Steve King

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Yes.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Did you offer an amendment in Financial Services?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Did Chairman Frank vote for that amendment?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Why isn't it law?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Could that be interpreted to mean that ACORN talked to his staff after the committee meeting and advised him that he should come to the floor and change the language?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Here is an image. In fact, this poster is not here tonight, but I will try to bring it down later this week so everybody can see it, Mr. Speaker. I thought it would be good for me to go down to the headquarters of ACORN to see what it looked like. So I went on down there to 2609 Canal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana. That's the national headquarters and, for all I know, the international headquarters of ACORN. In there is where they process the paperwork for many of--probably most of--and probably not quite all of their affiliate corporations. But inside those doors, the most fortified building in that neighborhood--I yield back.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Yes. But it's a four- or five-story building. I would have to look at the picture to count the stories. But the first two are all bars, and it's fortified. Then above that, it's high enough so that the crowds can't get in. But behind the glass in ACORN's national headquarters on the street side, there's a huge poster: ``Obama for President '08,'' and hanging right next to it is an ACORN flag. I have that picture. I have turned it into a poster. I brought it down here on the floor. ACORN is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. It is unlawful for them to engage in partisan politics, and yet they are a get-out-the- vote organization for Democrats. They are taking Federal tax dollars, and they're pushing it through to run political campaigns, and then they boldly advertise it in the front window of their national headquarters in New Orleans with an Obama poster.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mrs. Bachmann, you have raised a lot of children, foster children, your own natural born children. It is a phenomenal thing. Have you ever caught any of your children with their hand in the cookie jar?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Did any of them ever call for a hearing to clear their name?

Mr. KING of Iowa. I think that is the case. Clearly, it's a partisan get-out-the-vote organization. They're everywhere in America, in over 100 major cities, and then subdivisions within the cities. Their reach doesn't just go into politics. We saw what was going on with the-- what's the nicest word--subornation of prostitution, child prostitution, the encouragement of what appears to be illegal immigration, saying that they're going to help with a child tax credit, the refundable tax credit which is a transfer from the taxpayers to the pimp and the prostitute out of the pocket of the taxpayers, enabled by ACORN.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Well, it's circular, and it's incestuous. The statement that was made about investigating ACORN was made by Chairman John Conyers, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. I was sitting in the room when that was going on. We had a hearing before the Constitution Subcommittee, the subcommittee chairman is Jerry Nadler from New York. Chairman Conyers said, I think there's substance here. I think we should look into it. Chairman Nadler said, When I see something substantive, then I will consider hearings. There was plenty of substance. There is plenty more substance here now. But since that time, John Conyers has said, Well, the powers that be--not necessarily the higher-ups--but the powers that be have decided that there wouldn't be hearings. Now who could ``the powers that be'' be when you are the chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the House of Representatives? You really only look up and you think, well, the powers that be are either the Speaker of the House or the President of the United States. Well, what we do know is the President of the United States used to work for ACORN. That's irrefutable and not arguable. He not only worked for ACORN but he also was a trainer for ACORN, and he headed up Project Vote, which is part and parcel of ACORN. The President wore an ACORN jersey. He was a player and a coach, and now he is an alumni who has hired ACORN to help facilitate hiring people at a minimum on the Census and now they've backed off of that. I'm not all that optimistic that that will stick. But we have a President of the United States with a chief of staff named Rahm Emanuel who used to serve in the House of Representatives. He is known for hardball, hard-core Chicago-style politics. And we're going to have to wonder if we can actually get hearings and investigations. Here's what needs to happen, Mr. Speaker: this Congress needs to have multiple committees with bipartisan hearings and investigations on every aspect of ACORN. The Department of Justice has to deploy an entire division to go in and do a complete forensic audit of every dollar that comes and goes from ACORN and every one of their affiliates. They have to bring the IRS into this so we can track every dollar, and we've got to see indictments. We've got to see the perp walk. We are going to have to see people put in prison for what they're doing to the American taxpayers, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, did I hear a gavel? Does that mean my time has expired?

Mr. KING of Iowa. Okay. I thank you, Mr. Speaker. Then I will just simply conclude. I didn't pick up the sound very well. I appreciate the gentlelady from Minnesota coming to the floor to engage in this discussion and dialogue that we have. I'll appreciate it when this Congress steps forward and does the investigations of ACORN and multiple committees, the Finance Committee, the Ways and Means Committee, the Judiciary Committee, the Government Reform Committee, those, among others. And when the Justice Department steps up and instead of shutting down an investigation of voter intimidation, which was an open and shut case of intimidation in Philadelphia, if they will step in and really do an investigation of ACORN, let's give the taxpayers their due, let's represent the American people, let's clean this place up, and let's have the high standards that were envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, a Rasmussen poll found that 83 percent of voters believe only U.S. citizens should be eligible for health care subsidies. However, H.R. 3200, the health care bill, gives coverage to illegal immigrants, despite what the President says. Although language in the bill purports to prevent illegal immigrants from getting coverage, even the Congressional Research Service confirms that there are three major loopholes that render the language meaningless. Number one, there is no method to verify eligibility. An amendment to include it was defeated by Democrats in committee. Item number two, illegal immigrants are not prohibited from using the ``public option,'' better described as the government mandate. And, number three, all members of families including illegal immigrants may be eligible as a group, and language indicates so. So if Congress wants to represent the wishes of the people, including the 70 percent of Democrats and 87 percent of Independents, they should add citizenship verification of eligibility to any health care legislation. But they have voted it down in committee 29-28. False claims about not covering illegal immigrants are hollow.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. And having had an opportunity to listen to some of the dialogue that went on previously, I'm glad that I have a chance to raise these issues. On the front of everybody's mind in this country is the situation of our health care and our health insurance for 306 million people in the United States. And I would point out that if we look at the size of this economy and the size of this population, it is a huge endeavor to think that we would take 17.5 percent of the American economy, 17.5 percent of our gross domestic product and switch it over to a government-run plan, and do so in almost the blink of a legislative eye, and do so without the full deliberation of the floor of the House of Representatives or without the American people having an opportunity to weigh in. I am glad that this process has been slowed down--however great the price has been--so that there is an opportunity now for some of the legislation that has been more closely refined, shall we say, in its 1,100 or so-page form to be available to the public, a public that has more access to this information that is going on in the House than ever before because of being able to access this information now by the Internet. And all of us in this Congress have Web sites, and I would think there is at least one link on every Member of Congress' Web site that will help you access this information on where we are with bills that are being deliberated here in this Congress. And as I look at where we are today and what's out there, I'm very interested in the entire month of August and I'm very interested in the first week of September. Those are the times when the American people will have had a chance to read the bill, talk to the people within their profession or whatever their interest group is that have read the bill, weigh their ideas, do this across the backyard fence and do this at the coffee table at work, and be able to give us the benefit of the wisdom of the American people to weigh in on all the components that have been created here that are promised to come at us and perhaps have a vote on a final passage; not here, not any longer this week or next week or in the month of August, but perhaps in the first or second week in September, and something that--this will decide the fate, if it's passed, of the health care system of the United States, I believe, at least as far as we can look into the future. And it is a national health care plan. It is a government-run health care plan. It is a model that transforms the entire health care system in the United States. Today we have more than 1,300 private health insurance companies competing for premium dollars, And they do so by providing the best value for the dollar and marketing that best value for the dollar and trying to adjust those policies to meet the demands of the American people. Over 1,300 private health insurance companies, and among them they offer, in the aggregate, perhaps as many as 100,000 different health insurance options. And the President of the United States has said he just wants to offer one more option, 100,001 policies now for everybody in America to choose from if this bill should pass. And this extra government option that he would offer, as if there wasn't enough competition out there among the 1,300 health insurance companies and the roughly 100,000 policies that are there, how can anyone presume that one more policy that would just compete with the other policies out there would result in anything other than one one- hundredth more options for the people of the United States? I would submit that there is a lot more afoot here, Mr. Speaker, there is a lot more afoot here. The people that are advocating for this public option, the people that are advocating that the Federal Government should run their own health insurance policy in order to compete against the private sector are the people who sometimes they will leak it into the media, sometimes they will shout it out in a private meeting, but in their soul they want a single-payer, government-run, socialized medicine, one-option government plan for everybody. And they want to run every private health insurance company out of business and take the 100,000 options that the American people have with them. That is their agenda. And I can put together a string of quotes from the very liberal Members of this Congress that find themselves in powerful positions in this Congress, gavels in hand, that are determined to take away the private health insurance options and turn it into one government plan. Even the President of the United States believes in that, however much lip service he has paid to the idea of telling the American people, well, if you like your health insurance that you have today, then you get to keep it. That's one thing that I cannot accept that the President believes when he says it. He is a very smart man. He's got to understand that if it says in the bill--and it does, section 102 of the bill--that every private health insurance policy has to be rewritten in the first 5 years of the passage of the legislation that's proposed, that means the American people's individual policies will all change within 5 years and they will have to accommodate themselves to the new qualifications that will be written by a health insurance czar to be appointed by the President later, and regulations that are not in the bill, but regulations that would grant that health insurance czar the power and the authority to set the standard. So he might rule that every health insurance policy in America has to pay for abortion. He might rule that everyone has to pay for mental health. He might rule that everyone has to pay for all pharmaceuticals, or maybe only generic pharmaceuticals. Whatever he may decide, he'll be looking at the costs of the premium, the percentages of copayments, and the regulations will be written so that the public option, which is so carefully defined and that language that's determined to be defended by the Democrats in this Congress--so that the public option can compete with all of these 1,300 private health insurance companies that have competed in the marketplace for years and found their niche in the market and done it the American way. Now, if somebody thinks that there's too much money in the health insurance business, why don't they get in that business and provide that health insurance and lower the premiums and cut down on the administrative overhead and take some money and take some profit out of it? That's how this works in the free market system. If there's something out there in the marketplace that has too much profit in it, you don't need government to come in and do it for you. You need to take a look and determine is it a monopoly? If it's a monopoly, then Teddy Roosevelt rides again. Let's bring him in and let's bust the trust. But if you have 1,3000 health insurance companies and 100,000 health insurance policies, you don't have anything that looks at all like a monopoly. You see something that looks like the maximum amount, or nearly the maximum amount, anyway, of competition in the marketplace. So that argument is specious, the idea that we need to create one more company, unless it is the intent of the proponents to create socialized medicine--one size fits all, take away the American people's individual policies and give them a government policy or a facsimile of a government policy that would be their former private health insurance company that has had to adapt to the new rules written by government and offer a qualified plan. Now, why am I suspicious of this? I am more than suspicious. I'm convinced that this is the initiative: to wipe out all private health insurance and force everybody into a public policy and a public plan. One of the reasons is because there has been such an indignation about those of us who have said that this is a government-run health care plan that they're proposing. They have tried to censor us here in the United States. They have actually effectively to a degree censored Members of Congress who wanted to simply mail out the flow chart, the schematic, if you will, of what this proposed health insurance plan or this health care policy looks like. And I would take the people in this country back, Mr. Speaker, to this little chart right here. This is a chart that hung on my office for probably a decade starting in 1993, when Hillary Clinton came to town and became the secret master of the reform of the health care and the government takeover of health care in the United States. A lot of people remember, as I do, those were intense times. I was watching my freedom being marketed away day by day in secret meetings. I don't know if they actually kept minutes, but I know they weren't available to the public. I know the press wasn't allowed in the room. The public wasn't allowed in the room. There weren't Members of Congress representing their constituents. There were people like Ira Magaziner and others who were handpicked by Bill and Hillary Clinton to devise a plan. And the idea of this was, put these smart people in a room, have them devise a plan, don't let anybody weigh in on that, no kibitzers on this plan, because if that happens, then the American people would start to grumble, and if they start to grumble, they might start to talk out loud, and if they talk out loud, they might start to yell, and if they start to yell, they might come to town and tell us that they don't want to have a government-run health plan in the United States, that they don't want to have their private plans taken over. Well, that's what they finally did. They finally said they are not going to tolerate it, and the American people scared enough Members of Congress and enough United States Senators that they were going to lose their seat if they supported this monstrosity that this monstrosity finally was pulled down. This was a time when United States Senator Phil Gramm said that this health care policy will be over his cold, dead political body if they pass something like this. He stood there. He meant it. They held their ground. People in this House held their ground. And people like Dick Armey held their ground. In fact, Dick Armey was instrumental in helping to form this chart, this black and white chart that is the schematic that shows all the government agencies that are created by the old plan back in 1993, which I will at least give Bill Clinton credit for. He wrote a bill. He presented a bill to Congress, and he asked Congress to pass the Hillary plan. And, of course, Congress liked their job. They didn't pass the Hillary plan. And when I call it a ``schematic,'' I don't know that one might think today that that's pejorative, but in here they actually do call their own plan a ``scheme.'' Someplace