Republican Freshman Perspective

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Well, I thank the gentlewoman from Wyoming, and it's a pleasure to be with you tonight here and sharing our reflections on these first 5 months as Members of the 111th Congress. It's an honor to serve in Congress. It's an honor today.

In health care, my background was health care. I always had one boss. And today I consider that I have 660,000 very smart people that I work for in the constituents of the Pennsylvania Fifth Congressional District, and frankly, it's an honor to serve those individuals and this great Nation.

And I'm proud to be a part of this freshman Republican class. We come with diverse backgrounds, as you began to talk about, but we have a common characteristic of bringing real change to Congress. And it's change that the American citizens deserve and need to have. It's a vision of fiscal accountability, of preserving individual freedom and liberty and returning America to the values that this country was built upon.

And you touched off, the gentlelady has really touched off with the first one for this evening for our discussion, fiscal responsibility. And I would put in with that, fiscal accountability and transparency in terms of how the taxpayer dollars are being spent. We are guardians of, we are trusted. We have a responsibility to make sure that those dollars that the American citizens work hard for, that they are spent wisely here in Washington, and only on those things that they should be spent on and not wasted and spent in a way that's transparent and that's accountable.

You know, Washington, DC, really doesn't have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem. We hear time and time again with the legislation being proposed, well, you know, under the last administration we had a spending problem. Well, as the freshman class we recognize that. I think we agree with it. That's one of the reasons we came to Washington, because we knew that there was out of control spending here and that the American people deserved better. They deserve the same fiscal responsibility from their Federal Government that they exercise in their own household budgets every day.

American families make tough decisions when things get tough fiscally. You know, they don't go out. They don't put more money--they know enough not to go out and do deficit spending and fill up all the credit cards and take out loans where they have no idea who's going to be able to afford to lend them the money, if somebody will. But the Federal Government has been doing that.

You know, the freshmen, the Republican freshmen, all came here to restore fiscal accountability and responsibility. And that's why we're united in opposing the massive waste-filled stimulus, or as I prefer to call it, ``stimuless'' bill that we had.

And I don't think it's a reflection on my public education, but I have to say before I came to Congress I had no idea how many zeros were in a trillion.

The fact is I really didn't think it was physically possible to be able to spend almost $2 trillion in 3 months, but frankly, my friends and colleagues, Democratic colleagues, proved me wrong with that. In the President's first 100 days, it's estimated he spent $11.9 billion for each day he was in office. That's a number that's very difficult to wrap our brains around in terms of that amount of money. That means more new debt will be created under this one budget than all the combined debt created by the previous 43 Presidents, going all the way back to George Washington.

That's a lot of debt, and that's debt that the American people do not deserve to have. It's debt that I don't consider I will be in a position to pay back, my children, my grandchildren I don't have yet, great-grandchildren--I don't know how many greats we're going to have to go out in order to get enough generations to be able to satisfy that debt that we've wracked up just in 5 months here in Congress.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. First of all, I would be remiss if I didn't thank my good friend and colleague from Florida and also Mr. Hunter from California for your leadership in making sure that we don't compromise the bill that funds our troops' needs. As a Member of Congress and, frankly, as a proud father of a United States soldier, I thank you. I know my son, Logan, and his comrades thank you as well.

Health care has been my life. For 28 years, I have worked in rehabilitation. That is how I got involved in public service actually, being frustrated with the Federal regulations that were being piled on the health care system that was decreasing access, increasing costs, and making the health care system more challenging. And that is the Federal system.

We are blessed in this Republican freshman class, as you said, in terms of the tremendous health care experience that we have, and I think we have a lot to offer to this debate. Hopefully we will have access and opportunity to engage in that debate a little more than what we have had in the past. Huge issues have come before this body.

Health care is a three-legged stool. It is about access, and that is what we hear a lot about today in terms of talking about the uninsured in today's debate. But it is access, affordability, and quality. I happen to believe, and I have seen evidence, that we have the best health care system in the world. I'm not saying that it is perfect and there is not opportunities that we can continue to improve upon it, but the Democratic proposals that are being bandied about and discussed would, in my opinion, in the long run, increase access issues and, frankly, lower the quality of care that we have all come to expect as Americans. This is a place where people come from around the world when they need life-saving, quality health care services.

The other side would argue that this is to provide access to those who are currently uninsured. If we identify those individuals that make a decision to not purchase health care insurance but could afford it, and we eliminate those folks from that number, we are talking about approximately 9 percent of individuals who do not have insurance. And the lack of insurance does not necessarily mean that they don't have access to health care services.

In my district, we have agencies such as federally qualified health centers. An agency that was just in to see me today near my home town is called the Tapestry of Health. We have another one called Centre Volunteers in Medicine that stand in the gap. Can we do better in health care? Absolutely. Absolutely. But do we need to ruin our health care system by reducing access and quality for all in doing this? Absolutely not. I think the Republican freshmen stand uniquely prepared to bring solutions based on real life medical experience and health care experience to this important debate.

My district is just like the rest of rural America. You know, our health care debate has to include things that aren't being talked about right now in this body, things like peeling away the regulations on health care that were instituted 40 years ago and have long since outlived their usefulness, and only serve to add cost and decrease access.

We need to reduce the practice of defensive medicine by eliminating the fears of liability that our physicians have where they order tests because they need them as a part of, not the medical record, but the evidence record, should they be sued. And that is so frequent today.

We need to level the reimbursement system, frankly, that I see as favoring urban big city health care over rural America, specifically on issues related to the wage index.

We need to address the health care workforce crisis. I have not heard that addressed at all in this body, and yet we can redefine the payment system any way you want, but if you do not have qualified doctors and nurses and technicians and therapists to provide the services then there is no health care access. And today we are facing tremendous retirements with the baby boomer generation of those health care professionals.

There are some real health care reform issues that we need to be addressing that just have not been, and I think this class is well prepared to bring that to the health care debate.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source