Instructing Certain Committees to Report Legislation Replacing the Job-Killing Health Care Law

Floor Speech

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Mr. DOGGETT. Madam Speaker, with last year's important health insurance reform law, we provided real guarantees to American families against insurance monopoly abuses. Today, Republicans tell these families, ``Forget the binding guarantees. We have 12 platitudes for you.''

This isn't a Republican prescription--this is a placebo. And for the American middle class, it's a very bitter pill indeed.

Yesterday, House Republicans, in a remarkable measure, with one vote, decided to increase the national debt, reduce the solvency of the Medicare Trust Fund, raise insurance premiums, and charge seniors more for their health care.

During the last 12 years that these Republicans were in charge, 6 of them with near total domination of the government here in Washington under the Bush-Cheney administration, they failed to enact even one of these 12 platitudes in this flimsy 2-page excuse of a bill. Twelve health care platitudes up now, missing in action for 12 years.

Who wouldn't be for some of them? They are broad platitudes that propose something that they apparently kept hidden under a bushel for the last 16 years and now will unveil. Well, I think it will just be the same old tired, rejected, retread Republican proposals to give more income tax breaks to those at the top.

If you believe that they have got something new to offer to genuinely reform our health care system in a way that will help middle-class Americans instead of health insurance monopolies, I think you will want to buy some of that Republican ice cream that helps you lose weight. Our families don't need Republican platitudes; they need real help.

I will have to stay I think the tea party types are right about one thing. There are dangers from soaring debt, dangers they forgot for a decade. There are dangers from Big Government. But, you know, that's not the only threat our families face. They face threats from big banks and from big insurance monopolies.

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Mr. DOGGETT. Our middle-class families are threatened not only from the challenges of government, but from the big pharmaceutical monopolies that charge our people more than anyplace in the world, from the giant insurance monopolies. And sometimes, sometimes our families need government to come down on our side because otherwise those giant economic forces will take advantage of our families by writing out the very protection that the sick and injured need the most, protection that they write into the fine print of an insurance policy that no ordinary person can understand, where they are told that they are not covered anymore, that they have a preexisting condition, that you have reached your policy limits and cannot get the care that your doctor says is vital to sustain your life, that this policy just doesn't cover sick people or that it can be rescinded.

I say we need to provide people genuine protection. That's what we did last year. That's what they want to eliminate this year. Let's be on the side of the people, not the 12 Republican platitudes to benefit insurance monopolies.

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