Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Yes.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It's my privilege to be recognized to address you on the floor of the House of Representatives here tonight along with my colleagues that I have had this great honor and privilege to serve with throughout these years and this 111th Congress. I sat and listened to my friends on the other side of the aisle as they began to talk through this health care debate, which we have addressed, I think, quite a great deal over the last couple of months. No longer is it a legitimate point that we haven't had an adequate time to debate, although I don't know that there is anyone in this Congress that can read and digest 1,990 pages and then read the amendment that was 40 pages long that turns this into a 2,030 pages national health care act that affects every aspect of our lives. This is not just nanny state, cradle to grave. This is conception to natural death or euthanasia, depending on which component of the bill one chooses to apply. There are carve-outs for euthanasia. There is at this point a Stupak amendment that is part of the bill, a Stupak-Pitts- Chris Smith amendment that is a pro-life amendment and is very valuable to me and many others. However, there are grave concerns about the broad implications of this bill and the components of it that run anathema to the American Dream. I will just address some of the things that the gentlemen spoke of in the previous hour. One of them is that Republicans allegedly sat around and did nothing while they were in the majority. We had a narrow majority, and we did something. We pushed an agenda that was seeking to improve health care in this country and reduce or eliminate the necessary burden on health care. I made the point that we passed lawsuit abuse reform in this Congress. I believe the year was 2005. The lawsuit abuse that was passed was worked through the Judiciary Committee where I sat and where I participated in that language, and we modeled this after, of all places, a California initiative. Since that time, Texas has taken up the charge of reducing lawsuit abuse on medical malpractice in Texas. The doctors that were exiting the State have now turned around, and many of them have moved back to Texas and started their practices and other medical providers and practitioners have come into Texas. Now they do have an adequate supply of doctors, nurses and other medical practitioners that are there. But the cost that was diminished by the gentleman from Ohio, the cost of lawsuit abuse, even though the bill that was offered by leadership scored at only $54 billion, to the gentleman from Ohio--1 percent, he said, of the overall health care costs--I don't know about that number. I didn't run those numbers. It doesn't seem to me, Mr. Speaker, that $54 billion is a minuscule amount. It doesn't seem to me that $54 billion is loose change. It doesn't seem to me that $54 billion is pencil dust. Mr. Speaker, $54 billion is real money, and $54 billion is, though, a small percentage of the overall cost of lawsuit abuse when it comes to providing health care in America. Here are the numbers that emerged when one looks into the underlying costs of the lawsuit abuse. And the score that could come from the Congressional Budget Office cannot include all of this because they simply can't score some of the actual costs that don't index directly into the lawsuits themselves. It works like this: there are high costs in premiums that doctors and providers are paying, especially OB/GYN doctors, and access to those doctors and services is getting more and more limited. There are also costs involved with the litigation, costs involved with the settlements, whether they are in-court or out-of-court settlements. One might think that that's all the costs of the lawsuit abuse that is part and parcel of the overall costs of health care. But an even greater cost is the cost of unnecessary tests and procedures that are undergone by patients in this country directed by doctors in this country to avoid lawsuits, to protect themselves in the event of lawsuits, to minimize the risk and to also hold down their premiums for malpractice. So the cost overall of medical malpractice, the abuse of lawsuits for medical malpractice in America, the cost of the malpractice premiums coupled with the cost of the litigation, coupled with the cost of settlements both in and out of court, coupled with the unnecessary test tests, the defensive medicine that nearly every practitioner practices, whether it is something they can actually identify or whether it's a subliminal shift in their policy, all of those things together, the lowest number that can be applied is not 1 percent, to the gentleman from Ohio. The lowest number I can find out there by anyone's logical representation is 5.5 percent. The number that I trust the most is the 8.5 percent number that comes from the health insurance underwriters representative. And 8.5 percent is a low number. Some of those numbers go up to 10.1 percent and on up into the 20s, 24, 25, 28 and even 35 percent of overall health care costs. Now I won't range up in there into that one-fourth to one-third of the overall costs because I think that's a harder number to defend, although it may be true. But I do believe that I'm on very solid ground defending 8.5 percent of overall health care costs going to either premiums for malpractice, trial lawyers, those settlements or defensive medicine. Out of the overall costs of providing health care to America, 8.5 percent comes to $203 billion a year. That's only 1 year. This bill gets scored over 10 years. So, that $203 billion over 10 years exceeds $2 trillion, $2 trillion in the aggregate costs of premiums and litigation and settlements, unnecessary settlements. We're going to keep everybody whole. Those who are the unfortunate who are, I'll say, victims of medical malpractice, we're going keep them whole. We're going to make sure that their medical costs are paid for and their loss of income are paid for and there's pain and suffering there, but not the noneconomic damages, not that component that goes off into $7 million for spilling a cup of coffee on one's lap at McDonald's as happened, and I understand that that was negotiated down and reduced after the fact. So, 8\1/2\ percent of our overall health care costs going for lawsuit abuse. And we can reform a lot of that. We can reform a lot more than $54 billion of it, and it totals in its aggregate over $2 trillion, which in and of itself is enough to, according to the CBO, pay for Nancy Pelosi's socialized medicine plan, Mr. Speaker. I think this puts it in a perspective that's far more legitimate than was offered by the previous gentlemen in the previous hour, who also announced that if you make less than $89,000 a year, you're going to get a subsidy for your health insurance; $89,000 a year. And we're going to subsidize health insurance for people making $89,000 a year? Are they also going to be paying the alternative minimum tax, I wonder, Mr. Speaker? I suspect there will be many families if that is the case. We saw what happened when the majority sought to change the SCHIP legislation, that State Children's Health Insurance Program that provides health insurance premiums for low income--kids in low-income families. That passed in about 1997. I remember implementing it in about 1998, when I was in the Iowa State Senate, at 200 percent of poverty. The States could have adjusted that to some degree. Two hundred percent of poverty is the part that I supported. And I come to this Congress and the first effort on the part of Speaker Pelosi was to change the SCHIP program to 400 percent of poverty, to fund health insurance premiums for children in families of four that are earning at 400 percent of poverty in my State, with the exemptions that were directed by Governor Culver, that meant that families of four making $102,000 a year could have their health insurance paid for by the taxpayers, the taxpayers who presumably, many of them are making less than $102,000 a year. And that seemed to me to be an outrageously high income to have the health insurance premium subsidized by the taxpayers and the Federal Government. Since that time this voracious appetite to share the wealth, to take from those who have earned and invested and established capital, those, a lot of them whose investments are the investments that facilitate the creation of jobs, or they create the jobs themselves, scoop from that capital and distribute that to those who make less, takes away the incentive from those who make less to make more. Why would anyone go out and take a risk and invest capital and start a business and employ people and create goods and services that have value to this economy, if they're just going--the Federal Government's just going to go in and tax your income, keep you from establishing a capital base so that you could grow that kind of a business and grow the jobs and take the money that you earn and funnel it over here, and to take the position that if you make $88,999 a year, Uncle Sam will cut you a check. And that check will go to--as long as you invest it in health insurance for your family, health insurance for your kids-- they're already covered, aren't they? Because this Congress passed ultimately at 300 percent of poverty, so that lowered that number down to $70,000, something like that, in my State. But speaking of 70,000, that happens to be exactly the number of families in America that would qualify for Federal funding for the health insurance premiums for their children who also paid the rich man's tax, the alternative minimum tax; 70,000 families in America would have health insurance premiums for their children paid for by the taxpayer. Meanwhile, they're writing an extra check for the alternative minimum tax because they make too much money in the eyes of Uncle Sam. Seem a little paradoxical, Mr. Speaker? Does it seem a little bit inconsistent? Does it seem a little illogical? Well, it is government, after all, and it's getting more and more illogical as time unfolds. But the statement that Republicans did nothing is not a factual statement. It's not even an opinion. It's a fact that Republicans in this House passed reform legislation in several different categories, and it was fought every step of the way by Democrats. And by the way, when it did get out of this House, in spite of them, then it was blocked in the Senate. I said at the time on the malpractice, the lawsuit abuse reform, that the block that took place in the Senate was the result of the Senate being a wholly owned subsidiary, presumably, of the Trial Lawyers Association in America. Since that time, that investment seems to have paid off in the House of Representatives, and today, we have a House of Representatives that does not have one dollar worth of lawsuit abuse reform in a 1 to $2 trillion socialized medicine plan. Now, how could any group have such influence on the House of Representatives and presumably still, and I think even more so, in the United States Senate, that $2 trillion in the aggregate of abuse and cost in our health care in America, over this period of 10 years, more than $2 trillion, and we can't find one dollar worth of savings in lawsuit abuse reform, not one dollar in this bill that is a bill that was sent to this floor by Speaker Pelosi. Not one dollar. And yet, the same people can