in our country, and I guess that's probably why we serve here. We just love this country and love our own constituents and all.

In representing Missouri, we have some kind of rural expressions that are fun. One of them is ``hunker down.'' Sometimes you'll hear people in Missouri say, ``Hunker down.'' Then, if they're really serious about it, they'll add to this. ``They're hunkered down like toads in a hailstorm.''

It paints a picture, but that is, to a degree, the picture of the small business man and of the manufacturer in America just being hit, not with hailstones but with tax on tax on tax, and we wonder: I can't understand why there would be unemployment.

Do you see?

The thing that's tragic about this is the fact that the government has tried this before. They tried this before, and they created the Great Depression.

You had this little British economist, little Lord Keynes, running around, saying, Hey, I've got a brilliant idea. Why doesn't the government just spend tons of money, and by spending lots of money, it will get the economy going, and we will jump-start--I don't know if he used the word ``jump-start.'' I don't know if they had car batteries back then. I guess they did. We're going to jump-start the economy by the government spending tons of money.

So FDR thought that's a pretty good idea. Plus, it's not bad politics if I can run around like Santa Claus with the paychecks, you know?

So he gets Henry Morgenthau as his Secretary of the Treasury, and they test out this nifty theory. So they go out and spend tons of money year after year after year, hoping to see unemployment come down.

At the end of, I think it was 9 years, Henry Morgenthau came to this body, to the Ways and Means Committee, and he said, Gentlemen, we've tried this idea, and it doesn't work. He says it that simply: It doesn't work. All that has happened is that unemployment is as bad or worse than it was before, and we have a whole lot of debt to boot. Those were his words.

So what we're seeing is this idea of just taxing and taxing these businesses, and unemployment is just going to kill us because they're not going to be hiring people when they're hunkered down, worrying about what the next tax is going to be or whether it's going to put them out of business. They're going to be playing things very conservatively. Plus, it's hard to get loans for them.

I do yield to my good friend.

Wait a minute now. I've heard this term ``jobless recovery.'' I'd like to pick at these words a little bit. ``Jobless recovery.'' Do you think that's the same thing as a plastic glass or a jumbo shrimp? I mean, how is it a recovery if nobody has a job? I sure hope I don't suffer too much with that kind of recovery.

Here we go again. It's this tremendously long, complicated bill, a complicated plan, and it almost looks like just another attempt where we already determined when we started that what we really want is the government to run it all.

We've got the government firing the president of General Motors, running General Motors, running the insurance companies, running the banks, deciding what executive salaries are going to be, and that's not good enough to have the government doing that. We want the government to take over student loans, so we passed that this year, still letting private people do the student loans. There's $1 trillion in extra spending to cover all of these student loans. Now what we want to do is take over all of health care.

I mean, this is kind of ambitious. You know, this is a little overwhelming. My constituents are a combination of scared and angry about what's going on down here. I think it's important for us to offer simple solutions, and we've got a simple solution if you want something immediately that you can do, and that is, tomorrow at noontime, Americans are coming from all over this country to meet on the steps to talk about this whole thing and to express their opinions of whether they really think that a bill that raises premiums, that reduces health choices, that delays and denies care, that costs $500 billion in Medicare cuts and $729 billion in new taxes is the solution that they want to this problem.

People who want to say ``no''--at least I think a lot of them want to say ``no.'' I don't know what they're going to say because they're coming here tomorrow at noontime to this Capitol to express their opinions. They were invited by a bunch of us who are just plain old Congressmen, not leadership. They were just invited. You all come. Come talk to us about what's going on here. If people kind of get upset, this is the place to express your opinion.

I would yield.

Yes.

After church to the Rotary Club, that's dangerous?

Oh, the grocery store. I'm sorry.

They are saying, Bob, wait just a minute before you walk out with that loaf of bread. The loaf of bread is stale by the time you get out of the store.

Well, a lot of us are going to go out on the steps and we are going to listen to what those people have to say. I think you committed to be going out there too and be available. And we are going to talk. There are going to be a lot of interesting people, people doing some singing and all kinds of things, people making some little short talks and discussion. And that is a healthy thing in America, to have that freedom to have free speech, to talk, and to come to the Capitol building and to let people know what you think about this.

Of course, there is a different philosophy than this kind of take everything apart and rebuild it, and that is that there are some specific things that can be done that reduce health care costs that Republicans almost uniformly support.

One of them is tort reform, limiting the punitive damages. We know that in other States where that has been tried it reduces the cost of health care. We also know in other States where the government takes over health care, that the costs go out of sight. We have seen that in Massachusetts and in Tennessee. But we have seen in my own State of Missouri and Texas and other States, there is a distinct reduction in health care costs when you limit some of those punitive damages.

It doesn't mean that doctors don't make mistakes and shouldn't be held accountable. But the other thing is you don't rape the system and run the costs up so that every doctor is forced to practice defensive medicine.

Did you pass one in Ohio? Did you limit the punitive damages in Ohio?

So there is the problem. That is one place that Republicans have talked about where there is a specific thing that you can do. And there are other things. We talked about the idea of letting people buy their medical insurance across State lines.

The other thing in this 2,000 pages, there are a lot of loopholes and trapdoors. One of the things that is amazing to me is they do the opposite of tort reform and they say any State that has passed any tort reform, that that gets waived in order to get this government insurance. So you are going to be taxed whether you take it or not, but if you want the benefits of your citizens being taxed, you have to basically back off from tort reform. That is kind of a weird trapdoor.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend from Ohio, Congressman Latta. It has been a treat having you here.

So the Members of Congress may, but everything else is ``shall.'' There are 3,400 ``shalls''----

Packed into a 2,000-page bill.

So, in coming back to the theme of freedom, every ``shall'' is just like another death bell which is tolling for a little freedom that just died. Every ``shall'' is one more little freedom that just died. It is one person with one's doctor who's making a health care decision but who won't make it anymore because there's not going to be an insurance person there, second-guessing. No. It's going to be worse than that. It's going to be a government bureaucrat saying, I'm sorry, Steve. You're just a little too old.

Just having a moment to join my friends here, I think that I would be derelict in my duty if I didn't recognize my good friends, Congressman Hoekstra and Steve King.

You have been one of the people that's called, it's called a House call, it's like a doctor going to a house call, except we are asking for the people who aren't sick to come to Washington D.C. and try to straighten things out on Thursday at 12 o'clock. You are one of the people organizing that, and Pete has been working on it too.

This is really kind of a grass-roots thing, isn't it. I mean, this is not something that the leadership has been pushing particularly or anybody said to do. This is just a sense that we want to allow the many people we know that love this country and love freedom to have a chance to in some way express their opinion about this subject, because this is like some train that's lost any kind of way to talk to it on the telephone; and it is just going with the Governors off of it, full steam, full throttle down a track that's disappearing in empty space. We are just going to jump into this abyss of the government can run it somehow.

When I think of the beginning of this country and I think about freedom, such a special place America is. You know, there are all of these crazy people that came to America.

One of my favorites is this group of pilgrims, 100 of them. They came over with a dream. People say they came for religious freedom. They didn't come for religious freedom; they had religious freedom in good old Holland.

No, they came here because they wanted to build a new civilization unlike anything history had ever seen before. These people were nuts. Within the first couple of months, half of them died. When the Mayflower captain said it's time to go back to England in the spring, half of his crew was dead and he told his bosun to wind in that anchor cable and set the yardarm square to the wind, and that Mayflower sailed over the horizon and disappeared as a speck.

There are these 50 people or so standing on the shore, on the rocky shore line of cold, old Massachusetts, New England, because they had a dream in their heart. They had a dream of building a new nation. A number of years later you have Bradford writing that perhaps we have kindled a candle that will light up even as a candle could light other candles, can light up even a light to a new nation.

All these other crazy people, this one guy started building light bulbs and he built a couple hundred of them and nothing worked. He was just crazy enough to keep on doing it until Thomas Edison built it. America has been built, one idea at a time, by the people who had freedom.

You know, there are different sorts of levels of threats that we run into in Congress. You are an expert on the intelligence community. You take a look in the Midwest, you have these big towering cumulus that come across in June and July and you say is this something that's dangerous or whatever it is, and you take a look, Do we have threats from terrorists? Is that a problem? Is North Korea a problem? We sort of weigh these things.

I would have to say that so many people back in my district and so many of the people that I respect here in the floor would rate where we are right now, Steve, they would rate this as probably the biggest internal threat to America since the Civil War. That's kind of where I have come down. I mean, if you want to talk about American danger, I might say go back to the Cold War and Ronald Reagan and whether the Soviets are going to push the button.

But if you talk about internal threats to America, this idea of the government taking over these sectors, one of the things, there is a couple of things chilling about it. One of the things is tell me any time in the history of America when the Federal Government has taken something over that we have ever backed up from it. We never go backwards.

As soon as something gets socialized, it's permanently built into our culture. We can never get rid of it.

If we ever allow the Federal Government to run that sixth of the economy that's health care, how are we ever going to get back from that?

Bargain.

Wait, there has got to be a story here. A turtle fence. I assume this is to keep stampedes of turtles off the roads?

Is it environmentally acceptable to have a turtle fence, do you think?

The turtle fence, was the bridge for turtles too or not?

The reason I am hung up on this is because I keep a record in my mind of some of the dumbest ideas that I see legislatively. This health care bill has got one, actually. It's the wheelchair tax. Now, what person that ran for public office would want to do a wheelchair tax?

We will get to the turtle fence.

I can tell you what it was named by the Democrat Governor of Tennessee, because his State has tried this whole idea of the government running health care. So this is the Democrat Governor of Tennessee called it ``the monster of unfunded mandates.''

The question I have for my good friend from Iowa, how many dimes do you have to stack up to get to $1.2 trillion? Could you get to the Moon?

First of all, though, you've got to remember the Governor of Tennessee said this is a monster of unfunded mandates. So it is really not $1.2 trillion, is it, because a lot is going to be passed on to the States. So it is really more than $1.2 trillion. Then we are going to collect that with taxes, isn't that right? Like the wheelchair tax. I am still marveling at the political audacity.

$500 billion on small business. And, of course, we are going to do that at a time when employment is strong, right?

Is that dividends and capital gains? Are you talking about dividends and capital gains?

Now, Congressman, you are talking to a guy who made his whole life as a small businessman, Congressman King. Let's just take a look at what we are piling on him in 10 months.

First of all, as you say, we are having all of these different taxes that had been cut are all going to be raised, but particularly for small businesses, dividends and capital gains. So if you are a small business man, you have to have some cash to run your business, especially if you want to add any new jobs. You have to be able to afford a new piece of heavy equipment. That is what you were doing, Congressman King.

Now, what we are going to do is we are going to slam them with what-- you call it cap-and-trade, I call it cap-and-tax, but it is one of the biggest tax hikes in the history of the country. But also included with it are all of these regulations about the carbon footprint of your building.

So now you have got all of the tax things that are expiring. You get cap-and-tax coming. So energy, you are going to get hammered on that. We say, but don't you worry about anything, because we have got some more taxes in this government-run health care system.

Just going back to what I'm saying about some poor guy that's a small businessman out there in this environment, and you see this wave after wave of tax increases, and you don't know when the waves are going to stop, and you don't know what's going on and how you're going to run your company. It reminds me of an expression from a State right next door to yours. You're from Iowa. We're just a little bit east over in the State of Missouri. But we have an expression that I think adequately expresses if I were a small businessman in that Missouri. We say, ``hunker down like a toad in a hailstorm.'' And I think that's where our small business people are. They're not thinking about building that addition or adding that extra machine tool or coming up with an innovative new process. They're thinking about how am I going to survive this storm?

``Hunker down like a toad in a hailstorm.''

It just seems like the problem is just like the cap-and- tax. I mean, that was the one that had the 300 pages of amendments passed at 3 o'clock in the morning. And I remember from this very podium that I'm speaking from our colleague, Congressman Gohmert from Texas, with his droll sense of humor inquiring of the Chair. He said, Madam Chairman--there was a lady in the Chair at that time--is it customary that there be a copy of the bill in the Chamber when we're debating it and discussing it? So there was a discussion with the Parliamentarian who said, yes, there is, it's common that there is. He came back about four times and said, Could you tell me whether to go north, south, east, or west? I can't find a copy of the bill here. And, of course, the bill was still being collated at the time.

Now, that was another example of we have got a solution and we're just going to use the excuse----

But this is the same thing. This is just like that. If really CO2 were the problem, we could have fixed the problem easily.

Well, I guess my point was the objective was already predetermined. It's a massive takeover of all kinds of basically building code stuff, telling you you've got to have an electric outlet in your garage. You know, this sort of incredibly detailed stuff that the Federal Government thinks

we much better know how you ought to build your garage and have an electrical outlet in it. But the objective was all of this controlling stuff and a huge tax increase, which was the objective all along.

This health care situation strikes me as the same thing. The objective from the beginning is get the government to run it, and we'll use any excuse that we can to justify the fact, but we already know the solution and the destination, and that is we just believe in the government running this thing.

And there are a lot of people on the Democrat side that are completely open and honest and say that's their objective, and there are other people that are trying to obscure the fact that that's where they're going. We'll do it in some incremental steps, or we'll make it so that you can opt out. You can't opt out of the taxes, but you can opt out of the health care or whatever. But the bottom line is we want the government to run it.

That kind of reminds me of something. And I know that a couple of you are historians. There was a country that believed, and we heard it argued on this floor, that health care is a right, and there was a country that took a look and said, you know, you ought to have a right to shelter because in the cold, harsh climate of this country, if you don't have shelter, you will die. And you ought to have a right to food because you'll starve to death if you don't have food. And you ought to have a right to health care and you ought to have a right also to education. So that country, because they thought those were fundamental rights, had the government providing those things for their citizens.

I don't know whether that might kill you or not, but the point is that country is out of business. It was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. But that was their basic philosophy, that the government should do housing and food and health care and education. And here we are going along after we laughed at them and watched that complete mess that they made of their country, the poverty it left people in, and we say, well, now we want the government not to do just food stamps and housing but we want the government to do all, all of medicine in America.

A good bill.

Would it be okay, I would like to come back to that call just an hour or two ago from the people in Oregon.

I am thinking, you know, there are not that many people out there that can afford to just drop whatever they are doing, cancel their plans, buy an expensive airplane ticket, come to a strange city, figure out if you are going to get a rental car and survive the traffic.

You know, that is a pretty high threshold. And yet the thing that I love about this country is all across America when you fly back at night in those airplanes and you see those lights across the countryside, all of those lights of people who love freedom in this country, and they are willing to just do that and say, Stop. And they come down here and they feel powerless and they feel small, and yet they come down here and they want to say, Don't you guys remember about freedom? And don't you remember what this country is about? Why is it that you have this absolute, instinctive desire to always build more government and take our freedom away? When has that ever produced good results?

I just think that is why Ronald Reagan loved this country, because he saw all of those different people that were Americans that loved freedom. He didn't see all of the political shenanigans, the false promises. I won't spend a dime more, I will spend $1.2 trillion more instead. He didn't see that. He just saw all those freedom-loving people out there just chasing the dream that was in their hearts.

But government never gives up power, though.

Is that a record?

I've got to believe that's a record, isn't it? Have we ever passed a bill that created 1,100----

On Thursday at 12 o'clock, Congressman King, are you going to be out there on the steps of the Capitol?

But if you do, there are a lot of interesting trap doors, smoke and mirrors in that bill, a lot of very interesting things. One of them that I thought was absolutely amazing, we talk about tort reform, that is, limiting the punitive damages. Different States have passed that and have the effect of dropping their medical insurance costs in the State by as much as 20 percent is my understanding. At least Texas had a very good effect by dropping that.

This bill has a different kind of tort reform. It says any State that has done tort reform, you can't have any of the medical benefits that your taxes are going to go for. So it's a reverse tort----

That sounds like a good--you got me. What's the story?

It doesn't apply to Hawaii?

I wonder what Hawaii real estate is going to do if this thing were to pass?

So the only people exempt from the bill then is Congress and Hawaii.

Is it commissioner or czar? Did they change that? Is it a czar or a commissar or a commissioner? What are they calling this one?

That covers them all, yes.

And also, Congressman King, thank you for being part of calling the invitation, taking the initiative just as a Member of Congress to call the people of America to come to their Capitol Building and express their opinion.

Welcome to this debate that's been going on now for a good number of months, a debate that has caught the attention of Americans everywhere, Members of Congress, Members of the Senate, the question about health care. It's something that's big, it's as big as 18 percent of the entire U.S. economy.

We have seen in the last number of weeks the involvement of the government in new and expanded ways in this economy, not just the 18 percent, but we have seen czars setting the salaries of people in the insurance and banking industry, firing the president of General Motors. So we've seen quite a trend of the government getting involved in the private sector. But this involvement in the area of health care is certainly the biggest of all; this is 18 percent of the entire American economy.

I had the pleasure of being able to sit here and listen to quite a number of the Democrats talking about health care. It was like coming from a different planet. I thought it was interesting that they talked about pet phrases and slogans and things. I guess there have been quite a lot of different words bantering about and different phrases and things, and I think it's important for us to be very precise with our use of words. Otherwise we fall into very serious mistakes.

One of the things that has been talked about is will there be a public option? That's kind of an interesting choice of words, a public option. What that really means, in political talk, is not a public option, but a government solution. A government solution.

So when you talk about a public option, really the public doesn't have anything to say about who's going to get treated or what price it's going to cost or how it's going to work. The public has no say in that; the government is the one who does that.

And in terms of options, you can talk about how bad health insurance companies are--and certainly they do some things that we don't like-- but there is one thing about health insurance companies: If you don't like one, you at least have some option to try and find something else. If the option is the U.S. Government, your only option is to go to another country.

So there's not much option and not much that is public about the public option. Another phrase that sounds just wonderful is ``every American has a right to health care.'' Hmm, that's an interesting phrase. Let's think about that a little bit.

There was once a country that doesn't exist right now that had the idea that everybody had a right to certain basic things. For instance, if it gets really cold outside, you should have a right to housing, because if you don't have a warm place to live, you'll freeze to death. So they said that everybody should have a right to housing. If you don't have food to eat, you'll starve to death. So everybody should have a right to food. They said that everybody should have a right to education, that you should be able to read. So in each of these cases, the government was going to provide housing and food and education. The government said that you also needed to have a right to have a job. So the government was going to provide the job. And the government, of course, said that you had to have a right to health care, so the government was going to provide your health care.

This idea that because it's essential for your survival to have housing or food or education or a job or health care, to say, then, or to assume that, therefore, it's a right is to make the same assumption that was made by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. We used to call them commies when I was younger. How well did their system work? It didn't work very well. Lots of people got lousy health care, starved to death, froze to death and were persecuted and killed by their government because they had an assumption that you had a right to all these different things.

But I think that when our Founders started America, they talked about a right to something else, a right to life, a right to liberty, a right to pursue happiness. What's the difference between those things? Well, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is something that is granted by God to each and every individual citizen. Nobody else gives you that. Only God himself.

When you talk about a right to food, does that mean that the farmer has to be your slave and give you food, which is the product of the sweat of his brow? I don't think so. We call that stealing. So we need to be a little careful when we talk about rights a little bit too quickly. Because when you assume you have a right, then it's the government's job to enforce it, and pretty soon you end up with public option or essentially one choice, and that is the government running everything.

So let's take a look at when the government does too much. What happens when the government does too much? Well, one of the things we can see by other departments of the Federal Government is that we have some sense of rationing, inefficient allocation of services, degraded quality, and excessive expense. These are things that are not uncommon in government departments.

You can think about the postal department. The postal department is not known for its efficiency. There are a lot of private operations that are more efficient than the postal department. It was necessary when America first got going. But the government can do too much. That is the point of many of us on this side.

It's not that we want to have people not have health care, but it's also a reality on our side, as a Republican, that there are things called the law of supply and demand. And as much as we might like to repeal those basic laws, like the law of gravity, the laws of physics, the laws of economics and supply and demand, we can't do that. We cannot have the government guarantee everybody to get absolute first- class health care at absolutely no cost. It just doesn't work mathematically. You can't do it.

So the promise is that you're going to get Cadillac-quality health care at no cost, and don't worry because the government's going to take care of it. That's a great proposition. And if you believe that, there's probably some swampland in New Jersey that you could buy.

What happens when the government does too much? Well, we've taken a look at the Democratic health plan and tried to put 1,000 pages-- because it's got to be complicated to take over 18 percent of the economy. So we came up with this chart. Every colored box here is a new agency or something created. Now, if you think of yourself as a consumer and you've got the doctors on the other side, you've got to somehow get through this maze to get your health care.

Obviously, the first thing that you note about this chart is--and as you can imagine, a 1,000-page bill, if it's as limited as that--I'm sure it's longer than 1,000 pages--is not going to be simple. Another thing that you know

about it is that the more the government takes over, it's going to be kind of difficult if you don't like the quality of your care to change. What is your option? Where can you go?

