Thomas Perriello

Mr. PERRIELLO

Mr. PERRIELLO. Not to jump to the end of that story, but before we go on, I do believe when you instituted those reforms in your State, the premium rates increased at one-fifth, one-tenth of the rate of the rest of the country; is that correct?

Mr. PERRIELLO. This is a year when there's a lot of demand for bipartisanship. And bipartisanship is a wonderful thing. We already have bipartisan support for this bill. Now, bipartisanship can't be defined by those who want to hold Congress hostage and prevent us from getting anything done. We already have the unanimous support of the Attorneys General in 2007 as you mentioned, not a single dissenting voice in saying this needed to be repealed. This is not a Federal takeover. The Attorney Generals both want the resources to fight this, and they want the expanded jurisdiction. We have 95 percent of our health care markets highly concentrated. President Bush called a bipartisan blue ribbon commission together to look at the issue of antitrust exemptions, and they came back and said there is no justification for these antitrust exemptions to exist. Any arguments that are being made are anachronistic, or are simply ones that only make sense inside the Washington Beltway. This is something where we need Main Street values, not Washington collusion, to go and challenge these monopolies and get competition back in the market. I yield back.

Mr. PERRIELLO. As my coauthor from Colorado mentions, this isn't about being anti-insurance. This is being pro-competition and pro- consumer. It is well past time to put the patient first in the health care system. We heard during the last hour some of our colleagues from the other side of the aisle talking about the need to protect the doctor-patient relationship. What decade are they living in? The doctor-patient relationship has been invaded for decades now. My sister who is a pediatrician many days spends more time on the phone with the insurance company than she spends with patients, insurance companies whose profit motive is based on denying people care, not providing people with care. In a good, competitive market, the insurance companies will profit based on providing quality insurance and coverage to patients, not by highly concentrated markets. This is about putting that doctor back in control of care, instead of that insurance company back in control of care, because through the free market, we can ensure that consumers are moving towards the insurance companies that provide that kind of quality care. So this is about being pro-consumer and about being pro- patient and pro-competition. With that I yield.

Mr. PERRIELLO. The gentlelady from Colorado spoke about the issue of fairness as a basic principle. One of the things I hear so often back home is why should there be one set of rules for the people who write checks to politicians and another set of rules for our businesses back home who are working so hard just to keep people employed? The fact is there shouldn't be a different set of rules for the insurance companies just because they've been lobbying for 65 years in this town. Competition should apply. Monopoly protection should apply. People will hear this week, as this debate plays out, fancy words about safe harbor and this exemption and that exemption. They're sick of Washington providing safe harbors for those who have contributed the most to political parties. Four hundred million dollars in lobbying just last year alone. Now that $400 million in lobbying from the health insurance industry didn't come because they said, You know, those politicians are on tough times. They just aren't getting enough money. There's not enough money in Washington. We feel like we should offer them $400 million. They were doing it because they want to protect their monopolies. I just got back from a week in South Side, Virginia where we've seen job loss after job loss. One of the things that I heard from workers so often was--I was talking to a guy who just got laid off from Stanley. He was saying, I nearly made $40,000 back 20 years ago. Then I was down to $30 an hour and then down to $20 an hour. And now I just got fired from a job or laid off from a job for $11 an hour. Now, there are many things. We need to look at our trade policy. We need to see ``Buy America'' not to be a bad word or a bad phrase in this country anymore. But I also hear from workers all the time with this issue saying, you know, I remember when I used to go in at the end of the year and ask for a raise. Now I don't even ask for a raise. I just ask to hold on to my health care benefits. That's not because these business owners are bad people; they're great people. They're bending over backwards to try to ensure that they're able to keep their workers on the payroll and keep them with health care. The reason they haven't offered a raise to their workers in so many years is because that money that would have gone to a raise is going to the increased premiums for their health insurance just to keep people insured. There is a direct correlation where people aren't seeing that increase. Not only are they seeing their out-of-pocket health expenses go up, but that amount they don't see that their employer is paying has been going through the roof as well. So we are crushing the competitiveness of American business because we aren't forcing the health insurance companies to compete. This is a basic principle that gets back to that purchasing power of working class and middle class Americans who are so often coming up to me and saying, Who is looking out for us? It seems like everything is going to the big guys. Who is still fighting for working class and middle class Americans? Well, here is a two-page bill, 24 lines long, that stands up for working class and middle class Americans by saying we are going to force the biggest health insurance companies in this country to compete for your business. And that competition is going to mean lower costs and higher quality. We need to put working and middle class folks ahead of the health insurance lobbyists and the health insurance companies. And with that, I yield to the gentleman from New York.

