W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, it's a pleasure to be able to join you and my colleagues today and those who are in the gallery to talk about something that has been the talk of the town now for a number of months and is an intensely personal and important subject to all of us, and that is the health care of the bodies that we have to live inside. A great deal has been said and a great deal more needs to be said in clarifying exactly where we are on this issue because of its tremendous importance, its importance to us in an economic sense as a Nation, its importance to us as close to 20 percent of our entire gross domestic product, but also, as I said, because of the importance that each of us have to live inside our own bodies and are much attached to our health care system. Now, one of the great concerns about what's being proposed is is that the government will not immediately but indirectly and inevitably take over health care. Just as we saw earlier this year, the president of General Motors is being fired by the President of the United States. That's a unique situation. Usually we separate our private industry from the Federal Government, and what is being proposed here is, over time, the government takeover of one-fifth or so of our economy; that is, health care. Now, when the government does too much, we have come over time to recognize certain consequences. First of all, it becomes very expensive because the government, with its $500 hammers, is not the most efficient. In fact, you could sometimes talk about a health care system with the efficiency of the post office and the compassion of the IRS. The inefficient allocation of resources is legendary, particularly in other countries that have had the government try to run the health care system. The quality is degraded, and we will talk about those in hard statistics, particularly with people who have, for instance, cancer. We will take a look at what the cancer survival rates are in some of the European countries that have socialized medicine as opposed to the American medical system that we have in this country today. And then, of course, to me, perhaps one of the more frightening things is bureaucratic rationing. That is, decisions not by a doctor and the patient, but decisions made by some bureaucrat that gets in the way. Now, the first thing that the people have commented sometimes is, if health care is expensive now, just wait until it's free. That seems to be the experience for, particularly, people of Canada and other Nations. We have heard that this is a system that's being proposed by our President that's going to be simple, that it's going to save money. In fact, he said if it were going to cost us one dime more, then he wouldn't even support it. And yet we take a look at the simplicity of the organization--this is the Democrats' bill. It's an organization chart for the Democrats' bill. It's complicated. This is trying to put a 1,000-page bill onto one poster, which obviously it is going to look a little bit complicated. But you have here a tremendous maze of interlocking organizations and groups trying to replace a fifth of the U.S. economy. Obviously, it's going to be somewhat complicated. The question is, in this maze, can the patient find their way to their doctor. That is a good question. Well, what are we talking about in terms of costs here? Is there some way that we could try to decipher when the President tells us this isn't going to cost us much, in fact, the efficiency is going to be such that we can do this whole thing without spending any more money, what sort of a way can we get a handle on that? Well, one of the things we have already is Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security. Those, of course, are the three huge entitlement programs that have been running for some period of time, and we have here cost projections as to the rate of increase in the expenses for Medicare and Medicaid. And when you take a look at these over time, what you realize is that if nothing is changed in Medicare or Medicaid, Social Security, that the U.S. Government at a certain point out here, at 2052, for instance, that there will be nothing else in the Federal budget. They will absorb the entire Federal budget. We have a certain tax rate that we're running, and what we found in terms of tax policy is you can raise people's taxes but it doesn't raise the amount of money the government is pulling in. You can raise taxes so much it stalls the economy and you end up taking the same thing in in taxes as you did when your tax rate was lower. So this is kind of our historic tax rate, and when you project that out, you realize that Medicare and Medicaid, at least a big portion of this blue chart, is going to gobble up all of the Federal revenues. That means we won't spend any money, not just on food stamps or welfare, not just on art, not just on sort of ancillary things, but there will be no money for defense or anything else with the way that these programs are going. So the President, when he says this is going to be very efficient, it's going to save a whole lot of money, and you say, well, what do we have as an example of that sort of government efficiency, you've got Medicare and Medicaid. Those are not very comforting examples as to what's going to happen to our GDP. In fact, the President's made a lot of promises. He complained, as he came in to give his talk here about 3 weeks ago on health care, that he had inherited a $1 trillion deficit. In fact, he had not. It was about