Christopher Murphy

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I want to talk about choice. In half the States in this country, there is one insurer that controls 50 percent or more of the market. In about 75 percent of the States, there are two insurers that control about 75 percent of the market. As Representative Edwards pointed out, for a lot of employees, they only have one option to begin with, even if their employer offers them insurance. I mean, this mythology that we've got a really competitive marketplace out there is just that, mythology. I think about my small employers in Connecticut. They just got notice about 2 weeks ago that the big gorilla in the room in our State, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, is going to increase their rates this year--get this--by 32 percent, a 1-year increase for individuals and small employers of 32 percent. Well, those small employers are going to look at Medicare, which this year will increase its costs by about 3 percent. They'll look at the health care plan that we're all on, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which is going to raise its rates by 3 or 4 percent. Some of the plans in our network are actually lowering costs this year. And they're going to scratch their heads when they hear the Republicans saying that they shouldn't have the option to buy into a publicly sponsored plan. They're going to say to themselves, What kind of choice is that for me if all I can do is stay on a plan that's going to raise my rates 30 percent, and these Members of Congress are on a plan whose rate of increase is 10 times lower? I want that choice. I want to be able to buy into that. And that's what it is, choice. Listen, we can talk about a lot of myths, a lot of fabrications that come from the Republican side. But one of them is this notion that anyone is going to be forced on to a particular health care plan by the Democrats' plan--that we hope will get some Republican votes in the end--just isn't true. We are simply saying to people that you get to keep the coverage you want, but if you want to go on to a cheaper plan that might be sponsored by the government, you have the option to do that. There is absolutely nothing in this bill that forces one single person in this country to make that choice. I'm going to tell you, faced with a 30 percent increase in Connecticut, there are going to be tens if not hundreds of thousands of people in my State who are going to be clamoring to get access to the same kind of health care that Members of Congress have, if it can save them some money.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. It's a good issue.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Well, congratulations, Mr. Ryan of Youngstown, on a very well-deserved accolade, and you know, in some way it's a good segue to what we're going to talk about tonight, which is the need for this Congress to pass health care reform that revitalizes our economy, that cuts the cost of providing health care to employees for the thousands of businesses in Youngstown, Ohio; in Connecticut; in Maryland that are right now struggling to match revenue with expenditures to cut the cost of health care for the millions of Americans who don't have it today and desperately need it, you know, cut the cost of health care for the Federal Government that right now is about to bankrupt itself through major increases every year in the amount of money that we have to put out for health care. So, listen, families in my district, they didn't figure out that this economy was in trouble when the banks did and the investment houses did last October, November. You know, they knew this economy was in crisis long before that when they saw their wages stay flat over the last 10 years while their employer heaped more and more of the cost of health care on their backs. They figured out that this economy was in trouble when they showed up to get an MRI and they were charged a $200 deductible. They found out this economy was in trouble when they went to get health insurance in the new town, new State that they moved into and found out because their daughter had a complicated preexisting condition that they were uninsurable and that they were going to bear the full cost of care for their family. Health care costs in this country, whether it be for individuals or businesses, have been weighing this economy down for way too long, and this health care conversation that we're having today, this bill that we hope to pass that we're going to talk a little bit about over the course of the next hour, is certainly about getting health care out to the people that don't have it in a country that is the richest and claims to be the most powerful in the world. There's just no reason why some little kid goes to bed at night sick just because his mom can't afford to get him to a doctor. That's just not right. But this is just as much beyond the moral considerations of conscience for a country that doesn't provide health care to those kids. This is about economic revitalization of this country, realizing that we are going to be forever at a competitive disadvantage, vis-a- vis the rest of the world, so long as we have a health care system that costs twice as much as every other country health care system. And what we need to talk about is, yes, the cost of the bill that we're proposing and the cuts that are in the bill to providers and what that means, but we're also going to talk about the cost of doing nothing. We're also going to talk about the cost of the Republican proposal which is to sit on our hands for another 10 years and let this health care system spiral out of control for families and businesses. We cannot afford as an economy to continue to allow health care costs to strangle us. It is a tough issue to take on. There's a reason why this Congress has