Tom Price

Mr. PRICE of Georgia

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Does the rule not provide on a unanimous consent request that there be no significant embellishment of remarks, and in fact the majority party has continued to embellish their remarks upon their UC request?

Mr. PRICE of Georgia

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Madam Speaker, health care at its very core is a compassionate and a moral human endeavor. As a physician, I can tell you that I never saw a Democrat or a Republican disease. The medical decisions that each American makes for themselves and for their families are some of the most important and personal decisions ever made, and there are principles of health care that we should follow. Think about those principles of accessibility and affordability and quality and responsiveness and innovation and choices. Think about those principles. None of those principles are improved by the further intervention of the Federal Government, which is why we should adopt and concentrate on positive, patient-centered health care reform. It is so very important that principles be in place that will ensure that patients and their families and their doctors are able to make those personal medical decisions unencumbered by a stifling and oppressive Federal Government. But sadly, this bill will not allow those independent decisions and is wrong in so many ways. This bill, on page 94, will make it illegal for any American to obtain health care not approved by Washington. This bill, on page 301, will force Americans to purchase health coverage that Washington picks, not that you select for yourselves. This bill, on pages 297 and 313, places job-killing taxes on virtually every single business. This bill, on page 211, will force millions of Americans to lose their current personal private health coverage. This bills comes with a price tag of $1.3 trillion, which will be borne by our children and our grandchildren. This bill, on page 520, slashes billions of dollars from Medicare that will necessitate health care rationing for seniors. And this bill, on page 733, empowers the Washington bureaucracy to deny lifesaving patient care if it costs too much. This bill is not a health care bill. This bill is an affront on the morality of the provision of American health care. As a physician, when patients and their families and their doctors are not allowed to independently decide what care should be provided, we lose more than our health care system; we lose our morality and we lose our freedom. This bill, whether known or not, is an oppressive affront to every single American. The positive vote, the bipartisan vote on this bill is ``no.''

Mr. PRICE of Georgia

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Madam Speaker, on rollcall Nos. 835, 836, 837, 838, 839 and 840 I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea'' on all.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, yesterday we learned an interesting thing: the Senate health care bill will include a fig leaf opt-out of the government-run health care plan. Now, that brings up some interesting points and questions: Will Americans also be allowed to opt out of the rest of the government takeover of health care? Will they be able to opt out of the $800 billion in tax increases? Will they be able to opt out of the $500 billion in slashes to Medicare? Will they be able to opt out of forcing millions of Americans onto government-run medicine? Will they be able to opt out of a government bureaucrat getting between doctors and patients? The truth is, Mr. Speaker, anyone who seriously thinks an opt-out is the answer to all of these harmful provisions has already opted out of reality. What the American people know is that there are positive solutions like H.R. 3400 and the others included from the Republican Study Committee and the Republican Conference. The American people want patients empowered and they want positive reforms. That's what we should be working on.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Madam Speaker, on rollcall Nos. 790, 791, 792, 793, 794, 795, 796, 797, I was unable to record my vote due to a family illness. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes'' on all.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Mr. Chair, on rollcall No. 801. I was unexpectedly delayed due to constituent business. Had I been present, I would have voted ``aye.'' Amendment No. 5 Offered by Ms. Kaptur

Mr. PRICE of Georgia

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I raise a point of order against H.R. 2647.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Pursuant to clause 10 of rule XXII that states that nongermane items may not be included in conference reports and that this bill contains a nongermane item in the hate crimes legislation that was included in it, I raise a point of order against H.R. 2647.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, many Members have grave concerns about the thought-crimes legislation that's included in H.R. 2647. Is there any way for any Member to gain a separate vote on the thought- crimes legislation included in H.R. 2647 under the rule?

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, further parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, because thought-crimes legislation is included in H.R. 2647, is there any remedy that a Member of the House has for gaining access to have a separate vote on the thought- crimes legislation?