in this chart it addresses at least some of the components in it as a ``scheme.'' Well, I call it a ``schematic'' or maybe more appropriately a ``scheme-attic,'' Mr. Speaker. But it has here an ombudsman who is supposed to broker the deals between government because people can't get through government bureaucracy; so you create an ombudsman. Well, we have to change the name of that because now people know what an ombudsman is. We have the HMO provider plan that doesn't show up in the other chart that I can see. HMOs have slid down in their popularity. Here we have the global budget. In 1993 a global budget for a health care plan. All of these squares and boxes are created as new affiliations with the exception of the executive office of the President. A few others, but generally speaking, this scheme, and they call it a ``scheme,'' does scare the American people. Now, Mr. Speaker, I would point out that as scary as this chart looks, we have another chart here that is far more scary. This is the color-coded, modern-day, software-driven, packaged-up plan that is a very accurate facsimile of what actually is taking place in the Democrat bill here in the House of Representatives. This is 31 new agencies, and there are subagencies and other responsibilities that are behind it. But just to look at the chart, Mr. Speaker, one can look at all these white boxes here. If they're not colored, if they're white and they have black letters in them, they're existing government agencies. These are already hoops that people have to jump through. And then when you look at the colored boxes, the orange and yellow and the green and the blue and the purple, those are all new agencies. These are all new hoops for the American people to jump through. These are untried. They are untested. When you create new government agencies, you run a little beta test because you don't know how it's going to act, how it's going to function, and you don't know how people are going to react. All you can do is guess how people will react. And you don't know if you can actually manage this. But I will suggest this: We don't do that good a job of managing the health care that we pay for out of this Federal Government today. Right now the Federal Government is paying 80 percent of what the cost is to deliver Medicare services. And if I look at my State, where we have a high percentage of Medicare patients because we have a very high percentage of senior citizens, then the percentage of that Medicare that they're providing is less than 80 percent, and one of the reasons is because we have some of the highest-quality care. In the State of Iowa, if people go there, Mr. Speaker, they can expect that they will receive quality care in the top five of all of the States in the country year after year after year. And with that high-quality care, Iowa sits at the lowest Medicare reimbursement rate. So we're looking at this and wondering if it is the majority's, and that means the Democrats' and that means the President's idea, that we are going to fund the cost of this $1 trillion to $2 trillion health care ``scheme-attic'' that we have here, and we're going to fund it, in part, by reducing the funding that is going to Medicare by roughly $500 billion when Medicare funding that is already inadequate at best pays 80 percent of the costs, and they're going to cut these costs and fees going into the States to come up with enough money to pay for this? So what it means is, Mr. Speaker, is this: If you take $500 billion out of Medicare in order to fund a national health care plan, that means you're taking it right out of the health care for the senior citizens in the United States of America across the board. The health care access for senior citizens will be diminished. The services will be diminished. Presumably the quality will be diminished because the doctors and nurses and providers will have to spend less time per patient, accelerate their time with them, and that means less quality care. And it means fewer services to our seniors. So this $500 billion, a half-trillion dollars, taken out of Medicare, right out of the Medicare services, the health care services for our senior citizens, in order to find a way to do a pay-for for a $1 trillion to $2 trillion National Health Care Act. And President Obama has said we're going to pay for all of this. We're going to find a way to pay for it. Well, that's the problem that Charlie Rangel has run into in the Ways and Means Committee. But it looks like some of it comes out of not the pockets of our senior citizens that are accessing their health care; it comes out of services to them. And the arguments I've heard were behind closed doors, the derogatory comments that have been made about doctors and nurses and providers and the allegations made, for example, by the President of the United States that we have doctors that are removing tonsils because it pays rather than because they need to be removed. I think that needs to be documented and it needs to be quantified. And, yes, there are people in every industry that don't meet the highest standards. But to paint the whole industry with anecdotes like that without any data to back it up just further clouds this debate and makes it harder for us to make progress. This chart, by the way, this chart that we have called government-run health care, we have called this--well, it is. It's the organizational chart of the House Democrats' health plan, and this ``scheme-attic'' that has 31 new agencies, I would just direct, Mr. Speaker, your attention and the public's attention down to these boxes right here on the bottom: This white box here that says ``traditional health insurance plans,'' that's where the 1,300 companies are. That's where the 100,000 policies are, in this square box right here; 1,300 companies, 100,000 policies in traditional health insurance plans. According to the bill, section 105, all of these plans, every single health insurance plan in America, would have to run through--they would be here in this white box. They couldn't function after 5 years unless they met the qualified health benefits plans here in this purple circle right here. In order to be qualified, they would have to meet the new government standards that are not yet written. These new government standards would be written by the Health Choices Administration right here. Health Choices Administration would be run by the HCA, Health Choices Administration, Commissioner. Now, he's a commissioner, or she, because America is up to here with czars. We have 32 czars. We do have more czars than the Romanovs, and they're less accountable than the Romanovs. They're not held up to any kind of confirmation. They're not answerable to Congress. I don't know that we have subpoena power to even bring them before Congress to ask them what they did when they were managing the car industry, for example. We know we had a Car Czar that had never made a car nor sold one. I presume he'd driven one, probably never fixed one. But he was running the car business in America and on the phone sometimes multiple times a day with President Obama's appointed CEO of General Motors. The Car Czar wasn't doing too well. He got replaced. Now we have a new Car Czar, and that new Car Czar says, well, the Federal Government would like divest themselves eventually of General Motors and perhaps the Chrysler stock, but there's no definitive plan, just kind of a general goal. Well, it looks to me like the general goal has been to nationalize huge industries in America rather than divest the Federal Government from those and let the free market prevail. So if this bill passes, we will end up with a health insurance czar. He will be running the Health Choices Administration, and he will be called the Commissioner of the Health Choices Administration, but he'll be the czar. Commissioner. I don't call him commissar. Maybe I'll call him ``commi-czar-issioner,'' but he will be calling the shots for all of these 1,300 health insurance companies that exist today and writing the regulations so that they could become qualified health benefits plans coming out of there. So 100,000 qualified health benefits plans from 1,300 companies would have to qualify under new standards written by the new ``commi-czar-issioner'' of the Health Choices Administration. Now, if you had a few million dollars invested in a health insurance company, Mr. Speaker, would you really be interested in investing more money in that company on the odds that that new ``commi-czar-issioner'' would write some regulation that lets you stay in business, when the people that are writing this regulation want to take you out of business and they say so, people like the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank, who on tape says that he believes there has to be a public option? The public option is this purple circle right here, the public health plan. Chairman Frank believes there has to be a public option. This is because that public option is the path to a single-payer plan. A single-payer plan is code word for socialized medicine, one- size-fits-all, the government runs it all, and every one of these plans here that were in the private sector will all be swallowed up, they will all be squeezed out, and eventually this purple circle becomes the whole and everything else is swallowed up and diminished. I think this happens if this bill happens, because it is the goal of the liberals in this Congress to end private health insurance and eventually end private health care and eventually have every doctor working for the government or else for a government pre-fixed price, and the nurses and the clinics doing the same thing. They might be billing fee-for-service or fee-for-patient, but they won't be running their own clinic; they won't be working competitively anymore. When I look around the world, I will give you examples of why I believe this. The oldest example is Germany. Now, Germany has had its ups and downs over the last century, but the last century and a decade, about that far back, they passed their first national health care plan. That was back before we had modern medicine and certainly didn't have anything that looks like modern medicine today. But the German plan was passed under Otto von Bismarck. And as I read history, he did so in order to consolidate a political base in order to expand his political power. But it got established then. Of course, there will be Germans that will defend their policy. And it probably has helped and it has no doubt helped millions of them, and other millions have stood in line and they probably at this point don't have a concept of what it is like to have the freedom we have to go out and purchase a policy or be an employer to negotiate and select from the policies we want and do the best we can working with our employees and being an agent for our employees to put the best packages together, or for individuals to purchase individual policies. In Germany it works this way: you can buy a private plan there. They are pretty proud of being able to have private plans in Germany, even after more than a century of socialized medicine. But today it is this, Mr. Speaker: ninety percent of the plans in Germany are the public option. Ninety percent. And the 10 percent are the private options. Now, the private options, they only exist as the company is functioning and selling health insurance in Germany in order to cater to those people who are reasonably well off, those that believe they can get a little bit better quality of care, even though they have to pay a premium for that better quality care, because they don't want to be in the government line. They want to try to find a way to take care of their care and health means too much to them to let the government run it. That is the bottom line in Germany. Ninety percent on the pubic option, 10 percent on the private option, mostly self-employed and independently wealthy people. Not regular common people, very rare, not people that are generally working for someone else for a wage, not punching the time clock, not paid a salary so much. It is self-employed people and often independently wealthy people that carry their private health insurance in Germany. That is about 10 percent. Ninety percent the public plan, 90 percent socialized medicine. That is Germany. The United Kingdom passed their National Health Care Act in 1948. There they were recovering from the Second World War. They were a nation that was nearly broke. Nobody had any money, their industrial base had been destroyed by the bombing from Germany, and they had used all of their resources to save their country. God bless them, they were a great ally and it is a great thing for the world that the Allied Powers were successful in World War II and we turned back the level of tyranny that was threatening to swamp the world. But Great Britain was broke post-World War II, and they were looking for anything that provided them security, and they believed that they could manage health care in Great Britain if they just took it over and they could do better in government. If we remember, this nation was in peril in World War II, and we grew government in a great big way. There was a threat to take over the steel industry in that era as well. We managed to provide private sector industry that turned out bombers and battleships and the things that we needed to be successful in that war. But if our industry had been destroyed, if the spirit of the people had been hammered as hard as it was on a percentage of its population as it was in Great Britain, we might have been looking for security. We might have decided that we needed to do something with government to supplant what was being so efficiently provided in the private sector. For whatever the reason, Great Britain passed their National Health Care Act in 1948. And I read, Mr. Speaker, through a whole stack of Collier's magazines from that era, and each of them featured the socialized medicine that was being implemented in the United Kingdom at that time. And they showed pictures of long lines at the doctors' offices, lines that went outside the clinic, and they interviewed doctors and showed doctors that were haggard and frazzled and tired, and they lamented that they could not do that doctor-patient relationship in the fashion that they had before, that they had to limit the time per patient and they had to move from room to room and they had set up more rooms so they could get the patients in the room and get them ready for exams so they could walk in, do the exam, order what was to happen and go on to the next one. And doctors that are hurried like that make mistakes. So does any human being. But a human being should not be treated like they are on an assembly line. That was already what was taking place in the United Kingdom in 1948. The stories that are in those Collier's magazines from that era are the same stories that we hear in the modern version of socialized medicine that exists in the United Kingdom today. They are not a lot different than the stories you read and hear about in other countries in the European Union, including Germany. For example, I ran into an immigrant from Germany, actually it was in a Menards Store some months ago, and he told me that he had a hip replacement done. It had gotten very bad and he could hardly walk, and he had to wait, and he waited a long, long time in line. Finally he decided that he would try to get himself in more than one line so that he had the best chance of getting it over with so he could get on with his life. And so he got in a line, and the shortest line that he could get into was the line in Italy. So he queued himself into the line for a hip replacement in Italy, and some months later he was able to go to Italy to have the surgery to replace the hip. And now, good surgery, good job, he is healthy, moving around and enjoying life. But to have to go to another country to have the surgery done, it begs the question. It must be a lot of what it is like to be a Canadian, to go to another country to get your surgery done. And thinking of the Canadians and those kinds of surgery, I could give an example on that. We had a presentation done that was a little over a week ago by a doctor from Michigan, and this was at the Policy Committee on a Thursday night, a week ago last Thursday, if I recall. He has practiced medicine in Canada and in the United States. In one of his earlier forays into providing medicine and services in Canada, he was working in the emergency room and a patient came in, a younger man, who had torn up his knee playing sports. He had a torn meniscus, a torn ACL, an anterior cruciate ligament, and his knee was a mess. This doctor in this emergency room in Canada examined the knee and said, You need surgery and you need it right away. I will schedule you for surgery in the morning. Apparently the doctor wasn't familiar with the standards of qualifying for reconstructive surgery care, and he found out after he made that promise to the patient that he had to first get him scheduled for the specialist who approved the surgery. So he did his best to get that patient covered, because the patient was in a lot of pain. They had to put him in a knee brace. He was on crutches. And they scheduled him finally to be examined by the specialist who approves for the surgery, and he was examined 6 months later. He was not operated on the next day, not operated on 6 months later, but on crutches and with a knee brace on, unable to work, 6 months later examined by the surgeon, the specialist, who approved the surgery. The surgery was approved. Well, that was an obvious thing to the doctor who looked at him the first night, and 6 months later they did the surgery. Now, Mr. Speaker, I have to go back and reiterate, because it sounds implausible. A young man with the knee torn up, a torn meniscus, a torn ACL. He needed surgery the next day. In the United States of America he would have had surgery the next day. Instead, the exam to approve his surgery, which is required in Canada, took place 6 months after the injury, and the surgery itself took place 6 months after the exam. Almost a year to the day the surgery took place to reconstruct the knee. And we know what happens. He lost more than a year's work because the rehab was another couple of months, and that leg will atrophy because you are not using it, and all of that loss of quality of life, the things he could have been doing, his entire lost productivity gone, because bureaucracy is calling the shots, not the doctors, in Canada. Now, that sounds