Now, one of the things, when Americans start thinking about whether or not they really want to go this distance, whether they really want to fundamentally change all of American health care--you know, the proposition that I heard here in the last hour was pretty much the concept that, hey, American health care is broken, so burn the whole thing down and rebuild it entirely, have the government run it, is essentially where it's going. They're not doing that in one step. They are having the government option, which then takes over everything, and every other insurance plan has to be like the government one. And pretty soon, guess what? Just like student loans started out 15, 20 years ago, the government was just one player, now they're 80 percent and they've absorbed almost everything.

So what's going to happen in this kind of a complex scenario? Well, how do you answer that kind of question? What you have to do is you take a look historically at who else has tried it. One of the people that have tried it has been the Europeans, Eastern and Western Europe.

I have a letter here that was sent to me personally by a lady. She doesn't want me to give her name out because she is involved with some government things and that would be some very sensitive information. She has family that has lived in Western and Eastern Europe and looked for health care. She said, in the different governments where she has been involved with government-regulated health care, which is most of the European countries, she says, The first thing I note about the system of health care is that people who want really good health care travel to the United States if they can. If you're a well-to-do sheikh from Bahrain, and you have got a serious health care problem, guess what happens? You take your millions of bucks and you hike over to the USA to get your health care.

I was just hearing people saying that our health care is just terrible in this country, but an awful lot of people vote with their feet, coming to America to try to get their health care. This is a person who has a family that has had surgeries, transplants, various tests, medical maintenance checkups and facilities in these countries where medicine has long been regulated by the government. This is what was said. My first introduction to this was hearing a national friend express her joy to others by this statement. ``God has been so good to my mother. She got in a hospital where the staff mops the floors and changes the sheets.'' For an American used to even community health clinics that surpass some of the westernized specialty clinics that she saw when she went to Europe, she said this was a very, very shocking first impression that she got.

Later, as she talks about elderly people, she says, Later, as I became a regular visitor in middle class hospitals, I saw firsthand how very fortunate we are in America. The hospitals and the clinics, to speak of, care for the elderly is almost too sad to describe. But I can tell you that, whereas, once I was incensed by a low-budget nursing home my aunt was placed in, now that I have ministered to elderly people lying on narrow beds in the back corner of dingy two-room apartments because nursing homes or assisted-living programs are beyond the hope of the people who supposedly have free access to their nation's health care plan, I think of my aunt, and I'm grateful she had a comparably luxurious environment.

There are other stories, too. Here is one for women. No woman enjoys her annual gynecological annual checkup. I would ask American women to imagine a scene where, in one of the best clinics, you sit in a stark, icy cold room, naked from the waist up as folks walk in and out until you learn to bring your own cover-up while awaiting a mammogram.

Imagine that one of the best clinics in your city cannot give you more sophisticated testing for a suspicious spot, and after seeking a clinic in a neighboring country, you end up in another stark clinic where attitudes and expectations are demeaning to a woman's dignity. Eventually, you're sent where for reliable testing? To America.

Those are examples of Europe, Western and Eastern Europe. But we have examples that are a lot closer to take a look to see if this is a very good idea. We could look much closer, to Massachusetts and to Tennessee, where similar programs of government takeover of health care was tried in those States, both abysmal failures.

What else did we learn from those States? Well, one of the things that has been going on here in this debate about health care, you're getting a lot of conflicting statements and opinions. What I am going to do here, with a couple of the charts that I have, is to give you some that have come directly from our President, and we're going to take a look at them here in the next few minutes and just see what really seems to be the truth.

Most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system, a system that's currently full of waste and abuse. It's as though our current health care system has got line items on the various budget tabs that say ``waste'' and ``abuse,'' and we can just take money out of those accounts. It's not quite as simple as that. He is saying that this plan can be paid for by savings. Well, when you take a look at the fine print, you find out where the savings are coming from. We're taking it out of Medicare. That is one of the places it's going to be subtracted, and in other places there will be major tax increases. So that is going to be part of where this cost is coming from.

Now, you could also take a look at America and say, well, what has our experience been with government-run health care? We have two programs. One is called Medicare and one is called Medicaid. We had the Office of Management and Budget which, in the days that these programs were proposed, made estimates about how much they're going to cost. The only trouble was their estimates were a little bit low. The politicians didn't want those people to say it's really going to cost this much, because if they saw how much it was going to cost, people would have said, Baloney, that's too expensive. We can't afford that. So the estimates on each of these were many, many, many times lower by orders of magnitude--not by percentages, but by orders of magnitude--less than what these programs cost.

Now you take a look at what's going on here with Medicare and Medicaid and the expensive increase going on over time, and what you've got going with these three major entitlements programs--Social Security, which is not as much medicine, but the other two--what you have is basically an economic crash that's going to happen to America.

It's going to happen somewhere, because when you get--these programs have absorbed so much of our budget that you're getting into this near 20 percent line of taxation. At about 20 percent, what happens, if the government raises taxes, they don't take in any more money. Doesn't that sound like a weird thing to say? If the government gets taxes too high, they don't actually get in more money. The way that works is that when you run taxes too high, eventually you just stall the entire economic system in America, so you get less revenue.

Think of it a little bit like this. Let's say that you were king for the day and you had to tax a loaf of bread. So you think to yourself, well, I could charge a penny a loaf and collect some revenue from bread sales. Then you think, well, maybe I could charge $100 for a loaf of bread. You say, No, no one would buy a loaf of bread for $100. So somewhere between a penny and $100 is some optimum tax that you could charge for a loaf of bread if you were the king for the day, and anything above it, if you run the taxes up, you actually get less revenue.

There is a certain height that the government can run taxes, and then it just doesn't work. So these government-run medical programs are increasing in cost to such a degree that they're going to create a crisis economically in out-years.

So, if these programs--which were done very carefully, and we have good people trying to administer them--are making the country go bankrupt, is it so easy for us to take the whole enchilada, to take all 18 percent of medicine in America and have the government

run it? Well, I'm not so sure we can do it by just waste, fraud, and abuse and taking money out of Medicare. It seems like the experiences in Massachusetts, the experiences in Tennessee, even our own experiences with Medicare and Medicaid don't give us a lot of confidence.

Here is another statement by the President. Here is what you need to know: First of all, I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits, either now or in the future, period. Boy, that made me feel good when I heard him say that. The President is just letting us know that he's not going to get on any plan that's going to spend too much money or put us in any kind of debt, except for the fact I started asking some questions.

Let's see. Well, what's happened since the beginning of the year? Well, at the end of last year, we had half of the Wall Street bailout, and then we spent the other half of the Wall Street bailout. Special deals for Wall Street. Now that's not something that's exactly good for our budget deficit.

Then we've got this economic stimulus bill that was really not a stimulus bill whatsoever, but it was basically a big expansion of welfare. That's $787 billion. This is a big sucker. We were told if we didn't pass this, by golly, unemployment would get over 8 percent. Well, we passed it, and unemployment is now over 9 percent.

So they're talking about maybe doing another stimulus bill. Then we've got this SCHIP, and we've got the appropriations bill and the IMF. So this amount of spending totals about $3.6 trillion, and we don't have that money. So, when I'm told that we're not going to spend a dime to do this health care thing, it makes me a little skeptical.

How do you sort this stuff out? With some of it, you can't always believe exactly what you hear or the sound bites.

The assumption that we've seen, particularly in the proposals of the Democrat Party, have been what they call ``comprehensive.'' That means they're going to basically redo the entire system. The Republican Party has suggested quite a number of different changes that could be made without entirely burning down the barn. Those changes are now, I think, 50 some different, separate bills. I could name just a few, and I think it's important to clarify the record because sometimes people come on the floor and say that the Republicans don't have any ideas. That's not true, of course. Let me just list a few different things that Republicans are very comfortable with. They are ideas that will reduce the cost of health care in America, and they will make it so that it's more affordable for many, many citizens.

The first would be that we have a problem with trial attorneys and tort reform. In various States, there has been legislation to reduce what trial attorneys can do in terms of suing doctors. The result has been that doctors are still accountable for the medical procedures they perform, but you can't come up with outlandish kinds of punitive damages, which really run the cost of health care up. So medical malpractice reform is something that a great number of Republicans support, and in States like Texas, it has resulted in massive decreases in the cost of insurance and health care. So that's one proposal.

I have not seen much as to that in the different proposals from the Democrats in the House or in the Senate. Although the President mentioned it, there is a question as to whether or not he was very serious about doing anything legislatively.

There are other kinds of proposals. Another is the way the Tax Code works. Right now, if you work for a great big company, you get to buy your health insurance with pretax dollars, but if you're self-employed or work for a small company, you can't do that. Republicans believe in justice. We believe that the Tax Code should be applied consistently and uniformly, so we believe that people should be able to buy their medical insurance with pretax dollars all the way across the board whether you work for a big company or whether you are self-employed or whether you work for a small company.

Another proposal that the Republicans would make which makes a lot of sense--and this isn't something the insurance companies necessarily like, but it does make sense, and it prevents some of the monopoly situations that can occur with the insurance industry when they have heavy control in one geographic area. It is the idea that you'd be able to buy medical insurance across State lines.

To give you an example of how that might work, I'm from the State of Missouri, and we have, for instance, in Missouri a city which is Kansas City. We have Kansas City, Missouri, but the other half of the city is in Kansas City, Kansas. They're both sides of the river. So you have one city, and that city has a group of medical providers, but it is in two separate States. This legislation would allow you to do some shopping. If you lived on the Missouri side and if you could get medical insurance less expensively in Kansas, you could buy your insurance across State lines. What this does is it increases the amount of competition. Therefore, it helps to drive down costs.

We are not trying to repeal the law of supply and demand. We are not going to promise that everybody in America can have Cadillac care at no cost. That's just an empty promise, and it's deceiving people to try to create that impression, but there are many things we can do to improve what's going on.

If you stand back at a distance and look at health care in America and ask, Well, what really is the problem? one way to look at it, which I think is particularly helpful, is to say, look, you've got the provider system--that is the actual medical care that we're giving people in America--and then behind that you have the pay-for system. The pay-for piece is what's broken, not so much the provider side. Certainly, there can always be improvements to the care that we give. Some hospitals give better care. Some doctors do a better job than others, and you can always make improvements, but in general, American health care is pretty good. It's the way that we pay for it which is increasingly problematic. The reason for that is that two-thirds of Americans are paying for another one-third who isn't paying anything, and that just inherently, economically, causes problems. So there are some things that we can do.

Many Republicans support these ideas, again, of lawsuit reform so that we don't have these tremendous punitive damages where doctors have to practice defensive medicine. We like the idea of allowing health insurance to be purchased across State lines, and we think that, when you purchase medical insurance, taxation should be consistent across the board.

There are a lot of other ideas we have. Another one is the problem with the fact that you lose your health insurance if you change jobs or something. That's not a good deal. You're a responsible person; you're working hard for some company; you have medical insurance; you have a wife and some kids; they're covered under your policy. Then if you lose your job, all of a sudden, my goodness, now you have a child or a wife with a preexisting condition, and you're really up a creek without a paddle. That's not the way health insurance should work. We think insurance should be changed so that it's portable and so that you can continue to carry your insurance with you from job to job. So those are just a few ideas.

There are many ideas that Republicans support, but we don't think, when you have 100 million Americans with good health insurance and who like the relationships with their doctors, that you need to scrap that whole thing to try and address--whatever it is--the 10 or 20 million who don't happen to have insurance. We don't think you need to burn down anything in order just to treat the few. These are some concerns.

When you hear, Oh, this isn't going to cost too much, $3.6 trillion is an awful lot of money in the hole. The Republican President who preceded our current President may have spent too much money, but he is a mere piker by comparison to what has been spent here even in the last 9 months.

Here is another statement. First, if you're among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already has health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor

you have. Well, that sounds pretty good. It sounds pretty darned good. The only trouble is it isn't necessarily so.

First of all, if you happen to have Medicare, we already saw that the plans that are being proposed by the Democrats are going to take, depending on which plan you look at, somewhere in the range of $100 to $500 billion out of Medicare. So, obviously, if you're somebody who is having part of that money as part of your Medicare, that's going to change.

There are other changes that will occur with this proposal. These are other opinions as to whether or not you can really keep what you have.

Here is one. Jonathan Gruber. He is an MIT health economist: With or without reform, that won't be true, speaking specifically of this statement. His point is that the government is not going to force you to give up what you have, but that's not to say that other circumstances won't make that happen.

So, in other words, what happens is, if the government does this sort of public option idea and then they say everybody has got to change their insurance to be the same as the public option, well, essentially what has happened is what you had before is going to change underneath you whether you like it or not. It's going to be changed because the government will be getting into this 18 percent of the health care business. So that was his perspective on, ``if you like it, you can keep it.''

One of the huge things which, perhaps, frightens me the most about this whole health care debate is the problem of rationing. You see, there are really only two ways to control the costs of health care. There are really only two ways. One is that people take money that they earn and pay for it. The second way is that the health care is rationed by somebody, and somebody says you can get it or you can't get it. Guess who makes those decisions when the government runs health care. It's not an insurance company. It's not you. It's not your doctor. You guessed it. It's Big Brother. Big Brother decides who gets the insurance and who gets the health care.

The question then becomes: Well, how do they decide? Well, they've got to come up with some sort of a fair way, so they get their calculators out, and they start calculating: Well, if you're this age, you can get this, but if you're this age, you can't get it. We don't think it's appropriate for someone this young to get this kind of test. You can't get it. So you have the government, essentially, rationing health care.

Now, we can hear the Democrats say, Oh, no, no, no. That's never going to happen. We wouldn't have that happen. So we simply did a little test. We offered this amendment, which was Dr. Gingrey's. It's a simple, little, one-sentence amendment. These are not amendments that happen here on the floor. These are amendments that happen in committee because they won't let us do these amendments here on the floor. Here is his sentence:

Nothing in this section shall be construed to allow any Federal employee or political appointee to dictate how a medical provider practices medicine.

In other words, this amendment is saying your doctor-patient relationship is sacrosanct. They're the ones who make the decisions. The doctor and patient determine what your health care is going to be. We're not going to let any--what does it say?--Federal employee or political appointee. That means bureaucrat; that means czar; that means commissar. They're not going to tell you. It's going to be you and your doctor making the decisions. That's what this amendment says.

Well, when this amendment was offered in committee, as you can imagine, they took a vote on it. Well, how did the vote go? This is the Gingrey amendment. The Republicans voted for it, the 23 of them who were there, and none of them voted against this amendment. They said, No. As for this doctor-patient relationship, we need to keep that. No matter what we do in health care, keep the doctor-patient relationship. In fact, the Democrats voted 32 against it, with only one voting for it. So guess what happened? This amendment failed.

Does that give you any source of confidence that you're not going to get rationed health care if Big Brother government gets into the act? I think not.

Here is another statement. Again, this is our President: ``There are those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms I'm promising would not apply to those who are here illegally.''

Well, you know, we've got a recession going. There are a lot of people without jobs. You've got an unemployment rate at 9.7 percent. The idea of saddling the American public with having to pay for illegal immigrants to come to this country for health care is a hard sell, and it may be asking an awful lot of the American public to say we're not only going to have to pay for all of our own health care as well as for the people from other countries who want to come here for free health care.

So the President recognizes that this is kind of a hard sell. He said, ``Now, there are those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false.'' Well, is it really false? Let's just check this out. Exactly what does the Pelosi bill say?

This is the Congressional Research Service. It's not Republican. It's not Democrat. Their job is to read the bills and to render an opinion on basic questions. Here is what they say:

Under H.R. 3200--that's the Pelosi health care bill--a health insurance exchange would begin operation in 2013, and it would offer private plans alongside a public option. H.R. 3200--that's Pelosi's bill--does not contain any restrictions on noncitizens, whether legally or illegally present or in the United States temporarily or permanently, participating in this exchange.

Now, this is not a Republican, these are staffers that work for the U.S. Congress, and they are saying that this bill here does not, when people go to get insurance or when they go to get health care through this exchange, which is one of those boxes on that chart, there is nothing to say whether you are here legally or illegally, or if you are just simply visiting, anybody can get this. This Congressional Research is saying that the President is just flat wrong.

Well, is there any other way of checking this thing out? Yes, there is, as a matter of fact. It was done with another amendment in committee, a Republican amendment. Here it is. This is the Heller amendment.

In order to utilize the public health insurance option, an individual must have had his or her eligibility determined and approved under the income and eligibility verification system and the systematic alien verification for entitlements. What this is saying essentially is if you are going to get this health care paid for by the public, paid for by the American people, if you are going to get that, you've got to prove that you are a citizen here. So this is an amendment. It's offered in committee. What happened in committee? Well, here it is. Heller amendment.

The Republicans, in this particular committee, 15 voted for it, none of them voted against it. The Democrats, 26 voted against it. So, guess what happened? The amendment failed.

Well, it's pretty hard to believe the President when he says we are not going to have illegal immigrants coming here to get health care, and that that's false when the Democrats vote down an amendment to specifically prohibit that. That's a very, very hard thing to understand. In fact, I don't believe what the President said was true, and neither do other people.

One more misunderstanding I want to clear up, and this is the President: Under our plan--the Pelosi plan--no Federal dollars will be used to fund abortions and Federal conscience laws will remain in place.

That seems like a pretty reasonable thing to me. You know, America is very divided on the abortion issue. Some people think that people should have the right to have an abortion. Other people think it's killing a child. Americans don't agree on that subject. But is it reasonable to force every taxpayer to pay for abortions? That's a different question than whether you approve of abortions or not.

So the President says this is a misunderstanding. No Federal dollars will be used to fund abortions. Well, how do you test something like that? I know. We've got some astute people paying attention here today, and you are going to understand, yes, there is a

way to test whether this is true. The way to test it is, of course, with an amendment in a committee. Was an amendment offered? Yes, it sure was offered. Here's the amendment. This is Stupak. This is a Democrat Congressman who offered this amendment: No funds authorized under this act may be used to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes abortion.

Well, that's a pretty good amendment, offered actually by a Democrat this time. Let's see. How did this one come out in terms of how the committee voted? Twenty-two Republicans voted for that amendment and one voted no. Here's the Democrats: five voted for it, the guy probably, and four others; 30 voted against it. What's the total? The total is that this amendment, like the other ones, failed.

What does that mean? Well, it means the bill doesn't say what's going to happen with abortions, and yet you know what will happen. Because if the real intent were to make sure that we don't get in the point where American tax dollars are being used to pay for abortions, if the intent were there, we would simply have language like this in the bill. Language like this is not in the bill, and there is a reason for that. It's because the intention is to be doing taxpayer funded abortions. What the President again says does not stack up with reality.

Now, all of these questions come back to something that for all of us is very, very personal. Health care is the care of our own bodies. We have to live inside these bodies. That's the situation with it. If we are going to be tampering around with 18 percent of our economy, you think, boy, oh boy, we need to be careful and give a little bit of thought to what we are going to do. In fact, one of the things that you would want is you would want as many smart people as possible paying attention and giving input to what the bill should look like. There should be copies of the bill that are available. Before a bill comes to the floor for any kind of vote, it should be out for at least several days so people have some kind of chance to read the legislation. Yet we have seen over the period of the last 9 months that a number of major pieces of legislation have come to this floor without time for the Members to read them. In fact, I recall not so many months ago being right here on this floor, and it was almost comical if it weren't, in fact, true, and that was another Congressman from Texas stood up and inquired of the Speaker and said, is it traditional that when we are debating and voting on a bill that there is a copy of the bill in this Chamber?

The young lady who was Speaker at that time inquired of the Parliamentarian, and he said, Yes, it's customary for there to be a copy of the bill in the Chamber. Pretty soon the same guy stands up again and says, Another point of inquiry. I am having a little trouble finding the bill, and you said there is supposed to be a bill in the Chamber. If you could direct me to where I might find that bill.

After some talking up at the dais, he was told that you find the bill up behind me on the dais. So a third time he comes to the floor and he says, I still can't find the bill. Well, the bottom line, the fact was that the Clerk was still putting amendments that were passed at 3 o'clock in the morning, 300 pages of different amendments that were being shoved into this 1,000-plus page bill, and there wasn't a copy here on the floor and we were voting on it.

One of the great concerns that we have if we are going to go in and basically tear apart the system that 100 million Americans are using for health care today and re-create that whole thing with this particular government proposal, if we are going to do that, there are an awful lot of people that want to have a chance to take a good look at this proposal and say, is this really something that we want to be doing, and do we really want to go the route of Massachusetts and Tennessee and the European countries that went to a government-run system? Do we really want to go there? Or are there other proposals and alternatives that could be done that would be a little less radical and drastic?