Mr. PERRIELLO. I think one of the reasons why Ms. Markey and I have enjoyed working on this bill together so much is that we both are home in our districts every weekend. We have done a lot of town hall meetings. We have done a lot of roundtables with doctors and nurses and patients. We both come from districts that have a lot of Republicans, Democrats, and a whole lot of Independents as well. And I think we heard a lot of things. We hear a lot of things over and over again. One is, What happened to common sense? Well, this bill is a simple, pro-competition, get rid of the monopoly protections, make them play by the same rules bill. It is common sense. People say, Why the partisanship? Why can't we get together? As you said, the attorneys general from all of the States, not a single dissenting vote, said they want this. They want this increased power to go after the monopoly. And they know that they need some of the resources and support to get this done. President Bush's bipartisan commission came back and said there is no longer any reason why this should exist if ever such a reason existed. So this is a bipartisan idea. You mentioned former Senator Trent Lott as well. People said, what about a bill we can read and understand? Two pages, front and back, 24 lines, simple English. Lots of attempts to water this down, to add lots of legalese. No, this is a commonsense bill. People say to us, why is it that the special interests seem to win out over working and middle class families? Why can't we get a victory for working and middle class families over the special interests? Well, that $400 million the insurance lobby spent last year was to protect this monopoly, and we are saying no to that lobbying influence, we are saying we are going to put working and middle class people ahead. Finally, we have a simple choice, not one of these gray-area D.C. decisions. Tomorrow there will be a simple choice: Do you stand with patients and do you stand with competition, or do you stand with the profiteering and monopolies of insurance companies? It's a simple choice. Sometimes in this city it can get as muddled up as bad as the traffic, the logic and the morality, but it's a simple choice: Do you stand with patients, or do you want to protect the monopoly profiteering of the insurance companies? Now, not all insurance companies are bad. There are lots of great companies out there. If you are not engaged in monopolistic practices, you have nothing to worry about. But if you are sticking it to consumers and colluding, beware, because common sense is going to win out here with a simple two-page bill that is going to repeal those monopoly protections and put patients and consumers first.

Mr. PERRIELLO. We can make a difference tomorrow. We can make a difference in forcing competition in the health care market. We can also make a difference in starting to restore some of the trust in this body and in Washington. People across this country do not trust Congress, and that's for good reason. They always hear about the special interests coming out ahead. Here is a simple, simple thing: Two pages, 24 lines long, which simply say that health insurance companies, which are some of the biggest companies in the world, should have to play by the same rules. If the plumbers in my district got together and started to set prices, they'd go to jail. Why is it that the health insurance companies should be able to play by a different set of rules? People are always saying there are these commonsense reforms out there. Why can't we get them done? Well, Ms. Markey and I have come together and have taken that idea. It's not our idea. It came from the people in our districts, from conservatives and liberals alike, who agree that restoring competition and removing monopoly protections make sense. When we have seen premiums double in the last 10 years, crushing the purchasing power of working and middle class Americans, that's real for people. When you don't have to compete, the consumer loses. So people ask, Why can't you get these basic things done? Well, this is a chance not just to do something good in the health insurance market but to show the American people we can come together. We already know this is a bipartisan bill. All of the attorneys general, without a single dissenting vote, have said this is something we support. We want to be able to go after these monopolies. Jury after jury, juries of the American people, have found this has been going on only to be overturned by the judges who say, Sorry. Because of McCarran-Ferguson, those basic monopoly rules do not apply. The antitrust rules do not apply. This is a chance for us to do a simple two-page bill that puts patients ahead of the profiteering of the insurance companies. It doesn't say the insurance companies can't continue to make lots of money. They can. We're just saying you can't do it by colluding, by price-fixing and by doing the sorts of things that, since Teddy Roosevelt, we've put our foot down in this country and have said are anticompetitive behaviors. It should be a great chance for everyone in this body to show the people back in their districts: I'm here to represent you, not to represent the lobbyists who write the checks, not the $400 million that the insurance lobby spent last year in this city. It's a chance to say, I'm going to stand up for patients. This is not going to fix the entire health care problem, but why wouldn't we start with this? We know it has bipartisan support from the attorneys general. We know it has that bipartisan support from the President Bush commission that came out and said this needs to be done. It moves us in the right direction to put patients and doctors back in the driver's seat. It allows us to restore the basic sense of competition in this country. It says, for once, working and middle class families are going to come out ahead of the special interests. Consumers are going to come out ahead of the greed mentality that you talked about before. We can do this. The American people sent us here to do this--to listen and to find ideas which are not Republican or Democrat but which are fundamentally American ideas and to institute them. We will need to continue to have a debate about health care reform beyond tomorrow, but let's show the American people tomorrow, on the eve of this health care summit, that there are ideas we can come together on. We have that chance. So I come in to tomorrow with a great hope, with a great hope not only that we will get this bill passed but that it will restore a basic sense of competition and that it will put patients first. Maybe this could be the first step towards coming together in the health care debate to get things done, because people are in pain out there right now. We have lost millions of jobs. Yes, we took bold action a year ago to help stabilize the economy, but that's not enough. I'm not satisfied. We need economic growth. So I appreciate the work that Ms. Markey has put into this, that Chairwoman Slaughter and that Congressman DeFazio have put into this, and I thank the others who have fought this good progressive fight for so long. I look forward to seeing this through to completion tomorrow, and I thank you all for being part of this important, important fight.

