Floor Statements

I thank the Speaker and my colleagues for this opportunity to once again take a look at the area of health care, something that has been capturing the attention of Americans and legislators for lo these many weeks, and to take a look at some of the controversy that's developed between one statement and then a different statement and the two don't seem to agree. So what is the real story? And we're going to take a look at a number of those areas today. Various statements that have been made on health care, what the record seems to support, what Congressional Research has to say, people who are reasonably scholarly, take a look at the facts and say, well, what really is going on.

I think the first thing, and I think this is something that has caught the attention of Americans, is a concern over the cost of health care. If you bear with me just a minute, I'm going to try to get some charts up here to help illustrate it.

Through experience, just history and common sense tells us when the government is trying to do something, there are some side effects. Sometimes it's excessively expensive. Sometimes there is bureaucracy and rationing, inefficient allocation of resources, and degraded quality.

If you take a look at various government Departments, you think of things like the Post Office Department, something that's not noted for its efficiency, or the IRS, not noted for its compassion particularly, and the excessive expenses that seem to come up.

We established a Department called the Department of Energy. It was originally established to try to make sure that we were not dependent on foreign energy and foreign oil. That Department has grown tremendously, and we have become increasingly dependent on foreign oil.

So when we talk about the government, particularly the government injecting itself into a lot of areas, one of the concerns becomes particularly the cost.

Now, we were reassured on this point by President Obama when he spoke here in this Chamber not so many weeks ago, and this is part of his speech:

``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, what he's talking about, one of the major places where he's going to get money is from Medicare, which is kind of an interesting thing because in the past it was Republicans who were accused of raiding Medicare. Here President Obama is saying that this can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system and part of the piece of that is going after Medicare.

So the question is, Is this something that's going to cost us a lot of money and what is the record of this administration and the government in general in terms of spending?

Here we have, from the beginning of this year, the spending pattern of the President and the Democrat leadership. And he complained at the beginning of his speech on health care that he had inherited a trillion dollar deficit, and, in fact, it was $240 billion. And yet here he has in a matter of 6 months or so burned up $3.6 trillion. So this statement that most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing system that's currently full of waste, and then he goes on to say ``Here's what you need to know: First, I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits.'' He's not going to add one dime to our deficits either now or in the future, period. Well, $3.6 trillion in debt is a lot of dimes. I don't know how many dimes. They'd probably stack up from here to the Moon for all I know.

I'm joined today by some distinguished colleagues and particularly a doctor and a gentleman who has had experience in medicine for a good number of years and somebody who has studied up on this entire system.

Congressman Fleming, if you would join us, if you would like to make a comment.

I would like you to, first of all, take a look at this question. Is this proposal of the President something that really is not a big deal financially, or is this something that could become extremely expensive to the Federal deficit?

Say that again. How much was gutted from Medicare?

That is more than the deficit he inherited from the Bush administration. He is going to take that much out of Medicare?

$500 billion taken out of Medicare. That is a pretty gutsy move, it seems like to me, to be taking $500 billion out of Medicare. And he is calling that, what his statement was: Most of the plan would be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system, a system that is currently full of waste and abuse.

I guess he is looking at the waste and abuse would be $500 billion out of Medicare; is that correct?

I have heard politicians going along on this line, and it sounds like to me that there is a line item, or there are three line items, waste, fraud and abuse, and you can just cut the numbers out of those lines. Is that how it works?

That is interesting; $500 billion out of Medicare alone. That is a significant number.

We are joined by Congresswoman Foxx who has dazzled us down here in

the last few years. I think of her as the grandmother of the legislators. It is a delight to have you here.

I appreciate your bringing that up, but I would like to get there in just a minute.

Reclaiming my time, I would like to ask my friends here, and here is the specific statement made by the President. And I think it is helpful, you take the specific statements and you take a look at them and say: Does it make sense or does it not? Here is the statement, and what is a rational analysis of this?

``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.''

We have heard that we are not going to add a dime to the deficits, and in just 6 months we have scored $3.6 trillion from all of these different programs. You have the Wall Street bailout and the economic stimulus, the SCHIP, the appropriations bill, and this cap-and-tax, which is the biggest tax increase in the history of our country, and for him to say it is not going to add a dime to our deficit.

He also promised during the campaign that nobody making less than $250,000 would pay any taxes, and yet this cap-and-tax that we did means that as soon as you flip a light switch, you are starting to pay taxes. Now tell me, do people who flip light switches, do they all make over $250,000? There is a question of credibility when you hear a statement as broad and as general as that.

Here is another one: ``Most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system, a system which is full of waste and abuse.''

Every year we are putting a patch on Medicare because the doctors are getting paid so little that they are getting to the point that when somebody walks into their office and says, I'm on Medicare, they say, Sorry, I can't afford to take any more Medicare.

So as a doctor, if you keep getting paid less and less for Medicare people, there is going to come a point where the people who have Medicare, they have government insurance, but they don't have government health care because a doctor won't accept the wage.

So I guess when we hear this, I don't know if this passes the sniff test.

That isn't true, is it?

It isn't just my memory. There is an expression that everybody is entitled to their opinion, but there is only one set of facts. And the facts are that it was in the range of $250 billion or so, and many of us who are conservatives would say that was too much. But still, it is not in the range of a trillion, or $3.6 trillion, which we are burning with all of these programs.

Here is another chart that I think people are vaguely aware of. President Bush, before, went where you are not supposed to go politically and said to the American public, Medicare and Social Security are broken. And maybe people beat him up for that, but in general Americans realize Social Security and Medicare, these programs are broken, partly because they weren't designed right to begin with and partly because of the demographic shift and all of those of us who are baby boomers and all of that. But here is a chart on the expansion of Medicare and Social Security.

My question is, if we can't manage Medicare and Social Security, and those costs are going up to this point where you have this dotted line. You have Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security added together absorb the entire budget. There is no money for the arts, no money for public radio, and no money for defense or anything else, just those three programs. It totally gobbles up about the maximum you can get, because if you raise taxes more, you get less in because you kill the economy. So is it reasonable when you have the experience of Medicare and Medicaid expanding the way they are, the solution to this is obviously the government being more involved? Somehow, that doesn't pass the sniff test.

I yield to Dr. Fleming.

Reclaiming my time, therefore, following your line of reasoning, if you keep taxing the privates more and more, they are going to get smaller. And when that gets smaller, your base of collecting those tax revenues gets smaller, and you have more and more people who are subsidized who are absorbing the resource, and pretty soon you are in a death spiral. Is that your point?

Speaking directly on that point, and I appreciate your going there because that is something that I thought was very interesting. In the context of our health care debate, something that happened here last week on the floor, and people should be paying big attention to this, and it seems like it is an unrelated subject but it is not at all, and that is the student loan situation. We are fortunate to have Congresswoman Foxx who was literally involved in the middle of that situation.

I would like to explain the history of the student loan program and how that connects to this concept, because one of the huge debates here, aside from the cost of the thing, is the question of whether there should be a government insurance plan included. The Democrats are about 50/50 divided on that point. The Republicans are not at all divided. We think no, absolutely not. It is a deal breaker. We do not want the government getting into the insurance business.

So why would we be concerned? Well, because where that is going to lead. Let's go over and take a look at what happens in student loans and how that then relates to health care.

I yield to the gentlewoman from North Carolina.

Reclaiming my time, was that the government Direct Loan Program always had problems?

The deal is the government makes a loan to some student, you're going to go to college. The kid goes to college, doesn't repay the loan, and the government and the taxpayer has to then pick up the tab?

Here is the interesting thing, though. If you went for a direct loan from the Federal Government, you got a lower interest rate on your loan, so you would think, shoot, everybody is going to go for that kind of loan, and, in fact 20 percent did, and the other 70-some did not. They paid more money in interest. Why? Because the loan was administered through the private sector. And the private sector was so much easier to deal with, they were willing to pay more in interest just not to have to deal with the Federal Government on it.

So what we did last week, then, was to basically eliminate, and there were some people that weren't federally insured at all and they were just totally private. So 20 percent of the market was just private. You had not quite 20 percent that was just straight Federal Government, and then you had in between the sector of private money with a guarantee from the Federal Government. So we have taken that huge sector in the middle and gotten rid of that so now the government runs 80 percent or so of the student loans; is that right?

So the first thing we are seeing is once more the Federal Government is getting their fingers into everything, and in this case, they are basically taking over student loans. But they started with the idea that we are just going to help the students get a lower interest rate. That was the toe in the door, the nose of the camel under the tent, to the point where now 60, 70, if this bill were to pass the Senate, where you have the government now in the student loan business.

Now, let's fast forward. How does that parallel our concern on health care? Well, our concern is you put a public option in and the government starts with that. It seems like just a little thing.

Then pretty soon you say, well, every insurance policy in the country has to be the same as the government's, which is what the legislation says. And pretty soon, guess what? You have one provider, the Federal Government, and the government has now taken over all of the health care.

I yield to my good friend, the Congressman from Georgia, who has a distinguished record here in the House but also is a medical doctor, which we don't hold against him. I would just be delighted to recognize my good friend, Dr. Gingrey.

Wait a minute. Reclaiming my time, you are starting to blow my circuits. You are saying that a Congressman on this floor, the head of the Education Committee now, says that this government loan program is not going to cost us a dime?

In other words, the Federal Government is going to go in and take over all of these student loans, and it is not going to cost a dime. You know what you would have to prove to prove that true? You would have to say that every single loan is going to be made good. That is what you would have to say almost to make that happen. I mean, that is beyond credible.

30,000 or 40,000--that is jobs lost?

You know, there is kind of an overused phrase around here, ``people of faith.'' I mean, I think we are talking of people of faith that could make statements like that with a straight face almost.

I would like to just shift a little bit to my good friend from Georgia, and he in a way to me is a hero because he has done something which I think is a tremendous educational tool for the people of the United States.

On this House floor we are denied many, many times any kind of amendment that we can offer because it might be embarrassing to have to vote on something. But in committee, we still have the freedom to be able to offer amendments. And a third point of some considerable contention on health care is the question of rationing.

Is it going to end up that the government is going to, instead of an insurance agent getting between you and your doctor, which we don't like, even worse a bureaucrat telling the doctor and the patient, Sorry, you can't go there. Give him some aspirin and send him home. That is something that has been a concern.

So my good friend the doctor from Georgia offered an amendment in committee on this very point, and I don't think this has received nearly enough attention, Dr. Gingrey. But I want to review the simple sentence that you put in, because I think this really busts wide open this entire question about whether we are going to have rationing of health care.

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

My understanding of what you are saying, doctor, is that that doctor- patient relationship, which we all consider to be the backbone of good medical care, is sacrosanct, and we are not going to put bureaucrats in charge of doctor-patient and medical decisionmaking.

Was that your point? And tell me about your amendment.

Was that that fantastic colored flowchart that we saw that had all the boxes and arrows all over?

So isn't that your point? You don't want bureaucrats getting in the way of medical decisions. Is that what you are trying to get at here?

And how did it go? Tell me about the votes. Your amendment passed without any question, right? Everybody agrees to that doctor- patient relationship, right? There wasn't anybody that voted against your amendment?

I agree. It is a sacred relationship. How did the committee vote?

What I have got here in my notes, it says the Democrats, 32 voted against it, one voted for it. Republicans, 23 voted for it, none of them voted against it. So it is a straight party-line vote, with the exception of one?

So your amendment failed then?

Okay. But when it failed, what does that say to us if you are worried about bureaucrats making health care decisions? Does that give you any sense of comfort?

I really appreciate, doctor, your offering this amendment, because I think this, if there is ever any indication of where this health care is going and why the American public is concerned about it, this would be one of those things. Because we are talking about promises on the one hand that you can keep what you have and your doctor-patient relationship is good and don't worry about that; 100 million people in America have their own insurance and their own doctors and providers and they feel like they are getting pretty good health care. And yet here, this amendment says that.

We are joined by a fantastic Congresswoman, Congresswoman Lummis. I would be happy if you want to jump in here.

Let's talk a little bit. What part of Medicare did that come out of? Did you happen to notice that? I mean, is there any line item that says waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare that you can just take money out of? How do we do that?

Let me stop. That is an incredible number. In other words, we have a doctor like Dr. Gingrey, Dr. Fleming, and they accept a patient on Medicare. It costs them $1 to provide some type of medical care. They are getting reimbursed how much? $1.50?

$1?

How much?

Thirty-seven cents out of a dollar. So they are losing money on a Medicare patient.

So we are going to cut $500 billion out of Medicare and expect doctors to continue to do that? I don't understand how that is supposed to work.

I think that is a great phrase, ``a stunning departure from rational thinking.'' You know, I think we are seeing a little more of that than we need down here. You are such a nice person. That is a nice way to say being stupid, isn't it? In Missouri, we are not very good at explaining things. I wish I was as politically correct as you are.

I see my good friend, Congressman King from Iowa, over here, and he is having way too much fun. I think we have to let Steve have a chance at chatting with us for a minute.

Congressman King, somebody who is known for calling things plain and straight talk, I appreciate your midwestern perspective. Please join us.

Isn't that amazing? We have two medical doctors here, Dr. Fleming and Dr. Gingrey, and we have been really leaning on our medical doctors. I guess the question I have is, I have been here 9 years, and over this period we passed some bill, I don't know how many years ago, that says we are going to keep ratcheting down how much money we are spending on Medicare, and it obviously isn't working, if you take a look Medicare growth and costs. And every year we do the Medicare patch so the doctors aren't going to go bankrupt all the time, or at least so they will keep taking Medicare patients.

So it seems to me when we do the patch, we are putting more money into Medicare, and now we are talking about taking $500 billion out of it. This thing somehow, Dr. Gingrey, do you want to address that for a minute, or Congresswoman Foxx?

Every year we're patching that, though, aren't we?

