W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. So this is going to be a good deal. Everybody is going to have medical insurance, but you just won't have any doctor to go to see. Dr. Fleming.

Mr. AKIN. I really appreciate your bringing that up. I am just thinking, picture yourself instead of being a doctor as being a salesman, and you are given an assignment that you are supposed to go out and sell something. Say you are the President and your job is to go out and make this case. We have three huge entitlements that are destroying the solvency of our country. One of them is Medicare, one of them is Medicaid, both methodical things, and the government is running these things and they are destroying the economy because they are out of control, they are spending so much money. So your assignment is to go out and sell people that we ought to have the government take over the rest of the medical part. That is a little counterintuitive. You could be a good salesman, and it is hard to make that case. We have it messed up in this and this area, so give us the whole thing. It takes a little bit of courage to even try to do that. Dr. Fleming, please.

Mr. AKIN. So it kind of depends whether its your bill or my bill, I guess.

Mr. AKIN. I appreciate your perspective and particularly calling attention to the fact that this reconciliation is hijacking the entire legislative process. He is willing to do this, to pass this particular piece of legislation. My good friend from Pennsylvania, somebody said that if you've got a busted faucet or sink in your kitchen, a smart thing to do is to fix the faucet or the sink, not to remodel the whole kitchen. Does it appear to you that the difference between the two political parties on this issue is that the Democrats have really decided they're going to remodel the kitchen, whether you want it or not, and the Republicans, we have a lot of different health care bills as Republicans, but ours are all fix the sink or fix the drain. We're taking a look at what we have, seeing what needs to be fixed to make it better, and we're selectively doing that, whereas it seems the Democrats have the concept they're just going to re-create everything. Take one-sixth of the economy, have the government run it. Does that seem like it fits for you?

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to join you here once again as we get a chance to take a look at Special Orders, and also I am joined by some of my distinguished colleagues. We are going to be looking once again at a subject that has really absorbed the attention of Americans now for almost 9 months, the question of health care. It is still before us. Today was a little bit of a unique day for me because the President came to my district in the St. Louis area, and he wanted to deliver speeches and tell everybody that they should vote for the health care bill. He and I have a difference of opinion on the bill. I think his opinion is that if people just know more about this bill, they will like it. My opinion is the more we have looked at it, the more that people have taken a look at it publicly, the uglier they think it gets and the more they hate it. Fortunately, the poll data seems to be on my side, and the more you look at the bill, the more it seems it has problems with it. We have, today, joining us some distinguished colleagues from all over the country. We have two doctors and an attorney, and just, I think, a businessman and an engineer. It almost sounds like the start of some sort of a joke. But this isn't a joke, unfortunately. This is a very serious subject, indeed. So I am going to recognize Dr. Broun from Georgia, a gentleman who has spent a lifetime practicing medicine and then got elected to Congress, and now he is trying to straighten things out. I am going to have him, followed by Dr. Fleming as well. So, Dr. Broun, thank you for joining us tonight. Let's talks a little bit about this health care bill.

Mr. AKIN. So remodeling the kitchen--

Mr. AKIN. There you go. That's another counterintuitive thing. This whole bill seems to be counterintuitive, doesn't it? Let me ask a question. We have two of you who are medical doctors here, one who's a judge, one's a former medical professional. I'm an engineer by training, and now we're Congressmen. And one of the things that we have to do and we should pay attention to is our constituents. We get calls from people saying, Hey, I've got a problem with this, Congressman. You need to help me. And they ask us to do some weird stuff sometimes. Like, I remember the first time they asked me to get them a job. And I'm thinking, Hey, I'm not a job agency. I'm a Congressman. But we're asked to do a lot of different things, and we try to help out. Now, my question to you is, let's say we jump off the abyss, and now we've got this mess, and we have people back home calling us saying, My mom, my mom is sick. She got cancer. She got it bad, and she's going to need help right away. So I went to get some health care for my mom. They said I have got to wait 6 months. What I'm asking you is this question: How, as Congressmen, are we going to get through this mess to try to help our constituents? And even worse, how are our constituents ever going to get from here over to get their medical care? Does that concern you? Congressman Gohmert, do you want to take a shot at that? This doesn't look friendly to me.

