W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. So, if you've got cancer, you'll want to be in the good, old USA then.

Mr. AKIN. Okay. This is over 5 years?

Mr. AKIN. Let's do that statistic one more time, and we'll probably have to close up with that. In the U.S., your survival rate is 60-something percent overall.

Mr. AKIN. I yield my last minute or so.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, I appreciate, Doctors, your help. We have just a couple of minutes before I have to close, and I would like to correct one other thing. It's an assumption that has been kind of hidden in this debate over the months, which is that American health care is really cruddy and terrible and that it has to be totally torn down and rebuilt. Now, this summer, while we were debating this, my dear father, who is 88 years old, went to a heart doctor. His original heart doctor had been diagnosed with cancer, and he retired. He goes to a new heart doctor. The heart doctor says, What has the doctor done for your heart? Dad says, Well, I'm getting these medicines. He said, But what did you do? Well, come in, he says, for a stress test. He went in for the stress test. Within a couple of days, he had scheduled an angioplasty. My father was put under anesthetic. They went in and looked around with their little camera. He came back out. They hadn't done anything. They called us in the office. I was with my dad on Monday. He's 88 years old. The doctor says, You need open heart surgery. He says, What are the numbers? The numbers are these, he said. There's a 10 percent chance for a major complication in open heart surgery. If you don't get it, there's a 50 percent chance you're going to have a major heart attack. So I'm sitting there with my dad and my mom in the office. The doctor says, When can we schedule surgery? He said, Tuesday or Thursday. That is tomorrow or two days. So we scheduled surgery. My dad had a seven-way heart bypass. He was home from the hospital on Saturday. The whole process took about 2 weeks, 2\1/2\ weeks, and he's doing fine. That's the miracle of American medicine. Let me explain one thing, which is, if you're some sheikh in Bahrain with unlimited money, where do you want to go to get your health care? To the good, old USA. I say to you doctors, Hats off for the great health care that you provide. Yes, there are some things that we can do to improve it, but it doesn't mean we have to burn the entire barn down.

Mr. AKIN. I yield.

Mr. AKIN. One person is saying something, and it isn't all necessarily so.

Mr. AKIN. So we have the President saying we're not going to be covering illegal immigrants. In fact, the bill from a completely unbiased source says there is nothing in it to protect against that, and the amendment to specifically prohibit it was defeated on a party- line vote. So that's why there's some tension on this subject, isn't there?

Mr. AKIN. A party-line vote again?

Mr. AKIN. How did that go as an amendment? Did it pass? I assume it passed.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, if the objective is that we're not going to cover illegals, if that's the objective, you are saying let's make it clear to everybody. We'll put a simple sentence or couple of sentences in the bill, and we'll make it clear that we're not going to cover illegals, and that's offered as an amendment.

Mr. AKIN. I yield to Dr. Fleming.

Mr. AKIN. I would just like to jump to the record here. This is the August 8 speech: There are those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. He is saying people are saying things that are false. That's pretty close to calling them something else. They're saying things that are false. The reforms I am proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally. This is a statement that he made. Is it true or is it not? Well, one of the ways that you can check it out is to take a look at the bill. Another way that you can do it is to hire a group of legal scholars who works for Congress, called the Congressional Research Service. They're not Republicans. They're not Democrats. They looked into this statement. What did they find in this? Under 3200--this is Pelosi's health care bill--the health insurance exchange would begin operation in 2013, and it would offer private plans alongside a public option. Then he goes on: 3200 does not contain any restrictions on noncitizens, whether legally or illegally present or in the United States temporarily or permanently, participating in the exchange. In other words, in spite of the fact that the bill says this shouldn't apply--and there is actually language that says it shouldn't apply to illegals--in practice, when you turn the bill on, there's no screening mechanism.

Mr. AKIN. I yield.

Mr. AKIN. Yes, Gentlemen, this was the President's claim. So we hear this one claim on one side. Now, what is the balancing counterclaim? Well, here is one. This is a poor guy from MIT who wishes he hadn't said it because he was attacked for making this statement: With or without reform, that won't be true. This is about this statement. He says, 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 other circumstances will not make that happen. So, in other words, he can say you can keep what you've got; but in fact what happens is, just like in the funding for higher education, the government comes in and changes everything, and you don't have access to it anymore. Please, the gentleman from Iowa.

Mr. AKIN. Wait a minute. I am still coming back to this deal where you are a business and you are writing a letter to the people that you're providing a product to, and the government tells you you can't send a letter to them and you have to take it off your Web site? Is this 1984? I mean, what is this, George Orwell or something? I find the whole pattern here to be upsetting. I really do. My friend from Iowa, are you running away on us here? I was just about to recognize you, gentleman. Did you want to jump in on this?

Mr. AKIN. I appreciate your sharing that. I guess I appreciate it. I think it's a little bit chilling. I mean, the President said something about calling us out. That sounds like something my principal did to me all the time when I was, you know, talking or chewing gum or something. Going to Dr. Gingrey, have you heard about this situation? This is kind of a little spooky--that you can't send people a letter in America?

Mr. AKIN. I don't know if we have even got a First Amendment anymore.

Mr. AKIN. You are saying that we have a private company who is insuring people. They write a letter to the people that are buying their product and say to them, essentially, you're being targeted by Nancy Pelosi's health care bill. So they are a constituency, they are a group of Americans who have a right to have an opinion. Obviously they're somewhat predisposed to like it because they wouldn't be in the program if they didn't like it, and they're being told, Your program is going to be cancelled. The program you like in Medicare is going to be canceled. So they're warning their people that are buying their product, Look out. You're about to lose something. If you like it, you're going to have to say something about it. And now the government is threatening Humana for communicating?

Mr. AKIN. Wait, wait, wait. Stop again. I feel like I have just blasted off and gone to some other country or some other planet.

Mr. AKIN. So specifically, the bill that's being proposed by Nancy Pelosi--and indirectly by the President--is going to cut Medicare. Specifically in Medicare, it's going to cut Medicare Advantage, and Humana works with that. I just want to make sure we get this down.

Mr. AKIN. So we've got Humana. It's a health insurance company provider, and it's particularly working with Medicare money and packaging that money into more of like a private medical plan type thing?

Mr. AKIN. This is the area that's kind of sacred to Americans, the idea of free speech, that you can have your opinion, you can disagree with a family member or a neighbor. But we can have this debate and this discussion, and we're not going to hide information. Is that what you are getting at?

Mr. AKIN. So you are saying of Americans in general, 89 percent are saying, We're pretty comfortable with what we've got.

Mr. AKIN. So less than 4 percent. We're going to redo the whole system to deal with 4 percent. Even on the surface, it doesn't seem intuitively obvious to the casual observer that that's the way that you might deal with this thing. Congresswoman Foxx.