advocate for cutting Medicare reimbursement rates by half a trillion dollars, almost $500 billion, taken out of our Medicare reimbursements, Medicare reimbursements that only pay 80 percent of the cost of delivering the services. And the cost of delivering the services is not a cost that's calculated by the providers, by the health care practitioners, by the doctors and the nurses and the hospitals and the clinics. No, this cost of delivering the services is a number that's produced by Medicare itself. And then it gets a .8 multiplier across that number, and that's what they pay at Medicare. And so the White House has taken the position that there is waste, fraud, and abuse in our Medicare, and they're going to ferret that out. And they found some 10s and 20s and more billion dollars they've said of savings. These billions of dollars of savings that they can provide to reduce and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare seem to be a bit amorphous. It's hard to identify this and, in fact, the White House has said, well, we know it's there. We are going to go in and help pay for socialized, I put that in quotes when I say it, Mr. Speaker, ``their socialized medicine plan,'' by reducing and perhaps eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare reimbursement. So what do they do? They cut $500 billion, a skosh less, but $500 billion, half a trillion dollars, out of Medicare reimbursement rates, and then have not put their finger on where the abuse is, where the fraud is, where the waste is. It's just, trust us, we know what we're doing. It reminds me of a Saturday night sitcom that I used to watch occasionally. And it was called Sledge Hammer! Sledge Hammer was a detective, and he had a sidekick named Dori Doreau. And they would go through a half-hour routine of criminals doing bad things, investigating them, and near the end of the show, something would happen such as Sledge Hammer would fall down the escalator, something would go up the escalator, tip off the railing, and it would go through this Rube Goldberg menagerie of calamities, and when the dust had settled, somehow Sledge Hammer was laying on top of the criminal and somehow there was a miraculous ending. And he would get up and say, Well, I told you, trust me; I knew what I was doing. Well, I have about that level of confidence in an administration that would tell us they're going to find tens of billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse, but they can't point their finger at it. And they just simply say, Trust us, we know what we're doing. And if you pass this national health care act then we will go into action and save this money to pay for it. But if we don't, do we actually have an administration that's willing to tolerate tens of billions of dollars on their alleged waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare? Are they holding the right to a legitimate integrity and fiscal responsibility in our government? Are they holding that right to a legitimate responsible government hostage to a bill, a bill that's socialized medicine? And so if we pass this socialized medicine bill, the Senate and the conference report, and it goes to the President, whom I believe will sign anything that says national health care in the title--if we do all of that, then we get to find out this great secret in the White House: Where is all this waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare? I can tell you it's not in any significant amount in my district, Mr. Speaker. And I can tell you that because the providers that I have are getting significantly less than it costs to deliver that service. In Iowa, we not only are the lowest State in the union in Medicare reimbursements rates, but we also provide consistently some of the highest quality outcomes by the consistent measures that come out. Iowa ranks in the top five time after time after time in practice after practice and then in the aggregate and the composite. Often number one, more often number two. But we're in the top five consistently in the outcomes, medical outcomes. And yet, we're the lowest in the Nation in reimbursement rates. And Iowa is, and I can say this with great confidence, the very best combination of cost and quality of health care delivered in the State, but the lowest reimbursements rates in the Nation. And now the White House wants to cut half a trillion dollars from Medicare reimbursement rates. And my State, I believe, is the most senior State in the union. We have the highest percentage of our population over the age of 85 of all of the States in the union. That includes my mother. And in my district, the 32 counties in western Iowa, of the 99 counties in Iowa, and among the 32 that I represent, 10 of the 12 most senior counties in Iowa are in the Fifth Congressional district, the district I represent. And so I believe I represent the most senior congressional district in America. Punished, presumably, by a half a trillion dollar cut in Medicare, based upon the very questionable and doubtful allegation that there are tens of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare. I'm convinced it exists, Mr. Speaker. I think it exists in some of the large cities in the country, and I think it should be relentlessly and persistently rooted out. And we should take those criminals and we should do the perp walk with them, and we ought to get them locked up in prison where they belong. But you don't hold a principle that the American people have a right to, which is legitimate law enforcement and the elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse, you don't hold that hostage to an ultimatum that we've got to pass a national health care act, socialized medicine, in order to have good government. Good government is a right of the American people, and the American people need to demand that right. With the promise that, or the allegation, made by the gentlemen in the previous hour, that Republicans don't have any solutions--in fact the President himself has said Republicans don't have solutions. That statement was never supportable by fact. There have been at least 42 pieces of legislation, some of them comprehensive, introduced by Republicans in this 111th Congress alone. And the difference is we have logical, rational, free market freedom solutions that do not interfere and, in fact, heal up to some degree, the relationship between doctors and patients. And here are some of them. I talked about ending lawsuit abuse. The next one is to provide for people to buy health insurance across state lines. For example, a young man, 25 years old in New Jersey, would pay approximately $6,000 for a health insurance policy that, if he could buy it in Kentucky, across the state lines, would cost him around $1,000. And yes there is a difference in mandates. And that's part of the difference. But they have put so many mandates on the health insurance premiums in New Jersey that you don't have those kind of options. And because of the regulations and the burden and the cost, and maybe, just maybe, the White House could be right on some waste, fraud, and abuse up there. I'm looking forward to working with their Governor-elect as he becomes Governor and maybe we can help root out some of the waste, fraud, and abuse. And I'd like to see New Jersey rewarded for doing that. But, if people in America can buy insurance across state lines, and that $6,000 policy for the 25-year old man in New Jersey becomes a $1,000 policy for the 25-year old man in Kentucky, that dramatically reduces the cost of health insurance premiums in America. Another thing that dramatically reduces the cost of health insurance premiums in America is when people have access to, and can afford to purchase safely, catastrophic health insurance. Catastrophic is an essential component of health insurance, and that works in this way, especially when we have health savings accounts. Those health savings accounts that when we passed the HSAs in 2003 in this Congress, and it was enacted into law, if a young couple--and I did this in round numbers--so at age 20 had invested the maximum amount into their HSA for that annual year, $5,150 for a couple, say, at age 20, and they maxed out each year--it's indexed to inflation--and spent $2,000 in real dollars out of that in legitimate health care costs and accrued that at 4 percent, and when I did this math it was a logical thing, and it will be a logical thing again to accrue those investment HSAs at 4 percent. Throughout the 45 years of their working life when they arrived at Medicare eligibility rate having invested the maximum into the HSAs for that period of time and spent $2,000 a year out, they arrive at retirement with a health savings account of $950,000. Maybe it accrues it a little bit better. Maybe they spend a little bit less. But I am thinking in terms of well, sure, $1 million; a million dollars in an HSA. And what is the Federal Government's investment in that, Mr. Speaker? Well, the Federal Government wants to tax that million dollars. The government doesn't want people to have that money for any use of their own discretion when they arrive at Medicare eligibility age. I will submit that we want people to invest in a retirement account. We want them to manage that retirement account to include the whole continuum of their life, through an HSA, into a pension fund. I'd like to see them make that investment and manage their health and watch their diet, get their exercise, do the annual checkups, and be able to save those costs, those high costs of health maintenance by good health practices, see their premiums lowered because of it and see them rewarded by a growing health savings account so they can arrive at retirement with, let's just say, $950,000 in that account. Now, the liability that the Federal Government has today in today's dollars, to be fair, Mr. Speaker, when someone arrives at Medicare eligibility age, that means the cost of that entitlement for the balance of their life actuarially is about $72,000 per individual. So, if you have a couple that arrive at retirement today, the liability that the government accepts--which is taxpayers' money in Medicare costs--is about $144,000 for that couple to take care of their health care needs for the balance of their life starting at age 65. So the difference is roughly $800,000 and then adjusted for inflation of that liability itself. But Mr. Speaker, why wouldn't this Congress want to encourage people to invest in their health savings account and grow that health savings account and provide incentives for healthy practices, both exercise and diet and checkups, so that that health savings account became a retirement fund? And why wouldn't we at least, at a minimum, offer them that if you can arrive at retirement and Medicare eligibility and be able to purchase a Medicare replacement policy that would take that individual or couple off of the entitlement rolls, why wouldn't we then tell them, Keep the change, Mr. Speaker? Why wouldn't we say to the American people, Take this nest egg that you have managed and earned throughout your working life and use it to travel the world, retire on, give yourself a monthly pension to add to the other pension plans you might have--presuming Social Security is still there--add that to Social Security or will it to your children. You own it. Why would we want to keep people dependent upon a government program that will end up rationing