Growing The Government
Floor Speech
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Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. I thank my good friend from Missouri.
I came here in January, and I came here knowing that I had a pretty good handle on health care. I worked in health care for almost 30 years. I actually think we have a pretty good health care system, but it can be improved. And much of the improvements that I saw was getting government out of the way. The frustrations I had as a health care professional, as a health care manager, as a therapist, as a nursing home administrator, is when the government was creating problems, preventing access to cost-effective care, increasing costs because of these arbitrary ways that it gets involved.
To me, I think, as my good friend Mr. Bishop talked about, it is about the wisdom that our Founders had, and it is about free market.
You look at all the Republican proposals we have; they are free market proposals. It is not about inserting more government; it is getting government out of the way. And it is about the arbitrary rules that we have on where we can buy our health insurance from. The government tells us we can only buy within the confines of our own State, and it is about the government telling us we can't group together and form association health plans, that we have to endure medical liability. That becomes legislated and codified into our lives and adds just hundreds of billions of dollars of waste onto the health care system.
I am just so proud of the proposals that Republicans have put forward. I don't know how many in total we have, but between 35 and 40, I believe.
Mr. AKIN. I heard there are over 50 different bills at this point. Some are a combination of different ideas and put together in different ways.
You know, you used to be an administrator and you had to deal with red tape and bureaucracy. What we have just done is we have got a 1,990 page bill. It passed with less than 72 hours for the public to review it. It creates 118 new boards, bureaucracies, commissions and programs, and it is full of new mandates. And it contains the word ``shall'' 3,425 times. This is what it looks like. And that doesn't even have all of those 118 new boards on it. This is just a simplified version of it. Now, does that look like something to you that gives you much choices? And second of all, talk about overhead, talk about redtape.
You know, we were thinking about, and I see my colleague has come out here with some great sort of cartoons and things, and we were thinking about turning this into a cartoon. We were going to put patients over here and
doctors over here, and turn it into a place mat, and we are going to have lines like a maze, and the trick is, before your dinner is cold, to try to get the patient to the doctor. We were going to set the maze up so there wasn't any way to get there, because that is really what this tells you.
If you really want good, efficient health care, this thing here is in your way. That's the reason why a great majority of Americans don't believe that the Federal Government can take this thing over and manage it efficiently and effectively without the costs going through the roof and also without degrading health care, because the trouble is no other country has ever been able to do this.
I yield to the gentleman.
Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Let me reflect on my experiences as someone who was a manager of health care services in a rural hospital, skilled nursing, rehabilitation service--across the board, on what this means. Because you talked about increased costs to the taxpayers of this country.
I have to tell you, what I see there is a nightmare in terms of costs for hospitals and for providers. Hospitals alone, when you look at over 1,990 pages of new text, and that is just the bill. The regulations to be promulgated as a result of over 2,000 pages of law will be--it will just take a forest to be able to print those regulations. Those regulations all need to be administered.
Here is my prediction: For those hospitals that are not bankrupt in the near future, they are going to have to add tremendous employees to deal with that bureaucracy. Those employees' only job will be to interact with all those agencies, not health care, not people providing direct care. They will have to lay off people who provide direct care to be able to afford what will be required to administer those regulations, to make those regulations work within a hospital. That is not good health care.
Mr. AKIN. That's overhead.
Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. That's overhead. That's the complete opposite of access to quality care. That's preventing access.
Mr. AKIN. I would like to go to my friend Dr. Gingrey. He's got another very heavy medical concept for us. I can tell. He's got it all cued up here.
Mr. GINGREY of Georgia. I thank the gentleman for yielding back to me. In fact, I would ask him to put the previous poster back up, the one that showed all those additional bureaucracies that are created by H.R. 3962. In fact, that poster was created when it was H.R. 3200 and, as the gentleman from Missouri said, a thousand pages, now 2,000 pages. But he said something about, Madam Speaker, putting that in cartoon form. Well, I've got the cartoon for my colleagues, and here it is.
