Challenges and Opportunities
Floor Speech
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Mr. HUIZENGA of Michigan. Thanks. I appreciate my good friend from Missouri putting this together and having this conversation.
This is a conversation we need to have with the American people. There is obviously a lot of misinformation that is going out over the airwaves as we have talked about a number of times, and I think people are looking for that information. I know I have been tweeting out a few of the articles that I have come across on my iPhone here.
For those of you out there watching, it is @RepHuizenga. I would love for you to follow me and take a look at this, this #Time4Solutions hash tag that we have going here because it is talking about some of those challenges, as well as the solutions that, I think, we are all looking for.
I appreciate you pointing out to my friend and colleague from Michigan, Kerry Bentivolio, who is a great veteran himself of Iraq, as well as earlier times, and has done a couple of tours. For me, that World War II Memorial was something very special to be able to be a part of. That first day, there weren't television cameras around, there wasn't media. There wasn't anybody around except for those of us who cared about making sure that our veterans had an opportunity to go in and see a memorial that they earned.
I will tell you, as someone who is the son of a disabled World War II veteran, a man who suffered a B-24 crash in Italy in 1944, I can tell you I know how powerful it is for him, how powerful it was for his buddies that he was able to go to the memorial, and how powerful it was for me as a family member to be along on that very special day. The least that we can do is to open that up.
It is not just the World War II Memorial. It is the Korea memorial. I had a chance to bring a group of veterans from the Grand Rapids area in my district and in and around Kentwood and those areas. We went down to the World War II Memorial, and we also went down to the Korea memorial. That is where most of them were. They were greeted with no crowds, but the same barricades, as well as a park ranger who was in a very tough spot. He told me, Congressman, I am here to tell you that this monument is closed, this park is closed. I said, Well, respectfully I am here to tell you that I am going to help my constituents exercise their First Amendment rights and open up that barricade. We were able to get some people in there.
Today, as I was coming in, I drove past the Martin Luther King memorial. It was the same thing. There were buses lined up on the street with their flashers going, and there was a tremendous number of people in there exercising their First Amendment right, that civil disobedience that had gone on. The gate was kicked open, and they were in there going and seeing that memorial to a great man the way that it should be, open and available, right now, without the excuses, without the rented barricades, without those other things.
I also want to touch a little bit on the health care side as we are going through this. I appreciate you saying it is not just challenges, but also the opportunities. Frankly, we need to be talking to each other, to get to those solutions. This hash tag, #Time4Solutions, is very timely. We have had a Senate leader who has said absolutely no negotiations, none.
Now we are finally getting there, I think because they are hearing from their constituents back home that we need you to be talking.
The same with the White House. I think the White House even came around a little sooner than what the Senate leader did. But it is time to make sure that we are having these negotiations and these conversations.
A lot of us know the challenge, many of them are very well known, the signup glitches that happened. Glitches might be charitable, shall we say, for what was going on.
But one of my colleagues from Michigan, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers, had put forward an op-ed not that long ago, and I have a copy of it here that I was reading. He is talking about the privacy threat.
If you look at the hub, the data hub that is being built, you know, our health care records are going to be exposed to a tremendous number of people.
Your privacy information, your private information, health care information, yours, mine, all the constituents that are out there watching this, their information, your information is at risk. Your information is at risk, and it is time that we do something about it.
Now, who hasn't heard the ``if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor?'' Well, maybe not so much.
This is one of the things I just tweeted out. CNNMoney today was reporting about doctor choice and ObamaCare--not so much. This is CNN. This isn't me. This is CNN.
They are saying that, for example, there was a major insurer that was offering policies in 14 different States, and what they are saying is that they are looking at the more heavier areas of population, eliminating up to half of the doctors.
Think of that. Half of the doctors that currently you could go to if you had one of their off-exchange plans won't be available to you. In a lesser populated area, it is ``only'' going to be 10 or 20 percent of those same doctors.
I can tell you, I sat, for a number of years, on the Michigan Rural Health Association board of directors as we were looking at health care issues in Michigan, especially in the rural areas. If you are starting to limit health care choices, even more so than what they already are in some of these rural areas, the damage that is going to be done to people and that relationship that they have with their doctor and with their health care provider--a place where you maybe have to do tele-medicine just to be able to get the proper diagnosis and the things that are going on.
We have all heard, ``If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.'' Maybe not so much.
Oh, but the plans are going to be more affordable. Well, they had the number right. There was a discussion that this was going to save $2,500 for the average family. Unfortunately, we now know it is the right number, but the wrong direction. So it is actually going to cost the average family, like mine--I have got five young kids--it is going to cost $2,500 additional. That is the wrong direction.
Some of the lesser-knowns--I will give you an example. My nephew, Andrew, is putting himself through college. He is working as a waiter in a nice restaurant.