As I mentioned before, the Republicans have got quite a number of ideas and proposals that don't tear the whole system to pieces but at least allow us to make some selective changes which will make health care less expensive and more available to many people.

I have talked about what a few of those were. One of them, of course, is tort reform, so we are not practicing defensive medicine. Another one of those is the idea that you could buy your health insurance with pretax dollars, not just if you work for a big company but if you work for a small company or even self-employed. We have also talked about the idea that you could buy your medical insurance across State lines, creating more competition between insurance companies.

There are other kinds of ideas. One is called associated health plans. That would allow small businesses to get together with other small businesses, pool their employees and buy health care in bulk. In other words, it's a little bit like going to Sam's Club or some place that buys products in large quantities in order to get a discount.

That kind of proposal was passed a number of different years by Republicans, it was blocked by Democrats in the Senate, but that's another possible idea. Certainly we believe that if you lose your job or decide to change jobs, that the insurance that you are paying for should be something that you could take with you. We call that portability.

So when you go from one job, and let's say you are going to be self- employed or a small business, you are going to get in a situation where you are uninsurable. We do not support the idea of making a raid on Medicare. That's what's being proposed to pay for about half of some of the Democrat proposals, is to take a large portion or a significant amount of dollars out of some of the Medicare proposals and health care. That doesn't seem to make sense.

We have a grave concern because of the tremendously high costs of what we have already tried with Social Security and Medicare, a grave concern that really what's being proposed with this kind of a government-run system is way beyond the limits of what we can economically finance. We don't believe that you have to take the whole thing apart just in order to make some important changes.

There are many other kinds of proposals that are out there in health care. In my home State of Missouri we have a phrase, if it ain't broke don't fix it. We have a very large part of our health care system that ain't broke, and so I am not really sure that we want the government to take it all over, but, rather, that we make selective changes in certain places where there are problems.

Like some of the previous speakers, I have had some experience. My body is getting a little older now, I am 62, and have had a little bit of situation and experience with doctors and hospitals and things. In my case, I came here to Congress just about 9 years ago feeling fit as a fiddle and still felt in my early fifties bullet-proof and everything was fine, I thought. But I had also had some insurance that wasn't very good, provided courtesy of my own State, the State of Missouri, so it had been hard for me to get in to see the, quote, gatekeeper that they had.

We came here to Congress, and it turns out that there is a place where I could get a physical and kind of fit it into my job of going to the different hearings and all, and they gave me the results of my physical. They said, yes, Todd, you are fit as a fiddle except for one little detail: You have cancer. That, of course, sort of gets your attention.

As it turned out, after a series of tests and different things, within the first couple of months I was a Member of Congress, I had a radical prostatectomy, that's prostate cancer, and it's sort of the equivalent in men of breast cancer in women. It's the most common kind of cancer. So I have a particular sensitivity to people who have been diagnosed with cancer and for those who struggle to survive cancer.

You take a look at what happens when you have government-run systems in terms of cancer care. Here's some of the statistics for men and women. Here it is in the United Kingdom and here it is in the United States. Now, these numbers can be calculated in kinds of different ways, but the point of the matter is that when you have a government- run system, one of the effects of that is you have got waiting lines, and waiting lines are not

good deals if you have got cancer. If you've got cancer or you've got heart disease, which are the two leading killers of Americans, you don't want waiting lines. You want to be able to move immediately on your situation.

In England, they have waiting lines. If you've got cancer, they do this test and that test, that waiting is deadly, as these statistics show. Your chances of survival overall in England is maybe 50 percent and these numbers show, well, 10 percent better. Other numbers show even more.

U.S. companies have developed half of all the new major medicines introduced worldwide over the past 20 years. Why do you think that is? Do you think the countries that have the government running all the health care are going to develop new ways of doing things? What's the incentive? Why is anybody going to take the risk? Why would the government develop things?

No, what happens here, because America still has a free system of health care, our companies are developing a great number of worldwide different changes. One out of every three Canadian physicians sends a patient to the United States for treatment each year. The Canadians have a government-run system, but guess where they go when they have to wait too long in line. You go south. You go to America to get our health care.

The bottom line of the matter is that the quality of care in America, when you take a look at things like cancer, is significantly better. I am thankful for it.

I had another experience which I wish I had not had last summer. My own father is 88-years-old. He was going to a doctor who had developed cancer himself, so the doctor retired and my father had to look for a new cardiologist. So we found the name of one who we had heard was a pretty good doctor. He went to see the cardiologist. The cardiologist took a look at him and said, Let's see, you are on these and these and these medications. What else has been done lately for your heart?

My dad said, well, nothing.

He said, we are going to get you in here tomorrow and get you a chemical stress test.

I had never heard of it. But the bottom line was he didn't do very much walking on the treadmill. The doctor said, Stop, that will be all we need. Thank you. He said, You need to come in for an angioplasty- type thing, which turns out at 88-years-old, you are given anesthetic, they knock you out, and they come in from a vein or artery in your leg and look around inside and see what is going on.

So he survived that okay. And I was there at the meeting on a Monday morning, and the doctor said, Well, the bad news is that there is nothing we can do with stints. Your heart is all clogged up and you are going to have to have a bypass. Well, at 88-years-old, that gets your attention. So we said, What are the numbers?

The doctor said, Well, you have got about a 10 percent chance of a major complication at 88 from a bypass. But if you don't do it, you'll have a 50 percent chance you will have a major heart attack in the next year.

Well, we took a look at the numbers and the decision was easy. The next day my father was in for a seven-way heart bypass. That was on Tuesday. He was home from the hospital on Friday, and he is home now-- this was last July--he is home now and he is doing fine.

That time period in the United States, in St. Louis, took less than three weeks from his seeing a new doctor to being home from a seven-way bypass. That is not waiting lines. That is not government-run. That is not socialized medicine. That is free enterprise. And that is what I have heard people on this floor running down, saying American health care is lousy and it is no good. And I am simply saying, I don't know about other people, but if I were in another country, I would want to come to the good-old-USA to get my health care, and there is a whole lot of people voting with their feet to come to this country.

So the idea of torpedoing our whole system and saying we are going to throw everything upside down and basically turn it over to a government kind of run system doesn't seem to make sense.

Are there changes that should be made? Yes, there are. Have the Republicans proposed a number of those changes? Yes, they have. Are a number of those changes widely perceived by the American public as being necessary, such as tort reform? Yes, they are widely perceived. Are those changes part of the Democrat bills? Many of them are not.

There are things that we can do, but I'm not sure that the government takeover and this kind of system is where we really want to go. I think a lot of Americans are coming to the same kind of conclusions. They are saying, yeah, there are some things we need to do, but let's just wait. We have 100 million people insured and doing reasonably well. Do we want to scrap all of that for another 20 million or 10 million that may not have it?

So, you get to the bottom line, the bill that the Senate has come up with is not dissimilar to ones that we think may come out of the House. Of course, we don't know. We are not part of those backroom, closed- door meetings. I am a Republican. We are not included in the discussion. But we can guess somewhat from what we are hearing in the media and what the Senate has done, and we can say that the proposals that we are seeing are, first of all, going to raise people's premiums.

Who is going to be paying more? Well, first of all, seniors on Medicare are going to have less money in Medicare, because the Senate version has got Medicare cuts at $500 billion. I don't know if the House version is as high as that or not.

There are going to be higher premiums. Who is going to be paying for those? Well, some of the people that are going to have to pay for the higher premiums, aside from the average people on the street, are going to be small business people.

Now, small business people right now are pretty important to us. Small business people, people with 500 or fewer employees, employ 79 percent of the jobs in America. And we have got, whatever it is, close to 10 percent unemployment. So you want those small business people, you want those small businesses to be strong. You want them to have extra liquidity. You want them to be investing in new equipment, in new processes, and you want the innovators and the people who are inventors to be spending money to get new ideas going. And that is what gets the new jobs going.

So, how is it going to help? First of all, if you tax them a whole lot on energy, which we voted to do, but now you are going to tax them some more to raise premiums, and you are going to say, We are going to tax you even more to provide insurance for your employees. That is going to make them want to get rid of some employees, not hire more employees.

The other thing that happens is, when the government jumps into a market it reduces your choices. And eventually, over a period of time, and even the liberal Democrats who propose the government takeover of all health care--the more liberal Democrats want the government to take it all over; the more conservative say no, we don't want that, but we think if the government did a little bit, it is okay--well, the people who are pushing more for the government to take it all, they all say the government option is going to ultimately lead to the government being more and more involved in health care. What that does is it reduces your health care choices. So you don't have options; you have one option.

You know, I can think of something a whole lot worse than some insurance agent or person working for an insurance company getting between the decisions you and your doctor need to make about health care. There is something worse, and that is a bureaucrat. Because with the insurance person, if worse comes to worse, you can move to some other insurance. If it is a bureaucrat, you have no choice in these other foreign countries.

The delays and the slowdowns to health care, of course, are deadly with heart disease and with cancer. So that is a bad thing. And then, of course, the old standard, billions of dollars in new taxes. Is that what we want to do to a struggling economy, to add billions and billions of dollars in additional taxes on an economy that is struggling with

a 10 percent unemployment rate? Is this the time to be doing something like that? I think not.

I think that these kinds of costs say that what we need to do is take the system we have now, selectively look at certain specific problems, and let's put solutions together that address those problems. But let's not try to re-engineer all of civilization and all of society, saying that we now have this fundamental right to health care and the government has got to provide it for everybody. It sounds really good, but when you see the cost, this has led to that kind of amusing phrase: If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it is free.

This has been the effect. And these effects here are what we would predict and project if we make the mistake of following the Europeans, the Soviet Union before them, and Massachusetts and Tennessee, that have all played with these highly complicated government takeovers of health care. This is not the way that we think we should be going.

It is interesting that the polling data suggests that the American public, when you ask them what you want to do, they say, Yeah, we ought to make some reforms to health care. Everybody agrees to that. But they don't agree they want it all done with a government system. So that is pretty much where we are at this time.

I am joined by a colleague, a friend of mine from Louisiana, if you would like to make a comment or two. I think we are running close on time.

I appreciate your perspective. It seemed to me almost that one of the dangerous things to do legislatively is to have an agenda and then just try to figure out some excuse to give you a chance to do what you wanted to do before you even started. And it almost seems as though, instead of taking a look at the system, selectively saying, Hey, let's take one of the hardest things, say preexisting conditions. That is a tough nut to crack. Let's just focus on that. Let's get everybody, Republicans and Democrats together, to take this one nut, define what we want to do, and see if we can't fix that one problem-- instead, it was like, we don't need your opinion at all. Our staffers will write the bill. We will talk about it. We will cut some deals. We have to cut some deals, because we don't have enough votes to pass it. So we are going to have to do something for the insurance companies so that they don't have any liability in certain situations. We got to do a deal.

And you start putting the deals together so you get enough votes to try and pass it, and you cobble something together in the dark of night, bring it to the floor and hope nobody reads it too closely, because if you look at the details you are not going to like it.

Instead, maybe it is a little bit more deliberate, but you define what the problem is. You say, okay, let's put all of our resources on doing this the right way. Any idea is okay, and let's just have a good and open debate. The American public can be part of it and see what that is.

We didn't do that in this big bailout bill, and we didn't do it in this stimulus bill. That is what really made people mad. Then that huge cap-and-tax bill over here, to have a 1,000-page bill with 300 pages of amendments passed at 3 o'clock in the morning, not a copy on the floor and we are voting on this thing, the biggest tax increase in the history of the country the House just passed a number of months ago, that makes people upset. They say, wait a minute. You guys at least could read the bill.

No, we couldn't read the bill.

What do you mean, you couldn't read the bill? It gets them mad.

You say, well, there wasn't a copy on the floor.

Mr. Speaker, when people get into the details of health care, I think they sometimes miss seeing the very big picture. The big picture here is that the Pelosi and the Democrat health care plan has this final destination, which is that it's going to be run by some czar or commissar in the Federal Government.

I guess the question I have is: On what sense of faith is this decision made?

Is it the efficiency of the Post Office, perhaps, that inspires them or the compassion of the IRS, or is it, perhaps, the Department of Energy that was created to make sure we wouldn't be dependent on foreign oil or, perhaps, the Department of Education, which was studied some years ago, and it was determined in the study that, if a foreign power had done what the Department of Education has done to America, it would be considered an act of war?

Why do we want to destroy the health care system that 100 million Americans enjoy in order to just simply socialize it and to turn it over to some czar in Washington, D.C.?

That's an act of faith that's just too hard to follow.

Madam Speaker, it is a common refrain today that ``we are losing good manufacturing jobs'' in the United States; that manufacturing anything in the United States is becoming more and more difficult. As a former steel executive, I share the concerns of our manufacturing community and blame, in no small part, the onerous regulatory burden with which this government has saddled our manufacturers for that decline. But, despite what seems to be the best efforts of some in Congress and our regulatory agencies, there are manufacturing companies in this country who are succeeding and without government intervention. One such company is O'Fallon Casting; located in my district, they will celebrate their 6-year anniversary on Friday October 23.

Once a division of Hitchiner Manufacturing, Co. O'Fallon Casting has roots dating back 40 years in Missouri. But today it has shed its traditional past and transformed itself into a modern, high tech industry leader positioned for growth in the future. Proving that despite an increasingly competitive world economy, innovative U.S. manufacturers can and do successfully compete in the global market.

With the support of ownership, O'Fallon's management team has incorporated modern automation of the material handling and production systems. Additionally, compression straightening of castings has been implemented with four workstations feeding to a single, custom, 500-ton press. The company's goal is to provide their customers with access to cutting edge technologies.

Employing 169 people in O'Fallon, Missouri, over the past six years the company has also pursued a number of environmentally friendly initiatives including high-efficiency lighting and in-house recycling of water, wax and metal. In 2004, O'Fallon Casting was recognized by the State of Missouri with a prestigious Gold Award for its water recycling and waste treatment efforts. The City of O'Fallon named the company ``Manufacturer of the Year'' in 2005.

Throughout my tenure in Congress I have fought to reduce the tax and regulatory burden this government places on American business and manufacturing as a way to encourage companies, like O'Fallon Casting, who are responsible for creating the jobs that employ all our constituents. I'm honored to represent the company and its 169 employees in this House, and congratulate them on their sixth anniversary. I pray I will be able to celebrate many more such days with them for many years to come.

Madam Speaker, it's a treat to be able to join my colleagues today here on the floor of the U.S. Congress talking, once again, about a subject that has absorbed the attention and energies of Americans now for a number of months, the subject of American health care.

This is a big subject. It involves 18 percent of our entire gross domestic product. If you take a look at the hospitals, health care providers and doctors and all, you're looking at 18 percent of the U.S. economy. So from an economic point of view, it's a big deal. But we know it's a bigger deal than just that. We know it's a big deal because it's dealing with our personal bodies. It's a personal issue. And it's something that has to be done, and it has to be done the right way.

There are many different ways of looking at and talking about the subject of health care, and I'm going to be going through those. I anticipate being joined by some of my colleagues and friends here talking about this issue, but I thought I might start a little bit differently this week than I have in some past weeks on health care and read excerpts from a letter that I have received from a lady I have known for a good number of years. It turns out that she works in Europe, Eastern and Western Europe, has had a family over there for more than 10 years and has had access to the health care in a number of different Eastern and Western European countries.

So I thought I would share some of her comments as she hears about our debate here in the United States on the subject of health care and has shared some of her personal experiences from having lived there. She starts by saying, The first thing I note about the system of health care is that people who want really good health care travel to the U.S. if they can at all.

It's interesting, isn't it? People in Eastern Europe or Western Europe, if they want really good health care, they travel to the U.S. So regardless of what we say may be broken about our system, certainly they prefer to do that if they can. In fact, some of the immigration to our Nation is based upon older people wanting better health care. And when you observe that with government-regulated health care, older people can get two free cancer treatments, and then they must consent to go home and prepare to die, you understand why the world envies our tradition of health care in America.

She continues: My family have had surgeries, transplants, various tests and medical maintenance checkups in facilities in a number of countries where medicine has long been regulated by the government. My first introduction to this was hearing a national friend express her joy, and others, by this statement: God has been so good to my mother. She got in a hospital where the staff mops the floors and changes the sheets. For an American used to even community health clinics that surpass some of the westernized, that is, these European specialized clinics, that I have seen in Europe, this was a shocking first revelation that government-run health care was not all that it had been cracked up to be.

Then she goes on and talks about some different people that might be getting health care. The first category she talks about is the elderly. She goes on: Later as I became a regular visitor in middle-class hospitals, I saw firsthand how very fortunate we are in America. I speak here of hospitals and clinics to speak of care for the elderly as almost too sad to describe, she says. But I can tell you that whereas once I was incensed by a low-budget nursing home my aunt was placed in--now she says in America she had an aunt that was placed in a low- budget nursing home. She was very upset about that kind of care in America. Now that I have ministered to elderly people lying in narrow beds in the back corner of dingy two-room apartments because nursing homes or assisted-living programs are beyond the hopes of the people who supposedly have free access to their nation's health care system, I think of my aunt and am grateful she had a comparatively luxurious environment. So much for the elderly.

Let's talk a little bit about children. As for the care of children in a government-regulated system, let me give one example. As a public school teacher in a capital city, I was not allowed to help the orphan girl who lived with me to get glasses, though she obviously needed them. According to the school nurse in charge of the health of the children in that school, she did not qualify. Unfortunately, I did not realize then that this was my cue as caregiver to offer the nurse financial incentive to write the recommendation to request an eye exam at the government clinic. In other words, here is a little girl in a school that can't see properly, and you have to bribe someone in order to get an eye exam. So much for government care for children.

Here's one for women. This is from her own personal example: No woman enjoys her gynecological annual checkup. I would ask American women to imagine a scene where in one of the best clinics you sit in a stark, icy cold room, naked from the waist up as folks walk in and out until you learn to bring your own cover-up when awaiting a mammogram. Imagine that one of the best clinics in your city cannot give you more sophisticated testing for a suspicious spot, and after seeking a clinic in a neighboring country, you end up in another stark clinic where attitudes and expectations are demeaning to any woman's dignity. Eventually, you are sent where for reliable testing? To America.

These are just some of the impressions of someone that in a number of countries has dealt with government-run health care systems. And they are not very pretty pictures.

That's what we're going to talk about once again, and that is, what happens when our government tries to do too much, when the government decides that we are going to take over 18 percent of the economy. Now, there are those who are going to tell you that what's being proposed by the Democrats is not a government takeover of health care. Well, it all depends on what version you're looking at. But in essence, most of the versions of the Democrat-proposed health care plans have the idea that the government is going to get into the business of bidding for government health insurance. And so if you have the government get into the business to start with, what happens is typically that the government tends, over time, to take the thing over.

We've seen the same thing in student loans. There were government- assisted student loans a number of years ago, but there were a lot of private people offering student loans. Now after a bill that was just passed, essentially the Federal Government, while it just had its toe in the door before, now it has 80 percent of all the student loans in America.

And so what happens if the government does too much? It goes beyond what it's effective at doing. Well, we have seen some of these kind of things--inefficient allocation of resources, bureaucratic rationing, degraded quality and excessive expense. This has led people to quip in the case of health care, ``If you think health care is expensive now, just wait till it's free.''

And so let's take a look at some of these areas and see this if there is real cause for concern. The first chart that I have here is an attempt to try to put on a flowchart the proposal that Nancy Pelosi has set forth in the House plan. And it's about a 1,000-page bill, so this chart, to try to reproduce 1,000 pages, what they're doing is all of these colored boxes are new agencies or some new structure which is going to start taking over this 18 percent of our economy. This is the House Democratic health plan. There are several others in the Senate. But this is the House picture. And what you see here, in a sense is, if you're a consumer, if you're ill, you're over here, you've got doctors on the other side and you've got to somehow get through this maze. I was thinking about creating a cartoon with all these little paths and you would find that, unfortunately for many people, there is no path through this morass of government bureaucracy.

Now there are some people who have a tremendous faith in Federal Government, have a lot of faith in government in general, and feel the government could run this process better. But when you think about it, it's your body. And if you're sick, do you really think the government is going to provide you with a level of care?

So the first thing here is there is a complexity. It's very hard for the government to reproduce our free enterprise system of health care. And so this gives you a picture as to what the Democratic bill would look like. Now what I would suggest to you is that if you take a look at American health care, there is a lot of talk about it being so bad. And yet foreigners, if you're sick, if you're a multimillionaire sheikh from Bahrain and you're sick, guess where you're going to go with your money to get your health taken care of? You're going to come to the good old U.S.A.

So in America, we realize that there are some problems in health care, but we also realize that we still have the best health care in the world. So the idea that we just have to have change, let's change it to make it like all these other countries, doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

What is broken about American health care? If you stand way, way back and look at it from a distance, what you see is that it's not so much the care that is being provided for people, although there is always ways you can improve that, what is more broken is the way we pay for it. That is the more complicated question. And the reason that's complicated is because about one-third of Americans don't pay anything for health care, and the other two-thirds have to pay for the one-third that aren't paying. So that's part of the nature of the problem.

