John Fleming

Mr. FLEMING

Mr. FLEMING. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to have my name removed as cosponsor from the bill H.R. 5585.

Mr. FLEMING

Mr. FLEMING. Mr. Speaker, from the bailouts to the failed stimulus bills to the government takeover of health care to the failure to prevent and respond timely to the BP spill disaster, Americans are sick and tired of being ignored by their government. Republicans have heard this outcry and believe it is time to let Americans lead the way, so we've launched a new initiative aimed at giving every American a voice in Washington. America Speaking Out was created as a platform for Americans to share their priorities and ideas for a national policy agenda. In addition to open forum town halls held across the country, we've launched Americaspeakingout .com, an online tool where Americans can go and express their opinion about what issues they believe government should be addressing regardless of party affiliation. Through initiatives like America Speaking Out, Americans can make their voices heard in Washington. Now is your time to speak out, America.

Mr. FLEMING

Mr. FLEMING. I thank the gentleman from Washington for the time. Madam Speaker, I stand in favor of H.R. 5481, which gives subpoena power to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. As we stand here today, oil is still pouring into the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, and 242 miles of Louisiana shoreline are impacted by this oil. The highest priority for us must be to stop this leak and to get this mess cleaned up. BP must be held 100 percent accountable for their actions, and the administration must be accountable for their role in the response and oversight. Many questions are still without answers, the most pressing being what went wrong. The bill we have before us today would provide subpoena power to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. This commission has been tasked by the President with providing recommendations on how we can prevent and mitigate the impact of any future spills that result from offshore drilling. Future tragedies that we are currently experiencing can only be prevented if we know what went wrong. We must find out who made the mistakes, who made the erroneous judgment, what failed, and just exactly what went wrong. I will also interject, Madam Speaker, that, in operations like this, there are many backup systems; there are many redundancies. So, for a tragedy and a disaster like this to happen, there had to be gross error and gross negligence. This sort of thing just doesn't happen out of whole cloth. I will support the bill today, but I share the concerns raised by my colleagues on the scope of the subpoena authority. I will voice my own concern and will urge Congress, this commission, and the administration to keep their eye on the ball to resolve the crisis affecting my State and our country and not to use this as an opportunity to advance an agenda, to shut down offshore drilling, or to impose a national energy tax. The people of Louisiana have been hurt enough by BP's failures and by the inability of the administration to timely and effectively deal with this disaster. The last thing we need is the Federal Government's adding to this disaster by crippling one of the largest economic drivers in my State of Louisiana. The moratorium imposed by the administration would do just that. A Federal judge recently temporarily stayed the moratorium, affirming that it would cause irreparable harm. Any action by the administration, by this commission, and by this Congress must be based on science and not politics. Let's get the answers to what happened in order to stop the oil, to clean up the gulf, and to help Louisiana. Also, I want to point out a couple of things on this bill about the actors in this situation. First of all, I want to say that I condemn BP and its actions. It is very clear that BP was negligent, if not criminal, in its actions by putting profits ahead of safety. Let's talk about the administration for a moment. The administration failed to address well-known problems with the Minerals Management Service even well into the first 18 months of the administration. It held off high-volume skimmers from other countries that were offered within 3 days of the disaster. They barely acknowledged the spill for 9 days. They did not give permission for berm construction for almost 60 days in my home State of Louisiana. They repeatedly stopped emergency cleanup operations for trivial or unknown reasons, and that is happening even today. They repeatedly slapped moratoria, as I mentioned before, on offshore drilling that is over 500 feet, which is not, truly, deep water, and when all of the experts on this panel said that it was perfectly safe to do so. I would like to say there is one silver lining in this entire situation, and that is my own Governor, Governor Jindal. Governor Jindal has been standing point each day in this process, doing everything that a Governor should do and must do while our President is on the golf course and while, of course, the CEO of BP is out on a yacht. So I just want to say, in summary, Madam Speaker, that I do support H.R. 5481. This is one step in many toward finding out what happened here. We do need subpoena power to find out every bit of this, which will be going on for years, but so will the cleanup and so will the impact on my State of Louisiana, which at this point means that our tourism industry and our fisheries will be devastated, and now that the moratorium is shutting down 33 rigs, it is devastating our economy and our jobs.

