Paul Broun

Mr. BROUN of Georgia

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Even if you're employed, you won't like this bill, because what's going to happen is millions of people are going to be put out of work. They're going to lose their jobs because of this ObamaCare plan.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Or the Senate.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. That's correct.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. That's correct. And another thing that's going to happen to that employee, because the employer is going to be taxed or have to pay more for the plan--in fact, a lot of companies are saying already that it would be better for them to just pay the 8 percent tax on those employers than it is to continue to giving them the insurance. So it's going to force those employees off of their private health insurance that the employer's giving and force them on this so-called public option, the socialized medicine, Medicare-lite or Medicaid-lite that already has huge problems, but they're going to be forced into that. And a lot of them aren't going to want to do that either.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. The health czar, the health commissioner that is going to mandate to the employee's employer what kind of care that they're given, it's going to do two things at least to the employee and maybe even more. Number one, the employee has to accept the insurance provided by the employer. Now, of the 47 million people who are not insured today, some of those are eligible for insurance through their employer, but they just choose not to take it. But they're going to be mandated to take the insurance through their employer, and if they don't, they're going to be fined through the tax system. It's a 2 percent tax or fine for them not taking employee-mandated----

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. If you work for a company, you shouldn't like this, and the reason for that is that mandated coverage directed by the health commissioner--

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Let me bring up another category of folks if you don't mind, if you will yield just for a second, and that's employees.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. They will get it, yes, absolutely.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. They will get free health insurance.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. We don't know how many illegal aliens are here. They're not immigrants. They've committed crimes so they're criminals. They not only come here illegally, which means they're criminals, but virtually all of them have illegal documents, forged documents so they're guilty of many law infractions. But this health care plan, ObamaCare, is going to give every single one of those illegal aliens in this country free health insurance at the cost of taxpayers. And what that means is as we ration care to everybody in this country, that means American citizens, American taxpayers are going to have less care provided to them because we're funding these illegal aliens. And when we hear this number that 47 million people don't have health insurance--they say don't have health care. Everybody has health care. They have access to health care in this country today. Everybody has access--that 47 million people don't have health insurance, of that is at least 10, if Dr. Fleming's right, it could be up to 15, even 20 million illegal aliens in this country. So it's a huge part of that 45, 47 million people that don't have insurance.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Absolutely.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. So those techniques will not continue to be developed.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Yes, sir. It's private sector and it's doctors all over this country; but when we go to rationing care, then what we're going to do is demand the lowest quality of care for everybody in this country.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Government does fund some research through NIH and other entities, and thus there is--

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Absolutely. And in the past, people who had prostate cancer, there are many of them following that surgery were sexually impotent and could not perform sexually. With these new techniques, we've developed these new surgeries that prevent the impotence, prevent the incontinence, but the types of research and the innovative efforts that doctors make in this country today are going to be totally--

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. I'd like to go back to what Governor Hoekstra, Pete Hoekstra, our friend, just said from Michigan about Mayo Clinic and the innovative techniques that they're developing. And they're being developed at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, Georgia that I represent. Innovative techniques are being developed all over this country for all sorts of health problems. But now let's take the cancer that you have, prostate cancer. That's the most common cancer in men. With the new techniques that we've done and the stereotactic surgery and some of the things that go on today, we have developed surgical techniques to take care of prostate cancer that by and large will prevent men who have prostate cancer from having what in medicine we term incontinence which means urine leaks out and they don't have any control of the urine and have to wear a condom catheter with a bag on their leg to catch the urine because they can't control it. That is almost a thing of the past because of these new techniques that have been developed.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Well, I want to bring up that we hear all of these grandiose promises from the President, but I want to remind the Speaker and my colleagues here in the House--I can't speak to the American people--but if I could speak to them, I'd remind them, too, that the President just recently said that his non-stimulus bill is working just like he thought it would. Yet we have more people out of work today, and the promises made have been broken, and I was coming to that very point. The Chief of Staff of the President, Rahm Emanuel, who used to be a Member here in this House--