Mr. AKIN. Now wait a minute. You have got me all confused, Congressman Gohmert because my understanding is, Republicans--from what the President has said--don't have any ideas. We don't have any bills. Of course he also said that he read our bills, so that was a little confusing too. But what you just outlined was basically getting up at 50,000 feet, looking at the problem and saying, We really don't need the government to get into all this detail. We simply take the amount of money that the government's spending right now. You break it into pieces, just designate the number of families in our country, and you've already got something that's going to work.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. It sounds like what you're saying is that you can chrome- plate a pig, but it's still a pig when you're done. Go ahead. Yes.

Mr. AKIN. So, in other words, what's happening is you have other approaches to solving some of the problems of health care, not trying to have the government take it all over but, rather, to fix various component parts. We have a Rules Committee. If you want to offer a suggestion, for instance, they prohibit you from offering it as an amendment to get an up-or-down vote on it; is that correct?

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be able to join you, my colleagues, and those gathered in various places around the buildings here near the Capitol. I have had the opportunity, having served in government as a legislator for a number of years, to serve both in the majority, in the minority, but also in the wilderness. This last year and a half has been different; I have served in the wilderness because we have actually come up to the edge of the abyss with a piece of legislation that promises to be so threatening and so destructive to our country that should we decide to swallow this poison pill and pass this piece of legislation, America will never be the same. I have seen, in the majority and in the minority, pieces of legislation which are harmful and that may be poor solutions to some particular problem or solutions to a problem that doesn't exist or excuses just to have more taxes and more government control, but we have never quite seen a threat like the threat that confronts America today, and we, you and I, my friends, who love the red, white, and blue, are looking off the edge. I don't know if you have ever stood on the edge of the rim of the Grand Canyon and looked thousands of feet downward, or if you have ever been on the top of some high skyscraper or bridge and looked off into empty space, but that is where we stand tonight. That is where we stand this week or next week in America. We are standing looking into the abyss, into a piece of legislation which is quite possibly going to be passed. And if it is passed, it will leave our Nation very, very weak, much weaker and unlike anything that we have seen before. It threatens to do two major things: to destroy the quality of health care in America, and to destroy the fiscal integrity of our very country. I am talking, of course, about an old topic, a topic that has been debated now for more than half a year here in Congress. It has absorbed the attention of the Nation, and it is an interesting topic because the more that it has been around, it seems the more the public is aware of it, and the more they see of it, the more they don't like it. In fact, as you start to take the covers off the legislation on health care, it becomes a very ugly picture, and the American public is wise. In fact, the statistical information suggests that at least 20 percent more Americans believe that we would be better not passing this piece of legislation and a great majority think we should just scrap it and start over again by systematically defining a problem and fixing it rather than having government take over all of health care. Now, the process, the way that the legislature works historically has been so boring that none of the American public pay any attention to it, but that has changed since we have been in the days of looking into the abyss, the abyss of the destruction of health care and the destruction of our economy. And people are becoming conscious of how it is that bills are passed and how they become law. What would be required to have this health care bill passed would be a process that people call reconciliation. What that means essentially is that the bill would end-run or bypass a safety process in the U.S. Senate. The U.S. Senate has a very conservative way of operating, and that is that you can have a bill that you have 51 Senators who would vote for it--so it would pass if you had a chance to vote on it--but they put this extra caveat, that you have to have 60 Senators agree to bring it up for a vote. So in a sense, everything in the Senate requires