W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. You can take your employees and unload them on the Federal Government, and if you do that, how much money does it save?

Mr. AKIN. Let's get this straight. You have a company here and the company is being faced with some choices now. Their first choice is just take their employees and dump them into, is it the State or the Federal?

Mr. AKIN. So your costs tripled when you went this route?

Mr. AKIN. I want to mention that there may be some people joining us that are not always here on Wednesday evening. You are not just a Member of Congress, you are not just a former doctor, but you are also from the State of Tennessee, and the State of Tennessee is one of two States that tried this ObamaCare kind of approach to health care. And your experience in the State of Tennessee was did it decrease premiums and decrease the cost of insurance? That is what was promised by the President when he was a Senator. He said we are going to start by reducing premiums by as much as $2,500 a family. Did you believe that?

Mr. AKIN. Here is one that might be of interest to you. I have a couple of examples. This is a quote from Senator Barack Obama and it was on 10-4-08. We will start--talking about his health care proposal--we will start by reducing premiums as much as $2,500 a family. If somebody told me that, I am saying I like that. Our expenses, we go through a lot of money with a bunch of kids and health care. If you are going to reduce my premiums by $2,500 a family, that is a great promise if it is any good. And yet after making this promise, now here we go, not only the Congressional Budget Office which is our bean counters, Republican and Democrat bean counters in the House and Senate, our guys, and this Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services which is the administration's, it is Obama's bean counters, are saying it is going to reduce the premiums by as much as $2,500, both of these offices are saying that the insurance premiums will increase under the Obama care, not decrease by $2,500, it is going to increase and it is going to increase by, I think they are saying--let's see, here it is: Americans who buy their own health insurance plans will pay an average of $2,100 a year more for their policies. So if you are somebody going out and buying your health insurance, instead of decreasing by $2,500, it is going to increase by $2,100. That is a little different story. That is the sort of thing that gets people upset. We are joined by a doctor with a medical opinion on this subject.

Mr. AKIN. The promise was if you don't pass the stimulus bill, this was a year ago, you could have unemployment above 8 percent. I wish we hadn't passed it because our unemployment is now 10 percent. You were on the floor here about a year ago saying it wasn't going to work. It wasn't that we were being pessimistic, but we learned from history from Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Secretary of the Treasury. He said this economic approach of the government spending tons of money doesn't fix this problem of unemployment and recession. It just doesn't work. After trying it for 8 years, it wasn't that we were rocket scientists, it is just we learned a little something from history. Yet we get this one promise that if you don't do this, unemployment is going to go as high as 8 percent. Instead it went to 10 when we spent whatever it was, $700 billion or $800 billion. That is just amazing. That is one of the promises. I was thinking about the health care promises, but you're right on that.

Mr. AKIN. So we are getting this radical, one statement says one thing and yet when you look at it, it is the exact opposite.

Mr. AKIN. Do you think we really know the consequences? I don't think people have a clue what the consequences are.