A couple of months ago they called everybody in for the staff meeting and said, by the way, we are going to be starting this soon: No more than 29 hours per week. No more than 29 hours per week.
And he said, you know, Uncle Bill, I can get through this. It is not going to be easy. It is not going to be my choice, but I can get through it.
But he is looking at these colleagues, these single moms, these single moms that are saying, now where do I go for another 10 hours? Now how do I figure out where I am going to make ends meet and how I am going to make ends meet?
I think that is why we have seen letters by those big Republican organizations like SEIU, the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO, not exactly institutions normally related and associated with the Republican Party. They have put in formal letters saying, Wait a minute; this is not being implemented the way that it was supposed to be implemented.
They are afraid that there is an attack on the 40-hour work week, as well they should be afraid. That is exactly what is happening right now, and we need to be making sure that we are pushing back at that.
The medical device tax has been brought up a little bit. This has a significant impact in Michigan. Stryker Corporation, out of the Kalamazoo area, they have said publicly that it is going to cost them 1,000 jobs, 1,000 jobs. All right?
It is also going to be hundreds of millions of dollars in new taxes that are being laid on. This ObamaCare tax, it has been deemed a tax by the Supreme Court, so let's talk about it in the terms of a tax.
It is time that we repealed this tax. It is time that we not take those 1,000 jobs away from Stryker; time that we not take those jobs out of Ann Arbor, an innovative hub; time that we not take those jobs away from the next entrepreneur in Grand Rapids, on Pill Hill, Medical Mile, as it is sometimes called; that we make sure that they have got the same opportunities, not less opportunities, the same opportunities. That isn't going to happen under this.
As you had pointed out, coverage, the mandatory, forced coverage of abortive services that is mandated in this bill, is absolutely wrong.
I have a company that is gaining some prominence in my district called Autocam. John Kennedy, the majority stakeholder and president and CEO of Autocam, was just in Washington sharing his story last week.
As a devout Catholic, he had made the decision that that wasn't going to be something that he would offer in his plans. They are self-insured, and if his employees wanted to go do that, that was their choice, but he wasn't going to be forced to pay for it, until this bill came along and said: It doesn't matter what your personal beliefs are.
It doesn't matter that you own the company. It doesn't matter that your religion says this is wrong. We
know better. This government knows better, and we are going to force you to spend that money to provide a service that you wholeheartedly disagree with.
Does that sound like the American way to you?
Does that sound like the American way to any of us? Absolutely not, yet, somehow we are viewing it as acceptable.
Waivers for the politically-connected, as has been talked about; as long as you have got a good friend that is either in the White House or at Health and Human Services, we can probably work something out for you.
Now, how does that feel?
Now, today though, we finally maybe got to the root of it. The Senate had been going along, no negotiations, no negotiations, no negotiations.
Oh, but if you want to spend some more money, if you want to roll back those automatic, across-the-board cuts that we had agreed to 2 years ago, maybe we will start talking about some reforms. That is what it is.
As we talked about, this is about spending. This is about a group of people that want to see government grow. They want to see the footprint of the government just smash down on top of everything here and take control of our daily lives. That is really what the problem is.
So now we are seeing what the Senate is really all about. It is about spending. It is about more spending and more control for them. Now, that has got to stop.
Now, the opportunity side. I want to wrap up because I know we have got some other colleagues that are here, and we are having a great conversation and, again, I appreciate your hashtag, Time4Solutions, because this really is about those opportunities, as you talked about, the invention of Velcro and how we got there.
I have learned that most of the times you learn more from the things in life that are tough, not the easy things. Major shifts in society are not easy. They might be simple, but sometimes those simple things aren't real easy. Well, this is neither simple nor easy, and it is because it is the wrong direction.
First and foremost, we need the White House to acknowledge these problems. They won't even acknowledge these problems. It is all hunky-dory, peaches and cream here in Washington, D.C. We are rolling this program out.
Excuse us. We had to make sure that you don't worry about those ``glitches'' that were in the system as we rolled it out. Please don't look at those exemptions and carve-outs that we have had. Please don't, whatever you do, please, oh, please, don't talk about how this is a growing frustration that the American people have, because that would somehow acknowledge that the American people might know better than they do down at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
We have to acknowledge those problems. Words speak louder--I am sorry--actions speak louder than words. The words are, everything is fine. The actions are very, very different though. The actions are very, very different out of this administration, as they have signed 17 changes into this law, as we have seen these carve-outs, as we have seen them do things like make sure that the individual mandate is kept in place, but the other mandates are not put in.
I know my colleagues are here too, and I want to give them time, so I am going to wrap up with this. My friend from Missouri, thank you for doing this.
It is time that we do make those substantive changes and restore some faith, restore some faith with the American people, that we have their best interest, and make sure that Congress can live under the same laws that they vote for and that they pass.
I appreciate you having this conversation tonight.
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