health care? By the way, we are already there, Mr. Speaker. It was announced today that there's a government directive that went out. A panel, a health care advisory panel, that women should delay their mammograms until age 50 and then have those mammograms not every year but every other year, because there's too much anxiety involved in having those tests done every year and that anxiety is a factor that factors in. Think about this, Mr. Speaker. Is that really it? Or is this a Federal directive that ends up rationing health care? What about that 41-year old woman who ends up with breast cancer and doesn't get a test until its too late? What about the difficulty of treating that disease of breast cancer when it goes beyond that point where it can be handled without radical surgery? We have a directive that came out from the Federal Government that delayed by 10 years a recommendation that women get mammograms and spaced those mammograms out from 1 year to 2 years. So now 50-year-olds getting a mammogram on their 50th birthday, their 52nd, 54th, 56th, and on. That cuts more than half of the costs of the mammogram tests, breast cancer tests, that are going on in this country if everybody follows that directive. I would suggest that the Federal Government ought not be giving those kinds of recommendations. But I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that this is a little preview, a little window into what the Federal Government would be doing if this socialized medicine bill should find its way through the Senate, through conference, and off the floor of the House and Senate and to the President's desk, where I am convinced he will sign anything that has a title on it that says ``national health care.'' This is just a little preview of what we will see. We will also see rules and regulations that will come down that are hard rules, not just recommendations. It will be the Federal Government is paying for this so that means you don't get a hip replacement if you're over a certain age, or a knee replacement, or certain tests, or certain cancer treatments. They will declare ``end of life'' to be something different than the families and the individuals consider it to be. It has happened in every country that has socialized medicine. And many of the people there just simply capitulate. A number was published the other day that 4,000 babies are born in Great Britain in the hallway and not in the OB section because they don't have room because the rationing of health care and the lack of practitioners causes women in labor to back up in the hallways and have their babies there rather than in the delivery room. That is just one piece of data for one country that is significantly lower in population than we are here in the United States. So I have suggested two things the Republicans are for: ending lawsuit abuse, allowing for the purchase of insurance across State lines. The third thing is to provide for portability. Let people own their policy so when they leave their job or move from their State or whatever that change in their life might be, that it is their policy, they get to take it with them, and they own it, and that will give them the freedom and mobility from job to job; freedom to be independent, to start a business, freedom to manage their own health care. Another component of this, Mr. Speaker, is 100 percent full deductibility of everybody's health insurance premiums. That's also something that I'm confident would be ridiculed by the other side of this argument. A hundred percent full deductibility. Now, why would it be that in America, a corporation that's hiring people can offer them a package of salary and benefits plan, write off that salaries and benefits plan as if it were wages, 100 percent before taxes, an above-the-line write-off. I mean, that's all right. But why, then, would it not be the case for a sole proprietor, for a partnership, for an LLC--unless they took a salary out and incorporated in order to take a salary out and deduct those premiums--an individual or partnership cannot deduct in the same fashion 100 percent of the overall health insurance premiums like a corporation that has employees can? Now I am going to suggest--and I think it is a fundamental principle here in America--that if anything is deductible for any entity, it ought to be deductible for every entity. I can't think of a single exception that tells me that that would be wrong. So I will take this position--and I have--that if corporation X, Y, or Z can deduct a premium for a Cadillac plan or an average run-of-the- mill health insurance plan, if they can deduct a hundred percent of that premium, so should self-employed Joe the plumber, or John and Mary the farm operation, or the gas station people, anybody else that's out there; or an individual who is working for a wage for an employer that's not providing health insurance and wants to go out on the market and buy their own. I believe that that premium should be 100 percent deductible. If we did that, just simply provided full deductibility, that, Mr. Speaker, will insure another million Americans. And that gives us equity in this deductibility. I talked about HSA expansion. We also need, Mr. Speaker, transparency in billing. We have today cost-shifting going on in the health insurance industry and the health care industry, and when you have Medicare reimbursements that are coming in at significantly less than the cost of delivering that service, the cost of delivering the service at a minimum, along with some profit from profit margin--which is a good thing; it's an incentive for people to do well and a reward for those who are out there providing some of the best services and especially the innovative services--but the cost-shifting takes place when Medicare doesn't pay it all, it goes off onto some other entity, whether it be a private health insurance provider or whether it be an individual that might be self-insured. There are also the cases, I understand, of those that are uninsured. But we need transparency. We need to be able to take a look at these billings, and I am not interested in the names of the patients. But I am interested in the names of the institutions and the consistency or lack of consistency in the billing procedures. I believe that if you're going to get a hip replacement in San Francisco, then those people who would get that hip replacement from that provider in San Francisco should pay the same price. They should be billed the same price and there should be a legitimate attempt to collect the same price. I believe that if Bill Gates goes into the hospital and gets a hip replacement and Steve King goes in and gets a hip replacement, and Joe the Plumber goes in and gets a hip replacement, it's all the same procedures from all of the same providers; it all ought to be the same bill. If we did that, if we had transparency, that will bring together and reduce the cost-shifting because the American people will understand that they have to go shopping, they have to negotiate, they have to advocate, and if they have their health savings account that they're managing, they will have an incentive then to negotiate for a health care cost and outcome that's favorable to them and consistent. But instead, we patients in America, we are a lot like sheep. We get led into health care, and when we get sick, most of the time, much of the time, the patient in America doesn't pay the bill. They're not concerned about the cost. They simply show up at the clinic and the doctor examines them and says, All right. Now you need to go to a specialist here, here, and here. Run these tests. You show up at the hospital, the surgery is performed, if that happens to be what is ordered. And they generally heal up, they get great care and go home. And some don't address the bill at all. Some of them look at it but they know somebody else is paying the lion's share of that bill, and they're not concerned about the overall cost of their health care. Therefore, if an aspirin costs 20 bucks, they're not going to raise the issue. But if it is coming out of their pocket, if they're negotiating this, if they're trying to hold together the nest egg of a health savings account, then they're going to look at the cost; and they will look at the transparency in billing, and just the transparency itself will be a restraint from the cost-shifting. And the cost-shifting is kind of a big, not much spoken--not completely unspoken--but not much spoken problem that we have with health care in America. Four, association health care plans. This is Republicans. And this is legislation that we moved also through this Congress--that was blocked by Democrats--that allows people of professions to join together and bargain and negotiate and buy insurance packages within their professions. So let's say the plumbers get together and they negotiate; the accountants get together and they negotiate. In a similar fashion where credit unions exist and they have a membership that fits the definition, we can let people buy health insurance in the same way, by associating and buying health insurance. And a piece of this that I have briefly mentioned that needs to also be strongly sustained in this health insurance debate is catastrophic insurance. Catastrophic insurance is that insurance that as our health savings accounts grow, we end up with a nest egg. I gave you a description, Mr. Speaker, of how a young couple arrives at $950,000 in their HSA at the age of retirement. But let's just manage this in terms of $5,000, $10,000, $20,000, maybe $50,000 in an HSA. Now, if I am a young family and I happen to have been maybe working for 5 years and have been able to accumulate $20,000 in my health savings account, I am pretty comfortable to negotiate the lower premium with a $5,000 deductible or even a $10,000 or a $15,000 or a $20,000 deductible. That takes the premiums down dramatically and it provides an incentive for an individual to pay out-of-pocket for their minor health care costs, or pay out of the health savings account for the minor health care costs but to keep that nest egg intact. And instead of paying that higher premium, that premium that, by the way, if you're 40 years old in a family of four in Indianapolis, for example, that family would today be paying about $535 a month for their health insurance. Now, if you could raise that deductible and raise the copayment component of it, then that premium would go down and the savings would be something that goes back into--and at least figuratively if not literally and may be literally--the health savings account. The incentive for people to manage their health insurance premiums and the incentive for people to grow their health savings account needs to be expanded, not eliminated. But I haven't met anybody who can point to this health care bill, this 1,990-page monstrosity with a 40-page amendment, that can tell me that health savings accounts can even survive this bill in itself. Mr. Speaker, I have listed through here Republican solutions, and Steve King solutions for health care. Some of these we have passed out of this House. It is false to say Republicans have done nothing. The record is replete with legislation that has passed the House of Representatives and legislation that has been introduced into the House of Representatives, at least 42 bills in this Congress, all blocked by Democrats, all blocked by the Speaker of the House. These