Mr. FLEMING

Mr. FLEMING. Mr. Speaker, the selling of ObamaCare to the American public has been trademarked by one empty promise after another. On September 9, 2009, President Obama infamously promised Americans, and I quote, ``If you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have.'' Yet yesterday, in an ironic twist, the Obama administration released draft regulations indicating that up to 69 percent of employer-provided plans may be forced to change their health plans when the new health care law's mandates and requirements begin. Speaker Pelosi was quoted as saying that we will have to pass this bill to find out what's in it. As the fine print is being placed, we are learning bad news daily about this unpopular law. Mr. Speaker, I again ask: How many promises will ObamaCare have to break with the American people before we repeal this disastrous legislation?

Mr. FLEMING

Mr. FLEMING. Mr. Speaker, a recent report has shown that enrollment in high-deductible health plans associated with health savings accounts grew by 25 percent in 2009 to a total of 10 million Americans. These plans, which often provide the lowest-priced health insurance, are targeted in the newly enacted health care bill. ObamaCare will increase taxes on HSAs from 10 percent to 20 percent and will prevent over-the-counter drugs from being reimbursed tax free from the health savings accounts. Millions of Americans rely on HSAs to cover deductibles, insurance copays, over-the-counter medications, and a plethora of other medical expenses. Furthermore, HSAs are an excellent tool to cut health care costs, while ObamaCare, itself, provides no such tools. If you truly support health care affordability, I ask you to support my legislation, H.R. 5126, which restores the valuable tool that saves costs.

Mr. FLEMING

Mr. FLEMING. I thank the gentleman for yielding. First of all, I want to congratulate the chairman and ranking member for an excellent mark. I voted for it coming out of committee. I have three amendments in en bloc, two I would like to mention quickly. One is military retiree pay adjustment that ensures our Nation's military retirees are always paid on or before the first of each month. Second, it requires reports to Congress on U.S. modernization, sustainment, and recapitalization of our bomber force. However, I am very disappointed. The lack of an ear to the people of this country by this Congress is unprecedented, and a good example is the Murphy amendment that we see today that repeals Don't Ask, Don't Tell when we have a scheduled report coming out the 1st of December, and we had the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary Gates who oppose that. So I will oppose the Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal.

Mr. FLEMING

Mr. FLEMING. So there were a number of promises made and, you know, each time we tried to rebut these, we were told that we were using scare tactics, that we are scaring old people and that, really, it was unconscionable to do that. So what has happened since the bill was passed? Well, first of all, the bill had about 52 percent of Americans who were against it, against 38 percent who were for it. Today, 63 percent of Americans want repeal, so that means that more people now want to get rid of this bill than actually were against it before. That means that some people who were for it now want to repeal it. And what was the first thing we heard after it passed? Almost within 24 hours, AT&T a write-down of $1 billion, that is a loss of $1 billion for the year; Verizon, $970 million; John Deere, $150 million; Caterpillar, $100 million. We had communication just the other day, a small business owner who thought he was going to be okay under ObamaCare because he had 24 employees, and he said, you know, the threshold is 25 employees, so you get special tax credits and you get support under this program because you are a small business owner that has fewer employees.

Mr. FLEMING. Right.

Mr. FLEMING. Dr. Berwick, this is a quote from him.

Mr. FLEMING. Right. This is his quote. He considers the British health system ``a global treasure.'' In fact, it's my understanding--I don't have it in my data right here--it's my understanding that he helped design it. And it's designed very simply just to be--a little more technical than what you were describing--is that what they do is they take the population and they assign a value, a numerical value based on quality-adjusted life years. And so just as you say, let's say that the government can afford 1,000 hip replacements this year because of the budget and you've got someone who's 75 with diabetes and let's say somebody 35 who's fully healthy----