How many years can you practice medicine--let's say our salaries were cut 20 percent every year. How long would we be doing what we're doing? I mean, that's a tough deal. So we're cutting this. We keep adding money to it to prevent that cut from taking place, and now we're going to take $500 billion out of Medicare and everything is going to work fine?

Dr. Fleming, what do you think about that?

Is this a conference call? You're going to have a conference call?

I appreciate your response as a medical professional on that, and the fact that it's going to be awfully hard if year after year we're putting more money into Medicare to try and prop it up. As Dr. Gingrey has said, that's no way to run a ship. And that's true. But we're constantly putting more money in it, and all of a sudden we're being told by the President that he is going to take $500 billion out of it because it's waste, fraud and abuse; he is going to put it into this program, and there is not going to be a nickel of deficit involved in that.

Another claim that the President made--and I have been sticking a little bit on the theme of, there's a lot of debate over what's true. This guy says this, somebody else says that, and America is arguing about this stuff. What our objective is is to try to add some kernel of truth to one of these things.

Here's another statement. First, if you're 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 of the doctor you have. Now we've heard this over and over from the President. We've heard it from different Democrat Congressmen claiming this, and yet this isn't really true, from what we're seeing, as we take a good, closer look at it.

The first thing that strikes me is, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance--in other words, you have 100 million Americans who already have health insurance, and you like it, you like your doctor-patient relationship, and you are saying, Hey, just leave me alone, what's the objective? Well, the objective is to find some other number of people who don't have health insurance. So how many is that? We have an expert on that here in Congressman King. But let's just be very liberal. Let's say the President, who said originally it was 46 million, now he is going to take it down to 30 and probably if you looked at it closer, it's less than that. But let's say even if there were 30 that didn't have health insurance, and you have hundreds that have, why are you going to scrap the hundreds right off the bat in order to deal with the 30?

Reclaiming my time, my first point, when you read this, if you have hundreds of millions who already have health insurance, you're going to tamper with all of this to deal with 12 million?

So less than 4 percent. We're going to redo the whole system to deal with 4 percent. Even on the surface, it doesn't seem intuitively obvious to the casual observer that that's the way that you might deal with this thing.

Congresswoman Foxx.

So you are saying of Americans in general, 89 percent are saying, We're pretty comfortable with what we've got.

This is the area that's kind of sacred to Americans, the idea of free speech, that you can have your opinion, you can disagree with a family member or a neighbor. But we can have this debate and this discussion, and we're not going to hide information.

Is that what you are getting at?

So we've got Humana. It's a health insurance company provider, and it's particularly working with Medicare money and packaging that money into more of like a private medical plan type thing?

So specifically, the bill that's being proposed by Nancy Pelosi--and indirectly by the President--is going to cut Medicare. Specifically in Medicare, it's going to cut Medicare Advantage, and Humana works with that. I just want to make sure we get this down.

Wait, wait, wait. Stop again. I feel like I have just blasted off and gone to some other country or some other planet.

You are saying that we have a private company who is insuring people. They write a letter to the people that are buying their product and say to them, essentially, you're being targeted by Nancy Pelosi's health care bill. So they are a constituency, they are a group of Americans who have a right to have an opinion. Obviously they're somewhat predisposed to like it because they wouldn't be in the program if they didn't like it, and they're being told, Your program is going to be cancelled. The program you like in Medicare is going to be canceled. So they're warning their people that are buying their product, Look out. You're about to lose something. If you like it, you're going to have to say something about it.

And now the government is threatening Humana for communicating?

I don't know if we have even got a First Amendment anymore.

I appreciate your sharing that. I guess I appreciate it. I think it's a little bit chilling. I mean, the President said something about calling us out. That sounds like something my principal did to me all the time when I was, you know, talking or chewing gum or something.

Going to Dr. Gingrey, have you heard about this situation? This is kind of a little spooky--that you can't send people a letter in America?

Wait a minute. I am still coming back to this deal where you are a business and you are writing a letter to the people that you're providing a product to, and the government tells you you can't send a letter to them and you have to take it off your Web site? Is this 1984? I mean, what is this, George Orwell or something? I find the whole pattern here to be upsetting. I really do.

My friend from Iowa, are you running away on us here? I was just about to recognize you, gentleman. Did you want to jump in on this?

Yes, Gentlemen, this was the President's claim.

So we hear this one claim on one side. Now, what is the balancing counterclaim? Well, here is one. This is a poor guy from MIT who wishes he hadn't said it because he was attacked for making this statement:

With or without reform, that won't be true. This is about this statement.

He says, 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 other circumstances will not make that happen.

So, in other words, he can say you can keep what you've got; but in fact what happens is, just like in the funding for higher education, the government comes in and changes everything, and you don't have access to it anymore.

Please, the gentleman from Iowa.

I yield.

I would just like to jump to the record here. This is the August 8 speech:

There are those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false.

He is saying people are saying things that are false. That's pretty close to calling them something else. They're saying things that are false.

The reforms I am proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.

This is a statement that he made. Is it true or is it not? Well, one of the ways that you can check it out is to take a look at the bill. Another way that you can do it is to hire a group of legal scholars who works for Congress, called the Congressional Research Service. They're not Republicans. They're not Democrats. They looked into this statement. What did they find in this?

Under 3200--this is Pelosi's health care bill--the health insurance exchange would begin operation in 2013, and it would offer private plans alongside a public option. Then he goes on: 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.

In other words, in spite of the fact that the bill says this shouldn't apply--and there is actually language that says it shouldn't apply to illegals--in practice, when you turn the bill on, there's no screening mechanism.

I yield to Dr. Fleming.

Reclaiming my time, if the objective is that we're not going to cover illegals, if that's the objective, you are saying let's make it clear to everybody. We'll put a simple sentence or couple of sentences in the bill, and we'll make it clear that we're not going to cover illegals, and that's offered as an amendment.

How did that go as an amendment? Did it pass? I assume it passed.

A party-line vote again?

So we have the President saying we're not going to be covering illegal immigrants. In fact, the bill from a completely unbiased source says there is nothing in it to protect against that, and the amendment to specifically prohibit it was defeated on a party- line vote. So that's why there's some tension on this subject, isn't there?

One person is saying something, and it isn't all necessarily so.

I yield.

Reclaiming my time, I appreciate, Doctors, your help. We have just a couple of minutes before I have to close, and I would like to correct one other thing. It's an assumption that has been kind of hidden in this debate over the months, which is that American health care is really cruddy and terrible and that it has to be totally torn down and rebuilt.

Now, this summer, while we were debating this, my dear father, who is 88 years old, went to a heart doctor. His original heart doctor had been diagnosed with cancer, and he retired. He goes to a new heart doctor.

The heart doctor says, What has the doctor done for your heart?

Dad says, Well, I'm getting these medicines.

He said, But what did you do? Well, come in, he says, for a stress test.

He went in for the stress test. Within a couple of days, he had scheduled an angioplasty. My father was put under anesthetic. They went in and looked around with their little camera. He came back out. They hadn't done anything. They called us in the office. I was with my dad on Monday. He's 88 years old.

The doctor says, You need open heart surgery.

He says, What are the numbers?

The numbers are these, he said. There's a 10 percent chance for a major complication in open heart surgery. If you don't get it, there's a 50 percent chance you're going to have a major heart attack.

So I'm sitting there with my dad and my mom in the office. The doctor says, When can we schedule surgery?

He said, Tuesday or Thursday.

That is tomorrow or two days. So we scheduled surgery. My dad had a seven-way heart bypass. He was home from the hospital on Saturday. The whole

process took about 2 weeks, 2\1/2\ weeks, and he's doing fine. That's the miracle of American medicine.

Let me explain one thing, which is, if you're some sheikh in Bahrain with unlimited money, where do you want to go to get your health care? To the good, old USA.

I say to you doctors, Hats off for the great health care that you provide. Yes, there are some things that we can do to improve it, but it doesn't mean we have to burn the entire barn down.

I yield my last minute or so.

Let's do that statistic one more time, and we'll probably have to close up with that.

In the U.S., your survival rate is 60-something percent overall.

Okay. This is over 5 years?

So, if you've got cancer, you'll want to be in the good, old USA then.

Yes.

I very much appreciate your all joining us tonight. I thank my colleagues and the American public for continuing this discussion on health care.

God bless you all. Thank you.

I thank my very good friend from the State next-door to the State of Missouri. I thank him for his common sense.

I also thank my good friend from Arizona, a fellow member of the Armed Services Committee. He is both a statesman and is very good from an engineering point of view with the details of what is going on.

I'd like to just try and say similar things but in a little bit more of a net fashion because he was so scholarly about it.

Basically, what happened was the Obama administration made a decision, which was announced Friday, that they're abandoning missile defense in Eastern Europe. Those locations are chosen because of physics and geometry to protect Western Europe and the United States from a possible launch from Iran.

Now, when you talk about missiles, it isn't too complicated. You've got little ones, medium-sized ones and great big ones. The way you stop great big ones, which we call intercontinental ballistic missiles--and they have three stages, and they go very high and very fast--is with other big, fast missiles called ground-based.

The proposal was to put defensive locations in a couple of Eastern European states, the Czech Republic, among others, and to provide ourselves with a defense. The most fundamental purpose of a civil government is to protect their citizens, particularly to protect millions of citizens in the face of somebody who says, We're going to get you. They're building weapons that can only be used for that purpose. Nuclear bombs are not used to power a power plant. They're used to blow people up.

So we have an administration which has stepped away from the fundamental purpose of any government to protect its citizens. So this is a regular head-scratcher of a decision. Not only that, but we betrayed the people who politically put their necks on the line with their constituents and with their citizens, making a controversial decision in Europe to be able to be part of this missile defense.

This was Ronald Reagan's dream, and I don't see how anybody could have trouble with the idea of trying to protect oneself against somebody who is trying to ``nuke ya.'' I mean, to me, that just defies common sense.

So what is going on here is we've seen the Obama administration stepping away from the requirement to defend ourselves. President Bush did the heavy lifting. He went into Europe, talked to the Russians, and told them, You've got 6 months, and we're going to develop missile defense. Everybody said you can't do it. The Democrats said, It's too expensive and you can't do it. We developed the technology, and we did it.

Not only did we hit a missile with a missile, but we have demonstrated it time after time after time. At incredibly high speeds, we hit a spot on a missile with a missile. We can do that. We have the technical ability to do it and, yet, no will to follow through.

I don't understand that. What frightens me particularly, gentleman, is this decision is not made in a vacuum. It is a pattern that we are seeing on the Armed Services Committee and things, some of these things that from a security point of view we can hardly talk about.

But this is not one decision by itself. We are also seeing a very strong weakening of resolve in dealing with what's going on in Afghanistan. Our troops on the ground are sending us signals, hey, guys, we are going to have to go out and get it. This isn't going to be easy. This is one of these, like Iraq, it's going to be one of these insurgent-like conflicts. It is going to take some time and effort and enough people to get it. We are seeing a waffling on the part of the administration in the face of the challenges facing us in Afghanistan.

On a third point, which I would perhaps get in an argument with my very good friend from Arizona, that there is something even more upsetting to me, and that is the fact that Americans offensive capability has been based for many decades on the idea of a triad; that is big missiles that we launch from the land, big missiles that we launch from submarines. The third leg of the triad is a bomber, a bomber that can go over some potential enemy's territory with impunity and bomb them. With that offensive capability, we can live in peace, because we have no intent of wanting to drop missiles or bombs on anybody.

But what has happened is this administration is walking away from one leg of the triad. I know my dear friend on Armed Services knows what I am talking about. I have to be careful about what I can say and not.

But this is the bomber leg. Our bombers are currently old, some of them 50 years old. It is important that we do the planning now to develop the technology and the aircraft to maintain that leg. That also is being cut by the Obama administration, and that's something that has not received hardly any public attention. But this is a big deal, as big a deal as cutting missile defense.

So this is a pattern, a pattern of not funding national defense, not

prioritizing the protection of our citizenry, and I am very uncomfortable with it.

I would like toss those thoughts out for a little discussion.

You know, that's kind of interesting, because the missile technology that Iran has gotten came from the Soviet Union. So if the Soviet Union were really serious about reducing Iran's capability, at least in the area of delivering large missiles, then they are certainly approaching it from a rather unique point of view of selling missile technology to Iran. I don't think your proposition seems to make sense.

If the President got something for giving up missile defense in Europe, it wouldn't make sense that he got something from the very country that had been giving Iran the missile-building capability.

I don't know anything that he got for that. I am not sure that maybe he didn't just do it just to be a nice guy or something. I don't see anything that he got that would be valuable enough risking our population to the population of Western Europe. So you have really caught me. I really don't know the answer to your question.

I hope the gentleman from Arizona knows what the President got.

Well, I'm inclined to, as you start reminiscing that we don't learn from history, one of the things that I remember hearing about is when I was first elected to Congress in 2001, I was on the Armed Services Committee and we made the votes to fund the building of missile defense. But there was also a guy by the name of Rumsfeld who was Secretary of Defense. He came in and spoke to us on some pretty clear kinds of lines of reasoning.

He stated, If you're Secretary of Defense, there's kind of three situations. There's the things that you know about that you should worry. And those are things that are of concern to us. But the things that are particularly of concern are the things we don't know about, that we should worry. And then he gave an example of that.

One of the examples was, we had a treaty with the Soviet Union. And the treaty said that nobody is going to build biological weapons. And what had come out was in fact that the Soviet Union had all kinds of missiles pointed at America with biological weapons in those missiles, including smallpox. And so we didn't have a clue because we took their good will that they certainly wouldn't violate a treaty.

It seems to me that a more American way of thinking is if you're worried about somebody shooting a nuclear missile at you, maybe we just ought to have the capability of shooting it down before it even gets over our ground. That seems to be an awful lot more dependable mindset than trusting people who have systematically lied to us in the past.

This was a terrible decision by our administration. It can be viewed in no other light. It can only be viewed as stepping away from the responsibility of defending American citizens and Western European citizens and creating a less stable world.

