Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

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Mr. FLEMING. I thank the gentleman from Georgia, PAUL BROUN, a fellow family physician, a fellow conservative who has been a great inspiration for me, a great Member, and under whose leadership many of these issues have been very valuable to me.

Mr. Speaker, what I'm going to do is just touch very lightly, just highlights, on where we started with this and where we are today and certainly yield back for others to weigh in on this.

It's been slightly less than a year ago that we began to see a strong movement towards the passage of health care reform in Congress. Quite frankly, I ran on health care reform as a physician, and I'm sure Dr. Broun sees many of the things that can be fixed in our system that are problems. Having said that, we have the best health care system in the world. How do I know this? Well, just one of many empiric facts is a gentleman--I believe his name is Mr. Williams--who is Premier of Newfoundland, who needed heart surgery, and the type of heart surgery he needed was simply not available in Canada. So he came to the U.S. of A., the good old U.S. of A., to have that heart surgery because that's where the cutting edge is for health care. If you really need health care, the best of health care, and you have the resources, the U.S. of A. is the place to get it, but we need to be sure that good health care is available to all.

Less than a year ago, there was launched, by both the House and the Senate, efforts to pass health care reform, which really turned out to be, in my view, nothing more than a government takeover of health care.

Both bills are very similar. Both passed, of course, each House. The one or two major differences would include the House bill has a government option. The taxation is heavy in both. The financing is heavy in both, but very similar.

But, to cut to the chase, it cuts out a half-trillion dollars from Medicare. It taxes people $800 billion, and it does not bend the cost curve down. Even the CBO says that.

Now, we have a situation, despite the fact that all of us here who are speaking tonight have been working very hard for many months, day after day, night after night, attempting to drive a wooden stake in the heart of this vampire, the government takeover of health care. And it seems, even when it's dead, it seems to be rising again.

Now, you know, it started out with a slight approval rating in the early days. I mean, who wouldn't be for health care reform? It sounds like a wonderful idea. But as people began to learn about it, and certainly when we got to the August recess where there were town hall meetings, we saw situations where people became so angry they were almost, I would say, out of control at times, very angry at many of their representatives across the country who would dare want the government to take over the most intimate part of our society, and that is health care.

And so, little by little, and maybe not so little by little, but perhaps even rapidly, we saw the approval rating of the government takeover of health care drop. And today, 2 to 1 Americans are against this. And those of us who were against it, it doesn't matter what party you're in--it doesn't matter. I mean, the only thing bipartisan about these bills we can actually say is that there are people on both sides of the aisle who are against it. But the bottom line here is that Americans do not want this.

I perceive us today, at this point in time, to be two touchdowns ahead, and 2 minutes left in the fourth quarter. The debate is over among the American people.

Yet and still, we have the President and Members of the House and the Senate, Democrat Party, who still want to find a way to cram it through. And one of the things they've come out with is just the release, less than 24 hours ago perhaps, maybe a little more than 24 hours ago, of a compiled version of the two bills. And here is what we have. The bill is most like the Senate bill, that is, the Obama 2.0 that Dr. Broun refers to is most like the Senate bill, but it increases spending by $100 billion. It increases premiums that are already going to increase by $2,100 per family per year. And it does something unbelievable, unprecedented. It actually begins to tax, by a factor of 2.9 percent, unearned income. That's the capital gains tax, interest income. These are all things that come to people who, in many cases, have fixed incomes. And of course, yes, it is the people who make over $200,000 a year.

But you know what? Where are we today with the AMT tax? It was never indexed for inflation, and now we have middle class people paying it. This is not indexed either, so sooner or later, middle class taxpayers will be paying those taxes.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Will the gentleman yield a second?

Mr. FLEMING. Yeah, sure.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. I want to point out something too so that we understand. We keep hearing from the President, we want to tax the rich. Most small businesses in this country file their income taxes individually because they're sub S corporations, which means that their income taxes are filed individually, as a person or as a couple. And over half of those people that make over $200,000, which is in the President's current proposal, are small businessmen and women, and it's taxes on their business. So, by taxing folks making over $200,000 or over $250,000, what it's going to do is it's going to take money out of small businesses so that they can't expand, so that they cannot give their employees the kind of salary that their employees deserve.

And I've talked to a lot of small businessmen and -women in Georgia who are going to have to let people go. So this is going to cost a lot of jobs. In fact, millions of jobs all over this country are going to be lost because of this tax, so-called tax on the rich, because it's really a small business tax. It's a tax on small business that's going to cost millions of people their jobs in this country. They're going to be out of work, and so we're going to have more joblessness in this country if this monstrosity gets passed into law. I thank you. I yield back.

Mr. FLEMING. Yes. I appreciate the gentleman, Dr. Broun. Absolutely, that's the working capital for small businesses. You add to that that there will be as much as an 8 percent payroll tax for businesses that heretofore could not afford health care insurance, and they'll have to pay the insurance without getting that. And then their employees, who will not be able to afford to buy insurance, will be--instead of paying $750 per person under the Senate version, it'll be $2,000. So we have many things that are going to be job-killers out of this bill.

And last but not least, just when we thought all of those bad deals that really got this thing in trouble to begin with were going away, we find the Louisiana Purchase, the $300 million for Medicaid to Louisiana, which--Louisiana needs money to offset a FMAP problem, no doubt about it. But the problem is, if this bill goes to signature, that $300 million will be swallowed by a billion dollars of additional cost down the road that Medicaid is going to cost. So no real benefit to the State of Louisiana.

The Yukon deal--Senator Dodd added $100 million for a hospital that he liked for his State.

Gatorade--Ben Nelson secured extra benefits for Medicare Advantage beneficiaries. The handout, the Montana, the North Dakota Senators deal, Hawaii got a special exemption for higher Medicaid DSH, or ``Dish'' payments. On and on and on, there are all sorts of deals still in this bill that have not been cut out.

And so I agree with the gentleman. As we go into this summit, health care summit on Thursday, there's no doubt about it. The American people need to understand that this is not about a true negotiation. The Republicans have been locked out of negotiations. We've been locked out of amendments.

Despite what I hear my Democrat colleagues say, we do not agree with 80 percent of this bill, not by any stretch of the imagination.

And so why now would we have this summit in front of the cameras? The reason is, as I said, is because this bill is nearly dead. It's trying to be revived, and now this is time for the Hail Mary. The President's going to jump in there and try to revive this somehow at the last minute.

And so I submit, Mr. Speaker, that it's time to kill this once and for all. Let's go on to true health care reform, stand-alone bills, starting with the low-hanging fruit, one at a time, attacking the things that we know we can all agree on: Preexisting illnesses, aggregating employees into large buying pools, purchase of insurance across State lines, tort reform--these things are straightforward. We could improve health care and lower the cost overnight by doing these things. And then get back to the people's work, and that is creating jobs for this country. I thank you and I yield back.

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