logical solutions that I have listed, including ending lawsuit abuse, buying insurance across State lines, providing for portability, providing for full, 100 percent deductibility of health insurance premiums, expanding health savings accounts, providing for transparency in billing, providing for association health care plans, and protecting catastrophic insurance, all of those are Republican principles. Many of those have been blocked by this Democrat Congress. And I think it is not a question of whether Republicans have ideas. We have all kinds of ideas. We have moved some of them. Democrats have blocked all of them. Why did they do that? Why did Democrats block logical, free market, freedom-loving solutions to health care? Because their crown jewel is socialized medicine, 1,990 pages of socialized medicine that took months to leverage and arm-twist to get just barely enough votes to squeak by in the House of Representatives. Those are the facts. And this bill provides some really ugly things that happen to the American people. For example, here are some real numbers, Mr. Speaker. A healthy, 25-year-old male in Indianapolis today would pay about $84 for a health insurance plan. This is a typical plan. The same plan under the bill that passed the House, the premium would go to $252 a month. That is a 300 percent increase in the premium. It triples the premium for that young man. Now, why would we triple the cost for people who don't have a lot of risk and a lot of liability, especially if they are at the entry level of their income? And we are raising the costs on people at the lowest level of their income. You go around to the other end of this, and if you take a couple that is roughly 60 years old that have some marginal health, I will say a less healthy 60-year-old couple in Indianapolis, they would be paying about $1,169 a month for a similar health insurance plan. That adds up pretty good over a year. And their premium under this bill would actually be reduced about 11 percent down to $1,043. Now maybe that makes a difference to that older couple. Presumably, though, someone at 60, they will be making more money than they did when they were 25. They will be making more money than that 25-year-old that sees his premiums tripled so we can reduce the 60 year olds by 11 percent. This is a transfer of wealth in America, a transfer of risk and liability. And by the way, that 40-year-old family with two children, a family of four, mom and dad around 40 years old that are paying $535 today in Indianapolis, would be paying $1,187 under this new bill. That is a 221 percent increase in the premium. That should tell us what is going on, Mr. Speaker. These are bad things for America. I am going to go down through a little bit of this. Here are the principles that have been laid out by the President. He argues that the economy has been and remains and he would argue that it has stabilized somewhat in a downward spiral, that we are in an economic crisis. This is part of the dialogue that we have heard over the last year and a half or so. He has said that we can't fix the economy unless we first fix health care. Does anybody remember that? We can't fix the economy unless we first fix health care. What is the problem with health care? Two things. According to the President, we spend too much money and we have too many uninsured. Now, we spend too much money is the allegation because it is being pointed out that a lot of the industrialized world will spend an average of about 9.5 percent of their gross domestic product on health care. We will spend about 14.5 percent. Some will give you a number that it goes up to 16 percent and maybe a little more. I am comfortable with the 14.5 percent number. I am not here to argue that we do not spend too much on health care. I think we spend somewhere around $203 billion a year unnecessarily when it comes to lawsuit abuse in America. So that is a number that I would subtract a large share of that from the cost of our overall health care before I get down to we are not spending too much. But we also make more than those countries that are spending 9.5 percent. We have the best health insurance industry in the world, and we have the best health care delivery system in the world with the best individual outcomes for practices in the world. And they will argue that there are civilizations, societies, countries, cultures with policies where people live longer than they do in the United States. They don't seem to want to dig down and ask why. First, just a couple of months ago we got the announcement that the life expectancy of Americans has been readjusted upwards 2 years. Two years. Now the numbers that are being quoted by the other side, by the Democrats that are pushing socialized medicine, they don't take into account that adjustment in the extension of the life expectancy. They will argue that our infant mortality rates are higher than a lot of the rest of the industrialized world. I will argue, Mr. Speaker, that we count the babies that die. We have a more accurate data system and reporting system than most, if not all, of the other countries, so our infant mortality is going to be higher than it is going to be in countries that don't record the infant deaths. These are not measures of the health care system unless you drill down into it and come up with a reason as to why, if there is a society that lives longer, who are they and why. Do they abuse substances less? When you subtract the fatalities from car accidents and suicides, perhaps, and those that are dying from other kinds of accidents, are we a more active society? Once you make those adjustments, I don't believe it holds that Americans don't have the kind of life expectancy that competes with any country in the world. I believe we do. And I believe we have, again, the best health insurance industry in the world and the best health care delivery system in the world. But the President has been very critical of our costs and our uninsured. So aside from the costs, the other point is too many uninsured. Well, the uninsured in America are on this chart, Mr. Speaker. It comes out to be this. Their number is 47 million; 47 million uninsured. Now, if we just accept that number, that sounds like a lot. We have to ask the question: Who are these 47 million? Well, first of all, it does include 9.7 million who qualify for a government health insurance program, mostly Medicaid, but don't bother to sign up. So that is 9.7 million. The second number are there are those who qualify for an employer- based plan but don't bother to sign up. That number is somewhere around 6 million. And then those who make over $75,000 a year, that is around 6 million. Those eligible for government programs, 9.7 million. It shows 10 here. Eligible for employer-sponsored, 6 million. Then you have those undocumented, noncitizens, about 6 million, and then there is another 4 million who are legal immigrants but are barred by law from government programs. So altogether, illegal aliens and immigrants are around 10.1 million. When you subtract these numbers, illegal aliens and immigrants, from the 47 million, those who qualify for Medicaid from the 47 million, those who qualify under their employer and don't sign up, and those who make over $75,000 and don't bother to buy any kind of health insurance program, now you are down to Americans without insurance who do not have affordable options. That is 12.1 million. I like my other chart better. The number is 12.1 million. So 12.1 million Americans without health insurance and those without affordable options is less than 4 percent of the overall population of the United States. This is how this breaks down in these categories, and this yellow-orange segment is the segment of the overall 47 million uninsured that don't have affordable options. Now, this piece right here, Mr. Speaker, I will put this on the broader chart of the overall American population. This is the population of the United States at about 306 million. You can see that 84 percent of Americans are insured, and 85 percent of Americans are happy with the policy and the program that they have. So it is the vast majority of Americans, these little pie slivers up here go down through this category. The yellow and black are illegal immigrants and aliens. And, Mr. Speaker, I am not for providing health insurance programs for illegals. If they broke into the United States and violated our laws, I am not going to set a carrot out there and reward them for breaking our laws and giving them taxpayers' money and handing them a health insurance policy. That is what some people like Luis Gutierrez and others are for, and Mike Honda of California are for. Steve King is opposed, and I will stand in opposition of socialized medicine and funding illegals under that program. But that is what these slivers are here, the yellow and the black. Then this orange piece here, these are the individuals earning over $75,000 a year. I think they can find another solution other than a subsidy from taxpayers in the market system. And the green are those eligible for a government program, these 9.7 million who just didn't bother to sign up for Medicaid. We don't need to provide for them. It is already there. They will get coverage whether they sign up or whether they don't, but we can't solve it with this solution. Then those eligible for employer-sponsored plans, about 6 million, and they don't bother to sign up or opted out. So you are down to this 4 percent. This red one here is the only one that I am concerned about, 12.1 million Americans out of 306 million, less than 4 percent of our population, and for that, for this red sliver, Mr. Speaker, Democrats have a magical solution for too many uninsured. Socialized medicine, a single-payer plan, incrementally imposed upon America by setting up a health choices administration czar that writes new rules. And in the bill, the result is, reading the language, the cancellation of every health insurance policy in America, whether it be 2011 or 2013, they all have to go back and reboot, push the reset button, push control, alt, delete and see if they can write a health insurance policy that would comply with the new regulations that will be written by the new health choices administration czar. That's where we are. So 1,300 companies, 100,000 policies, none of them can be guaranteed under this bill that a single policy qualifies with the whims or the regulations that would be written by the new czar yet to be appointed even though he would be confirmed by the Senate. I see my friend from Texas has arrived. Congressman Mike Burgess is a medical doctor. He has lived this. He sees this agenda and sees how this actually happens in real life. He has been a fighter for freedom, and I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I would like to pose a question and ask your response. In the previous hour, the gentleman from Ohio alleged that that $54 billion that would be saved by the lawsuit abuse reform would only be 1 percent of the overall cost of our health care; therefore, it's of small consequence and apparently not worth the trouble to take on the trial lawyers for that 1 percent. And I've made a response to that, but I would offer to the gentleman for his viewpoint since that is a field of your expertise.