gone 30 years without passing major structural health care reform. It's tough. There are a lot of special interests involved in this thing, but for families and for businesses in Youngstown, in New York, in Connecticut, in Maryland this is the right thing to do and the right time to do it. So I hope that over the course of the next hour we're going to talk about the need for health care reform, and we're going to talk a little bit about the specifics, and we're going to push back on not the myths that have been created from the other side, but frankly the outright fabrications that have come from our colleagues on the other side of the aisle and the pundits who talk on the air waves and radio waves at night and try to clear the record as to what this means for our constituents. So, with that, let me welcome my friend from Maryland, Representative Edwards, for joining us here this evening for this Special Order hour.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you, Representative Edwards. I think you're exactly right. There are just a lot of forces of ``no'' here. Frankly, it's not the first time we've seen it. When we tried to free this country of dependence on foreign oil, there were a whole bunch of people in this House of Representatives who said ``no.'' When we tried just 2 years ago--I mean, forget health care reform in the way we're talking about today. A couple of years ago in this House we just tried to extend health care coverage to 4 million more kids. Just 4 million more poor kids out there who just deserve a chance to get up healthy, on two feet, and learn every morning. We couldn't even get it to them. So there are a lot of people in this House who are against any change.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I thank the gentleman from Ohio. I do now want to welcome to the floor a good friend, Representative Tonko from New York, who is joining us, a new Member, and just been a great proponent of trying to get more people in his district insured and lower costs for the folks as well. Mr. Tonko.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Tonko, I think that if the Democrats had introduced a one-page bill that was a nice, pretty picture of a flower, the Republicans would have claimed that it was socialist medicine. It just didn't matter, right? It doesn't matter what is in the bill. A lot of our friends--not all of our friends, but a lot of our friends on the other side are going to scream, ``Government-run medicine and socialism'' because their pollsters have told them--and we got a 28-page memo from the top Republican pollster, Frank Luntz, who's laid it all out for them that if you want to kill health care reform, all you've got to do is go out there and shout, ``Government-run. Government takeover.'' And so there are friends on the other side of the aisle and those outside this House who want to stop health care reform who've never read the bill, who have just decided to shout some slogans to try to stop it.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Let me ask our good friend from Maine, Representative Pingree, to join us, somebody that I knew about long before she got here as a tireless advocate across this country and in her home State of Maine for health care reform. So I'm happy you're here to join us.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. It's amazing to me how we can all represent districts as different as they may be who are all struggling with the same problem. There are uninsured folks in every single one of our districts, whether they be affluent districts or poor districts, African American districts, Caucasian districts, whatever it may be. And the fact that some of the Members of this House come with no solution at all, no answer for their thousands, if not tens of thousands, of constituents who don't have health care, whose families who are amongst the 50 percent of bankruptcies that are caused by health care costs. We can have a constructive debate as to what the best solution is. But the debate right now, which is between something and nothing, Mr. Ryan, is just unbelievable to a lot of us that are hearing these stories back home.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. If you pick up that issue, you can also read about pet airways and the shiny object of the month as well.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I thank my friend. You know, I'm feeling pretty good. Something Mr. Ryan said must have really galvanized folks because we're getting a crowd down here. We've got a few minutes left, and I want to yield to my good friend from Virginia to kick in to help end our discussion here.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, we're here for the next 60 minutes to talk about the need to get health care, affordable accessible health care to all Americans; but before we do, I want to yield to my good friend from Ohio who's going to join us for this hour to share with us some pretty exciting news about his home district.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Let me just close our hour here with a quick story. A guy came to me at one of the supermarket office hours that I hold. He's a wallpaper hanger. He lost his job, and he's got diabetes. He can't afford his medication. He's just waiting for the day when he gets so sick that he's going to end up in the emergency room, cost his family a fortune, go into bankruptcy, and have their lives forever altered. We've got to have an answer for that guy and his family. And over the course of the next weeks and months, it's time for this Congress to step up to the plate and get health care for this country.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I thank my colleagues for the time. We will be back here as soon as we can to continue to push forward. With that, I yield back the balance of our time.