But the question is, is the solution to that problem to have the government take it all over, either directly or de facto by getting into the business of selling health care until nobody else sells it except for the government? That's what this proposal would suggest.

Now there are other problems as we have seen. Excessive expense is one of the things you have to worry about when the government takes over something. Do we have any reason or basis for being concerned about an aggressive government takeover of the medical area? Well, take a look here at three of the large, large entitlement programs created some many years ago. One you know is Social Security, which is not so much medical. But Medicare and Medicaid are. If you take a look at the projected growth, particularly in Medicare here over a period of time, you realize that the government is not doing a good job of controlling cost. It's almost impossible, in fact, for the government to try to control the cost. They've written the program, written all of this law, and the law just ticks away and people collect their benefits. It's called an entitlement program. These entitlement programs--these graphs are agreed-to numbers by liberals and conservatives alike--are showing that these programs are financially out of control. In fact, if you really want to take a look at understanding the real challenges to the American economy and the biggest challenges to the solvency of our government, certainly the major component parts are the tremendously ballooning increases of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Now, this red line here is about what the historical average of tax revenues are. You think, well, shoot, if these things go up, we just raise taxes more and everything will be okay. But that doesn't necessarily work, because what happens when you raise taxes too high, you kill the economy. You may have a very high rate of taxes, but the amount of money that the government takes in is not very good.

That may seem strange to you, but if you really think about it, let's say you are king for a day and your job is to raise taxes by taxing a loaf of bread. And you think to yourself, well, I could charge a penny a loaf and make some tax revenue on that. Then you think, ha, maybe I could charge $100 a loaf on bread. But maybe people wouldn't buy so much bread then. Somewhere between a penny and $100 there is some optimum level of taxing where you are going to get the most tax revenues.

What we found historically, when the Federal Government runs its taxes too high, it just kills the economy and we end up not making too much money. So you can't fix this problem by constantly taxing people more and more.

So, with this experience, this would give us a lot of confidence to say we want the government running our health care. I would suggest now that that is an optimistic way of looking at things, if you want the government to do that.

This is a statement made by our President. ``Most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system, a system that is currently full of waste and abuse.''

It is as though we had some government document in our ledger books that said ``waste and abuse,'' and we can just subtract some money out of waste and abuse and we have all this extra money in here.

Well, where was it he was going to go to get all of this ``waste and abuse''? Well, he was going to go to Medicare. And how much money was he going to take out of Medicare? Oh, at one time the estimate was $500 billion being taken out of Medicare, particularly the Medicare Advantage program which is enjoyed by many seniors all over this country.

So here he says, ``Most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system.'' What sort of savings? Taking it out of Medicare. That is one of the reasons why these health care proposals have been not too popular. The senior population enjoys Medicare Advantage and other parts of Medicare, and they are not so sure that this is the way to pay for socialized medicine.

Another statement by our President: ``Here is what you need to know. First, I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits, either now or in the future. Period.''

Very emphatically. I am not going to add one dime to our deficit, says the President; yet, if we take a look at the last 6 months, we kind of wonder whether he is really very serious, or maybe whether he was joking. Because if you take a look the Wall Street bailout, $250 billion we spent; economic stimulus, which was really an expansion of welfare and a lot of other programs, $787 billion; SCHIP, another $66 billion; another $410 billion for appropriations in the IMF bailout here. When you get all done, we are looking at a spending of $3.6 trillion, which we don't have.

In fact, by the time we got to about March or April of this year, we had spent all the money that was coming in in taxes. In other words, it would be like you and your family budget, and you are sitting there, you have one year you are supposed to make your budget over, and you get through the first 4 months and you have spent all the money for the year. That is what happened here federally with the trillions of dollars of debt and deficit that is being piled up under the Pelosi and Obama leadership.

We were told that George Bush spent too much money, and he did. That is why I voted against a bunch of his proposals even though I am a Republican. But he is a mere piker when it comes to spending. So when we say we are not going to add one dime for a health care plan that isn't paid for, this record that has been established over the last 9 months certainly is one that leads us to be just a little bit skeptical about that promise.

We have had some other promises from the President. Here is one: ``If you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid or the VA, nothing in this bill will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have.''

Boy, I am sure glad to hear that. One thing, if I knew the Congress were going to be having the government take over health care, if they told me I could kind of keep the program I have and the doctors that I am comfortable with, I would think that is a good promise. I really like that. But is it true? Is it true? Let's take a look at what other evidence there is to see if this is true or not.

This is an MIT health economist. ``If you like it, you can keep it?'' with a question mark. Is that really true? If you like your health insurance today, can you keep it?

Here is what Jonathan Gruber said. ``With or without reform, that won't be true,'' said Gruber. So he is basically saying the President is wrong, it is not true. His point is that the government is not going to force you to give up what you have, but that is not to say other circumstances won't make that happen.

So, what you have going on here is that by having the government involved in health care, what is going to happen is the government will continuously exert an influence. It will change the way that the private insurance companies write their health care, and you will not be able to continue with the care that you currently have. So this is another promise which is a bit misleading.

One of the things that is particularly important I think for most Americans in health care overall, and that is they want that doctor- patient relationship protected. When you go to see your doctor, most of the people who practice medicine do so because they like to heal people, they like to help people, and they will take time with you. They will try and diagnose what is wrong with you, and they are going to say, you know what I think you should do, you ought to do this, this and this.

They are going to make a recommendation. You may or may not choose to take their advice. You may get a second or third opinion if it is something that is very serious, but you are going to check it out. Then, when you and the doctor eventually come up with a plan as to what you are going to do if you have a problem, you don't really want somebody in an insurance company telling you, No, you can't do that. You want to be able to have the doctor-patient relationship to be intact and that you can proceed on that track. You certainly don't want somebody that works for an insurance company getting in the way.

But there is one thing worse than some big insurance company getting their nose in the relationship between you and your doctor, and it is much worse, and that is when a bureaucrat gets his nose in and says, Sorry, you are not qualified to get that care.

You see, there is nothing about the way the bureaucrat is going to figure out who is going to get care, because this is basically a law of supply and demand. It is a basic law like the law of physics, and that is, if you have an unlimited demand and a limited supply, things aren't going to work. So you have everybody in the country wanting absolutely free health care and you have got a limited number of hospitals and doctors, something has got to give.

So what is the solution? Well, the government bureaucrats are going to get these big old calculators and they are going to figure out whether you are the right age to get this particular health care or not, or maybe use other parameters to determine do you get service or do you not. It is called bureaucratic rationing.

You know, the trouble with their calculators, those big old calculators, they don't know anything about health care. They are just counting dollars. So, if you are the wrong age, too bad. You get a bottle of aspirin and get to go home and just wait to die.

Anyway, one of the things that is very important to Americans is the idea that you and your doctor's decisions about health care should be protected and final. So this is something that never can happen here on the floor of the House, because people wouldn't want an embarrassing vote to happen here on the floor. But they do allow amendments in committees.

Here was an amendment that was offered by a good friend of mine, Dr. Gingrey from Georgia, an amendment in a committee. Here is what the amendment says: ``Nothing in this section shall be construed to allow any Federal employee,'' you can translate that bureaucrat, ``or political appointee,'' an appointed bureaucrat, ``to dictate how a medical provider practices medicine.''

That is, we want to leave the doctor-patient relationship intact. That is what this is about. This is kind of a simple little amendment. You may think we pass thousand-page bills on the floor here that we haven't had read or printed. That is true. We don't like it. We have a bill to try to fix it. That does happen. This isn't any 1,000 pages.

This is a simple little sentence. You can read it off this chart. This amendment was offered in committee, and guess what? This amendment failed. People voted on it. Do you like this? Do you want to keep the doctor-patient relationship sacrosanct?

Here is the votes. The Republicans, 23 of them, voted for this amendment that Dr. Gingrey proposed. The Democrats, 32 of them, voted against it, and one voted for it. So it was almost a straight party- line vote, and this amendment failed. This amendment failed.

So if we start talking about some bureaucrat dictating whether you are going to get care or rationing of health care, don't be surprised. A lot of politicians say a lot of things. This here is a written sentence in English, and this here is an historic vote total. People can have opinions, but they don't have the right to their own set of facts. This is a fact. This is what happened in committee, and this should give you some concern if you don't want the government rationing your health care.

Here is another statement by our President: ``There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms I am proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.''

Well, I am glad to know that the people who are paying for health care in America wouldn't be having to pay for people that aren't even American citizens. And that is what the President is assuring us of. We are not going to be paying for people who are here illegally.

Well, again, like a lot of these other statements, instead of just taking it at face value, you probably better take a look at the fine print to see if he is telling the truth, because the last couple of statements he made, I don't believe him at all. Do we have any reason to believe this statement? Let's take a look and see.

This is an amendment that was offered by Congressman Heller, and it is going to clarify this question. This is an amendment that is going to go on to the Democrat health care bill. It was tried in committee. What he wanted to do was, Congressman Heller, who is a Republican, he wanted to take Obama up right on this promise right here that he made that no illegal immigrants are going to be getting any of this government-paid-for health care; translated, that means you and I pay for it.

So, he says, well, fine. If that is what you mean, we are not going to have illegal immigrants getting health care, what I am going to do is write up a sentence here just to make that absolutely clear. Here is the sentence: In order to utilize the public health insurance option, an individual must have had his or her eligibility determined and approved under the Income and Eligibility Verification System, IEVS, and the Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements, SAVE, program.

In other words, using other parts of our government law, you have to prove that you are here legally if you are going to get any of this health care provided courtesy of the U.S. Government, provided courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.

So here is an amendment that just makes clear that what the President was saying is true. And how did this amendment go in terms of voting in committee? Well, here we have it again. The Republicans voted 100 percent; that is, 15 of them voted for this amendment. They said, yeah, we don't want illegal immigrants getting this socialized health care. And the Democrats voted 100 percent, that is 26 noes, and they don't want this in the bill.

Now, does that give you a sense of confidence that what the President said is really true? If we didn't want illegal immigrants to be getting this health insurance from the government, wouldn't the President say, hey, Democrats, vote for this amendment so we can make it clear to the public that we don't have any illegal immigrants getting this? No. Of course, this is voted.

So we hear one thing from the President, and yet, in fact, when we actually put an amendment up in committee, we find a straight party- line vote.

Some people say there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. If you worked down here, my friends, you would know there is a very big difference. A very big difference indeed.

I am joined by a good friend of mine, Congressman Hoekstra, and you have joined us before as we have talked about health care, just kind of running through a whole series of different aspects of what is involved in this huge debate that is taking place. Apparently, at some period of time there is going to be a big vote on this subject. I don't know if we will get a copy of the bill or not, but there is going to be a big vote.

I would yield time to my good friend from Michigan to let us know what your thoughts are.

So basically what you're really saying is one of the things that's going to be lost, one of the big things that's going to be lost is the person who's sick having some say over the direction of which way they're going. I think this big blue button here, this is the nerve center. And if you want to be in the right place in health care, you want to be this health care--I don't know if this is a czar or not.

I do yield.

Just reclaiming my time. Gentleman, you're talking about a situation, you're 30 years old, bullet proof, but you say, yeah, it's possible. If I got the really bad part of the statistic, I could get something I couldn't afford to pay for so I'm going to get that catastrophic plan that fits me in my situation. I don't need OB-GYN coverage because I'm a guy, and so I don't need that part of the plan. I'm just going to get this catastrophic thing and take the rest of my money and I'm going to put it into my small business because I've got a dream.

Go ahead.

If you push this button, it'll make the whole thing go, I think.

You're talking about freedom.

Gentleman, I don't accept that and I know you don't accept that, that we just roll over and say we're going to have this government takeover of everything. I don't accept that.

He's looking too happy over there.

Well, I think somebody's getting their fist in some of that Federal money. You know, you talk about free enterprise. One aspect is in free enterprise you can fail, and we even allow some of our States to fail. You talked about their examples, Massachusetts and Tennessee have been pioneers in this system. And what have we learned from them? It's like Thomas Edison making light bulbs. He made 100 light bulbs. The first hundred, none of them worked. Well, these light bulbs don't work either. They not only have mercury in them, you turn them on, they just cost you money and don't work.

We are joined by your good friend from California. I see he has a little something he wants to say. But, Congressman Lungren, I would just be delighted if you'd join our conversation here.

Oh, litigation reform box. It's got to be here somewhere. Could it possibly be forgotten?

You're admitting to being a lawyer here on the floor. I appreciate that.

Well, gentleman, as a way of trying to answer that question, I do recall the President saying earlier, and repeatedly, that the Republicans don't have any ideas on this. And so this must be one of those ideas that's not an idea because that's why they didn't put it any of their plans. Of course most people that know anything about medical care know that some of the excessive costs are created by things that are done just for the purpose of attorneys.

Actually, I would like to defer your question to the good doctor from Georgia who's here, who has had 20 years or so in practice. Well, we've got two doctors actually. Just a second, now. Congresswoman Foxx, are you trying to escape on us here? We've got two doctors. I'm going to go to my most beautiful doctor who's here joining us this afternoon. Would you please share for a minute, and then I am going to go to you, Dr. Broun.

Congresswoman Foxx, let's just hold right there for a second. What you just said is so very, very important. We've already mentioned one Republican alternative that is not in any single Democrat plan, which is tort reform, isn't it?

And so our good friend from California, who is an attorney who came in here and warned us about this, there's one. Okay, now why don't you name another one or two.

So that's usually called by the word ``portability,'' isn't it? And that's something that Republicans largely support; is that your understanding?

So, in other words, another proposal would be that if you got a bunch of small businesses, if they want to pool their employees and get a better deal on health care, they can create these health care pools. Now that's an idea. Do you know any Republicans that are opposed to that?

Well, we appreciate very much your good work on the Rules Committee, and Congresswoman Foxx it's just a treat to have you. And I yield to my good friend, Congressman Hoekstra.

In the State of Missouri we have the same sort of principle. It may be not quite as much defined by engineers, and we say, ``If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'' And you've got a hundred million people with health care that they like pretty well, everything is chugging fine, and you want to destroy and throw the whole thing overboard because you may have at the most 10 or 12 or 15 million that aren't getting the care that you think they ought to get. That's one of those, ``if it ain't broke, don't fix it.''

And that really does raise a question. It almost seems that we're starting with the premise that we want the government to run all of health care and just looking for an excuse to try to do that.

We got a little bit off track.

The question was, are there really legitimate savings and costs through some reform in terms of tort reform?

We have a doctor here. He's practiced medicine 20-some years.

Dr. Broun, what do you think about tort reform? Does it make sense? Do we have some savings there? And can we improve the quality of medicine in America by making some adjustments in that area?

Let me ask you a specific question, Doctor.

You picture yourself--and maybe you're the emergency room doctor that night or you're practicing medicine--and somebody comes to you and they say, I think I need this such test, and it's vaguely related to something that might have happened to them. You look at them and in your medical opinion, there isn't one chance in a thousand that they need that test. So if you deny them getting that test, then do you have some risk?

Even though it doesn't make any sense at all to do it?

You have a big liability because if you don't do the test, then what could happen?

If you do order the test, what does that cost you?

So it runs the cost up on the system so the incentive for the doctors is, take the fallback, it's safe. I don't care. Let the cost go up. I'm not going to stick my neck out, right?

It violates the law of supply and demand, doesn't it, Doctor?

My good friend from California would like to jump in here.

Yes, I yield.

We've got just about maybe 5 or 6 minutes to go.

We've been accused, as Republicans, as not having any ideas. You started by saying, Yeah, we sure do. You want to take a look at one thing, you can avoid getting into this kind of mess. If you're worried about the cost of medicine, you can deal with tort reform. That's one piece.

The lady who was here from the district before, Ms. Foxx, talked about the idea of treating pools of people, small businesses coming together and getting a better buy on their insurance. She talked about portability, so that when you leave one job, you can take your insurance along with you. All of these things are things that we talked about that we agreed to. And there are a couple of other things.

More choices equals freedom, doesn't it, gentlemen?

So if you have some insurance companies that may have a little bit of a monopoly in one part of a market and you allow people to buy insurance across State lines, you're breaking up monopolies, allowing prices to come down and giving people more choice, which is more freedom. Is that right?

Do you know if that is included in any of the Democrat bills at all?

None.

So we don't have any malpractice reform. We don't allow the competition of--of course, they don't need to worry about that in their bill because their plan is, they're not going to have any private insurance companies in a period of time because the government is going to run it all.

I do yield.

That's the end goal.

Not to mention $500 billion out of Medicare, taxing small business when we already have close to 10 percent unemployment.

Now you're getting off to preaching and getting on to meddling a little bit.

I just hit 62, and I was just reading that in Canada--I've got a bad hip--I wouldn't be able to get that hip replacement that Dan got because I am too old, I'm an old geezer now, and it's not worth it for a government bureaucrat to pay me to get my hip fixed.

So we've been talking a little bit bad about these Democrat proposals. This is something that Congressman Lungren's been hitting, and that is it reduces health choices. Freedom is about increasing health choices, not reducing them. It raises premiums as long as there's even going to be premiums, it delays and denies care, $500 billion in Medicare cuts.

I do yield, yes.

In our last minute or two, what I might do is share something personal because I came to this Congress 9 years ago, and they have a little medical clinic that's downstairs, and the medical clinic gives you--if you want to spend about $400, you can get a test, you can get a physical.

I hadn't had a physical in years because I had some sort of State HMO policy. I never could see my primary care doctor. I don't even think he existed. I could never get an appointment.

So I go down there and find out I was bulletproof, as I thought, except for one detail. I had cancer. So when you use the ``cancer'' word around me, my ears pick up a little bit. I take a look at how does it work when these governments run and deal with cancer. Here's your survival rate for men in the United Kingdom, 44.8 percent. It jumps up here quite a number percent to 62.9 among men in the United States. And we want to go over and make ours like that? I don't think so.

I yield to my friend from Georgia, last minute.

So you have rationed care. Rationed care means you've got to wait longer in line. Waiting with cancer is not a good deal.

And ``poor outcomes,'' that's doctor's talk for you're going to die, isn't it?

Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, this evening we're going to be continuing on a familiar theme for many, probably the single issue that rivets the attention of Americans perhaps more than any single debate and discussion and, that is the change to American health care. This is not, of course, a small debate. It is a debate that involves a question of, to a large degree, whether the government is going to take over 18 percent of our economy. That's not a small section of our economy, 18 percent, nor is it a small question.

Not only economically is it a big question, every one of us has to live inside our own bodies. So it is a very personal question. We have to live inside our bodies, and we're dependent on health care, and we hope that we can continue to enjoy the high quality of health care that we have had in America.

But people recognize that there are problems with American health care. Those problems largely are not so much in the delivery of the health care but rather in how the health care is being paid for. So there are stresses in the system as to who's going to pick up the tab on it.

We've seen a lot of examples of different departments of the Federal Government. It does amaze me just in a commonsense point of view why people would really want to trust their own personal health care with any department in the Federal Government when I think of the profound inefficiencies within many departments of government.

We don't think of the post office as being a model of efficiency, the IRS as being any particular model of compassion or precision. If you think about the Energy Department, the Energy Department was founded on the idea that we had to make sure that America never had to rely on foreign sources of energy. Since that time, the Energy Department has grown in employees, and we have also grown on our dependence on foreign oil.

Then you've got, of course, the Education Department. That is a model of something that I wouldn't put my trust in. In fact, there was a study done on the Education Department some years ago that concluded that if a foreign nation had done to America what the Education Department had done, it would be viewed as an act of war.

Yet there are people in spite of this--and we've seen the Federal emergency management in response to Katrina and other departments of the Federal Government. In spite of that, people want to turn over 18 percent of our economy to the government.

Well, when the government does too much, there are some things that we tend to see as becoming problematic. One of them is that you get some inefficiencies. You could get excessive expenses, degraded quality, or bureaucratic rationing.

Is this something we need to worry about when we are talking about health care? Somebody quipped that if you think health care is too expensive now, just wait until it's free. We will take a look.

Here is what was proposed in the House plan, right here. It's a 1,000 page bill, but you can summarize it in this nifty flowchart. All of the colored boxes are new parts, new moving pieces.

You could see that it certainly doesn't meet the test of simplicity, that's for sure. People who have looked at this and studied it long enough say, I want to be the health care czar. He's the guy who makes all the decisions and determines who gets care and who doesn't.

Tonight, we are going to be talking on the subject of health care. A lot of new information is breaking, new estimates from the Senate as to how much their plan is going to cost and how much is going to be taken out of Medicare on that plan.

