Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

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Ms. FOXX. I thank you, Congressman Akin, and I thank you for leading this special order. I want to build on what you and Mr. Jordan have said. I had a town hall meeting in my district on Monday. The people in my district are commonsense people. And they are saying, we just want commonsense solutions. They want the truth. They want the simple truth about what this bill is going to do and what needs to be done.

I find it just unbelievable that these folks who are in charge here, the Democrats who are in charge, have such a low opinion of the American people. I want to talk about that for just a minute because I think that is part of the problem that we have. There is an article today in the Washington Times, and it says, House Democrats Tuesday defended the idea of tying together the Senate health care overhaul bill and a companion bill of repairs that could spare Members from having to vote outright for the Senate's tax on high-cost insurance plans and other contentious provisions. Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said the public isn't going to be worried about how Congress passed a bill, but rather what's in the bill, and won't differentiate between the procedural paths. This is his quote: ``Do you think any American is going to make a distinction,'' he asked? ``I don't think any American, real American out there, is going to make a distinction between the two.''

Well, the people I was dealing with on Monday are real Americans. I can tell him that. And they don't like the Slaughter provision. I want to add to that a comment that was made by Speaker Pelosi during a discussion with bloggers on Monday, saying she liked the idea of tying the bill to the rule. And her quote was, ``Because people don't have to vote on the Senate bill.''

Now, the public understands that if these folks in charge are trying to keep their people from voting on something that there must be something wrong with it.

Mr. AKIN. There is something that smells, doesn't it? This thing has been sitting around for about a half a year, and the more people find out about it, the more they hate it. A week or two ago, I just started making a list of all the people who would hate this bill, and there are just circles of Americans, one on top of the other.

If you are an older person you don't want all that half a trillion dollars taken out of Medicare.

If you are pro-life you think, well, I don't like abortion. Well, if you don't like abortion, how do you like the fact that your taxpayer dollar that you are forced to pay is paying for abortion? That to me is different than just--I mean one thing people talk about is choice. I don't call it choice, I call it killing children. But even if you accept the idea of choice, some people think abortion is okay, some people think it is not. But to take the people who think it is not and force them to pay to do abortions where they think it is killing a child even if other people don't, no wonder people don't like this thing.

Or illegal immigrants getting medical care on the back of the taxpayer. I could see there are so many people that wouldn't like it.

Ms. FOXX. Would my colleague yield?

Mr. AKIN. I do yield.

Ms. FOXX. I think another thing that they have a hard time understanding is how a Member of Congress could lambast the bill one minute and then say we need to vote on it the next. And I want to say Chairwoman Slaughter, the chairwoman of the Rules Committee, who is now doing everything she can to get this bill passed with the trick that she has come up with, the Slaughter sleight of hand I call it, she said last year, right after the Senate bill was passed, ``The Senate should go back to the drawing board.'' And she further said, ``The Senate bill will do almost nothing to reform health care, but will be a windfall for insurance companies.''

So the public is really confused because one day these folks say one thing and then the next day they are doing everything they can to destroy our country and all that we stand for to get these bills passed. It's got to be terribly confusing.

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