a $250 billion deficit, which is bad, shouldn't have inherited that, and yet what we have here proposed in the last 6 months, you can see the level of spending at $3.6 trillion that we've spent in 6 months on all of these--here's the Wall Street bailout. That's $250 billion. That was started in the previous administration, but half of it was spent by our current President. Then you've got the economic stimulus. I would call it the porkulous bill, didn't have much to do with stimulus at all. There goes $787 billion more. And then you have got SCHIP and then the appropriations. You've got an IMF. This cap-and-tax, the House has passed this one. This is the biggest tax increase in the history of our country. The President made the promise that if you're making less than $250,000, don't worry, we're not going to tax you, except a little detail. Anytime you flip your light switch, you are going to get taxed, with this $846 billion which is, of course, the biggest tax hike in our history. And then, of course, the government health care that's being proposed, it even dwarfs that. So we're talking about a pattern in history of a tremendous rate of spending. In fact, if you were to take a look at all of the deficits from George Washington to George Bush, that comes out about five- something trillion. We're looking at $8 trillion for this administration. So we have a promise that this isn't going to cost very much. We don't have very much historical data to give us any sense that this is going to be a financially responsible package. Now, one of the things that goes to the heart of health care, and I think probably if a bunch of just plain old Americans were going to stand around and say, you know, let's talk about what are you going to do to health care, one of the things you'd say, well, one thing we know for sure is that we want to make sure that the relationship between the doctor and the patient is left alone. We don't like this deal where the insurance company comes in and gets between the doctor and the patient, and so one of the things we want is to leave that sacrosanct. If you like your doctor or health care provider, you can keep them. If you like your health care plan, you can keep that, too. This is what the President told us in July. He's repeated it. Is that true, though? He's also said it's not going to cost anything. He also said you're not going to be taxed anything if you make less than $250,000. So what is the truth of this statement? Can you really keep what you currently have, because this is a very important question because 100 million Americans have health care policies and relations with doctors that they like just fine right now. And we've probably got, when you sort through it, about 15 million people who are not insured. And so the question is: Are we going to basically take apart entirely and try to rebuild the system for 100 million people in order to deal with a problem 15 million? That's the question. So here's the promise that comes from the President, but is that really true? Well, here's MIT health care economist Gruber. He says, with or without reform, that won't be true. His point is that the government is not going to force you to give up what you have. But that's not to say that other circumstances won't make that happen. In fact, what's going to happen, and that's what this MIT professor was going to talk about, is that when the government jumps in to this entire equation and starts to have a government option, what it tends to do is crowd out the private provider. So over a period of time, your employer is going to say, I'd rather pay the fine and just dump your health insurance on the government; and more and more people do that until, guess what, there is only the government left, the single provider. Now, you can say, well, do you have any evidence that that's going to go on? Well, we did. It was a week before last, we just voted in a way to make the student loans in America--almost all of them are all going to be provided now through the government. Originally, the government came in just to help the student loan process. But now what's happened over a period of time, the government can easily forgive a student that doesn't pay their loans, whereas the private companies can't. So the government has an advantage because they keep soaking the taxpayer. And so the question then is, that's what this is, that Jonathan is saying here, what his point is, that what's going to happen inevitably is that we're going to end up with a government-driven system and, therefore, you will not be able to keep your insurance or your health care provider. And so what is being said is not, in fact, true. Along the same lines, and of particular importance, is this entire question about whether we are going to allow government agents or bureaucrats or people working for the government to make health care decisions. Is the government going to jump into the middle of the doctor/patient relationship? Well, that's not the kind of amendment that's allowed on this House floor. The Democrat Party does not allow us to make amendments that we might like to make. It has to go through Rules Committee. They control the Rules Committee, and if they have an amendment that would be embarrassing or they don't want, they just say you can't have it in the rules to offer that amendment. But in committees, we do offer amendments. This is an amendment that was offered by Dr. Gingrey. Dr. Gingrey is a good doctor from Georgia, been a medical doctor a long time, now joining us here in