This is not a decision that the American people should let stand. This is something that must be reversed. It requires action on the part of people who are patriots and people who love this country, who love life and freedom itself.

Mr. Speaker, it's a treat to be able to join you, Members of Congress, and those listening in tonight on a topic that has absorbed the attentions of our country, the topic of health care.

This week, the President delivered a major address to the House, to the Senate and to the public about his health

care plans. It was really a big debate. There was a lot of discussion, actually some heated kinds of words, some concerns about facts, and what was opinion and what was fact. All of these things have probably been inescapably in the news for many of us to observe. The big debate on the facts calls forth that old quip that everybody is entitled to their opinions, but there's one set of facts.

What we're going to try to take a look at this evening are some of these different controversial areas and how you straighten this thing out and why there is controversy and why there is debate over what the facts are, even though people have their own opinions.

So when we take a look at this--I apologize. Being an engineer, I may tend to make things a little complicated here. This is a chart of the Democrats' health care plan. If it seems like it's a little complicated, it's because it is a little bit complicated; and something as complicated as this, obviously, is going to make it a little difficult for people to sort out.

What exactly are the facts? That's what we're going to be working on.

I'm hoping to be joined by some of my colleagues who are experts in certain areas here of the health care plan, but I think just to start with: sometimes a picture is worth 1,000 words. This is a fairly complicated proposal by the House Democrats in their bill. Essentially, it is going to try to take over 18 percent of the U.S. economy, which is the entire health care sector, and put it under government management. Now, it doesn't do that immediately, but that's its net effect over a period of time. So, if there are some debates over facts and questions, it may not be surprising.

Now, perhaps, when you take a look at a big government takeover of something in any particular area of our government, one of the things that you worry about is that it may become expensive and that your quality may go downhill. There have been complaints sometimes about the Federal Emergency Act and about the FEMA people. There were concerns about their performance during Katrina. There were concerns about the performance of the post office relative to how much it cost. There were concerns about the CIA, about the kinds of numbers they gave us on Iraq before Gulf War I and Gulf War II. They got it wrong both times.

I do yield to my good friend from Minnesota (Mr. Kline).

If the gentleman would yield, if you're talking about a 1,000-plus-page bill and if you're trying to put it on one chart, it's going to look a little complicated.

I yield.

It's like, if you had a rug and you took out all the threads going one way, the whole thing wouldn't make any sense almost.

Yes.

Gentleman, I can't help but interrupt you there for a minute because I've heard it said repeatedly, and particularly by the President, that the Republicans don't have any alternatives or options. The fact is there are dozens of Republican bills, and none of them were put into any of this.

What you are suggesting, Gentleman, it's almost too commonsense for us to do. One of the ways that when we do create good legislation, usually there is a good consensus, and the minority and majority parties work together, they put stuff together and say, Well, this is the stuff we can agree to, this is the stuff other people can agree to, but together let's take a piece of the problem and solve it.

Instead, what this is is an attempt to take--what is it, one-fifth of our economy--and federalize it. And that's a pretty ambitious step, even if everybody agreed, this will be an ambitious step. And in this case, not one Republican agrees and agrees in the House or Senate, from what I know. Even if they did, this would be very ambitious to try to rewrite 18 percent of the U.S. economy and federalize the whole thing. That's a pretty ambitious thing to do.

Actually solved some problems.

Ran right through.

Gentleman, I would like to get to some of these questions that have come up, questions the President has raised, other people have raised, and take a look at them a little bit more carefully now that we have a little bit of time to say, What is the story? What are the real facts? Because you are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.

So one of the first things you are going to think about is in our environment, is this health care proposal expensive or is it too expensive? Somebody once quipped that if you think health care is expensive now, just wait till it's free.

So how do we take a look to assess how expensive it would be? You know, the President started his speech last week by saying, Hey, I inherited a trillion-dollar debt.

And immediately, as a member of the other party, I thought, well, you inherited a trillion-dollar debt, but you are not doing too shabby yourself. Because if you look at the Wall Street bailout, half of that was under his leadership, that's $350 billion. You have got another $787 billion for this supposedly stimulus bill.

You have got SCHIP, and then you have got, what was it, the appropriations bill. And then the huge bill that was passed, the cap- and-tax bill in this House, that all adds up to $3.6 trillion.

So I think it's reasonable to ask the question is this thing where the government takes over 18 percent of the economy going to be expensive? And he said it's going to be so efficient that we are not going to have any debt, and it's going to be fantastic and will hardly cost anything because we will take the money out of Medicare.

And so with a bill that's sort of plastic, I mean, you have got a 1,000-page bill, and people want to change it all the time. No one really--hasn't been finalized, all we have is the 1,000-page draft. How much do you assess how much it's going to cost?

Well, one way to do it is, here is Medicare and here is Social Security and Medicaid, the three biggest entitlements we have got, and they are growing out of control. So what we are claiming is that this socialized medicine bill is not going to do what these other socialized medicine things did or particularly Medicare and Social Security.

Now the liberals agree to these numbers. They are saying Yes, these things are growing out of control, but this proposal is not supposed to.

It was billions, now trillions.

So there is a good reason for people to be saying ``hold on'' in terms of these Big Government solutions. We are just absolutely not spending our kids, but our grandchildren, into debt with these things.

And I guess the question is, when you go from George Washington to George Bush, and you are running at, whatever it is, $5 trillion, and then you are going to add another 8 just under the Obama administration, doesn't that suggest that perhaps we need to kind of get off the accelerator of spending government money?

That's something we will live to see, and our grandchildren will just be growing up enough.

I would just like to stop on that point because I notice that the gentleman is probably a little younger than I am, but not too far distant. And you don't get to be a colonel by just being a--you can be a chicken, but not just a spring chicken.

As we grew up our parents, sometimes called the Greatest Generation, they had it in their heart that they wanted to hand a better future to their children and to America than what they had been blessed with. And it seemed like it was one of these, just sort of a national virtue that that generation had the desire to personally sacrifice so you and I could do things like go to college or graduate school or do things that they had not had a chance to do.

And somehow or other, this breaks my heart that we, in our generation that had been blessed by a selfless set of parents in that great generation are, instead, wanting to leave our children and grandchildren in a much worse fix than we found ourselves. Something about that seems almost un-American and intolerable to me.

Gentleman, would you want to comment on that?

Dad, my father, was with Patton.

The experience of other countries with nationalizing their health care, has that been an inexpensive experience? My understanding is it's about broke the budget of people that have tried to do this thing.

I do know that Massachusetts tried it and Tennessee tried it. And the experience that they had was, it was expensive. Massachusetts' health care costs have gone up like a skyrocket and Tennessee, the doctors just about left the State. The Democrat governor that tried it as a trial project was followed by another Democrat governor who called it an unmitigated disaster.

The head of Canada just declared their socialized medical system a complete mess and a disaster also and very expensive.

I was told by some Canadians it's the best health care system in the world as long as you are healthy.

Well, thank you very much, the gentleman from Minnesota, Congressman Kline. I appreciate your staying extra on the floor and helping us with it, a close look, try to take a look at some of the questions.

If I could interrupt a second, what you're talking about is precisely what I wanted to get to tonight because what we've got is a debate over what the facts are, and you're bringing up the question of abortion, which is one of the debates. Here is the direct quote from our President. It says: ``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.'' This is what the President says. And now you've made the point that in committee an amendment was offered; is that right, gentleman? I just wanted to lay that groundwork because this is his statement. This is what the President says. Now, what's actually going on in committee, please?

What you're saying is something that you and I, gentleman, take for granted. We live in this world day in and day out, God help us, and in the political world we realize that when a bill is passed, there are armies of people that write the rules and regulations that flesh out what the bill will be. So the question then becomes does this bill make it clear that we won't be using Federal taxpayer money to provide free abortions to people.

Now, to me, this is a different question because I have always been pro-life, but to me, it's a different question than the question of abortion. It's a question of the fact that I have constituents who are violently pro-life, violently pro-choice, and they disagree on that point. But the question is are we going to compel all citizens to use their taxpayer dollars to fund abortions. And that's something very upsetting to many people. So the question is does this bill do that.

Well, the bill doesn't specifically say anything, does it? So one of the ways to determine whether or not that's a future intent, that that's a little thing you're going to put in later, is to offer an amendment to make it clear just so that nobody will get upset about this issue, make the bill so that people can be more comfortable that there won't be any of this Federal money used for abortions. So when this amendment is put up, what happens? It gets voted down by a great majority of Democrats, right? So that leads you to the conclusion, well, they want to leave the door open for Federal funding for abortions with this bill. You can come to no other conclusion.

And the gentleman from Texas will shoot you if you don't mention his bill.

Reclaiming my time, I appreciate your joining us.

Congressman Bishop is just a regular powerhouse here in Congress.

We are very thankful for your district's sending you up here. Your background in teaching and making ideas straightforward and clear and being precise, that scholarly discipline is dreadfully needed at this hour, particularly when we start talking about these very nebulous kinds of nail-JELL-O-to-the-wall health care bills.

I am also joined by a gentleman that I respect greatly. He has been a leader here in Congress and an innovative thinker, Congressman Shadegg from Arizona. I appreciate yielding to you.

Let me just say, as we're getting started, though, because you have just come on the floor, what I have tried to do is to say, look, earlier last week when we talked about health care, the President came on this floor, debated and discussed, talked about what he wanted to do with health care, there was quite a lot of concern about what really the facts were. The President made a number of assertions, and what I was trying to do was to go back and forth and say here's the assertion and here's what we know about what the facts are and try to lay that out to make it clear.

The President said, first of all, that the bill isn't going to cost hardly anything. It's going to save money. It won't put us in debt or anything. And yet we don't have too much to be confident about other than his tremendous optimism.

The next thing that he was saying is that--one of the things he said was there are no abortions in this bill, and yet when an amendment was offered to make it so that there couldn't be any, that was voted down on this great party-line vote.

So that is what we are trying to do is to say let's try to get to the heart of what some of these questions were, the costs, the abortion, the immigration, some of these different issues.

I yield to my good friend from Arizona.

Reclaiming my time for just a minute, if Lyndon Johnson, who noticed there were people who were hungry in America, took the same approach, he would have had the government take over all the farms and the grocery stores, wouldn't he?

We would have considered that a little bit radical, wouldn't we?

In fact, we don't even know what the costs are.

Because they are selling the auto insurance to the consumer in a free market. And people who have the most basic, fundamental understanding of what the job of government should be, which is justice, which means people are equal before the law. And yet how can it be equal before the law when one guy gets insurance with pretax dollars, and the other poor guy has to pay with dollars after he has been taxed.

I yield to the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Bishop).

I yield to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Shadegg).

Reclaiming my time for a minute, the gentleman raised an interesting point. And I think the President made a stronger case, he said there is one State where there is one insurance player in the market. So his solution is what, so we are going to give you one insurance plan for the whole United States. Now that is an interesting way of looking at the problem.

What you are suggesting, gentlemen, is that you take your insurance and sell it across State lines and what you are trying to address what I believe is a problem, that in some markets an insurance company can kind of corner the market and run the prices up.

And so what you are talking about is free market competition so you can buy an insurance policy across State lines.

So you have to move to a different house.

So you are maintaining the principle of federalism, the State insurance commissioner still controls and regulates the insurance in their State, but you allow that competition to take place.

I suspect, practically speaking, if it were passed, your bill would have its most dramatic effect right near the

border areas of the States because there you have a network of providers that people could go to, and I would think that is where the bill would be most effective.

I yield to Congressman Bishop.

I appreciate the gentleman from Utah getting perhaps philosophically to the heart of this debate. Really, the question is are we going to go down the path. And if you take a look, there was a nation that we knew very well back just a few years ago, and the nation had this basic operating philosophy: the government will provide you with an education. The government will provide you with a job. The government will provide you with a house. The government will provide you with health care. And we see our own country. And that nation was called the Soviet Union which is now in the dust bin of history.

Now we see our Nation providing housing, providing food, providing education, and now we are talking about health care. Now, this is a little different speed, though, because before when someone was hungry, the proposal was give them a food stamp, which I am not sure was very efficient, but it wasn't to federalize every grocery store and every farm in America.

This proposal that we are talking about is different. This is saying that we are going to step right in and the government is going to take over one-fifth of the U.S. economy, and that is a pretty tall step to take.

So you have postal service and FEMA. Keep going.

Let's stay on the subject just a little more. Somebody talked about the compassion of the IRS. Do you want the compassion of the IRS in the health care system, or the efficiency of the post office?

Here is one that really frosts me, and nobody has made a big deal about this.

In Gulf War I, the CIA came to us and said the Iraqis are 10 or 15 years away from building a nuclear device. We get in there, and they are a year and a half away. So they got it completely wrong.

Then we go to Gulf War II and they say they are a year and a half away from building one, and we get in there and they are not even close to it. They have completely missed it both ways. And then you want to trust your body to these guys?

Then let's talk about the efficiency of the Energy Department. Do you know why the Department of Energy was created?

To reduce our dependence on foreign oil, to ensure energy independence. And ever since they have been created, which way has the graph been going?

We are joined by the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Lamborn).

You were courageous to do that because there were a lot of people who tried to have town hall meetings and their constituents were not very happy about what has gone on down here in the last 6 months. You had at least a sense that you wanted to hear both people's opinion, both sides.

We did a town hall, a lot on health care, and it was very interesting.

We fired the president of General Motors. I still can't get my brain around that. The President of the United States fired the president of General Motors. I never thought I would see that.

Today we are taking over college loans. We are going to basically chase the privates out of that business.

Reclaiming my time, Congressman Lamborn. I just hit 62, and I have become even more and more painfully aware of the fact that I have to live inside this body. And I think Americans feel that way.

When you start talking about, Well, I got some government that's going to take over all of this and there's going to be somebody determining what kind of health care you get, that gets people's attention. Maybe they like the idea. But they want to know how is this going to work.