Mr. AKIN. Madam Speaker, I appreciate being recognized. As we do on occasion on Wednesday, after the main part of the House business is closed, we have an opportunity to take a look at various topics and subjects. Usually we have chosen subjects of significant importance to Americans, ones that affect everybody's lives. And it might seem odd in that we have already passed the government takeover of health care bill that we would go back to that bill, but I think there is continuing information that is being released that a lot of people may not have known about when the bill was passed, additional facts and figures which are, at a minimum, quite disturbing. The facts and figures that I thought that would be important to talk a little bit about today are the facts and figures that come from the President's own people, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. These are people that the administration has chosen. They are a group of people who are taking a good look at the bill that was proposed and has been passed, what its implications are and some of the financial facts. So this was something that was actually approved by the Obama administration. This was not the House Congressional Budget Office, which is viewed as being fairly bipartisan and has its own numbers. But these facts have just come out recently. We have to assume the President knew them, and the facts are in sharp contradiction, in complete disagreement with statements made by the President himself. So I think we need to take a look at some of these things. Particularly, there was the claim in the health care bill that we have to bend the cost curve down because the numbers financially, for our Nation, we can't continue to have increasing health care costs. Everything was centered on the fact that we are spending too much on health care. First of all, of course, the premise of that is a little odd. If you are a sick person, maybe you are not spending too much on health care. Maybe you spent what you needed to get well. But we are looking when that comment is made on what the government is spending on health care, particularly Medicare and Medicaid. So we are saying the government runs Medicaid and Medicare and they are spending too much, so the government needs to take it all over. But the whole thing was sold on we are going to bend the cost curve down so Medicare and Medicaid, also health care in America, will cost less. Here we have Obama's hand-picked Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services saying that, in fact, this bill is going to increase the cost of health care. Well, that is kind of odd because the whole logic for doing it was because we are going to decrease it. And now we are hearing it will increase it. We are going to look at some of the different promises, quotes, and comments. I am joined by a good friend of mine from Pennsylvania, and hopefully we will have some other guests on the floor tonight. I will introduce things first, and then we will discuss this. This was an attempt to try to summarize the 2,000-page bill. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, this picture may be a little tough. I don't know if it is worth 2,000 pages or not, but it is a tough picture. This is a rough idea what the government has to take over on the bill we just passed. So obviously it is going to be complicated. It shouldn't surprise us when we see this and ask: Is this going to save money? The answer now from Obama's own people is, No, this is going to cost more money than it is going to save. So this is one of those things, just to get a sense of how complex the change is, and people are asking our offices all the time: When is this going to take place? For instance, those of us in Congress, we lose our health care coverage with this bill. So we are asking ourselves: When do we no longer have health insurance; and where do we have to go to buy it? Well, you have to go to an open exchange. And there are a lot of questions about how is it that the Federal Government is going to take over one-sixth of the U.S. economy and somehow make it more efficient than what we have right now. The answer is they are not. They are not. The authorities appointed by the Obama administration again say it is not going to be more efficient, it is going to be more expensive. There were all kinds of promises that we heard about, and I think it is important to go back and look at some of those things. Congressman Thompson from Pennsylvania may remember some of those quotes. First, this is one that the President said: If you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare or Medicaid or the VA, nothing will require your employer to change the coverage with the doctor you have. Try to explain that to the Members of Congress who are all losing their health insurance. This doesn't even pass the laugh test. This is ridiculous to make this statement. The proposal that is before us, and you can probably technically say first, if you are among those who already have a health insurance policy, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change. Well, for how long? Well, until the bill goes into effect; then it will make you change. So this is really something here. Particularly the people who are going to be rather cynical when they read this are the people who are the Medicare seniors on Medicare Advantage. I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people are in Medicare Advantage. You are going to have half a billion dollars taken out, $500 billion being taken out of Medicare Advantage. And obviously when you take that money out, the people on that plan are not going to have that same plan. About 50 percent of the seniors in Medicare Advantage are not going to have the same thing. I want to contrast back and forth, the President says something, but yet, it taint necessarily so, as the song goes.

Mr. AKIN. Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate my colleagues joining me here tonight and for being a part of an important discussion. It is an ongoing story.

Mr. AKIN. I have not jumped in from a personal point of view because you guys are all experts. I am just the poor sucker that receives the services. I am a cancer survivor. I happened to have taken a look at the cancer survival rates in foreign countries that have socialized medicine. You notice the U.K. survival rate of cancer in men is a whole lot less than it is in the U.S. Well, why would that be? Is it that the cancer technology is different? I don't think so. I think the deal on cancer is if you've got it, you want to get treated as quick as you can. So what happens in the U.S., you don't have the same waiting line. Now, you start putting those waiting lines in and it starts to affect your statistics of what's going to happen on a disease. That's what we talk about when you all of a sudden hear your doctor say, oh, by the way, you're doing great, Blaine, but little detail, you have cancer. That kind of gets your attention. And you think, I better get that dealt with right away. They say, well, that's just fine, but you are going to have to wait for, you know, whatever it is. You are going to have to wait 6 months to get treated. You got melanoma, that's probably not a real good idea to be waiting 6 months. I have a good friend that's a doctor friend of mine, Steve Smith. He has told me that on these kinds of things, you just don't want waiting lines. You just don't want socialized medicine. His advice to me is the same as the doctor friends we have down here, just repeal this piece of junk. That's what he is saying. My good friend from Missouri, Congressman Luetkemeyer.