Mr. FLEMING. A football player, okay. Now, according to the quality- adjusted life years, the 35-year-old has not only more years left to live, but he has more productive years, that is, he's going to work for the state more years. In fact, the 75-year-old probably is not going to work any more years. And so they have to draw the line someplace: Which thousand is going to get the hip replacement this year? And guess which one it's going to be? It's going to be the 35-year-old. That is the way the comparative effectiveness system works. That's the way they do it in England today. And anybody who's skeptical or doubts that that's where we're headed, they just need to read about Dr. Berwick and all the other information that's coming out on this. And again, there is much reported by The Wall Street Journal. It says, The decision is not whether or not we will ration care-- according to The Wall Street Journal--the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open. And right now, we are doing it blindly. It goes on and on to describe the fact that if the quality effectiveness research board is not, in essence, a death panel, then I don't know what really is because, just in the case with the gentleman with the prostate cancer, that's a decision between him and his doctor whether he gets chemotherapy, whether or not he can get surgery. Or maybe he decides, he and his doctor, that the cancer has advanced too far and he's just going to go home, take pain medication, and not fight it. Some people decide that, but that is their decision. But this is going to make it the government's decision to do that. If you doubt that that happens, again, go and talk to people from the United Kingdom and from Canada. It happens all the time. It's acceptable in those countries and in those cultures that if the government says you don't get treatment or you get only palliative treatment when there is a cure, then that is strictly the way it is. And as far as I know, there is no right to petition; there is no court or anything that you can go to. So what we really have, just to summarize my comments here, is we had a number of promises by the President. He said the cost curve would go down, as you say; he said the middle class would not pay increased taxes; he said the premiums would go down; and he said a number of other things that I can't even think of today. He scoffed at the idea of death panels and any kind of board or bureaucrat that would dictate what your care would be like, whether the bureaucracy or government would come between you and your physician. And he said that businesses would be happy, that this would be a boon for businesses. Well, today, where are we? None of those things have proven to be true. Now that the bill is in law, we have businesses not hiring people because we have an unemployment rate of 9.9 and holding because businesses know that if they hire people, they're going to have to pay a lot of money for their health care coming forward. And we also know that what we feared the most is actually in play, and that is that we will have a board, a comparative effectiveness board, just like that in the United Kingdom.

Mr. FLEMING. If you would yield for just a comment about employers. I'm a small business owner, and you, as a medical physician and one who has to run a business, in essence, for health care, I think a lot of people out there may feel safe in the fact that, you know, my employer has always taken care of us, they've always stepped up and done the right thing. But what people have to understand is that if an employer is paying these high premiums and their competitor is not paying those high premiums or reduces the number of employees, then your employer is no longer competitive in the marketplace, and he either has to do the same thing or he goes out of business. So it's not like you can take comfort in the fact that, well, my employer always does the right thing, he always steps up and he always buys us insurance. This is a whole new paradigm because he's going to be competing; and if his costs are higher, then he's going to go out of business or match what the other one does. I yield back.

Mr. FLEMING. Additional tax from the actuary who is saying it's going to be more taxes. Job cuts: 90 percent of medical device makers say that they will eliminate jobs. That's 9 out of 10 companies that make anything from tongue blades to pacemakers, what have you, as a result of the taxation, heavy taxation, excise taxation of medical devices.

Mr. FLEMING. Yes.

Mr. FLEMING. I thank the gentleman, Dr. Broun from Georgia. And I still see patients as well when I get a chance, but it's not nearly as often as I'd like. We, being both family physicians, I think we have a special bond. I want to thank the gentleman for his leadership, and certainly he's been a mentor for me, and also a special kind of family practice heart that only we family physicians understand, not just for your patients, but for the work that you do here, and not least of which is for this Republic that I know you love so much. And that, I greatly respect. What I wanted to extend a little bit from our discussion that we're already into is the fact that, you know, we've had a number of these GOP Doctors Caucus Special Orders during the health care debate, and tonight we know the bill is passed. There's nothing we can say tonight that's going to keep it from being passed. The votes have all been counted and it is in law; although, it's not been fully implemented.

Mr. FLEMING. I thank the gentleman. What I would like to do is take a moment to look through the retro spectroscope, where we are today now that the bill has passed, look at the rhetoric that occurred during the debate--

Mr. FLEMING. Right. Well it's a quasi-medical term which is equivalent to armchair quarterbacking or postmortem in which we look back and we go, How do things look now, looking back, as opposed to the way they looked then? You know, what we were saying during the debate is this: This bill is by no means really paid for, that there is smoke and mirrors about the financing, that it will definitely cost tax for the middle class, although the President said otherwise. The President said premiums would go down for insurance. We said they would go up. The President said people would get more care and better care, and we said, no, the care would be diluted, there would be less access to care.