Mr. PERRIELLO

Mr. PERRIELLO. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. PERRIELLO

Mr. PERRIELLO. Madam Speaker, I rise today as one of many freshmen who will be speaking during this hour because a little over a year ago, we came in on a wave of change. Many of us came into politics for the first time, certainly to the Federal Government for the first time, because we believed this country needed a new kind of politics, not just a politics of right or left, but a politics of right and wrong. For too long, both parties had failed to rise to the challenges of our time. Energy independence, redefining our competitive advantage--there were so many challenges to take on. And a year later, we are not satisfied. Tomorrow night, the President of the United States will come and join us here in this body to speak and give us a report on the state of the Nation. Well, the Nation is in pain. Working and middle class families are in pain, and we haven't done nearly enough to show people the results of standing up for the working and middle class. There are many things that the change was about, but certainly at the heart of it was a desire for a new era of accountability, accountability for the private sector, accountability for government, and even accountability for consumers and bad decisions that had been made. But most importantly to this was a need to shift our economic policies from speculation on Wall Street to job creation on Main Street. Changing the name plate on the door from Hank Paulson to Tim Geithner does not represent a change of economic policy. We need to understand what it will take to have actual economic accountability and job growth in this country. We believe in this House, the people's House, we have taken dramatic steps to put working class and middle class people ahead of the most powerful among us. But the pain continues. In my district over the last 5 years we have seen people's utility rates go up 93 percent by Appalachian Power and others. We get calls every day, 20 percent increases in their health insurance premiums, bank fees, credit card fees, Comcast fees, all going through the roof while the working and middle class pay the price. We have taken steps here to stand up and say someone is going to stand up for Main Street, demand that accountability and that economic relief that we thought was part of the change. We hope tomorrow night to hear more about your willingness to lead in these areas. But we also must switch this focus to Main Street because we are in a jobs crisis. We need a wartime-like mentality of how serious this job crisis is. And we took dramatic efforts a year ago that have helped to stop the bleeding, to help turn from some of the most dramatic job losses in American history, certainly modern American history under the last administration, to stopping that bleeding so that we could begin the recovery. But we know much more needs to be done. We are not satisfied. I hear time and time again the banks are still not lending. If we need to do direct lending, if we need to do more to get the lending going to small and medium-sized businesses, we have to understand that in America's economy today two-thirds of job creation comes from small- and medium-sized business. They may not have the political power and control over both parties in this town, but small- and medium-sized businesses create that job growth. We need to get job creation on Main Street through direct lending. We also need to see the kind of investment in our infrastructure not only because it puts people to work today, but because it rebuilds America's competitive advantage. The hardworking, proud people of my district would rather collect a paycheck for building something than an unemployment check for sitting home. People want to work. They don't want those holes in their resume. And we know we are being outcompeted. So this is a jobs crisis. But it also goes to the heart of restoring the capitalistic innovation in this country. We saw a policy under the last administration of rewarding failure with bailouts. Many of us wanted a change in that policy. We are not satisfied with what we have seen. We cannot have the strength of our private sector when we continue to reward failure instead of innovation. The people's House has taken bold moves to ensure the kind of accountability that will restore the very heart of our capitalism. We know that the other side put in place many of the policies that created this problem, but it is not enough to point the finger. Let us be judged not by what the other side did to get us here, but by what we did to get us out of this economic mess. Many of us came here, we are working a double shift every day and will not rest until we see the kind of job creation and rewards for innovation that the American people deserve. That is why many of us came here. And we are not satisfied. We want to continue being that change, demanding that kind of shift from speculation on Wall Street to job creation on Main Street. With that, I yield to the gentleman from Ohio.

