W. Akin

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Thank you, Congressman King. I appreciate your love for free enterprise and for your willingness to stand up for freedom. We've been joined here over the last hour by a number of distinguished doctors, by doctors who have given a large portion of their lives to providing good quality health care--by Dr. Roe from Tennessee, by Dr. Gingrey from Georgia, who just left, and by Dr. Broun from Georgia. They all, of course, know health care far better than a lot of us because they've lived it for 30 or 40 years of their lives; but there's something that I've lived for about 9 years of my life, and that's what is called cancer. People in America, when you hear the word ``cancer''--they call it ``the big C''--you pay attention to it. When I got here as a freshman Congressman, I waltzed down to the doctor's clinic that's provided by the Navy in this Capitol building. I felt bulletproof and fit as a fiddle at barely over 50. They said, Yeah, you're in pretty good shape except for one little detail: you've got prostate cancer. So, when you hear the words ``the big C''--cancer--pay attention to it. So, although I'm not a doctor, I've had some experience. There was one set of numbers that jumped out at me that we really didn't talk about, although it was mentioned by the gentleman from Arizona, Congressman Shadegg. He talked about prostate cancer and breast cancer, but let's generalize those numbers a little bit more. Let's talk about survival rates. What we're talking about here is that, for the sake of 4 percent of the people who are chronically uninsured, the Democrats want to remake the best health care system in the world even though they were throwing rocks at it an hour and a half ago. Nobody goes from America to get health care somewhere else. They all come here to get their health care. Now what they want to do is turn us into something like Canada or England or Tennessee, which had a bad experience, or like Massachusetts. Let's take a look at their track records before we jump too fast off this cliff. Let's take a look at the survival rates of cancer among men. In the United States, there is a 62.9 percent survival rate. That says, if you get diagnosed, there is a 62.9 percent survival rate.

Mr. AKIN. Let me just get to the other one. Look at this one in the U.K.--that's your socialized medicine: 44.8. You're talking an 18 percent difference in the survival rates between these two systems. We want to move from the U.S. system to be more like Canada or the U.K.? I will yield, and I have to yield to the gentleman from Iowa.

Mr. AKIN. That's my understanding. These numbers here are the survival rates of all cancers among men and of all cancers among women. Now, as you know, Doctor, prostate is the most common among men and breast cancer for women, but this is the whole deal.

Mr. AKIN. It's hard for everybody to be able to see the chart here. Regarding the cancer for women, you're at 66.3 percent survival. You're better off if you are a woman in the United States than if you are a man in the United States; but if you go to the U.K., women are still 14 percent worse in terms of cancer. So, in other words, if you're a man in England, you're really in trouble. That's the worst you can be is a guy in England--okay?--with cancer. But if you are a woman in England with cancer, you're still at a 14 percent worse condition for survival rates than if you're in the United States. So, in other words, it's 18 percent worse in England for a cancer patient than it is in the United States.

Mr. AKIN. No. If you are a woman in the United Kingdom, you have got a 52 percent. So you are a little better off than a man in the United Kingdom, but not as good as a man in the United States at 62 percent.

Mr. AKIN. But still the point of these numbers is that this government-run health care system is not producing results. It's doing just what our doctors are telling us is happening, and that is, that you have all of these mandates in the government that are making it so that it can't be effective. Of course the place where most of us, when you get to be my age--there are a few old geezers here, like me. And what do you do when you get a government that can't afford to pay for the health care? Well, they start to ration care. And who are they going to ration it to? It's the older people. They are going to say, Yes, it's fine, but you don't qualify for this kind of care. You're not enough of a benefit to society. We're going to cut you off.

Mr. AKIN. How many bureaucrats can dance on the head of the pin, huh?

Mr. AKIN. Is there a medicine to treat nausea?

Mr. AKIN. I need to interrupt. I am so hopelessly confused. I really need some help from my colleagues tonight.

Mr. AKIN. I remember we were promised if we don't pass the stimulus bill, we're going to see unemployment over 8 percent. And so, of course, we didn't vote for it. But they passed the stimulus bill, and now we've got 9.5, or whatever it is percent, unemployment

Mr. AKIN. This is part of the plan. By golly, it just seems like to me maybe we shouldn't have passed that.

Mr. AKIN. Your 20 million people are the number of people almost that don't have health insurance. So now we've created 20 million unemployed through this wonder of economics, this Keynesian economics that supposedly says the government goes on a spending spree, everybody is going to be doing great.

