W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Yes, I do yield.

Mr. AKIN. I think that's a very strong point. I was just starting out our discussion, gentlemen, this evening talking about why in the world would you bring up something at 3 o'clock in the morning, a bill hasn't even been read and you want to push it through in a great big hurry? And the reason is you don't want people to know what's in the bill because it's easier to pass it.

Mr. AKIN. So not just doctors now, but the Mayo Clinic is opposed to this scheme that we have seen concocted here.

Mr. AKIN. And do we have new procedures as well, doctors?

Mr. AKIN. Don't we have a lot of new drugs that are developed in America?

Mr. AKIN. Just to interrupt a minute. Now, isn't America really known for innovation in health care?

Mr. AKIN. You've got five doctors here. You better be honest.

Mr. AKIN. Not in the daughter.

Mr. AKIN. Breast cancer?

Mr. AKIN. It's personal to me. It was my prostate, gentleman.

Mr. AKIN. Mr. Speaker, it's a pleasure to be able to join you tonight and my colleagues and friends to talk about some things that are of tremendous significance to us here in this country. And in order to do our discussion tonight, I'm going to back up just a little bit and answer an interesting question. It was about--I guess it was about 3 weeks ago, and it was a situation that occurred here on the floor of the U.S. Congress. If you go back from the day that we actually voted on the bill, what's going on was that at 3 o'clock in the morning, we had an 1,100- page bill called cap-and-tax or cap-and-trade. It was the largest tax increase in the history of our country, and that bill was going to be coming up for a vote. Well, at 3 o'clock in the morning, a major committee that was influencing that legislation at 3 o'clock in the morning passed a 300-page amendment to this 1,100 page bill. Now, this amendment was not just one amendment but was a whole series of amendments that went into the bill. So starting at 3 o'clock, or whenever the staff got here, they started to put each page of those 300 pages of amendments into the bill as we were just finishing the debate and going to vote on the bill. So before we even voted on the bill, the question was asked, Do we have a copy of the bill that we're going to be voting on? And the funny thing was we're supposed to have a copy of it here on the floor before you vote on a bill, and there wasn't any copy here. In fact, the clerk was still turning the pages trying to get these 300 pages passed in the dark of night into the bill. And then, of course, the thing was rushed forward and was voted almost a straight party-line vote. It was the largest tax increase in the history of our country, but it also had a lot of other component parts which were very onerous. For instance, it put the Federal Government basically into the building code business telling local communities that, for instance, if you have a garage, you've got to have an outlet for your electrical car. So it was very intrusive from a red tape point of view. But the reason that I wanted to introduce our discussion on health care tonight in this context is why in the world would the U.S. Congress be voting 300-page amendments into a bill at 3 o'clock in the morning and we don't even have a copy on the floor and rush it to a vote? Now, to an average person, an average American, that would seem like not much transparency, not much time for people to read 1,400 pages of bill and know what they're voting on. So why would you do something like that? The logic is simple. If people don't know what it is in the bill, it's easier to get them to vote for it. You may say, Well, that's not a very honest or fair tactic, but that's what we do on this floor over the last 6 months. That's what has been going on. And that's what the attempt is going to be on this great big bill of basically taking 20 percent of the U.S. economy, that is the entire medical sector, and putting it under government control. This is a very, very big change in America. You wanted change. Boy, when you see 20 percent of our economy going to be run by bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., I guarantee you there is change. This bill, we've been talking about it a number of weeks, but the same idea. People don't really want you to know what's in the bill, so we're going to talk about what is in the bill. Now, on the surface--and I have been joined by a doctor from Louisiana, a fantastic guy, a medical doctor. He knows something about medicine. He spent his life practicing medicine. What I would like to do is to say, to begin with, that on the surface this looks like a pretty good deal. Well, what's being promised here? First of all, you are going to get free health insurance and free health care. Free health insurance, free health care. That sounds pretty good. What else are we gonna get? Well, I just heard Democrats on the television this morning saying any kind of health insurance you have now you get to keep it. So if you've got something you like, don't worry, you can keep what you've got. You can keep it the way you have it, but there are other people who are going to benefit from this. So you can get free health insurance but you could also keep what you have. And also, the other thing about this proposal is it's going to save money. In fact, we've heard the President say, If you pass this, it's going to help us get the economy going and get jobs going and help America get going because of the fact it's going to save so much money. Well, I suppose if those three things were true, everybody would be for it. The fact of the matter is an awful lot of people are not for this bill because those things are not all what they appear to be on the surface. So let us take a look, first of all, at the free health insurance question and also the fact that you are going to save money. Well, one of the things when government starts to do things, particularly stuff that they're not very good at doing, when the government starts to do too much, we notice these things happen. First of all, it gets expensive. You have a lot of bureaucracy and rationing. You also have an inefficient allocation of resources. We've seen this in many other departments of government and you see degraded quality. Now, do we have any evidence to suggest that what the Democrats are saying, that this is so efficient it's going to save money and it's going to be free and you can keep what you have, is there any evidence to suggest otherwise? Well, there certainly is, but this is something to think about. If health care is expensive now, just wait until it's free. We have, joining us on the floor tonight, a doctor that I have come to respect deeply from Louisiana, Dr. Fleming. I would like to yield to Dr. Fleming in a moment or two. I would like to talk a little bit about these claims. Is this an efficient way to be running medicine? And what is your impression about these claims that this is going to be something where you get to keep whatever care you have?

