Pete Hoekstra

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I was thinking it sounds like czar. Coming from Michigan, we've had enough of czars. We've had enough of car czars, you know, who are running our automobile industry, who are making decisions about which car company will survive, how they will survive, who will manage the companies, who will be on the board of directors, what dealers will survive. I mean, you know----

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman would yield for just a moment.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. You know, think about it. If the President believes that he can decide who should run General Motors, which is a decision that he made in which he forced the replacement of the president of General Motors, then taking the next step and telling each of us what kind of health care we're going to have, what treatments we can have, what procedures we can have, and how much the government is going to pay for each one of those is fully within the realm of possibility, which is exactly where this bill goes.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. What we're really seeing here is a continued erosion of the rights of individuals and the rights of States. Michigan is a donor State in terms of transportation. What does that mean? It means, since the inception of the national highway or the national gas tax, for every dollar that Michigan has sent to Washington, we've received 83 cents back. That hardly seems fair to me, especially when we're now number one in unemployment. Think of it. When we get that money back, the Federal Government tells us how to spend it. The same thing happened with education. We sent money here. Think about what's going to happen with health care. It's going to come here to Washington, and we're going to apportion it back to the States. Some States are going to do better than others, and it's not going to be based on population or those types of things. It's going to be based on the power of the people in this Chamber and in the Chamber down the hall as to who has got the most influence. There are going to be donor States and--what are they?--donees or beneficiaries, the ones who get more than the rest of us.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Recipients. That's no way to run a health care system. We will lose freedom, and this place will become the center of distributing money and of distributing power back to groups around the country. This is what we're fighting for. We're fighting for freedom for individuals and for sovereignty back to the States.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I'm listening to your description of the bureaucracy in the U.K. and those kinds of things. I have just been paging through this bill. I think we all know--I think it was last week--that the majority leader said something like, ``If we had to depend on the people who read the bill to vote for it, we wouldn't have very many votes.'' The first time that I saw this bill was about 15 minutes ago, and I'm just kind of paging through.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Let me just read a couple of things. Here is a paragraph. I will just open it up. Before we went through, The commissioner shall, shall, shall. And we said, Okay, he shall do everything, and there is not going to be anything left. Listen to this paragraph: ``Change in the income as a percentage of FPL. In the case that an individual's income expressed as a percentage of the Federal poverty level for a family of the size involved for a plan year is expected in a manner specified by the commissioner to be significantly different from the income as so expressed used under subsection A, the commissioner shall establish rules requiring an individual to report consistent with the mechanism established under paragraph two significant changes in such income, including a significant change in family composition to the commissioner and requiring the substitution of such income for the income otherwise applicable.''

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Think of how many bureaucrats it is going to take to interpret that paragraph.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Then they're going to do ethics standards, accountability performance programs and all of these things, Federal bureaucrats. And guess what--the same people who wrote this bill, also their last bill that they wrote was No Child Left Behind because it says that as they collect this information, the Secretary shall identify organizations that are enrolled in the program that have failed to significantly improve. Does that sound like No Child Left Behind, like we have in the Department of Education? What do we have? We have people in the Department of Education who don't read anything, who don't know the schools in Ludington, Michigan, or Detroit or Saginaw or Ann Arbor, Michigan; and they're identifying them as failing schools. Now the Federal Government is going to go through the process of identifying failing hospitals, failing nursing homes and failing those if they don't meet Federal requirements; and it's going to take a lot more bureaucrats. But I think we ought to challenge the American people. Members of Congress may not read it, but they ought to read this thing and see if they understand whether this is going to improve their health care or make it worse. I think they will become ill reading this bill.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Well, I think they have recognized that a czar is not a very popular word. The czar in this bill is called a commissioner. So I guess when you get to the 33rd--I guess we can only have 32 czars. Now we are starting to create commissioners, and we'll probably have 32 commissioners. Then we will have what, grand leaders after that? But I think we've topped out on czars.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield, it's identified in here how you will identify the failing czar and with the corresponding rules and regulations that go with this that I'm sure will be written in plain English because this is not.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield for a second, with the manufacturing of all of this paper to print this bill, as a member of the Energy Committee, would this still be qualified under cap-and- trade? Or is this a violation of cap-and-trade?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Excuse me. I was serious.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank the gentleman for yielding. This is an amazing bill. We've talked about the creation of this commissioner who will have the power to implement much of what is in here. You start reading it and you really can't understand it because it's not written in plain English; although, in the bill, there's a requirement that stuff be written in plain English. And then you start getting into the penalties and the fines and the payments for people who don't meet certain regulations or certain requirements. I haven't gotten to the tax part yet, but as I've been briefed on this program throughout the day, I think we all recognize that this massive new free health care from the government is not going to be free. It's going to cost us a lot of money. There's a lot of stuff in here about the authorities of the IRS and what the IRS can do, and then you start getting in here and, you know, you start reading what services are included, which ones are excluded and those types of things. And what you recognize is we're going to see the same thing on this bill that we saw on cap-and-trade. Remember what happened on cap-and-trade? There was a 900-page bill that passed out of your committee and, you know, late Thursday night, early Friday morning, when they didn't have the votes--

Mr. HOEKSTRA. At 3:09 in the morning, they added about this many more pages to the bill.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. 316 pages to get to 219 votes, and nobody knew what was in it, and you're going to see the same thing here. This bill cannot get 218 votes because this bill will be out there for the American people to read for the next couple of weeks, but don't worry, the night before it will be changed and there will be 400 new pages at least buying off Members' votes to get something into this bill to get to 219. And that's how we're going to construct health care reform in America.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Actually, if you click on that icon, your computer will crash. I thank my colleague for getting that information for us. Thank you.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Are you telling me if someone actually breaks their hip in Canada, then it doesn't take 2 to 3 years?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield for just a minute.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Because the Canadians have another way to escape. They escape to the American system. Some of our busiest hospitals are those along the border. So the Canadians that have the resources and are at the bottom of the line, what they will do is they will jump the border and they will get their health care in the United States.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Yes.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Reclaiming your time but given to me, what this Wall Street Journal says: ``Access to a waiting list is not access to health care''. Waiting lists are what I hear about all the time when I'm talking to our friends across the border. But what I hear from the medical professionals and the hospitals in Michigan is we treat the well-to- do Canadians who will come across the border and access our health care because they're unwilling to be on a waiting list. And they recognize that being on a waiting list isn't having your problem taken care of. If you've got to wait for 117 days or 171 days--117 days for a bypass--excuse me--I think that's about 112 or 113 days too long.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If it's you. If it were me, I would say it's about 116 days too long. The same thing for a hip replacement and all of that. The American health care will fundamentally change if this goes into effect.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. We can take care of this in Michigan. We've got great doctors and hospitals who are ready, willing, and able to serve. I appreciate the leniency of the Chair to make sure that I can get this paid public announcement in for the State of Michigan.