Mr. AKIN. I think that we've had chance a little bit to take a look, and I think in a constructive way to, lampoon this method of doing business. We already saw the 1,100- or 1,200- or 1,400-page bill and then 300 pages of amendments at 3 o'clock in the morning, all this kind of gobbledygook, and the equivalent of a czar to take over 20 percent of our economy, which is health care. And yet, the fact of the matter is those of us standing here--and we can do this a little bit with a sense of humor, almost crying at the same time--know that there are some very plain English principles which we have all seen that make health care work, things that we all stand for and believe in. We believe in the fact that there should be a relationship between a doctor and a patient, and the bureaucrat shouldn't get in the way. I think an awful lot of Americans believe in that, too. I think that those of us standing in this Chamber tonight believe in the fact that we don't want some government bureaucrat rationing our health care and telling us that we're too old and that it is too expensive for us. We would rather have a competitive system and let us see what we can buy with our own dollars rather than having a bureaucrat rationing our health care. There are other things that we believe in. The gentleman has introduced another bill that he didn't talk about tonight, my good friend from Arizona, and that's a bill that says that you can go shopping for health care. And what it does is it prevents any health care provider from cornering some section of the market. It says you can go buy your health care from across State lines. If an insurance provider wants to allow you to buy the insurance, you can go to a different place to get that. So we create legitimate competition in the marketplace. What we have always stood for is freedom, and what is being proposed here is the same rubber-stamped baloney that we have seen all the last 6 months. It is more taxes and more bureaucracy. The solution to every problem to a liberal is more taxes and more bureaucracy. The only thing is it is escalating. This is $1.5 trillion worth of taxes that's going to be required to make this work, and there's no idea anybody has of how they are going to come up with that. There goes more deficit. There are plain English things that make health care work, and to try to destroy the best health care system in the world with this bureaucratic stuff is a travesty. It's really wrong.

Mr. AKIN. Well, that's right, and what we're talking about here, though, is if you get it done late enough at night and nobody has a chance to read it, you can sneak it by. And that's not a principle that Americans should be proud of. We heard an awful lot about transparency, but we've seen none of transparency. All we've seen is dark-of-the- night, backroom deals, and more taxes, more regulations, more bureaucracy, and this one threatens the lives and livelihoods of our constituents.

Mr. AKIN

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, the Governor of the State said it was a disaster in Tennessee?

Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time for a minute, I'd like to introduce the gentleman, because you're a medical doctor also. You got in the business to practice medicine. You're not from Tennessee. You're from Georgia. But Dr. Broun is a respected expert on the subject of health care because you have been doing it all your life. And I'm just thankful that we have you here. I'd like to you to continue commenting where we are because this is a very important discussion.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time a second, now this supreme court justice, she was no right-wing conservative?

Mr. AKIN. By politic standards of America, she would be considered liberal. Yet she is saying that this socialized system doesn't work. And access, just because you have insurance, doesn't do you any good. You can have a free C-section, but if you have to wait 12 months, it doesn't do you much good.

Mr. AKIN. I yield back to Congressman Broun from Georgia. I think you had the floor for a moment there, and then I'm going to go to Congressman Gingrey, another medical doctor we have joining us. We have a lot of doctors here tonight, and I'm very thankful for your expertise, my friends.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, the laws passed here in Congress shut down a lab that you had to be able to treat people that had an upper respiratory type of infection?

Mr. AKIN. They shut it down?

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, I just heard promise this thing doesn't cost that much, and yet the Congressional Budget Office, the original version was 3.5 trillion, and they've whittled it down to only 1.5 trillion is what we understand. And you're only talking $300 billion. And we did that huge, the biggest tax increase in the history of our country on energy taxes which is going to hurt our productivity, and that's only not even 800 billion. We're not there yet.

Mr. AKIN. Just reclaiming my time for a minute, what you brought up is an absolutely critical point. It is part of how they are going to try and pay for this humdinger bill. And what you are saying is they are going after small business. Now a lot of us know small businesses have 500 employees or less, and they create 80 percent of the new jobs that are created typically in the economy. So if you target small business, now you are going to drive down employment. And that is significant. I yield the gentleman from Arizona time.

Mr. AKIN. We are going to repeat this? Please continue.

Mr. AKIN. Reclaiming my time, I think you have really given us several very concrete examples in the health care business where the government involvement has basically run the cost of health care up. That is not a big surprise, is it? Because as we look at the regular marketplace, I think one of the examples would be the idea of Lasic surgery for eyes. That is one thing the government didn't get its big fingers into meddling, right? And laser technology has come along, and what used to cost thousands of dollars for a procedure now is done for hundreds of dollars. And so we have seen a dramatic decrease in the cost of good quality care just because the government wasn't tampering in it. Yet every time we see the government gets it fingers into things, the costs invariably go up. I would like to get over to Congressman Gingrey from Georgia, another medical doctor joining us with many years of medical practice, also a former senator from Georgia and a great colleague. I yield time.