W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Well, I very much appreciate the gentleman from Utah. Congressman Bishop, you are just an inspiration, and that really is a breath of fresh air flowing through this Chamber, the idea of freedom and the idea of limited government and the idea that we will allow States to solve their own problems instead of the Federal Government, the one-size-fits-all Pelosi plan. And it also takes the pressure off of intense levels of Federal spending that are bankrupting our Nation. We talked about earlier--can you believe that the communist Chinese were telling us that our government is spending too much money and getting too big? That is a wrong day in American history. It is something else. I am joined by Dr. Gingrey from Georgia, who has some great charts. They look more interesting than mine, so I yield to Dr. Gingrey.

Mr. AKIN. Can I ask you about what you've got, because that's really an exciting concept. First of all, what you're saying is that a small business has some employees, they want to treat their employees right but they also have to make the small business make money so they can say, Look, we're going to put aside this amount of money for each of our employees to help them with health care, but we're going to allow those employees to have some choices as to what they buy. So, for instance, let's just say that I am a husband. I've got a job in small business. I have a wife. And it turns out we know that we're never going to have any children. So I don't really need to get the coverage for childbirth or something that maybe somebody else does. So I could find a policy that would suit, that would be more tailor-made to our family and therefore could get better coverage in some other areas possibly. So you have a way to fine-tune something that meets your particular situation.

Mr. AKIN. So if you take the 10 factor, how much congressional budget--I mean, they're making assumptions trying to guess what something is going to be years into the future. But if you take that 10, if you put the unfunded mandates from the States and you put in the fact that they skewed the time schedule to try to keep it under a trillion, say, they're over 2 trillion, that's $20 trillion?

Mr. AKIN. Looks like we're just starting to have fun and the clock has already run out. I just want to thank all of my gentleman friends here. Congressman Garrett, thank you so much for joining us. Hearing from the east coast, that's very refreshing. From down in the South, from Louisiana, Congressman Scalise. And also G.T., all that health care experience that you bring here to the floor managing, we appreciate that. Thank you. Have a great evening.

Mr. AKIN. I appreciate that, and I look forward to doing that. I thought you were going to bring some sort of gory medical pictures here.

Mr. AKIN. Do you really think that we're going to balance the budget with a socialized medicine bill that they've said is going to be a trillion? Do you know what the budget estimate on Medicare was when it was passed? The Congressional Budget Office, they tried to estimate it. They were off by a factor of seven times. This thing is clearly over 2 trillion when you do honest math with it. If that's off by a factor of seven, that's $14 trillion. No wonder the Chinese were giving us a lecture telling us we've got the government spending too much money. They've got some American Treasury bills. It's not like they don't mind big government, but they just don't want to see us ruin their treasuries. I've got my good friend from New Jersey here, Congressman Garrett. Please join us.

Mr. AKIN. How many was that, gentleman?

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, I would like to take a look at your chart here. You were boggling on my poor brain here. You're the Congressman from District One, and they're saying there are 40 some congressional districts in Louisiana, which is real news to me. I suppose that was news to you, too. And you finally get ahold of the White House, and they spent millions of dollars to create this Web site to track down where we spent the $787 billion, which was guaranteed or supposed to keep us under 8 percent unemployment, and we get some guy that says, ``Who knows, man, who really knows.'' It's like Woodstock lives on. And we've spent billions of dollars to get that kind of answer?

Mr. AKIN. My friend is a medical doctor, and you're planning to vote ``no'' on the bill.

Mr. AKIN. I yield to my good friend Dr. Gingrey.

Mr. AKIN. Now, wait a minute. My understanding was that what we were cutting was 400 or $500 billion out of Medicare in order to pay for that trillion. How then is the cost of Medicare going to go up if we're cutting $500 billion? How do the mathematics work?

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, you were speaking clearly except there was one word I didn't quite catch. I thought you said, was it ``doc fix'' or was it ``doc tricks''?

Mr. AKIN. I yield.

Mr. AKIN. So it's a trick to make it seem like everything is going to go right with Medicare, but, in fact, it's not. In other words, the idea was it was going to fix the formula in Medicare so that the doctors wouldn't keep having their salaries cut a certain--what was it, 5 percent a year or something like that?

Mr. AKIN. Thank you very much, Dr. Gingrey. Thank you for joining us, and I appreciate your at least trying to put somewhat of a humorous face on a very, very serious situation. We're joined by a very good friend of mine from Louisiana. I hope you would join us here on our discussion we've got going here tonight. I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. AKIN. That's overhead.

Mr. AKIN. So you have portability?

Mr. AKIN. That idea sounds like freedom. I am really liking this already. Go ahead.

Mr. AKIN. I appreciate your keeping it in a sort of a big picture form as to what we're talking about on cost.

