Health Care

Floor Speech

Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Speaker, as we enter now an historic moment in our country's progress towards creating a fair, a more just, and a better economy for ourselves and for our children, I want to offer for the record a quote--a fee quote--from a business in my district with 60 employees which underlines why we need to move forward. This is one of the good guys. He employs 60 people with good wages and benefits, and for 2010, he has been told that his health insurance premiums are going up 32 percent.

We have heard for months now about how we're moving too fast and about how we've got to take our time, but the fact of the matter is that it is time to act so we can have an economy that can address creating new jobs without taking on enormous new benefit costs, which is the reality today, particularly for small businesses and for the self-employed.

If you care about growing this economy, if you care about giving the risk-takers of America the opportunity to go out and to pursue their dreams, we have got to create a stable marketplace, which H.R. 3692 will do with a national health insurance purchasing exchange.

Source