Providing For Consideration Of Senate Amendments To H.R. 4872, Health Care And Education Reconciliation Act Of 2010

Floor Speech

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Ms. FOXX. I thank my colleague from California for yielding time.

I want to say that it has been said over and over again that Republicans want to block health care reform. We don't want to block health care reform. We want commonsense health care reform--not an overhaul of the system that is a government takeover of health insurance and health care in our country.

One of the things that people tell me they dislike the most about the way the Congress operates is when the Democrats put together two bills that are totally unrelated because one of those bills cannot get passed on its own. That is what happened in the reconciliation bill, a bill totally unrelated to health care where the government is going to take over the student loan program in this country making the Federal Government the fifth largest bank. That is reprehensible to the people of this country. We shouldn't have done that.

I offered an amendment in the Rules Committee to separate those two. The bill on student loans should have stood on its own but it can't and so it got attached to this bill. These are minor technical amendments, but we were denied major amendments. One hundred nine amendments were offered in the Rules Committee on Saturday. We had 13 hours of debate. Some of our amendments were excellent amendments and should have been accepted.

We want reform. Republicans want to change many things. We want to take care of preexisting conditions; we want to lower the cost. The problem with this bill is it doesn't lower costs; it makes them larger.

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