The Star Democrat - Harris Answers Questions on Health Care, NSA, and More

News Article

By Andrew Sharp

From immigration to NSA spying to government spending, U.S. Rep. Andy Harris, R-1st, covered a wide range of questions from those in attendance at his town hall meeting Thursday, Aug. 22, at the Talbot Senior Center in Easton.

Criticism of government spending was a major focus of his remarks, and he emphasized the need to continue to cut the deficit. He said Congress had managed to keep the deficit to $680 billion, but they still had a lot of work to do.

Someone asked whether the recent $1.65 million federal grant to Talbot County and the town of Easton to build a sewer line was appropriate.

"We as a country have to come to grips with how much money we want to send to Washington so they can send it back," Harris said. "Money coming to Easton came from Easton."

It is inefficient to send it off so it can be sent back, he said.

"You should send the least amount possible to Washington," instead letting funds go to local government, which would be more responsive. He pointed to Medicare as an example of government inefficiency, saying it would never be fairly and efficiently run.

Harris was asked if he would vote to defund the Affordable Care Act. He said rather than trying to defund it, he would work to delay it for a year, possibly using the debt limit as leverage. "The Affordable Care Act pretty clearly is not implementable the way it ought to be this year," he said. "You're treating individuals differently than you're treating large corporations ... the thing is a mess ... it's a lead weight around the neck of the economy."
Harris said Obamacare's mandates for businesses with a certain number of employees encourages part-time hiring. "The vast majority of jobs created we are bragging about are part-time jobs," he said.

Harris was asked if he had any alternatives to the Affordable Care Act. He said he supports making sure that everyone with a pre-existing condition has access to health insurance, but that had already been in effect in Maryland, funded by a tax on health care. He also said he supported removing caps on insurance benefits, because health care costs reach those caps quickly with treatment of diseases like cancer. He said it would cost little to remove those caps to insurance, and it should have been done a long time ago.

Striking a different tone from his earlier remarks about federal funding, Harris said people who can't afford health insurance already have Medicaid, so they have access to health care.
Rather than force young people to buy health care or pay a penalty, which he called a hammer over the head approach, he said they should get a tax credit for buying insurance, and make it attractive for them by offering low-cost catastrophic insurance and lowering the price by bringing competition to the marketplace. He did not go into much detail about how this would be done except by allowing people to shop for insurance across state lines.

When asked about making use of energy resources in the U.S. like natural gas and oil, Harris spoke highly of the boom in production brought by new fracking technologies. He said it has been estimated that North American countries could produce all the fossil fuel energy we need.

"I think that's an important foreign policy step."

The time has come to be an exporter of oil and natural gas, he said, but "standing in the way is an unrealistic view that by limiting our consumption of fossil fuel we can somehow do something to prevent global warming."

He said developing economies in other countries are increasing their energy demand as standards of living rise. In addition, "I believe the actual science is uncertain," he said, saying statistics from even those who believe in climate change show global temperatures have not risen in the last decade.

"We have to understand why it hasn't; before we spend literally, worldwide, trillions of dollars on this, we should understand exactly what's happening, and even more importantly, whether ... by spending that money, we have a chance of affecting it in any significant way. Because I don't believe we are going to convince the rest of the countries of the world not to use more energy."

Media reports on the recent global warming statistics cite climate scientists as saying the leveling off of temperature rise is only temporary.

Harris acknowledged that if sea levels are rising, and the Eastern Shore is slowly sinking, as has been widely reported, it poses a significant issue for the area. "But we have to understand it more before we do things like threaten our economic growth."

On other economic issues, Harris said he does not support a higher minimum wage. He stated the laws of economics are simple and if there is a minimum wage, people on the bottom economic rungs won't get hired. McDonalds can't afford to hire people for $10 or $11 an hour, he said.

He also defended proposed Republican cuts of food stamps, saying food stamp spending has skyrocketed in the past decade, and that the proposed $40 billion in cuts would be spread out over the next decade, making it only a 5 percent cut.

Harris strongly condemned the NSA's surveillance of communications metadata, pointing to recent news that the government's secret court had ruled the NSA illegally gathered data.

"We have to put constraints on it," he said. "The end can't justify the means on that. We give away too much."

Suppose the Talbot County sheriff decided to search every house in the county unannounced, Harris said. "He's going to find some drugs and he's going to make some arrests," he said, but people would not accept that kind of surprise search just because it got results. "That's exactly what the NSA did," he said.

Harris was also asked whether he suppported a path to citizenship for people living in the country illegaly.

"No," he said. "If you came here illegally, you should be very happy if what we do is just to allow you to remain and contribute to the economy illegally."

For those whose parents brought them when they were children, he might support allowing them to stay and work, but would draw the line at letting them become citizens. He is also willing to talk about allowing temporary workers for the economy, he said, but "the discussion can't include citizenship."

Source