I am joined by some good friends of mine here, and I am thinking my friend GT is here. I am just going to recognize and yield to you, my friend, a Congressman who has not been here that many years and yet who has already earned a reputation far in disproportion to the amount of time he has served, and long on the common sense department, which I think we need a whole lot more of that common sense.

Slow down just a minute now. The four basic principles of health care, do that again.

Doctor-patient, yes.

That doesn't sound like a very good idea. Just probing a little bit, though, you made a comment. You said that you came here with 20-plus years of health care experience. You came here with ideas that could improve the system, and we have been accused for months, both by the President and others, as saying the Republicans don't have any ideas, yet you had quite a few ideas.

Let me ask you this. Did any of your proposals--because we have been accused of this as well, did any of your proposals raid money out of Medicare?

Yet the Democrat proposal we were talking about 2 weeks ago was raiding $500 billion out of Medicare. Now, that has been scored in the Senate. It's about 400-and-something billion being taken out of Medicare to try and pay for this thing. That wasn't something you were proposing?

Here, this is a chart of these three big entitlements. People talk sometimes about earmarks and other stuff about Federal spending. But the real story about the Federal budget being broken is really within these three big entitlements. All of them, you can see, are growing out of control over time: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.

Now, as these things grow, what you are saying is, in spite of the fact it's costing a ton, there is still not enough money in those programs to really pay for what the medical costs are. We are now taking money out of the private sector or from other sources to help subsidize these things that don't work.

Now, you are a commonsense guy. It seems to me that if we have Medicare and Medicaid that are financially broken, the solution to say, well, we are going have the government take over all of that and a lot more, that almost defies common sense.

You know, we are joined by a gentleman whose sagacity and also years of service on the floor are about legendary. Congressman Souder, I would appreciate you joining. I think of these as kind of a dinner conversation. Let's just talk about what we have got going on. This is something that Americans care about all across our country, and I think we need to have enough time to talk about it, take a look at it, and to say just say rationally what's the right thing for us to be doing.

This is not really a particularly subtle point, yet the American public understands this. They would like us to read the bill. It's really hard to read the bill when the bill we are debating and voting on is still being collated up here, like the cap-and-tax bill that we had with 300 amendments passed at 3 o'clock in the morning.

Your point is well taken. First of all, it would be a good idea to see what the bill is before we vote on it. It seems like a straightforward point.

This is death care?

As you talk, what comes to my mind, as I am hearing you talk, is basically a form of rationing that's really diabolical, a sort of rationing that says, well, you can take a bottle of aspirin or what. I am getting to be an old codger at 62, but if I were older, I would be even more paranoid, I think, from what I am hearing you say was in the bill.

What strikes me, gentleman, and your points are very, very, well taken, currently full of waste and abuse. It's almost like you have a line item on a budget that says waste and abuse and so many million dollars. I mean, if you had that, you take that line item off the budget. Well, what exactly does waste and abuse mean?

We were just talking to cardiologists today that came in. They explained the kinds of equipment they have in their office. From a practical point of view, if you are a cardiologist, it's like what used to be a stethoscope. A doctor hung it around his neck. He might not have used it all the time, but he needed it on a fairly regular basis.

Their stethoscopes now are far more sophisticated, but they use them all the time. Not all time, but they have to have them immediately available to do their job. As you say, that allows them to provide service reasonably close where people live, and it allows them to do it right in the office. Particularly, it provides the fact you don't

have to wait weeks and weeks to get some particular checkup.

That is the weak underbelly of the socialized medical systems in England and Canada, because you take a look at things like cancer, you don't want to wait weeks and weeks. If you have got melanoma, you want to get it and you want to get it now. If you have got heart disease, you want to get it now.

I just went through this with my father. He got a new heart doctor. His old heart doctor wasn't paying too much attention. His new heart doctor took a look at him, took a look at his meds and said you need to get a chemical stress test. When he got that, he said you need to get an angioplasty thing. So they go in and look around with that. They said when you get that, you need to get a heart bypass, which turned out was a seven-way heart bypass. When he got done with that, 4 days later he is home. Total period of time, less than 3 weeks from the time he went in to see the doctor until he had a seven-way heart bypass and was home from the hospital.

That is the American medical system, because it can react quickly and rapidly to something that if you let it go is going to be life threatening. That is what you are talking about.

So this waste and abuse, we have seen where some of this supposed waste and abuse is coming from; $500 billion out of Medicare. I know Republicans have been accused for years of being people who want to cut Medicare. Here we have got the Obama plan, we are going to get the money out of Medicare.

In fact, you made the point, gentleman, that we hear these conflicting claims and people say, Well, what's the truth?

Here's what you need to know: ``First, I'll not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits, either now or in the future.'' This is our President. He says he is not going to add a dime to our deficits. Guaranteed, first thing. Well, let's take a look at the track record since the beginning of the year.

Deficits. We are talking trillions of dollars worth of deficits here. Here is the Wall Street bailout, the second half of that. Economic stimulus. If you don't vote for this, you might have over 8 percent unemployment. So all these liberals voted for this thing, $787 billion, mostly in handouts and welfare types of things; and now we have got, whatever it is, 9 percent unemployment.

Maybe that's what he meant, it wasn't a dime, it would be trillions of dollars. But this doesn't give us any record to be comfortable with. This assertion doesn't square with what our history is.

Now, there have been a number of other assertions. This is what makes people confused.

First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare or Medicaid or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. The President is saying this. You get to keep what you have got. If you like what you've got, you can keep it.

Yet here you have an MIT health economist, with or without reform, that won't be true. His point is that the government is not going to force you to give up what you have, but that is not to say that other circumstances won't make that happen. Essentially, what happens is the government gets into the insurance business, the other privates all close down, and you only have one choice: you have got to go to the government.

So one thing you are hearing, you can keep what you have. In fact, here is a guy from outside that doesn't have a dog in the fight, he says that is not how it's going to work.

Here, this is a section, the doctor-patient relationship. If there is anything important in medicine, it is the doctor-patient relationship. This is an amendment that was offered by Dr. Gingrey from Georgia, one of our friends and colleagues. Here is his amendment:

``Nothing in this section shall be construed to allow any Federal employee or political appointee,'' that is bureaucrat or whatever, ``to dictate how a medical provider practices medicine.''

In other words, we are going to enshrine the doctor-patient relationship. We are going to make it clear that when a doctor and patient decide on a particular procedure, we are going to proceed. Nobody is going to get in the way. Not only do we not want the insurance company getting in the way; we don't want any bureaucrats.

So he puts this amendment up and it goes to a vote in committee. Most people don't know this amendment went to a vote in committee and here is the result: 23 Republicans say, yeah, we want to leave that doctor- patient relationship sacred. And where were the Democrats? Thirty-two of them voted against this, only one voting for it. So what confidence does that give you that we're not going to get a rationed health care system? And yet we're saying whatever you have, you can keep it. We've had these claims and counterclaims, and I think it's important for us to let the American public shed some light on this. This is what people are saying.

I've got some other charts, but I want to go to my good friend from Pennsylvania. I yield.

Gentleman, you've got all of our curiosity up. How can we get $26 billion? You say there is a line item of $26 billion that you could work on.

Oh, tort reform.

I think my friend from Indiana had a comment on that. I yield.

Yes.

We've been talking about how do you deal with some of the different questions in health care. What has just been illustrated here is the fact that Republicans do have a number of ideas. One of those is tort reform. You're not talking about the fact that if a doctor makes a mistake that the patient shouldn't be made whole; but what you're talking about is this wild, punitive damage kind of thing which just introduces such a wild card for the insurance companies that they run the cost of insurance up and then the doctors practice all this defensive medicine, which my friend from Indiana is pointing out as well; and any doctor you talk to will explain that that's just standard. We don't necessarily like it, but politically the Democrat Party doesn't want to allow dealing with that tort reform.

Now, the President did make a comment about it, and it is kind of the elephant in the room, but it's a big cost to health care that could be dealt with.

We're joined also by my good friend from Louisiana, Congressman Scalise. Please join us.

Wait a minute now. You got my attention. The average American family, the proposal that's being offered is it's going to add $1,700 more a year for the cost of their medical insurance?

Isn't that the new study on the Democrat Senate plan? Isn't that where that was done?

Let's talk about cost. You've got $400 billion in new taxes, and you're going to take another 400 or $500 billion out of Medicare. So right off the bat when you say, Here's this new piece of legislation, what do I get for it, well, first of all, $400 billion in taxes, 400 or $500 billion out of Medicare. That's something, just as we started talking. It raises this kind of commonsense question: You've got over a hundred million Americans that have insurance and doctors and health care that they like pretty well, and they don't really want to change; they're content with what they've got, and in order to try to fix what problem, you've got somewhere between 10 and 20 or 10 and 30 million who don't have health care, maybe could afford it but don't. And so in order to do the 10 or 20, you're going to basically take apart the system for a hundred, which also raises kind of a commonsense question, too. I just don't quite see that.

There are a lot of claims going on. Here's one:

``There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This is false. The reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.'' This is the President. This is his claim. But let's take a look and see, well, what does the fine print say.

This is the Congressional Research Service. This is a nonpartisan group. They've studied the bill that the President was talking about. They say:

Health insurance exchange would begin operation in 2013 and would offer private plans alongside public option. H.R. 3200--that's Speaker Pelosi's bill--does not contain any restriction on noncitizens. It does not contain any restrictions on noncitizens, whether legally or illegally present or in the United States temporarily or permanently participating in this exchange.

Yes, I do yield.

Isn't that amazing? This is why Americans to some degree are upset. They're upset about the points you made. They would like us to have 72 hours to at least look at a bill and read it.

And then, they're not too fond of the idea they're going to get cracked for $400 billion or $500 billion taken out of Medicare. Certainly senior citizens aren't too fond of that. Some people don't like the idea of having to pay for illegal immigrants' health care services. This is very clear from the Congressional Research Service that what the President said just flat isn't true.

And if that were not enough for you, here's an amendment by one of our colleagues, Congressman Heller. This is another one of these amendments that takes place in committees where people don't see it so much. This is going to clarify this statement that the President made. In order to utilize the public health insurance option, an individual must have had his or her eligibility determined and approved under the Income Eligibility Verification System, IEVS, and the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement, SAVE programs under section 1137 of the Social Security Act.

So, in other words, what we're saying is, we're going to make sure, we're going to card you at the liquor store. When you buy those cigarettes, we're

going to card you. That's what this amendment says. You notice it says ``failed'' down here at the bottom. It failed why? Well, because here's the Republicans. They all voted for it. Here's the Democrats. They all voted against it. There are more Democrats so this amendment is history.

So the President says, we're not going to have any illegal immigrants, but, in fact, the Congressional Research Service and this amendment and the vote on this amendment bears testimony that that just isn't true.

I do yield to my good friend from Pennsylvania.

Till 5 'o clock in the morning?

This is the illegal immigrants getting access to the money of Americans that are paying money for health care.

I do yield to my friend from Indiana.

Just for some people that might not be familiar with the way the House works, when this bill, this medical bill, whatever it is that the Democrats come up with, it comes to the floor, they're not going to let us offer any of the amendments that are going to be in any way embarrassing or debate them or discuss them. It's going to be a take-it-or-leave-it. The train is leaving; either get on or stand on the platform with your hat in your hand.

Well, let's just review a few of those amendments. The first thing is, you don't want illegal immigrants to be tapping into the money for the health care. Another one was saying we weren't going to use health care to pay for abortions. So that was one that, I mean, a lot of Americans are thinking, I don't really want my--whether you're for or against abortions, I'm not sure I want my money being used to give people free abortions. And then there was a question about the doctor-patient relationship. Are we going to ration health care with bureaucrats, some calculator, some computer that says, well, at your age and at this and such, you don't get any?

And so you've got an amendment that says that you're going to have a doctor-patient relationship that is going to be sacred, and that you're going to allow the doctor and patient to make medical decisions. All those amendments offered in committee go down on a straight party-line vote.

A vote isn't an opinion. It's a hard and historic fact, yes.

And that's one of the talking points as we talked to one of the Senators this morning about the new--because we're getting information about what the Senate is doing, and that was one of their things--it reduces health choices. I think the whole point of the policy is Americans don't all necessarily want the same policy. You know, if you've got a medical savings account, which is something that we have supported, so you can put money aside to cover different things, and you've got a lot of money in that medical savings account, the insurance you may want would be what we used to call a major medical policy. It covers the great big things, but the smaller stuff, you can say, hey, I can afford to take a thousand or $2,000 hit because I've got enough money in my medical savings account that I don't need to pay for a policy that covers everything.

Somebody else who's just starting, and maybe they're a little bit worried about they just can't take anything, they're going to want a policy that covers a lower deductible. And depending--as you made eloquently clear, one size doesn't fit all. It's not the, You can have any car you want as long as it's black. We've got choices in America. And what this Democrat Senate plan, and it is Democrat, does--there's only, huge news, one Republican, just one, that ventured to vote for this thing; everybody else is against it--it reduces health choices. That's not the way you save money, and it's not the way you provide good health care. Very good points, gentleman. I yield to my friend from Pennsylvania.

Another party-line vote. Just amazing, isn't it? Well, you know, if you take a look at what the Senate is talking about doing, you can understand why there's this amazing gap, because the public opinion polls are showing that people are not very comfortable with what we're talking about jumping into, and for the sake of whatever it is, 10 or 20 million people, destroying the health care of 100 million.

And this, these are some of the costs: It raises premiums, and it reduces the health choices which we've been talking about. Those health choices are very important. It delays or denies care. This thing here, delaying and denying care, as a cancer survivor, I understand the importance of this because if you don't get it and get it quick, you're a goner. And so this idea of rationing and postponing and having to wait in queues, which is endemic in England and Canada, that's something that we don't--that's a high cost.

We've got some other costs here. We've been joined by my good friend from Iowa, Congressman King, and I imagine you might have a few thoughts on these subjects as well.

I'd just like to cut in a little bit on you, gentleman. When you've raised this point that Medicare pays for whatever it is, 80 or 90 percent of the actual cost of a procedure. So what that's saying is, whenever a doctor treats a Medicare patient, what's really happening is there's more cost than actually is being paid by Medicare. So what that means is at a certain point, if you were to reduce what Medicare is paying, there's going to come a point where a doctor says, enough already. I just can't afford to cover any more Medicare patients because, guess what, I'm going to have to cover some other patients, and I'm going to have to charge them 120 percent to make up for the 80 percent over here because we're cost shifting.

So, in other words, what's happening is somebody is having to pay more. So now what we're going do is take $500 billion out of this. And what's that mean? Somebody else is going to have to pay more.

That's not a lot of fat.

Rationing is something we need to give some thought to.

My good friend from Indiana.

Wait. Wait. Wait. You're going too fast for me. This is absolutely incredible. What you're saying is one of the most brilliant parts of American health care has been the innovation, has been all the new drugs, the new devices, the new procedures. As I mentioned, I'm 62 now. I have gotten to be an old geezer, and my left hip has been giving me trouble. You see me limping around, and I'm going to be looking at a hip replacement. Those weren't available 25, 30 years ago.

So what I'm hearing you say, gentleman, then, is this. Let's just assume if you're a company, for every dollar you put into R&D, you get the same benefit out. You're saying you're going to slash the R&D budget of some of the big innovators in medicine; you're going to slash it by half because you're going to tax them?

Now England and Canada have had this socialized medicine for years. Are they known for the innovation that those countries have added to health care?

They come here?

So what you're saying, gentleman, is you're going to kill R&D. You're going to kill the development. There are all kinds of people that have cancer that is ticking away slowly. They want some innovation. They are hoping some new drugs or some new procedures are going to come along. We're going to kill that. We're going to get rid of that, and we're going to go to a system that has never worked historically.

Here is a chart. This kind of got my attention, because as I mentioned, I was diagnosed with cancer, but take a look at the cancer survivor rates when you go to the U.K. compared to the U.S., and what you see is that big waiting time and that lack of innovation. You don't live as long when you are over in the U.K. In fact, I was told that when you add up all the cancer times, U.K.'s is a 50 percent survival rate if you're diagnosed with cancer. In the States, it's supposedly considerably higher. So why do we want to destroy a system that is producing this level of innovation?

What you are talking about is free enterprise. And free enterprise needs, first of all, to have people have enough money to be able to invest; and second of all, have that competition and that hub of technology that you're starting to drive and one guy is thinking, Hey, I see what they did. That was a cool device. But I think I could up it one. I could do it even better. And that American process is what has allowed us to enjoy the best health care in the world. If you're a rich sheikh from Bahrain and you're sick, guess where you're going to go? The good old U.S.A.

My good friend from Iowa.

The thing that concerns me is that it's possible for us jumping in haste to some kind of a solution like this because of all the political hubba-hubba that's going on, to jump into something which is going to permanently damage American health care. It's going to irreparably move us in a direction where it's going to be almost politically impossible to recover from. It's a little bit like when you get on the gunwale of a canoe, you put enough weight on it, and you're going to dump it over.

We have a very good health care system, but can it take this kind of a hit? $400 billion in new taxes. Guess who is going to pay those? Do you think those are rich guys that are going to pay those? That's going to be every plain old working person in this country that is going to be part of that $400 billion. $500 billion out of Medicare. Guess who's going to pay that? That's going to be the seniors. And the delays and denied care. Who's going to pay that? That's people with heart problems, people with cancer problems. People will be waiting in line. People will have some bureaucrat controlling their health care.

One of the things that really scares me about this, and maybe I'm thinking of it a little too personally, but we are Congressmen, and one of the things that we do in our office is we try to help our constituents that have a problem with the Federal Government. And

so if somebody needs to get a passport, we go hurry up and try and help them get their passport quicker. If somebody has a problem with a permit or something, WE go call the bureaucrats up and say, Can you help out? What form have we not done? How can we help this? And we try to help our constituents out. Now, I'm picturing I'm on the phone and we've got this kind of system, and I'm getting the phone call that says, You've got some government bureaucrat that just told my dad he can't get a heart bypass. What am I supposed to do?

I yield.

Thursdays on 2 hours. So get in line. That's incredible.

We are about at the end of our hour. I would very much like to thank my good friends representing a host of different States, people with a great deal of common sense, and particularly Pennsylvania, with 25-plus years of being in the medical business. You see this thing, it's like a train wreck that you're seeing in slow motion.

What we're trying to say is Americans, pay attention. We cannot afford to go this deal about taking 18 percent of our economy and giving it to the Federal Government to run. It doesn't make sense. It's going to be expensive. It's going to destroy health care. And in every other regard, this is just a bad deal for everybody.

Thank you so much for joining me, gentlemen.

Mr. Speaker, the bill that's before us today is a product of hundreds and hundreds of hours of hearings, all kinds of work by Members and staff, and by and large it's a good product. It's a political product. It has trade-offs here and there to try to balance one requirement against the other; and it is, once again, a reflection of a committee that I have been honored to be able to serve on for 9 years, a committee that has been largely bipartisan, a committee that has focused on solving problems, defending our Nation, and supporting our troops.

And in all of those regards, this bill is fine, except for there is an elephant the room. The elephant in the room was an invention of the Senate. They decided to put onto a bill that is focused on supporting our troops their own liberal social agenda of hate crimes legislation. Now, they claim they have the votes to pass that so why don't they pass it somewhere else? Instead, they put it on the backs of our service men and women and expect to use a blackmail kind of approach to have us, to dare us to vote against adding something that's totally extraneous to defense of this Nation on the backs of our service people.

A number of us are saying, as much as we support our troops, as much as we support the hard work of this committee, we believe that this is a poison pill, poisonous enough in fact that we refuse to be blackmailed into voting for a piece of social agenda that has no place in this bill. This is the kind of shenanigans that makes the American public irate. This is the kind of thing, like passing 300 pages of amendments at 3 in the morning, that makes the public nauseous.

And I, for one, as much as I support our troops, indeed, I even have a son going to Afghanistan in 3 weeks, as much as I support him and the rest of our troops, I will not allow us to be blackmailed into voting for something totally extraneous on this bill; and that's the reason why I will not support the bill.

Madam Speaker, thank you for this opportunity to once again take a look at some of the very significant questions that face our country this evening in this 1-hour. We're going to be taking a look at the subject of health care in America, something that has absorbed the attention of citizens and political leaders now for a number of months. Something that is, of course, important to every single one of us.

We each have to live inside the bodies that we have, and how health care is run in this country is not only very important from a financial and economic and policy point of view; it's very personal because it's our bodies, after all.

So what we're going to take a look at this evening once again is the question as to what are the reforms that should be made in American health care.

Now, sometimes people when we deal with this want to say that everything is wrong; we need to just burn the entire barn down and start completely over. But of course people from foreign countries that have millions and millions of dollars come to America all the time as their choice for the best health care that they can buy anywhere in this planet.

So, certainly, there are many good aspects to our health system even though it may need some reforms in some areas.

