Health Care

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. LATTA. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I appreciate your hosting this very special Special Order this evening.

Where I come from in Ohio, we are very, very hard hit. Our unemployment rate is one of the highest in the State in our district. I represent the largest manufacturing district in Ohio. I represent the largest agricultural district in Ohio. At this time last year, we were, according to the National Manufacturers, about the ninth largest in manufacturing.

Mr. AKIN. Well, that's a very important fact. Don't go too fast. What you're saying is your district is the ninth largest manufacturing district in the country?

Mr. LATTA. We were at this time last year, but we've slipped to 15th now.

Mr. AKIN. You've slipped to 15th?

Mr. LATTA. Yes.

Mr. AKIN. So what is your take on manufacturing? Because we were told old people don't like this bill because it's cutting Medicare. Small businesses don't like it because they're getting hammered one more time into the dirt with tax increases. Let's talk about manufacturing because, in a way, that's the backbone of American industry.

Mr. LATTA. Absolutely.

Mr. AKIN. What is your take on this? How does this work?

Mr. LATTA. Well, I'll tell you. You know, when we were all home during the August work period, I went through I don't know how many different factories, and I went through lots of small businesses.

As one example in particular, I had a gentleman walk up to me. He was a factory worker. He said, You know, I'm really not sure what you all are talking about there in Washington. He says, If I can't put a roof over my family's head, if I can't put food on the table, health care is not the top issue for me.

People are all concerned about health care, but as to where it is in the priority ranking, it's at survival right now. We've got a lot of folks out there who need to survive. At the same time, you have a lot of these smaller businesses--you know, when I talk about smaller, it could be a factory of about 150-170 which is now down to 29-35 people, and they're just hoping they can keep the lights on. When they see and hear that Washington might impose a mandate on them, especially at that 8 percent level, they say, Well, we're not going to survive.

Mr. AKIN. Let's get back and get those numbers. We were just talking about this last night.

We've got small business and even manufacturers that have been hammered so hard now that they're struggling for breath.

Mr. LATTA. Absolutely.

Mr. AKIN. We're going to nail them with another, possibly, 8 percent cost. This is 8 percent.

Also, what's going to happen to the dividends and capital gains? That's going to go up through this bill, too. So, not only do we have additional taxes on top of the other taxes, on top of the ones that are going to expire and go up--you've got all of that coming down the pike. Also, they don't see any end in sight.

So we have created an environment where there are a lot of unknowns. If you don't know what's going to happen the next month, when we get done with this tax, we're going to go to another one. What you're going to do is you're going to try and play it safe and see if you can survive. Am I on the right track?

I need to just thank you. Congressman Latta is from Ohio, and he is really an upstanding young Member. Your opinion is very important, and Ohio is a very important State, particularly because of the manufacturing base.

Mr. LATTA. Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head.

All of these companies that are out there struggling right now look at everything. Health care is a huge issue to them. Cap-and-trade is an issue out there--the electricity costs to keep the machines running. Then we had the second highest corporate tax rate here in the United States.

If you put these all together, plus you throw in the EPA and the environmental things that have to go on at these companies, and if they're owned by a parent company that has a plant someplace else in the United States, they can say, as in our situation, Well, you know what?

Your costs go up too great in Ohio. You're just going to have to move.

There are some companies out there that are multinational and they've said, You know what? We're to the point that, with any more costs, it would be cheaper for us to actually make it on the Pacific Rim and ship it here, and then we won't have to worry about all of these costs, and there's the product.

Yet, you know, health care is one of those things that everybody wants to make sure that we have; but at the same time, we've got to do it in the right manner, and that's what a lot of folks back home are very concerned about, because I don't care if you're a senior citizen and you're on the Medicare side or if you're a businessowner. Again, these businessowners are the ones who are very frightened because they're the ones who keep people employed on Main Street.

In talking about Main Street, not too long ago, I was out on one of my Main Streets in my district. One of the businessowners asked, Bob, you know, is this thing going to pass? He said, You know what? You're looking at my business right now, and I will not be able to survive, with the numbers that I'm seeing from Washington right now, under this legislation.

Mr. AKIN. You know, a wonderful part of America are these different expressions. There is such a diversity of people in our country, and I guess that's probably why we serve here. We just love this country and love our own constituents and all.

In representing Missouri, we have some kind of rural expressions that are fun. One of them is ``hunker down.'' Sometimes you'll hear people in Missouri say, ``Hunker down.'' Then, if they're really serious about it, they'll add to this. ``They're hunkered down like toads in a hailstorm.''