Congress. And he said a very simple sentence: nothing in this section shall be construed to allow any Federal employee or political appointee to dictate how a medical provider practices medicine. In other words, this amendment would guarantee the doctor/patient relationship. It would say that that doctor/patient relationship is not going to be interfered with by some government bureaucrat. Well, how did this amendment fare in Nancy Pelosi's committee that was putting together the House health care bill? Well, here's how it came out. The Republicans, 23 Republicans voted ``yes.'' We want to keep that doctor/patient relationship sacrosanct, and none of them were against it. If you take a look at the Democrats, however, 32 Democrats voted against this, which, if you say you're against this, then it suggests that you're going to be in favor of letting bureaucrats control costs. And only one Democrat voted for it. So what happened? Well, this amendment failed. When this amendment failed, it, again, raises a serious question whether what the President says is really true, Are you going to be able to keep your doctor? Are you going to be able to keep your health insurance? Will you get your health insurance through the same place you get it now, or is it all going to be provided by some government? Now, I have had either the fortune or misfortune of being in public office for a number of years. And one of the experiences that those of us who are public servants have is we get phone calls. We get phone calls from our constituents and they say, hey, Congressman Akin, I've got a problem with this, that and the other government agency. Can you help out? Or I've had really a hard time with this, this, and this. Can't you do something about this? And so we, in a sense, then go to bat for our constituents with different either State or Federal agencies. I recall one of my earliest experiences as a State rep, and there was a bad intersection where there had been some accidents in my district, and we needed to get a left-turn arrow put in at a traffic light. I would bet that I made over 100 phone calls over a 2- or 3-year period to the highway department in our area trying to talk them into putting one lousy left-turn arrow into a traffic light signal. There was already a lane painted for the left turn, so all they had to do was to change the traffic light. It took me several years to talk the highway department into putting one silly left-turn arrow in. Now, can you imagine what goes on if we're Members of Congress and we get phone calls saying, the government that you represent has told my wife that she can't get that heart bypass. They've told my mother that she can't get that heart bypass. They've given her a bottle of aspirin and told her to go home and wait to die. Is that the sort of thing that we want to deal with with the bureaucrats getting in the way of health care decisions? I don't think so. This amendment should not have failed. If the American public knew that this amendment were being offered, they would have called their Congressman and said, don't you mess with the relationship between me and my doctor, or between our family and our doctor. That's what's at stake. Now, from my point of view, this becomes personal. I was elected to Congress in the year 2000, came here in 2001 to serve. And one of the things I found out about this Congress is the fact that there are some Navy doctors in this building in a clinic. So sometimes if somebody's walking around in the summer and they have a stroke or this or that, they've got an ambulance, then the first place they go is to the little clinic right here in the Capitol Building. It's almost like a little mini-city for a certain number of blocks. There are some medical professionals that are there. And those medical professionals also offer physicals, your yearly physical. So I had not had a physical because I had been in the State of Missouri in the Missouri legislature, and basically, what happened there was my insurance had a health care provider that there was no way you could go see your primary care doctor, and so the insurance company was getting between me and some potential doctor that I could never even figure out who the doctor was. They said my primary care physician is so and so. You call them and you could never see them. So I walked into the clinic downstairs in this building feeling bullet-proof, about 52 or 53 years old, and they told me my health was great except for one little detail. Congressman Akin, you have cancer. Now that's the sort of word that gets your attention when somebody tells you that you've got cancer. And so it was that because I was here and I had access to health care, I was able to get the cancer treated. But if you take a look, when it talks about cancer, let's talk about the survival rates between men and women in the United States. In men it's 62 percent, 66 percent in women in the U.S. Take a look at where it is with socialized medicine in the United Kingdom: 44 percent. For women it's not 66, but it's 52. So in other words, your chances of survival in America are a whole, whole lot better with our free enterprise system. So all of this talk about how bad American health care is, boy, that's a lot of hooey. We still have a very, very good health care system; and to try to destroy what 100 million people enjoy just to try and take care of 15, that doesn't seem to make sense. I have been joined by my good colleague. Did you want to join us on the health care discussion? Please jump in. I yield.