Mr. PERRIELLO. Let me yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. PERRIELLO. Thank you very much. I think it is important to remember we have got to rebuild jobs in this country that are between $6 an hour and six figures. There still has to be a middle class, a working class in this country. We have to respect those jobs, remember that we have lost jobs in construction, we have lost jobs in places where people want to go back to work. The jobs bill we passed here was a good start. We need to be bold in our willingness to both put people to work and recreate our competitive advantage. Even before the Great Recession, even before some of the horrible fiscal decisions of the last administration we had been getting outcompeted around the world. We have got to make the investments in our infrastructure, in our small-and medium-sized businesses, and education and workforce development so that we can outcompete any country. We are more innovative than any country on earth. We will continue to do that. But we cannot do it when we have a corporate capture of this body that means we reward failure instead of rewarding innovation. That must be the key. With that, I yield to the gentleman from Vermont.

Mr. PERRIELLO. One thing I just want to add on that before I move to the gentleman from Colorado is to say anyone who has run a business or a household knows the difference between an expenditure and an investment. Going out to the movies is different than investing in a solar panel or retrofitting your home. Now is the time where we need to be investing. We can do that through some of the retrofitting of both our commercial and residential stock. We can do that by investing in our workforce development and by getting that lending, again, to small and medium-size business. There has been a thought among some of the elites in this country that we can continue to prosper without building anything, without growing anything. At some point, we have to be creating value in the system. Our financial sector is extremely important, and it will be strong if there are good rules in place that allow for predictability. But we also must remember the industrial and agricultural sectors. These are not things of a bygone past, though sometimes in this city and on Wall Street that is forgotten. These remain major drivers of economic growth, major drivers of employment; and we must have an economic development strategy in addition to a financial sector strategy. Some of the things that continue to change and set us back, I believe the gentleman from Colorado wants to address, are not just in this building but perhaps across the street. With that, I yield.

Mr. PERRIELLO. I thank you for those comments. We can't say enough about how disastrous this decision is, not just for the political system in terms of corruption of the political system, but really a threat to the private sector itself, when the biggest corporations are able to capture government, as we have seen in the years past. What they do is they try to lock in the status quo that is the very antithesis of capitalism, which is about innovation and competition. When you are able to buy the referees on the field, you no longer have a decent game. We will outcompete and win on that fair battlefield, on that fair sports field, but you cannot do it when they are buying the referees. And anyone who thinks that money has no influence in politics may need to have a little wake-up call. This is a disastrous decision that goes against decades of precedent. Many out there who decry judicial activism, this is not only overthrowing decades of precedent but a decision just 6 years earlier that had come down the opposite way which looks dangerous in terms of what it means for our Supreme Court. But, again, I think you do a good job of pointing out exactly what it means for the private sector. I will go to the gentleman from New York and then the gentleman from California.