like anecdote. Well, it is a real live human being case, and I am confident that I could trace that back and name the individual, and I am confident I am likely to get that individual to come here and try to talk to the thicker skulls that exist on this side of the aisle. But suffice it to say that here is the data that supports this individual that some might allege is an anecdote. And it is this: the average waiting time for hip surgery to replace a hip in Canada, the average waiting time is 196 days. Once you are approved for surgery, you wait in the line, in the queue, 196 days. A lot of people with bad hips are on crutches--196 days. If you are waiting for a knee replacement, Mr. Speaker, you wait for 340 days on average in Canada. Outrageous delays, loss of human productivity. And there isn't anybody's chart that calculates the loss to the GDP, the gross domestic product of Canada, lost work time, the loss to their economy, because people who would otherwise be productive are hobbling around on crutches or sitting in a wheelchair because they can't get the services until that delay is over. Mr. Speaker, that is what goes on in Canada. Furthermore, there are companies in Canada that when they offer their employment, they set it up as part of the employment package that the worker has an opportunity to come to the United States if he needs reconstructive surgery. If, let's say, for example, it is heart surgery that would be necessary, it is written into the policies. In some of the policies in Canada, if you have a good job and you have a good benefits package, they will have it set up so they will package it up. Say you need bypass surgery, they can put you on a plane, fly you to Houston for heart surgery, and give you the heart surgery, get you back on the wellness side of this thing, get a little rehab, and then send you back home again and set that all up, and it is turnkey. It is turnkey provided there because they know that people can't wait in line in Canada. Everybody is not going to be alive at the end of their waiting period. But in the United States, it is a different story. We get people in immediately. We bring them in immediately because it is lifesaving. In Canada they make provisions to get out of the country and come to the United States. There are companies that are set up in Canada for the very purpose of packaging up health care access into the United States. And so let's presume this, and this is not a documented story, but let's just presume it this way. Let's say you live in Toronto and you need hip surgery and you don't want to wait the 196 days. You want it done. You want to get on with your life. So let's just say travel agency companies are a natural to tie up together with health care providing companies, people that know things about health care. You might be able to go into a company in Canada and contract to come down to, let's say, the Mayo Clinic at Rochester, Minnesota, and they will turnkey that. They will say, we have got you an airplane ticket. Here is the hotel you go to. Here is the shuttle bus, the transportation from the airport to the hotel. You will up show up at the clinic tomorrow morning or on the morning following your flight. You will be examined that morning. If it is what I think it is, you will go right into surgery the same day or the next day. They will give you the rehab that you need, take care of you to get you back out to the airport, fly you back home to Toronto. All of that for, write one check, hand over your debit card or your credit card, and have access to the best health, reconstructive surgery in the world, right down here in the United States of America. Why is that? Do the people on the other side that propose this scary schematic, this color-coded, it will be quotas. There will be 31 new agencies, do they think that the best health care in the world that brings people from not just Canada, but all over the world to access this best health care, do they think that it just kind of randomly spawned itself out of American society? Or do they think that there is real reasons that we have the best health care system in the world? I think there are reasons for that. One is health care is important to us and the American people are willing to pay for high-quality health care because our health is the most important thing that we can protect with the capital that we have in this country. We're a country that's comparatively very, very wealthy. We've demonstrated our commitment to health care by committing a lot of our wealth to health care. We should not begrudge the people that are making our lives longer and more enjoyable for making a profit at it. We should not begrudge them for that. If we think they're making too much money, we should get in the business, compete against them, gather in some of that profit, and then lower our prices. Competition lowers prices. That, we know. Adam Smith wrote about that in 1776 in Wealth of Nations; and it's been true well before he recognized it; and it's been true every day since; and it always will be true. This schematic, by the way, that is here is not something that the Democrats in this Congress want to see out in the public eye. It's something that they want to censor, in fact. Here's the model of what they have done. This chart shows 31 agencies. It shows how every American who has a health insurance policy will have to watch as that policy submits to the new regulations that are written by the health insurance czar and qualify under new rules that will be written by that Health Choices Administration commissioner. They will watch every policy change in America or else watch the qualifications be adapted to a few policies in America that the Federal Government wants to allow to compete. People understand this chart. But here's what's going on over the head of the Franking Commission, I believe. It's been prohibited for Members of Congress to send this chart out in our mail to the American people, Mr. Speaker. I don't think there's ever any comparable job of censoring Members of Congress than what's going on here. They have decided this chart can't go out in the mail, paid for under the franking privilege that any other chart can go out. We saw mail go out under President Obama's stimulus plan that advocated in a partisan way for how the stimulus plan was going to solve our economic problem. Democrats in this Congress used the franking privilege to try to convince the American people that the stimulus plan was the only way to go, and it's clear to everybody in America today that the stimulus plan has failed, with the exception of the gentlelady from Texas who I heard a little bit ago say that it had succeeded, and it had created jobs. She hasn't shown me where they are yet. So I will reserve my judgment on the accuracy of that statement until I actually see some jobs created by the stimulus plan. Mr. Speaker, my point is, in a partisan fashion, Democrats in this Congress used the franking privilege to put the virtual stamps on their mail to tell the American people that the stimulus plan was necessary or the economy was going to collapse. That went on. This chart is not pie-in-the-sky threats that scare people. This chart is just stomp-down accurate, and it has withstood the test of the criticism of even the Democratic staff in the Ways and Means Committee, the Energy and Commerce Committee and the Joint Committee on Taxation. They've tried to blow holes in it, and yes, there's a little tweak there, but it's not substantive. It's simply specious to make that single little point, and it doesn't change the score of this bill. Bottom line--31 new agencies, other obligations that are behind these squares, added to all of these white boxes that are existing programs or agencies, it creates all these hoops that the American people would have to jump through, and Democrats don't want this chart shown to the American people. So I thought, Okay, if they don't want us to show this chart, there must be a lot of truth here that they surely don't want to have to face, and they surely don't want to see the American people come to their town hall meetings and fill up that room and ask them how they're going to defend swallowing up 17.5 percent of America's gross domestic product, our health care, and turning it into government run. Have we done that good a job with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Have we done that good a job running General Motors and Chrysler? Have we done that good a job with anything the government is doing other than, let's just say, our military, for example, who's done a great and fantastic and noble job and has achieved victory in Iraq? Does anybody have confidence that the Federal Government can run health care better than the American people, working with their private health insurance companies, negotiating for their own policies? I say not, Mr. Speaker. I think the American people understand what this is. I think they understand that when something is censored, it's not profane. Democrats want to fund the National Endowment for the Arts, which is funding millions of dollars to produce profanity in America. They're not offended by all of the profanity that goes out from the National Endowment for the Arts. They're offended by the truth about their bill about health care; and so they censor it because they have the majority here in this Congress, and they decide which staff people get a paycheck and which ones don't, in some cases. They also have the benefit of the President, I believe; and there are people in this Capitol building and in this complex of offices around who are more interested in pleasing the President, I think, than they are in preserving the fundamental integrity of the franking privilege or objective debate. This is objective debate. Here are some of the subject matters that the Democrats don't want us to use when we describe this national health care plan. Mr. Speaker, these are all objectionable phrases, the seven dirty words or phrases you're not supposed to use to describe the leading Democratic health care proposal. It says, ``you can't use,'' but I'm going to use them. These are the words that, in part, brought about the censorship of this color flow chart of the 31 new agencies that swallow up people's private health care in America. We can't call it a government-run plan. They want to amend that. They have another word for that. I think it is the public option, rather than the government-run plan. It is a government-run plan. I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that you could walk down the streets of America, and you could ask those good, well- educated, commonsense people that I have the privilege to represent in western Iowa and in many places across this country, and go to them a month ago and say, Explain to me with regard to health insurance what is a public option. I can only imagine what kind of answers we would get if we asked people what that meant. But I will suggest that most of those answers would not have been accurate. They would not have said, Oh, a public option. Let me see. That's what President Obama wants to make sure everybody has. That would be government-run health care. If they were going to describe what a public option is, a regular man or a woman on the street with common sense couldn't describe what a public option was, if they understood what it was, without describing it as, Oh, government-run health insurance. They would have to describe it as government-run or they couldn't even describe it at all. This phrase is far more descriptive and honest than public option. Public option is Orwellian gobbledygook for the eventual Federal Government monopoly on health insurance. We just say government-run. The President wants us to say public option. They want to censor government-run. I say, I'm going to say it over and over again. It's government-run. Don't say single payer. A single-payer system means socialized medicine. So we can't say single payer. How do you describe that? Ask a commonsense person on the street, What is a single payer for a health insurance public option? Well, let's see. They would have to say, A single payer is when only one entity pays for all of the health care that an individual might receive. So let me describe how that works. Mr. Speaker, let's use that hip replacement because that's an easy thing to describe. Somebody went into the clinic and said, I'm in terrible pain here. I don't think I can hobble along any longer. What can you do, Doc? A doctor would do that examination. He would likely do an x-ray. He would evaluate the x-ray. If he was satisfied that he knew what was there, he might prescribe that there be reconstructive surgery done that would put a new hip joint in that individual, put him through some rehabilitation and hand him a cane that could be handed away later on and get him back out to the square dance. All of those things are going to take place. There would be billing that would come from the clinic, billing that would come for the service of the surgery, billing for the anesthesiologist, the operating room, the hospital bed, the gauze, the Tylenol, and whatever else there might be. Who would pay for all of that? Well, it might be the patient today, and it might be Medicare, and it might be a private health insurance company. But when they say single payer, that's code for--the only entity that ever pays for it all--I shouldn't actually say that because there are private individuals that will pay for it all out of their pocket. So the entity they're talking about is the Federal Government paying for all of the health care services. That is socialized medicine. That's taxpayer-funded government doing it all single payer. But if you're not versed in the vernacular of the Orwellian gobbledygook, when they use the term single payer, you might think something entirely different. I don't think a normal person on the street can describe what a single payer means. We say single payer. Democrats think it's pejorative, that it is biased against the single- payer plan, for example. So using the terms that describe what they want to do is pejorative, and they are, presumably, forbidden, and it shouldn't show up on a color chart. We shouldn't send it out and can't send it out on our frank mail, otherwise they will bill us back for the costs out of our own pockets. We can't say socialized medicine. I already slipped into that in describing single payer. Socialized medicine does describe what they're talking about, maybe not in the first phase because they won't do like Canada eventually did and outlaw the health insurance policies of everyone in America. If you apply the Canadian plan today, the Canadians outlawed private health insurance. They did so incrementally in the provinces over the years, and then they did so in a Federal fashion. I would have to guess, but I think the year was 1964 when that happened. It may have been after that. So Canadians have socialized medicine. They have single payer. They have government-run. We know what's going on up there, don't we? There is a 196-day wait for a hip, 340-day wait for a knee. They have government-run, single- payer socialized medicine. They just don't have ObamaCare. You can't say ObamaCare because that aligns the President with a policy that is becoming ever more unpopular. We use shorthand around here to describe things, and this is why the American version of the English language has been such an effective language to communicate because it's fluid, and it picks up new meanings, and it conveys those meanings. I think that we can paint the picture of this society and this culture very effectively because our language adapts, it flows, and it moves. This is one of those words in our language that--back in 1993, everybody knew what HillaryCare was. HillaryCare was the black-and-white schematic that we had then. No one wondered. It wasn't pejorative then. This chart got mailed out by franking mail, by Members of Congress in '93. It was devastating to those that wanted socialized medicine. We just simply called it HillaryCare, and this chart was in the minds of millions of Americans as they went in and filled the offices of their Members of Congress and said, I don't want that. And I don't want this thing to be run over the top of Senator Phil Gramm's cold, dead, political body either. I don't know who has put a stake out there in the United States Senate that's taken that kind of stand, that's gotten that much press out of it. But I hope they're there, and I hope they're strong, and I encourage them to speak up. This was HillaryCare in 1993. We are not supposed to declare this to be ObamaCare in 2009 because this has been censored by the Democrats in this Congress who think that these terms that are on this chart are pejorative. Pejorative terms, government-run. What about a government- run United States Marine Corps? That makes me feel good. I like government-run Air Force. I like government-run Navy. I like government-run Army. We cover those four branches. Government does some things good. Government-run is not pejorative. But it tells you what is going on if they are going to run health care. Single payer--hmm. Single payer does tell you that government will be calling all the shots because of the golden rule. Whoever has the gold makes the rules. The government will have all the gold, and they will write all the rules for everybody's health insurance policy in the United States of America. That's in the flow chart that's behind here that's been censored. And if it's single payer, it is socialized medicine. To declare it to be ObamaCare, it is pretty accurate. I haven't heard whether the President disagrees with the liberals in this Congress or the liberals in the United States Senate. I have heard the President talk about all kinds of socialized medicine programs. All he has said that defends the private market is if you like your policy, you get to keep it. That is simply not true, Mr. Speaker. When you look at the chart, when you look at the language, and you understand that every single policy would have to qualify under rules yet to be written by President Obama's appointee, the health insurance, czar-issioner. Would we get rationed care? Indeed. We're only paying 80 percent of the Medicare today of what it costs to deliver it. They propose to take $500 billion out of the Medicare funds that are streaming there now. How are they going to do that? They're going to have to cut down on services, cut down on surgeries for seniors, cut down on access to health care in order to come up with