What is being proposed here is not minor. In fact, that's one of the problems with the fact that legislation has not moved in months on the health care subject and that's because what was being attempted is to do a great, great deal. What's being attempted is the government, essentially over time, is going to take over 18 percent of the entire U.S. economy, that is, the government is going to run the health care system.

Now, this is a rather bold proposal. When Lyndon Johnson discovered hunger as an issue, he didn't propose that the government was going to take over all of the grocery stories and farms and all of the trucking in between, but rather that he would propose food stamps. This, instead, is the idea the government is going to take over everything in medicine over a period of time.

So the question is, is this a good thing. Does it really meet the problems, and what are the potential dangers of it.

When the government does too much, we have seen a pattern in the past of things that happen. We have examples of England and Canada where the government is running their health care systems but also examples in our own country of government getting involved in things that it's not very well positioned to do. And we see some inefficient allocation of resources, excessive expenses, degraded quality, and bureaucratic rationing. All of these are part of what can happen if the government does too much.

In fact, it led someone to quip, If you think health care is too expensive now, just wait until it's free.

One of the things that happens when the government does too much is they tend to make things very complicated. This is a chart that we have that tries on one chart to summarize a 1,000-plus-page bill. All of these different groups--the heart, of course, is not really a czar, but it might as well be a czar. It's either a commi-czar--we're very, very fond of czars lately. And commi-czars are I guess a sort of a form of a czar, but it's telling everybody what they're going to do in health care.

But this is an organization chart, and I've often thought we can almost turn this into a maze. And we can put the patients here and the doctors over there, and we can see and give people a crayon and do it as a doily, and they could see if they could get their patient over to the doctor. I am not sure whether it's possible to do that or not, but it would make a good maze.

This is a good chart that we have trying to depict what happens when the government takes over 18 percent of our economy.

Another aspect of that is an objection that the President has tried to respond to.

He says, Here's what you need to know. First, I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits either now or in the future. Period. Boy, that's reassuring to have the President tell us that he's not going to sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficit either now or in the future. That's reassuring, if it were true.

Well, this is what we've got going so far this year. We've got the Wall Street bailout, that's $350 billion; economic stimulus--I don't think it's really stimulus--but whatever it was, it was mostly just increasing government programs, $787 billion; SCHIP at $6.6 billion. Then there's the appropriations bills at $410 billion; and IMF bailout. And then you've got some taxes, also.

So when you put it all together, we're talking about a total of $3.6 trillion. I don't have a lot of confidence with this level of spending that this idea about one dime, he's not going to add one dime to the deficit when we've got $3.6 trillion that we've already done this year. Somehow this is not reassuring, this promise that he made.

Most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system, a system that is currently full of waste and abuse. Of course, our health care system--I don't know of anything in our budgets that say waste and abuse. So you can just delete a line that says waste and abuse all through it.

But he says this will be paid for by savings within the existing health care system. Well, what is he talking about?

Of course, what he's talking about is taking $500 billion out of Medicare. I don't know if that makes the older people in my district very happy to know that we're going to take all of this money out of Medicare to try to pay for the thing. In fact, what's the track records of these great big socialized programs? You've got Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; and if you take a look at the projected trend in these things, by the time you get up here to about 18 or 20 percent, you just can't raise taxes enough to pay for them.

What this chart is saying is when you see the growth of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, they will eventually absorb the entire Federal budget.

So we've got Medicare and Medicaid, government-run socialized-type programs, and they're out of control economically.

And so the President says, Well, don't worry, but this one is not even a dime. I don't know that that really helps a lot.

I am joined by several good friends of mine, one I just found out is a Ph.D., and I didn't realize that we had a Ph.D. joining us.

But I would yield the floor to the good doctor.

Congresswoman Foxx, how is it that dead people could be eating all of those narcotic drugs? That is kind of an interesting equation, isn't it?

$23 billion in drug costs?

Drugs in the Medicaid program.

Now, just sort of seeing where you are going, if you allow me, what this makes me think is that the government is running this program now. If the government is so efficient in running this program, what confidence does that give us that the government should take care of your personal and my personal health? Is that the direction you are going in?

If that happens in a short period of time, what happens when the program gets older and older and gets more encrusted with bureaucracy?

We are joined here by Congressman Bishop who has shared with us some very good insights in the past.

It strikes me, not dealing with tort reform, you can talk to any physician, that builds a lot of cost into medicine. Although the President made sort of a passing reference to it, there is no genuine interest in dealing with tort reform, which is something that Republicans do support.

We are blessed with a couple of doctors here tonight. Dr. Price is also joining us. Let's talk a little bit about the cost of all of these things.

Just thinking for a minute, you've grown up in the medical profession. I actually came out of engineering. I used to work for IBM and some businesses, but I have also been a legislator for some number of years. One thing that we all experience as legislators, we have our constituents call us up and they have a problem and they want us to help them fix it.

Now I am picturing to myself, on top of everything else we have got, now we have people calling us and saying, you know, my dad needs a hip replacement and he went to the government bureaucrat and the bureaucrat told him he is too old and he can't get his hip replacement. Also, my mother needs a heart bypass. And, Congressman, won't you go to bat with this bureaucracy and get them to give medical care to my relatives? And we are supposed to take a look at this mess and say somehow we are going to get past all of the rationing for health care and bureaucracy and are supposed to get people the medical care that they need. It is asking too much of people's Congressman. Anybody who sets this system up is just creating a complete disaster.

The thing that scares me to death is my first experience as a State legislator was trying to get a left-turn signal put into a traffic light. Now, there was a lane marked in the pavement. They had a left arrow, but they didn't have a light that had a left arrow. That took me about 4 years and probably over 150 phone calls to the highway department to get them to put that little lens in there with a light that says left turn.

I am thinking, if I have trouble with that, how in the world are we going to make something like this work. This is just bizarre. Then I start to think who in the world would have the faith to want to put this system together. Let's take a look at how well our current different departments are doing.

You have the post office department known for its efficiency.

Then you have an energy department. It was created with the purpose of making sure that we weren't dependent on foreign oil. Oh, that is helpful to know that.

Then you have the people who took care of Hurricane Katrina and our emergency management services there.

Then you have the education department. They set some records, too, because a study was done of the U.S. Education Department and the conclusion was, if a foreign power had done to America what the Department of Education had done, it would be considered an act of war.

Then you have the CIA. Now, there is an interesting operation. In Gulf War I they tell us, well, Iraq is probably 10 years away from making a bomb. We get in there, they are 1 year away. Gulf War II they say they are 1 year away from making a bomb. We get in there and they are not doing it at all.

So we have all of these agencies with a great track record, and now we are saying, yeah, so let's turn our health over to the Federal Government. I mean, this takes a lot more faith.

I would yield to my good friend, Congresswoman Foxx.

Reclaiming my time, there may be some people here that have forgotten, but we took a vote saying that at least you should have a couple of days, especially on a thousand-page bill.

We have heard all kinds of promises about transparency from Speaker Pelosi, and yet the bottom line is it is not transparent at all. We do not have a chance to read bills. The spectacular one was the 300 pages of amendments passed at 3 in the morning and brought out here, and we are debating and voting on a bill on the floor and there wasn't even a copy of the thing here in the Chamber. It is almost laughable it was so silly. And the American public was going, we don't have to be very sophisticated, but we would at least like you to read the bills.

Jumping in here, I didn't realize that the economists who can score outlines are so smart.

I don't even know how I'd start scoring an outline of a bill when you don't have anything that says--that's really an amazing--I wonder if the American public is going to be impressed with the fact that we're scoring an outline of a bill?

Just reclaiming my time for a minute. You know, what has really encouraged me in the last 3 or 4 months is the American public is really engaged. They're starting to pay attention, and they're starting to make comparisons between claims and what the bill actually says, if they can get copies of it. Here's one. This is kind of an interesting deal. Again our President says, There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This too is false. The reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.

So I mean, this is what's being said by the President, and yet the public is starting to say, wait just a minute.

I do yield, lady.

That is correct. People are starting to cross-check Congress, and they know the bills better than some of the Congressmen that are proposing them. And that's exactly what's happened. One of the things, and I don't know if it's quite as easy to catch on the Internet, lady, would be also these amendments. This is the Heller amendment, which was on that very subject of illegal immigrants. What this says: In order to utilize the public health insurance option, an individual must have his or her eligibility determined and approved under the income and eligibility verification system. In other words, what this is saying is, before you come and can get this socialized medicine and everything and tap into that you, first of all, have to prove that you're a citizen.

So this amendment was offered in committee and the amendment failed, which doesn't give us a whole lot of room for confidence that we're really serious about cracking down on illegals who are illegally taking money out of the health care system.

I do yield.

That's what he said.

That's correct. The bill has something in it that says well, illegals shouldn't access it, but there isn't any protection whatsoever in terms of the mechanics of the bill. So anybody who wants to can just walk right in and help themselves. And this amendment, I don't know if this amendment is available to the American public, but I think this pretty much says, you know, there's a huge difference between the two parties, first of all, and second of all, that this amendment really calls into question what the President is promising. And there's a whole series of other promises that we can talk about as well.

You know, gentleman, that's exactly right. And the thing that I find perhaps encouraging at least, maybe it's a bright side to a dark

cloud, and that is that the public is becoming aware of what's going on, and the mainstream media is putting this out. The President is putting this stuff out. And yet, you take a look at the polling information and the public is starting to pick up on this. And they're realizing that what the media tells them and what the President tells them just isn't true, just isn't true.

And as they start to read it, they start citing sections of the bill. And here's another one. This is perhaps--and I know we have a couple of doctors joining me on the floor here. If there's anything that as a patient is a big deal to me, if you want to boil health care down to one thing, I want the doctor and the patient to be making the decisions. As a Republican, I don't like it when insurance companies stick their big nose into that relationship. The only thing I could think of that's worse than that is some government bureaucrat sticking their big nose in that relationship.

So here's another promise that the President has been saying, and this one too isn't true. First, if you're among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid or VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. That's wonderful if it were true. But the trouble is, it ain't necessarily so, one more time.

Here's the first. There's a Congressional Research Service. This is an unbiased--it's very professional people that we use, count on them. Hear what they say, okay: Under this bill, this is Pelosi's bill, under H.R. 3200, a health insurance exchange would begin operation in 2013, would offer a private plan alongside a public option. And it goes on to say, it does not contain any restrictions on noncitizens. Well, this is the one about legal or illegal immigrants.

But here's another amendment that's along the same lines. This is Dr. Gingrey. Nothing in this section shall be construed to allow any Federal employee or political appointee, that means bureaucrat, to dictate how a medical provider practices medicine. This is the heart of what we believe in as Republicans, the doctor-patient relationship. This is an amendment offered. It says no bureaucrat's going to get in the way of your health care.

I do yield.

You know, the thing that's scary to me about that is, the way the Federal Government's going to go about that, they're going to start taking a look at your age and how much it costs and everything, and I'm getting to be kind of old. I mean, I just hit 62, and I'm not too encouraged by the idea of some bureaucrat saying, look you old geezer Akin, you can't have that hip replacement that you need. I've been talking to you, Doctor, about getting some help with that because I've been limping around. We have Dr. Burgess here, and I would just really appreciate it, as a medical doctor, if you could shed some light on the situation.

2,000 people?

Well, you know, gentlemen, a number of you have raised the point that there's a whole lot of Americans that are not very thrilled with this approach of government takeover of health care. But let's just think about it for a minute: Why it is that you had that reaction, 2,000 people come out of nowhere, and they're all hotter than hornets about how this is lousy stuff, we don't want some bureaucrat rationing our health care.

Let's talk about who might be against this bill. First of all, if you're an older guy like I am, you're going to be worried, because statistically you're at the point where they're saying it's not worth it for the government to pay for you to get your health care.

So if you're an older person, all they're going to give you is aspirin and some pain pills or something. And so if you're an older person--you're not going to like this--if you're an older person, you're probably also on Medicare. And you want $500 billion taken out of Medicare? I just don't think that's going to be very popular with some of our older voters.

But let's say that you're a different person. Let's say that you have a small business. This bill is going to tax your small business a whole lot. You're saying, I'm already struggling. I'm barely making ends meet. We've got a lot of unemployment in America. If I had some money, I'd be able to add some new machines, get my small business going, and we could help the unemployment. But now you're going to tax me to death on a bunch of this socialized medicine. So the small businessman is not going to like it, the guy who is pro-life is not going to like this.

I yield.

We've got unemployment that's just running away. The statistic almost everybody knows is that I think it's pretty close to 79 percent of the jobs in America are with companies with 500 or fewer employees. So small business employs almost 80 percent of Americans. And what are we going to do? We're going to slam them with an 8 percent tax on top of things right now with unemployment already at 8 or 9 percent.

The sad thing is that, to a large degree, we're doing it to ourselves with this kind of overkill legislation. This almost looks like somebody has got a solution looking for a problem to justify it.

I notice that we're joined by my good friend, Congressman Fortenberry. I'd like to yield some time to you so you can be part of our discussion.

I have to say that Congressman Fortenberry is highly respected. He is one of these level-headed kind of decent guys. Everybody likes him.

You've got to have some people in your district talking to you about this. What are you hearing, Congressman?

I yield. We're basically enjoying having a conversation here. A little bit like going to dinner with your Congressman, except the food, you have to provide that for yourself.

Proceed, please

Only 1.7, gentleman? That's not very much increase. Most people's insurance jumps 20 percent a year.

Gentleman, I really appreciate your approach of trying to solve problems. We have focused for some of our discussion this evening on the things that are wrong with basically having the government take the whole thing over and socialize it. But we have also been criticized by the President and others that the Republicans don't have any kind of solutions to health care, which you just showed was a tremendous amount of innovative and very kind of strategic thinking in terms of how do you approach this. I think maybe it would be worthwhile. Doctor, I ask you to join us, please.

Let's just kind of tick off some things that--just think about our Republican colleagues and friends. I'm going to just toss out a few things that I would figure get at least 90 percent, probably 95 percent from our colleagues.

One of them is that the big companies and employees of big companies get to pay for health care with pretax dollars, but the small business guy and the individual has to pay with after-tax dollars. I think most of us would say justice means that people are treated equally before the law, and that if we're going to allow people to buy their medical insurance with pretax dollars, that should be made available to everybody.

Don't you think that we'd get a 95 percent on that, probably?

I'm not speaking for the whole House because they want the government to take things over, apparently. That's just one idea. I toss out another one.

Which therefore, Doctor, suggests?

Fleshing that idea out a little bit, in the case of Missouri, where I'm from, you've got Kansas City; half of it's in Missouri and half of it's in Kansas. So if somebody in Missouri kind of goes over the line into Kansas and finds out, Hey, I can get a couple hundred bucks less a month on the same health policy, why can't I buy that policy from an insurance company in Kansas?

So what you're saying is, Yeah, that's okay. Allow people to shop for insurance across lines, which then reduces the monopoly problem in the insurance industry. That's something that don't you think most Republicans would support that idea?

Which, again, gets to another Republican proposal for portability. I mean, you know something isn't right with the way insurance is written when somebody does all the right things. They run for a number of years, they buy insurance, and all of a sudden their kid gets sick with juvenile diabetes or something very expensive. Then they changes jobs or something and now they're uninsurable. They fall through the cracks.

That's not the way the system should work. That would be a very admirable thing if the House were to just focus on fixing that problem. That would be very good work. No, we have to scrap everything. We've got a hundred million Americans with insurance policies and doctors and doctor-patient relationships, a hundred million of them, and we're going to scrap the whole thing and have the government take it over. That's irrational.

So what you're talking about now, just to kind of summarize what we have talked about, what you're talking about is what people call in this business associated health plans, the idea that people can create these pools and buy, on a discount rate, their health care. That's a pretty straightforward idea. That's something that Republicans have voted for dozens of times. So we have got associated health plans. We're saying people should have their tax treatment and when they buy health insurance should be the same. We're going to deal with the issue of portability so that when you own a policy you get to keep it and the insurance company can't just dump you.

The other thing we haven't, of course, talked about is tort reform which we have good support for that. That drives health care costs tremendously. And yet we are unwilling to really be serious about it. All of these ideas Republicans are supportive of. So the charge that we're not willing to deal with this debate is not true.

Go ahead, my friend.

Except instead what we've had is apparently our Speaker has pulled together various people, ignored the recommendations that we had and decided, well, we just know what's best, that is the government is going to run it all, we want this public option, and we're charging down this aisle.

Basically people are wondering, well, why is this health care thing stalled? Well, the reason it's stalled is you don't just take over 18 percent of the economy, take $500 billion out of Medicare, basically allow a program which is going to allow public funding for abortion and illegal immigrants getting access to this money and all that stuff without people having something to say about it.

I would like to thank my good friend, Congressman Burgess and also Congressman Fortenberry. Thank you very much.

Mr. Speaker, once again we see shenanigans going on on the floor of the House. And the idea is that we're going to sneak stuff through, and we're going to use the good will and the support of the American public for our warfighters in order to pass some particular specialized agenda that has nothing to do with the warfighters at all.

This is not new this year. There was a big bill we passed--it was called cap-and-tax--3 o'clock in the morning. Three hundred pages of amendments passed. It came here to the floor for us to debate, and we are asking is there a copy of the bill on the floor? And the answer was no, there's not even a copy of the bill on the floor because of the fact we're going to do this in the dark of night with tricky little procedures.

And here we go with a bill that many of us have labored hard for. I have an important amendment on the bill, and yet what's going on? We're going to slip into this bill to fund--my own son, in fact, who's going to Afghanistan in 3 weeks--we're going to use the good will of the voters of America to slip into this thing a bill called hate crimes which has nothing to do whatsoever with what's being passed.

It is more of the same cloak and mirrors, dark of the night, slippery kind of stuff the American public is fed up with, and I am fed up with it. I have three sons that have graduated from the Naval Academy. I have two sons who are in the Marine Corps right now. This bill talks about funding them and funding the defense of our country, which I take very seriously.

But to put into this bill this hate crimes bill which has been, I think, kicked around the Judiciary Committee for years and to try to connect that with something that's unrelated is just procedurally wrong. It's something that is shameful. It should not happen on this floor. And in that regard, I refuse to vote for this bill in spite of the fact that the bill is good underneath.

Mr. Speaker, I have sat here and listened to this debate, and I've heard all kinds of reasons why the hate crimes bill is so wonderful. But the more they make the argument, the more confusing the question becomes. If this bill is so wonderful, why don't we bring it to the floor and just vote on it and pass it? Why, instead, are we going to stick this bill together with a bill for funding our national defense? The two don't belong together. They're not in the same committee. They have nothing to do with each other. What they have in common though is the fact that, instead of taking a straight-up vote, what we're going to do is we're going to hold everybody who depends on national defense, the people such as myself, who has a son going to Afghanistan in 3 weeks, they're going to hold us hostage.

We're going say, look, if you want to fund the national defense of the United States of America, you're also going to have to vote for this hate crimes bill. And one thing that my good friend from Virginia has made clear, and that is the public is starting to see through the shenanigans that go on in this place. And this is an extremely frustrating situation. It wasn't so many weeks ago that at 3 o'clock in the morning we passed a 300-page amendment to a bill that we were discussing the next day, and there wasn't even a copy of that bill in this Chamber, the cap-and-tax bill.

And here we are, again, with a bill which is on national defense. It's actually a fairly decent bill on national defense, and we're going to stick on this something that has nothing to do with it. I could speak on hate crimes, but the point of the matter is if everybody's who's saying hate crimes is such an important piece of legislation, let's bring it up on its own bases. Let's see if it will stand on its own base.

No, instead what we're going to do is we're going to sneak it through, and we're going to put it in so that anybody who wants to vote for national defense now is stuck having to support hate crimes. This is not the way this House should be run. The American public doesn't like to care about procedure, but they're getting fed up with this.

It's my pleasure to join my good friend. And as you talk a little bit about freedom, you have spoken in somewhat general terms about the effects of the government taking over paying the doctors and what that would do. But I would like to get a little bit more into the details, because I think we have to remember the results of what that freedom has done in the area of medicine.

The level of innovation that has occurred in medicine in a free society such as ours is just incredible. And it is America that drives all of these new developments of various drugs. It is America that is driving all of these things like laser surgery for eyes.

We see examples now of something that was considered a very risky and strange procedure that wasn't covered by insurance company, called Lasik surgery for your eyes, which now is tremendously common. My wife had some 10 years ago, and her vision was terrible. It's much better than mine now because of the fact we had this innovation. We have innovation in terms of heart surgery and the way that we deal with that. My dad just had a seven-way heart bypass. That was something that wasn't available 30, 40 years ago. And he is surviving and doing well at 88 years old. There are so many different kinds of innovations, use of radiation which is now focused in a very, very tiny area to be able to destroy cancer, and different types of drugs and things. All of this innovation is the product of freedom, because as people take risks and try new ideas, new and better ways to do things are born.

