30-Something Working Group 1/23/07

30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you, Mr. Ryan. I am only making a name for myself by associating myself with the works and deeds of Mr. Meek and Mr. Ryan.

You are exactly right. As you know, I am able to join you here as a second time as a new Member of this Congress.

What we were charged with doing was really taking back this House and this place for people who are struggling every day to make ends meet. The cost of tuition since 2001 has gone up 41 percent, while we know wages have essentially remained stagnant, the minimum wage staying exactly where it has been for the last 2 years, while the cost of everything from food to school to gas goes up exponentially.

What we are doing here, piece by piece, is really restoring that American dream, that idea your kids might be able to do better than you, that your grandkids are going to live in a world with a greater quality of life than you were able to live in. The first 100 hours were about doing that, and, as I know you both have remarked, doing it in a bipartisan way, doing it in a way in which the votes that came before in the first 2 weeks drew an average of 60 Republican votes.

As Mr. Meek was saying as I walked into the Chamber, I think the President tonight will find a very receptive Democratic side of the aisle if he seeks to embrace that same type of middle-class/working-class agenda that we have made really the central feature of this place for the last 2 weeks.

Mr. Ryan, if I might, I wanted to talk just for a moment about health care, because we are going to hear something from the President that, unfortunately, we have heard for the last several years. We have heard that the President wants to focus on the rising costs of health care, the trouble that middle-class families are finding in trying to find insurance.

It is about time on the issue of health care that this administration starts to meet words with action. We have seen a lot of verbal compassion, but we haven't seen a lot of meaningful reform from this administration, as the profits being made by those who would make money off of this health care system are in record numbers today. We are seeing on the other side record numbers of families falling into the ranks the uninsured.

Tonight we are going to hear a proposal that will essentially lop off families who are receiving good insurance and put them into the ranks of those families that have very bad insurance or are underinsured. Essentially the President is going to propose tonight to make health care cheaper and worse, whereas the Democrats, we know we can find a way to make health care cheaper and better.

I simply look forward, Mr. Ryan, to engaging the President on that debate and trying to convert he and his administration to the new-found wisdom we found in this Chamber to put middle-class families rather than those lobbyists and corporate interests first.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I thank Mr. Meek.

There are already reports that the words we may get tonight are going to give a little short shrift to the issue of Iraq. If the President wants to put forth a plan that is so unpopular that it is not backed by his own military leaders, it is not backed by our civilian foreign policy expert, it is not backed by the American public, well, then he should also have the courage to talk about it, to defend it, to put it before us. But knowing that it is unpopular, we may not hear too much about it tonight.

To get back to, Mr. Meek, your point on health care, let us be honest about what is going to be proposed tonight, how we are going to save money on health care. It is not by investing more in prevention; it is not by moving people out of emergency rooms and putting them into real programs and care. It is taking people who have good insurance and making their good insurance bad insurance. It is going out and taking folks who have had the great benefit of working for an employer that provides a comprehensive package of benefits, and it is becoming less and less likely these days that even good employers out there can afford to give a robust package of benefits.

What the President is going to propose today is that for families that have had the good fortune to find a good insurance plan, they are going to tax that employer. They are going to make it less likely that you are going to get good insurance anymore. So we are going to get a proposal today which is going to actually result in worse health care for a lot of families.

I guess the point here is that, you know, again, if we are going to listen to the words that come from this administration, we heard in last year's State of the Union that we need to confront the rising cost of care, strengthen the doctor/patient relationship and help people afford the insurance coverage we need, if we want to talk about that, then we need to do something about that. And how we do something about that is not by taking the haves and putting them into the column of the have-nots. It is by keeping the haves where they are on health care and taking the have-nots and giving them that same level of health care.

We can absolutely do that without adding cost to the system, because those have-nots, as Mr. Ryan said, end up getting care. They just end up getting the most expensive, the most unfortunate type of care, that being crisis care. We can do a better job on that.

And, Mr. Meek, as you said, we can make sure that we continue to have that discussion on Iraq, which may be missing tonight.

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