the $500 billion. All of that spells rationed care. Care has been rationed in every Nation that has a single-payer, socialized medicine, government-run plan. We can't believe it's anything else. It will be rationed care. ObamaCare will be rationed care. We're on a path, if we pass this, to single-payer, socialized medicine, because there will be government-mandated care for everybody, whether you can hang on to your private plan or whether you can't. Government-mandated care is another term that we're not supposed to use because they think it's pejorative, but this chart, the color-coded chart of the 31 new agencies schematic is full of all kinds of government mandates. That's what they are. They're mandates, Mr. Speaker, almost all of them. You're not even supposed to say keep your change care. Well, I don't know that you get to keep your change. I don't use that phrase very much, but it's one of the things that they've raised as objectionable. So in the end, in real summation of this issue of the national health care plan that is almost completely crafted here in the House of Representatives and probably poised to go before this House on a vote sometime after Labor Day, presuming that there are enough Members of Congress still standing after the public shows up at their town hall meetings, at their offices, at their house, wherever they might be able to encounter their Member of Congress or their staff, presuming that there are enough Members of Congress still willing to walk this path, we're likely to see a vote here on the floor, and the result will be all of these things that we're not supposed to say now. If it passes, it will be a government-run, single-payer, socialized medicine, ObamaCare, rationed care, government-mandate care. If not the first day, it will be over time when everybody's health insurance has to requalify and be run through the qualifications that will be drafted by the new health insurance czar, the commissioner, the comiczarissioner of health insurance in America. That's where we are, Mr. Speaker. And so I will quote Congressman John Shadegg who articulated this as well as anyone in this Congress when he said, if you like your health insurance that you have today, get ready to lose it. That's what will happen. The American people understand that it is their freedom, that their discretion is at risk, and there are people who want to create a complete nanny state, who have privatized--excuse me--who have nationalized eight huge entities here and moved us on a leftward lurch off the abyss into socialism in the private sector; three huge investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors, Chrysler, all now under the control of the White House. And this White House now wants to take over all the health care in America, eventually. And we understand that was President Obama's original policy. He has just moved to try to set up health insurance in such a way that he can promise you you get to keep it. And I promise you that it will not look like anything you have today if the government's going to write new regulations that it has to qualify for. And I will submit that Republicans have good solutions to this. I'll submit also that what we're trying to fix here is this. Here's where I agree, Mr. Speaker. I believe that we have a very, very difficult economic situation to work our way out of. I believe that it may be as serious as anything that we have seen since the Great Depression, but I'm not certain of that because I lived through the eighties during the farm crisis and the other, the housing crisis that we had and the banking crisis that we had during that period of time. We lost 3,000 banks in the eighties. Those were tough times. I want to measure this after it's over and look back before I would commit that this is the worst time since the Great Depression. But it's not a very good time. It's a bad time. And we have our challenges ahead of us, and we have to fix this economy. With that, I agree with the President. But the President says that health care in America is broken. I don't agree. I don't believe it is broken. I believe that we can improve it, and we should. But the President declares that we can't fix the economy without first fixing health care. Now, if health care--and that encompasses health insurance and the health care that's provided through our clinics and our hospitals and the whole breadth of the health care that we have. If health care is broken, there must be a service out there that's not adequate compared to some other country in the world. I'll submit health care is not broken. We have the best health care in the world. It costs too much money. I'll agree with the President on that. About 14\1/2\ percent of our GDP, and some of the costs that you see in the rest of the industrialized world are around 9\1/2\ percent of GDP. They ration health care. They have socialized medicine. They don't have the research and development that we have. We have the best in the world. We lead the world in development of pharmaceutical and surgery techniques, and we lead the world in survival after cancer diagnosis. And we also lead the world, I believe, in the diagnosis of cancer itself. All of those things are at risk today. But if we have to, according to the President, change 100 percent of the health care system that we have in order to declare we have fixed it so we can declare we're fixing the economy, I will submit that that statement cannot be valid. It cannot be defended or sustained in open public debate or any kind of analysis because they want to spend $1 trillion to $2 trillion. Now, if we're spending too much money on health care in America, and we are, why do we need to dump another $1 trillion to $2 trillion into it to fix it? If we're going to fix it, we should be able to fix it and save money, not fix it and dump trillions of dollars into it and raise taxes and cut funding that goes into Medicare and deny health care services to our seniors, all of that wrapped up in the name of fixing something that's not broken, just changing and transforming America. We socialized three large investment banks, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors and Chrysler. They're nationalized today. This is about the nationalization of the best health care system in the world, and 17\1/2\ percent of it, and taking away the freedom of the American people to go out and purchase a health insurance policy that they choose. I want to expand the health savings accounts and I want to provide 100 percent deductibility for everybody's health insurance premium. And I want to reduce the medical malpractice liability that's out there by capping the liability claims so people get whole again but trial lawyers don't get rich. We can do all of those things and more, besides. And by the way, there's only 4 percent of America that are chronically uninsured, 4 percent, 10 to 12 million people, depending on whose study you look at. That's 4 percent. And we would upset 100 percent of the health care system in order to fix an expensive health insurance program only if you compare to other countries that don't have the quality that we have. I think that would be a colossal mistake, and we could never get back from that colossal mistake because it creates 306 million people that would be dependent upon the government-run, single-payer, socialized medicine, ObamaCare, rationed care, government-mandate care. And I reject it. I hope the American people do.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Concurrent Resolution 172, 111th Congress, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentleman from Oklahoma for yielding, and I rise in opposition to this food safety bill, as it's labeled. It will provide some more food safety. I won't dispute that. But the point is that it grows government regulation, and it broadens the FDA's regulations over what I think, if it's going to be regulated, should be USDA. We are looking at two, three or four individual food safety problems; and instead of looking at that and trying to solve the problem, first, we should try to solve it without legislation. Second, it should be specific to the food rather than the broad stroke that this bill is. I know that there are exemptions for feed grains; but in the end, this is a growth of regulation. It's a burden on our farmers and our food producers. It's a tax on our food producers. It's going to come out of the pockets of the American consumers, and it will diminish the smaller operations among us. We have here a solution in search of a problem. We can solve this problem without new extra regulatory authority for the FDA. I rise in opposition to this bill, and I believe it should be Ag Committee jurisdiction.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, President Obama, in part of his campaign to be elected to office and part of his campaign after he had been inaugurated as President, said that we have an economic calamity, and we can't fix it unless we first fix health care, and that health care is broken. Well, if you have a business that's broken, it doesn't take a $1 trillion to $2 trillion program to try to fix it. If the problem with health care is we're spending too much money on health care, why do we have to spend $1 trillion or $2 trillion more to fix it? I mean that is the number one question that doesn't seem to be answered by the administration. And the second one, a statement that is not believable to the American people, is the idea that when the President promises if you like your health insurance program, you get to keep it. In fact, if they pass this legislation, they will take it away, and it says in section 102 of the bill that they're going to take it away. The American people are not going to be able to decide if they get to keep their health insurance program because the government will write new rules for every health insurance program, and the employers will decide whether the insurance is cheaper under the public plan, the government- run plan, or the private. Vote this down.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the judge, the gentleman from Texas, for organizing this Special Order, bringing this point up, and for getting the media out so that the American people understand what is going on. I'm looking at the two charts that the judge has put down there. One of them is the HillaryCare chart that was black and white that you will remember from a few moments ago, Mr. Speaker. Back in 1993, the black- and-white HillaryCare chart was enough to sink the National Health Care Act. HillaryCare went down because the American people saw a chart. They saw all of those government commissions that were created; and every time you create a government commission, they knew intuitively that some of their freedom was going to be gone, some of their choices were going to be gone, taxes were going to go up, services were going to go down, lines were going to get longer, and the quality of health care was going to be diminished, all in the name of leveling this thing down to the lowest common denominator, would be how I would describe it. That was when that flow chart in '93, 16 years ago, was in black and white. This flow chart is in full technicolor. Mr. Speaker, when you look at this chart--and I hope you have studied this chart thoroughly and understand all of the 31 agencies that are created here in this full technicolor chart and the maze of government bureaucracy that is created by it, the loss of quality that would result from it, the increasing cost that will come from it, and the dependency that will be brought about because this safety net turns into a hammock; and in the end, no individual will really have an incentive to take care of their own health insurance because they will be crowded out by the public option. This is a national health care plan. This is socialized medicine. Mr. Speaker, I'll say socialized medicine real clearly to you here in this House of Representatives. If I had the notion to put it on frank mail, then we would see how that works too. Public option is the President's words and the national health care plan. Government-run insurance is what it really is. Now we know a little bit about government-run insurance. A lot of western civilizations have government-run insurance. They have government-run a lot of things that have crippled them to the point where they couldn't compete with us. When you get down to the extreme in this, there's a reason why we won the Cold War--because we didn't have government-run, we had private sector-run, private sector- motivated, a whole mass of worker bees that went out and contributed; they were entrepreneurs; they were creative; and they sparked this economy. The vitality of the American free enterprise system not only created the best health care system in the world, the highest-quality medicine in the world, it created the most dynamic, the most competitive economy that tied together with strong political, military and cultural country. And in the end, the Soviet Union imploded because they couldn't keep up with us economically. Here we are looking at the rest of the world having failed in their central planning models, whichever side of that great Iron Curtain they originated from. We can look at western Europe; we can look at the plan in France, in the United Kingdom; we can look to our neighbors in the north in Canada and see what they have created when they started down the path of trying to produce a substitute for the private sector health insurance models. We have over 1,300 health insurance companies in America. That's not policies. That's companies, and companies with multiple policies, Mr. Speaker. The President has this idea that we need one more competitor, one more injector of good ideas supposedly into this health care debate. I would submit that of all the people that have spent their lives creating good ways to provide a more competitive model of health insurance, the President's not going to think of a better idea than they came up with. I think he proved himself here just a couple of days ago on the Cambridge issue. The President doesn't always come up with good ideas. Sometimes his ideas are not so good. But to look in on an industry and decide you want to create a government-competing industry so that you have more competition when you have more than 1,300 health insurance companies, there are only two things that can happen with this. That is, this circle on the chart and down at the bottom in the purple circle on the side that would be the left hand of those who are watching on television is the white square that shows all the traditional health insurance policies that are there. They have to flow into qualified policies. Qualified policies will be policies that will be qualified when the newly appointed health insurance czar decides what kind of rules to write for these private insurance companies, these 1,300 that will have to change their policies to conform with the new rules that will be written by a person yet to be named by the President of the United States. There will not be 1,300 that qualify. They all won't qualify. Some will decide, they can see the writing on the wall, they'll know what's happened, and they will just pull the plug--pull the pin, as we say, and drive away from the wagon they have and decide to get out of the business because they know the government's coming. The government's coming with your tax dollars, and the government is determined to build--this administration at least and the Democrat majority in this Congress--is determined to build a health insurance policy to compete with 1,300 private insurance policies, which means they're going to do two things in some combination. I could say one of two things. I think they'll do both things. The new health insurance czar, who is the guy in the blue box with the yellow letters above the two purple circles dead center up about a third of the way. The new health insurance czar will write new rules. There will be compliance rules; and those rules will be things such as: They will mandate. They will mandate mental health coverage, which it is good to cover mental health. Some of the States have mandated it, and some have not. They will mandate mental health coverage. They will probably mandate contraceptive coverage. They will probably mandate anything that you can imagine; and additionally, they're going to mandate--they will not step away from this so we know they're going to mandate that this policy fund abortion in America. And they will trample over the top of more than 50 percent of Americans' deeply held convictions that life begins at the instant of conception, and that it is sacred in all of its forms. They're going to ram this policy at us all, and some of these companies will decide out of moral reasons that they are no longer going to be in business in a country that is going to compel abortion, for example, or compel mandates, for example. All of those mandates that are on there will drive the premiums up. Now if the newly appointed Obama health insurance czar, which is the guy in that rectangular box in that schematic there, the blue box with the yellow letters on it, if he will write those regulations tough enough, a lot of companies will drop out, and the others will have to raise their premiums. When they do all that, then the Federal Government can compete with their public plan that they want to have, just one entity out there to compete with the private sector. And they will be able to compete more easily and still be able to have premiums that are competitive for a time, and then when we find out that the competition is not working that way, they will subsidize the premiums in the public plan, and that will drive the private sector insurance companies. And we know the model in Canada. They started out with a similar proposal. I actually think that's where President Obama got this idea. The Canadians don't have any competitive health insurance plan today. There are no two purple circles, one of them the public options, the collection of them, and the other is the private. They have one circle, one size fits all, and everybody has to submit to one health care system in Canada. And they have to stand in line, and the result is rationing. And so, for example, if you're waiting for a knee replacement in Canada, the average wait is 340 days. When you're waiting for a hip replacement, the average wait in Canada is 196 days. If you're waiting for heart surgery, I'd like to think it's not as long a wait. But we know this: If people have to wait for health