W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Can you get a private student loan now or is it that, basically, you can't get them anymore?

Mr. AKIN. I really appreciate the gentleman's points that have been made here, explaining the fact that one of the people who is not going to like this is somebody who has an insurance policy that he likes, because when the government offers something for free, one can bet that what's going to happen is that the insurance policy is going to go away. Now, it isn't as though the ideas that are being advocated in this bill are particularly new. They've been tried in other places. Here is one. Massachusetts tried. Basically, everybody has to have insurance, and the government is offering health care. What was the end result? I mean we don't have to reinvent the wheel. We see that what happened was, first of all, Massachusetts took a huge hit financially, and health care access is down because patients have to wait 70 days to see a doctor in Boston. So, first of all, it is the typical red tape in government. You've got to wait in a line, but what's more, it costs a whole lot of money to wait in line because now your health care costs in Massachusetts are 133 percent more than what the average is. So it's not like we haven't tried this before. It has been tried; yet we're going to want to try and do the exact same thing. It has been tried in other places. It was tried over here in Europe. We can take a look at that. What happens with cancer? I happen to be a cancer survivor. I'm not a wizard doctor; I'm not even a wizard economist, but I know a little bit about cancer because I survived it. I see my good friend from California. If you'd like to jump in here, we'd be delighted to yield you time.

Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time a moment, what you just said is mirrored--just a week or so ago we had about 1,100 pages of the bill. I started reading it and it said the commissioner shall, we go to another page, the commissioner shall, and we had page after page, the commissioner shall do this, the commissioner shall do that. It may not be his intention to have the government run it all. He could have called it the czar. We had some discussion whether it's a commissioner or a czar or a commissar. We weren't sure what. But anyway it was one after the other pages. That's what the bill says. And just to your point. Sorry to interrupt. I yield back.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, you're talking about honest leadership and they're saying, as they take a look at this incredible flow chart, they're saying that if you've got a good relationship with your insurance company and your doctor and you like what you have, you can keep what you have. And yet listed in the bill is specific language that says you can't. That doesn't seem to me like they're following what the Web site says. I'd like to recognize our conference chairman. Maybe you could get us out of this morass, gentleman, because we're a little confused between the politically appropriate language which seems to be okay for Democrats but not for Republicans to call this a Democrat health plan. But I yield to my good friend from Indiana. (Mr. PENCE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. AKIN. Unemployment is still going up

Mr. AKIN. How you do it is important.

Mr. AKIN. But you've got to be up at 3:00 in the morning to hear what's going on in committee.

Mr. AKIN. Fix the other four or five half-baked ideas we've already started.

Mr. AKIN. So we passed the stimulus bill. The purpose is to make sure that we don't have unemployment and that we've got plenty of jobs. And here we are, whatever it is 4, 5 months later, and the board of directors, which is the public, is saying we're at 9 percent unemployment, which is a conservative number, and rising, and you guys just spent whatever it was, almost $800 billion, to make sure this doesn't happen.

Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming, gentleman, what you just said, I think, is another censored phrase, government-run health care. We're not allowed to say that. And our constituents say, why don't you say something more? And they're telling us if we print ``government-run'' health care, then we can't, then we have to pay for the mailing out of our own pocket. Isn't that weird?

Mr. AKIN. The funny thing is that these are not Republican targets. These are not our targets. This is the President's target. He's saying 8 percent if you don't give me the stimulus. He gets the stimulus bill and now it's 9. I yield to my friend from Louisiana.

Mr. AKIN. Timeliness. You know, in cancer, they always say, if you can diagnose it early, your probability of success goes up. As for that timely thing, you know, I think the socialized medical system says, We'll give you a free C-section, ma'am, as long as you're willing to wait 12 months.