I yield time.

Except there is something that has been proposed by the Speaker of the House. It's her committees. And we have a bill number on it, and there have been amendments made to it. It's been dealt with in committee. He apparently wants the Democrats to vote for that Pelosi plan.

So I think, you know, at least a reasonable person is thinking that the President wants the Democrats to advance the plan, which is the 1,000-page bill which is being offered by the Speaker and the committees that are under her authority. That's what we were talking about tonight, because the President makes these assertions, and yet when you take a look at what's in the Pelosi plan, you start to see this disconnect between the two.

I think a lot of Americans have gotten that personally involved in this that they have copies of the plan. They're starting to read it, and saying, The President is saying this, the plan is saying this, the President is saying this, the plan is saying that, and that's what I was trying to get at tonight.

Here's an example. There are 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 this is what the President says.

If you go to the bill, the bill says this bill is not for illegal immigrants. Okay, that squares with what the President says. But, then, when you look more closely, you find out that in the enforcement section it says, basically, anybody can sign up for the deal.

So there's no enforcement to put any teeth at all in this, which then makes you think, Wait a minute. What's the smoke and mirrors?

And so there's different ways to test this. One is to offer an amendment. So the Republicans offered this amendment. In order to utilize the public health insurance option, an individual must have his or her eligibility determined and proved under the income and eligibility verification system. This is fancy language of saying you've got to be a U.S. citizen. You have to be here legally. And this, of course, is voted down on a straight party line vote. There were Republicans--15 voted yes. A total of 15. Twenty-six Democrats voted ``no.''

Now this basically would say that not only are we going to say, No, illegal immigrants can't get this, but we're also going to say, Before you get it, you've got to prove your eligibility, and they said ``no.''

Now that leaves some level of confusion, but it clearly leaves the point that the Democrats did not want this amendment in their bill. So this is that disconnect where the President says one thing. And yet, when you start to look at the facts, you go, Oh, my goodness. What other way can you look at this?

One of the things we did, there's a Congressional Research Service. We asked them, When you take a look at this bill, will illegal immigrants be able to take advantage of the bill? Now this is a body that's not Republican, not Democrat. They're just a bunch of scholars.

Here's the quote from the Congressional Research Service, August 25, 2009, just a couple of weeks ago. Under House Resolution 3200--that is Nancy Pelosi's health care bill--a health insurance exchange would begin operation in 2013 and would offer private plans alongside of 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 these people are saying the same things.

When our constituents read the bill--bless their heart to wade through all of this stuff--they're saying, It says there's no illegal immigrants. But in fact there's an amendment we offer to make it clear. The amendment is turned down on a party line vote, and there are no teeth in it at all.

So there's this disconnect. And I think that's creating a lot of stress out there.

I yield to my friend.

I just have to stop you there, gentleman. I think you put your finger on probably one of the biggest question marks going here. This is such a straightforward question, but I think it needs to be repeated.

What we're saying is that 80 percent, at least, of Americans have some kind of health insurance. Most of them are reasonably pleased with the health insurance and the doctors they have and the delivery systems. So you've got 80 percent of the people that are okay with it, and yet you're going to basically take all of that and change it in order to take care of what, 5 or 10, depending whether you count illegals or whatever.

Yes.

I think you have brought an exceptionally important point. Unfortunately, our hour has just flown by. I would just like to thank my good friend, Congressman Lamborn, for his expertise and great leadership you've shown here on the floor. I thank my other colleagues for taking part in trying to get through some of these details.

Wait a minute. Would the gentleman yield?

I can't help but jump in when somebody is defending the cause of free enterprise. I guess there's different ways to describe or explain the phenomena that you're talking about. And one of them is that one side of the aisle tends to be much more in favor of free enterprise and the other one is much more in favor of having the government do things.

I guess what we start to get to is a question that's kind of a fundamental question, really the biggest thing that we divide and talk about and argue and debate about on this floor is, what is the proper function of the civil government, particularly the Federal Government? What should the Federal Government be doing? Should it be baking bread or should it not be baking bread? Should baking bread be left to citizens out on the street? Should it be the job of the Federal Government to be giving food away to people? Should it be the job of the Federal Government, according to Joe the Plumber, to take money from one person and give it to another person? Is the job of the Federal Government to be the big sugar daddy, dispensing favors? Is it the job of the Federal Government basically to be Big Mama, taking care of everybody? Or is there a different purpose for government, which is simply justice, simply creating a level playing field so that everybody can go out and use their God-given potential as they're directed to do it? And it seems to me, gentleman, that you can make the case of Federal control of everything versus free enterprise, or you could just say,

What's really the legitimate job of the Federal Government?

Now we had some liberals in this Chamber some years ago, and they discovered there were people in America who were hungry. Of course there have been people in America who have been hungry for a long time. But they came up with a bright idea that we're going to socialize a little bit, we're going to steal money from some other people through taxes, print food stamps, and give food stamps to people who are hungry to take care of the problem of hunger. In fact, they declared war on hunger, and hunger won, of course. That was their approach.

What's being proposed here today, gentleman, is an entirely more radical agenda. This would be the equivalent of somebody discovering that there is hunger in America and the government taking over the farms, the grocery stores and the distribution houses in between, taking over the entire food industry. That's what's being proposed with this socialized medicine. It's not a matter of just giving somebody Medicare or Medicaid who can't afford to pay for medical care. It's about the government taking over one-fifth of the economy. This is a whole radical step more in the direction of a challenge to freedom and free enterprise. It is fundamentally un-American is what we're dealing with.

Gentleman, just a minute. I can't help but interrupt. Thirty percent has been nationalized if you just add up those big corporations?

Thirty percent of the profits. And that's not even counting health care yet.

If you would yield, gentleman, one of the things somebody once said--and I was not a whiz on taking history in high school--but if you don't learn from history, you are bound to repeat mistakes. And I do recall a very threatening and ominous nation that we saw taking over country after country called the Soviet Union. If you were to try to just simplify their philosophy, it was that government was going to take care of food, clothing and shelter. They were going to pay for your education, set you up with a job, and take care of your health care. We laughed when that country collapsed, a little bit with a sense of anxiety because they had nuclear weapons aimed at us and all. We said, you know that Communist/Socialist stuff won't work. Their economy was a mess. They couldn't keep up with us in the arms race because their economy was a disaster. The government can't run all that stuff efficiently. People starved to death over there. Their medical care was so abysmal, people that went into their hospitals would shudder. There was no anaesthetic, no clean bandages. It was a disaster.

And when the whole thing went down the drain, we said, Everybody knows Communism/Socialism won't work. So what are we proposing now? The government's going to provide food. The government's going to provide housing. The government's going to provide your education. We just decided to nationalize a whole lot more of that. No more private loans. We're going to have the government take care of all that. And now we're talking about the government--not only the insurance and the automotive, but now the government wants to take over one-fifth of the economy in terms of health care.

Now, it seems to me we should learn something from history, don't you think, gentleman?

I can tell the gentleman is from Iowa. He has got this farming technology down. Isn't that incredible, GPS in your tractor, telling you how much fertilizer to put in a section of a field? It's amazing what free enterprise can do.

You know, the thing that just amazed me about that comment, Free enterprise doesn't work because we've got this big economic crisis. And you go, Well, let's see. What's the economic crisis caused by?

Oh, it's a real estate problem. Oh, real estate. In what regard? Well, it seems like a whole lot of people have mortgages that they can't pay in real estate. Well, how did that happen? Oh, well, we've got Freddie and Fannie. And what sort of agencies are those? Quasi- governmental agencies. And what have they been doing? They've been instructed by the U.S. Congress to make loans to people who can't afford to pay their loans.

Now guess what's happening, the people can't afford to pay their loans, and

all this stuff is sliding down the wall in a big mess. So we've sold this stuff all over the world, and now the economy is in a mess. Let's see, how did this economy get in a mess? Oh, the Congress created an agency who distributed lots and lots of loot to Congressmen in the form of PAC checks. They created an agency to sell stocks and bonds, packaged up in a nice clever way by Wall Street that weren't worth anything because the people couldn't pay their mortgages, and we say this is a failure of free enterprise? It's a failure of socialized government trying to impose itself on the free market and in the idea of trying to be charitable, saddling somebody with a loan they can't afford to pay so they have got to go into bankruptcy. What a compassionate solution.

Gentleman, you just jumped out of the realm of free enterprise, didn't you? You jumped into the realm of government planning.

So there's no failure of free enterprise at all. It wasn't a failure of free enterprise, was it?

It was a failure of another government socialized scheme is what it was.

What I was getting at even more so was Freddie and Fannie, because you had the Reinvestment Act. But parallel to it was Freddie and Fannie. And Freddie and Fannie were encouraged to make all of these loans to people who couldn't pay. But then the bankers got smart, and they cut the loans up in lots of little pieces and packaged them up and sold them all over the place. The thing that is interesting was, people were really getting down on Bush for making such a bad economy and it was free enterprise's fault, it was George Bush's fault.

In reality, you go in The New York Times and you see President Bush in 2003--I remember because it was September 11, 2003, New York Times, not exactly a conservative document. And this is Bush saying, Hey, I've got to have more authority to control Freddie and Fannie. They're out of control. They're making loans that are going to become a huge disaster.

And at the same time you have a quote in that article of Barney Frank from the floor of this House, who is now the chairman of the committee that runs all of that saying, Freddie and Fannie are fine. You can read the quote.

It was September 11, 2003, New York Times.

Of course, obviously, September 11, 2001.

They learned from his mistake.

The interesting thing was, he was not in the majority party at the time. I think he opposed legislation, but we passed it here in the House. Republicans were in charge at that time. We passed legislation in the House to regulate and to require that capitalization of Freddie and Fannie. It went to the Senate. But because of Senate rules, Democrats in the Senate were able to kill that legislation. And yet they want to blame President Bush, they want to blame free enterprise for what was another one of these socialized schemes where the big government is going to step in and try and repeal the laws of economics.

And of course we are going to use Federal money to pay ACORN to do all of these activities, which has become an interesting topic lately, as well, as we've seen some enterprising young people going in and checking out exactly what the story was in these different ACORN locations.

Now, that's getting millions of dollars of Federal money. So we're using taxpayer money--

Fifty-three million of taxpayer dollars to advertise for a political candidate.

Well, it almost makes you wonder about the Attorney General investigating. I suppose, perhaps, the gentleman has seen some of the various tapes that were cut with hidden cameras as people went into various ACORN locations.

It was kind of an interesting phenomenon, nothing that was broken by the big media in America, but it just shows that that underground kind of media, the new Web and the Internet and the bloggers and all--you have an enterprising gentleman and a young lady going in and being very bold at various ACORN offices talking about the fact that they want to open a house of ill repute and want to get some help from ACORN to help them figure out how to buy the house. And they are so candid with what they're saying. And the comments that were recorded in camera I think have been getting a lot of hits, a lot of people watching it. The mainstream media has paid no attention to it, and yet all over America people are looking at this. They have already heard about ACORN and the dozens of violations of this organization that we're paying for with tax dollars. I mean, what in the world is going on?

You've got--these two are just actors, you know, but they're entrepreneurs in an information kind of age. They're just going in pretending like they want to open up a house of ill repute so he can raise money to run for Congress. It's almost laughable if it weren't true.

I didn't hear that word somehow or other.

But they were some interesting sets of tapes, and some courageous people that were willing to do that because there is some threat potential there.

I have to interrupt just a minute, if the gentleman would yield some time.

I have always had a deep respect for my congressional friend from Iowa and the fact that you're a small business man, but the way you put that together, I mean, I can see why you're a good businessman. But in your construction business, you tried to stay kind of a little closer within the law, and yet here we're talking about an organization that's paid for with Federal money.

Now, what's happened with ACORN, though, is that there have been so many of these kinds of things that all of these community organizations that used to be under ACORN have changed their names--and it doesn't mean they've changed their stripes, but they've changed their names so that when we try to withhold funding from ACORN, all the other community organizers which used to be ACORN, no longer called ACORN, they are still wanting to pull down Federal money to do this wonderful entrepreneurial kind of proposal that you're talking about or many other kinds of schemes along the same lines.

And again, I think it suggests it's just one more nail in the coffin that says maybe the Federal Government shouldn't be doing this stuff. Maybe we've gotten our Federal Government just trying to do too many things for too many people. Maybe we better pull back to the idea, as you started, gentleman, with the concept of free enterprise, with the concept of the Federal Government creating a set of laws where everybody is equal before the law, not a setup of special deals, and a place where every American can have the freedom and the risk to chase the dream that God puts in their own heart, to be whatever it is, whether it's a contractor with heavy equipment, as you were, or in the steel business, or working in the computer business with IBM, as I was, that you can chase the dream that's in your own heart without the government doing any special

deals, either taking your money or giving you any money.

If you would yield.

It seems like what we're really talking about is kind of two visions of government. One vision of government is that government is limited and government is interested in justice, and it's a vision that promotes freedom. It promotes people having the freedom to go out and succeed or fail. It allows the individual to take the greatest gamble of their life, to live whatever dream God put in their heart. And America is full of people that came here and they were nuts, they had these crazy dreams, and they worked on them and they worked on them, and those dreams became a vague possibility and then they became a possibility. And finally those dreams became a reality, and America was built one dream at a time.

There was some nutty guy that had the idea of making a light bulb. He made 100 light bulbs and none of them worked, and he said that's good because now I know 100 ways not to make a light bulb. His name was Thomas Edison.

It became so common, we called it the American Dream.

The other view of government is not a rule of law. It's not people equal before the law. It's the special deal society. It's the special deal for me or for you. If you've got the right government contract, you can get a bailout; but if you don't, you go bankrupt. It's a special deal that, for one person, you get treated one way, but for somebody else, the law is different.