Mr. PERRIELLO. What the gentleman talks about here is so important. We have to have the courage at this moment not just to think about how we survive the next quarter, but how do we thrive in the next quarter of a century, How do we compete again. And spending $1 billion every day on oil that goes overseas to some of the countries that hate us the most is one of the dumbest strategies imaginable, $1 billion every day out of this country. Let me brag on Southside, Virginia for a moment before I go on, because we are at the cutting edge of the new energy economy. Just last week, we worked with one of the biggest dairy farmers in the State, and we are going to turn cow manure into power. So instead of having all the effluence go off into the Chesapeake Bay and annoy neighbors with the smell and be a costly thing that makes milk more expensive, we are going to invest in an anaerobic digester that is going to turn that into power, not only fuel the entire farm, but also much of the town around it. I say to farmers who say, How are my kids going to make it with the utility bills that these monopoly utilities are jacking up on us--a 93 percent increase in my area in the last 5 years--I'd say, I don't want you to have a power bill at all. In 5 years, I hope you're selling power in the same way that you're selling milk today. We have a truck stop owner in my district who's figured out a way. After 9/11, he said, You know, I'm nothing but a front man for al Qaeda. I'm selling their product. Instead, I want to sell an American product. He's worked with farmers in our area to use canola oil to sell a premium diesel fuel--a premium fuel, not a low-grade fuel--and instead of 3 cents on every dollar staying in the county, which is what happens in a normal truck stop, 93 cents on every dollar is staying in our community supporting farmers, supporting the refining. One of the poorest communities in Virginia, highest unemployment, we're working in their landfill to capture the methane, turn it into power so we can reduce power bills for low-income residents and make it more attractive to business. This is what other countries are daring to do, and we've always been better at it. We've got to dare to be better at it if we're going to be ahead. With that, I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. PERRIELLO. Thank you. And before I go to the gentleman from Ohio, I think it is important to note how serious fiscal responsibility is and how serious it is for those of us, frankly, who are some of the younger Members of this body who understand that this threat of fiscal irresponsibility is not coming due for our children or our grandchildren. It's not that far off. It's going to be within our lifetime that we see this. And in order to fix a problem, sometimes you have to understand the root cause of that problem. With that, I yield to the gentleman from Ohio.

Mr. PERRIELLO. I will take the challenge from the gentleman from Ohio and remind him of the recent NCAA soccer championship in which I believe the University of Virginia beat a team from your State, a very good team from your State.

Mr. PERRIELLO. I do just want you to be warned that that challenge may not work out well for your State. I think what we're talking about here is this issue: We cannot speculate our way to economic recovery. Sometimes when I'm meeting with the folks in my district--just a couple of days ago I was down in a town that has seen several plants close. The big plants closed back in the nineties after NAFTA. A recent set have closed that had managed to cling on a lot longer. They turned to me and said, Do people up there know we exist, those of us that are making 15, 20, 25 bucks an hour? Do they know we're out there? And they know that I'm fighting through the Jobs Caucus, through the jobs bill, by being a broken record about jobs, jobs, jobs. But there's a sense that sometimes those on Wall Street and, as Mr. Poe mentioned, that Wall Street-Washington collusion, only think about the folks that are already doing really well in the economy and forget about that working middle class, forget about advanced manufacturing, forget about the next generation of farming and ag products and forestry, forget about the fact that two-thirds of job growth in this country comes from small and medium-sized businesses. They may not get the same headlines as the Goldman Sachs, but they employ America. They treat their workers well. They're accountable, and they produce real value in our community. Those are the folks we have to remember. Those are the people that are taking it on the chin from getting nickel-and-dimed by credit card companies and bank fees and utility rate increases and everything across the board. Those working- and middle-class folks need a voice. We need to be that voice. I've given the President a little grief tonight and certainly his Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Geithner, for not being the change that I expected to see and not doing enough for Main Street, but when the President last came here, he did say something that's so important for us to remember. He was talking about how big the challenges are that we face, whether it's health reform or energy independence or the great recession. And he said, We're going to step up and face this because that's what Americans do. We don't back down. We don't back away from a challenge. Every generation of Americans are faced with a challenge. Some have to storm the beaches of Normandy, some have had to fight great wars. We are being asked to figure out how to compete again in the 21st century and have a strong middle class. And part of that is being willing to do the tough decisions on energy independence and other areas that are going to be the job creators. When we worry about something like the Supreme Court decision saying that if corporations can spend unlimited money, that means the corporations that are competitive today will be able to lock in their monopolies through the Washington-Wall Street collusion. What we have to have is the innovation, even the creative destruction, to create the jobs and the competitive advantage of the future. The President asked us to have that courage that every generation of Americans has, to not back down from the challenge. This is our challenge, whether it's how to get the budget balanced, how to shore up the middle class, how to be economically competitive in a global economy, how to create competitiveness in energy and health care and other sectors. This is our time, and we will step up and we will try to be worthy of the American people. We will not forget those working- and middle-class folks. With that, I yield the gentleman from New York.