care, if they have to get in line for health care, they will die in line. Some will die in line. We've seen numbers that are pretty stark, and I'm going to hesitate on quoting them. But I will tell you that a week ago Thursday night, we had a speaker in the Policy Committee that Mr. McCotter, who just spoke, from Michigan, chairs, and it was a doctor from Michigan who has practiced medicine on both sides of the border, in Michigan and in Canada. He told a story of going up there to work in the ER in the hospital in Canada, and they brought a patient in that had a knee that was all torn up, a torn meniscus and a torn ACL, anterior cruciate ligament. And so this knee was a mess. And the doctor examined the knee, did what tests he could within the ER, and he said, You need surgery. You need surgery right away. I'll schedule you for tomorrow morning. Well, it must have been the doctor's first real foray up into Canadian medicine working within the system because he found out that he couldn't schedule the surgery the next morning. He had to schedule another exam and another approval from a doctor who was a specialist. And by the way, this doctor is a specialist. And so he couldn't get him scheduled, not for that night or the following morning or the day after, which would be a real stretch in America. Can you imagine laying around in a hospital for a specialist to come along, your knee swollen up the size of a cantaloupe, and waiting for a doctor to show up 2 days? And I'd say, Mr. Speaker, no. We wouldn't wait 2 days for a doctor to show up to look at our leg. If he couldn't be there that night, he would be there the next day, probably in the morning. And he would do the examination and they'd find a way to schedule the surgery, and they would do that surgery as quickly as they could because they care about recovery and quality of life and service and they want to make sure that you're not in an ambulance going to a hospital somewhere else telling them that you couldn't get in at so and so memorial hospital because there was a long line. They don't want that to happen. But in Canada, in this patient, this real case that was related to us before the Policy Committee a week ago last Thursday night by a doctor from Michigan, it took 6 months for that young man with that torn-up knee to see the specialist to be diagnosed in order to be approved for surgery that this doctor would have liked to have seen done the next day. And then 6 months later, they actually did the surgery. A knee torn up, a man who's in the productive time of his life, on crutches for 12 months waiting for surgery. And then we know that the leg atrophies and the recovery and the rehab gets to be longer. So he was out, I think pretty close, I believe the doctor said 15 months he was off work, when they could have had him back to work in a couple or maybe even less if they could have just had the surgery right away. That's an example of Canadian health care. And I recall reading through a stack of Collier's magazines from 1948 and 1949. These magazines were--they featured the United Kingdom's socialized medicine plan that they passed in 1948 in Britain. And there they showed pictures of long lines outside the clinics and doctors that were just frazzled that they had to see so many patients in order to hold their economics together. They didn't have time to be a doctor with a patient relationship. They just ran through them as fast as they could do so, and it just was wearing everybody down. All the predictions, the things that we see today were even predicted then. They saw them. They were real in the first year of the socialized medicine plan in the United Kingdom. And here we are where we can't even call this government-run health care, government-run system. Well, who will be running this system if it's not the government? Who is poised to pass this legislation if it isn't the Democrat majority in the House of Representatives and the Democrat President in the White House? And it will take a Democrat majority in the United States Senate to pass this schematic that is in full technicolor today that takes away the American people's freedom to purchase their own health insurance policy and access to their own health care, all in the name of trying to provide for the people that are not insured and blurring, intentionally, the language between health insurance and health care. If we had a billion dollars for every time somebody on this floor had blurred the language between health insurance and health care intentionally, I believe, Mr. Speaker, we would have enough money to fund this monstrosity. People are being confused, I believe, intentionally. I've seen this language unfold for at least 2 years now. People don't have health care. It gets said over and over again. Every American has access to health care. And we can have the argument about whether going to the emergency room is the right way to do it or not, and we know it's not the cheapest. But if they have access to health care, we should not tell the American people they do not. We need to tell them every American has access to health care. Not every American can afford their own health insurance policy. But when you break the numbers down, we're around 306 million people, and if you start subtracting from that those that are in America that are here illegally, if--let's just say this great gift of automatic government health insurance had to be delivered to these illegals in this country by the Department of Homeland Security, they would be obligated to deport those people rather than reward them with a government-owned and run health insurance plan. Subtract them from the 306 million. Subtract those that are here legally that are immigrants. They're supposed to take care of themselves. We don't hand people entitlements when they come to the United States. That's by law. Subtract them. Subtract the people that make over $75,000 a year. They can find a way to take care of themselves. And if you subtract the people that are eligible for Medicaid but are not signed up--and by the way, Mr. Speaker, almost half of those eligible for Medicaid just aren't signed up. And I don't know why we would think that if we would just give everybody free access to health insurance that they will sign up. But you subtract the Medicaid people that are not signed up. Then you subtract the people that are eligible for an employee-run option but they don't sign up for one reason or another, and you get down to a study that is this. One was by a pair of Penn State professors that does the math down to 10.1 million Americans are the chronically uninsured. And there's another study that one of our government agencies, I think it actually was CBO, but I'm not certain, 12 million uninsured. So, in any case, between 10.1 and 12 million Americans are chronically uninsured. That's the universe that we're supposedly trying to get to, about 10 to 12 million Americans. That maps out to be about 4 percent of this population, 4 percent of the population chronically uninsured. And we know that the people that are, let's say, chronically not covered by Medicaid just simply don't show up. So why would we think that the chronically uninsured are any different type of personality or any different kind of person utilizing the health policies that we have. So I will submit that even if we handed them a free policy, probably not more than half of the 4 percent that are chronically uninsured are going to sign up. The rest you'd have to chase them down and impose it on them. Staple the policy to their shirt collar on the chance they'd show up at the emergency room, in which case we're going to take care of them anyway. The administration cost of providing health insurance for the 4 percent of the chronically uninsured when you can't get probably half of them to actually sign up, so we get 2 percent of a population of 306 million people at the price of $1.5 trillion and a raising of taxes of $800 to $900 billion and a deficit of $239.1 billion, at the low side, and maybe a deficit of $500 to $600 billion on the up side. I wonder if anybody wants to censor those numbers? I mean, I'm always open to that debate. But I found out that when I put numbers out here, some will say, You're wrong, Congressman. And I say, What's your number? And they don't have a number. If they don't have a number, they don't have any right to challenge my numbers. I'll put the numbers out here. But this is about access to health care. This is about our freedoms. This is about whether 1,300 private health insurance companies in America can do a better job of providing the options that are suitable to the American people and the creativity and the research and development and the innovativeness and the modern health care system that sets the standards for the world. And the rest of the world, by the way, poaches on the innovativeness of the American health care system. We create more pharmaceuticals and more techniques and surgical techniques than anybody else by far. And they're available to the rest of the world for a really cheap price, if anything at all is charged. We set the standard. The Americans pay the price, and still they can't keep up with the results we have here in America. I could go on, Mr. Speaker, but I think I have made my point, and I thank the gentleman from Texas for bringing this up. And I'll just say this. Can I say this like a Texan, Judge? This is our chart. Kevin Brady of Texas put that chart up. It is accurate. It shows 31 government agencies, new ones. It is accurate and it shall stand. It shall not come down. And like that first flag down in Texas with that cannon on it, if they think that this should not be something for the public to see, they can come and take it. Thank you, Judge. I yield back.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege of being recognized to address you here on the floor of the House. Having been able to listen to some of the dialogue in the previous hour, I think it is quite curious that there would be a chart that went up with question marks on it that would be described as the Republicans' health care plan. There are all kinds of question marks in this Democrat health care plan that we have. This is the censored flowchart, Mr. Speaker. This is the chart that the Franking Commission, I think after having been leveraged by House leadership, decided that it couldn't be mailed to the constituents of the Members of the House of Representatives because they didn't want this to say ``government-run health care,'' because that is pejorative, or ``the Democrat health care plan,'' because that is pejorative. So, instead, the Democrats put up question marks on the floor of the House and they say Republicans don't have a plan. They don't know. Well, there are all kinds of questions about the Democrat plan. First of all, why is it so sensitive that you have to censor the truth? Secondly, let's see, we can go through a whole list of questions about the Democrat plan, great big question marks. How much does it cost? Oh, we don't know, someplace between $1 trillion and maybe $2 trillion, or a little more than $2 trillion dollars. We don't know. We are not even within a trillion dollars on how much we think that is going to cost. That is the Democrat response. How much deficit will it create? Well, maybe a minimum of $239.1 billion, but it could be well over that. It could run into $600 billion or $700 billion. Some answers there. Who will get to keep their health care? Who can you actually guarantee and point to them and say you can keep your, more correctly, health insurance program? And no one can be actually promised that, even though the President has said so. He can't guarantee that promise. So, as the questions go on and on and on, what insurance companies would survive after we have this plan? And looking at this scary flowchart, this schematic, Mr. Speaker, there are 31 different new government agencies that are created in this plan. First I am going to take us back to 1993. I think it is instructive. This is the 1993 HillaryCare plan, and this is the chart that hung in my office in my construction company during those years, hung in my office all the way through the nineties. I didn't take it down. I think this chart, that showed this great growth in government, all of these configurations here, government agencies, programs, this whole list, a lot of these acronyms I don't recognize anymore, all of these little flows in the drug pricing, they actually call this a scheme, ``drug pricing scheme.'' I just called it a schematic, but they actually called it a scheme, drug pricing scheme. How about the global budget? That is in here. As you read this through, the configuration between the President, the National Health Board, the State governments, the Regional Health Alliance, the Corporate Health Alliance, the ombudsman, who is there to smooth out all the things and make sure when you have trouble dealing with government, Mr. Speaker, that there is an ombudsman there who will take care of that for you, because we know how difficult it is to find your way through the maze of paperwork that is created when government is involved. This chart, Mr. Speaker, was enough to scare the Americans off of the Clinton health care plan, commonly known as HillaryCare. This chart came in black and white, it didn't come in Technicolor, but it showed you all of these agencies and this creation. And people understood that they were being offered in place of their own health insurance program, they were being offered a government maze that swallowed up all of the things that were private and completely took it over for government. The American people loved their freedom in 1993, and they rejected giving up their freedom to purchase a health insurance plan of their choice, to control their health care decisions themselves. They rejected it. This is an HMO provider plan. That is another piece that is not so popular today. But the American people were scared away from the Clinton plan by simply looking at this chart and listening to Harry and Louise. Some of them, that is all the further they went. But they knew they didn't want a government option when it was going to be the only option. They didn't want to have their options taken away and put in the control of a government bureaucrat, a government-run plan, a Democrat health care plan. That is what it was then, that is what it is now. The difference is, this is in full color, Mr. Speaker, as opposed to the black-and-white chart from 1993. This chart is flat-out accurate, and it does describe 31 new agencies created by the bill. Anything you see in white are existing agencies, and the things you see in color, in green and yellow and orange and red and blue, those are all new agencies. If you count these dots that are colored, there are 31 of them, Mr. Speaker. One can get animated about having to wade through that massive government red tape, but when you wade through it down to the bottom is where I get the most concern, and that is, I go down to this little square right here, Mr. Speaker, traditional health insurance plans. That is those plans that insure the majority of the American people today, any private health insurance plan. There are over 1,300 companies that provide health insurance plans, and generally they have multiple plans out there, so we don't know how many plans there are to choose from. But a reasonable estimate might well be 100,000 separate plans by the time you figure the options on the deductibles and the different things that are there so that people can get a health insurance plan that serves them at a price that they can best settle to. All of those, 100,000 plans, roughly, 1,300 companies, all dumped into this little box right here. And that's how our health insurance is provided for and paid for and administered and funded is all right here in the traditional plans. But under--I don't know exactly how to describe this--the Democrat government proposal, all of these health insurance plans, if they were going to stay in business after that, would have to qualify. They'd have to become qualified health benefits plans. That's this little purple circle here closest to me. There are two identical circles in size, but the qualified health benefits plan would be where all the private health insurance companies go if the bill is passed and the President signs it, which he'll sign anything that says ``national health care'' on it. And I suspect that's the case. He wants a bill, and they want to start this down the path because they believe that this will morph into a single-payer plan. That's what he really wants. That's what the Speaker wants. That's what the liberals in the Congress want. They want to take away the American people's 100,000 policies and roll them eventually into one government, one-size-fits-all plan over here. So these 1,300 companies, 100,000 policies in this square box, if they were going to do business after the bill was signed, they have to get qualified. They would be qualified if they met the new government standards. The government would tell them, You have to cover maternity. You have to cover mental health. You have to cover abortion, Mr. Speaker. That's the standard that is coming out of the White House these days. If the White House doesn't tell you that they're opposed to forcing Americans to pay premiums to fund abortions, then you know that if it comes the way they plan it, there will be abortions funded by the American people through the dollars they would pay to these premiums. There isn't any history in this country of this government not funding abortions unless there was an explicit exemption written into the language of the bill. There is no explicit exemption written into the language of any of the bills that are working here before this Congress now, which should tell anybody that's studied this and watched this issue since Roe v. Wade in 1973, that they plan to take the tax money and the premium money from the American people and use it to kill babies. That's going to be in this plan. And all of these health insurance policies here will have to pay for it the same way the government intends to pay for it over here in the public health plan, and many Americans are going to object to that. But what they do is, when they require that these health insurance policies have to cover everything they think it should cover and they write so many mandates into it that the health insurance premiums will go up, and so will the copayments and so will the deductibles go up, and as they go up, then it will be