a 60 percent approval before it goes to a final vote. Now, there is an exception to that, and that is because of the necessity of dealing with the budget and spending and taxing and some of those issues, that on certain financial kinds of transactions, because of the fact that we can't afford a gridlock, we allow a 50-vote majority to be able to move something along, and that's called reconciliation. But it is not a process that is typically used for a completely new bill on a very broad subject, which is not just specifically a financial kind of thing. We have this quote from our President on this subject of reconciliation, he says, ``Reconciliation is, therefore, the wrong place for policy changes.'' Now, wait a minute now, this is the President saying ``reconciliation is, therefore, the wrong place for policy changes. Isn't the health care bill a policy change? I guess it is. It's a whale of a big policy change. In short, the reconciliation process appears to have lost its proper meaning. A vehicle designed for deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility has been hijacked to facilitate reckless deficits and unsustainable debt. Well, I wish the President would pay attention to his own words. This is what he said, Reconciliation is not a place for policy changes, and yet the health care bill is a massive policy change. It will take over about one-sixth of the U.S. economy. The government will step in and effectively run one-sixth of the U.S. economy with all kinds of rules and regulations and bureaucracies. I guess that's a policy change, Mr. President. In short, the reconciliation process appears to have lost its proper meaning. Indeed, it does. A vehicle designed for deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility, that's what the reconciliation process was supposed to be about, and in fact it's going to be hijacked. It's been hijacked to facilitate what? To facilitate jamming down the throats of the American public a bill that America clearly does not want us to do. They want to take the reconciliation process as a mechanism to jump with all of America into the abyss. So I think it's interesting that after the votes, particularly the vote in Massachusetts where the Democrats do not have 60 votes in the Senate, they don't have one Republican that would support this bill, not one, for people who have served in the legislature, that is a huge warning sign. When you see a total party line vote on something, that means there's some problems. Usually in the legislative process, if it's been done properly, a lot of people have a chance for input, people have a chance to improve and say this part seems to be a little radical, let's go back this way. Usually what you have is more of a mix of people. When you see something being jammed in a process that is not designed--that is, reconciliation--for this massive policy change, and you see not one Republican voting for it, that should be a warning sign for people everywhere, and it is a misuse of reconciliation. And so while the public is saying in poll after poll, survey after survey, phone call after phone call from our districts, stop this train, do not jump into the abyss, do not allow the Federal Government to take over one-sixth of the economy, and yet, what do we see? We see a tremendous determination to jam this bill through, whether the procedure fits or not. But it's my way or the highway, and we're going to do it because we know what's best for you. This is a very high-handed approach, and it is something that does not--never does and never will--produce a good consensus in America. It will be something that will divide America, create a tremendous amount of tension and pressure, end up with lousy health care, and a Federal budget that is even more out of control. Now, if you take a look down here, we have another quote from the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and it says, ``This will take courage.'' In other words, for the Democrats to vote for this bill, it will take courage. What does that mean, it will take courage? Well, if it takes courage, it means somebody is going to be mad, somebody is not going to like it. And so you have to be courageous and stand up to somebody who doesn't want you to vote for this bill. Who do you think the ``somebody'' is? Is it the Republicans? The Republicans don't like it, but we have 80 votes less than the Democrats, so we can't say much of anything about it other than explaining why we don't like it. But our votes don't make the difference. Nancy Pelosi has a whole lot of extra votes. She could have 20 or 30 people vote no and still pass this bill. So why does this take courage? Well, it takes courage because somebody doesn't want it, somebody very much doesn't want it, and they're going to be mad if it's jammed