Rushing Into A Health Care Plan

Floor Speech

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Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I'm sorry I don't have the time to respond to the majority leader's comments about PAYGO. But I would just simply say that the Democrats passed a PAYGO policy when they first took over, and we're getting deeper and deeper into debt. If that's what PAYGO does, then woe be unto us if we sign on to it.

The President, the Speaker and the majority leader are all in a rush to pass legislation here. So much in a rush, they will not even give Members a chance to read the bills. Why is that? It's perhaps because they don't want people to know what's in the bills. But the American people want to get health reform right, not just fast. Artificial deadlines for passing legislation serve a political purpose, not a legitimate purpose. I have promised that I will not vote for any health care legislation that is not publicly available in its final form for at least 72 hours in advance of a vote. Every Member of Congress should have time to read the health care bill they are asked to vote on, and the American people should be given this same common courtesy. Let's give them significant time to fully understand the details of a health care proposal rather than steamrolling partisan legislation through Congress. We should make August a national health care awareness month so that Americans can let their Member of Congress know where they stand before voting because we already know of many problems in the proposals that are being put forward. Number one, the bill contains zero savings from eliminating or even reducing waste, fraud and abuse. In an attempt to correct this egregious lack of oversight, Ways and Means Republicans offered six amendments during the committee's markup to reduce wasteful spending. All of them were rejected by the Democrats.

We know that the House Democrats' health care plan will increase Federal spending significantly, that coming directly from the CBO, appointed by the Democrats. We know that it's going to raise taxes on small businesses through surtax increases. Of taxpayers who file in the top brackets, more than half of them are small businesses. The Democrat plan, according to a study by the Tax Foundation, would raise the top tax rate in 39 States to more than 50 percent.

Significantly, it includes fines of up to $500,000 on employers who make an honest mistake thinking they had provided what the government deemed "sufficient'' coverage. It will impose an 8 percent payroll tax on employers who can't afford to offer health insurance to their employees, and on employers who do the right thing and offer health coverage to their employees but it is deemed insufficient by the government, and employers who are not paying at least 72.5 percent of an employee's premium or 65 percent for family coverage.

What they plan to do is take over more aspects of our life. Every piece of legislation that is passing out of this House this session is aimed at putting the government more in control of our lives and giving us less freedom. The health care bill is the worst of those. Cap-and-tax was horrible; this is even more horrible.

We must not rush into passing health care legislation. We must slow down and get things right. The American people are hurting. We know they are hurting. Unemployment is going up dramatically under this Congress and under this President, and we need to be dealing with what we can do to create jobs and help individual families, not make things worse by killing more jobs and raising taxes. That's what PAYGO does. It is hard to make cuts in spending, easy to raise taxes, and that's what they plan to do. We shouldn't let them fool the American people again. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. We have got to stop letting the Democrats do these things, rushing bills through, hiding things in obscure language, and taxing us into high unemployment in this country.

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