Health Care

Floor Speech

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Mr. FLEMING. I thank my colleague, Gentlewoman BACHMANN, for providing leadership in this hour and particularly on the subject of health care.

You know, Mr. Speaker, there is really a fundamental economic, that I think we always have to go back to. I practiced family medicine for over 30 years, still practice from time to time.

There is something very important that we all need to learn. That is that, yes, Medicare and Medicaid is government-run health care. If you ask the average person who has Medicare, they will say they are happy with it.

But there is a very important reason why they say this. Medicare currently pays a fraction of the actual cost and delivery of Medicare care.

So who pays the rest? The rest is paid for by private insurance. Private insurance today subsidizes Medicare and Medicaid. If you ask the average physician in practice, he or she will tell you that they can only have a certain number of Medicare and Medicaid patients in their office. Otherwise, they become insolvent.

So when the President says, Well, we need to have this government-run option to pull the cost of private insurance down, that really defies reasoning. It's really upside down from what economically is going on.

What is happening is, when you make your private insurance payment to the tune of about $1,800 per family per year, what you are really finding is that that is the subsidy that goes for Medicare.

So, if you enlarge Medicare or government-run health care in general, and you artificially depress the price, which is what the President and H.R. 3200, our colleagues on the other side of the aisle call for, what will in fact happen is you will cause the cost of health care, private insurance premiums, to actually accelerate.

Under this plan, the employers are given the option: They can either pay 8 percent as a fine, if you will, or a tax, and dump their employees into this plan, this government-run option, or they can try to continue to keep up with the growing cost of private insurance. Over time and through competition, employers will be forced to dump their employees into enlarging, if you will, a black hole, a public option or government-run medicine.

What we end up with at the very end of the day is a very small flange, if you will, of private insurance, that which we all know and appreciate today. And everyone else, of course, is in this large government-run system.

Who will be left in the private insurance market? Well, it will be the very healthy, it will be the elite and, of course, Members of Congress.

I proposed House Resolution 615, and I have many of my colleagues, now, who have signed on to it and over a million Americans who have signed in support of it, that simply says that if a Congressman votes for the public option, he or she should be willing to sign up for it themselves. So far I have not had one person on the other side of the aisle who has also signed up for that.

In closing, let me say that we also need to focus on who the insured group is. You have heard this number: 46 million Americans who are uninsured. Well, who is that group?

About 10 million of them actually are not Americans at all. They are illegal immigrants. Ten to perhaps 17 million of them are young healthy adults, what we call the invincibles, who have opted out of the insurance, who have decided it's not worth the money because they are healthy anyway.

We also have a number who are eligible for Medicaid but simply don't sign up for it. Really what we have is 10 million Americans who qualify for health insurance as Americans, but they can't afford it because of a preexisting illness or a current illness; the expense is too high. Perhaps they own a small business or they are employees of a small business. Because the risk pool is so small, they simply can't find affordable insurance. All of that is fixable for that targeted 10 million Americans who want insurance but can't buy it.

Instead, Mr. Speaker, what our colleagues on the other side of the aisle want us to do is totally dismantle the best health care system in the world and put in place a UK- or Canadian-style medicine, form of medicine, form of health care, which provides universal coverage but not universal care.

What do I mean by that? Certainly, I think we can all agree that care delayed is care denied.

In America today, those who are uninsured still can go to the emergency room and, by law, be treated for whatever ails them, even if they don't have the ability to pay for it. In fact, we are not even allowed to ask them, as providers, whether they can afford that.

If someone has needed surgery, perhaps, or they need to be admitted to the hospital for lifesaving treatment, it's going to be done. Now, you take the UK, you take Canada and much of Europe, yes, they have coverage. But what good is coverage if it takes 4 years to get the treatment?

The average waiting time in Canada today is a year to get an MRI scan. Then after the scan is done, you get in line for the needed surgery. Talking in my district, a lot of folks in my district have relatives back in Canada. One lady said, Well, my brother tore his rotator cuff, but it took a year to get an MRI. When he finally saw the doctor, it was too late to repair it. The definition of elective surgery in Canada is surgery that's not lifesaving. For us, elective surgery is surgery that you elect to have. You don't necessarily need to have it.

Mr. Speaker, I really think that we on this side of the aisle have won the debate on this issue. The American people agree with us today, 56 versus 32 percent, that the current health care we have today is better than this Obama care or this government-run option.

The problem is, we still have Members of Congress, we have Members of the Senate and even a President, who insist on going down that road and taking one-sixth of our entire economy and reforming it into a socialist government-run system. I think if we look back on what the government is doing today and what it has done in the past, whether you are talking about the post office, which has a $9 billion deficit, whether you are talking about Medicare itself, which will run out of money completely within 8 years, and all the fraud, waste and abuse that exists there, and the $350 billion that our President says he is going to save out of that, when after 40 years not one single politician has been able to find the solution to that problem. I think it's really the wrong decision to make, to have more government control of our health care.

With that, I appreciate so much my good friend, Michele Bachmann, for inviting me and allowing me to participate in this discussion today.

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