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank Representative Grayson for his graciousness in allowing me to control the time on this bill. As he mentioned, this bill is the Frank Melville Supportive Housing Investment Act of 2009. This bill is a reauthorization and improvement of our Nation's existing section 811 supportive housing program. This House passed a nearly identical bill last year. It unfortunately didn't get past the United States Senate. So we reintroduced it and hope to see it through the full extent of the process this year. Before I talk a little bit about the underlying bill and the importance of the issue which it addresses, let me thank a few people. First, Chairman Frank and Subcommittee Chairwoman Waters have been instrumental over the last 7 years in helping us bring this very important bill to the floor, as well as Ranking Member Capito on the Republican side. But really the largest thanks is to my cosponsor in this legislation, Representative Biggert of Illinois. She has, for the full extent of her career, been a supporter of supportive housing, which I will describe as our Nation's most important housing program for individuals with physical and mental disabilities. I'm really honored to have been able to cosponsor this legislation with Representative Biggert and am very pleased that it's back before the House today. Mr. Speaker, what is the 811 program? The 811 program is this Nation's supportive housing program that allows for Federal funds to be used to build supportive housing for individuals with physical and mental disabilities. It is a program which has meant a great deal to an unfortunately limited number of individuals that have benefited from it. What is supportive housing? Supportive housing, very simply, is housing for individuals that have certain disabilities that allows them to live independently on their own leading full, productive lives in the communities with a small amount of community support around them. A unit of supportive housing, either on site or in the community, will have connected to it the job skills, the social work, the medication- adherence individuals and support services that are necessary for people that have complex physical or complex mental illness to be able to live on their own. These people can live in the community; they just need a little bit of help to do it. The measure of this government, the measure of this Nation is how we treat those amongst us who, through no fault of their own, have been born with a certain illness--whether it be mental or physical--that doesn't give them the access to the apparatus of opportunity the rest of us have. Supportive housing, which gives that fundamental life building block--a roof over your head, a bed to sleep in at night--to those individuals is one of the most important things that we can do as a compassionate Nation. The problem is that over the course of the last 5 to 10 years, the 811 program just has not been working. HUD tells us that there are 1.3 million individuals with disabilities in this country who are living in substandard housing. The 811 program, over the last several years, has only built about a thousand new units despite all of the resources that it has. And it is taking right now upwards of 6 years for a supportive housing project funded with 811 dollars to move from the application stage to the completion stage. This is unacceptable. Representative Biggert has been a great spokesperson for this for years, and the culmination of her work and the advocacy community's work is this legislation. This bill fixes the 811 program as well as reauthorizes it. It does this in a number of ways. First, it takes all of the vouchers that have traditionally been used to fund individuals who are looking for supportive housing, it takes those vouchers, which have been very inefficiently administered by the 811 program, and moves them to the broader section 8 program. The section 8 program is much better equipped to track these vouchers and make sure they are actually being used by people with disabilities. That has been a big problem through that program within the section 811 program. That money that is now freed up by moving those vouchers over into the section 8 program is now going to be used to build new units. That's really what we need to do here. We need to build more capacity in the system--1.3 million living in inappropriate living; we need more of it for them. It also will use that money in more creative ways. Instead of just building a full apartment complex with supportive housing in it, it's now going to work with developers who might have affordable housing projects currently underway to have them build in to that complex two or three or four or five units of supportive housing to allow for more scattered site housing throughout the community leveraging existing affordable housing projects to build in scattered site supportive housing projects. And lastly, it cuts a lot of the red tape and bureaucracy that has restrained applications from moving forward, chiefly by allowing State affordable housing agencies to do a lot of the bureaucratic work that right now is being performed by Housing and Urban Development here in Washington, D.C. We think that through the passage of this Act, we can triple the number of supportive housing units that are built across the country with this 811 program. And I think by doing so, we will do justice by the individual whose name is on this Act. Mr. Speaker, this Act is called the Frank Melville Supportive Housing Investment Act. Frank Melville was a constituent of mine. He and his widowed wife, Ellen, started the Melville Charitable Trust which funds much of the affordable housing and supportive housing advocacy work in the Northeast and throughout this country. Frank Melville is no longer with us, but this bill--which we hope to pass today and bring to the Senate for its consideration--does justice to his legacy. I commend this bill to the House for passage. I think it is going to do so much to live up to the initial promise of this Nation's commitment to individuals with physical and mental disabilities. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, just briefly to close. In Connecticut during the course of my work in the State legislature, a lot of us would occasionally don a button that said ``keep the promise.'' That was a reminder to us that when we deinstitutionalized those with mental illness, that we had a promise to them to make sure that they had humane and responsible housing in the community. This bill I think does just that. It helps us keep that promise to those people living with mental and physical disability that we are going to find them appropriate and supportive housing in the community. I thank Representative Posey for his support and Representative Biggert for her advocacy. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you very much, Representative Speier. Thank you for drawing attention to what this reform effort that we're talking about here tonight means, not just to these people that you're talking about that have been denied coverage for preexisting conditions, but what it means to all the folks that have insurance out there. If I had a dime for every person I've run into that has talked to me about the fact that, you know what, they're not really happy in the job that they're in. They want to go do something else, or that they really have a great idea, a business that just has been germinating in their mind and they want to go out and start it, but they can't leave their current job. They can't go out and start that business because they're going to lose their health care because their daughter is sick and they've got some health care for her now, but if he leaves or she leaves and goes out and does what they really want to do with their life, or starts that small business, that they're going to lose that health care coverage. There are millions of Americans who have health care today and are trapped, are trapped in their job, are trapped in their place of employment, because they can't dare lose the coverage that they have. Now, in the most powerful country in the world, in the beacon of freedom from around this globe, that kind of servitude to your employer, just because you have insurance that you can't leave, just doesn't seem right. But it also is just absolutely silly economic policy. Think of all of the innovation that we're stifling. Think of all of the great entrepreneurs who never get to go out and invent, who never get to start that business because they can't leave the insurance that they have. So this really is fundamentally about trying to make health care for those that have it more meaningful, more real, but also more flexible. And I thank you for drawing attention to this issue. Well, we are blessed to have with us on the floor Representative Ryan. We were talking earlier. This is kind of a hybrid health care hour/30-Something hour, and one of the things we're talking about here, Mr. Ryan, is that this is hard; right? This is a big problem. We've got one the most confusing, most complicated health care systems in the world, and we're going to take on a very complex and convoluted system at a lot of different angles. So the bill that is going to come out is going to be big. It's going to have a lot of pages to it, because in order to tackle a really complicated and confusing health care system, you have to have the guts to think big. You've got to take on all of the various problems that have been created in this system, whether it be high cost health plans, preexisting condition exclusions, post-claims underwriting, all of the various tricks of the trade that insurers and others have used to try to make money and exclude people we've got to take on and do things with. But it also makes it really easy for folks who are critical of health care to just sit back and say, Well, what you're proposing isn't any good, and we're just going to sit back and criticize rather than propose alternatives. And that seems to be the dynamic once again that's playing out on this floor, that the Democrats are going to offer real solutions, real opportunities for this country to move forward on health care, and we're going to be met with opposition that defends the status quo and really doesn't offer alternatives. So we're here tonight to----

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. You know, there are a lot of really great companies out there who have figured this out. I think of a company in my State, Pitney Bowes, who has been a leader in health care reform because they've figured out over time how much money they were losing to sick workers, how much productivity they were losing because they had a health care plan that somebody else was administering out there that had a financial incentive to deny care. So they decided that they were going to take on their health care plan themselves, that they were going to put health care clinics in their facilities, that they were going to put health care close to their employees, that they were going to give rewards to employees that worked out, that invested themselves in keeping themselves healthy. There are companies out there that have figured out really great models to provide better health care, more immediate onsite care for their employees; and they have benefited not just because they feel good about keeping their employees healthy but because their bottom line has been strengthened by the fact that their employees are healthier, showing up for work more often and ready to produce and ready to compete. You mentioned the fact that this health care system is going to bankrupt this economy. Right now we're spending 17 