Mr. FLEMING. Yes, what's happening is the employers, now that they are getting the language of the bill--remember that Speaker Pelosi said if we want to find out what's in it, we have got to pass it first, okay? Well, now it's passed. So, now, business owners are putting the pencil to it. Here is what they are finding. This is a gentleman who said, you know, I have got 24 employees. So I should be under the threshold, and I should actually get some subsidies and tax credits. But what he found out was that the way it's calculated, he would have to draw down his 24 employees to 10, and he would have to cut wages down to $25,000 a year, fine print. The gentleman's name is Zach Hoffman. He is going to have to go from 24 employees making an ample of $35,000 a year down to 10 years making $25,000, $35,000 versus $25,000 a year in order to make that happen. But that's not all. Remember, what I am telling you is not me telling you this. I am just passing on the bad news. Don't shoot the messenger here, okay. What I am telling you is what people are finding out. The President's chief actuary, this is from, this is in the President's administration, soon after the bill was passed, said, You know what, we made a miscalculation on this. That's from CMS, that this is going to cost $311 billion more than what was anticipated and that it will consume 21 percent of gross domestic product instead of the 16 percent that we predicted. This was within days of it passing. And then also the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, which we know played along with the smoke and mirrors and the sleight-of-hand financing of this says, oh, my goodness, there's $115 billion that we haven't accounted for. So instead of this thing being revenue neutral or maybe a little bit on the plus side, no, it is going to go in the red just like we were saying all along.

Mr. FLEMING. Let me focus on Dr. Berwick, specifically, because this is important.

Mr. FLEMING. But it goes further than that. There's going to be $120 billion in taxes that were not anticipated. That's on top of the $600 billion that were already----

Mr. FLEMING. Well, what it basically means is that there's going to be a bunch of unelected bureaucrats, perhaps not even doctors, who are going to be tasked with looking at research, hopefully there's going to be research or they are going to do research, to decide what treatments and what diagnostic tests are worth paying for and which ones are not.

Mr. FLEMING. Right.

Mr. FLEMING. Yes. So you have costs going up and you have jobs going down. We know that there's supposed to be 32 million more Americans covered under this than otherwise. Half of those are to be estimated to be going into Medicaid. And doctors across the country are dropping Medicaid. Where are these people going to end up? They are going to end up in emergency rooms, not in the doctors's offices like was anticipated. But let me get to something that I think is real important because you remember that we brought up the idea that there would be committees that may make a decision about what kind of treatment you may or may not get? Now, we know that they exist in Canada and in the United Kingdom, but we started talking about these. I know that Sarah Palin, Governor Palin, made mention of this and the left blew apart. They said, my goodness, you are talking about death boards. Shame on you for scaring the American people. Okay, well, let me tell you what's really happening, and this is being reported now. The President has nominated Dr. Donald Berwick to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, that's CMS, and his job is to oversee CMS. He is also supposed to oversee the $2.5 billion comparative effectiveness research.

Mr. FLEMING. If the gentleman would yield.

Mr. FLEMING

Mr. FLEMING. Mr. Speaker, like millions of small business owners across the country, Zach Hoffman had been duped into believing his office furniture store would qualify for the small business tax credit under ObamaCare. Imagine his surprise when after analyzing the numbers, he discovered he would receive zero assistance with the nearly $80,000 in health care premiums he pays for his 24 employees. By Hoffman's calculation, he would need to cut his staff to 10 employees and drastically lower wages to be eligible for the tax credit that the Obama administration previously touted as a lifeline for businesses with less than 25 employees. After seeing his premiums rise 15 percent this year, Hoffman rightly feels his government has ripped him off and eloquently described the situation as a bait and switch. Mr. Speaker, how many promises will ObamaCare have to break with the American people before we repeal this disastrous legislation? Remember when it passed, 52 percent of Americans were against it. Today 63 percent want it repealed.