down the throats of the American people. Who is the somebody going to be? You got it, the American public. People are not going to like this bill. So if you vote for it, the point she's making is you're risking your seat because people are going to be mad. It's interesting when the leader is saying it's going to take courage. That says somebody doesn't like it. Now, are there some reasons why people don't like the bill? Well, first of all, this is a rough flowchart trying to describe what happens when the government takes over one-sixth of the U.S. economy. Obviously, there's a whole lot of things being done by private institutions which will be replaced with government institutions, and they've got to figure out how to replace it all. So no wonder it takes almost 3,000 pages of bill to try to put some sort of a scheme together for the government to be running the health care business. Now, on the surface of the whole situation with this bill, this is not an easy sell. As you know, this bill has been around for more than half a year--I guess it's three-quarters of a year. People don't like it very well. The President thinks it's a beautiful bill, but the more that people see it, the less they like it; they think it's an ugly bill. Well, let's just think about the logic of this, stand way back away from all the details of health care. We've got Medicare and Medicaid, both of those have to do with medicine. They are both very large Federal entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid. In fact, the great challenge to the American budget are three entitlements. People say earmarks is what it's all about. Earmarks are 1 percent. Earmarks are not the thing that's really a threat to the budget. The thing that's a threat to the budget are three entitlements: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Two of those have to do with health care--Medicare and Medicaid. And what's the problem with Medicare and Medicaid? Well, they're financially broken, and if they continue as they are right now without changing those laws, they will bankrupt our country. So we've got Medicare and Medicaid, government programs that are currently bankrupting our country. And so what are we trying to sell the American public? Oh, hey, we've got the government running Medicare and Medicaid, they're bankrupting our country, so let's take over all of health care with the government. There is something intuitively counterintuitive about that, isn't there? Why would you want the government to take over something that it's already messing up, that not working financially, that is in the process of bankrupting our country. If you can't do it in a smaller area of Medicare and Medicaid, why do you want to expand it to everybody? So this is kind of a hard sell for the President, and that's why it's taking a lot of courage and why this bill is not moving any too fast and why the public doesn't like it. But there are many, many other reasons. You can see the complexity here, and as you can imagine, when you start to look at the details, you find that it is full of a lot of little devils. One of the things that you find--and I think one of the little devils that is perhaps most noxious to a lot of American people--are the special deals. You see, when you have a piece of legislation that's going to take a lot of courage, you have to put some sugar in it to make people vote for it. And the sugar, of course, comes in the special deal form. So what you find in the legislation--to the best of our knowledge, because the idea about transparency and openness we have not seen, and so we don't actually see exactly what's in this bill in its final form, but you see what it was like in the House, we saw what it was like in the Senate. But we find that it has some of these special little things, that is, that it's going to take $500 billion out of Medicare, but is it taking $500 billion out of Medicare all the way across the country? No. In fact, in the State of Florida, it's not going to take any money out of Medicare Advantage at all. So it won't be coming out in Florida, but in the other States, they do take it out. Well, that was a special deal for somebody in Florida. Then we've got special deals for--I think it was called Louisiana Purchase II for Louisiana; special deals for Massachusetts that Medicare gets these special reimbursements there; going to build a hospital, as I recall, in New Jersey, but not in other places. So you have special deals. That's one of the things that makes this look ugly to the voters because you're not treating every State the same; you're making some States pay more and other ones don't, and you're making some special adjustments for various people. You find there are special adjustments for people who work in a labor union, but somebody who works