So the question is: Do we have a rule of law, or do we have basically a political kind of controlled anarchy? That's the question. Where are we going as a country? Are we going to have a rule of law? Are we going to have people equal before the law, or is the government going to be the big sugar daddy that's supposed to take care of everybody and that will reward people for behaviors which will destroy their lives? Is that the sort of government that we want?

That's the question before the American public today as they watch what happens on the floor of this Congress.

I yield back.

If the gentleman would yield, my memory may be a little weak on this, but we were involved about a year ago with this big Wall Street bailout. My understanding was, of part of that Wall Street bailout money, there was some sort of a tax that was going to be placed on some of those companies that was going to go directly to fund ACORN.

Do you know if that part of the bill passed on part of that Wall Street bailout? Do you know whether the funding for ACORN was built in there? I remember there was talk that it would be. If that's the case, my concern is this: that all of these organizations known as ACORN are not stupid. They're changing their names to community organizers so that you'll have all of these people who used to be ACORN still sitting there, still collecting Federal money and yet will no longer have the ACORN name because the ACORN name has been so incredibly disgraced.

So I guess my question and concern is--and I think as you're saying-- if we're really serious about dealing with this corruption, then it seems like we're going to have to deal with more than ACORN. We're going to have to deal with all of those organizations which came under that ACORN umbrella.

I would yield.

I am encouraged, Gentleman, and it just seems to me in the last 6 months that many Americans, who are many great patriots--and I'm not talking about rich people. I'm just talking about the people who love our country are getting engaged. They're getting energized, and they're asking the question: What can we do?

As they're busy asking these questions, all of this kind of information is coming out, and people are understanding, just as this President said that he was running on a platform of change, and many of us are realizing that there have to be changes inside us. The changes that you and I in a free enterprise system believe in are the changes that come in our own hearts--the changes of how we're going to run our businesses differently and of how we're going to do better for our families. Those are the kinds of changes a lot of Americans are looking at.

It's not so much a change of Big Government's telling everybody what they're going to do. Some of the change is going to have to be repairing some of the moral infrastructure of our country, a sense of outrage over a system that has gotten out of control. Particularly as good old Ronald Reagan said, We're buying a lot more government than we can afford. I think there are a lot of Americans, regardless of their political affiliations, who have come to the conclusion that we are buying more government than we can afford, in the order of trillions of dollars of more government.

I think the time is coming when there are going to have to be some changes here on the floor in terms of before we can get the changes that we need in policy, we have to rein in a beast that seems to be somewhat out of control, which is the Federal Government, which seems to be more in the business of telling us what to do than in being the servant of the people--the way it should be.

I just appreciate the gentleman, I am not a big fan of pie charts, I love pie, but I don't like pie charts. But this chart, I think, is a good graphic. It depicts something which almost defies reason.

What we are seeing is, we are going to take all of that green area, if you can point to that green area with your pointer, there--but I am talking about the turquoise area, the whole thing. We are going to change all of that. We are going to scrap our whole health care system, have it taken over by the government in order to address that little sort of orange-red sector.

What that suggests to me is that somebody has an agenda, and it's more federalizing anything than it is really solving a problem. And this is something that I find, from an integrity point of view, really distressing, particularly as an engineer.

I mean, we just passed the biggest tax increase in the history of our country because we are under the premise that CO2 is such a bad thing that we have got to tax everybody in order to put a tax on CO2. So in spite of a promise--if you are making $250,000 or less, you won't be taxed--in fact what we have passed in the House is, if you flip a light switch, you start getting taxed.

So the simple problem is, though, if you want to get rid of CO2, all you have

to do is take the nuclear power plants--that's 20 percent of our electric generation in America--take the 20 percent and double it. So we have 40 percent of our electric coming out of nuclear. If you do that, you would get rid of all the CO2 from every passenger car in the country. And yet we have come up with this complicated, tremendously intrusive, huge tax increase, when you could just simply say in a page or two, just double the number of nuclear.

Now, here what you have got is, you have got all this folderol about health care, we have got to take it over, the government has got to do all this stuff, and you have got 4 percent of people who are uninsured. It just seems like, it seems like we have made our conclusion ahead of time that we want our government to run everything, and our excuse is that little tiny 4 percent wedge. Even I like cherry pie. If all I got was 4 percent, it isn't worth it. It just plain isn't worth it. That's the obvious conclusion of your chart.

And I appreciate you just taking us into the world of free enterprise and what's really going on with our Federal Government. I appreciate your leadership. The gentleman from Iowa is really a saint, and we are thankful to have some good old midwestern commonsense values here on the floor of the U.S. Congress.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize the accomplishments of Junior Achievement of Mississippi River Valley. In particular, I would like to congratulate the organization's President, Lori Jacob, for winning JA Worldwide's 2009 Karl Flemke Pioneer Achievement Award. This award recognizes significant achievements and contributions of new Junior Achievement USA Member Presidents.

Junior Achievement is the world's largest organization dedicated to teaching students in Kindergarten through 12th grade about the importance of economics, entrepreneurism, and financial literacy. The organization reaches over 9 million students around the world each year, with over 130 local offices in the United States and operations in over 110 countries worldwide. One of the things that makes JA so unique is its use of adult volunteers to bring business to life for students. In the U.S. alone, young people in more than 188,000 classrooms benefit annually from these positive role models.

Ms. Jacob is clearly deserving of receiving this year's Flemke Award.

She began her career with Junior Achievement in 1987, serving in many roles within the Marketing, Education, Development, and Operation departments until she assumed her current position in 2007. Under her leadership, the area reached 127,000 students in over 700 schools this year, on a $2.7 million budget, making Junior Achievement of Mississippi Valley one of the organization's largest operations in the United States. Ms. Jacobs led the area to become a national two-time winner of JA's most prestigious funding award--the MetLife Entrepreneurial Award. She has been a champion in creating more awareness of JA, and has a volunteer board of directors composed of over 60 leaders of the St. Louis community.

In this current economic climate, teaching students the importance of economics and financial literacy is of the utmost importance, and I congratulate Ms. Jacobs and Junior Achievement of the Mississippi River Valley for their efforts throughout the St. Louis metropolitan area.

Madam Speaker, in accordance with House Republican Conference standards, and Clause 9 of Rule XXI, I submit the following member requests for the record regarding H.R. 3327, Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010.

Project: Hyperspectral Imaging for Improved Force Protection (HYPER-

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 680, had I been present, I would have voted ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your recognizing us on a very interesting and important topic, something that I believe that anybody who pays much attention to what is happening in Washington, D.C., is quite aware of. That is the subject of health care, something that impacts every single American in our country, affects our budget, and affects our family members, and is something of great interest.

I would like to start tonight by just backing up, though, about 4 weeks or so to this very Chamber that we are meeting in, that we are talking in today. It was here, during a day that we were debating a bill that was called cap-and-tax, and it was the largest tax increase in the history of our country.

Now, what happened right before that was of interest because at 3 o'clock in the morning a 300-page amendment was passed to an 1,100-page bill. And as we were debating this bill on the floor, because of the speed with which the Democrats moved we didn't even have a copy of the bill on the floor. You are supposed to have a copy at least so in case somebody wants to check a fine point, they could read it.

Of course no one had read the 1,100-page bill. And certainly what was happening right behind me at the dais, we had good staff people hurriedly trying to put those 300 pages of amendments

in the 1,100-page bill, and we are debating a bill and there's no copy on the floor. And the thing was passed without, as I recall it, a single Republican voting for it, and Democrats all voted for it.

Now, the public doesn't like it when we pass bills that we don't know what's in them or haven't read them, and we've been embarrassed a number of times this year by that same process. Why do you pass a bill that people haven't had a chance to read or don't know what happened in the dark of night, or the amendments?

I do yield to my very good friend from Michigan. Please jump in.

And just reclaiming my time for a minute, that was the stimulus plan, as I recall--was that the one that had the special bonuses for insurance executives and it was a finger-pointing deal as to who put this in in the dark of night?

This is exactly the same bill, just to put this in perspective, this is a bill that if we didn't pass it, we might see unemployment at 8 percent, right? Is that the same bill?

Now unemployment is whatever it is, 9 something.

Just reclaiming my time, what you're saying is pretty incredible. What you're saying is a bill that we've been working on for some number of weeks that is going to put the government in charge of all of health care in America, basically the government is going to be taking over, what is it, just under 20 percent of the U.S. economy----

I do yield to my friend from Louisiana.

Reclaiming my time, in summary, then, we've just been taking a look at the last 6 months--and it has been a scary 6 months-- but we've seen a pattern. We've seen a pattern of rushing to spend a tremendous amount of money, or rushing to tax the taxpayers a whole lot, without letting people be aware of what's in the bills. And we've had a pattern of a lot of fiscal mistakes.

We have a pattern of an unprecedented level of spending and taxation. But there is also the pattern of doing it in the dark of night, and that's what I wanted to get to on this health care thing.

What I would like to do is let's talk a little bit about whom do you want to keep in the dark on this? Who would naturally be opposed to a government takeover of health care? That's where I would like to go, because I think a lot of people are interested. Well, hey, if I were a congressman or how would I want my congressman to vote or what's my position on this? Well, there are a lot of groups of people that are be going to be affected very seriously by this government takeover of health care, and I think that's what we need to talk about.

I yield to my good friend from Michigan.

Unemployment is still going up

How you do it is important.

Fix the other four or five half-baked ideas we've already started.

So we passed the stimulus bill. The purpose is to make sure that we don't have unemployment and that we've got plenty of jobs. And here we are, whatever it is 4, 5 months later, and the board of directors, which is the public, is saying we're at 9 percent unemployment, which is a conservative number, and rising, and you guys just spent whatever it was, almost $800 billion, to make sure this doesn't happen.

The funny thing is that these are not Republican targets. These are not our targets. This is the President's target. He's saying 8 percent if you don't give me the stimulus. He gets the stimulus bill and now it's 9.

I yield to my friend from Louisiana.

That actually looks like a structure that will----

I hate to interrupt, but I've got this chart up here and you've got that chart up there, and the two charts aren't the same. Even though I don't like reading complicated charts, it's obvious to me there's a red box on your chart that isn't on my chart. This is my understanding of the Democrat proposal for health care, to take over 20 percent of the economy. And this is very much of a simplified chart of what is being proposed. When the government takes something over, they have got an awful lot of different things to connect. And yet your chart has got this big red box on it. I would like you to explain where that thing came from.

Reclaiming my time, what you're saying goes to a little bit more even than the health care debate. We are talking about the right to free speech. What you just said, as a Member of the U.S. Congress from the State of Louisiana, if you'd like to communicate to your constituents a flowchart of the bill that the Democrats proposed, they will not allow you to do that, and if you were to send that to them, they would make you pay for the thing personally. Is that what you're saying?

Reclaiming my time, you're getting at the very heart of what I want to talk about today, and that is there's a reason to censor something, because you don't want somebody to know something. There is somebody who is not going to like this bill, and you just told us one of the groups.

I would like to yield to my friend, who is actually the top guy in the Intelligence Committee. We need to pay attention to him, my good friend Congressman Hoekstra.

I need to reclaim my time again. You're going awfully fast for us.

The first thing you said was if you don't like government bureaucracy and you don't want a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor, then you probably don't like this flowchart. You want something a little simpler where it's you and your doctor making the health care decisions.

You also said if you're worried about fiscal responsibility, you're not going to like this bill, too. That's another group, because you're worried about the government spending. This thing here, even when they try to use every gimmick in the book, it's over a trillion dollars more spending. So if you're worried about that, you don't like it.

I would like to recognize my friend from California. You've been dealing with this chart, and if you could share it, because you've gotten into the details.

What are we trying to hide here?

Reclaiming my time, you've used a couple of terms that I think some people might not be as familiar with. You talked about a thing called the Franking Commission.

The Franking Commission is a group of Republicans and Democrats that meet together, and when you're going to send a piece of mail to your district or do something using government money to do the printing and mailing, it's an agreement that what's going to be there is going to be at least reasonably accurate. It's not a political piece and you're not slamming, but you're trying to simply communicate some information.

Reclaiming my time, the idea is to have kind of a fair standard so people can communicate with their constituents. We think of it as the First Amendment, just speaking to your constituents.

Where something was censored.

We've been joined, as you note this evening, by my good friend, Congressman Bishop, and I'd like to recognize him and let you jump in here in just a minute.

Well, but he maybe has a couple of ideas about your charts, gentleman. I yield.

And, gentleman, just reclaiming my time, what you've just said to us is, again, when we take a look at why do you want to keep this thing secret, why would you want to censor it, why would you want to tell us we couldn't send a flow chart out, part of the reason is because when the American public sees things like that there are going to be people who get worried about it. They're going to vote ``no,'' particularly every single one of us that some day is going to get sick and we're going to want a doctor to help us, and I'm not sure that we really want to have somebody going in between in the government, some part of this organization, second guessing the doctor the way the insurance companies do too much in our own day.

So if you really like your doctor/patient relationship, then this thing is bad news. That's why they're wanting to censor it. Do you believe that's right, gentleman?

A linguistically appropriate way.

In other words, if you're like I am, an old geezer at 62 years of age, and you need a new hip the way I do, they're going to say, we're putting you out to pasture; take a few pain pills. But they're going to say that in a really nice way, though, at least. So I hope it's linguistically appropriate, but my hip's still going to be sore anyway.

We've been joined this evening on the floor by a couple of very distinguished Congressmen, a couple of my very good friends, the gentleman from Texas and also the gentleman from Indiana. I'm going to recognize the gentleman from Texas who seems like he's got really something he's got to say. And I'll go right back over to my good friend, Congressman Pence from Indiana, highly respected on the floor, for your perspective on this.

Just reclaiming, gentleman, what you just said, I think, is another censored phrase, government-run health care. We're not allowed to say that. And our constituents say, why don't you say something more? And they're telling us if we print ``government-run'' health care, then we can't, then we have to pay for the mailing out of our own pocket. Isn't that weird?