Mr. PERRIELLO. Well, it is interesting that you mention the importance of this because really, again, what we're doing is voting referees back on the field. We shouldn't be choosing sides as a government, but we should make sure the rules are there. Now no one ever leaves the ball game and says, Wow, I really liked the referees in that game. No one ever says, Oh, the referees did a good job. You notice the referees when things go wrong and when a bad call is made. Government certainly makes errors. But what is important is that we have referees on the field. I talk to friends of mine all the time who are investors and business leaders, and they say, We want predictability and accountability in the market so we can then adjust to that. It's frustrating not just, I think, for many working and middle class folks who have been asked to pay for the mistakes that were made on Wall Street, in part because of mistakes that were made in Washington, to ask hardworking people in my district making $30,000 a year to pay for people that were making millions every year. But it has also been frustrating for some investors to say, Look, I made the smart investment. I didn't go for the crazy, exotic mortgage-backed securities and derivatives. I made smart, reasonable hedged risks, and it was fine. Yet the people who did make those high-risk, high-return investments not only got to see the upsides in the good years but then got bailed out in the bad years. I mean, if you go to Vegas, and you bet 13 on the roulette wheel, it's a sucker's bet. But if you know that every time you lose on 13, someone is going to make you money to make the next bet, and when you win, you're going to get to keep it all, of course you are going to keep betting on 13. So with this, we must understand that the rules must be clear on the field. That's what this is. It's not about being anti-Wall Street. It's about being pro-accountability and having rules that are there. So let's get down to some brass tacks on Main Street job creation, that moves us from speculation on Wall Street to job creation on Main Street, and these are some good, commonsense ideas that should be able to be pursued on a bipartisan basis. We need to figure out a way to get lending going to small- and medium-sized business. If we need to do it through incentives, we can do it through incentives. If we need to do direct lending because the banks just won't do it, we need to do that. We need to get creative. That is what I hear in my district. People want to expand. They want to hire. They can't get the lending. Consider a capital gains freeze for 2 years for small business. Infrastructure investment, particularly smart grid technology, water infrastructure, broadband infrastructure that we know creates competitive advantage. We've talked about retrofits that already make win-win sense in the economy. We can do this in the commercial sector, the industrial sector. Not at the scale of 100 homes here and 100 homes there. The market incentives are there to do this more broadly than that and put hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people to work in retrofits. These are concrete areas that will not only help us in these dramatic downtimes in our economy, but do it in a way that creates value on the upside because we know that the cheapest electricity is the electricity you never have to buy in the first place. These are ways to invest in our competitiveness. And with that, I yield to another member of our class.

Mr. PERRIELLO. We stand here in the midst of a tremendous economic crisis. What we hear when we go home every weekend is the pain of people who have lost their jobs, the fear of those who think they might be next, the confusion and frustration of having seen one administration seem to wreck the economy and the next not doing enough to fix it. Well, like many Americans, I am not satisfied. We can sit here tonight and blame the other side for letting the deficit go off the rails or helping to wreck the economy. I am not satisfied being judged by what the other side did. I want us to be judged by whether we get this economy back on track. I want us to be judged by whether we have stepped up to the generational challenges that both parties have failed to address in the decades past. It's too easy in this town to focus on winning a debate or a legislative fight or a campaign by convincing people that the other side is even worse. That's not a politics worthy of the American people. We've done a lot to stop the bleeding in the economy in the last year, but I'm not satisfied with us merely stopping the bleeding. We must have the healing and the rehabilitation, not just to get us back to where we were, but to an even stronger working and middle class that we've seen in the last few years, a more competitive American economy. A politics that doesn't just reward and lock in the status quo through corporate campaign contributions and ads, but rewards innovation and dares to think of what the next big thing can be, that can unleash again the American competitiveness that is being choked out by so much of the Washington-Wall Street collusion that seems to reward what has been, instead of what needs to be in this country. It's good to see that Wall Street has recovered and is above 10,000, but I am not satisfied until we see that growth on Main Street, we see the job creation, we see jobs that are somewhere between $6 an hour and six figures for that vibrant middle class that's always been at the heart of this country. I'm a big believer in this President, and I am a big believer in hope, but hope doesn't pay the mortgage. We have to deal with the banking crisis, the housing crisis. We have to look at the construction sector, education, and workforce development. I am not satisfied with solutions that simply stabilize where we are or offer something a little bit better than what came before. We promised something better than that. I believe tomorrow night the President has an opportunity to give an address to this Nation that gives an honest reading of the state of this Union, both its unbelievable strengths, its unprecedented hunger for innovation, but also the reality of its economic suffering, particularly with our middle class and working class families who continue to suffer under monopolies of electric utilities, of the credit card companies, of the joblessness; that we will see a President who steps up and continues to say, We are not going to shirk away from the challenges of our time because that's not what Americans do. We step up. We figure out a way to innovate, to out-compete, and to give the American people a kind of politics that they deserve. That's what brought many of us into politics for the first time, like many of the freshmen who have been speaking tonight. And we are not satisfied yet with the change, but we still believe it is possible. We are looking for everyone to come together, Congress and White House, Republican and Democrat, and all the American people throughout this country, to dare to believe that that hunger we have for change and for hope can translate into real results, including a reinvention of America's competitive advantage that helps restore the strength of that middle class, that understands that two-thirds of our job growth comes from small- and medium-sized business, that gets lending going again, that gets job creation going again and moves us from rewarding speculation on Wall Street to job creation on Main Street. I thank my colleagues tonight for joining with us on the eve of the State of the Union address.