It paints a picture, but that is, to a degree, the picture of the small business man and of the manufacturer in America just being hit, not with hailstones but with tax on tax on tax, and we wonder: I can't understand why there would be unemployment.

Do you see?

The thing that's tragic about this is the fact that the government has tried this before. They tried this before, and they created the Great Depression.

You had this little British economist, little Lord Keynes, running around, saying, Hey, I've got a brilliant idea. Why doesn't the government just spend tons of money, and by spending lots of money, it will get the economy going, and we will jump-start--I don't know if he used the word ``jump-start.'' I don't know if they had car batteries back then. I guess they did. We're going to jump-start the economy by the government spending tons of money.

So FDR thought that's a pretty good idea. Plus, it's not bad politics if I can run around like Santa Claus with the paychecks, you know?

So he gets Henry Morgenthau as his Secretary of the Treasury, and they test out this nifty theory. So they go out and spend tons of money year after year after year, hoping to see unemployment come down.

At the end of, I think it was 9 years, Henry Morgenthau came to this body, to the Ways and Means Committee, and he said, Gentlemen, we've tried this idea, and it doesn't work. He says it that simply: It doesn't work. All that has happened is that unemployment is as bad or worse than it was before, and we have a whole lot of debt to boot. Those were his words.

So what we're seeing is this idea of just taxing and taxing these businesses, and unemployment is just going to kill us because they're not going to be hiring people when they're hunkered down, worrying about what the next tax is going to be or whether it's going to put them out of business. They're going to be playing things very conservatively. Plus, it's hard to get loans for them.

Mr. LATTA. If the gentleman would yield.

Mr. AKIN. I do yield to my good friend.

Mr. LATTA. You hit on a very important point right here. One of the things they're talking about right now is that we've been coming out of this recession into a jobless recovery. When you have these unemployment rates----

Mr. AKIN. Wait a minute now. I've heard this term ``jobless recovery.'' I'd like to pick at these words a little bit. ``Jobless recovery.'' Do you think that's the same thing as a plastic glass or a jumbo shrimp? I mean, how is it a recovery if nobody has a job? I sure hope I don't suffer too much with that kind of recovery.

Mr. LATTA. It's the way they define when you're coming out of a recession.

Back in 1982, when I look at that recession, one of the things that a lot of people point to is that it was very, very tough. We all remember coming out of the Carter administration with double-digit unemployment, with double-digit inflation and with a 21 1/2 percent interest rate. A lot of people also said the same thing: You know what? It's tough, but at the end of the day at some point, that factory down the street is going to reopen, and I'm going to get my job back.

In this case, we've got so many companies out there, especially in my district, that are saying, You know what? We've cut as much as we possibly can. We're going to do as much as we possibly can to make sure we can just keep the doors open, and we find right now that we can survive with what we've got.

When they say ``what we've got,'' it's the employees who are on the floor right now. They say, We're not going to hire anybody else.

That's the scary thing because now, all of a sudden, we're going to have all of these young people coming out of high school, coming out of trade schools, coming out of community college, and coming out of college. Where are they going to go? Because we've got more and more people saying, I can't retire. I've got to keep working because I'm not sure what I'm going to have down the road.

There are all of these things that, I think, have got to really be looked at. That's why, I think, the American people have said to us, especially in my district, We all agree. There's not one person in this body right here who would say we should not do something

about health care in this country; but it's how we do it, how we proceed. It's slowing it down. The American people want it to be the best thing, not something that's rushed through, not something that's in a 1,990-page bill.

Mr. AKIN. Here we go again. It's this tremendously long, complicated bill, a complicated plan, and it almost looks like just another attempt where we already determined when we started that what we really want is the government to run it all.

We've got the government firing the president of General Motors, running General Motors, running the insurance companies, running the banks, deciding what executive salaries are going to be, and that's not good enough to have the government doing that. We want the government to take over student loans, so we passed that this year, still letting private people do the student loans. There's $1 trillion in extra spending to cover all of these student loans. Now what we want to do is take over all of health care.

I mean, this is kind of ambitious. You know, this is a little overwhelming. My constituents are a combination of scared and angry about what's going on down here. I think it's important for us to offer simple solutions, and we've got a simple solution if you want something immediately that you can do, and that is, tomorrow at noontime, Americans are coming from all over this country to meet on the steps to talk about this whole thing and to express their opinions of whether they really think that a bill that raises premiums, that reduces health choices, that delays and denies care, that costs $500 billion in Medicare cuts and $729 billion in new taxes is the solution that they want to this problem.