the same kind of job in a company that's not in a union doesn't get the same break as if you are in a union. So again, this is one of those special deals. The American people in general see that and say that isn't fair, that isn't right, that isn't good legislation, that's special deals. We don't like special deals because they don't treat people equally before the law. Now, when you take a look at the complexity of this chart, what it suggests is that this is going to be expensive. Not only is it going to be expensive, if you've got a problem and you fall through the crack somewhere, you may never get over to getting any health care at all because it has got so much redtape and bureaucracy. And so the whole idea of this kind of a system working well and providing good quality service is a little bit hard to understand. And when you take a look at the failings of Medicare and Medicaid in terms of the projected way that they're going to take our country into bankruptcy, do you really want to expand all of health care into these categories? So there is a fiscal sanity kind of component. One of the ways to take a look at the bill and to ask some questions and to get a sense of what's going on as to why this bill is unpopular as people study it and see more and more of it, these are some comparisons of what the health care proposal does. This is the old Democrat bill, this is the President's new online bill, and this would be the Republican alternative, or alternatives. So we have three different bills in comparison here, and a comparison based on a number of different criteria. I think it may be helpful to take a look at some of those. First of all, it says here that it imposes half a trillion in Medicare cuts. We talked about that just a minute ago. This bill is going to cut Medicare. You always heard the Democrats saying the Republicans are going to take your Medicare away. That didn't turn out to be true, we have not done that, but this bill does. This bill is going to cut $500 billion out of Medicare, and the answer to this of course is yes, the old Democrat bill did that. That's the yes. The President's new bill is going to do the same thing. So it's going to impose a half a trillion in Medicare cuts. The Republican alternative does not. So this is one of those situations where people are a little uncomfortable. Medicare is having trouble financially, and doctors are not being reimbursed very much in Medicare, so they're starting to not accept new patients because they're not being reimbursed enough to make it worth their while to take patients. If that's a problem in Medicare, why are we going to pull half a trillion dollars out of it? That's one of the ways you can look at these bills. So there is a difference. The Republicans are not proposing that, but both the President's new online bill and the Democrats' bill do that. Then it also enacts job-killing tax hikes and government regulations, costing hundreds of billions of dollars. It's a $1 trillion bill, which is a conservative estimate. This bill is going to cost a lot more than $1 trillion. How do you pay for it? Guess what. By tax increases-- right?--and with cuts to Medicare. So the tax increases here are going to come from where? Well, a lot of them come from small businesses. When you tax small businesses a whole lot for their employees, guess what's going to happen? They're not going to be able to hire as many employees, so this bill then has the effect of causing unemployment. So, in our particular climate, with unemployment near 10 percent in America and with not a lot of sense of hope that that employment is going to turn around in a hurry because of very badly shaped policies by the Federal Government, particularly policies which hammer small business owners, to have this bill which is going to tax heavily small business owners and which is going to put tremendous new government regulations on them which will cost billions of dollars is not something, from an unemployment point of view, that is a very good idea. This is going to be done by the old Democrat bill and the President's new proposal. The Republican alternative, it won't surprise you, is not enthused about tax increases, and we don't know that that's the best way to be dealing with some of our problems in medicine. I am joined by a very good friend of mine, Congressman Bishop. I would very much appreciate his perspective as to what we are talking about. I've just been saying--and I don't think I am overdramatizing this-- that, to a degree, it's my sense that America is standing on the edge of an abyss, like looking over the Grand Canyon or something, and that, if we step off the edge and misuse this reconciliation process, we are going to damage our country in a way unlike anything that we have seen before. Please join me.