Mr. AKIN. That is really a good question. And the thing that's disturbing for my good friend from California, the thing that's disturbing is that you're not the only guy that's offered amendments in committee on this bill.

Mr. AKIN. Well, there's a poison pill.

Mr. AKIN. The amendment that I just mentioned a moment ago--which I think to me, it's personally scary--and this is a medical doctor, and what he's saying in this bill is nothing in this section shall be construed to allow any Federal employee or political appointee--that is a bureaucrat--no bureaucrat can dictate how you and the doctor, how that medicine is going to be delivered. In other words, the doctor and the patient make the decisions. And again, just like your amendment, this thing goes down in flames on a straight party-line vote. How can you stand there and vote that you want bureaucrats to ration health care? I don't understand it. But I do understand why Americans would be strenuously opposed to this.

Mr. AKIN. I very much appreciate your taking some time to join with us. This is such an important discussion. Your experience in California with the great amendments that you offered both in California but now, I understand, in committee are making it clear that the promise, we are not going to spend one dime of deficit, and yet it gets defeated on a straight party-line vote. It took some courage to offer that amendment, but at least it defined where we are in this entire situation. And I'm very thankful that you came out and joined with us today on a very important discussion. The talk is that sometime in the next couple of weeks, this whole thing may come down to a vote. Once again, I go back to my own personal experience with having been a survivor of cancer, coming into this very building, having medical doctors tell me, Congressman Akin, you are fit as a fiddle except for the fact you have cancer. That's a sobering kind of thing. So what had happened to me was the insurance companies had discouraged my getting a physical. I should have. If I had been smart, I would have forced myself to get a physical and line up and wait for it all, but I didn't do it until I got here in Congress. Well, here's what happens, one step worse than an insurance company getting between you and your doctor, and that's when the Federal Government gets in between and starts to ration and dictate what's going to happen. We have this experience in the United Kingdom with what happens in cancer there, and in Italy and Spain. Then you take a look at the U.S. results, and in spite of the complaints about American health care, if you're some well-to-do sheik from Bahrain and you have got unlimited billions of dollars or millions of dollars to spend and you're sick, guess where you come. You come to the good old USA for our health care because we still have a lot of good things going on with the level of services we provide. There are changes that need to be made, but the change doesn't need to be socialized medicine. It doesn't need to be a government system which will crowd out all of the privates. It doesn't need to be a system which is going to create an incentive for private companies to dump their employees on the government. It doesn't need to be a system which is going to take $500 billion of Medicare funds away from people who are on Medicare. It doesn't need to be a system that basically guarantees that illegals can get health care at the public trough. It doesn't need to be a system that says that we're going to use Federal money to provide free abortions for anybody who wants those. And it doesn't need to be, above all, a system that is driven by bureaucrats getting between the patient and the doctor. Those are things that we don't need in America. Americans, in spite of the fact that a great preponderance of media have not been giving all the facts and pointing out that these quotations are not true, in spite of that fact, Americans across the board, whether they're liberal or conservative or whatever, they're saying, Please, don't take our one-fifth of the economy and completely redesign it to fit 15 million people who may not have insurance when 100 million people are comfortable with what they have. We need some reforms. We need some changes, and there are some very good things we can do. We haven't even mentioned tort reform, the high cost of defensive medicine. That's one thing that's needed to be fixed for a long time. That will drive health care costs down. We haven't even mentioned here today the fact that people that work for big companies or the government get to buy their health insurance with pretax dollars; whereas, a small business or self-employed person has to pay for their health insurance with after-tax dollars. That is not just. It should not stand. We should not tolerate this. There are changes we need to make, but socialized medicine is certainly not one of them. All you need is a little common sense to look at the foreign countries or the two States in America that tried this Pelosi-type plan and you will see that this is not the direction we need to go.