Mr. AKIN. Well, gentlemen, I would call your attention to another colleague of ours, Congressman Rogers, from Michigan. He told the story the other day of when he was, I believe, 18 or 19 years old and had bladder cancer. Now, his doctor didn't know that, of course. He had some blood in the urine. He went to his doctor, who had known him and who had known his family for some period of time. The statistical probability of his having bladder cancer at that age was almost nothing. Yet, because he had that relationship with his doctor, she didn't let it go. It was just like your father wouldn't, my friend. She didn't let that thing go. There was something about her intuitive sense of knowing there was a problem there. They checked it out, and found out that he had bladder cancer. He's a Congressman now. This was some 40 years ago. But you know when you have these statistics saying it just fits in this category, he held up a calculator and he said, There's nothing in this government calculator that knows anything about health care. All it is is some government agent running statistics. There was a guy from Canada that I just read about, and he was younger than you are. He was in his fifties, and the Canadians said, You can't have a hip replacement. You're too old. So of course he used the option. He came to America and got it--the free enterprise system. My good friend from Texas.

Mr. AKIN. Let's do this again. Every single household in America is going to get hit with an additional $10,000 per household to make this transition to a socialized medical system that produces this kind of result? Is that what you're saying?

Mr. AKIN. I think you just put your heart right on what this debate is about.

Mr. AKIN. We know that, for the British, for the European Union--in England--this is a 50 percent number. Now, if I were sick, you could talk to me all you want about the government's giving me free health care, but it wouldn't do me any good if I were dead. This shows you what happens when we go to a government- run system. I would be happy to yield to my friend.

Mr. AKIN. I yield.

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your recognizing us on a very interesting and important topic, something that I believe that anybody who pays much attention to what is happening in Washington, D.C., is quite aware of. That is the subject of health care, something that impacts every single American in our country, affects our budget, and affects our family members, and is something of great interest. I would like to start tonight by just backing up, though, about 4 weeks or so to this very Chamber that we are meeting in, that we are talking in today. It was here, during a day that we were debating a bill that was called cap-and-tax, and it was the largest tax increase in the history of our country. Now, what happened right before that was of interest because at 3 o'clock in the morning a 300-page amendment was passed to an 1,100-page bill. And as we were debating this bill on the floor, because of the speed with which the Democrats moved we didn't even have a copy of the bill on the floor. You are supposed to have a copy at least so in case somebody wants to check a fine point, they could read it. Of course no one had read the 1,100-page bill. And certainly what was happening right behind me at the dais, we had good staff people hurriedly trying to put those 300 pages of amendments in the 1,100-page bill, and we are debating a bill and there's no copy on the floor. And the thing was passed without, as I recall it, a single Republican voting for it, and Democrats all voted for it. Now, the public doesn't like it when we pass bills that we don't know what's in them or haven't read them, and we've been embarrassed a number of times this year by that same process. Why do you pass a bill that people haven't had a chance to read or don't know what happened in the dark of night, or the amendments?

Mr. AKIN. I do yield to my very good friend from Michigan. Please jump in.

Mr. AKIN. And just reclaiming my time for a minute, that was the stimulus plan, as I recall--was that the one that had the special bonuses for insurance executives and it was a finger-pointing deal as to who put this in in the dark of night?

Mr. AKIN. This is exactly the same bill, just to put this in perspective, this is a bill that if we didn't pass it, we might see unemployment at 8 percent, right? Is that the same bill?

Mr. AKIN. We've been joined this evening on the floor by a couple of very distinguished Congressmen, a couple of my very good friends, the gentleman from Texas and also the gentleman from Indiana. I'm going to recognize the gentleman from Texas who seems like he's got really something he's got to say. And I'll go right back over to my good friend, Congressman Pence from Indiana, highly respected on the floor, for your perspective on this.

Mr. AKIN. In other words, if you're like I am, an old geezer at 62 years of age, and you need a new hip the way I do, they're going to say, we're putting you out to pasture; take a few pain pills. But they're going to say that in a really nice way, though, at least. So I hope it's linguistically appropriate, but my hip's still going to be sore anyway.

Mr. AKIN. A linguistically appropriate way.

Mr. AKIN. Now unemployment is whatever it is, 9 something.