Mr. AKIN. So things like Medicaid, you always hear about a tremendous fraud level in Medicaid. Would that be an example of what you are talking about?

Mr. AKIN. So people get away with a lot of fraud in Medicaid, and that runs the cost up to make it less efficient. Do you have other examples?

Mr. AKIN. How many people get busted for Medicaid fraud? Does that happen a lot?

Mr. AKIN. A very small number.

Mr. AKIN. Another thing that we could take a look at--because this is an assertion that we're hearing the President make that this thing is going to help our economy, and yet the Congressional Budget Office took a look at the first bill that the Democrats trotted out here, and they were looking at $2 trillion. Now, that's spending $2 trillion. It's hard to make a case that that's going to save money because we're not spending that $2 trillion now, and yet they're saying this is going to be $2 trillion. Well, they went back to the drawing board, came back and with a little hocus-pocus, and taking some money from some other places, they got it down to $1 trillion. But that doesn't seem like that's spending less. It's a trillion more than we're spending right now.

Mr. AKIN. So they're going to take the money out of Medicare in order to make it look like it's not really $2 trillion, it's more like $1 trillion.

Mr. AKIN. Now that big cap-and-tax bill that we just passed, which was the biggest tax increase in the history of our country, was only about 780-something billion dollars. So that's less than 1 trillion. So that huge tax increase won't be enough to pay for the system, I suppose.

Mr. AKIN. Now, the other thing is it's not like we're flying without instruments on this course that we're taking because various States have tried to do what the Democrats are proposing. It's not new; it's just new to do it at the whole Federal level. Various States have tried it. Tennessee was one, Massachusetts was the other. We've got some of the results right here on this chart about what happened in Massachusetts. In 2006, Massachusetts required universal health care coverage, which is what's being proposed here by the Democrats much like the current Democrat plan. People were required to purchase specific levels of coverage. Now, what was the result of doing that? It's not like this is new. This is something we tried. Health care costs were up 42 percent since 2006. That doesn't look like that's going to save any money. That's where that $2 trillion is talking about. This is very, very expensive. Health care access is down. That is, patients had to wait almost 70 days to see a doctor in Boston. And so are those the kind of results that we want? Now, health care costs are 133 percent of the national average. So this jacked the cost of health care by a third over what it was before. So it's not like it hasn't been tried. What we're doing is nationalizing a failure. Now, the results in Tennessee were not much better. Doctor, do you recall that?

Mr. AKIN. In other words, are you saying that the private medical insurance people that are writing medical insurance plans are subsidizing Medicare and Medicaid?

Mr. AKIN. So in other words, what is going on then is in order to fix the part of health care that the government is already meddling in, which is in terms of medical payments overall, the government handles half the money that is going through health care. If you take Medicaid and Medicare and you add that much money up, I think that's about half of the total of all the money spent. So we already have the government meddling in half of it, and now what's happening is you're asking the privates to support all this public stuff, right?

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. I try to picture that you can get a free C-section as long as you're willing to wait a year for it, you know? That's really going to be helpful.

Mr. AKIN. That's the whole point of doing these things at 3 o'clock in the morning with 300-page amendments. There's not even a copy of the bill on the floor. Why do you want to do it in the dark? Because how many Americans are going to vote to spend $250 million to teach your daughters how condoms work? There are not too many American people who want to vote for something like that. That's why you want to do it in the dark of night. The other thing they don't want you to do is to understand the difference. They want to say, Our health care system is so bad. Hey, there are some problems, but take a look at this compared to this socialized mess over in England or in Canada. Take a look at people like me. I'm a cancer survivor. Take a look at your survival rate for men with cancer: 18 percent better in the United States. We want to trash our system to go to something that has worse numbers? It doesn't make sense. I yield back.

Mr. AKIN. I would like to jump in a little bit about this whole idea about our trust for different bureaucracies. Let us take a look at the track record. We're talking about a health care system that's going to have the good heart of the IRS and the efficiency of the postal system. Let us take a look at some of these different government agencies and how much--do we really want to trust them with our personal health care? Let's think a little bit about the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy was chartered with a mission. The mission was that we were going to make sure that we're not dependent on foreign sources of energy. Now, we have had a lot of employees and we're more dependent on foreign energy than we've ever been. So how good is the Department of Energy? Let's talk about the Department of Education. There was a Presidential commission studying the Department of Education. They came to the conclusion that if a foreign country had done to us what the Department of Education has done, we would consider it an act of war. But we have a lot of faith in government bureaucracies. Let's talk about your favorite bureaucracy. I shouldn't pick on your pet, the CIA. We go into gulf war 1 and they give us this intelligence. They say, Look, Iraq is 10 years away from making a nuclear device. We get in there; they're a year-and-a-half away. So they go to gulf war II. They say they're a year-and-a-half away. We get in there, they're 10 years away. I mean, why do we have so much faith in all of these? I guess FEMA did a wonderful job on Hurricane Katrina, and yet we want to turn our personal health care over to all of these government agencies? I don't get it. It doesn't seem to make any sense at all.

Mr. AKIN. I was thinking about that Berlin Wall example. We think about the Soviet Union and what was their basic theory. Well, the theory is the government is going to basically give you food, the government is going to give you housing, the government is going to give you education, the government is going to give you health care. And let's see, what are we doing in America? The government is going to give you an education, the government is going to give you food, the government is going to give you a place to live, and the government is going to give you health care. We didn't seem to learn a whole lot, did we? Well, thank you very much gentlemen.