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Texas. In the minute or so that we have left, I have in here in my hand a list of the new Federal agencies that are created by this bill. This is the old chart for H.R. 3200. That's pretty scary. This is the new chart, and in the middle of that is the old chart. Now, here are all the new agencies that are created. Well, actually maybe not all of them. I've just highlighted a few of them on the front. The program of administrative simplification, I think they know they've got something complicated. Health choices administration, that is the scary part, this guy right here. That's the new commissar- isioner, referenced by the gentleman from Texas. The qualified health benefits plan ombudsman, which tells you no one can deal with this bureaucracy so you have to have an intermediary already written into the bill. I don't know if you have to have somebody to deal with the ombudsman. The health insurance exchange, where all of these policies and insurance companies would have to be approved. The State-based health insurance exchanges as well. Public health insurance option, well, that's the one that will squeeze out the private insurance companies. The list of the colossal magnitude of this socialized medicine bill goes on and on: 111 new agencies, 2,030 pages altogether, and the bottom line of it is, Mr. Speaker, the dramatic reduction of Americans' choices and thereby our freedom and liberty under assault by people who believe that we have to have a nanny state and live under socialized medicine. And I stand in opposition and I will fight this all the way. And I do believe the American people will rise up and kill this socialized medicine bill. Kill the bill, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I would first say, as the gentleman from Georgia stated, all Americans deserve health care, that all Americans have health care, every single one. Eighty-five percent of us are insured and 85 percent of us are happy with the policy that we have. The President has made two arguments. One of them is that health care in America costs too much money. What's your solution? Spend another $1.5 trillion. Too much money, throw another $1.5 trillion at it. That's upside down. What is the simplest part of logic that you don't understand? Second thing, too many people in America are uninsured, 47 million. Well, subtract from that 47 million illegal aliens which will be funded under this bill, immigrants, those that qualify for Medicaid and other government programs, employer programs that make over $75,000 a year, now you're down to really only 12.1 million Americans who are without affordable options. That is less than 4 percent of America. And for that you would throw out the liberty of America, throw out the baby with the bathwater of the best health insurance industry in the world, the best health care delivery system in the world, destroyed by a desire to create a dependency society to steal our freedom.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the privilege of being recognized by you, the Speaker and address on the floor of the House of Representatives in this seamless effort that we have to stand up and defend the freedom that this country needs. This has been for a long time about socialized medicine, socialized health care, the reason that so many people came to this Capitol and so many people have all across this country laid out and stood up and gone to congressional offices and joined in their groups, the tens of thousands of people who were here yesterday and so maybe people that are looking across the country, jamming the telephone lines, doing everything that they can. Mr. Speaker, the American people don't want this socialized medicine. I understand that the gentleman from Arizona has a presentation that he would like to make in a window here for a few minutes, and I am happy to yield to the gentleman from Arizona for that period of time before we pick up the balance of this exchange.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I really thank Congressman Trent Franks. Mr. Speaker, that presentation that we just heard over the last few minutes is something that I know he sat in his office in late hours and put this together and brought through and brought out some of the most significant components in this 1,990-page bill that has a 40-page amendment and makes it 2,030 pages altogether. As we speak here tonight, the Rules Committee is off into something that started up at about 2 o'clock this afternoon, and it's 10 minutes to 11 tonight. The real debate on this bill is us down here talking, Mr. Speaker, or the people up in the hole in the wall that finally has television cameras in it. For the first time, I think, in the history of the United States Congress, we see at least a significant bill that's being televised. I have gone up there, and the Rules Committee by the way, Mr. Speaker, I don't disrespectfully refer to it as the hole in the wall. I am the person who thinks so much of the Rules Committee, up where they deny amendments to be offered here at the floor, at the direction I believe of the Speaker, up on the third floor of the Capitol, a little old room that doesn't even have room for all of the Members that want to engage in this, let alone staff, so the hallway is full of staff and Members. If there is information that needs to go in, they pass in papers like a bucket brigade to make an argument before a Rules Committee that is being asked to be an expert on everything that Congress, all of us, might want to know or vote on. This is a piece of the process that for the first time the American people are learning about because they can now see on television what goes on. It has changed the dynamics in that room. I came down here 2\1/2\ years ago and called for television cameras in the Rules Committee. They weren't too impressed with that request, so I introduced a resolution to move the Rules Committee down to the floor of the House of Representatives because that is where the debate is taking place so the American people can see it. Now we are on about maybe the third panel of the Rules Committee and the American people, some of them, and I have had people ask me would anybody go up and watch the debate in the Rules Committee. Well, people all over America are doing that. Some are watching this tonight. Some have keyed into the channel that is showing the Rules Committee. It is going on and on. There are people that seemed to be a little bored by that. Who is watching? Watch your e-mail account, Members, because they are sending messages in. The people who are watching the Rules Committee with eyes like an eagle are the ones who came to this Capitol yesterday by the tens of thousands and filled this place up and said, Keep your hands off of my health care. They want to see how this system works. Some of them are becoming experts. They are going to be, some of them, the future leaders that come into this Congress because they are fed up. Mr. Speaker, the American people are fed up with the assault on American freedom and the complete disregard for the very foundations of American exceptionalism. In fact, I don't know if some of these people who are supporting this bill couldn't actually say the word sincerely that American is an exceptional country. We have a whole lot of reasons why we are exceptional, and at the core of each of them are freedoms. So that, Mr. Speaker, is the backdrop of what all is going on here. The schedule is to bring a rule down and have a vote about 9 tomorrow, and then start carrying out a debate, and a debate that will be limited. It has already been announced by the chair of the Rules Committee, Louise Slaughter, that they are only going to accept two amendments to the bill. Now when the public has been told by the chair of a committee that there are only going to be two amendments that will be allowed to be debated on the floor of the House and voted on, and I presume one of them will be the Republican leader's amendment and the other one may be a motion to recommit, but only two, I think it tells everybody in America who is watching this show up here in the hole in the wall of the Rules Committee, what the deal is. If you are going to go to a committee and offer amendments to perfect legislation and in all good seriousness engage in the debate, and debate for hours and hours and hours before a chair and a committee that has already announced to the world that all of those amendments that are being offered save two will be rejected and have no value, that, Mr. Speaker, is what is going on right now. The American people are figuring it out. They have a nose and a sense for this. So what I would like to do as this evening unfolds is recognize the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett) who has been such a strong and articulate voice and a dynamic leader. Mr. Speaker, anybody who is here tonight loves this country and loves our freedom and is absolutely opposed to socialized medicine. I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett).

Mr. KING of Iowa. Would that be debtor's prison then in the bill? If you don't pay the fine, then you go to jail?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman for his relentless effort and, I will say, a thorough understanding of what we know about these 1,990 pages-plus-40. And we do know that's 2,030 pages at least. I have made the statement, Mr. Speaker, and I think it's important that the American people know this: yes, we should have an opportunity to evaluate all of the implications. There are going to be amendments that will come out that we have not seen that are likely to be approved by the Rules Committee because they will be giving direction, not because they will be doing a significant analysis. The American people want to read this bill. We handed this bill out yesterday to the tens of thousands of people that came here to this United States Capitol, the 2,000-page bill. I don't think I will ever forget the image of John Culberson standing on the wall tossing pages of the bill out to people who passed it around. They would each take one page and pass it to somebody else. And they went around this Hill and they began asking Members of Congress, tell me what this means, tell me what this page means. There were not enough pages of the bill to go around to all the people that came to oppose this bill yesterday, and there won't be enough pages to go around to all the people that come to oppose this bill tomorrow at 1 o'clock, east side steps of the Capitol. We've got another wave of American people that are coming in here to express their rejection for socialized medicine. It is so important to understand this. When people say, well, I sat up and I read the bill, there are people out there, salt of the Earth, good regular people that took it upon themselves to read what's available for them to read, to work through those 1,990 pages, and they will do everything they can to understand it. If they don't understand it, they sometimes feel like they're inadequate because they're not a lawyer or they're not educated or they're not a legislator. Here is the statement that I think is important for the American people to know, Mr. Speaker, and that is, you can take the smartest person in the world and you can shut them up in a room with a desk or a table and a chair and give them 6 months in that room to read this bill and ask them to write up a summary of what the bill does, the effects, the costs, the implications, and the nuances that would be interpreted