People who want to say ``no''--at least I think a lot of them want to say ``no.'' I don't know what they're going to say because they're coming here tomorrow at noontime to this Capitol to express their opinions. They were invited by a bunch of us who are just plain old Congressmen, not leadership. They were just invited. You all come. Come talk to us about what's going on here. If people kind of get upset, this is the place to express your opinion.

I would yield.

Mr. LATTA. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Again, that's what happened during the month of August and when we were back home. We were out in our districts, and the people got to see us and talk to us face-to-face, and that's what they really want to do. They want that opportunity to say, I want a piece of my voice to be heard on this.

One of the things, I think, that has been missing in this is that I came from the Ohio legislature, and I chaired a couple of committees in the house and the senate. One of the things that, I think, is very important is that we have people come in, be able to testify and be able to face the members.

Mr. AKIN. Yes.

Mr. LATTA. I think what we ought to have been doing during this whole period of time here is that we should have taken this back onto the road, and we should have had committee hearings across this country so that Americans could have gone to their States and to wherever it would be that the Members would be holding the hearings for the three different committees here in the House which were hearing this piece of legislation. I think that's what we should have been doing because, again, people feel left out. The most dangerous place for me to go, for my wife to send me, is to the grocery store after church.

Mr. AKIN. After church to the Rotary Club, that's dangerous?

Mr. LATTA. Well, it's the grocery store.

Mr. AKIN. Oh, the grocery store. I'm sorry.

Mr. LATTA. Because what happens is that people come up to me, and they want to talk. I go home every weekend, and I don't care if it's at the grocery store or at the gas pump. You know, it could take 45 minutes to an hour sometimes.

Mr. AKIN. They are saying, BOB, wait just a minute before you walk out with that loaf of bread. The loaf of bread is stale by the time you get out of the store.

Mr. LATTA. The American people want to be heard, and I think that is one of the things they are really saying here is wait a minute, I don't think we are being heard in this discussion.

Mr. AKIN. Well, a lot of us are going to go out on the steps and we are going to listen to what those people have to say. I think you committed to be going out there too and be available. And we are going to talk. There are going to be a lot of interesting people, people doing some singing and all kinds of things, people making some little short talks and discussion. And that is a healthy thing in America, to have that freedom to have free speech, to talk, and to come to the Capitol building and to let people know what you think about this.

Of course, there is a different philosophy than this kind of take everything apart and rebuild it, and that is that there are some specific things that can be done that reduce health care costs that Republicans almost uniformly support.

One of them is tort reform, limiting the punitive damages. We know that in other States where that has been tried it reduces the cost of health care. We also know in other States where the government takes over health care, that the costs go out of sight. We have seen that in Massachusetts and in Tennessee. But we have seen in my own State of Missouri and Texas and other States, there is a distinct reduction in health care costs when you limit some of those punitive damages.

It doesn't mean that doctors don't make mistakes and shouldn't be held accountable. But the other thing is you don't rape the system and run the costs up so that every doctor is forced to practice defensive medicine.

Mr. LATTA. If the gentleman will yield, when we are talking about punitives, we are not going to say to people limit the economic damages. It is the noneconomic damages. Because it took us quite a few years in the Ohio legislature to finally get a small portion of that passed, but we saw changes almost within a year in what was happening out there.

Mr. AKIN. Did you pass one in Ohio? Did you limit the punitive damages in Ohio?

Mr. LATTA. That is one of the things we had to do on some of the noneconomic damages, and, again, it was only a small portion, because we had to pick certain areas and we picked the one area, and we watched those things come down. Because what happened was as soon as we passed the legislation, as soon as it was signed into law, it was challenged in the Ohio Supreme Court and it was upheld for being constitutional. But those are the things you have to do.

Those are the things when you are talking about doctors not having to practice that defensive medicine, instead of running four, five or six tests, maybe they only have to run the two. But they are going to run the four, five or six tests. Why? Because if it is in your neighborhood and the courts have been saying why haven't you done this, you have got a problem. That is why these doctors say I have to do it, because otherwise I am going to get sued and my malpractice insurance is going to say you didn't do what you should have done, and now you are in trouble.

Mr. AKIN. So there is the problem. That is one place that Republicans have talked about where there is a specific thing that you can do. And there are other things. We talked about the idea of letting people buy their medical insurance across State lines.

The other thing in this 2,000 pages, there are a lot of loopholes and trapdoors. One of the things that is amazing to me is they do the opposite of tort reform and they say any State that has passed any tort reform, that that gets waived in order to get this government insurance. So you are going to be taxed whether you take it or not, but if you want the benefits of your citizens being taxed, you have to basically back off from tort reform. That is kind of a weird trapdoor.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend from Ohio, Congressman Latta. It has been a treat having you here.

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