easier for the public health plan, the Obama health insurance plan, to compete with the private sector. And they will do two things with these two purple circles here. One of them is they will regulate the traditional private providers to where they become mirrors of the government plan and then have to compete with the premiums that the government plan will charge. And the other thing that they will do is they will subsidize the government plan so that they can keep those premiums down long enough to compete with the private plan, and that will squeeze out the private plans. And you can expect, Mr. Speaker, that there will not be private health insurance in America in a relatively short period of time, whether that be--probably not 5 years. By 10 years, we'll see the picture. By 15 to 20 years, it should be settled in if this happens. We can look around the world and see where they have made these mistakes. In Great Britain, they have a completely socialized medicine program that was implemented into law in 1948. In Germany, they have the world's oldest socialized medicine plan that went in under Otto von Bismarck in the late 1800s. That plan provides for private health insurance, and today, about 90 percent of Germans are under the public plan and about 10 percent are under the private plan, and those that are on the private plan are generally self-employed people that have some means to try to provide a plan that they think gives them a little better access and maybe even a little better quality health care than the 90 percent of Germans that are under the public plan. But one thing that they have in common in the United Kingdom and in Germany is they wait in line. Their care is rationed, and the quality isn't what it is in this country. The survival rates for cancer in the United States versus that of United Kingdom or the European Union are some four times greater here in the United States than they are in those countries that have socialized medicine. And now, Mr. Speaker, we can also look to the north to Canada, and understand what went on up in Canada. When Canada passed their socialized medicine program, it was set up to compete with the existing privates, and eventually they were all squeezed out. And today there exists a law in Canada that prohibits anyone from jumping ahead of the line or going to create a new line. One size fits all. Everyone, all Canadians have to comply with the same health care programs. Government-run socialized medicine in Canada. And now, thinking about what that means, the Canadians lost their freedom when they decided to go for a little security and still try to keep some freedom. They lost their freedoms on their health insurance, and maybe they are a little bit more secure, but the quality of their health care doesn't match up to the quality here in the United States. And so what we know is that, let's just say the cancer survivors in Canada, their numbers look better than the people in the United Kingdom or the European Union that have been diagnosed with cancer. More Canadians survive with cancer than do the other countries that have a socialized medicine program. And I don't know the numbers, and I probably won't get time in this debate over the next week or maybe a little more to drill back into this and be able to compare the statistics. Mr. Speaker, I'm going to suggest that a factor involved is the Canadian proximity to American health care has helped Canadians live longer. It's helped their survival rate. It's helped in such that when people get diagnosed with cancer and can't get treatment in places like the United Kingdom, Germany, across Europe, they die sooner than they do in Canada, and they die sooner in Canada than they do in the United States. People live longer here after they've been diagnosed with a cancer than any of those countries that I have mentioned, and I've seen no data for any others. And I'm going to suggest that the Canadians' access to American health care helps their life expectancy because at least they can sneak across the border and get in line down here, even if they have to pay for it out of their pocket. Those would be the factual circumstances involved. And so we have Democrats asking the question, what's the Republican health care plan? I'll ask the question, what do we know about the Democrat plan? We know it'll cost a lot. We can guess within 1 trillion, maybe 1 trillion or $2 trillion. We know it's going to create a deficit; 239.1 billion on up to 600, 700, $800 billion in deficit. We know it's going to create lines. Lines are rationing. People do die in line. We know it's going to discourage doctors and specialists for taking the years necessary to be trained so that they can be proficient enough to provide the quality of health care that we have. So we'll have fewer doctors. We'll have fewer nurses. Fewer people will want to go into the industry because the government will be telling them how they are going to treat patients. There isn't going to be any way that the Democrats in this Congress will agree to pull the government out of the relationship between the doctor and the patient. There was an amendment that was offered in the Energy and Commerce markup that specifically said that the government would not interfere with the doctor-patient relationship, and that's a short summary, and it was voted down except for one, all on a party line, all but one Democrat voted no. Every Republican voted yes. We want the doctor- patient relationship to be maintained. Democrats do not. We also have the rules that will be squeezing out these private carriers, these 1,300 companies. There will not be 1,300 that will qualify. There will be substantially less, and they'll be squeezed out by the public option here, this public health plan, this government-run health insurance plan, but the regulations will be written by the Health Choices Administration. It has got a nice little acronym--HCA, Health Choices Administration. You know that the people who wrote this are for choice, right? So they have named that there will be a commissioner of the Health Choices Administration. That commissioner is the modern, fancy name for ``czar.'' We have 32 czars. The American people are fed up with czars, so now we're going to start calling them ``commissioners.'' Some said, well, ``commissars,'' but the commissioner--not commissar--will be calling the shots on what these health insurance plans are, and he will decide what they will cover and what they will not. He will also be the one who probably makes a lot of the decisions on how much health care is rationed in America. The results, again, will be long lines. How do we know this? They exist in every country that has socialized medicine. I ran into an individual at a home improvement place in my district, oh, about a year ago. He was a legal immigrant from Germany who'd had a hip replacement over there. In order to get his hip replacement, he had to travel to Italy because the lines were too long in Germany. They were a little shorter in Italy, so he got himself in the line in Italy. He traveled down there and got a hip replacement. He didn't think a lot of the system that they have in Europe. That was just a little anecdotal discussion that took place in a home improvement center. I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, a week ago Thursday night, we had a doctor who practiced medicine in Michigan and in Canada. He has written a book, at least one that I know of. He was our guest speaker at the Policy Committee a week ago Thursday night. He told a story. He was working in the emergency room in Canada. It must have been the first he'd been up there to work, is my guess, and he probably hadn't anticipated what kind of a bureaucracy they have. They brought a patient in who had a knee joint that was all torn up, I believe from a sports injury, but I don't know. He had a torn meniscus and a torn ACL, an anterior cruciate ligament. That knee was all swollen up. It was wrecked. He examined it; x rayed it. He told the young man, You need surgery and you need it right away. I'll schedule you for surgery in the morning. Well, he didn't realize how difficult it was. This is an American doctor working in Canada. He began to schedule the surgery the next morning, and he found out that there had to be a specialist who evaluated the knee and then that they had to file the forms. Then they had to get him in line. Then they had to get him approved so he could go ahead and have the surgery. Well, the examination, the secondary examination that had to take place by the doctor who does the approving for the surgery, in order to hold down costs, mind you, wasn't able to see this patient right away, so they put a brace on this patient's knee that was blown up like a cantaloupe, and they put him on crutches. After a while, he left the hospital, waiting for his examination by the doctor who works for the bureaucracy and who decides who goes into the line. Well, that examination didn't take place the next day, Mr. Speaker, or the next week or the next month. The examination that if he passed would approve him for surgery took place 6 months later. In America, he would have had surgery the next day, and he would have been in rehab. In a couple of months or even less than that, he'd have been back to work. He spent 6 months on crutches, 6 months with a leg brace, 6 months with a torn meniscus and a torn ACL. Then he went in for the examination, Mr. Speaker. After the examination, one might think that the examining doctor came to the same conclusion that the ER doctor from Michigan did, which is that he should have surgery the next day. Well, maybe that doctor did come to that conclusion, but they didn't have room for him, not for a day or two or a week or a month, Mr. Speaker, but for 6 months. No, I didn't say 6 months from the injury to the surgery. I said 6 months from the injury to the examination and another 6 months from the examination to the surgery. We know, if you have a patient who is hobbling around on crutches for a year, his unused leg atrophies, and the rehab takes longer. It takes a long, long time to get a patient back to speed after surgery, when and if the surgery is successful, which I guess I don't know. This is the circumstance right here across the border into Canada. Many Americans live along the border, and they see the Canadians come down to the United States for their health care. It happens in Maine; it happens in Michigan; it happens in Minnesota. The Mayo Clinic at Rochester takes a lot of patients from Canada. Some companies in Canada will write into their employment contracts with their employees that they have extra good health insurance programs for them. If they are hurt or if they need emergency surgery, heart surgery, for example, in the employment contracts, they will have policies set up that will actually fly a Canadian employee to Houston for heart surgery. Now, if you have a health insurance and health care program that is in such a condition that employers write it into their employment contracts that they will export their employees out of State to come to America, to come to the United States to access high-quality health care, that should tell us something about what we should not design. I would think it would be very clear. So the White House and the liberals in Congress--maybe they don't want to say, House Democrats' health plan. Maybe I should say, liberal House Democrats' health plan. This plan is very similar to the plan that was unrolled in Canada where they had private health insurance for a while before it was squeezed out by the public health plan, which swallowed up everything. In Canada, they passed a law that prohibited anyone from starting a new line or from jumping in front. Some provinces in Canada enforce it more than others, but the Federal law in Canada is that you are stuck with the same health care as everybody else. There's no jumping ahead in line. There's no creating a new line. You can't open up a clinic if you're a doctor and serve patients unless you're approved by the government. The government will require you to strap on their harness and pull in exactly the patient load in exactly the way they describe it; whereas, in America, if you license yourself as a physician, you can open up a clinic and can start taking care of patients wherever the demand is. Now think about the difference between that where you have individual entrepreneurs who are seeking to serve a marketplace. Maybe they're working for hospitals, and they look around and decide that there need to be other services in that they're not able to take care of the patients who are there. Maybe they see a population demographic or an age demographic that needs to be better served, so they'll open up clinics or hospitals or surgery centers or they might go out and pick up some medical technical equipment and deploy that to locations where it's needed or they'll go out to the rural hospitals and go ride the circuit, so to speak, and stop in and maybe once a week do the scheduled orthopaedic surgery that's there. It happens with OB as well. They'll schedule some of that as best they can, at least the examinations. The births come along on their own unless they're by Caesarean. Remember, HillaryCare actually called this schematic, or at least one component of it, a scheme. This color-coded schematic should scare the daylights out of the American people, and they should be worried about all of the question marks in the Democrat plan, that plan that will give us socialized medicine in America. We can understand that, Mr. Speaker. That's where it's going, and it will bust the budget, and it will take away our freedoms, and it will prohibit a doctor from opening up a clinic where he sees the demand. It will prohibit a doctor from charging more or less--I suppose there may be some opportunity to charge less, but that wouldn't last very long--because they're going to squeeze these resources down. Today, Medicare is only reimbursing at 80 percent of the cost that it takes to deliver it. In my State, in Iowa, we are the lowest out of the 50 States. We have the lowest Medicare reimbursement rate of all of the States in the Union. And yet, the proposal here in this flow chart is to squeeze maybe as much as half a trillion dollars out of Medicare. And now all for what? What is the purpose of all of this, Mr. Speaker? Why would America, why would this Congress consider upsetting, destroying, wrapping up packaging and throwing away the best health care system in the world? Why? What would be the purpose? And I will submit, Mr. Speaker, that the argument is that there are the uninsured. Now, they continue to blur the words between ``health care'' and ``health insurance.'' They don't seem to know there is a difference between the two. Everybody in America has health care. Everyone in America can walk into the emergency room and be treated for an injury or an illness. Everyone has that opportunity. We don't have people in America that are denied health care. Everybody in America doesn't have health insurance. And before I go down that path a little, I want to point out that we do spend a lot of money on health care in America between health insurance and providing that health care. And it's about 14\1/2\ percent of GDP. And in some of the European Union countries, socialized medicine countries, it's around 9\1/2\ percent of GDP. So maybe 5 percent more, half again more. So our health care here costs us 3 bucks. It costs them 2. Is our health care that's provided in this country worth half again more? Maybe. We're willing to pay it today. But perhaps not in the long run, Mr. Speaker, and we can do a lot of things to reduce the cost of health insurance and health care in America. And there is a difference A number of those things would be: Address the medical malpractice, the irresponsible litigation that's taking place, the suing of doctors and clinics and hospitals and providers all for an opportunity to try to cash something in rather than correct something that's wrong. And perhaps the word ``all'' is not the right one, because there are cases where someone has had the misfortune of being a victim of medical malpractice. We pushed legislation and passed it through the Judiciary Committee a few years ago and off the floor of the House of Representatives that limited the medical malpractice settlement and capped the noneconomic damages at $250,000 and still took care of the patients who had unfortunately been subject to medical malpractice. Paid the patient's doctor bills, paid them loss of income. Paid them pain and suffering. Just didn't pay punitive damages, that $7 million for the cup of coffee that the lady spilled in her lap. That's the punitive damages that we call it out in the layman's world. It's called noneconomic damages in that bill. Those are capped at $250,000. That's the model that California has that has been relatively successful. That's one of the things we can do to hold down the cost. Another one would be provide for 100 percent deductibility for everybody's health insurance premium, for a corporation to purchase health insurance and pay the premiums and fully deduct those premiums, but if someone goes and buys that same policy, they can't deduct it from their taxes. A self-employed person can't deduct their health insurance premiums fully like say an employer can for their employees. So if you are a sole proprietorship and you have high health insurance premiums and you haven't formed a corporation, you might be paying $11,000, $15,000 a year in high health insurance premiums. Let's say it's $15,000 a year. You can get around that lack of deductibility by forming a corporation and paying yourself a salary, and part of the salary package would be the health insurance premiums. Then you can deduct them. Those are a lot of hoops to jump through to try to meet a government regulation when there should be no particular advantage for one company over another, one individual over another. If we have someone who is self-employed or someone who is independently wealthy and they are responsible enough to go out and buy their health insurance and pay the premium, every dollar that's deductible by a corporation should be deductible by an individual. All of those health insurance premiums should be deductible. We should raise the maximum amount for health savings accounts so we can be sure that people that are young today, when they arrive at Social Security age, will have enough money in their health insurance, in their health savings account, to be able to purchase