W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. It seems to me the study has already occurred. Various States have done it, tried it, and it saved a lot of money. What more do we need to study on it?

Mr. AKIN. I really appreciate your highlighting this question of unemployment because I really think that a whole lot of Americans would think we were more effective and that they would have more respect for Congress if we were dealing with the fact that we've got a 10-plus percent unemployment rate out there. And in fact that number is probably conservative because of the fact that if you haven't had a job in a year, you're no longer part of the statistic. So as people get more and more discouraged, don't get a job, they fall off those numbers, and we still have a 10 percent unemployment rate. So I think a lot of the public would say, Hey, why don't you guys pay attention to unemployment. Well, here's a way to pay attention to unemployment. We've got a bill here that, on the face of it, economists have rated it's going to cost 5 million jobs. Why in the world would this proposal cost 5 million jobs? Well, you just hit it. But do it again, gentleman, so people can make that connection. You have got to understand, this is going to increase unemployment in America. Is that what the public wants, more unemployment? I don't think so. But please run through that again. You're a small businessman and this bill passes, and what does that mean?

Mr. AKIN. You are right. The thing about legislation, because it affects so many people, it is so expensive and what you sometimes create can never be taken back, it is absolutely crucial that we get this thing right the first time. We would be far better off--I guess it is maybe a little bit like choosing a wife. You want to be sure you choose the right one the first time. It is less expensive that way. This is something you want to get it right the first time, and if there is doubt, if there are questions, then it says it is probably better to slow up and take a good look at what you are doing. Now, there are some things about the bill that are being proposed here that are just completely anathema to many, many Americans. I think if you have to say, well, what would some of those things be, I mentioned the special deals. People don't like that. But if you get to the heart of what is going on in health care, it is that relationship between you when you are sick and your doctor. We call it the doctor-patient relationship. I think that is fundamental to our understanding of what good health care has to start with, and that is that you have got qualified, professional doctors who work with somebody who is ill. The family and the doctor come together and they put together a solution as to what is going to happen and what the doctors can do to help you with your health. Now, one of the things that gets people very upset, and with good reason, is when somebody butts in to that doctor-patient relationship. One of the examples that we have seen too frequently is that we have allowed insurance companies sometimes to jump into that doctor-patient relationship, and they say, oh, we are not jumping into the doctor- patient relationship; it is just that we are deciding what we will fund and what we won't fund. In other words, the doctor says you need to do X, Y, and Z, and the insurance company says, oh, you don't need to do that. So we don't like it when somebody who is not a medical professional starts to superintend over our health care and we don't have any control of it. What is even worse is that when the doctor makes a medical mistake, he is going to get sued, but when the insurance company says you don't need to do that and then you up and die and your relatives say, hey, the insurance companies just cost a life, well, it turns out they don't have any medical liability. That is not a good situation. But it is not the worst situation. Something worse could happen. It is this. This is what is worse. Instead of an insurance company, which, if you want to, if you have to, you can change your insurance company, this is going to put a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor, and that is something that I don't know a single Republican that likes that idea. We don't think we want government bureaucrats getting between you and your doctor. And how is that going to happen? Well, because the bureaucrats have got their calculators, and as they calculate, they say, how old are you? What are the statistical chances of this? Whoops, you don't get this care. So the bureaucrats say, we are not going to allow you to get this kind of health care. And the doctor says, no, I understand the statistics, but in this case this particular medical treatment is necessary. And the bureaucrat says, no, you can't get it. That is one of the reasons why in the United Kingdom health care death rates are much higher than they are in America, because of the fact that the bureaucrats say, no, you can't get any care.

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. I do yield to my good friend from Utah.

Mr. AKIN. I couldn't agree with you more, and I do think that is a fundamental question. And when people talk about compromise, I would picture people on the outside of Congress saying, why can't those people just get together, solve a problem, bury their partisan hatchets and just serve the American public? Part of the reason why you don't see that is because there are really fundamental differences of opinion on what you do with health care, and one of the very, very big ones is that question: Is it going to be between you and your doctor or is it going to be between you and the Federal Government and some doctor that they choose? And that is a very, very big difference in opinions on health care, and this system forces the Federal Government between you and your doctor, and it is why it doesn't have any support, among other reasons, from Republicans. There are a couple of other things here we probably ought to talk about, because when we talk about health care being too expensive, one of the things that really increases the cost of health care has been attorneys, particularly trial attorneys who are going to sue doctors for having done the wrong thing. Now, there are times when doctors do the wrong thing. There are times when doctors do the wrong thing. They need to fix it and need to pay for some of the damages that their actions caused. But this is more than that. These are these punitive lawsuits with millions of dollar claims. And what does that do? It adds a tremendous cost to the cost of health care. So, one of the ideas, if you want to reduce the cost of health care, is that you want to have what is called tort reform. We were promised in Baltimore by the President that certainly he believed in tort reform. But as we take a look at the legislation that we have got, one of the things that you find is that the supposed tort reform in this bill, the old Democrat bill, and I believe the President's new bill, although I am not sure this is in there, is the fact that the States that have enacted tort reform, such as my own State of Missouri, the States that have enacted tort reform, they cannot keep that tort reform in place when this medical bill goes in. So it gets rid of tort reform instead of making tort reform. Now, I said that costs a whole lot of money if you don't have tort reform, or tort reform is a good idea to reduce the cost of health care. In the State of Missouri, it has dropped the cost of health care significantly, I am talking in excess of 10 or so percent, States that have decent tort reform. It reduces the cost of medicine. So, that is a reform that Republicans wanted to do, and it is not included in the bill, which is the tort reform. I do yield.