But you've got to be up at 3:00 in the morning to hear what's going on in committee.

Reclaiming my time, you're talking about honest leadership and they're saying, as they take a look at this incredible flow chart, they're saying that if you've got a good relationship with your insurance company and your doctor and you like what you have, you can keep what you have. And yet listed in the bill is specific language that says you can't. That doesn't seem to me like they're following what the Web site says.

I'd like to recognize our conference chairman. Maybe you could get us out of this morass, gentleman, because we're a little confused between the politically appropriate language which seems to be okay for Democrats but not for Republicans to call this a Democrat health plan. But I yield to my good friend from Indiana.

(Mr. PENCE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Just reclaiming my time a moment, what you just said is mirrored--just a week or so ago we had about 1,100 pages of the bill. I started reading it and it said the commissioner shall, we go to another page, the commissioner shall, and we had page after page, the commissioner shall do this, the commissioner shall do that. It may not be his intention to have the government run it all.

He could have called it the czar. We had some discussion whether it's a commissioner or a czar or a commissar. We weren't sure what. But anyway it was one after the other pages. That's what the bill says. And just to your point. Sorry to interrupt. I yield back.

I really appreciate the gentleman's points that have been made here, explaining the fact that one of the people who is not going to like this is somebody who has an insurance policy that he likes, because when the government offers something for free, one can bet that what's going to happen is that the insurance policy is going to go away.

Now, it isn't as though the ideas that are being advocated in this bill are particularly new. They've been tried in other places. Here is one. Massachusetts tried. Basically, everybody has to have insurance, and the government is offering health care. What was the end result? I mean we don't have to reinvent the wheel. We see that what happened was, first of all, Massachusetts took a huge hit financially, and health care access is down because patients have to wait 70 days to see a doctor in Boston.

So, first of all, it is the typical red tape in government. You've got to wait in a line, but what's more, it costs a whole lot of money to wait in line because now your health care costs in Massachusetts are 133 percent more than what the average is. So it's not like we haven't tried this before. It has been tried; yet we're going to want to try and do the exact same thing.

It has been tried in other places. It was tried over here in Europe. We can take a look at that. What happens with cancer? I happen to be a cancer survivor. I'm not a wizard doctor; I'm not even a wizard economist, but I know a little bit about cancer because I survived it.

I see my good friend from California. If you'd like to jump in here, we'd be delighted to yield you time.

Can you get a private student loan now or is it that, basically, you can't get them anymore?

So it's like Henry Ford and his car. You can get any color you want as long as it's black.

So the only kind of student loan you're going to get is a government student loan because we've basically chased the private sector out.

A lot of them are quite happy with the idea of socialized health care. They acknowledge that.

I'm not allowed to say ``socialized''? Socialized. Socialized. Socialized.

Oh.

Organic chemistry. As an engineer, I feel your pain, my friend.

I think you just put your heart right on what this debate is about.

Go through that again.

What we're really talking about--and this isn't politically correct. I guess I've never learned that very well. We're talking about government-rationed health care, aren't we?

Reclaiming my time, gentlemen, that's what I'd like to do because I have a chart here.

I would also like to recognize my good friend from Texas, Congressman Gohmert, who is noted, actually, for being, in spite of his humble demeanor, really an expert when it comes to knowing how to phrase things in a tactful and direct kind of way.

It seems like the basic principle should be to respect your other colleagues and, at the same time, to also tell the truth. It sounded like what you said would be my idea of what the truth is, but then I may not pass the political correctness test.

Let's take a look at this.

I'd like to take a look, though.

You were just talking about there being different ways to control costs. One of them is, when the government does it, they ration health care or they make various decisions to keep costs down. Here is the result of a comparison. These are 5-year survival rates for all different kinds of cancers.

This is the European Union average. They all have socialized medicine. I guess they do call it ``socialized medicine.'' Here is the U.S. system, which at least is, largely, more of a free enterprise system. It's the beige.

Now, if you'll take a look at these different kinds of cancers, one of the things that you'll notice is that the survival rates are a whole lot better in the U.S. than they are with these socialized systems, and I don't think that that's a coincidence. It's just a fact that free enterprise works a lot better than socialism does.

The particular cancer I had here was called ``prostate cancer.'' Let me see if I can see where it is. Here is ``prostate'' down here. You've got the survival rate in the United States at 90-something percent. Back over in Europe, it's only at 78 percent. I'll tell you, if I were to have prostate cancer, which I had, I'd want to be treated in America. That's what I'd want.

We know that, for the British, for the European Union--in England--this is a 50 percent number.

Now, if I were sick, you could talk to me all you want about the government's giving me free health care, but it wouldn't do me any good if I were dead. This shows you what happens when we go to a government- run system.

I would be happy to yield to my friend.

Timeliness. You know, in cancer, they always say, if you can diagnose it early, your probability of success goes up. As for that timely thing, you know, I think the socialized medical system says, We'll give you a free C-section, ma'am, as long as you're willing to wait 12 months.

I yield.

Well, gentlemen, I would call your attention to another colleague of ours, Congressman Rogers, from Michigan.

He told the story the other day of when he was, I believe, 18 or 19 years old and had bladder cancer. Now, his doctor didn't know that, of course. He had some blood in the urine. He went to his doctor, who had known him and who had known his family for some period of time. The statistical probability of his having bladder cancer at that age was almost nothing. Yet, because he had that relationship with his doctor, she didn't let it go.

It was just like your father wouldn't, my friend.

She didn't let that thing go. There was something about her intuitive sense of knowing there was a problem there. They checked it out, and found out that he had bladder cancer. He's a Congressman now. This was some 40 years ago.

But you know when you have these statistics saying it just fits in this category, he held up a calculator and he said, There's nothing in this government calculator that knows anything about health care. All it is is some government agent running statistics.

There was a guy from Canada that I just read about, and he was younger than you are. He was in his fifties, and the Canadians said, You can't have a hip replacement. You're too old. So of course he used the option. He came to America and got it--the free enterprise system.

My good friend from Texas.

Let's do this again. Every single household in America is going to get hit with an additional $10,000 per household to make this transition to a socialized medical system that produces this kind of result? Is that what you're saying?

Here's something that I think is kind of amazing. Take a look at this statement. This was an amendment that was offered to the Democrats' health plan: Nothing in this section shall be construed to allow any Federal employee or political appointee to dictate how a medical provider practices medicine.

Now, I would say I think that's something that a lot of my constituents would say I don't want some bureaucrat telling some doctor what he can and can't do to take care of me. Take a look at the vote when this was done in committee. This was an amendment that was proposed by Dr. Gingrey. He spent his life going to medical school and taking care of patients. And look at the votes. Republicans, 23 votes saying we don't want to put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor, and zero voted against this, of the Republicans. Of the Democrats, only one Democrat voted for this amendment and 32 of them voted against that.

Now, I think a lot of people on Main Street America think why can't we just get along as Republicans and Democrats and just solve problems. But this is a very fundamental difference between the two parties, isn't it? This is what we've been talking about. Do we really want a Federal bureaucrat? And what they just voted to say was we think that in order to control costs, you're going to have to let some government bureaucrat make those decisions and tell a doctor and a patient that they can't get the care.

That's not intuitively obvious, in order to avoid bankruptcy, we've gotta spent more money.

With only one exception of one Democrat, a straight party- line vote saying we want to put Federal employees between your doctor and you as a patient.

This is pretty serious stuff. This is very serious stuff to me. Because as I said, when I came to Congress, I had a poor health care plan. I came to Congress and found out there were some Navy doctors in this building, and those Navy doctors gave me a physical. I felt bulletproof and everything at 52. I found out that I was bulletproof and doing great except one little detail: I had cancer. And the fact that they discovered that and were able to get treatment without some bureaucrat taking that away from me, that's why I'm alive today.

I can understand why people are going to be very, very cautious entering some government-run plan that produces results for people, something like what the European Union is doing.

I yield to my good friend from Texas.

I thank you very much. I thank my many good friends who've joined us here for this discussion. I think many understand it's a very serious issue. It's better to go slow and get it right and don't mess it up as we have some of the things that have been passed at 3 o'clock in the morning.

Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 649, H.R. 1121, the Blue Ridge Parkway and Town of Blowing Rock Land Exchange Act of 2009, had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

On rollcall No. 648, H.R. 1376, the Waco Mammoth National Monument Establishment Act of 2009, had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

On rollcall No. 647, H. Res. 593--Recognizing and celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the entry of Hawaii into the Union as the 50th State, had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. Speaker, the Democrats are proposing that they're going to take over 20 percent of our economy. They're proposing they're going to spend at least $1 trillion, probably $2 trillion, in doing that, and they're going to put bureaucrats in charge of health care decisions. Now, this is not really a new idea. This has been tried a lot by other countries. It's called socialized medicine. So the question before us is very straightforward. It is this:

If you get sick, where do you want to be treated? Do you want to travel to Europe? Do you want to travel to Canada or do you want to stay in the good, old USA?

I had that experience 9 years ago here. I had newly been elected as a Congressman. I got the first physical I'd had in 10 years because I'd had lousy health care. They told me, Yeah, you're doing great, Congressman Akin, except for one thing: You have cancer.

When you hear the word ``cancer,'' it causes you to stop and think. Because of the American health care system, I'm standing here today, but I'll tell you the statistics of what would happen if you were in the United Kingdom. There is a 50 percent chance you'd be dead with the type of cancer I had. That's the question: Who is going to provide the health care?

Madam Speaker, pursuant to the Republican Leadership standards on earmarks, I am submitting the following information regarding earmarks I received as part of H.R. 3288, the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010.

Requesting Member: Congressman Todd Akin

Bill Number: H.R. 3288

Account: FHWA TCSP

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Missouri Dept of Transportation, District 3

Address of Requesting Entity: PO Box 1067, 1171 S. Route 61, Hannibal, MO 63401

Description of Request: New Interchange, US 61 at S. Lincoln Drive, Lincoln County, MO. This request will fund the preliminary engineering for a new interchange at the intersection of US 61 and this business loop (South Lincoln Drive). US 61 in Missouri is the continuation of I- 64 north of I-70 and is on the National Highway System. Vigorous regional growth has resulted in an accident rate along this corridor-- particularly at intersections--that is twice the state average. This location presently is the most critical area of need in Lincoln County along US 61. This new interchange at the south end of the business district in Troy, MO will eliminate a busy at-grade intersection, improve safety, and help alleviate traffic congestion.

Requesting Member: Congressman Todd Akin

Bill Number: H.R. 3288

Account: FHWA TCSP

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Missouri Dept of Transportation, District 3

Address of Requesting Entity: PO Box 1067, 1171 S. Route 61, Hannibal, MO 63401

Description of Request: Bridge Replacement, MO Rt 79 at Sandy Creek, Lincoln County, MO. MO Route 79 is a heavily traveled 2-lane highway that runs 85 miles northwest along the Mississippi River from I-70 in St. Charles County to Hannibal, MO. This highway provides access to Lock & Dam 25 near Winfield, Lock & Dam 24 near Clarksville, and other communities along the river. This bridge replacement just north of the City of Foley is important to the residents of Foley, to the region, and two major Corps of Engineers projects: The Navigation and Environmental Sustainability Program (NESP), the Environmental Mitigation Program (EMP), as well as for normal Operations & Maintenance (O&M) activities for L&D 24 and 25.

Mr. Speaker, it's a pleasure to be able to join you tonight and my colleagues and friends to talk about some things that are of tremendous significance to us here in this country. And in order to do our discussion tonight, I'm going to back up just a little bit and answer an interesting question. It was about--I guess it was about 3 weeks ago, and it was a situation that occurred here on the floor of the U.S. Congress.

If you go back from the day that we actually voted on the bill, what's going on was that at 3 o'clock in the morning, we had an 1,100- page bill called cap-and-tax or cap-and-trade. It was the largest tax increase in the history of our country, and that bill was going to be coming up for a vote. Well, at 3 o'clock in the morning, a major committee that was influencing that legislation at 3 o'clock in the morning passed a 300-page amendment to this 1,100 page bill.

Now, this amendment was not just one amendment but was a whole series of amendments that went into the bill. So starting at 3 o'clock, or whenever the staff got here, they started to put each page of those 300 pages of amendments into the bill as we were just finishing the debate and going to vote on the bill. So before we even voted on the bill, the question was asked, Do we have a copy of the bill that we're going to be voting on? And the funny thing was we're supposed to have a copy of it here on the floor before you vote on a bill, and there wasn't any copy here. In fact, the clerk was still turning the pages trying to get these 300 pages passed in the dark of night into the bill. And then, of course, the thing was rushed forward and was voted almost a straight party-line vote.

It was the largest tax increase in the history of our country, but it also had a lot of other component parts which were very onerous. For instance, it put the Federal Government basically into the building code business telling local communities that, for instance, if you have a garage, you've got to have an outlet for your electrical car. So it was very intrusive from a red tape point of view.

But the reason that I wanted to introduce our discussion on health care tonight in this context is why in the world would the U.S. Congress be voting 300-page amendments into a bill at 3 o'clock in the morning and we don't even have a copy on the floor and rush it to a vote?

Now, to an average person, an average American, that would seem like not much transparency, not much time for people to read 1,400 pages of bill and know what they're voting on. So why would you do something like that? The logic is simple. If people don't know what it is in the bill, it's easier to get them to vote for it. You may say, Well, that's not a very honest or fair tactic, but that's what we do on this floor over the last 6 months. That's what has been going on.

And that's what the attempt is going to be on this great big bill of basically taking 20 percent of the U.S. economy, that is the entire medical sector, and putting it under government control. This is a very, very big change in America. You wanted change. Boy, when you see 20 percent of our economy going to be run by bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., I guarantee you there is change.

This bill, we've been talking about it a number of weeks, but the same idea. People don't really want you to know what's in the bill, so we're going to talk about what is in the bill.