a paid-up Medicare replacement policy and take the difference, the hundreds of thousands or perhaps more than a million dollars, take the cash in the difference on their HSA tax-free if they're willing to take themselves off of the entitlement rolls of Medicare by buying replacement policy. That's something else we can do in the long term. So expand our HSAs, provide for full deductibility on our health insurance, limit the liability for these doctors so we can hold down the costs of medical malpractice premiums and the cost of the extra tests that are there in order to protect themselves from the litigation that's bound to come when you ambulance-chasing lawyers are chasing doctors around. What percentage of this 17 percent of our economy is going to the trial lawyers in America? I say, Mr. Speaker, it is significant. So there really aren't questions about what Republicans are for. There are a lot of questions about what comes out with this chart, but the idea that the Franking Commission, which appears to be controlled by the Democrat majority in this Congress, would censure this document and tell Members of Congress they can't send this off to their constituents, they can't package it up and put it in an envelope and mail it to their constituents because the Democrats didn't like the idea that it says ``House Democrat Health Plan.'' And they don't like the idea that it says ``government run.'' Well, it is government run, and it is the House Democrats' health plan. There are bipartisan programs here when it comes to health care in this Congress. The bipartisanship is in opposition to this kind of a government-run plan, and that's what Democrats and Republicans that oppose this today--I cannot find a single Republican that supports this plan, and I don't think that individual exists in the United States Congress. So that would be my component of the speech here that has to do with this schematic that should scare the living daylights out of the American people, and they should rise up. And, Mr. Speaker, the American people should rise up. And in August when their Members of Congress come home and they start doing parades and townhall meetings and corn boils and whatever else is going on, crab fries or whatever they do in the East Coast, this chart should be out in front and the American people should go see them and say, Vote ``no,'' be a ``no,'' oppose this plan, oppose this plan. Give people their freedom, and we can do so in the fashion that I've described. Now, there is another huge entity that's taking away our freedom. Right here, Mr. Speaker, this is a picture that I took of the headquarters of ACORN, and this is down in New Orleans, Louisiana, at 2609 Canal Street, New Orleans. This is a fortified building. I mean, these bars are heavier the lower you go. This is up on the second or third floor of the building. And I just zoomed in on this window because something caught my eye. ACORN's national--maybe even international--headquarters, where they have 174 or more corporations running out of this single building, four or five stories, glass, with bars, the most fortified building in the whole neighborhood. But inside that window you can see at least two posters there. This one says ``Obama '08.'' ACORN is to be, and is registered as, a 501(c)(3) corporation, a not-for-profit corporation, a nonpolitical, nonpartisan organization organized as a corporation. If this is their headquarters and they have ``Obama'' posters inside--it's clearly displayed in the window so people can go by on the street and look and see that. And in the State where I come from, we call that electioneering. If you are a not-for-profit, nonpartisan corporation, 501(c)(3), you don't do any electioneering. You certainly don't post an ``Obama'' sign in the front window of the national headquarters of the Association For Community Organization Reform Now, ACORN. And if anybody wonders about where this picture came from--and I've got the pictures of the address and everything, but over here is the flag that hangs outside. It is kind of a faded red flag. It is clearly, and you can read it, that is the ACORN logo. So the ACORN logo on this flag hanging outside the window at the national headquarters of ACORN, and the Obama sign in the middle of the window displayed so people can see it, is it intentional? Either that, or stupid. Is it okay to say that something happened that was stupid in America, Mr. Speaker? I'm a little concerned about that. It seemed to be not a very good tactic for the President, but I see his name inside this window at ACORN at their headquarters and I see the ACORN logo, and here is where it is, 2609 Canal Street. Now, this is an interesting turn of events. I took this picture just before the 4th of July. And last week, on Thursday, about the close of business, there was released a report, and this is a nonpartisan report from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The ranking member is Congressman Darrell Issa, California's 49th District. The subject of this report--and Mr. Speaker, I hold this up. It is what the cover of it looks like. The United States House of Representatives. The subject of this report is this question: ``Is ACORN Intentionally Structured As a Criminal Enterprise?'' This report is dated July 23, 2009. And if anyone should like to look this report up and read it, I believe if they googled, ``Is ACORN Intentionally Structured As a Criminal Enterprise,'' they will be able to find it, or if they go to the Government Reform Web site--I know that it is on Mr. Issa's Web site and it soon will be on mine. I have here the executive summary. It is 88 pages long. I have read carefully through the first two-thirds of it. It has in it a list of 361 affiliated corporations. I have listed 174 in the amendments I have offered that were designed to eliminate Federal funding to ACORN. ACORN has received at least $53 million in taxpayer funds to operate their criminal enterprise. And I have the executive summary here. And just to go into it a little ways, Mr. Speaker, this executive summary of this report out of the Government Reform House of Representatives that asks the question, ``Is ACORN intentionally structured as a criminal enterprise?'' July 23, 2009, the executive summary reads, in part, like this: ``The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, ACORN, has repeatedly and deliberately engaged in systemic fraud. Both structurally and operationally, ACORN hides behind a wall of paper, of nonprofit corporation protections to conceal a criminal conspiracy on the part of its directors to launder Federal money in order to pursue a partisan political agenda and to manipulate the American electorate.'' Corporate protections to conceal a criminal conspiracy on the part of its directors and launder money. That is the first paragraph. Then it reads, ``Emerging accounts of widespread deceit and corruption raise the need for a criminal investigation of ACORN. By intentionally blurring the legal distinctions between 361 tax exempt and nonexempt entities, ACORN diverts taxpayer and tax-exempt monies into partisan political activities. ``Since 1994, more than $53 million in Federal funds have been pumped into ACORN, and under the Obama administration, ACORN stands to receive a whopping $8.5 billion in available stimulus funds. ``Operationally, ACORN is a shell game played in 120 cities, 43 States, and the District of Columbia through a complex structure designed to conceal illegal activities to use taxpayer and tax-exempt dollars for partisan political purposes and to distract investigators. Structurally, ACORN is a chess game in which senior management is shielded from accountability by multiple layers of volunteers and compensated employees who serve as pawns to take the fall for every bad act. The report that follows presents evidence obtained from former ACORN insiders that completes the picture of a criminal enterprise.'' So they describe them as a criminal enterprise, and they describe them as to conceal a criminal conspiracy. A criminal enterprise, a criminal conspiracy. And these are some of the headings under the executive summary. ``First, ACORN has evaded taxes. ACORN has obstructed justice, engaged in self-dealing, and aided and abetted a coverup of the embezzlement by Dale Rathke, the brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke.'' And that embezzlement was $948,607.50, Dale Rathke embezzlement covered up by his brother, the founder, Wade Rathke, whom it appears provided misinformation to the counsel for ACORN and redirected--and it appears to be willful--to string it out and delay any kind of punitive action that would come to visit his brother, his brother Dale, who did embezzle the $948,607.50. And it seems to be beyond question that that happened, that some of the money was misappropriated to fill the hole in their accounting system. That is the first point. The second point is, ``ACORN has committed investment fraud, deprived the public of its right to honor services, and engaged in a racketeering enterprise affecting interstate commerce.'' Committed investment fraud. That is the second point. Third point, ACORN has committed a conspiracy to defraud the United States by using taxpayer funds for partisan political activities by having the equivalent of a slush fund, where dollars were moved around from corporation to corporation, affiliate to affiliate, resulting in get-out-the-vote efforts that may have had--and likely did have-- 501(c)(3) not-for-profit taxpayer dollars invested in them, but used for political and partisan purposes, Mr. Speaker. It says, ACORN forged both formal and informal connections with former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, also formal and informal connections with Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, and formal and informal connections with President Barack Obama, among others. ``Each of these campaigns received financial and personnel resource contributions from ACORN and its affiliates as part of a scheme to use taxpayer monies to support a partisan political agenda.'' A scheme to use taxpayer monies to support a partisan political agenda, Mr. Speaker. ``These actions are a clear violation of numerous tax and election laws.'' Another point, the fourth point, ``ACORN has submitted false filings to the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Labor, in addition to violating the Fair Labor Standards Act, FLSA. Committee investigators have tracked ACORN's numerous failures to comply with Federal laws that required the payment of excise taxes on excess benefits to Dale Rathke. SEIU Local 100--the Service Employees International Union--under the direction of ACORN founder Wade Rathke-- filed bogus reports with the Labor Department in order to conceal embezzlement.'' Now, all of this off of this report, this nonpartisan House of Representatives report that asked the question, ``Is ACORN intentionally structured as a criminal enterprise?'' dated July 23, Mr. Speaker. And fifth, ``ACORN falsified and concealed facts concerning an illegal transaction between related parties in violation of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA).'' ACORN falsified and concealed facts concerning an illegal transaction between related parties in violation of ERISA. Findings go on. They should pierce the corporate veil and do an investigation. Justice needs to do an investigation. And something that they point out is that, when ACORN crosses the line--which I don't think anyone questions they do--the individuals harmed are the low to moderate income workers whom ACORN was founded to protect. They hurt the very people that they were founded to protect. Dale Rathke's, the brother of the brother, embezzlement and the cover up are violations of ACORN's corporate duties, and they are fraud. The identities and roles of those involved must be disclosed. This goes on, Mr. Speaker. I have poked through this report. I have spent hours and hours over the last 4 to 5 years tracking ACORN. This report lists the 361 affiliates, and in there will be information on campaign contributions, who received what money. It will be easier to take that information and cross-reference it back to the FEC documents and follow the money. It will tell us a lot about what is going on. I think there's an indicator here that is pretty interesting. I have in my hand the ACORN celebration of 39 years. ACORN was founded in 1970. They held a celebration on June 17 of this year. And the celebration takes place at the National Education Association Atrium, probably birds of a feather. That is at 1201 16th Street Northwest, Washington, D.C. This is a celebration of 39 years of ACORN. And it is interesting that some of the people that are less than enthusiastic about doing the investigation of ACORN are invited to be headliners there at the ACORN celebration of 39 years. Now, I remember 39 years might be Jack Benny's year to celebrate, but 39 years is not a year ending in a zero or a five; so this must be the annual celebration of ACORN's founding. Who is there in the headline? Who is honored? Well, let's see, Senator Charles Schumer, New York, the number one headliner for the ACORN celebration, their annual celebration. I don't know that Charles Schumer has demonstrated a lot of enthusiasm to investigate ACORN. I can't imagine that would happen. The next one on the headline is Representative Luis Gutierrez, Chicago. Chicago politics. Chicago ACORN. Let me see, President Obama made his first political reputation in Chicago as an employee of Project Vote. He also represented ACORN in court a couple of times, some said pro bono. But in any case Project Vote, according to this report, this U.S. House of Representatives nonpartisan Government Reform Committee Congressman Darrell Issa report, dated July 23, 2009-- according to this report, it's indistinguishable between Project Vote and ACORN. They commingled their funds. They had dozens of accounts, and one affiliate that managed all the funds of all the affiliates, according to the report. But President Obama, according to all reports, Democrats and Republicans, made his political reputation working for Project Vote in Chicago. Project Vote, inseparable from ACORN, thought of as ACORN, and the head of Project Vote was also a top officer of ACORN in Chicago. Chicago politics. Remember Rod Blagojevich? He's listed in this report. Well, Chicago politics are listed in this annual celebration that ACORN held in this city in Washington, D.C., June 17, this summer, headlined by Senator Charles Schumer; Representative Luis Gutierrez; Representative Maxine Waters, who stood before an ACORN celebration and told them all that they were all going to get together and vote the Republicans, some certain part of their anatomy, out of office. So she has, in a partisan way, spoken before that supposedly nonpartisan organization. Now, of course, we know they are a partisan organization. ACORN is a get-out-the-vote machine. It's a fund-raising machine. It writes campaign checks by its affiliates to candidates, and the three people who headlined this, on the top of the list, Charles Schumer, Senator; Representative Luis Gutierrez; and Representative Maxine Waters, all tightly affiliated with ACORN, none of whom are very interested in investigating ACORN. And if we go down through the list, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Interesting. A number of interesting names. John Podesta, Henry Cisneros of the Clinton administration, recognized and patted on the back for their affiliation with ACORN. It is a sad day, indeed, when we see the corruption of our election politics, Mr. Speaker, and we see it done by an organization that is set up now with 361 affiliates. And, strangely, the Congress doesn't have enough curiosity in order to do an investigation, and the Justice Department doesn't have enough curiosity to do an investigation, and ACORN themselves admit that they produced over 400,000 fraudulent voter registrations in the last election cycle. Their goal was to register, they said, I believe, 1.3 million, and they admitted to producing and turning in over 400,000 fraudulent voter registrations. ACORN is under investigation in 12 to 14 States. Across those States, there have been at least 70 ACORN employees that have been convicted of some type of fraudulent activity. Most of it is voter registration fraud. ACORN itself in Nevada is under investigation/ indictment for election fraud. This isn't something that is an anomaly; this is a pattern. This is the MO, the mode of operations, of a criminal enterprise that is corrupting our election process. And we know it's for political gain. We know it's for the money machine that gets churned. They are linked together with the SEIU. I read that part. There is more to that as well. Those dollars pour into the coffers of Democrat candidates, not Republican candidates. ACORN then hires people and gets volunteers to go to the streets to turn out the vote, turn out the vote for Democrats, not for Republicans. I don't know of a case where we have ACORN out supporting a Republican unless it would be--let me just say for tonight I don't know of a case, although I've got something in mind. This is the headquarters, ACORN's headquarters, 2609 Canal Street, an Obama sign in the window, an ACORN sign on the outside. President Obama got his start in politics, in Chicago-style politics, with Project Vote, an arm of ACORN, that was registering people and turning out the vote. And he has since hired ACORN to turn out the vote. It was an ACORN affiliate to the tune of $800,000. And that fungible money, some of it was commingled into the same accounts and distributed out as if it's their own personal slush fund, Rathke's own personal slush fund, to build power in a power-based width. We have also the White House having reached out and signed an agreement with ACORN to help with the consensus. Now, any organization that can produce 400,000 fraudulent voter registrations can't be trusted to count the American people, not when there is political gain involved. This can be done without ACORN. There has since been a statement issued by the Census Bureau that they were not going to use ACORN. I have to see that to believe it. Are they not going to use any one of the 361 affiliates that are listed in this Government Reform report? I think it's going to be hard to see, no, they aren't. Are they not going to use any of the employees that work for them, Mr. Speaker? So let's not forget President Obama has been tied to ACORN since the first days of his political life in Chicago. He has worked for them; they have worked for him. He has hired them with campaign money, and they have contributed campaign money to him. President Obama is part and parcel ACORN. When the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, took interest in investigating ACORN and made such remarks in a Judiciary Committee meeting a couple of months ago, I was given heart that perhaps we would start to investigate ACORN. But 3 weeks later, the chairman came back in a public statement and he said the powers that be decided that there isn't enough evidence there to investigate ACORN. Now, who would the powers that be be that are more powerful than the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee? Would it be Speaker Pelosi or President Obama? Mr. Speaker, I am not convinced that it's necessarily Speaker Pelosi. But I point this image out. This is the cover of National Review magazine from March 23, 2009, this year. They put this image out here, Mr. Speaker, and I have just removed the letters so that it doesn't blur the image. It just says National Review on top, the date on the bottom, and whatever their headline story was. I take note to the logo on the shirt pocket of the polo shirt. That says it all, I think, Mr. Speaker. This is what we have going: we have a criminal enterprise that is being hired by the White House to help run the census that helped put the President in the White House, a massive organization that reaches into 43 States and the District of Columbia, that has engaged in a number that approaches a million dollars in embezzlement and covered it up for 8 years, 400,000 fraudulent voter registration forms, Federal tax violations, and violations of not-for-profit conditions on 501(c)(3) corporations that are being used for partisan purposes. And, Mr. Speaker, we have the image, we have the logo, and we have the national headquarters here at 2609 Canal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana, with the Obama sign in the window and the ACORN flag out on that side. Mr. Speaker, we have to investigate this organization. We have to bring the Judiciary Committee to bear and the Government Reform Committee to bear. We need the Justice Department to drill into this. No one single entity can unravel this spider web of 361 corporations. It must happen, or it will corrode and destroy this great constitutional Republic, the United States of America.