one way or another with the latitude and license that's in the bill. You can ask the smartest person in the world to analyze the 3,425 ``shalls'' that are in the bill; you can ask that smartest person in the world to analyze what it means, this one--there is more than one ``may,'' but one of the most important ``mays'' in the bill is, Members of Congress ``may'' utilize the newly formed government option. The government option for all this right over here, this public health plan, Members of Congress ``may.'' There was an amendment offered in Energy and Commerce--or maybe it was Ways and Means, or both--that said anybody that votes for this bill would be compelled to live underneath the health insurance policy that they would create under the Federal Government, the government option. If Congress thinks this is such a good deal, they've got 3,425 ``shalls'' in the bill, why not make it 3,426 ``shalls'' in the bill and make ``Members of Congress shall live underneath this law.'' That would be the actual poison pill for this bill. If the people over here, the ones that have signed on to whatever document it is, the 190 or so that say they will vote for whatever bill Nancy Pelosi thinks should come to this floor, if they had to live underneath the law that they are imposing on the American people, all they have to do is do a little amendment that says, Members of Congress ``shall'' use the government option, not ``may.'' Strike ``may,'' put in ``shall,'' kills the bill, or it makes it a policy good enough that we can all live with and the American people wouldn't have to come and storm this Capitol. They wouldn't have to take this hill; they wouldn't have to hold this hill until we kill the bill. But we're going to have to do that. We have to keep this up. We fought a great battle yesterday. There is a good battle going on up in Rules right now. There is another battle tomorrow at 1 o'clock here at the Capitol on the east side of the steps, Mr. Speaker. And this has to go on and on and on until this bill is killed. This idea was killed back in 1993 and 1994. A bill never came to the floor then. I will give President Clinton credit; he wrote a bill, but it never came to the floor because the American people took it apart and rejected it. And someplace over there against the wall I have a chart of the original ``HillaryCare'' that we took off of the archives of The New York Times. It is a scary thing. It is a very scary thing. And if we can find it over there I will put it up, Mr. Speaker, so everybody can see it. It's in black and white. This is the real color version of the original House bill, which is H.R. 3200. This bill and this analysis comes from Kevin Brady in the Ways and Means Committee. He has done a fantastic job of educating the American people. The flow chart that was created in 1993 and 1994 is the one that scared the living daylights out of me and caused me to get engaged in the political world because I could not tolerate what government was doing to me. The people that believe that they are intellectual elitists, that think that they know more than the American people know and want to take away our freedom had drafted a bill called HillaryCare that really did swallow up at that time one-seventh of the U.S. economy. It didn't come to the floor because it was killed because the American people found out about it. This is the flowchart that is now 15 years later. This is the organizational chart of the House Democrats' original health care plan. This is H.R. 3200. The new one is uglier, but I can tell you this is all pretty much in here. The colored boxes are new agencies. There are at least 32 colored here, and there are 53 in the bill. In the bill before, it was amended with a Ways and Means component of this thing, and it went from 1,000 pages to 2,000 pages. These 32 agencies colored and 53 all together now have grown to 111 new Federal agencies so that we can have a complete nanny state that will direct our lives from conception to natural death. That sounds like a pro-life statement. Well, for me, it generally is, Mr. Speaker. This bill of 2,000 pages that is before us does affect us from conception to natural death because it funds abortion and it has death panels and it regulates everything that has to do with our health care--the cost, the access--everything that has to do with it from conception to natural death. On these charts with colors on it, I'd focus your attention to two things or, actually, to three things, Mr. Speaker. This one is the health choices administration, which we've heard the gentleman speak of. This is where they would regulate everything--all of the health insurance in America, all of the health care in America. This is the HCA commissioner, the health choices administration commissioner. He is the new czar. As I talk about the black-and-white version of HillaryCare, this is what we saw in 1994. This is the black-and-white flowchart that was created by the closed-door meetings that Hillary Clinton had when she was appointed the individual to write this all up. Now, again, I give them credit. They wrote a bill. They met in secret. They met behind closed doors a lot of the time, and that caused them some problems. Phil Gramm, who was down at the other end of that hallway--right out the center to the other end--stood on the floor of the United States Senate, and he said, This bill passes over my cold, dead, political body. It was this scary flowchart that scared the living daylights out of me, and it scared me into the public service/political life to try to put the brakes on the overgrowth of government. The American people rejected this in 1994. They threw this out, and the bill never came up for a vote anywhere. Now we have this full-color monstrosity of H.R. 3200, which is even scarier, but the focus down here is on the public health plan side which has to compete with the private sector side. These two boxes exist today--private insurers and traditional health plans. Private insurers: 1,300 companies selling insurance, not policies. 1,300 companies, Mr. Speaker, right here. There are 100,000 policy varieties to choose from, which is a tremendous amount of competition. There are some States that don't have much because it's like 70 to 80 percent in a few States where a single provider has that market share. So what we do is we open it up to sell insurance across State lines. That provides the competition. It's all the competition we need, and it's more competition than the Democrats in this Congress are willing to accept. So, Mr. Speaker, this public health plan which will be run by the new health choices administration czar--commissioner, commissar-issioner-- will write the rules to benefit the Federal plan that will be subsidized by taxpayers. Then it will make it difficult, if not impossible, for the private health plans to compete against the public. We've seen it in the school loan program. We've seen it in the flood insurance program. This bill must not pass or that's going to happen to everybody's private insurance. By the way, this bill that's up there before Rules right now cancels every health insurance policy in America in either 2011 or at the end of 2013, depending on the definition. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I reclaim my time, and I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I would make this point. I'm trying to run through the list of organizations in my mind that support this bill, and there are quite a lot of them. Then I'm trying to come up with a name of an organization that supports the bill that doesn't have a vested interest, and it seems as if it's a very broad approach to this from the perspective that--let's just say, as for the AMA, they get more dollars into the industry. They've done a calculation. It seems a little cynical. That's how it is. AARP, they're willing to take a $500 billion cut in Medicare benefits because they can make it back--and then some--by selling insurance through the exchange. I would pose this question to the gentlemen that are so knowledgeable on this subject that are here on the floor, or anyone that would care to come down here, and I would be glad to yield to a knowledge base, if it exists, on the other side of this aisle as to where are the unvested interest supporters for socialized medicine? Who are they? Where are they? Can you name one? Is there either one of you that could answer that question or anybody here in the Chamber tonight that I could yield to that could speak to that? I am completely flummoxed when I think about altruism behind socialized medicine. Where are they? I would like to know. I'm finding all kinds of patriots that are for killing this bill. I saw altruism like I had never seen before yesterday, patriotism in its purest form, of people that dropped everything. I shook hands with people from San Francisco and Oregon and most of the States in the country. I am convinced that we had people here from every State in America yesterday. They just want to have their freedom to buy the health insurance policy that they choose; they want the freedom to succeed; and they want the government to stop growing and start shrinking and un-tax them and take the burden off of children and grandchildren. And I see that. I see those salt-of-the-Earth Americans that are there. Any one of them could have showed up at a church picnic at my house or my place in my neighborhood. And the tears run down their cheeks because of what's happening in America. It's not just because of the song, it's not just because of the prayer. It's afterward, hours afterwards, and they're saying, What can I do? What can I do? I'm losing my county. And their faces are being washed with tears, and the cynicism that grows within me because of the vested interest, and nobody can answer me, where is the contingency of the people that just want to have what's best for America? I can't find them.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I would make this point, that the legislative strategy for them is this, that they were queued up to ram this bill through before the August break. That's what they wanted to do. They rammed cap-and-tax through before the August break, and no one read the bill. Mr. Gohmert from Texas stood here on this floor and he posed a series of questions, and the one that stands out in my mind, it will be historically remembered, I think, forever, that there was no bill in the well. There was no real copy of the bill. And I know no one read the bill because the bill didn't exist. Congressman Gohmert finally said, after 35 minutes of holding up the debate, ``Madam Speaker, if the House of Representatives passes a bill that doesn't exist, is it possible to message a bill that doesn't exist to the United States Senate?'' That was the question, Mr. Speaker. The result was, apparently, yes. Apparently in this Congress we can pass a bill that doesn't exist and message a bill that doesn't exist to the United States Senate. That's the subject matter that I think is important. And this 2,000-page bill that we have now, the reason that they are pushing on it is because we went home for August, and the town hall meetings were jam packed full all over the country. We saw real-time footage that came out, angry people, frustrated people, people that just want to be left to succeed and left to be free, filled up these buildings, filled up the community buildings, jammed these places. There were meetings held in Iowa outside because we didn't have buildings big enough for the town hall meetings. The tiny little down of Adel, over 600 people in a meeting just like that. What the message from that was, the American people don't want this bill. They don't want socialized medicine. They want to kill this bill. They made their opinions known loudly and clearly for the entire month of August and into September. But now these Members of Congress have been in Speaker Pelosi's echo chamber since then, they haven't really been back home listening to their constituents the way they were in August; and now they have gone all wobbly again. She is afraid to let them go back home to be braced up by their constituents. That's the calculation. It's a political calculation. It's not a logical one. I recognize the gentleman from New Jersey asked for a logical one. There is a difference between reasons and excuses. There isn't a reason. There are only excuses. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, this is a destiny bill. This is a piece of legislation that changes the direction of the United States of America, Mr. Speaker, forever. There is no going back to a point. It isn't like we missed an exit on the interstate and we will just go to the next exit and get off and turn around and go back. This is taking the off ramp from freedom, and it is going into the abyss of socialism. It is the leap off into the abyss of socialism. This bill, this is a socialized medicine bill that is the crown jewel of socialism. There is no other way to define it, when you take over 17.5 percent of the economy, one-sixth of the economy. This legislation cancels every single health insurance policy in the United States of America, a good chunk of them at the end of 2011 and all the rest of them by 2013. The promise that the President of the United States made was that if you like your health insurance policy, you get to keep it. Well, you get to keep it until they cancel it. Can you keep it until 2011 and think the President kept his word? I will leave that out there as a rhetorical question, Mr. Speaker. But that is something that brings me great concern. We aren't going to raise taxes on anybody that makes under $250,000 a year. We know it raises the taxes on everybody. We aren't going to hurt the little man. Here is a little, little man piece. It hurts them all. If they go with this rating that is in there, just in the individual market, a 25-year-old male in Indianapolis, we will pick that, that happens to be the state of our conference chair, he would be paying about $84 a month for his premium. If this bill passes, it jumps to $252. It is a 300 percent increase in the premium that he is paying. Now, this is a young man that is trying to get into the workforce, that is trying to build an economic base. Usually when you start in, that is when you make the least, and you grow your income stream. You are young and healthy. You can't afford much insurance. You don't need much, because you are young and you are healthy. But this would triple the insurance premiums for a 25-year-old man and fine him or punish him if he doesn't buy the policy, and eventually put him in jail. Then you have the family of four, roughly 40-years-old, a couple of kids. They would be paying today in Indianapolis about $535 a month for insurance. They can probably afford that, if they have been raising their income up. It is tough, I know, but usually they will find a way to maneuver. But this bill makes it so much worse. Now that $535 premium would go to $1,087. The premiums would be a 221 percent increase. I can go on down the line, Mr. Speaker. I recognize the clock is ticking. I want to make sure if any of my colleagues have a last thing they have to say, they will let me know. I yield quickly to the gentleman from New Jersey.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I appreciate the gentleman from New Jersey bringing this up again. Here is the message. We have had all kinds of battles in this country and people have paid a huge price. We had Lexington and Concord. We had patriots that marched through the snow with bloody feet to go to Trenton. We had Saratoga. We had Yorktown. We had Hamburger Hill. We had Pork Chop Hill. We had the battle of Capitol Hill yesterday, and the American people took this hill. We have to come back to this hill tomorrow at 1 o'clock. We have to hold this hill until we kill this bill.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for heading up this Special Order tonight and for taking the lead on life in this Congress for years and years. Maybe we could start to count that in decades, it's been such a persistent and relentless effort that has been made. As I listen to the dialogue here tonight and I see the pro-life leaders that are here in this Congress, the core of the pro-life people that are on my side of the aisle and the help we have of some of the pro-life people that are on the other side of the aisle come to a head here in this Congress this week with the very idea that Congress might pass a national health care act, a socialized medicine act that would have in it the kind of language that would compel pro-life, God-loving, God-fearing, unborn baby-loving and protecting Americans with a conscience to fund abortions, and this would be the complete component of a socialized medicine piece of legislation that wouldn't just be cradle to grave, it would be conception to grave. We have long held this standard in this Congress, with the Hyde Amendment, with the Mexico City policy, that it is immoral to impose the costs of abortion on the people who strongly believe in this--it is a majority of the American people that strongly believe that innocent, unborn human life are human beings too. I simply ask two questions, and I will raise these questions in a high school auditorium or anywhere across this land. Madam Speaker, I especially make this point to the young people in America. I tell them, You will have a profound moral question to answer, and it will be very soon that you need to come to this conclusion. And when you make moral decisions, they need to be very well grounded. They need to be grounded in the fundamental principles. The first question that young people need to ask is, is human life sacred in all of its forms? Do you believe in the sanctity of human life? I ask them to look at the person who sits next to them. Is that person on your right, is their life sacred? The person on your left, is their life sacred? They will say yes. Is your life sacred? And, Madam Speaker, they will say yes. It's almost universal in America that we believe our lives are sacred, each one. And the law in America doesn't differentiate between someone who is 101 or someone that's 1, whether they have a century of life ahead of them or a century of life behind them. All human life has the same value under the law in the United States of America with equal protection under the law. That's the principle. That's the belief. The late father of Senator Casey from Pennsylvania, Bob Casey, the former Governor of Pennsylvania, made this statement that I had put on the wall in my office at home in Iowa, and it's been there for years. Bob Casey, Democrat, denied the ability to speak before the National Convention, but his statement on life, Madam Speaker, was this: Human life cannot be measured. It is the measure itself against which all other things are weighed. Life is sacred. Question number one, do you believe in the sanctity of human life? Answer, yes, we all believe that. Then the only other question we have to ask, in what instant does life begin? I pick the instant at conception. It's the only instance we have. If there was a moment before that, we should examine that. The instant of fertilization/ conception. Those two questions ask, do you believe in the sanctity of human life? Yes. Does it begin in any other instant other than that of conception? No. Therefore, life begins at the instant of conception. It's immoral to ask the American people--to compel the American people to fund abortion. Yet that's what this Speaker is prepared to do and that's what we are prepared to oppose.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Georgia for heading up this Special Order tonight and for covering my back every time that I need it covered. It's a strong sense of duty that he has and a sense of friendship that I feel, and I appreciate it. I listened to the other doctor from Georgia who showed our poster a little bit earlier, that poster with all of those colored new Federal agencies. That's enough to scare the living daylights out of anybody. But this bill that the gentleman from Michigan has just showed, these 1,990 pages plus 40, if you can stack them all up together, so it's over 2,000 pages. But in that are now, not as the colored chart originally showed was 32 new agencies and some added up to 54, but this 2,000-page bill is 111 new agencies. I have here a list of them. I'm not going to read them all off because it would put me to sleep before I got to the bottom, but I highlighted just a few of them to give us a sense of what kind of government bureaucracy and empire building would be launched if the Speaker has her way and socialized medicine is imposed upon America in the form of this bill. H.R. 3962 has in it a program of administrative simplification. So we have to have a government agency to simplify the government bureaucracy. That's one of those that would be from George Orwell. Another one, Health Choices Administration. It is the scariest. That director of the Health Choices Administration becomes the commissar- isioner that writes all the new rules for everybody's health insurance policy. Then you have the Qualified Health Benefits Plan ombudsman. Well, that's the person that has to be in between the regular person and the government, because the government will be so complicated that a regular person can't deal with the government. That's why they put an ombudsman in here. Then you have the Health Insurance Exchange. That's where every new health insurance policy would have to qualify. There is not a single policy out of the 100,000 that are available for purchase in America today that are issued by 1,300 companies in America that the President of the United States, the Speaker of the House or the Majority Leader in the United States Senate can point to and say, that policy will be available in 2013 if a bill passes that goes to the President's desk, because they all would have to comply with new rules to be written later. Then you have program for technical assistance to employees of small businesses buying exchange coverage. Well, that gives me confidence, having something that long. Health Insurance Exchange Trust Fund, where the money goes for the new health insurance exchange. State-based health insurance exchanges. Public health insurance option. Oh, yes, the ombudsman for public health insurance option because no regular person could possibly deal with the public health people. They have to have an intermediary called an ombudsman. The list goes on. Demonstration programs, Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research, Comparative Effectiveness Research Commission to run the center.