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. The point being that the President and his administration give us all of these grandiose promises, and they use all this sleight of hand, shell game of words to try to tell people what they want to hear, but the reality is what they say is not factual. It's just absolutely not factual, and the American people need to understand that.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. BROUN of Georgia

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. I thank you, Mr. Bishop, for yielding me some time. I was really touched by the faces that you've brought forward to the American people tonight here on C-SPAN about these people who have lost their jobs and my good friend Tom McClintock talking about the National Forest and the mismanagement that is going on because of the endless environmental wacko lawsuits that are going on there and the unfortunate untimely death of this young man who was fighting those fires that probably could have been prevented if we had managed the forest in a better way, in a correct way, according to normal silviculture practices. Civil culture means forestry practices to the best extent for economic purposes, and I thank both of you for bringing the face of people to this discussion tonight. Mr. Speaker, I'm a medical doctor, and I've seen the faces of a lot of patients who have struggled with the cost of health care expenses, the cost of health insurance and medication and hospital bills. In over 3\1/2\ decades of practicing general medicine in rural south Georgia and now northeast Georgia, I've literally given away in my services several hundred thousand dollars of my services if I had charged for them. We have a proposal that I call ObamaCare that's being debated here in the Halls of Congress. Mr. Speaker, the director of the Congressional Budget Office last week said that if ObamaCare is passed it's going to cost 750,000 people their jobs across America. Three-quarters of 1 million people are going to be put out of work just because of passing a bill that supposedly is going to make everybody covered by health insurance. But the Congressional Budget Office director also said that even in the next 10 years not everybody would be covered. Let me say that again, because what we keep hearing from the Democratic side is we're going to cover everybody; everybody's going to have health care. Well, everybody does have access to health care today. Federal law requires it. What everybody does not have is health insurance. But our Democratic colleagues want to give free health insurance to illegal aliens, and that's what ObamaCare does. It gives free health insurance to illegal aliens. The 12 million, 15 million illegal aliens in this country who are criminals have entered this country illegally. Virtually all of them have illegal documents. They've broken many Federal laws. They're criminals. And my Democratic colleagues want to give them free insurance. It's going to cost 750,000 American citizens jobs to do so. Mr. Speaker, this House considered a bill just a few weeks ago that they, my Democratic colleagues, call cap-and-trade. I call it tax-and- trade or tax-and-cap because it's about taxes. It's about revenue. We hear over and over again that it is going to create all these green jobs. Well, it will create some green jobs. In fact, I saw a friend, my next door neighbor in the hall over in the Cannon House Office Building, bring in a chart where he's going to talk about green jobs, and it indeed will create green jobs, but what you're not being told is what happened to Spain. Our President has lifted up Spain as being the model of what we need to do on these green jobs and environmental policy. Well, about a decade ago Spain put into place a similar piece of legislation as our tax-and-trade bill that's languishing over in the Senate, and I hope the Senate will defeat it. But in Spain, for every single green job that was created, 2.2 other jobs cost. In other words, 2.2 people were put out of work for every one person put to work by these green jobs that tax-and-trade is going to create. I know my Democratic colleagues can add and subtract. I don't want to accuse them of not doing so, but if you subtract 2.2 from 1, you get a minus 1.2, and that's exactly what's going to happen. If the American people don't stand up and say ``no'' to tax-and-trade, or tax-and-cap, whatever you want to call it, and tell the U.S. Senators, Mr. Speaker, that this is going to be disastrous and it's going to cost American jobs and to defeat it over there in the Senate, there will be 2.2 people put out of work for every 1 person that is put to work. I already said the Congressional Budget Office says 750,000 people are going to lose their jobs because of ObamaCare, but it's going to do many other things, too, that are disastrous. ObamaCare is going to insert a Washington bureaucrat between every patient and their doctor, and the Washington bureaucrat is going to be making, Mr. Speaker, every single individual in this country's health care decision. The patient, the patient's family won't be able to make those decisions. The doctor won't be able to make those decisions. It's going to be a Washington bureaucrat that makes that decision. We were told by our Democratic colleagues it's all about