Mr. AKIN. Wow.

Mr. AKIN. Less access or, as you used the word, rationing.

Mr. AKIN. Let's get the exact quote.

Mr. AKIN. This is part of that same report that we were just talking about that has just now been released conveniently after the bill was voted on.

Mr. AKIN. I yield to my good friend from Pennsylvania.

Mr. AKIN. Thirty-six million more people go into Medicare--now, you don't have to be too much of a wizard on business--36 million people go into Medicare that weren't there before, it's going to cost more money. And then you are going to cut $575 billion out of the program. So now you are doing two things: one, you are adding millions of people into the program, you are taking billions out of the program, and you are saying, hey, maybe your quality of health care is going to go down. That's pretty straightforward.

Mr. AKIN. What you just said is so common sense and straightforward. You are going to take how many more people and put them into Medicare?

Mr. AKIN. So I guess from what you are saying, a quick summary, 31 years in medicine, you thought maybe you knew something about medicine, decided to take the huge amount of effort to come to Congress so you would have something to say about the debate. And in spite of the fact that you tried everything other than carrier pigeons and smoke signals, the White House refused to honor their promise to let you look at line by line what's going on. So the logical conclusion is you are going to run for President? Is that where we are going?

Mr. AKIN. That's an incredible question, isn't it, the control of the information, the spin on the whole thing, the promises initially of it being a transparent process, it's going to be on C-SPAN, everybody can watch it, and in fact everything is closed doors. A couple of our doctors have left, but, Dr. Roe, were you invited to take part in the drafting and putting this bill together? Were you allowed to go into their meetings? I think that's an important question.

Mr. AKIN. That is really frustrating, isn't it, to basically give people a mushroom treatment. You keep them in the dark, smother them in some sort of a fertilizing material, and we tell them these things: if you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what. And yet the report that you are talking about makes it clear that this just flat is not true. So it is a frustrating thing. And in a sense, all of these things are falling out now, and it wasn't so obvious before. My good friend from Louisiana, Congressman Scalise, please join us.

Mr. AKIN. Influence the debate with any facts? My goodness, people might not vote for this thing.

Mr. AKIN. Wow. We've been joined by a good friend of mine, Congressman Lamborn. Welcome to the discussion. We're just taking a look at the fact that, you know, you'd think logically: What in the world are these Congressmen doing, standing on the floor, railing about some bill that has already been passed? Well, part of the reason is there was some truth in what Speaker Pelosi said, which is that you've got to pass the bill to find out what's in it. We're still discovering all kinds of surprises. In a way, that's what we've been talking about tonight--things that the Obama accountants in the Medicare/Medicaid group are analyzing in the bill. They're saying, Whoops. It's not going to bend the cost curve down; it's going to bend the cost curve up, so it's going to be more expensive. Uh-oh, it's going to cost jobs. Anyway, please join us.

Mr. AKIN. Was that the cornhusker kickback?

Mr. AKIN. I don't want you to make just a final point, but I'd like you to answer this question: The Democrat Governor of Tennessee, before this bill was passed, called this the mother of all unfunded mandates. In other words, one thing State legislators hate is when we up here pass some piece of legislation which busts their budgets. Then they have to take the political hit for the fact that we're fiscally irresponsible and legislatively irresponsible. Now, is this a budget buster for a State?