Mr. AKIN. But the cost supposedly by the Congressional Budget Office was that this was going to cost a trillion dollars, so your figure over there was overweight in costing a trillion dollars. The trouble with this estimate is it's wrong because the Congressional Budget Office took some assumptions when they built it because they were told we've got to keep this thing under a trillion dollars. The problem is, first of all, the Democrat Governor of the State of Tennessee, who has already tried this lovely idea, has taken a look at this and called it the ``monster of unfunded mandates.'' What that means is that that trillion dollars was trimmed one way, was to dump a bunch of the costs down to the various States, aside from the fact that it destroys everything that the State of Utah has set up, which is actually kind of an innovative idea. It destroys that because it says every single health insurance plan has to follow what the Federal Government says. So now they're going to define what health insurance is and that's all there is, one definition. And anybody else that doesn't follow that definition, you know what the bill says. You're going to get fined if you're offered health insurance that doesn't fit with what the government guidelines say. So this trillion dollars is wrong. The other thing they did was they took the trillion dollars and they took the time to calculate this in such a way that the revenue was coming in but the real expenses of the program hadn't hit their peak yet. So they cheated on the two different time scales as to when the money was coming in versus when the costs were going to come. So, in fact, the trillion as the Senate has calculated it is closer to $2 trillion, which is $2 trillion we don't have. I think the gentlewoman Congresswoman Foxx said that there was a survey done that said that Americans believe there is more probability that we're going to discover aliens in outer space than the fact that this thing is ever going to be anything other than a big budget-busting deficit, driving deficit spending. And, you know, there is a pretty good reason why Americans have that common sense, because we've tried these things before. The Federal Government has tried Medicare and Medicaid, and we see their costs are going out of control, and we're told, Trust us. Medicare and Medicaid are going out of control, so we're going to take the whole system over and run it by the government and it's not going to go out of control. I yield to my good friend from Pennsylvania.

Mr. AKIN. Last time I checked it was 10.2, and you know those were conservative numbers because it doesn't include somebody being unemployed more than a year. They take their name off the list. It doesn't mean they got the job.

Mr. AKIN. The implication is that the unemployment that we're having trouble with was really Bush's fault. Everything that doesn't work right, well, it was Bush's fault. Bush, when he came in--I was here; I came in the same year he did--and we had a problem with a sagging economy. We were going into a recession, and he dealt with it the same way that JFK had done it and Ronald Reagan had done it, and that is he got off the back of the small businessman because he knew he had to let that guy have some breathing room to get those jobs going. We're doing the exact opposite, which is what Henry Morgenthau did, and we're going to turn a recession into a depression if we're not careful. And when this thing passed, this stimulus bill, we stood here on the floor--and I think you were with me, young lady--and we said it's not going to work. I don't mean to be an ``I told you so.'' You don't have to be an ``I told you so.'' All of history is screaming that this is not the way to solve this problem. And now we hear, well, because we have unemployment, it must be the Republicans' fault somehow when we're 40 seats in the minority.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. I thank my good friend from Iowa for yielding. A number of the different words that you're using are so important to the foundation of the whole logic of how the American system works. You were talking about the idea of a rule of law, and that's one of those terms that sounds pretty straightforward. We believe in the rule of law. What's the alternative to the rule of law? We have been seeing a whole lot of it this year. The alternative to the rule of law is special deals. If you recall, rule of law is depicted frequently by the marble statue of Lady Justice. And she has the blindfold across her eyes. She's holding up the scales. And regardless of who you are, man or woman or big or little or rich or poor, Lady Justice just simply says, Just the facts. So that's what is called the rule of law. People are equal before the law. But the alternative to that is, of course, rule by whims of mankind. It's special deals.

