30-Something Working Group
Floor Speech
30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP -- (House of Representatives - July 11, 2007)
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. If the gentleman would yield, just to make one last point on this, and I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for coming down, before I came here, I was the chairman of the Public Health Committee in the Connecticut State Legislature. What we figured out over time, because we were a State that submitted waivers to the Federal Government to expand our children's healthcare program, so we actually ended up with one of the more generous SCHIP programs in the country. We had more kids as a percentage of children who were eligible for children's healthcare, sponsored and subsidized by the State and Federal Government, than most other States, and what we found was that was actually reducing the cost of healthcare over time.
I got to listen to a little bit of the rhetoric on the other side of the aisle earlier, and they act as if we have existing today a fiscally responsible system of healthcare. We don't. We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world.
You may have covered this earlier before I got on to the floor. But we have the most expensive healthcare system in the world for outcomes that are lucky if they rival those of countries that spend 50 percent less on their healthcare, 16 percent of GDP in this country compared to 10 or 11 percent in other countries that insure everybody and get basically the same or better outcomes.
So what we found in Connecticut was as we expanded the reach of our SCHIP program and got more kids eligible and enrolled, we were actually cutting the cost of care for those kids because, guess what? Preventative care, as I am sure has been said on the Floor, is much less expensive, much more fiscally responsible than crisis care, when these kids show up in the emergency room with much more complicating, debilitating illnesses that require much more expensive care.
So, for my money, investing in children's healthcare insurance is the right thing for taxpayer dollars. We certainly know it is the humane thing to do, it is the moral thing to do, to insure children who have no healthcare through no fault of their own. But it is certainly the right thing to do if we are going to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars.
If I were sent here, as the folks on the other side of the aisle believe they have been, to be stewards of taxpayer dollars, I would be investing in preventative healthcare every single day I was here, and that is what the SCHIP program does.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you.
We know because we have talked to these families. When they are crying about their loved ones injured in the field of battle or, God forbid, have not come back, there is also a sense from military families that their despair is because they realize they are the only ones that are being asked to sacrifice for this war.
Mr. MEEK of Florida. What happened to the coalition, Mr. Murphy?
Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. The coalition of the willing is no more, Mr. Meek. What is left are the military family, and their friends and families have been asked to shoulder almost the entire burden of this war.
When we talk about where we are going to spend the taxpayer dollars, you have to talk about what we are getting for that investment.
You gave the statistics on the casualties since the beginning of the war, but it is even more terrifying when you talk about what has happened simply since the surge has begun: 593 soldiers have died since January 10; 3,500 have been wounded; 1,600 wounded so badly they cannot return to battle. We are talking about 13,000 Iraqi civilians and members of the military police who have been killed or wounded since the surge took place.
So you have to ask what we are getting for this investment. It has gone from $8 billion a month to $10 billion a month since the surge has gone into effect. What we have gotten is an Iraqi political institution or Iraqi political infrastructure which is even less willing to take responsibility for its own actions, even less able to take control of their own country.
It was reported in the Associated Press of the President's report on progress in Iraq that the Iraqi government has not ``met any of its targets for political, economic and other reform.'' Has not met any of the targets we have given them for economic, political reform.
Parliament is going home for the summer. There is a parliament where the biggest Sunni group has pulled out. You have an inability for the Iraqis to deal with their own shop. As someone said, right now the Iraqis are paying wholesale for their politics because we are subsidizing every decision that is being made there. It is time they start paying retail for their political decisions, and that is only going to happen when they have a sense of when the crutch is going to be taken away from them.
So, Mr. Meek and Mr. Ryan, I think to myself when we talk about how we are going to spend money, whether we are going to spend $120 billion a year in Iraq or whether we are going to spend $40 or $50 billion on children's health care insurance, and I think, as Mr. Ryan said, that $120 billion investment is getting more and more Americans killed every day and is making this country less safe and less safe every day, and is making it less and less likely that the Iraqis will ever be able to take control of their country.
That's a terrible investment. That's a bad investment. When I think about $50 billion in children's health care, by doing the right thing, the moral thing for kids, and at the same time, probably making our health care system more affordable and less costly in the end, because we're hooking kids up with preventative health care, that's a great investment. That's a worthwhile investment.
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We're slingshotting the kids then for 5 months.
Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. At some point, we've got to talk about what results we're getting for our money, and if you can turn around even a portion of the money that we're using over there to make this country less safe, turn it around and college age, children's health care, I mean meat and potatoes things that matter to middle-class families, those are the investments that I came to Congress to work on. Those are the investments that millions of Americans around this country sent a new class of Democrats here to work on, and if we can get some Republicans to stand up with us this week, as we have seen happening in the Senate over the last week and a half, we'll start to make good on those promises.