Mr. AKIN. Well, that's the way the process has worked. Yes. Go ahead. Right.

Mr. AKIN. You know, I kind of like this chart because I think that some entrepreneur could make money with this chart. If you were to just shrink it down a little smaller and add some additional lines, you could start over here. These are the consumers. These are the people who are sick. The medical professionals are over there. You could sell it to restaurants as a placemat and give people crayons, and customers could try and draw and see if they could get through the maze to get over to the health care professionals, because that's a little bit how this looks. Now, maybe that sounds like a silly thing to say; but, gentleman, you're in the business in your office--among other parts of the work that we do as Congressmen, we get phone calls from our constituents. Our constituents want us to help them solve problems that they're having with the Federal Government. I'm thinking, if this system gets put in, I'm going to have I don't know how many thousands of people every day on my phone, saying, ``I need this kind of medical care, and I can't get through this system''. They're going to ask me to help them do it. I'm going to say, ``Fat chance. This is a mess.''

Mr. AKIN. We are basically muzzling a lot of the representative process. As you said, there have been different analogies. You talked about your son with a candy bar. Another one was the idea of a kitchen that has a broken sink. When you hire a plumber to fix the broken sink, you don't remodel the entire kitchen. Of course, that's the model that the Democrats have been using. It's the concept of, Ha, the sink is broken. Therefore, we can remodel the whole kitchen. They have the idea of remodeling the kitchen, and they've been wanting to do that for a very long time. The broken sink is now the excuse to remodel the whole kitchen. I think the point of the matter is that the American people would be more comfortable and the legislative process would work better if we were to say, ``Let's define a specific problem in the health care system.'' Instead of having the government take it all over, let's try to solve that one individual problem. I guess it depends on how you explain it or say it. If I were to ask, Gentleman, would you like the government to buy you a house, you might be tempted to say, Well, that sounds pretty good. Yet, if I were to ask, Would you like to live in government housing, you might think, I'm not so sure I want that. That may be a little bit of an analogy to explain what we've got here. The idea is to say, ``Hey, don't you want free health care?'' But the other way of looking at it is, Do you really want the government making health care decisions, or would you prefer that your doctor makes those decisions? So it depends how you say it, but the American public has gotten wise to this, and that's why you've got at least 20 percent more in the number of Americans who don't want this program.

Mr. AKIN. Right. So we don't have to create unemployment and deal with health care. It's just that this approach is going to create unemployment. Now let's take a look at how that works. There's a number of ways that unemployment is going to be driven. The first is you're going to tax the guy that owns the business. When you tax somebody that owns a business, it means he's got to give money to Washington, D.C. That means he can't take that same money and put it back in his business to add a wing to the business, to buy a new machine tool to create a new process to create more jobs, because instead of taking the money to build the small business, you're taking it to give to the government to run health care. So when you take money away from the owner of a small business, you're going to kill the job creation process. What else does it do? Well, it creates a lot of redtape for business owners. And when you create redtape, that also makes it so that it's harder for them to be efficient and competitive. And so that tends to hurt job creation. You also, because this bill has been sitting around and been hanging, scaring everybody to death for three quarters of a year, it creates a sense of tension and a restlessness, so that business owners are saying, I don't know what the business climate is going to look like in 6 months. I don't dare take a risk because I see threats on the horizon to the financial stability of my company.

Mr. AKIN. It forces individuals to purchase government-approved health insurance. Let's talk about that for a minute. Yeah, the old Democrat plan forced you, it forces everybody in America to buy something. And the President's new version forces you to buy something. The Republican does not force you to. And aside from the fact that Americans don't like to be told that you have to buy something, there's a small detail: It's not constitutional. When can the government tell you that you have to go out and buy a gun or you have to go buy a watermelon or something? That's not constitutional for the government to tell you you have to buy something. Yet, that's what's going on here.

Mr. AKIN. Well, you know, I hate to admit how many years I've served in the legislative body. I started by saying I've served in the majority, in the minority and now in the wilderness. As to most legislation I've seen that works pretty well, surprisingly enough, people are sold on it. There is a process of a bunch of people coming together, defining a problem, working on a solution. Frequently when they start, the bills are pretty rough, are pretty hard to understand, and have a lot of questions and problems in them; but as more and more people have a chance to work on them, to roll their sleeves up and have input in them, the bills get refined. In the business world, if you want to mess something up, you send it to a committee. In the political world, when committees work on legislation, they tend to refine the product. After a period of time, what happens is you have certain ideas that some people just can't tolerate, and you tend to throw the radical stuff out. What you can agree to comes together. When that happens and particularly when it happens across party lines, you don't have major fundamental reform, but you change, and you fix things in ways that solve people's problems. What happened this year is we had 80 less seats than the Democrats, so they thought, We don't need the Republicans. The dickens with the Republicans. We've got such a majority that we can do whatever we want. As they've marched off to totally change all of health care, now they've gotten kind of in a jam because they're realizing the public is not agreeing with it, and they don't have one Republican vote. That's very, very unusual politically that there is not at least one Republican who would vote for a bill. That says that this has been such a partisan kind of approach, and that's why there is cause to scrap it. It's not that people are going to go back to ground zero in health care, but they're saying this approach right here is just too much.