Mr. AKIN. So we have the ``too big to fail'' rule. So we tax Americans, not so much Americans that live now but their grandchildren we're going to tax, and we pass these things like the porkulus bill, which is supposed to be stimulus, and we pass the Wall Street bailout. We take all this money and we give it to whom? Every small mom and pop shop that might fail? No. We give it to the ``too big to fail.'' So, therefore, you've moved from the rule of law to a special deals society. And that's the problem. Of course, that's really what socialism is. It's special deals administered by guess who, Big Brother government. That's not what made America great. That's not what allowed our great Nation, my good friend Congressman King, that's not what allowed us to have a list of the different nations throughout the world that Americans freed from horrible dictatorships. That's a long list. I saw it actually listed on a cartoon. It had the list of all of these countries that American GIs and that American treasure through the ages have freed. Places like Germany. Places like Japan where you have some dictator, where we went in and we freed them from that. Places like Grenada, where our sons and daughters went in and took a risk and left a free country. That's not why we were able to do that because we're another socialist Big Government-run country. It's because we're a country that was based on a different set of principles. The thing that strikes me the most, and I don't want to overuse the welcome that you've extended to me, is this. There was a country not so many years ago, and this is how their thinking worked: They said, look, if you've got somebody and they don't have a house to stay in and it gets cold in the winter, they're going to freeze to death. And if they don't have food to eat, they're going to starve to death. And if they don't have medical care, they're going to die of some kind of medical condition. So they ought to have a right to housing, a right to food, a right to health care. And if they haven't had an education and they can't read, they ought to have a right to know how to read and to study and be educated. So that government created those rights for its citizens, and they marched forward boldly into the future until they became bankrupt and were disbanded. And it was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. We call it the USSR. And we knew it wasn't a very good system because it was based on communism and socialism. Yet here in America, we have heard, even as I have stood here on the floor with you my friend, Democrats say that you have a right to health care. So as a government, we are now saying that we're going to have the government get involved in housing. The government's going to get involved in food, in food stamps. The government is now going to take over health care. The government has now taken over most of the loans for colleges and education. And it's like how come we're repeating the same things that the Soviet Union did and anticipating that we'll get different results? Instead, our Founders had a different concept. They said that our rights are basic things that come from God. In our Declaration of Independence, all are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If you'll note, those rights are not rights to something that somebody else has a claim to. Those of you from Iowa do some farming. I think you grow some corn in Iowa. I know we do some in Missouri, but our next-door neighbor does a lot of wheat and corn. And when you have one of your Iowa farmers combine the sweat of his brow with the produce from the field, they own that corn. It is their corn because it was grown on their land. They worked hard and it belongs to them. We call that private property. We call that free enterprise. And because I'm hungry doesn't give me a right to something that belongs to someone else. That's theft. That's stealing. And if the government takes someone's corn and gives it to someone else who didn't grow it, that's called stealing, except we just call it institutionalized theft. That's socialism. You never have a right to something that's the unique property of another person. The Founders said you have a right to your life because God gives that uniquely to an individual. You see, you have a right to liberty because God gives you just one life and you can go choose a career of your choosing. Nobody else chooses your career. You get to do it yourself. But it doesn't say you own somebody else's career and should tell them what they should do with their life. That's what the Soviet Union thought. So our system was based on freedom, was based on limited government; limited in the sense that it was the job of government to protect just those basic rights that God gives to all men. And we have been setting aside that formula that works, instead trying to adopt something that the Europeans have never made work, and, of course, it never worked in the Soviet Union. We're going in the wrong direction, and we need to go back toward freedom. I didn't mean to get on too long a dissertation, but those distinctions between equal before the law as opposed to special deals, that's a very big part of what we're dealing with, Congressman.

Mr. AKIN. I really appreciate your yielding to me. One of the things that happens down here, as you're aware of, this legislative process gets a little bit complicated. Sometimes people pay attention to people like you and I on the floor of the Chamber of the House. People may even pay attention to what we're voting on here on the floor. But when you talk about this Nancy Pelosi health care/ socialized medicine bill, on the floor, you're not going to have an amendment that says, yeah, but the illegal immigrants can't get free health care here. They're not going to have that amendment out here because people don't want to vote that because that might not be very popular back home. But the interesting thing is, gentleman, as you know, in various committees, they do take those votes. In fact, that very amendment was offered in one of the committees where the Pelosi health care bill was for some number of months, and they offered an amendment saying that there will be no one that's eligible for any of this insurance pool, any of these insurance pools that has not passed the eligibility of citizenship, and they spelled out what that was. That was an amendment that was offered. The bill had said originally, we're not going to give this to illegal immigrants. But there was no enforcement mechanism. So in order to add the enforcement mechanism, that amendment was proposed. That amendment then went up for a vote in the committee. Can you guess on you how the voting went? It was supported 100 percent by Republicans and rejected by the Democrats. So, is there a protection in the bill for illegal immigrants to be able to get health insurance? The answer is, of course they can get it, because that amendment was defeated. Now there were all sorts of protest. Oh, it's not our intent that illegal immigrants are going to get this free health care. But the fact of the matter is, if that were really the intent to protect that, there would have been an amendment in the bill to say, we don't mean for people to get this unless they pass the citizenship eligibility requirements. But that amendment was defeated by the Democrats in committee. They knew that. It came to the floor without that protection, and it passed this floor without that protection. And that says that the way the Pelosi health care bill stands now, that you've got illegal immigrants that come to this country and they're going to get health care. And guess who's going to pay for it? The U.S. taxpayers are going to pay for it, or their children or their grandchildren with the multi-trillion dollar bill that has been proposed. It's interesting that what you're saying, a lot of people say, Well, I don't like this partisan stuff. The Democrats claim this. The Republicans claim this. Can't you all just get along? The fact of the matter is you put an amendment like that up in committee and you see there's just this polar division of opinion as to what should be in this health care bill. And what you saw was that all of the Republicans said we need to protect against illegal immigrants getting this health care. And the Democrats voted--I think there may be one or two that voted with the Republicans, but certainly clearly a great majority, so that that amendment failed, and that's the way that Pelosi health care bill is now. And so I just thought it interesting because people don't know about what happens in committees.