Mr. AKIN. The cost of the system, and what is the other?

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

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

Mr. AKIN. I just appreciate your discipline, and having worked through specifically and exactly what the bill says. Because it is easy to say that this bill isn't going to cost a dime because somebody can say it isn't going to cost a dime. Well, that is because it is going to cost a trillion dollars instead. And you are clarifying the importance of words here. But let me ask you this question: Is it true that the policy defines what insurance has to cover? And therefore, does the Federal Government tell you that you have to have this, this, and this in your policy, and therefore force the policy to be changed even if you didn't want to change it?

Mr. AKIN. The summary of the summary is longer than the summary of the 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. I bet you a lot of people would have wanted to tune in on that.

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

Mr. AKIN. That makes it awfully awkward, because let's say that some of these bills were scored. You know this well, some of these bills would save a lot of money. And somebody is going to ask: We have a President who wants to spend a trillion dollars at the cost of $5 million in jobs to pass a government takeover of health care, and the Republicans have a plan that is actually going to cut the cost of health care, doesn't have tax increases in it, why not take the less expensive plan? Somebody is going to ask that question. But it is a lot easier if the Republican bills have not had a chance to be scored. Interestingly, there is a guy who is scoring the President's bill who is not CBO, and he is a Democrat. I don't know if you have heard of him, but he is the Democratic Governor of Tennessee. Why would he say anything bad about the Democrats' health care bill, the President's health care bill? The reason is because, guess what, Tennessee is going to have to pay for this government takeover of health care. That trillion dollar price tag that CBO hooked on this bill is not all the cost because some of it is hidden. And guess who is going to pick up some of the pieces of that, it is going to be the various States, and the various States like Tennessee that have tried this government-run scheme of health care. They know it is a disaster. It wrecked health care in Tennessee and Massachusetts. It ran the cost of health care in Tennessee and Massachusetts way up. So that Democrat Governor, who also could be taken to the woodshed, says no, this is a bad idea. This is going to be very expensive, and States have balanced budgets, how are we going to pay for this thing. So there is somebody that is scoring the bill and it is not CBO; it is a Democrat. And he is saying no, it is too expensive.

Mr. AKIN. You are making a point here, my friend. I don't know if you knew that you left off to preaching and went on to meddling, because when you talk about cancer, I am a cancer survivor myself. If you take a look at cancer survival rates in England, you find they tend to be about 20 percent worse than they are in America. Why is that? Well, you have explained it very accurately, and that is cancer is particularly sensitive. When you diagnose it, you want to get to it quickly before it spreads or gets too bad. The idea of putting someone on a long waiting list is deadly when you are dealing with cancer. So if you have cancer, you have a much, much higher percent of dying from that if you are in Canada or particularly in England, and it is because of the waiting list. Governments have a little bit of sensitivity to them. Instead of telling you that they are going to deny your health care, they say no, you have to get in line. You can get a free Cesarian section; you just have to wait 12 months. But I needed it in 9. Well, that is a problem, isn't it. So what you are talking about is a sensitive subject to me because I had cancer in this country. When they discovered it, I thought it was time to take care of it right away and so did the doctor and so did the hospital. I had it on spring break. I had an operation to try to get rid of the cancer back 9 years ago, my very first spring break down here. But in America, when you get cancer, something the doctor says is, it's time to move, let's go. That's why we have such better survival rates, and that's why the guy from Canada wants to come here to get health care.

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

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. That's what we called it during the last hour. We called it ``Political Drama.'' You know, there isn't anything, first of all, that the Republicans can do that could block his bill. The problem he has got is he doesn't even have enough Democrats who want to do this thing, so he is trying to drum up, as you say, support for this thing to make it look like there are people who are supporting it. Yet he goes behind closed doors, puts some deal together, comes out, and says, Now are you going to agree with it? There is nothing bipartisan about that. It's just a scam. I just don't think the American people are going to buy it.

Mr. AKIN. You know, it was interesting to me that there was a country--it was the U.S.--and they had a theory. Their theory was that the government should provide you with a job, with an education. They should provide you with health care. They should provide you with food and with clothing and with a place to live. That was the job of the government to do those things. We watched that country. It was a big country. After a while, it collapsed. It wasn't just the U.S.--It was the USSR. Aside from the fact that they just hated people of the Christian faith, aside from that sort of prejudice, that was their operating philosophy--that the government was going to provide things that were necessary for your survival. You've got to have food to survive, so the government is going to give it to you. You've got to have health care, so the government is going to give it to you. You have to have education, so the government is going to give it to you. That was their operating premise. We sat there, as I was a young man, and we went ``yuk, yuk, yuk'' when the whole thing fell apart, because we knew it was a dumb idea. So what are we doing in America here under the Pelosi and Obama leadership? The government is not only providing education and housing, but now they're going to jump into expanding to take over all of health care, and they are going to tell you where to work. I guess my question is: How come we are doing the same thing we knew that wouldn't work before? I think that's what a lot of American citizens are saying. Time out. What is going on? We need not just to get the budget in control. We need to deconstruct Washington, D.C., and we need to remove them as a threat to the freedom of this country.

Mr. AKIN. Well, you know, now, when you get to the State of Missouri, that's one of those things that just kind of depends.

Mr. AKIN. Yes. We're going to have to do some showing down in the State of Missouri. We're not too bad on oatmeal, but I'll tell you what is something, I think, of a little bit of New England that I would want to recommend, and that is that you'd get that cornbread and put maple syrup on top of it and then homemade apple sauce over the top. I'd even stack that up against grits in spite of what my good friend from Georgia might say.