percent of our GDP on health care, and economists are telling us that in the not so distant future $1 out of every $3 that we're spending in this country is going to be on health care. That is just unsustainable. But on a much more local level, these are personal bankruptcies too. We think of bankruptcy in this country as, you know, being somebody that went out there and bought too many snake oil securities or made a real bad bet in a real estate investment and then all of a sudden they've gone belly-up. No, Mr. Ryan. You know this. Half of the bankruptcies in this country, half of the families that have to go into bankruptcy do so because they had an unexpected medical cost, a cancer or a terminal disease that bankrupted their family. Lives, families devastated through no fault of their own, just because they got sick and they either didn't have insurance or they had insurance that wouldn't cover the full extent of the illness. The dirty little secret out there is that a lot of insurance plans, you may not know this because it is in the fine print, have a lifetime limit on the amount of money they will spend on you. So you're okay until you get really, really sick. But for that 1 or 2 percent of people that are spending millions of dollars on their care over their lifetime, your insurance runs out even if you think that you have it So this is about individual people whose lives are shattered, shattered by having expenses that they can't control. That is what this health care reform is about as well, Mr. Ryan.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I thank you for joining us here. We will be down here talking about this because it is so important to get health care for America. As you said, our friends on the other side of the aisle had 8 years to get this done. And people may say, well, Mr. President, you're taking on a lot really quickly. But we are paying for the costs of inaction. We are paying for the costs of a Republican Party which for whatever reason decided not to do much about the cost of our health care system. And we are going to get this done. We are going to get this done so that nobody loses their livelihood, nobody loses their access to the apparatus of opportunity just because they get sick and can't afford to treat themselves. We are going to lower the cost of doing business. We are going to lower the burden of the cost of living for families, and we are going to do it this year. And with that I yield back.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I thank the gentleman who has been such a great leader on this for a very long time. I think he is right. This is our moment. But it's no coincidence that it's taken a long time to get here because there are a lot of forces that are aligned against health care reform happening here. For whatever reason, for a long time they had control of the levers of power down here. The folks that have been doing very well off the status quo have stopped health care reform from happening here for a long time. There are a few individuals out there who are running some of the big health care companies, who are down on Wall Street, who have made their fortunes off this health care system. But what's happened is they've priced their products, whether it be a drug or a medical device or an insurance plan, to such an expensive degree that people can't afford to get it; and so the cost of their fortune ends up being people's lives, people's health. So it is no coincidence that it's taken us this long to get here. There are powerful interests that are aligned against getting health care to people that don't have it.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Ryan, it is not that we are not going to ask people to contribute to the cost of health care. We are talking about caps on the amount of money that you're going to contribute. But we are still going to expect people to step up to the plate and pay for part of health care, to have a little bit of exposure and scratch in the game themselves. And that is important. It is important to have shared responsibility. Nobody is talking about the government coming in here and either taking over our health care system in general or paying for everybody's health care or even asking insurance companies to pay for 100 percent of health care. We want individuals to have some scratch in the game. We just don't want it to end their lives.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. That is absolutely right. As I was saying earlier, some of that cost is sort of invisible to people because all of the money that we send to emergency rooms to cover the uninsured, all of the extra medicine that is being practiced out there that doesn't need to be practiced that we're paying for through our Medicare and Medicaid systems is buried in the people's tax bills. The wages that people never got because their employers took all of the extra money they earned that year and sent it to the insurance company to pay for their increased premiums. So that increase in the health care system that we're going to see if we don't enact health care reform is visible in some places, to some people out there, and it is invisible in other places. I just see no way to get this economy back up and running unless we take on the high cost of this health care system. Now it's one thing to sort of be for cutting costs in our health care system. We heard a lot of people on the Republican side of the aisle talk in unison with us about cutting cost. It's another thing to be for things that cut cost. I want to talk for just one second about the element of the Democratic plan that saves our health care system about $100 billion over the next 10 years and is giving small employers and individuals the option, if they want to, to buy into a government health care plan--you know, not unlike the one that you and I