Now, on the surface--and I have been joined by a doctor from Louisiana, a fantastic guy, a medical doctor. He

knows something about medicine. He spent his life practicing medicine.

What I would like to do is to say, to begin with, that on the surface this looks like a pretty good deal. Well, what's being promised here? First of all, you are going to get free health insurance and free health care. Free health insurance, free health care. That sounds pretty good. What else are we gonna get? Well, I just heard Democrats on the television this morning saying any kind of health insurance you have now you get to keep it. So if you've got something you like, don't worry, you can keep what you've got. You can keep it the way you have it, but there are other people who are going to benefit from this. So you can get free health insurance but you could also keep what you have.

And also, the other thing about this proposal is it's going to save money. In fact, we've heard the President say, If you pass this, it's going to help us get the economy going and get jobs going and help America get going because of the fact it's going to save so much money.

Well, I suppose if those three things were true, everybody would be for it. The fact of the matter is an awful lot of people are not for this bill because those things are not all what they appear to be on the surface.

So let us take a look, first of all, at the free health insurance question and also the fact that you are going to save money. Well, one of the things when government starts to do things, particularly stuff that they're not very good at doing, when the government starts to do too much, we notice these things happen. First of all, it gets expensive. You have a lot of bureaucracy and rationing. You also have an inefficient allocation of resources. We've seen this in many other departments of government and you see degraded quality.

Now, do we have any evidence to suggest that what the Democrats are saying, that this is so efficient it's going to save money and it's going to be free and you can keep what you have, is there any evidence to suggest otherwise? Well, there certainly is, but this is something to think about. If health care is expensive now, just wait until it's free.

We have, joining us on the floor tonight, a doctor that I have come to respect deeply from Louisiana, Dr. Fleming. I would like to yield to Dr. Fleming in a moment or two. I would like to talk a little bit about these claims. Is this an efficient way to be running medicine? And what is your impression about these claims that this is going to be something where you get to keep whatever care you have?

So things like Medicaid, you always hear about a tremendous fraud level in Medicaid. Would that be an example of what you are talking about?

So people get away with a lot of fraud in Medicaid, and that runs the cost up to make it less efficient.

Do you have other examples?

How many people get busted for Medicaid fraud? Does that happen a lot?

A very small number.

Another thing that we could take a look at--because this is an assertion that we're hearing the President make that this thing is going to help our economy, and yet the Congressional Budget Office took a look at the first bill that the Democrats trotted out here, and they were looking at $2 trillion.

Now, that's spending $2 trillion. It's hard to make a case that that's going to save money because we're not spending that $2 trillion now, and yet they're saying this is going to be $2 trillion.

Well, they went back to the drawing board, came back and with a little hocus-pocus, and taking some money from some other places, they got it down to $1 trillion. But that doesn't seem like that's spending less. It's a trillion more than we're spending right now.

So they're going to take the money out of Medicare in order to make it look like it's not really $2 trillion, it's more like $1 trillion.

Now that big cap-and-tax bill that we just passed, which was the biggest tax increase in the history of our country, was only about 780-something billion dollars. So that's less than 1 trillion. So that huge tax increase won't be enough to pay for the system, I suppose.

Now, the other thing is it's not like we're flying without instruments on this course that we're taking because various States have tried to do what the Democrats are proposing. It's not new; it's just new to do it at the whole Federal level. Various States have tried it. Tennessee was one, Massachusetts was the other. We've got some of the results right here on this chart about what happened in Massachusetts.

In 2006, Massachusetts required universal health care coverage, which is what's being proposed here by the Democrats much like the current Democrat plan. People were required to purchase specific levels of coverage. Now, what was the result of doing that? It's not like this is new. This is something we tried. Health care costs were up 42 percent since 2006. That doesn't look like that's going to save any money. That's where that $2 trillion is talking about. This is very, very expensive. Health care access is down. That is, patients had to wait almost 70 days to see a doctor in Boston. And so are those the kind of results that we want?

Now, health care costs are 133 percent of the national average. So this jacked the cost of health care by a third over what it was before. So it's not like it hasn't been tried. What we're doing is nationalizing a failure.

Now, the results in Tennessee were not much better.

Doctor, do you recall that?

In other words, are you saying that the private medical insurance people that are writing medical

insurance plans are subsidizing Medicare and Medicaid?

So in other words, what is going on then is in order to fix the part of health care that the government is already meddling in, which is in terms of medical payments overall, the government handles half the money that is going through health care. If you take Medicaid and Medicare and you add that much money up, I think that's about half of the total of all the money spent. So we already have the government meddling in half of it, and now what's happening is you're asking the privates to support all this public stuff, right?

And that then is adding to the cost of everything. So we have already, talking about nationalizing health care, Tennessee just about crashed their economy trying to do the same thing, is that correct?

So it isn't like all of these promises that this is such a wonderful health insurance, in other words, the thing that strikes me a little bit would be, let's say somebody said to you, It sounds like what they are selling sounds pretty good. The government is going to give you free health insurance, free health coverage, not just insurance, but even health care access. If somebody said, would you like the government to give you a free home? I mean we would be crazy to say no. Of course, I would like a free home.

Then they would follow it up with a followup question, do you want to live in government housing? Oh, that's a different question, isn't it? And isn't that the parallel that we're talking about now? We're going to give you free medical insurance, except that you've got to wait a whole lot longer, and it is a whole lot more expensive. Wait just a minute. I like the idea of free medical insurance. But is that really what we're getting? You have to take a look a little bit below the surface. So we have seen it didn't work in Massachusetts. It didn't work in Tennessee.

We are joined by another doctor, a good friend of mine. It is interesting that doctors are coming out to talk about this plan, isn't it? We have got a Dr. Broun from Georgia, another medical doctor. He has a great reputation and is bold in just laying things out and telling it like it is. It is terrible English but it is a good phrase. Dr. Broun, please join us.

Now, just butting in for a minute, I heard a congresswoman from this Chamber on television this morning, walking past a TV set in the gym of all places, and she was saying, if you like what you have, you can keep it. And yet we had copies of the bill that was proposed, the Democrat plan, on the floor, and it didn't say that, did it? Go ahead, please.

Say that again? In other words, today, you have got some insurance, you have a doctor you like, and if you like that, what the Democrat said is you can keep it, and, in fact, what the bill says is you're going to lose it? Now that is really a radical difference.

Wait a minute. You're saying there is some high level government bureaucrat and they call him a ``czar'' or a ``commissioner?''

He could be a czar. A commissar?

But this is not a czar, this is a commissioner though?

But maybe you call him a commissar. We can compromise. Go ahead.

So he's independent, and he can do whatever he wants.

So what does the section say of the bill?

It sounds a lot like a dictatorship. What does the section say? Does this contradict what I just heard a congresswoman saying on television today?

So what you're saying is this bill literally says that by the end of a 5-year period, a group health plan must meet the minimum benefit requirement under section 12, 121. So in other words, what we're saying is that you could have a plan you might like now, you have got private health insurance, but if it doesn't meet the government plan, then at the end of 5 years at the longest you just can't have it, because your plan has to be exactly like the Federal one, or at least has to have all of the things that the Federal one has.

I would like to stop for a minute just as I started out this evening, Doctors, the whole secret of bringing something to the floor really fast, do it at 3 o'clock in the morning, get that 300-page amendment--they haven't even got the bill together--and quick, quick, vote on it before anybody knows what is in it is great strategy if you want people who are voting not knowing what they are voting for, especially if you're trying to hide stuff in the bill.

And what I would like to do is, I would like to just take a moment and just go around and let's start thinking about the people that if they understood this bill, which you're going to have to be pretty smart, because this is an organizational chart of the bill.

But let's start talking about the people who might want to vote against it if they knew what were in here, because the promise is it's all free, you can keep what you have. It's all free except what? A couple trillion dollars, or if you cheat with the numbers, a trillion dollars more than the biggest tax hike. You can keep what you have except you can't keep what you have, and you're supposedly going to get good health insurance and good coverage. And there's, of course, a difference between insurance and whether you get coverage or not.

I would like to start categorizing who are the people, if they were us, they would be voting, ``No, by golly, darn it all, we don't want it, no, no, no.'' Who is going to vote ``no'' on this thing? Because I think as we look at this, we'll see that there's a lot of hidden stuff here, and there's a lot of people that have good reason to encourage every one of us to vote ``no'' on it. Let's just start talking about some of the groups, and you brought the first one up, Dr. Broun, and that is the people who let's say they are pro-life.

In America, you have constituents, I have constituents, we have some who are pro-life, and some who believe in abortion and that people should have a right to abortion. Those are deeply held views. But what is going to happen in this bill--and if this were not going to happen, there could be an amendment offered to make sure that it doesn't happen--and that is that the government plan is going to include that you could get free abortions. We did that for a while in America. We had subsidized abortions.

So if you're pro-life, or let's say you're pro-abortion, but you think it's unfair to make people who have deep religious convictions that think that killing the unborn is a wrong thing to do, are you going to make them pay taxes to fund something that you think is fundamentally wrong? So if you're pro-life, you're not going to vote for this thing unless there's some amendment that says we want a guarantee that this government plan doesn't give people a right on government money to abort their kid. So if you're pro-life, that is one group that will say ``no,'' I think. But go ahead, Dr. Broun.

Amendments were offered where? In committees?

Party line vote, the Democrats are saying they don't want that amendment that says you can't get a free abortion?

So if you're pro-life, first off, that is one group of people if this weren't in the dark of night and all were known about this bill, certainly the pro-lifers wouldn't vote for it, is that right?

I would like to go to Dr. Fleming. Do you have another group?

Okay, two doctors are here.

So the doctors voted ``no'' about supporting this. So you guys are both doctors, and the other doctors said, No, this isn't a good idea, right?

We have two groups. I'm going to keep score. First of all, if you're pro-life, you're not going to like this bill. Second of all, in general, the doctors don't like the bill. Even though the AMA cut some deal, their membership told them, We really don't support this thing.

So the AMA doesn't represent all doctors, just only 20 percent. Even the 20 percent wasn't in favor of it?

I'd just like to keep going on the list because we've got one. The people who are pro-life, they don't want this thing. The doctors don't like this thing. We have two doctors here that don't like it.

I want to bring up another category because, when I wake up in the morning sometimes, I'm feeling a little older and achier. I just hit 62. I want to talk about old geezers like me. Seniors. If you were a senior citizen in America, what do you think about the government running health care? Do you think you're going to like that idea very much?

I do yield to Dr. Fleming.

So we're going to gut Medicare first. So if you're a senior you're not going to like gutting Medicare.

Okay. So there's a committee somewhere in this chart that's a Comparative Effectiveness Committee. And what is it going to do?

So let's say you're a smart bureaucrat, and you've got an awful lot of money being spent on health care in America, and the budget is going bust, and you're thinking, oh, my goodness, how am I going to fix this. And so you find that the old 80/20 rule is working just fine right here in health care; that is, that 20 percent of the people have 80 percent of the cost. And guess who the people that have 80 percent of the costs are--it's old geezers like me. And so you're going to say, hey, we're going to need to regulate this system, and so we're going to deny care. In other words, what we're going to do is we're going to say that the doctor and the patient don't make the call. We're going to say some bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. decides whether you get treatment or not. That may seem pretty outlandish or harsh, but the fact of the matter is that's what's going on in Canada.

And this is personal to me because I've got a bad hip. And people keep saying, Akin, how come you're limping? I fell on some ice 10 years ago. Well, the reason that I'm limping is that I'm postponing getting a hip replacement. In Canada, if you're my age, at 62 you can't get a hip replacement. In fact, if you're later fifties in Canada you can't get a hip replacement. Guess where you get your hip replacement? You come to the good old USA. And so if you're an old person, what's going to happen is there's going to be rationing of care, and you're not going to get taken care of because the bureaucrats say you're too old, it's not a good financial investment, but we'll give you some pain killers. So if you're an old person, first of all, Medicare is going to get taken. But the second thing is you've got the problem of somebody coming between you and your doctor, and that's the bureaucrat from D.C. So if I'm an a older person I'd say, if I'm a senior I sure don't want to touch this thing.

I want to yield to my friend from Georgia.

I yield to my good friend who has joined us at this time, not a medical doctor, but known for his seniority on the Intelligence Committee. So we have a guy who is intelligent. Please join us, Congressman Hoekstra.

That's not exactly an encouraging thought. We've had a guy who's the top guy in intelligence and two doctors, and I don't know what I'm doing in this conversation at all. But I know one thing. I've had some experience with health care in the sense that I'm a cancer survivor. I was one of those guys in my early fifties. I came to Congress, bulletproof, and I'd had a very lousy insurance plan provided by the State of Missouri, and I hadn't had a physical for a long time. I thought I was bulletproof. But somebody told me, hey, when you get to be over 50 you need to go get yourself a physical checkup. So I waltzed down to the doctor's office right here in this Capitol building run by the Navy doctors. They said yeah, Todd, you are bulletproof and you're doing great, except one little detail. You have cancer. You have prostate cancer. I'm going, oh my goodness. Let me tell you--doctors, you know--that gets your attention when they use the big C word.

We've talked about people who are pro-life. They're going to hate this bill. We've talked about older people because their care is going to be rationed. They're going to hate this bill because Medicare is going to be decimated and they lose their insurance, in spite of the promises. The bill says everybody's insurance is going to be government insurance. But let's talk about somebody who gets cancer. If you go over to the United Kingdom, they've got this kind of socialized medicine. And let's take a look at the United States. The survival rate for cancer in men--that's got my attention--62.9 percent in America. In the United Kingdom, 44.8. That says you have an 18 percent greater probability you're going to die in the U.K. because of their socialized medicine. If you're a woman it's a little bit better. Cancer survivors in women in the U.S., 66.3. They're doing a little better than the men. And in the U.K. a little better still. Fourteen percent greater chance you're going to die over there.