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, pursuant to the Republican Leadership standards on earmarks, I am submitting the following information regarding earmarks I received as part of H.R. 3288, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010. Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King Bill Number H.R. 3288, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010 Account: Federal Highway Administration, Interstate Maintenance Discretionary Amount: $500,000 Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Iowa Department of Transportation Address of Requesting Entity: 800 Lincoln Way, Ames, IA 50010 Description of Request: The requested funds will be used to provide to the City of Sioux City to help it meet required funding obligations to the Iowa Department of Transportation for the relocation of utilities that will be required for IDOT to complete the reconstruction of Interstate 29 through Sioux City. The Iowa DOT has included the much needed reconstruction of Interstate 29 through Sioux City in the 2009-2012 State Transportation Improvement Plan. The goal of the I-29 improvement project is to enhance the safety and operation of Interstate 29 through Sioux City. A project of this magnitude has many challenges, including the need to relocate utilities existing within the Interstate 29 right-of-way, a very confined area in which to work, as the bluffs border the east side and the river borders the west side, as well as the challenge of staging a interstate project of this size. This project has been a priority for the region for many years. A needs study was jointly completed by the Iowa DOT, SIMPCO, and the City of Sioux City in 1997. The same three entities as well as the City of South Sioux City, NDOR, Dakota Dunes, and the SD DOT have participated in the current planning study started in September of 2004. The project has been identified in Iowa in Motion, Iowa's 5-year program, Siouxland Interstate Metropolitan Planning Council (SIMPCO) MPO TIP, Iowa STIP, SIMPCO ITS Architecture, and the past/present SIMPCO LRTPs. The City of Sioux City will incur costs in relation to the much needed reconstruction of Interstate 29. These costs include utility relocation, relocation, connections to the local street system, and aesthetic improvements. The total estimated cost for the project is approximately $250 million. Of this total amount, the City will likely be responsible for approximately $30 million. Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King Bill Number H.R. 3288, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010 Account: Federal Highway Administration, Surface Transportation Priorities Amount: $750,000 Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Iowa Department of Transportation Address of Requesting Entity: 800 Lincoln Way, Ames, IA 50010- Description of Request: The requested funding will be used to continue construction of four-lane US 20 in northwest Iowa. The Iowa Department of Transportation continues to devote significant funding toward completion of the final 90 miles of this expansion project. Activity ranging from grading to environmental study and design is taking place on each of the 90 miles, with nearly half of those miles in the IDOT's Five Year (Construction) Plan. The requested funds will assist in this critical project to increase traveler safety, economic development and stem population loss in one of the state's most productive regions by providing funding for the continued construction of four-lane highway 20 west of highway 71 in western Iowa.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, pursuant to the Republican Leadership standards on earmarks, I am submitting the following information regarding earmarks I received as part of H.R. 3293, Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010. Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King Bill Number H.R. 3293, Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010. Account: Department of Education, Higher Education Amount: $100,000 Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Briar Cliff University Address of Requesting Entity: 3303 Rebecca Street, Sioux City, IA 51104 Description of Request: The requested funds will be used to help fund the Nursing and Health Education Improvement Project at Briar Cliff University. Since 1930, Briar Cliff University has provided superior healthcare education to students, which has positively affected the quality of life for the citizens of the Siouxland region. Many healthcare professionals in the region were educated at Briar Cliff University. In keeping with this legacy, Briar Cliff University is inaugurating a new center for gerontology during 2009. In support of this program and the nursing and healthcare programs of the university, this project will provide state- of-the-art nursing simulation equipment, science laboratory equipment, and instructional technology (including distance learning technology) to enhance access and academic quality for students. Providing $200,075 to assist in this critical project will help ensure the quality of education for the healthcare graduates of the university and prepare well-qualified professionals in fields that serve seniors. Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King Bill Number H.R. 3293, Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010. Account: Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Amount: $350,000 Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Visiting Nurses Association Address of Requesting Entity: 300 West Broadway, Council Bluffs, IA 51503- Description of Request: The requested funds will be used to purchase home health monitors and to train nurses on best practices protocols for the management of chronic illnesses in seniors in the Council Bluffs area through the Visiting Nurses Association's Telehealth Program. The program has national and local significance. In Iowa, specifically the Council Bluffs area, many senior citizens suffer from heart failure, diabetes, and other serious chronic illnesses, contributing to millions of Medicare/Medicaid expenditures for costly care. The VNA's telehealth program demonstrates the capacity to save the Medicare/Medicaid program significant money. VNA estimates that the VNA telehealth program saved Medicare and Medicaid $932,500 with prevented emergency care and hospitalization costs since 2004. 2004--Estimated savings $198,620 2005--Estimated savings of $363,220 2006--Estimated savings of $370,660 2007--Estimated savings of $526,840 Total cost savings for Medicare and Medicaid are estimated to reach $1 million over the next 7 years. The intended benefits are significant: it will save lives; improve the quality of life for chronically ill seniors and their caregivers; reduce hospitalizations; and save federal funding and reduce nursing costs. The project will have direct economic and safety benefits. VNA telehealth program is a viable solution to the four most pressing concerns in healthcare delivery today including: (1) Skyrocketing healthcare costs; (2) Challenging chronic disease management; (3) The shortage of nurses; and; (4) Consumer & patient demand for more control over health care information and treatment. Research shows that the program save lives, improves the quality of life for seniors and their families, and it save millions of Medicare and Medicaid dollars. Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King Bill Number H.R. 3293, Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010. Account: Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration--Health Facilities and Services Amount: $150,000 Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Graceland University Address of Requesting Entity: 1 University Place, Lamoni, IA 50140- Description of Request: The requested funds will provide Graceland University with the resources necessary to establish a nursing patient simulation lab to train 80-100 nursing students every year. This lab will allow Graceland University to better prepare its 40 to 50 nursing graduates every year to enter the field and care for a diverse group of patients they may never have had the ability to care for without such technologies as simulation. This training will help to address the acute nursing shortage that the rural midwest is expected to experience in the coming years. Graceland also plans to make the lab accessible to other health care training programs in the area, including a school of osteopathy, fire departments, hospitals, area vocational health programs. This will allow for an even greater leveraging of the federal funds invested in Graceland's Nursing simulation lab. In addition, Graceland has requested funding to complement the new educational opportunities offered through the creation of its Nursing Simulation lab with the purchase of two pieces of lab equipment that play a key role in medical education and research: A Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometer (the forerunner of the MRI) and a Gas Chromatograph / Mass Spectrometer. Requesting Member: Congressman Steve King Bill Number H.R. 3293, Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010. Account: Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration--Health Facilities and Services Amount: $250,000 Legal Name of Requesting Entity: Iowa Western Community College Address of Requesting Entity: 2700 College Road, Council Bluffs, IA 51502- Description of Request: The requested funds will be used to increase the number of highly skilled nurses in the state of Iowa through continued development of Iowa Western Community College's Nursing Center of Excellence. Iowa Western Community College's graduates have passed the state nursing certification test on the first attempt, which is better than many of the states, as well as the region's, four-year institutions. Because Iowa Western Community College currently graduates many of the state's top dental assistants, dental hygienists, practical nurses, registered nurses, surgical technologists, medical assistants and emergency medical technicians, enrollment could be greatly increased to meet demand if the college had the necessary equipment and expanded faculties. Therefore, Iowa Western Community College proposes a new Iowa Western Nursing Center of Excellence, with multiple laboratories and high-tech equipment on which to train thousands of future nurses within the next decade. The college, community and private donors have recently committed at least $10,000,000 to the Center's construction. The college now reaches out to the Iowa congressional delegation to respectfully request that the laboratories be equipped with the finest nurse training technology available, which is expected to cost the college $1,560,901. The new laboratories and equipment will strongly enhance substantial job creation within Iowa, improve access to health care for Iowans and expand the creation of a scientifically qualified workforce in the medical and health services arena. By greatly enhancing the teaching environment, as well as the physical learning space and equipment, Iowa Western Community College will alleviate the region's nurse shortage and double the number of nurses it trains annually by 2013.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to clause 2(a)(1) of rule IX, I hereby notify the House of my intention to offer a resolution as a question of the privileges of the House. The form of my resolution is as follows: Whereas the gentleman from Iowa, Mr. King submitted an amendment to the Committee on Rules to H.R. 3293, the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010; Whereas the said gentleman's amendment would have required that none of the funds made available in this Act be made available to ACORN or any of its 174 known affiliates; Whereas, since 1994, ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and its affiliates have received $53,643,444.58 in taxpayer funding from the federal government; Whereas despite the trust placed in ACORN by taxpayers to act as a responsible steward of the funding provided to it, ACORN has proven itself to be an organization committed to breaking our laws and undermining our democratic political process; Whereas during the 2008 federal election cycle, ACORN mobilized its nationwide, grassroots organization in an effort to affect the outcomes of elections nationwide through voter registration campaigns; and Whereas ACORN is now under investigation in at least 14 states regarding allegations of fraudulent activities that were undertaken by the organization as part of its voter registration campaigns; Whereas ACORN was charged with voter fraud in Nevada; Whereas ACORN has admitted to submitting over 400,000 fraudulent voter registrations in the 2008 election cycle; Whereas, because of its alleged fraudulent behavior during the 2008 election cycle, it is important that ACORN be prohibited from receiving any additional taxpayer funding; Whereas the need to prohibit additional funding to ACORN led the Gentleman to submit his amendment to the Committee on Rules; Whereas the gentleman's amendment complied with all applicable Rules of the House for amendments to appropriations measures and would have been in order under an open amendment process, but regrettably the House Democratic leadership has dramatically and historically reduced the opportunity for open debate on this Floor; and Whereas the Speaker, Mrs. Pelosi, the Democrat leadership, and the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, Mr. Obey, prevented the House from voting on the amendment by excluding it from the list of amendments made in order under the rule for the bill: Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That H. Res. 673, the rule to accompany H.R. 3293, be amended to allow the gentleman from Iowa's amendment be considered and voted on in the House.

Mr. KING of Iowa

Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for his yielding and for his relentless work on the Rules Committee that has taken on a responsibility that goes beyond what was anticipated by the Founding Fathers or the tradition of this House. Mr. Speaker, 229 years, and Members are reduced to sitting in tiny little chairs with their elbows tucked into their waistline, not having room for their own staff to come in the room, sending e-mails out where the staff has congregated in order to get a piece of paper handed in that you might need to beg the Rules Committee to allow for an open debate here on the floor of the House of Representatives. This is the deconstruction of deliberative democracy. This usurps 229 years of tradition in this House, and it muzzles Members of the United States Congress and disenfranchises the people on this side of the aisle especially that represent over 600,000 people. I have offered, the number goes upwards of 40 amendments to the Rules Committee. Only two have been allowed to come to the floor. Both of them passed. In 2007, the last time we had a legitimate open rules process under appropriations, I offered something like 12 amendments; nine of them passed. I don't think anybody in Congress was successful in passing more amendments than I happened to have been myself, but my constituents have been muzzled by this. Today, my amendment that was offered would have cut off funding to the criminal enterprise ACORN in light of this report that came out of the Government Reform Committee that is about 82 pages long and now lists 361 entities that are affiliated with ACORN and claims that there has been systemic fraud, that they have created a paper wall, that they are a criminal conspiracy, that they have laundered Federal money, that they manipulated the elections and the electorate of the United States of America, that they have evaded taxes, that they have obstructed justice, that they have covered up embezzlement of $948,607.50 embezzled by the brother of the founder and covered it up for 8 years. The gross abuse of tax laws that is affiliated with that and other bookkeeping procedures, the documents they have from insiders, the definitive evidence that is here, this amendment needs to be allowed, and this rule needs to be voted on.