Mr. AKIN. That's the other thing that's interesting. America, such a great country, and we have these fifty States. And the States, to some degree, were like little laboratories. People could try stuff in the States and see how it worked. And then, if it worked really well, perhaps you might want to bring it to the Federal level. But why would we want to repeat the failed experiment of Massachusetts and Tennessee?

Mr. AKIN. You know, that's the thing that I find hard, the amount of faith that's required, when you take a look at the performance of government agencies, to turn our physical bodies over to those government agencies to take care of us. It's kind of a hard thing to swallow. As you say, the compassion of the IRS, the efficiency of the post office. FEMA, we've seen that--legendary. But we've got other ones. You've got the Department of Energy. Do you know why the Department of Energy was created? To make sure we weren't dependent on foreign oil. Aren't you glad that we've got all those employees making sure we're not dependent on foreign oil? And then you've got the CIA; the cloak and dagger stuff. Well, that would be great, but they're the ones that gave us a report in Gulf War I that the Iraqis were 10 years away from making a bomb, a nuclear device. When we got in there, they were about a year to a year and a half away from making it in Gulf War I. So we go to Gulf War II, they tell us, Oh, within a year, year and a half, they'll have a bomb. We get in there, and they weren't doing anything. And we want to trust our health care to these agencies? It's one thing if it's the post office or something, a letter gets missed. What happens--that's what I'm asking you my friend--what happens when we get the call and somebody says, Congressman McClintock, they're not letting my mom get the heart bypass, and I don't have any other alternative. How are we going to deal with that? How can we explain that?

Mr. AKIN. It's interesting that we seem to--as a political party system, the Democrats seem to be wedded to trying to copy what did not work well in the United Kingdom or in Canada. You can take a look at these cancer statistics and other measures of quality and they're really bad. If you look overall at cancer in the United Kingdom, you're looking at a 50 percent survival rate. Whereas in America, the numbers are so much higher. So why do we want to repeat something that doesn't work? Why do we want to mess up something that 100 million Americans have got a good system going, and we want to just turn it over to the government? It's almost like we've got these blinders on. Regardless, we know the government should do it all. And so half the Democrats want to go that way, the other half are kind of dragging their feet--and I'm thankful for them.

Mr. AKIN. Against the law federally?

Mr. AKIN. Why would that be, gentleman?

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. I think you just covered something that is absolutely amazing. You know, we don't put enough emphasis, maybe, on history. You are saying to the very day 70 years from the time Russia invaded Poland is when we just drove the knife in the back of Poland and cut the ground out for them as they were trying to defend their own country and the European countries. Is that what I just heard, 70 years exactly to the day we just sold them down the river?

Mr. AKIN. On the same day that the IAEA is saying that Iran is gaining nuclear capabilities; and 70 years before when Poland was invaded, we make the brilliant decision to abandon Poland, to abandon the one tool we have to stop intercontinental ballistic missiles and hold this fig leaf of an excuse that we could use a medium-range missile to try to stop things. This is a horrible decision.

Mr. AKIN. Will the gentleman yield? You're getting me upset.

Mr. AKIN. Does the gentleman yield?

Mr. AKIN. To me, it seems like you've understated how bad things are, because not only is the industrial base closed up, the buildings shuttered, the engineers working on some other project at some other place, but it takes time to get it back on track. If somebody is shooting missiles at you and they're going to arrive in half an hour, that's not very much time to start up a business and to rebuild your missile defense. You just can't do it in that amount of time. This requires planning. The gentleman's numbers and statistics are right. The only thing is, they do have ground-based not just in Alaska. I think there are a few in California, but it's not spread out. Am I wrong on that? I thought there were a couple of them in California. Anyway, the point is right, which is that they're not spread out. The other point is we're using something to kill something that isn't designed to work from the beginning. It just doesn't make any sense. As the gentleman has expanded the topic a little bit, let's talk about the different things that have been cut.