It struck me, my good friend from Iowa, that it was said that it wasn't until about the First World War that when you got sick and went to a doctor that you came out ahead. In other words, if you went to see a doctor before World War I, it was certainly after the Civil War, but if you got sick and went to see a doctor, at least 50 percent of the time you would leave the doctor worse than where you started. And that is, of course, kind of a grim situation to be very sick and have to see a doctor knowing you have got less than a 50 percent chance to do better than when you started.

I'm afraid that America is probably less healthy under the results of the Pelosi Congress. If you were to judge in economic terms, you would be talking in trillion-dollar measurements of less healthy. You would be talking about excessive spending and excessive government control.

I think sometimes history is so close to us we fail to grasp the significance. Did you ever stop to think that the President of the United States fired the President of General Motors? That is an incredible intrusion that our forefathers would say, What? I can't believe that.

And now we are talking about this isn't just a sort of semi-benign Lyndon Baines Johnson war on poverty. He figured out there were people that were hungry out there, so he decides to hand out some food stamps, which has turned out to be a very corrupt program.

So he decides to hand out some food stamps, which has turned out to be a very corrupt program, but he didn't try to have the government take over every supermarket and every farm in America.

You've got 100 million people that have got good health insurance, good relations with their doctors and hospitals, getting good medical treatment, and for what he started saying, 30 million, and then your chart I see coming up is going to explain about how small this is.

So we're going to basically have the government take over the entire system and mess everything up for 100 million people in order to try and help 15 million? I mean, just the common sense of this. And you're talking about the Pelosi Congress. I will tell you, the patient is a lot sicker than they were 6 months ago, my friend.

Now, who is it that should allow the Federal Government to tell American citizens whether they're spending their money in the right place? Isn't that kind of this Big Government top-down mindset that comes up with something as dumb as that?

If you're sick, you're going to spend as much money as you need to try and get well. Who's to tell you you spent too much or too little? Even the very sniff of that speaks of this Big Government mindset.

So what we're doing, gentleman, is we're saying we're going to scrap the whole system, have the government take it over, because of that little 4 percent thing. I came from the engineering world, and there's one thing about solving a problem. There's another one to have a solution to just try to force your solution on something that doesn't make sense.

It appears to me that the solution is we want the government to run everything. We want the government running health care, so we're going to force a government solution just because of that little red--that isn't even a decent piece of pie. You couldn't even gain any weight on that amount.

Gentleman, the truth of the matter is we're not standing here defending everything about the American health care system. There's things that need to be changed, and we've talked about those things. You have mentioned on the floor that tort reform has to be a big part of it because tort reform is just using up a whole lot of money that doesn't need to be spent, which could be spent on good medicine. So that's one item.

But there's some other things that I think almost any American, if you heard about it, would say, Oh, yeah, that's right. For instance, there are some people in America who get to buy their health insurance using pretax dollars; whereas, small business men and self-insured people have to use the money they pay after they've paid taxes on the money.

So that's not just justice. People are not equal before the law. We say we're a Nation of laws, but that's not a just solution. What we should do is that everybody should use the same equation. I think you and I would agree that we just pay for health insurance with pretax dollars. That would be making everybody consistent.

There's a second thing that we could do. Another thing is the idea of a medical savings account. You could allow

people with pretax dollars to set money aside. They could use that money to buy health insurance or to pay medical bills. And if they don't use it, they can keep it earning interest in an uninsured account. If they up and die, they can pass it on to their kids. That makes sense, too. That allows us to allow Americans having their own money, buying health care, and that equation starts to get people to shop for prices. So that's another good idea. And there are quite a number of other ones that we've proposed.

You mentioned another one which makes a whole lot of sense. People say, Oh, well, you're trying to help the big insurance companies. No. What we want is reasonable competition. And that idea of being able to shop for health insurance across State lines is a very effective and competitive mechanism, because if one State has got laws that allow the insurance to be purchased at a lower price, then why can't a citizen, particularly where we have a big metropolitan area that bridges two different areas, get their health insurance from places less expensive?

So there's another idea that's been proposed. And there are other ones. I don't want to run too long on your time, gentlemen, but there are a number of things that we can do to make medicine better in our country.

Let me tell you. You know who votes with their feet? You get some sheik in Bahrain or some other place or some other part of the world that's loaded with millions of dollars and they get sick, guess where they come to get their medical care? They come to the good old USA. That's because our medical system is not bad. It's producing very good results. It's just that there's a lot of cost shifting going on.

Here's an idea, gentlemen. I just toss this out for you to think about it. Somebody summarized, if there is a problem with American health care, the problem is this: that is that one-third of Americans are paying nothing for it and the other two-thirds are paying for it, and that that cost shift is the problem, that one-third are paying nothing. And that's part of what's causing our cost shift problem.

I'd yield.

That strikes me a little bit as, first of all, you run over them with a car and then back over them to say you're sorry. I mean, you're getting them coming and going.

First of all, they're doing what we would say is the right thing as a responsible citizen--having a job, buying health insurance, and trying to take care of their own bills--and now you're going to tax them for doing the very thing that you wanted them to do in the first place.

There's a basic rule of economics, and that is what you tax, you get less of, and what you pay for, you get more of. The more people you pay for free medical care, you're going to get more and more people signed up for it. And the more you tax people who are working and paying for their own health care, you're going to get less of it. So why in the world would we want to adopt a policy like that?

The interesting thing is, gentleman, this proposal, the Pelosi health care proposal, in spite of the fact that a lot of major media is pushing it and the President is pushing it and all kinds of people like that are pushing it, the American public is not buying this thing. And I was just kind of thinking in my mind, Who would be against this? Why is it that the polling data shows that this is not popular with the American public? And I'm thinking, well, it's almost like politics, in a way.

How many groups of people does this Pelosi plan antagonize? Well, let's see. First of all, if you're on Medicare, you're going to take $500 billion out of Medicare. Well, the people who are on Medicare are thinking, I don't want you to take $500 million out of the place where I'm getting my health. So the older people--who are pretty regular voters, by the way--they don't like this thing.

Well, then you've got other people. Gentleman, you were a successful owner of a small business. Well, the small business guys are going to get soaked to have to pay for this plan, so they're not too enthused about it. Then you have some other people. They call themselves pro- lifers. They don't like this plan very well either because there was an amendment offered in committee making it clear that we weren't going to use this government socialized money to pay for free abortions. That amendment was defeated in committee. It is very clear that this money is going to go for abortions, and that's why National Right to Life says, This is the biggest threat in the pro-life area since Roe v. Wade.

So the pro-life people don't like this, small business people don't like it, older people don't like it. Then you have got the 100 million people that have their insurance, doctors that they like and a system that's giving them good health care, and basically you're creating something that's going to destroy that, and they're going to have to change to a government system within some number of years, so they're not liking this.

After you start adding those people together, it starts to make sense why people don't like this. And particularly, most Americans at a fundamental level understand that good health care has to start with a patient-doctor relationship. It has to start with the doctor and the patient deciding what is the right health care alternative. We don't like it when some big insurance company sticks their nose in that relationship, and we like it a whole lot less when it's going to be a government bureaucrat.

You know, you talked about a lot of corrupt and illegal practices, gentleman. And when I think of ACORN, maybe as an engineer, I'm thinking cause and effect. ACORN is more closely associated with the central nerve center and hub of what created the housing crisis and the housing bubble in America. They're the ones that basically started all of these bad loans which Wall Street then lied about, saying that they were good loans, packaged them up and sold them all over the world, creating the current economic crisis. So if you want to look at the epicenter of what created, for many of us who lost 30, 40 percent of our life savings in this economic mess, you're looking at the symbol of that ACORN. I'm glad you've got a line through it because we don't owe them any favors.

The interesting thing is, our judicial system should be punishing lawbreakers, and yet what we saw just a few weeks ago was a couple of courageous--I don't know if they were college students--some gal with some pretty legs going in with a hidden camera at ACORN and getting all of the financial information necessary and the legal information, how they could set up a house of ill repute, bring in underage illegals to work, to write them off as dependents so that the taxpayer is paying some of the tab so that this guy could run for Congress because he started this illegal brothel.

This whole thing is on tape, and yet we've got the Justice Department and all of these institutions of law in America that should have been cracking down on this organization; instead, you've got a couple of courageous kids that are barely out of college, taking some videos and capturing the attention and building the rage of the American public. It is just mind-boggling that our government is so inefficient and so unable to stop this organization that passed out money like it was water down here in Washington, D.C.

Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 744, had I been present, I would have voted ``nay.''

Mr. Speaker, it's a pleasure to be able to join you and my colleagues today and those who are in the gallery to talk about something that has been the talk of the town now for a number of months and is an intensely personal and important subject to all of us, and that is the health care of the bodies that we have to live inside.

A great deal has been said and a great deal more needs to be said in clarifying exactly where we are on this issue because of its tremendous importance, its importance to us in an economic sense as a Nation, its importance to us as close to 20 percent of our entire gross domestic product, but also, as I said, because of the importance that each of us have to live inside our own bodies and are much attached to our health care system.

Now, one of the great concerns about what's being proposed is is that the government will not immediately but indirectly and inevitably take over health care. Just as we saw earlier this year, the president of General Motors is being fired by the President of the United States. That's a unique situation. Usually we separate our private industry from the Federal Government, and what is being proposed here is, over time, the government takeover of one-fifth or so of our economy; that is, health care.

Now, when the government does too much, we have come over time to recognize certain consequences. First of all, it becomes very expensive because the government, with its $500 hammers, is not the most efficient. In fact, you could sometimes talk about a health care system with the efficiency of the post office and the compassion of the IRS.

The inefficient allocation of resources is legendary, particularly in other countries that have had the government try to run the health care system. The quality is degraded, and we will talk about those in hard statistics, particularly with people who have, for instance, cancer. We will take a look at what the cancer survival rates are in some of the European countries that have socialized medicine as opposed to the American medical system that we have in this country today.

And then, of course, to me, perhaps one of the more frightening things is bureaucratic rationing. That is, decisions not by a doctor and the patient, but decisions made by some bureaucrat that gets in the way.

Now, the first thing that the people have commented sometimes is, if health care is expensive now, just wait until it's free. That seems to be the experience for, particularly, people of Canada and other Nations.

We have heard that this is a system that's being proposed by our President that's going to be simple, that it's going to save money. In fact, he said if it were going to cost us one dime more, then he wouldn't even support it. And yet we take a look at the simplicity of the organization--this is the Democrats' bill. It's an organization chart for the Democrats' bill. It's complicated. This is trying to put a 1,000-page bill onto one poster, which obviously it is going to look a little bit complicated. But you have here a tremendous maze of interlocking organizations and groups trying to replace a fifth of the U.S. economy. Obviously, it's going to be somewhat complicated. The question is, in this maze, can the patient find their way to their doctor. That is a good question.

Well, what are we talking about in terms of costs here? Is there some way that we could try to decipher when the President tells us this isn't going to cost us much, in fact, the efficiency is going to be such that we can do this whole thing without spending any more money, what sort of a way can we get a handle on that?

Well, one of the things we have already is Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security. Those, of course, are the three huge entitlement programs that have been running for some period of time, and we have here cost projections as to the rate of increase in the expenses for Medicare and Medicaid. And

when you take a look at these over time, what you realize is that if nothing is changed in Medicare or Medicaid, Social Security, that the U.S. Government at a certain point out here, at 2052, for instance, that there will be nothing else in the Federal budget. They will absorb the entire Federal budget.

We have a certain tax rate that we're running, and what we found in terms of tax policy is you can raise people's taxes but it doesn't raise the amount of money the government is pulling in. You can raise taxes so much it stalls the economy and you end up taking the same thing in in taxes as you did when your tax rate was lower.

So this is kind of our historic tax rate, and when you project that out, you realize that Medicare and Medicaid, at least a big portion of this blue chart, is going to gobble up all of the Federal revenues. That means we won't spend any money, not just on food stamps or welfare, not just on art, not just on sort of ancillary things, but there will be no money for defense or anything else with the way that these programs are going.

So the President, when he says this is going to be very efficient, it's going to save a whole lot of money, and you say, well, what do we have as an example of that sort of government efficiency, you've got Medicare and Medicaid. Those are not very comforting examples as to what's going to happen to our GDP.

In fact, the President's made a lot of promises. He complained, as he came in to give his talk here about 3 weeks ago on health care, that he had inherited a $1 trillion deficit. In fact, he had not. It was about a $250 billion deficit, which is bad, shouldn't have inherited that, and yet what we have here proposed in the last 6 months, you can see the level of spending at $3.6 trillion that we've spent in 6 months on all of these--here's the Wall Street bailout. That's $250 billion. That was started in the previous administration, but half of it was spent by our current President.

Then you've got the economic stimulus. I would call it the porkulous bill, didn't have much to do with stimulus at all. There goes $787 billion more. And then you have got SCHIP and then the appropriations. You've got an IMF.

This cap-and-tax, the House has passed this one. This is the biggest tax increase in the history of our country. The President made the promise that if you're making less than $250,000, don't worry, we're not going to tax you, except a little detail. Anytime you flip your light switch, you are going to get taxed, with this $846 billion which is, of course, the biggest tax hike in our history. And then, of course, the government health care that's being proposed, it even dwarfs that.

So we're talking about a pattern in history of a tremendous rate of spending. In fact, if you were to take a look at all of the deficits from George Washington to George Bush, that comes out about five- something trillion. We're looking at $8 trillion for this administration.

So we have a promise that this isn't going to cost very much. We don't have very much historical data to give us any sense that this is going to be a financially responsible package.

Now, one of the things that goes to the heart of health care, and I think probably if a bunch of just plain old Americans were going to stand around and say, you know, let's talk about what are you going to do to health care, one of the things you'd say, well, one thing we know for sure is that we want to make sure that the relationship between the doctor and the patient is left alone. We don't like this deal where the insurance company comes in and gets between the doctor and the patient, and so one of the things we want is to leave that sacrosanct. If you like your doctor or health care provider, you can keep them. If you like your health care plan, you can keep that, too. This is what the President told us in July. He's repeated it. Is that true, though?

He's also said it's not going to cost anything. He also said you're not going to be taxed anything if you make less than $250,000. So what is the truth of this statement? Can you really keep what you currently have, because this is a very important question because 100 million Americans have health care policies and relations with doctors that they like just fine right now. And we've probably got, when you sort through it, about 15 million people who are not insured. And so the question is: Are we going to basically take apart entirely and try to rebuild the system for 100 million people in order to deal with a problem 15 million? That's the question.

So here's the promise that comes from the President, but is that really true? Well, here's MIT health care economist Gruber. He says, with or without reform, that won't be true.

His point is that the government is not going to force you to give up what you have. But that's not to say that other circumstances won't make that happen. In fact, what's going to happen, and that's what this MIT professor was going to talk about, is that when the government jumps in to this entire equation and starts to have a government option, what it tends to do is crowd out the private provider. So over a period of time, your employer is going to say, I'd rather pay the fine and just dump your health insurance on the government; and more and more people do that until, guess what, there is only the government left, the single provider.

Now, you can say, well, do you have any evidence that that's going to go on? Well, we did. It was a week before last, we just voted in a way to make the student loans in America--almost all of them are all going to be provided now through the government. Originally, the government came in just to help the student loan process. But now what's happened over a period of time, the government can easily forgive a student that doesn't pay their loans, whereas the private companies can't.

So the government has an advantage because they keep soaking the taxpayer. And so the question then is, that's what this is, that Jonathan is saying here, what his point is, that what's going to happen inevitably is that we're going to end up with a government-driven system and, therefore, you will not be able to keep your insurance or your health care provider.

And so what is being said is not, in fact, true. Along the same lines, and of particular importance, is this entire question about whether we are going to allow government agents or bureaucrats or people working for the government to make health care decisions. Is the government going to jump into the middle of the doctor/patient relationship? Well, that's not the kind of amendment that's allowed on this House floor. The Democrat Party does not allow us to make amendments that we might like to make. It has to go through Rules Committee. They control the Rules Committee, and if they have an amendment that would be embarrassing or they don't want, they just say you can't have it in the rules to offer that amendment.

But in committees, we do offer amendments. This is an amendment that was offered by Dr. Gingrey. Dr. Gingrey is a good doctor from Georgia, been a medical doctor a long time, now joining us here in Congress. And he said a very simple sentence: nothing in this section shall be construed to allow any Federal employee or political appointee to dictate how a medical provider practices medicine. In other words, this amendment would guarantee the doctor/patient relationship. It would say that that doctor/patient relationship is not going to be interfered with by some government bureaucrat. Well, how did this amendment fare in Nancy Pelosi's committee that was putting together the House health care bill? Well, here's how it came out. The Republicans, 23 Republicans voted ``yes.'' We want to keep that doctor/patient relationship sacrosanct, and none of them were against it. If you take a look at the Democrats, however, 32 Democrats voted against this, which, if you say you're against this, then it suggests that you're going to be in favor of letting bureaucrats control costs. And only one Democrat voted for it.

So what happened? Well, this amendment failed. When this amendment failed, it, again, raises a serious question whether what the President says is really true, Are you going to be able to keep your doctor? Are you going to be able to keep your health insurance? Will you get your health insurance through the same place you get it now, or is it all going to be provided by some

government? Now, I have had either the fortune or misfortune of being in public office for a number of years. And one of the experiences that those of us who are public servants have is we get phone calls. We get phone calls from our constituents and they say, hey, Congressman Akin, I've got a problem with this, that and the other government agency. Can you help out? Or I've had really a hard time with this, this, and this. Can't you do something about this? And so we, in a sense, then go to bat for our constituents with different either State or Federal agencies.

I recall one of my earliest experiences as a State rep, and there was a bad intersection where there had been some accidents in my district, and we needed to get a left-turn arrow put in at a traffic light. I would bet that I made over 100 phone calls over a 2- or 3-year period to the highway department in our area trying to talk them into putting one lousy left-turn arrow into a traffic light signal. There was already a lane painted for the left turn, so all they had to do was to change the traffic light. It took me several years to talk the highway department into putting one silly left-turn arrow in.

Now, can you imagine what goes on if we're Members of Congress and we get phone calls saying, the government that you represent has told my wife that she can't get that heart bypass. They've told my mother that she can't get that heart bypass. They've given her a bottle of aspirin and told her to go home and wait to die. Is that the sort of thing that we want to deal with with the bureaucrats getting in the way of health care decisions? I don't think so. This amendment should not have failed. If the American public knew that this amendment were being offered, they would have called their Congressman and said, don't you mess with the relationship between me and my doctor, or between our family and our doctor. That's what's at stake.

Now, from my point of view, this becomes personal. I was elected to Congress in the year 2000, came here in 2001 to serve. And one of the things I found out about this Congress is the fact that there are some Navy doctors in this building in a clinic. So sometimes if somebody's walking around in the summer and they have a stroke or this or that, they've got an ambulance, then the first place they go is to the little clinic right here in the Capitol Building. It's almost like a little mini-city for a certain number of blocks. There are some medical professionals that are there. And those medical professionals also offer physicals, your yearly physical. So I had not had a physical because I had been in the State of Missouri in the Missouri legislature, and basically, what happened there was my insurance had a health care provider that there was no way you could go see your primary care doctor, and so the insurance company was getting between me and some potential doctor that I could never even figure out who the doctor was. They said my primary care physician is so and so. You call them and you could never see them. So I walked into the clinic downstairs in this building feeling bullet-proof, about 52 or 53 years old, and they told me my health was great except for one little detail. Congressman Akin, you have cancer. Now that's the sort of word that gets your attention when somebody tells you that you've got cancer. And so it was that because I was here and I had access to health care, I was able to get the cancer treated.

But if you take a look, when it talks about cancer, let's talk about the survival rates between men and women in the United States. In men it's 62 percent, 66 percent in women in the U.S. Take a look at where it is with socialized medicine in the United Kingdom: 44 percent. For women it's not 66, but it's 52. So in other words, your chances of survival in America are a whole, whole lot better with our free enterprise system. So all of this talk about how bad American health care is, boy, that's a lot of hooey. We still have a very, very good health care system; and to try to destroy what 100 million people enjoy just to try and take care of 15, that doesn't seem to make sense.

I have been joined by my good colleague. Did you want to join us on the health care discussion? Please jump in. I yield.

So let's just go along. So you're saying the worst we had up through Bush was 3 percent of GDP.

Right.

That number is incredible to me. Let me just try and put that in context, what you're saying. When the President started his speech on health care in this Chamber, he complained about inheriting a $1 trillion deficit or something, when it was I guess, 250 billion, so he magnified----

He said it was $1 trillion.

So just to reclaim my time a minute, what you're saying, gentleman, is we've got a big financial problem with this promise that this health care system isn't going to cost anything.