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. I thank the Speaker.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Mr. Akin, I appreciate your leadership on this and always bringing truth to these issues on the floor of the House. As you mentioned, before I came to Congress, I practiced medicine. I was an orthopedic surgeon and took care of patients for over 20 years. One of the things that I recognize and certainly my patients recognize is that when the government gets involved in the practice of medicine, which is what they do when they stick their fingers in the pot, it confounds things. You had a chart up earlier on the machinations, the diagram of the plan. There it is. This chart is astounding to me. I have shared this with my town halls back home, any number of them, and what I ask folks to look for on that chart is not whether they can figure out all of the lines and boxes and squares and triangles, but I ask them to concentrate on the colors on the chart, because every single configuration on the chart is a new bureaucrat or new bureaucratic program. When they recognize that they say, Oh, my goodness, that is not what I want for my health care, because they know that already in place, either through the government or through the insurance companies, the bureaucrats make it incredibly difficult to get the kind of care that they desire. The good news is we don't have to move in that direction, and I know that we are going to talk about that some tonight, the solutions. There are positive solutions that put patients in charge. I appreciate you bringing that chart because it points out the increase in bureaucracy which will increase cost and decrease the quality of care, just that diagram right there.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. I appreciate that point because we do. We get calls from our constituents all the time to help people work through the morass of government bureaucracy in whatever arena. I get calls about the passport office or the post office or the IRS when they have a challenge with them. We may talk about that in a moment. If you think about just the calls that you get on Medicare and Medicaid and the VA health system itself, and some of our colleagues on the Indian Health Services, it is astounding the challenges people have just to get through, the ability to be able to be seen by a doctor and get the kind of care that they want. What this administration apparently wants and the Speaker wants is to turn all of us over to a bureaucracy that would increase certainly the number of folks calling our offices and trying to work through that bureaucracy because they will never figure it out because that is not the role of government to help them figure that out.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Wait a minute. Are you telling me that the Senate is about to vote on a health care bill and they don't even have a bill?

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. So the Congressional Budget Office is trying to figure out how much this is going to cost, and they don't even have the text of the bill before them to figure it out; is that correct?

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Now, this is, again, a very interesting point. So the President is saying that none of the monies in this health care bill will go to cover medical treatment on a non-emergency basis for folks that are here illegally. That's what the President says, right?

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. And then we have an amendment proposed by Mr. Heller from Nevada in committee that outlines the process that you'd go through to be able to make certain that that wasn't the case, and the amendment failed. And as I see on your chart there, the vote was taken on July 16. Fifteen Republicans voted in favor of it; 26 Democrats voted no. So 26-15, it failed because the Democrats apparently don't believe that you need to have any process in place to determine whether somebody's here legally. That's the only conclusion I can draw.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. If the gentleman will yield, there is a spot where folks can go to look at the amendments that were offered in committee. In fact, I think there were 57 or 58 of them that failed virtually along party lines. It's at the Republican Study Committee Web site if folks were interested in doing that, colleagues were interested in going to the Republican Study Committee Web site and looking up, and there's a document there that has all of the amendments that were offered on the Republican side of the aisle in the three committees of jurisdiction, and the vote that was taken, and in fact what it shows time after time after time, as the gentleman from Missouri so well knows, is that the statements that are made by the President and by Members of the folks in charge here, the Democrat party in charge, so oftentimes are at odds with the policy that they're putting in place. So they know what they want to tell their constituents, but in fact the policy that they put in place doesn't match what they're saying. And that's why I believe the American people have been so incredibly outraged over the past couple of months, because they don't see Congress doing what they say they're going to do or what they want them to do.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Does the gentleman yield?

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. This is a remarkably important amendment that was offered in committee because, as a physician, my patients would literally bristle at the knowledge that somebody was affecting what I could do for and with them. But this amendment, which was offered in committee, this is not conjecture. This actually happened. Was offered in committee. And it said that nothing in the bill would allow any Federal employee or political appointee, these are nonmedical people, to dictate, that's the language, to dictate how a medical provider practices medicine. And the vote, as I see there, was 23 Republican and one Democrat supported it, so that was 24. And 32 Democrats voted no, which tells me, the only conclusion I can reach from that is that the Democrats want Federal employees and bureaucrats to dictate to doctors how to practice medicine. That's the only conclusion I can draw.

Mr. PRICE of Georgia. Will the gentleman yield?