So if you're a cancer person, you don't want this plan. You don't want this socialized medicine. If you're pro-life, you don't want this thing. If you're an older person, you don't want this thing.

I do yield.

That's breast on that side. I can tell a breast from a prostate, gentleman. But go ahead.

I can see the chart maybe better than you can, gentleman, from where I'm standing. What I see, the purple is the United States. Prostate cancer, I'm seeing somewhere between 90 and 100 percent survival rate, and I'm seeing the sort of greenish bluish color is England. I'm seeing something about the 50 or 40 percent survival rate. So you're saying this generalized cancer statement, it's a lot different with prostate. It's almost 2-1 difference. In other words, in Canada, it's a flip of a coin whether you're going to live, whereas the United States, it's a good chance you're going to live fine.

I do yield.

It's personal to me. It was my prostate, gentleman.

Breast cancer?

Not in the daughter.

You've got five doctors here. You better be honest.

Just to interrupt a minute. Now, isn't America really known for innovation in health care?

Don't we have a lot of new drugs that are developed in America?

And do we have new procedures as well, doctors?

So not just doctors now, but the Mayo Clinic is opposed to this scheme that we have seen concocted here.

I think that's a very strong point.

I was just starting out our discussion, gentlemen, this evening talking about why in the world would you bring up something at 3 o'clock in the morning, a bill hasn't even been read and you want to push it through in a great big hurry? And the reason is you don't want people to know what's in the bill because it's easier to pass it.

Yes, I do yield.

That's part of the innovation that's practical for people, isn't it?

Those different technologies and developments, were those a product of the government coming up with those things?

It is the private sector that comes up with things?

It goes back to that phrase, you know, it would be nice if the government gave you a free home, but do you want to live in government housing.

Let's talk about people who would be against this bill. We've already said people who are pro-life are not going to like it. If you're an older person, you don't want rationed health care. You don't want Medicare savaged financially. If you think that it's important to have innovation and new technologies, if you're a cancer person or someone else, you're going to want that new technology marching along to hopefully protect you there, and so those are people that are not going to want this full government takeover of health care.

Let's talk about people in this country, I mean, we all have constituents. Don't you have some constituents that don't like illegal immigration?

And is this bill basically going to give illegal immigrants free health care?

About 10 million?

So if you came to America before--and we had some people coming in with the drug traffic and they also smuggled individuals into our country through illegal immigration. If before we had trouble with people coming here illegally, if we give them free health insurance and health coverage, that's going to make it more attractive for them to come, right? So if you don't like illegal immigration then you are not going to like this bill either, are you?

Okay. So I'm just trying to think of people who would want to vote ``no'' on this bill. Go ahead. I yield to Dr. Broun.

So part of the reason for doing this bill, at least supposedly, other than just this uncontrollable desire for the government to run that, but aside from that, there's some 40 million people that don't have health insurance, and this is supposed to help fix that problem. But you are saying 10 of those 40 at least are illegal, and the way the bill is set up there's nothing in there that says that the illegals don't get free health insurance.

They will get it?

So if you don't like the idea of illegal immigrants, you're having to pay for their health insurance, then you wouldn't like this bill either; is that right?

Okay.

Or is it the czar? It was commissioner.

Wow, you've got another category. So let's keep this list going.

If you're an employee in a company and you're currently not taking that particular insurance, you're going to be forced to do it. So you're not going to like this bill because it's going to force you to do something you didn't want to do.

So we already know that people who have a private plan that they like are going to lose that. So if you have a private plan you like, certainly you don't like this.

If you are an employee and you don't have a plan that an employer offers because you don't like it, you're going to be forced into that plan. So you are not going to like it. How about if you are the employer? I'd like to go to my friend, Mr. Hoekstra.

So by August 1, we're going to take 20 percent of the U.S. economy and turn it over to some czar or commissioner or commissar or something, and this is the flowchart of what's going to happen.

You've already given me a headache.

Are you trying to tell me our constituents actually want us to read the bill and know what's in it before we vote on it? Now that's a novel--

Well, reclaiming my time, going back to the whole premise, if you do it really fast and nobody knows what's in it, you don't have as many people that are going to say don't vote for this thing, because they don't know what's there.

We've been joined by another fantastic Congressman from Louisiana, a man who's not spent that much time in the House, has distinguished himself already for being articulate and a very penetrating questioner of some of these different schemes that we see, my good friend Congressman Scalise from Louisiana.

The gentleman was just talking a minute ago. You said you're talking to your constituents. A powerful tool that we have is to have a computer call a lot of our constituents and we just can sit and have a conversation for an hour or two. I did that last night with my constituents. You know what I heard about? Jobs. Where are the jobs? You know who's really not going to like this program here is people that are looking for jobs.

Let me connect the dots here. Where do 80 percent of the new jobs in America come from? They come from small business. That is 500 or less employees, 500 or less employees. That's where we make 80 percent of our new jobs. And who's going to pay for this mess? Guess what?

Small business. You take their money away so they can't invest in new buildings, new pieces of machinery, and guess what happens? They don't make the jobs. So if you're unemployed, you're not going to like this very well, are you?

I yield to Congressman Broun.

Why are they going to lose their jobs?

A whole lot more burden on the small business man, and guess what happens? It doesn't create the jobs. In fact, you start to lose jobs.

This is interesting because our constituents have been telling us jobs are a problem, unemployment is a problem. Now we've set some records. In the last 6 months, we have lost more jobs than ever in any time period since the Great Depression in America. We've lost more jobs in the last 6 months than have ever been lost since the Great Depression. So this is a serious thing.

I hope they don't rescue it much more.

Could I just jump in for a minute? There are different categories of people who aren't going to like this bill; but there are people who just hate government redtape. Genetically, I don't like government redtape. Can you picture trying to get a health care decision and something that's messed up, and you have got a wife or kid that needs health care, and you've got to deal with this to try to get health care, and these people are going to tell you whether or not you can get it?

You know the one thing in my telephone townhall meeting people said that they want more than anything else, they want health care decisions made between the doctor and the patient. We offered that amendment in committee, and it was voted down on a party-line vote. The Democrats saying that they want the redtape bureaucrats to make health care decisions, and they voted against an amendment that said that the doctor and the patient should make the health care decisions. Now that's not where the mainstream of America is, and that's not why you doctors are practicing medicine--to have a bureaucrat tell you how to practice medicine. It gets me upset.

The wealthy.

Just a moment now because I think you are making a point. The Democrats were here about an hour-and-a-half ago. They were saying, Hey, we don't like the idea that an insurance company rations your care, an insurance company gets between a doctor and a patient. As a Republican, I don't like that idea either; but the solution isn't to put an even bigger bureaucrat in the way. The solution is to get back to the doctor-patient relationship, which is why you practice medicine.

It was my first year here.

I voted ``no'' on that too.

And yet every Republican standing here tonight, we all stand behind that doctor-patient relationship. That's what medical care should be about. It was a straight party-line vote, with the exception of only one Democrat.

I would like to talk a little bit about the President's ability to predict the future in terms of his numbers because, as I recall, just 3 months ago, we were taking a look at what was supposed to be called a ``stimulus bill.'' Some of us called it a ``porkulus bill.'' Anyway, it was about a tremendous amount of spending. I think it was $787 billion in spending. The President gave us a number that we could take to the bank.

He said, Look, if you guys do not pass this stimulus bill, why, we might have unemployment as high as 8 percent in America. So we passed this tremendous spending bill. Let's see. What's our unemployment now?

9.5 percent.

This bill isn't going to cost anything. The Congressional Budget Office first comes out and says it's $2 trillion, and then they whittle some numbers by some little fancy stuff, and it comes down to $1 trillion, and he says this is going to help the economy and is not going to cost anything. That's a little bit like his promise when he said, Listen to me now. He said, If you're making under $250,000, there won't be any tax on you, except we've got this little deal that, when you flip on a light switch, you're going to get taxed. Who doesn't flip on a light switch?

I try to picture that you can get a free C-section as long as you're willing to wait a year for it, you know? That's really going to be helpful.

That's the whole point of doing these things at 3 o'clock in the morning with 300-page amendments. There's not even a copy of the bill on the floor. Why do you want to do it in the dark? Because how many Americans are going to vote to spend $250 million to teach your daughters how condoms work? There are not too many American people who want to vote for something like that. That's why you want to do it in the dark of night.

The other thing they don't want you to do is to understand the difference. They want to say, Our health care system is so bad. Hey, there are some problems, but take a look at this compared to this socialized mess over in England or in Canada. Take a look at people like me. I'm a cancer survivor. Take a look at your survival rate for men with cancer: 18 percent better in the United States. We want to trash our system to go to something that has worse numbers? It doesn't make sense.

I yield back.

I would like to jump in a little bit about this whole idea about our trust for different bureaucracies.

Let us take a look at the track record. We're talking about a health care system that's going to have the good heart of the IRS and the efficiency of the postal system. Let us take a look at some of these different government agencies and how much--do we really want to trust them with our personal health care? Let's think a little bit about the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy was chartered with a mission. The mission was that we were going to make sure that we're not dependent on foreign sources of energy.

Now, we have had a lot of employees and we're more dependent on foreign energy than we've ever been. So how good is the Department of Energy?

Let's talk about the Department of Education. There was a Presidential commission studying the Department of Education. They came to the conclusion that if a foreign country had done to us what the Department of Education has done, we would consider it an act of war. But we have a lot of faith in government bureaucracies.

Let's talk about your favorite bureaucracy. I shouldn't pick on your pet, the CIA. We go into gulf war 1 and they give us this intelligence. They say, Look, Iraq is 10 years away from making a nuclear device. We get in there; they're a year-and-a-half away. So they go to gulf war II. They say they're a year-and-a-half away. We get in there, they're 10 years away. I mean, why do we have so much faith in all of these?

I guess FEMA did a wonderful job on Hurricane Katrina, and yet we want to turn our personal health care over to all of these government agencies? I don't get it. It doesn't seem to make any sense at all.

I was thinking about that Berlin Wall example. We think about the Soviet Union and what was their basic theory. Well, the theory is the government is going to basically give you food, the government is going to give you housing, the government is going to give you education, the government is going to give you health care. And let's see, what are we doing in America? The government is going to give you an education, the government is going to give you food, the government is going to give you a place to live, and the government is going to give you health care.

We didn't seem to learn a whole lot, did we? Well, thank you very much gentlemen.

Americans love records. How fast can you go? How high can you go? How deep can you go? We love to set records. Why, the Democrats just set a fantastic record of the biggest tax increase in the history of our country. And was it clever? It was really clever. All you have to do is flip a light switch to pay a tax. And spending. Oh, we've done a great job of spending it. As a result of taxing and spending, more records. Why, in the last 6 months, we have lost more jobs than any 6- month period since World War II. There's a record for you.

Here's another record. We have, in the last 6 months, used up more jobs and lost jobs than we created over the Bush years over the previous 9 years. That's the only time that's happened since the Great Depression.

And here's another record, too: That is, the jobs that we've lost have been longer than any time since we've been measuring unemployment in 1948.

I wish we didn't set quite so many records. We don't need the Democrats' help for this kind of record.

Where are the jobs?

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

Requesting Member: Congressman Todd Akin

Bill Number: H.R. 3183

Account: Army Corps of Engineers, Construction

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Monarch-Chesterfield Levee District

Address of Requesting Entity: 17627 Wildhorse Creek Rd., Chesterfield, MO 63005, USA

Description of Request: Provide an earmark of $3.331 million to complete construction of closure structures and pump stations. Funding from this request could be used to construct the Baxter Road closure structure and initiate design of the Walnut Grove flood wall at Long Road. These structures will augment completed earth works that provide 500-year protection to over 700 businesses. This request is consistent with the intended and authorized purpose of the Army Corps of Engineers, Construction account and has previously been authorized by the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 2000, Section 101(b)(18). The Monarch-Chesterfield Levee District will provide its cost share in accordance with Federal cost-sharing requirements for Federal flood protection projects, 65 percent Federal, 35 percent non-Federal, and the non-Federal funding will come directly from the Levee District.

Requesting Member: Congressman Todd Akin

Bill Number: H.R. 3183

Account: Army Corps of Engineers, Operation and Maintenance

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, St. Louis District

Address of Requesting Entity: 1222 Spruce Street, St. Louis, MO 63103

Description of Request: Provides an earmark of $44.130 million This project extends from the mouth of the Missouri River at St. Louis 105 miles upstream to the tail waters of Lock and Dam 22. Funds could be used for current-year O&M as well as for deferred maintenance on an aging system of locks and dams (Locks and Dams 24, 25, and 26 (Mel Price)). Basic Operation & Maintenance would provide a nine-foot navigation channel, regulating works, dike and revetment, dredging, environmental compliance and environmental stewardship.

Requesting Member: Congressman Todd Akin

Bill Number: H.R. 3183

Account: Army Corps of Engineers, Construction

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Rock Island District

Address of Requesting Entity: Clock Tower Bldg, PO Box 2004, Rock Island, IL 61204

Description of Request: Provides an earmark of $20 million. This project addresses

adverse impacts to the aquatic ecosystem caused by maintenance of the river's navigation channel. This includes habitat rehabilitation and measures to determine if enhancement projects are effectively preserving and improving fish and wildlife habitat on the river.

Requesting Member: Congressman Todd Akin

Bill Number: H.R. 3183

Account: Army Corps of Engineers, Construction

Legal Name of Requesting Entity: City of Valley Park

Address of Requesting Entity: 320 Benton, Valley Park, Missouri 63088

Description of Request: Provides an earmark of $600,000. The flood control portions of this 3.2 mile levee project in St. Louis County, Missouri on the left descending bank of the Meramec River are largely complete. Funds would be used to install seepage controls at railroad embankment, prepare the final operation and maintenance manuals, prep final as-built drawings, conduct final reviews and audits, and perform financial close-out of the flood damage reduction component of the project.