Mr. AKIN. I'm the ranking member on Seapower, and you know, there's something that just doesn't make sense. I've been aboard our ships that have these standard block 3-type missiles on them, okay? I've talked to the people who run those systems, and they tell me, if North Korea launches an ICBM, their chance of stopping it is about 1 percent. The reason is that the missile on the ship is a two-stage missile. It doesn't have the velocity and the ability to get on track with a much faster, higher- moving missile. So that's why I say you've got small ones, medium ones and big ones. You fight the big ones with big ones, and the big ones are ground-based interceptors. It's a three-stage. That's why we have them in Grayling, Alaska, that's why we have some in California, and that's why there should be some in Poland. This decision, I believe, was made all based on politics and not based on logic. I'll tell you what makes me secure. It's secure when we have American troops defending American homelands instead of vague promises from some Russian or some Iranian leader that everything is going to be okay.

Mr. AKIN. Right.

Mr. AKIN. Well, we just basically cut the limb off from underneath them. I mean who else is going to want to partner with us in some sort of a decent effort to defend the Western World from either nuclear destruction or at least blackmail? These guys have gone out on a limb, and we just cut the limb off from underneath them. What's even worse is the fig leaf of an excuse from a technical point of view--for those of us on the committee, we know this is just a bunch of baloney--of the idea that we're going to use the standard block 3 missile on a ship to stop intercontinental ballistic missiles. Look, this missile defense stuff is not as rocket science as people think. It's pretty simple. You've got small ones, medium ones and big ones. The big ones are called intercontinental ballistic missiles, and you can't shoot an intercontinental ballistic missile with one of our two-stage missiles off of a ship. You can't do that and make it work very well. Not only that, think about the logic of what we're saying. The Navy is complaining that they've got a lot of demands in places where they're going to put their ships. Now, if you're going to try and cover this with ships, you're going to have to have probably three ships on station all the time. That's really expensive. It's a lot simpler to put the radar on the Czech Republic and some ground-based interceptors in Poland. So we're talking about, first of all, a technical solution which is not going to give us the protection we need. It doesn't even make any sense. Then to say the threat assessments have dropped, the President is just not making sense in the kinds of things that he's talking about.

Mr. AKIN. We cut the limb off.

Mr. AKIN. This is kind of hard to figure out. I really am thankful. The ranking Republican member, Congressman McKeon, does a great job on Armed Services, and he is so gentlemanly and scholarly, and he lays the facts out. I want to just kind of put these things together and ask anybody if this makes any sense at all. What we're going to do is drop missile defense in Europe. Now, this is something for which quite a number of Europeans had to stick their necks out politically. It is the Czechs and the Polish who are agreeing to put this missile defense in. Now, if you draw a line between Iran and New York City, guess what's in line with that? Well, Poland is. So now we're going to drop this missile defense program to protect our country and Western Europe from rogue states, particularly Iran, which we now know is putting together three things. They're putting together long-range missiles, nuclear warheads and radical Islam. That's not a great combination. So now we're saying the threat assessment has been dropped. How do you figure that? The threat assessment has been dropped when you're putting long-range missiles and nuclear warheads with radical Islam. I don't feel like the threat assessment should have been dropped. I don't know anybody with common sense who would assert that.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. I appreciate your bringing that up, but I would like to get there in just a minute.