lowering costs; but just last Friday the Director of the Congressional Budget Office said that it's not going to rein in the cost of health care. In fact, it's going to cost more money. So let me get this right. It's going to cost more money to put in place ObamaCare; it's going to take decisions away from patients and their family and their doctor about making health care decisions; and it's going to put a Washington bureaucrat in charge of those decisions, and that Washington bureaucrat is going to say whether a patient can get needed treatment, surgery, x rays, MRIs, or not. We already know in countries such as Great Britain and Canada that in those socialized medicine, government-run programs, that the death rates for cancer overall are much higher than here in the United States. Women who get breast cancer in Canada and Great Britain, roughly 50 percent of them are dead after 5 years. Prostate cancer, the same, roughly 50 percent of people that are diagnosed with prostate cancer in those countries, or 60 percent, are dead in 5 years. Here in the United States, it's over 90 percent are still alive. So what's going to happen here? Our death rates are going to go up for all cancers. Just today, we had a bill here on the floor that I talked about that is one to try to encourage people to understand diabetes. As a medical practitioner, I've treated diabetes for years, and the end result of diabetes and the reason it's so important to catch it early and to treat it is that people die at a young age when they have diabetes, a lot younger than they should if it's treated. But the thing is, as we ration health care and the Washington bureaucrat tells patients that they can't get the tests that they need, they can't get the life-saving coronary bypass surgery or stints and the procedures they need to help them not die from heart attacks or from strokes, the Washington bureaucrats are going to say particularly to the elderly that you can't get the dialysis that you desperately need because you're old and it's not cost effective, it's not comparatively effective, and thus, you just must die and not get the treatment that you desperately need. So people are not only going to be put out of work but people are going to be in poor health. We're going to degrade the quality of health care delivered by doctors and hospitals across this Nation because a Washington bureaucrat's going to say ``no'' to patients and say ``no'' to doctors. This is going to be disastrous. We're creating a debt and a deficit that's unprecedented in the history of our Nation. We're going down a track right now, Mr. Speaker, that every great nation in history has gone down: Great Britain, Spain, even Rome. We're going down a track of spending money that we don't have, creating debt that we cannot pay. We're robbing our children and our grandchildren of their future. They will live at a lower standard than we live today because of this huge debt that we're creating, Mr. Speaker, this huge deficit that this administration is creating. I hear from our friends on the Democratic side, even just this week I heard them blame President Bush for the debt and deficit. Well, I blame President Bush for being a big spender and he was. While I was here during the tail end of his Presidency, I fought all those big spending bills. I fought the Washington bailout of Wall Street. But President Bush was just a piker compared to what this administration's doing. We're creating unprecedented debt and deficit that our grandchildren cannot pay. So their standard of living is going to be worse than it is today. Mr. Speaker, there are going to be a lot of people put out of work. During the Great Depression all the spending that FDR did did put some people to work, but the unemployment rates bounced up and down and stayed very high. Mr. Speaker, in my district in Georgia, many counties have over 13 percent unemployment today. I've talked to several managers of plants, manufacturing plants in my district, that tell me that if this tax-and- trade bill that the Senate has over here that this House passed, they are they're going to lock the doors. Those jobs are going to go overseas because they can't afford to pay the higher energy tax. Most Americans are going to have a hard time, particularly the poor and the people on limited incomes are going to have a hard time paying the higher energy cost. Mr. Speaker, Republicans have stood up over and over again and have talked about the proposals that we have made, proposals to stimulate the economy and create jobs; proposals to lower the cost of health care expenses to all Americans; proposals that would stimulate the economy; proposals that don't cost our grandchildren their future and, in fact, will not even cost the taxpayers today any increase in their taxes. But those proposals are not heard because the leadership of this House and the leadership of the Senate across the way won't let those proposals get to the floor to be discussed, and it's not right, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we're robbing America of its future. We're robbing Americans of their jobs today. We're going down a track that's going to put more and more people out of work. It's going to create more problems for people paying their utility bills, their gasoline, their home heating costs