When you put a gown on that chart, this is what it looks like: a bloated, bloated patient called the House health bill. And this is a cartoon actually from the San Diego Union Tribune a few days ago. And, my colleagues, look at the poor patient, and, of course, I don't know if you can see up at the top corner, ``nip/tuck.'' And these two Senators are standing over here. I guess that may be the majority leader of the Senate, HARRY REID, and possibly the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee or the chairman of the Senate Health Committee standing next to Majority Leader Reid, and the caption is, ``Hey, this might take a while'' to nip/tuck this bloated 2,000-page bureaucracy that's depicted by my colleague Representative Akin.
It just shows you in a cartoon form, but unfortunately it's not funny, is it? It's not funny, my colleagues and Madam Speaker. This is serious business. And I hope and pray that the Senate will be the saucer that cools the drink of the hot cup that has come over from the House, because Lord help this country if we don't do a whole lot of nipping and tucking if not downright eliminating this bill, H.R. 3962.
Mr. AKIN. I appreciate your keeping it in a sort of a big picture form as to what we're talking about on cost.
Mr. GINGREY of Georgia. No pun intended, of course, about the cartoon.
Mr. AKIN. But the cost supposedly by the Congressional Budget Office was that this was going to cost a trillion dollars, so your figure over there was overweight in costing a trillion dollars. The trouble with this estimate is it's wrong because the Congressional Budget Office took some assumptions when they built it because they were told we've got to keep this thing under a trillion dollars.
The problem is, first of all, the Democrat Governor of the State of Tennessee, who has already tried this lovely idea, has taken a look at this and called it the ``monster of unfunded mandates.'' What that means is that that trillion dollars was trimmed one way, was to dump a bunch of the costs down to the various States, aside from the fact that it destroys everything that the State of Utah has set up, which is actually kind of an innovative idea. It destroys that because it says every single health insurance plan has to follow what the Federal Government says. So now they're going to define what health insurance is and that's all there is, one definition. And anybody else that doesn't follow that definition, you know what the bill says. You're going to get fined if you're offered health insurance that doesn't fit with what the government guidelines say. So this trillion dollars is wrong.
The other thing they did was they took the trillion dollars and they took the time to calculate this in such a way that the revenue was coming in but the real expenses of the program hadn't hit their peak yet. So they cheated on the two different time scales as to when the money was coming in versus when the costs were going to come. So, in fact, the trillion as the Senate has calculated it is closer to $2 trillion, which is $2 trillion we don't have.
I think the gentlewoman Congresswoman Foxx said that there was a survey done that said that Americans believe there is more probability that we're going to discover aliens in outer space than the fact that this thing is ever going to be anything other than a big budget-busting deficit, driving deficit spending. And, you know, there is a pretty good reason why Americans have that common sense, because we've tried these things before. The Federal Government has tried Medicare and Medicaid, and we see their costs are going out of control, and we're told, Trust us. Medicare and Medicaid are going out of control, so we're going to take the whole system over and run it by the government and it's not going to go out of control.
I yield to my good friend from Pennsylvania.
Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. I appreciate that, Mr. Akin.
To that point on Medicare, because of the baby boomer generation, utilization is going up. Those costs are climbing. But just this past week we heard from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. They released their 31-page actuarial report on the Pelosi health care plan on what would this do to Medicare. You know what? You're going to have to make that poster a little larger because what the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services--which is the Medicare agency, and they're nonpartisan. That's not a partisan report. It comes from the people who actually run the Medicare and Medicaid systems in the country. As they looked at this bill when they scored it, they said that this would increase costs to the Medicare program over the next 10 years by $289 billion. So I'm afraid we're going to have to budget for a little larger poster, because with the Pelosi health care bill, it's going to take quite a steep climb beyond where Medicare is already on----
Mr. AKIN. So you're saying that the cost of Medicare is going to go up with this program.
Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Absolutely, $289 billion is what the Medicare agency----
Mr. AKIN. Now, wait a minute. My understanding was that what we were cutting was 400 or $500 billion out of Medicare in order to pay for that trillion. How then is the cost of Medicare going to go up if we're cutting $500 billion? How do the mathematics work?
Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. You know what? I have asked that question many times since I came here in January, how does the math work in this Chamber, because it doesn't add up.
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