And you're saying that red line that you showed, was that about three times more deficit than what he had inherited from President Bush?

So the President that stood here and told us he had inherited a deficit didn't mention the fact that he had four times more that he'd spent in 6 months or 8 months than the deficit that he inherited.

Anything in the peacetime history, so that'd be a combination of all of these things. Did you count the biggest tax hike in history, the cap-and-tax?

And that's not even including the biggest tax hike in the history of our country passed by the House that means every time you flip your light switch on you're going to pay taxes on that.

A trillion dollars won't add a dime to the deficit? That is a stretch.

So you basically just took the President's words and just put an amendment to say, okay, we're going to hold your feet to the fire. You said it's not going to add one dime to the deficit so we're going to put an amendment on the bill----

Let me just highlight what you said then.

What you're saying was the President said this is not going to add a dime to the deficit or that he wouldn't support it.

And that was your amendment then?

Congressman McClintock from California simply taking what the President said, offering it as an amendment, and in a straight party-line vote, it was defeated.

Does that leave you with any comfort that we're not going to add a dime to the deficit?

They don't believe that's going to happen.

How are they going to pay for this whole thing, anyway? The Congressional Budget Office says it's a trillion-dollar bill for this basically having the government take over all of this health care, and, of course, that's just for openers.

So now we're going to increase your taxes, right? Is that what you're saying? We're going to increase the tax on small business, is that right, what we're doing?

Let's take a look at the logic of that.

If we increase taxes on small business, they have less money to invest. Small businesses create 80 percent, or 79 percent of the new jobs in our country. We've got unemployment now, not at 8 but 9- something percent. And so what we're going to do is we're going to tax small businesses, which is going to make it even harder for them to put in new pieces of equipment or new processes to hire new people, so we're going to kill jobs even more by going to this socialized medicine.

I guess that doesn't help us do much in terms of the unemployment. So a piece of it is going to be we're going to tax small business.

My understanding is, though, that some of this is going to come out of the hide of people that are on Medicare.

My understanding that was $500 billion--isn't that close to half of that trillion--is going to come out of Medicare.

I am kind of scratching my head because every year we've got a problem that Medicare, they keep trying to automatically ratchet down how much we're spending on it, and then they don't pay the doctors anything, and the doctors are not going to take anybody in Medicare anymore. So we quick-quick do a patch.

I know you have really been keeping an eye on the numbers here, and we very much appreciate your leadership. The people of California did a good job of sending you here.

But how in the world--you're a good numbers man--how in the world are we going to cut $500 billion out of Medicare and not expect to feel that somehow?

That is really a good question.

And the thing that's disturbing for my good friend from California, the thing that's disturbing is that you're not the only guy that's offered amendments in committee on this bill.

The amendment that I just mentioned a moment ago--which I think to me, it's personally scary--and this is a medical doctor, and what he's saying in this bill is nothing in this section shall be construed to allow any Federal employee or political appointee--that is a bureaucrat--no bureaucrat can dictate how you and the doctor, how that medicine is going to be delivered.

In other words, the doctor and the patient make the decisions. And again, just like your amendment, this thing goes down in flames on a straight party-line vote.

How can you stand there and vote that you want bureaucrats to ration health care? I don't understand it. But I do understand why Americans would be strenuously opposed to this.

Just to reclaim my time for a minute, this is the President. I've

got the actual flip of his quote on that subject:

``There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.''

Now, that's pretty plain what the President said, but is it true?

Well, there's a poison pill.

Here is actually the text of this amendment. This is the Heller amendment, one of our colleagues. Bright fellow. He offers this amendment in committee: In order to utilize the public health insurance option, an individual must have his or her eligibility determined and approved under the income and eligibility verification system--that's this--and the systemic alien verification for entitlements, SAVE programs, under section 11.

In other words, what they're saying is if you want to get this free health care from the government--which is going to be very expensive for your free health care--you've got to prove you're here legally.

Now, this amendment also was offered in committee. Republicans gave it 15 ``yes'' votes and zero ``noes,'' no one voted against it, and yet the Democrats had 26 people saying, No, we don't want this in the bill. That means, in other words, that there is no enforcement mechanism for these illegals, that they're just going to come in and we're supposed to pick up the tab for all of these other people.

In fact, it was interesting to note that this very question was sent to the Congressional Research, which is a nonpartisan group, and they point the same thing out. The President is just flat wrong.

It says here, under 3200--that's Speaker Pelosi's bill--health insurance exchange would begin operation in 2013 and would offer private plans alongside a public option. Does not contain any restrictions on noncitizens, whether legally or illegally present.

This is just a bunch of researchers who read the bill. Which is, of course, when you've got a thousand-page bill and all of this--but that's what they came up with.

You've given us a number of examples: One, it's not going to add a dime to the deficit. We know that's not true because you offered the amendment. And then the other one is that you get to keep your doctor and you get to keep your insurance. And then there's this thing that it's not going to fund illegals.

I can see why the American public would be upset because they're getting very conflicted information.

That raises another question, that the American public has a chance to read the bill. Because what's being proposed by those of us who are Republicans is that we want to make sure that there are 72 hours for people to be able to read something before they pop it up for a vote.

You and I sat here on this floor, and we find out that 300 pages of amendments were passed at 3 o'clock in the morning, and the next day we're supposed to vote on a thousand-page bill with 300 pages of amendments. And the usual policy is there's a copy of the bill here in this Chamber. Well, there wasn't any copy of the bill, on that cap-and- tax bill. They were still busy trying to collate the amendments when they were taking the vote.

And the American public thinks, hey, maybe it's a good idea if you guys read the bills before you pass them. We have a proposal to allow for 72 hours so people could read the bill.

I thought California was the land of the fruits and the nuts. All of us in Missouri, we kind of worry about California out there. And yet you are so much more sober than the way this institution is.

Doesn't sound radical to me at all. I don't think our constituents, gentleman, would think that's radical that we would have 72 hours at least to look over some proposal before we're going to be voting on it.

And yet what we saw in that huge bill--I guess it was 1,300 pages when you put the 300 with the thousand--the biggest tax increase in history. Snap, bam, we passed it right out of the House here.

Oh, that was a piece of work.

And did that have some ACORN funding in it?

That was another piece of efficiency and government at work, especially when you do things in the midnight hour and try to hide things under the basket that way.

Just think a minute. Let's say that you were the Speaker, Speaker Pelosi, and you had a bill that was going to do these things: one, it's going to take $500 billion from Medicare. So that doesn't mean that your older people in America are going to be too happy with it. Two, it's quite clear that it will provide abortions over time, free abortions for people using taxpayers' money. That doesn't make the pro-life community too happy.

So they've got the older people on Medicare, you've got the pro-life people upset. Then if you're a small business person--small business employs about 80 percent of the people in America--they're going to get a huge tax increase to help pay for this government takeover. Well, the small business people aren't going to be too happy with it.

Let's see what else you've got.

You've got a hundred million people who have insurance policies, and those insurance policies, they're pleased with because they have a good relationship with their doctor. So they're getting good health care currently. And that whole system is going to be completely rewritten. They've been promised they can keep what they have, but they're not going to be able to. So they're not going to be very happy either.

When you start putting all of those things together, you're going to have illegal immigrants being able to get free health care on the back of the U.S. taxpayer, you start putting that all together and you're Speaker Pelosi, that's a hard bill to pass. So you've got to do something tricky to get that thing through.

I was just talking a little bit earlier. Did you serve in the California House as well?

I'm sure that you've gotten phone calls from your constituents and they're saying, Hey, Congressman, I'm having trouble with this, that, or the other part of the Federal Government, I'm trying to get my passport or this or that. And you or your office goes to bat for those people trying to talk to different Federal agencies to help them with their problem.

Now, I'm just trying to picture in my mind. Let's say that the Democrats jam this thing down everybody's throats. Can you picture getting a call from somebody from your district and they say, The bureaucrat that you're in charge of in that Federal Government just told my mom she couldn't have a heart bypass.

How are you going to deal with a constituent like that?

I think The Wall Street Journal had another guy--I remember, because he was in his late fifties--and the Canadian system said, Sorry; you're too old. You can't get a hip replacement. Well, I'm 62 and my hip has been giving me trouble. I'm probably going to have to get a hip replacement. I fell on some ice when I was jogging 10 years ago. They basically tell me, Take some aspirin and suck it in, buddy, because you're not allowed to have that.

Winning the lottery.

Are those all U.S. citizens now?

Well, Congressman McClintock, you just brought up a little bit of a tender subject for me. Just about 6 or maybe it was 8 weeks ago, my father, who's 88, in the State of Missouri, went to a new heart doctor. His new heart doctor took a look at the medicines his previous doctor had prescribed and said, What did the doctor do for your heart? My dad said, Well, I don't know what you mean. He just gave me these medicines.

So you can see this troubled look in his new doctor. The new doctor says, Well, you need to come in tomorrow, and we're going to give you a chemical stress test. I don't know how exactly that works, but it's like a stress test of being on a treadmill, except it's for older people. They do it chemically, somehow.

He didn't go very far and the doctor said, Stop, that's good enough. He said, You need to come in the beginning of next week for this heart catheterization, or whatever it is. So he comes in and they put him out and they take a camera and go up through his leg and look at his heart.

He wakes up--and they said they might put some stents in or something--and they said, Well, we didn't do anything. And I was at the meeting with the doctor. The doctor said, Your heart is in too bad a shape to put in stents. You need open heart surgery.

This is, mind you, about a week and a half elapsed, or so. So I'm at the meeting on Monday and he says, Here's the numbers. First of all, if you have open heart surgery at 88 years old, because it should have been done earlier, you've got about a 10 percent chance of a major complication. But if you don't get it this next year, you've got a 50 percent chance of a major heart attack. So you take a look at the numbers and you go, Okay, he explained it so I understand it.

So the doctor said, Well, you can come in tomorrow or Thursday. It's Monday. My father goes in Tuesday, has a seven-way heart bypass and by Saturday he's back home again, and he's doing well now.

Now people want to say that the American health care system is broken, but I would suggest that that being done in less than 3 weeks, a seven-way heart bypass and the technology involved in that, that's the kind of thing that you're never going to see with a government-run health care system.

So the government wouldn't have to run the whole thing at all.

That's something about freedom, isn't it?

That's called freedom, isn't it?

Gentleman, what you're talking about is you're talking about one of a whole series of different Republican proposals of what can be done to health care. Our position in being very critical of socialized medicine is not to say that there aren't things that are constructive or positive that should be done with our current health care system. In fact, a lot of the problems in our health care system were put there because we already have the government with its big nose in about half of it.

But there are some things that can be done. As you say, one of the things is you own your own health care policy. People sometimes use the word ``portability.'' That is, if you own it, you can take it with you as you go from job to job. It also means if you're insured, you're not going to get uninsurable because you already have the health care plan.

You just don't buy your groceries in California. You can go across State lines to buy groceries.

That makes a whole lot of sense, doesn't it?

And the way that works is that of course you've got different States that have their own requirements for health care, but if a plan meets the requirements of a given State, and that company wants to sell their health plan to someone over a State line, now you've got a chance for shoppers to get a better price on their product. And it tends to break up the monopolies that an insurance company can generate in a particular State market.

I picture, gentleman, that that's going to be particularly effective where you've got basically large metropolitan areas that span several States. You can go back and forth and kind of shop for what's better for you. Is that your impression?

Or you might not able to afford.

Why would that be, gentleman?

Against the law federally?

It's interesting that we seem to--as a political party system, the Democrats seem to be wedded to trying to copy what did not work well in the United Kingdom or in Canada. You can take a look at these cancer statistics and other measures of quality and they're really bad.

If you look overall at cancer in the United Kingdom, you're looking at a 50 percent survival rate. Whereas in America, the numbers are so much higher. So why do we want to repeat something that doesn't work? Why do we want to mess up something that 100 million Americans have got a good system going, and we want to just turn it over to the government?

It's almost like we've got these blinders on. Regardless, we know the government should do it all. And so half the Democrats want to go that way, the other half are kind of dragging their feet--and I'm thankful for them.

You know, that's the thing that I find hard, the amount of faith that's required, when you take a look at the performance of government agencies, to turn our physical bodies over to those government agencies to take care of us. It's kind of a hard thing to swallow.

As you say, the compassion of the IRS, the efficiency of the post office. FEMA, we've seen that--legendary. But we've got other ones. You've got the Department of Energy.

Do you know why the Department of Energy was created? To make sure we weren't dependent on foreign oil. Aren't you glad that we've got all those employees making sure we're not dependent on foreign oil?

And then you've got the CIA; the cloak and dagger stuff. Well, that would be great, but they're the ones that gave us a report in Gulf War I that the Iraqis were 10 years away from making a bomb, a nuclear device. When we got in there, they were about a year to a year and a half away from making it in Gulf War I. So we go to Gulf War II, they tell us, Oh, within a year, year and a half, they'll have a bomb. We get in there, and they weren't doing anything.

And we want to trust our health care to these agencies? It's one thing if it's the post office or something, a letter gets missed. What happens--that's what I'm asking you my friend--what happens when we get the call and somebody says, Congressman McClintock, they're not letting my mom get the heart bypass, and I don't have any other alternative. How are we going to deal with that? How can we explain that?

That's the other thing that's interesting. America, such a great country, and we have these fifty States. And the States, to some degree, were like little laboratories. People could try stuff in the States and see how it worked. And then, if it worked really well, perhaps you might want to bring it to the Federal level. But why would we want to repeat the failed experiment of Massachusetts and Tennessee?

I very much appreciate your taking some time to join with us.

This is such an important discussion. Your experience in California with the great amendments that you offered both in California but now, I understand, in committee are making it clear that the promise, we are not going to spend one dime of deficit, and yet it gets defeated on a straight party-line vote. It took some courage to offer that amendment, but at least it defined where we are in this entire situation. And I'm very thankful that you came out and joined with us today on a very important discussion.

The talk is that sometime in the next couple of weeks, this whole thing may come down to a vote. Once again, I go back to my own personal experience with having been a survivor of cancer, coming into this very building, having medical doctors tell me, Congressman Akin, you are fit as a fiddle except for the fact you have cancer. That's a sobering kind of thing. So what had happened to me was the insurance companies had discouraged my getting a physical. I should have. If I had been smart, I would have forced myself to get a physical and line up and wait for it all, but I didn't do it until I got here in Congress.

Well, here's what happens, one step worse than an insurance company getting between you and your doctor, and that's when the Federal Government gets in between and starts to ration and dictate what's going to happen. We have this experience in the United Kingdom with what happens in cancer there, and in Italy and Spain. Then you take a look at the U.S. results, and in spite of the complaints about American health care, if you're some well-to-do sheik from Bahrain and you have got unlimited billions of dollars or millions of dollars to spend and you're sick, guess where you come. You come to the good old USA for our health care because we still have a lot of good things going on with the level of services we provide.

There are changes that need to be made, but the change doesn't need to be socialized medicine. It doesn't need to be a government system which will crowd out all of the privates. It doesn't need to be a system which is going to create an incentive for private companies to dump their employees on the government. It doesn't need to be a system which is going to take $500 billion of Medicare funds away from people who are on Medicare. It doesn't need to be a system that basically guarantees that illegals can get health care at the public trough. It doesn't need to be a system that says that we're going to use Federal money to provide free abortions for anybody who wants those. And it doesn't need to be, above all, a system that is driven by bureaucrats getting between the patient and the doctor. Those are things that we don't need in America.

Americans, in spite of the fact that a great preponderance of media have not been giving all the facts and pointing out that these quotations are not true, in spite of that fact, Americans across the board, whether they're liberal or conservative or whatever, they're saying, Please, don't take our one-fifth of the economy and completely redesign it to fit 15 million people who may not have insurance when 100 million people are comfortable with what they have.

We need some reforms. We need some changes, and there are some very good things we can do. We haven't even mentioned tort reform, the high cost of defensive medicine. That's one thing that's needed to be fixed for a long time. That will drive health care costs down. We haven't even mentioned here today the fact that people that work for big companies or the government get to buy their health insurance with pretax dollars; whereas, a small business or self-employed person has to pay for their health insurance with after-tax dollars. That is not just. It should not stand. We should not tolerate this.

There are changes we need to make, but socialized medicine is certainly not one of them. All you need is a little common sense to look at the foreign countries or the two States in America that tried this Pelosi-type plan and you will see that this is not the direction we need to go.

Will the gentleman yield? You're getting me upset.

This is kind of hard to figure out.

I really am thankful. The ranking Republican member, Congressman McKeon, does a great job on Armed Services, and he is so gentlemanly and scholarly, and he lays the facts out.

I want to just kind of put these things together and ask anybody if this makes any sense at all. What we're going to do is drop missile defense in Europe. Now, this is something for which quite a number of Europeans had to stick their necks out politically. It is the Czechs and the Polish who are agreeing to put this missile defense in. Now, if you draw a line between Iran and New York City, guess what's in line with that? Well, Poland is.

So now we're going to drop this missile defense program to protect our country and Western Europe from rogue states, particularly Iran, which we now know is putting together three things. They're putting together long-range missiles, nuclear warheads and radical Islam. That's not a great combination. So now we're saying the threat assessment has been dropped. How do you figure that? The threat assessment has been dropped when you're putting long-range missiles and nuclear warheads with radical Islam. I don't feel like the threat assessment should have been dropped. I don't know anybody with common sense who would assert that.

We cut the limb off.

Well, we just basically cut the limb off from underneath them. I mean who else is going to want to partner with us in some sort of a decent effort to defend the Western World from either nuclear destruction or at least blackmail? These guys have gone out on a limb, and we just cut the limb off from underneath them.

What's even worse is the fig leaf of an excuse from a technical point of view--for those of us on the committee, we know this is just a bunch of baloney--of the idea that we're going to use the standard block 3 missile on a ship to stop intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Look, this missile defense stuff is not as rocket science as people think. It's pretty simple. You've got small ones, medium ones and big ones. The big ones are called intercontinental ballistic missiles, and you can't shoot an intercontinental ballistic missile with one of our two-stage missiles off of a ship. You can't do that and make it work very well.

Not only that, think about the logic of what we're saying. The Navy is complaining that they've got a lot of demands in places where they're going to put their ships. Now, if you're going to try and cover this with ships, you're going to have to have probably three ships on station all the time. That's really expensive. It's a lot simpler to put the radar on the Czech Republic and some ground-based interceptors in Poland.

So we're talking about, first of all, a technical solution which is not going to give us the protection we need. It doesn't even make any sense. Then to say the threat assessments have dropped, the President is just not making sense in the kinds of things that he's talking about.

Right.

I'm the ranking member on Seapower, and you know, there's something that just doesn't make sense.

I've been aboard our ships that have these standard block 3-type missiles on them, okay? I've talked to the people who run those systems, and they tell me, if North Korea launches an ICBM, their chance of stopping it is about 1 percent. The reason is that the missile on the ship is a two-stage missile. It doesn't have the velocity and the ability to get on track with a much faster, higher- moving missile.

So that's why I say you've got small ones, medium ones and big ones. You fight the big ones with big ones, and the big ones are ground-based interceptors. It's a three-stage. That's why we have them in Grayling, Alaska, that's why we have some in California, and that's why there should be some in Poland.

This decision, I believe, was made all based on politics and not based on logic. I'll tell you what makes me secure. It's secure when we have American troops defending American homelands instead of vague promises from some Russian or some Iranian leader that everything is going to be okay.

Does the gentleman yield?

To me, it seems like you've understated how bad things are, because not only is the industrial base closed up, the buildings shuttered, the engineers working on some other project at some other place, but it takes time to get it back on track. If somebody is shooting missiles at you and they're going to arrive in half an hour, that's not very much time to start up a business and to rebuild your missile defense. You just can't do it in that amount of time. This requires planning.

The gentleman's numbers and statistics are right. The only thing is, they do have ground-based not just in Alaska. I think there are a few in California, but it's not spread out. Am I wrong on that? I thought there were a couple of them in California. Anyway, the point is right, which is that they're not spread out. The other point is we're using something to kill something that isn't designed to work from the beginning. It just doesn't make any sense.

As the gentleman has expanded the topic a little bit, let's talk about the different things that have been cut.

I think you just covered something that is absolutely amazing. You know, we don't put enough emphasis, maybe, on history. You are saying to the very day 70 years from the time Russia invaded Poland is when we just drove the knife in the back of Poland and cut the ground out for them as they were trying to defend their own country and the European countries. Is

that what I just heard, 70 years exactly to the day we just sold them down the river?

On the same day that the IAEA is saying that Iran is gaining nuclear capabilities; and 70 years before when Poland was invaded, we make the brilliant decision to abandon Poland, to abandon the one tool we have to stop intercontinental ballistic missiles and hold this fig leaf of an excuse that we could use a medium-range missile to try to stop things. This is a horrible decision.