and things like that. Even with the mandates from our friends on the Democratic side that they are putting on health care, it's going to literally lower the income of people who are working, and it's not right and it's not fair. Mr. Speaker, it's got to stop. The American people need to stand up and say ``no'' to ObamaCare, ``no'' to tax-and-spend policies that this administration, that this leadership in this House and the Senate are bringing forward because it's going to destroy America. And I thank my friend from Utah, Mr. Bishop. I see he has a poster here that we have a lot of these unemployed people in my district. Praise God that we don't have 14.7 million people in my district out of work; but more and more people are becoming unemployed, and they're going to continue to lose jobs in my district in Georgia, and I'm sure they are in yours in Utah if we don't stop this outrageous spending that the leadership of this Congress, of this administration, are doing. We've got to stop it, and it's up to the American people to demand from their Senators and their Congressmen and this administration saying ``no'' to this outrageous spending that's going on. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I rise today because I want someone to show me the jobs that we have been promised by the Democrats. Many counties in my district have unemployment rates of more than 13 percent. Show me the jobs, Mr. Speaker. My colleagues on the Democratic side of the aisle promised that their trillion-dollar stimulus would immediately create jobs and unemployment would not rise above 8 percent. Nothing could be further from the truth. In June alone, almost half a million jobs were lost, driving unemployment to its highest level in 26 years. Now, after shoving a $646 billion energy tax down the throats of the American people, liberal leadership is now shoving a multitrillion- dollar health experiment. According to the CBO, this will cost 750,000 more jobs and push 100 million Americans off of their private health care plans. Mr. Speaker, I ask you to show me the jobs and show me why the American people should believe once again that a trillion-dollar experiment will work.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I rise really in amazement today to hear our colleagues on the other side talk about hydroelectric power being a renewable energy source, because we have seen multiple venues here in the House where Democrats have denied that. Mr. Speaker, we have a tremendous need in this country for alternative sources of energy, renewable sources of energy. Nuclear energy is one of those renewable sources of energy, or a source of energy that is one that makes the most sense from an environmental perspective as well as a cost perspective. We have many members of the opposition on the other side that want to deny us going into a nuclear age. France gets over 80 percent of its electric power from nuclear sources. The United States should do the same thing. In my home State of Georgia, the Georgia Power Company for a long period of time now has been trying to get permitting for two new nuclear reactors at their plant in Vogel just south of my district, just south of Augusta, Georgia. They already have two. They want two more. But, Mr. Speaker, they have had a great deal of difficulty because the regulatory commission and various environmental groups have made it extremely difficult. They are not alone. All over this country, there are electric power companies that want to put in electric power plants that are nuclear- fueled. Mr. Speaker, they have great difficulty doing so. We need to use our renewable resources, not only for hydroelectric power, but for nuclear power. We need to look to wind and solar. We need to look to biomass. We need to stop this idiocy of a corn-based ethanol source of energy. Mr. Speaker, I'm from Georgia, and I love my cornbread and grits. It makes no sense to me to drive down the road burning up my food. But we've done that. And it has driven up the cost of corn for the chicken producers that produce most of the chicken for the world, all over the world in my district, and in my friend Nathan Deal's district from Gainesville in the Ninth and Tenth Congressional Districts of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, we have an energy policy that is broken. Republicans have presented bill after bill that would solve the energy crisis. The American Energy Act is one. It is an all-of-the-above energy plan that would stimulate hydroelectric power. It would stimulate nuclear power. It would look to alternative sources of power.

Mr. BROUN of Georgia. But our plans are not being heard on the floor of this House. Why is that? Why are the American people's representatives not being heard? It is because the leadership on the Democratic side wants to stifle debate, wants to shut off any alternative ideas. They call the Republican Party the ``Party of No,'' but the Democratic Party has been the Party of No, whereas the Republican Party is the Party of k-n-o-w Know because we know how to solve the energy crisis. We know how to solve the health care financing crisis. We know how to solve the economic crisis. But those ideas are not being heard. Mr. Speaker, it is time for the American people to wake up and demand that the Republicans are heard.