Mr. AKIN. Yes. I very much appreciate your all joining us tonight. I thank my colleagues and the American public for continuing this discussion on health care. God bless you all. Thank you. Dear __: With the media reporting daily on Congress' and President Obama's efforts to enact meaningful health reforms this year, many Humana Medicare Advantage (MA) members are contacting us with questions. Members just like you want to know what these reforms might mean for their Medicare health plan and how they can get involved to help protect Medicare Advantage. We are working diligently to ensure that our nation's leaders understand how proposed reforms might affect you. At the same time, we have created the Partner program to keep you informed about proposed Medicare changes and help you get involved so your voice is heard in Washington. Your opinions matter to us, to others on Medicare, arid to your elected officials. There are two things you can do now to help show Congress the importance of Medicare Advantage: Opt into the Partner program. Becoming a Partner is easy. Just complete the accompanying, postage-paid form and follow the instructions to fold and mail it back. As a Humana Partner, you will join more than 50,000 Humana Medicare Advantage members who are receiving information about this issue and learning how to get involved to protect your Medicare health plan coverage. Let your Members of Congress know why Medicare Advantage is important to you. Congress is considering significant cuts to Medicare Advantage now, and your Members of Congress will want to know why this program is valuable to you because these cuts could mean higher costs and benefit reductions to many on Medicare Advantage. We've made it easy for you to have your voice heard. Just call (877) 698-9228 (toll-free) or visit www.humanapartners.com for additional information about this issue and how you can offer helpful input to your elected officials. Leading health reform proposals being considered in Washington, D.C., this summer include billions in Medicare Advantage funding cuts, as well as spending reductions to original Medicare and Medicaid. While these programs need to be made more efficient, if the proposed funding cut levels become law, millions of seniors and disabled individuals could lose many of the important benefits and services that make Medicare Advantage health plans so valuable. On behalf of Humana's 28,000 employees, I would like to thank you for being a Humana member. We look forward to partnering with you to ensure the Medicare Advantage program remains strong, so you can have peace of mind about your health coverage--now and in the future! Regards, Philip Painter, M.D., Chief Medical Officer, Humana Medicare.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Well, I'm inclined to, as you start reminiscing that we don't learn from history, one of the things that I remember hearing about is when I was first elected to Congress in 2001, I was on the Armed Services Committee and we made the votes to fund the building of missile defense. But there was also a guy by the name of Rumsfeld who was Secretary of Defense. He came in and spoke to us on some pretty clear kinds of lines of reasoning. He stated, If you're Secretary of Defense, there's kind of three situations. There's the things that you know about that you should worry. And those are things that are of concern to us. But the things that are particularly of concern are the things we don't know about, that we should worry. And then he gave an example of that. One of the examples was, we had a treaty with the Soviet Union. And the treaty said that nobody is going to build biological weapons. And what had come out was in fact that the Soviet Union had all kinds of missiles pointed at America with biological weapons in those missiles, including smallpox. And so we didn't have a clue because we took their good will that they certainly wouldn't violate a treaty. It seems to me that a more American way of thinking is if you're worried about somebody shooting a nuclear missile at you, maybe we just ought to have the capability of shooting it down before it even gets over our ground. That seems to be an awful lot more dependable mindset than trusting people who have systematically lied to us in the past. This was a terrible decision by our administration. It can be viewed in no other light. It can only be viewed as stepping away from the responsibility of defending American citizens and Western European citizens and creating a less stable world. This is not a decision that the American people should let stand. This is something that must be reversed. It requires action on the part of people who are patriots and people who love this country, who love life and freedom itself.

Mr. AKIN. You know, that's kind of interesting, because the missile technology that Iran has gotten came from the Soviet Union. So if the Soviet Union were really serious about reducing Iran's capability, at least in the area of delivering large missiles, then they are certainly approaching it from a rather unique point of view of selling missile technology to Iran. I don't think your proposition seems to make sense. If the President got something for giving up missile defense in Europe, it wouldn't make sense that he got something from the very country that had been giving Iran the missile-building capability. I don't know anything that he got for that. I am not sure that maybe he didn't just do it just to be a nice guy or something. I don't see anything that he got that would be valuable enough risking our population to the population of Western Europe. So you have really caught me. I really don't know the answer to your question. I hope the gentleman from Arizona knows what the President got.