Mr. AKIN. Well, I think we have had a chance to take a look tonight at what I started out by saying that we are standing as Americans on the edge of an abyss. I recall standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon and seeing a thousand feet of open space in front of me. And in a sense, that's where we stand today, with America perhaps politically poised to push forward using a misuse of a process to force this government takeover of health care down the throats of many, many Americans who do not want to see this take place. This is a very serious moment in American history. I can recall historically there's been other very, very serious moments in American history. The Pilgrims standing on the frozen shore of Plymouth with the dream of creating a new kind of civilization; our President-to-be, President George Washington, on his knees at Valley Forge, praying for his little army. And even old skeptic Ben Franklin at the Constitutional Convention asking for prayer each day. In all of these cases, Americans discovered that in their hour of need they turned to God for his help and his guidance. I believe as we stand on the abyss tonight, for those Americans who are wont to turn to God for answers, that this is a time to be doing that. To ask for his help supernaturally so that we don't make this fatal step pushing our Nation into socialized medicine, creating a precedent for our citizens to be continually handcuffed to a government health care in a system which no politician that's freely elected could ever reverse because the public would say, You're going to take my government health care away. I won't elect you. That's been the experience of other countries. It completely changes the nature of the freedom and the nature of the quality of health care in America if we'd fall off this abyss. And it's time for some prayers. God bless you all. Thank you. And good night.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. You know, it's sort of a ``shall'' bill.

Mr. AKIN. One little ``may'' sitting in there. And the American public picks up on that and says, well, maybe you're not that sure that this bill is such a good thing. It doesn't seem like it's good for you guys. I think you have really been pretty humble here in talking about that Declaration of Health Care Independence because you're one of the people that wrote it, and you're laying out those basic principles. I had a chance to speak this last weekend to a pretty good size crowd back in St. Louis, and one of the things that I wanted to talk about or mention was the fact that if Republicans have made the mistakes, it seemed to me we have made just one mistake, but we make it over and over, and that is when we don't stick to basic principles that we believe in. What you took time to do, gentleman--and I want to just let people know that the guy from Texas that worked on writing this declaration of health care rights, what you're doing is you're laying out these basic principles. You talk about transparency; that's something that is supposed to have been promised to us. You talk about if it's good enough for everybody else, it ought to be good enough for those of us in Congress. That's kind of a basic principle you're talking about that you should not get in the way of the doctor-patient relationship. You're laying out those basic principles in this health care Declaration of Independence, and I think you have--and I was in the meetings where we were writing it too. The point is, other people can write it, other people can sign their name on the bottom, too; isn't that correct?

Mr. AKIN. It paints a vivid picture. And as much as you and I have always railed against insurance companies making health care decisions, that's not quite so bad, because if you don't like the insurance company, you can change to a different insurance company. You might have to change your job to do it. But you can change your insurance company. It's not so easy to change the U.S. Federal Government.

Mr. AKIN. But the problem is, it's one thing with lip service to say that you like the doctor-patient relationship. It's another thing to try to substitute a bureaucrat in between that relationship. And that's what we've been objecting to all the way along.

Mr. AKIN. I bet you a lot of people would have wanted to tune in on that.

Mr. AKIN. A straw dog or a straw horse. And you say that your opponents think this, and then you beat it up. Yet you and I have been here. I have been a Republican now--this is my 10th year. I have never heard Republicans say, We want to reduce or relax what health insurance companies are doing. We've been railing on the fact that we don't want them to get somebody who is not a medical person between a doctor and a patient. We've been trying to defend that point, and certainly we wouldn't do what this bill does, which allows an insurance company to get between a doctor and a patient, make a medical decision in practice and then not be held accountable for that decision. I don't know where the President comes up with this idea or who it is who writes the speeches for him, but it just isn't really true.

Mr. AKIN. And yet they have still not scored your bill that has been sitting there since last summer.