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I appreciate the gentleman yielding. It works like this. This is the invitation to the American people. There are American people up and down the Eastern Seaboard, there are Americans who have already converged into this city. They are walking around the Capitol grounds tonight. They are here to defend their freedom to own their own health insurance policy, the one of their choice. What we have seen happen is from the first part of August, Members of Congress deployed out across this country and did hundreds and hundreds of town hall meetings, and hundreds of thousands of people came, filled those meetings up and said I want my freedom. I don't want you taking away my health insurance policy. Eighty-five percent of the people in America are happy with the policy they have. But that was August. This is November. The people that have come back to serve in this House have been caught in the echo chamber, in the Speaker's pressure chamber that says vote for socialized medicine and a national health care act. What changes their mind is when they have to look in the eyes of regular American people, and what we have asked is that America come to this Capitol, fill up these Capitol grounds, fill up this building, be here for a press conference at noon tomorrow over on the West Side of the steps of the Capitol, and we will have there these Members of Congress that are here tonight, Michele Bachmann, Tom Price, Scott Garrett, Michael Burgess, and others, along with Mark Levin, Jon Voight, the actor, and many others. This will be a gathering where we talk about how we preserve our freedom at noon tomorrow on the West steps of the Capitol, and stay on the Hill because you will taken the Hill, and you have to hold it until this bill gets pulled down.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Forty-six pages.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Before the gentleman from Louisiana gets off the floor, I wanted to just make a point in all fairness to the very sharp attorney from down there in Cajun country whose hospitality I have enjoyed. There is a little bit of a technicality in the presentation, and that is that the Pelosi bill actually does address some tort reform by establishing some new grant programs at the State level. But the caveat is that it is conditional to--those laws that they might set up at the State level can't limit attorneys' fees and they can't impose caps on damages. So if you can't cap damages and you can't limit attorneys' fees, then simply there can't be reform, and this is more gobbledygook Orwellian speak. It is in the bill, a matter of technicality. But functionally, I agree with the gentleman from Louisiana. I wanted to make that point.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I appreciate the clarification. I would point out that the cost of medical liability and the litigation and the defensive medicine is put at 8\1/2\ percent of the overall cost of health care in America by the health insurance underwriters. That is a low number compared to some of the other estimates, but the simple multiplier is $203 billion a year, or over $2 trillion over the course of this bill over 10 years, that would go to the trial lawyers and to the premiums and to the defensive medicine. That's just one of the reasons we've got to come in, and we, the people, have to assert ourselves tomorrow at noon at this Capitol Building. The press conference will be on the west steps. It's a House call. The American people are here. Some are here now. Many are on their way. There will be many here tomorrow who will be surrounding this Capitol and filling up the grounds. They will be claiming their freedom, and they will be making their opinions known to these Members of Congress who are hanging in the middle and who have maybe decided that they are a little more afraid of the Speaker than they are of their constituents, but they like their jobs. We know that August was effective and that early September was effective, but the energy has gone down. It gets wound up tomorrow, Mr. Speaker. It gets wound up to the maximum here tomorrow. I'm going to ask people: Come. Come up on this Hill. You take this Hill. Hold this Hill, and don't give it up until this socialized medicine bill is pulled down. I yield back.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Georgia. I wish they'd take that 1,990-page bill--and with the 40-page amendment, it's 2,030 pages--and put it back into the tree. It would have a lot more use there than it does here. I have to call it what it has been called before, especially by the Congresswoman from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, who called it the ``crown jewel of socialism.'' This is socialized medicine. It's more than cradle-to-grave medicine. It goes beyond the nanny state, Mr. Speaker. This is conception to state- managed death health care that's being imposed here. As I said earlier, there isn't a single health insurance policy that we know which could qualify beyond 2013. Any policies that are set today, according to this, would be outlawed, and they would have to jump through new hoops that would be written by the new health choices commissioner, the czar--the commissar-issioner of health choices, I would call him. Yes, he may be confirmed, but it doesn't prevent the President from appointing someone to supersede his power. He has done that a number of times, some 57 times. This is a call to the House. This is a House call. This is the American people coming here to this Capitol. For months, Mr. Speaker, the American people have said to me, What can I do? What can I do? I don't always have a good answer. I said write letters, get on the phone and send e-mails. Go to district offices. All that needs to be done. There are those who already have resigned themselves also. I am not among them. I believe we can kill this bill. And I would draw the parallel of about 3 years ago when there was a comprehensive amnesty bill that was pushed out of the White House with bipartisan support, and the American people rejected amnesty. A lot of people thought it was all set to pass through, pushed by the White House through the Senate to come over to the House and be passed in a comprehensive amnesty legislation. But the American people rose up and they jammed the switchboards of the United States Senate. And they did it twice that summer. They killed the bill. We can kill this bill. It doesn't have the greased wheels like the comprehensive amnesty did. This bill is one that is wobbling along like a wounded duck, and it got wounded a lot more when it flew through the flak in New Jersey and in Virginia last night, when the Virginians and the New Jersians stood up and said we have had enough of this growth of government. We have had enough of this debt, that our grandchildren will have to be paying the interest on and that our great grandchildren will have to pay the principle on. We want to maintain our freedom. That message was resounding out of Virginia. It was resounding out of New Jersey. And it does affect the thought process and the voting of the Members that are sitting on the fence tonight. And the American people that are in this city right now and those on their way will affect the judgment, and they will provide the good judgment for those who are sitting on the fence. Those that are more afraid of their Speaker than they are of their constituents, tomorrow they are going to see the whites of our eyes. They are going to look in the pupils to the soul of the American people that say I love my Constitution and my country and my flag and our history and our common cause. We do not have a common destiny if we can't maintain our freedom. Already a third of our private sector has been nationalized in the last year. This is another one-sixth. This is 17.5 percent. It does take us over 50 percent. This is the time, this is the place, this is the ``Super Bowl'' of our resistance. Take the Hill tomorrow. Hold the Hill until this bill is killed.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate being recognized to address you here on the floor of the House. This is a big night for a lot of Republicans across the country, and as we're watching things unfold, the American people have come out to the polls today across the eastern part of the United States, and their voices are being heard. As our voice has been heard sometimes in the echo chamber in the House of Representatives, now the real voices of the people have been heard through the ballot boxes in places like Virginia and in New Jersey, and we wait to see how it unfolds above and beyond that. This is, Mr. Speaker, a time for choosing. This is a time for the American people to step up and to reclaim their freedom. The American people understand what has happened in the last year, in a little more than the last year. They understand that there was a Secretary of the Treasury who came to this Capitol and who demanded a $700 billion TARP fund. A lot of us said ``no,'' and everybody here on the floor, I believe who I'm looking at, said ``no.'' Then along came the nationalization of three large investment banks--AIG, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac--and then General Motors and Chrysler. Then behind that came a $750 billion economic stimulus package that may have saved some government jobs but that hasn't created anything that has to do with the way you create wealth in a free enterprise society. Right behind that came the very ill-thought-out, worst piece of economic burden that has ever passed the House of Representatives--cap- and-trade. The American people saw that go through them like a freight train--one car after another, after another, after another. At about the time they lifted their heads up to see what happened, another car hit them. Then they looked around, and we had an August break, and this Congress went home to get away from the humidity and the heat in Washington, DC. When we went out, we had hundreds and hundreds of town hall meetings, and tens of thousands--in fact, hundreds of thousands-- of Americans came out for their voices to be heard. At the core of all of that--of all the squabble, of all the tension that we saw and heard and that a lot of us looked right directly in the eye--was the American people who wanted to preserve and protect their freedom--our freedom, Mr. Speaker. They continually said, What can I do? What can I do? I said, Come to town hall meetings. Pick up the telephone. Write letters. Go see your Member of Congress. Look him in the eye. Tell him that you want to hang onto your freedom. If there was anything that I said in a town hall meeting that resonated with the people in the Fifth District of Iowa was that I will oppose any bill that diminishes our freedom. Well, we have a bill that looks like it's coming to this Congress very soon that diminishes our freedom. It's 1,990 pages.

Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra).

Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time and thanking the gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Speaker, I want to reiterate this: that the dye has been cast in this Congress for some time. The Speaker has been leveraging votes on this 1,990-page bill that may see a several-hundred-page manager's amendment drop in on us at any time. Even as we speak, it could happen. With all that leverage that has been taking place behind the scenes and with all the negotiations that have taken place in the White House, in the Speaker's office and in Harry Reid's office, there has been no Republican at the table, not one.