have access to or the Medicare plan that lots of other folks have access to. All we're saying is that people and businesses should have the choice to go out there and buy a not-for-profit government-sponsored health care plan. If they think that their private insurance is better, then stay there. But if they think that maybe they'll do better on a government plan which costs less because it doesn't have to pay the big CEOs' salaries, it doesn't have to return big returns to shareholders, if they think they'd be better off there, let them go there. And our nonpartisan budget office has told us that that's going to save the health care system about $100 billion a year. The Commonwealth Fund, a nonpartisan research group, estimates that an individual might be able to save $1,100 a year by choosing that government-sponsored health care option. Now it's up to them whether they want to do that. But we are hearing from both our budget experts here and our budget experts outside of this building that there are real cost savings. That's why when we're looking at surveys on this issue of whether or not the public wants to have the option to buy into a public health care plan, every single survey they have done shows that 65, 83 percent, 76, 72 percent want that option. In fact, on this chart the most remarkable thing is that the highest survey here, the survey that shows 83 percent of people wanting the option to buy into a government-sponsored health plan, that survey was done by a group called EBRI, which is essentially all of the major institutional health care companies' research arm. So even when the groups out there that are a little bit more skeptical about health care reform do a survey, they find the same thing that everybody else finds. So listen, I think that there could be some real bipartisan agreement here on cutting costs. But it's one thing to stand up on the House floor if you are a Republican and say that you want to cut costs. It's another thing to actually be for legislation that does it, that actually implements cost-cutting measures.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Absolutely.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Let me go back to a number that I used at the outset of this hour. Over the last 10 years, a time during which the Republicans had control of this House and the Senate and during which the Republicans had control of the White House, the employers in my district saw health care costs go up by 120 percent. Now, they've had a lot of things increase during that time. Frankly, Mr. Ryan, the only thing that competes for that are energy costs, probably during that same time, depending on what oil was costing from coming abroad. Energy prices might have gone up by 120 percent, but nothing else has increased by 120 percent. That is an unsustainable rate of growth for our employers, and it puts them at a tremendous disadvantage vis-a-vis the rest of the world. We live in a global economy today. If we want to go back and diagnose all of the reasons that our economy, essentially, went into a free fall at the end of last year-- and that were abated at the beginning of this year, in part, by the actions that this Congress took--you've got to look at health care costs. You've got to look at the fact that $1,500 of every car produced in this country can be accounted for just with regard to retiree health care benefits. That number is essentially zero for their competitors in Asia or in Europe. This economy is weighed down by a health care system that costs twice as much as every other health care system in the rest of the world. So, if we want to talk about economic revitalization, if we want to talk about making this country globally competitive again and about coming out of this recession stronger than we were when we went back into it, then we've got to do something about costs. We spent some time today in our committee, Mr. Ryan, with the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. They outlined for us the economic effects of our bill, and they made it very clear: The reforms that are outlined in our bill are going to lower the costs of health care insurance for individuals and for employers, that the menu of options that we are going to present, an increased menu of affordable options for businesses and for individuals, is going to lower the costs of health care. In an era where most businesses are crossing their fingers and are hoping and praying that this year's premium increase is only 10 or 11 percent, a decrease in cost is almost unthinkable for those businesses, and it's central to why we're doing health care reform.

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut

Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, yesterday we had the historic introduction of our health reform act. This bill is going to fundamentally improve care for Americans, for people that have insurance but also for people that don't. Importantly, this legislation includes a robust public health insurance option. The cost of health care insurance is just too high for people that have it and businesses that are paying for it, and the public health insurance option is going to be one of our most effective ways to bring the cost of insurance down. Don't take my word for it. Take a study by the Commonwealth Fund that shows that premiums for individuals can be reduced by 25 percent by the pressure put on private insurers by a public health insurance option. That's why studies show that 70 percent to 80 percent of Americans want the option to purchase a public insurance option because it will lower their costs, both as individuals and as employees of businesses throughout this country who are paying far too much for health care. Mr. Speaker, I encourage us to take a serious look at a very, very important health care bill that's been introduced before us.