Mr. AKIN. I thank my very good friend from the State next-door to the State of Missouri. I thank him for his common sense. I also thank my good friend from Arizona, a fellow member of the Armed Services Committee. He is both a statesman and is very good from an engineering point of view with the details of what is going on. I'd like to just try and say similar things but in a little bit more of a net fashion because he was so scholarly about it. Basically, what happened was the Obama administration made a decision, which was announced Friday, that they're abandoning missile defense in Eastern Europe. Those locations are chosen because of physics and geometry to protect Western Europe and the United States from a possible launch from Iran. Now, when you talk about missiles, it isn't too complicated. You've got little ones, medium-sized ones and great big ones. The way you stop great big ones, which we call intercontinental ballistic missiles--and they have three stages, and they go very high and very fast--is with other big, fast missiles called ground-based. The proposal was to put defensive locations in a couple of Eastern European states, the Czech Republic, among others, and to provide ourselves with a defense. The most fundamental purpose of a civil government is to protect their citizens, particularly to protect millions of citizens in the face of somebody who says, We're going to get you. They're building weapons that can only be used for that purpose. Nuclear bombs are not used to power a power plant. They're used to blow people up. So we have an administration which has stepped away from the fundamental purpose of any government to protect its citizens. So this is a regular head-scratcher of a decision. Not only that, but we betrayed the people who politically put their necks on the line with their constituents and with their citizens, making a controversial decision in Europe to be able to be part of this missile defense. This was Ronald Reagan's dream, and I don't see how anybody could have trouble with the idea of trying to protect oneself against somebody who is trying to ``nuke ya.'' I mean, to me, that just defies common sense. So what is going on here is we've seen the Obama administration stepping away from the requirement to defend ourselves. President Bush did the heavy lifting. He went into Europe, talked to the Russians, and told them, You've got 6 months, and we're going to develop missile defense. Everybody said you can't do it. The Democrats said, It's too expensive and you can't do it. We developed the technology, and we did it. Not only did we hit a missile with a missile, but we have demonstrated it time after time after time. At incredibly high speeds, we hit a spot on a missile with a missile. We can do that. We have the technical ability to do it and, yet, no will to follow through. I don't understand that. What frightens me particularly, gentleman, is this decision is not made in a vacuum. It is a pattern that we are seeing on the Armed Services Committee and things, some of these things that from a security point of view we can hardly talk about. But this is not one decision by itself. We are also seeing a very strong weakening of resolve in dealing with what's going on in Afghanistan. Our troops on the ground are sending us signals, hey, guys, we are going to have to go out and get it. This isn't going to be easy. This is one of these, like Iraq, it's going to be one of these insurgent-like conflicts. It is going to take some time and effort and enough people to get it. We are seeing a waffling on the part of the administration in the face of the challenges facing us in Afghanistan. On a third point, which I would perhaps get in an argument with my very good friend from Arizona, that there is something even more upsetting to me, and that is the fact that Americans offensive capability has been based for many decades on the idea of a triad; that is big missiles that we launch from the land, big missiles that we launch from submarines. The third leg of the triad is a bomber, a bomber that can go over some potential enemy's territory with impunity and bomb them. With that offensive capability, we can live in peace, because we have no intent of wanting to drop missiles or bombs on anybody. But what has happened is this administration is walking away from one leg of the triad. I know my dear friend on Armed Services knows what I am talking about. I have to be careful about what I can say and not. But this is the bomber leg. Our bombers are currently old, some of them 50 years old. It is important that we do the planning now to develop the technology and the aircraft to maintain that leg. That also is being cut by the Obama administration, and that's something that has not received hardly any public attention. But this is a big deal, as big a deal as cutting missile defense. So this is a pattern, a pattern of not funding national defense, not prioritizing the protection of our citizenry, and I am very uncomfortable with it. I would like toss those thoughts out for a little discussion.