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Well, $50 million for children's health care or 5 months more in Iraq, let the American people make that decision. Poll that, get the focus group out and figure that one out, where the American people are going to be. They're going to be with the leadership. They're going to be with the Speaker. They're going to be with the majority leader in the Senate. They're going to be for making these investments.
And I just love, Mr. Speaker, how our Republican counterparts went way back to 1992, they went into the deep parts of the Republican library, the CATO Institute and everywhere else, and they pulled out the 1992 talking points, and they've dusted them off and everything's socialism and union bosses. And it's typical of why they're not in power.
Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I guess I wonder whether the water is different in the Republican cloakroom down here than it is in the Senate cloakroom, because what we've seen in the last couple of weeks, and I've got a list here of all of the people who have changed their opinion on the war in the last several weeks and all the quotes from Republicans in the United States Capitol regarding their new opinion of this war, which is that we should set a date for withdrawal, and it is Senate Republican after Senate Republican after Senate Republican after Senate Republican, Dick Lugar, George Voinovich, Pete Domenici, Lamar Alexander, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins.
What's missing from that list, for some reason, are members of the Republican minority here in the House. This is the body that's supposed to actually be more responsive to the American people, not less responsive. So I haven't been here long enough to understand what the difference is, but some Republicans are waking up to the notion that it's time for a change. It just hasn't happened here yet.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. To go deeper than that, let's explain exactly what the deal is. Let's delve one layer deeper into this, explain exactly what the deal is for banks here.
We already guarantee all of these loans for the banks. That's a great deal. You tell me that I'm going to lend money to somebody and if they don't pay it back, somebody else is going to pay me back? Well, guess what, I'll probably make that loan.
But then what we did on top of it, on top of it was we gave them a cut of the loan, too. You know what we figured out? They're still going to make the loans even if you don't give them a cut of the loan. They're guaranteed loans. They're essentially guaranteed loans. That's just commonsense.
And so as Mr. Ryan said, this becomes sort of a socialist welfare program for just a different set of people, people that are doing pretty well already. So, to me, this is just commonsense. So to a lot of people it's commonsense.
When we go back in our districts, we're hearing a lot of people talking about Iraq. People are behind the Democrats' plan to reorder our priorities there and start going after the real bad guys, but there are a lot of people struggling just with getting by every day and every week, and there are a lot of young parents who are raising young kids and looking at college costs, thinking to themselves how on earth am I going to do this.
And to think that one of the things that stands in their way is a system now that subsidizes some pretty well-off banks, at the expense of those parents and their kids, is ludicrous. I mean, frankly, I could probably sit there, even coming from a pretty fiscally conservative State like Connecticut, I could probably sit here and justify bringing in new revenue somehow in order to increase money for student aid. I think I could sell people back in Connecticut, and say, listen, we've got to put a little more into the pot and we're going take care of students who need help, I mean truly meritorious students.
We don't even have to do that here. We don't even have to make that argument. All we have to do is say listen, we've just got to shift moneys from the haves to the have-nots. That's the brilliance of this program.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Just a quick point. During the May break, I went back and spent most of the week visiting with manufacturers and businesses in northwestern Connecticut. I could imagine what I heard was the same thing from what anybody who makes that trip will hear. It's all about workforce, workforce, workforce, that our economic salvation as a region in the Northeast, but also as a country, is not going to necessarily be, in terms of how cheap we can turn out the rubber balls, it's going to be about the quality of our product, and the quality of our production capacity.
That's all about training the new generation of workers. I mean, this money that we are talking about, it doesn't just go for students who are going to a 4-year Ivy League school. This is also money for kids that are going to community technology colleges that are being trained to be tool-and-die makers, that are being trained to be computer technicians at the shops and the manufacturing centers of the next decade and the decade beyond.
If we are going to compete as a Nation, as you say, against China and everyone else who is undercutting us, it is going to be because we have the best trained and the most productive workforce in the country. That's what our manufacturers are screaming for, and that's what you address when you talk about putting money into higher education.
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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. If I was one of those high-priced political consultants and a prospective candidate came to me and said, listen, this is what I want to be for, this is what I want to be known for, I want to stand with the President every turn, make sure we stay in Iraq for as long as we can. I think I am also going to be against children's health care insurance. I am going to try to defend the status quo on our health care system. I think it's about right, I think we got it right.
Also, I think I also want to be against affordable college. I think I also want to fight against increases in Pell Grants and Stafford loans and all the rest. If I was that political consultant I might sort of look at my watch, look at my date book, and, you know, take a pass on that one.
You know why? It's not about Republicans or Democrats. It's what the American people are asking for; it's what the American people have been crying for. They want a new direction in Iraq. They want help with the cost of getting by every day, which certainly includes the cost of health care and college affordability. They want a place that is listening to them again instead of listening to the White House and the banks and everyone else that has had the run of this place for a while.
It will be another good week here, and I hope sooner rather than later some of our friends across the aisle join us in standing up for what the American people have been crying for for a real long time.
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