Mr. PERRIELLO

Mr. PERRIELLO. Mr. Chairman, I recognize the good things this bill does to make health care more affordable for families and expand access to preventive and wellness care. I just want to clarify for the record that maternity care is a required benefit in the essential benefits package for all individual insurance and employer insurance across the country.

Mr. PERRIELLO. And it is my understanding that prenatal and postnatal care is generally considered to be part of maternity care, as recognized by organizations such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Mr. PERRIELLO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this clarification.

Mr. PERRIELLO

Mr. PERRIELLO. Madam Speaker, today I recognize Lieutenant Adam W. Bryant of the United States Coast Guard, who went missing in a helicopter collision over the Pacific Ocean on October 29, 2009, along with eight fellow Coast Guard officers. My heart goes out to his parents, Jerry and Nina Bryant, his brother Ben, and all of those who knew and loved Adam. He is sorely missed by his friends, family, community, and fellow servicemembers. Adam was a graduate of Kenston Forest School in Blackstone, Virginia, and the United States Coast Guard Academy. After completing his mandatory enlistment, he continued his service in the Coast Guard. He had served for 10 years. His family has described him as an intelligent, talented young man who knew from an early age that his calling was service to his country. I know that many will feel his loss deeply, for his accomplishments, his potential, and his role as a loving son, brother, grandson, and nephew. On behalf of Virginia's 5th District, I offer Adam's family my sincerest condolences and thank them for Adam's years of courageous and devoted service.

Mr. PERRIELLO

Mr. PERRIELLO. Thank you very much, Mr. Himes. I just want to pick up on what you said about the Greatest Generation. I think part of what made the Greatest Generation great was the concept of deferred gratification--the concept of responsibility. I am going to step up and take care of my family. I am going to save ahead of time. I am going to take that opportunity of the GI Bill, that unprecedented opportunity, to invest in my own education and to help move my family into the middle class. You look throughout history at empires in decline, and you see this idea--the bread and circus period--in the empire of Rome, and you say, What is it about that? Well, it's the difference between being a culture of instant gratification--I want it for me right now--and a culture of deferred gratification, or a culture of responsibility. I think what we've seen in the last few years in this country is really a deterioration of culture and not just of policy and of the market. We really have to point the finger in all sorts of different directions--at the private sector, at the household sector, at people buying homes they couldn't afford, at the government sector of turning the other cheek--and not in the good way but in the way of saying, I'm going to ignore what's happening on the other side. We know right now what we need is this new era of responsibility, which isn't antimarket; it's pro-market. What I hear from so many of my friends who are in the investment community is that I'm sick and tired of being the responsible investor who makes the right decisions, who doesn't take the high-risk investment, and then I see my colleagues or my peers who did take the high-risk, high-return investment get bailed out. This has to be about a system of rules and predictability that encourages responsible investing. That includes the diversified portfolio, as we all know, whether it's a fewer thousand dollars of our personal money or whether it's someone taking a larger amount to invest for other people. This is that moment where we can say we want those rules of predictability, where we want to close those loopholes so that we're rewarding good behavior and responsible investing in the same way that, in the energy sector, we need to start rewarding innovation, not rewarding the status quo. What that means is, instead of always being focused on how can we cash in on other people's misfortune or hedge against that risk, it's how can we create a system that is going to perpetuate the very balance that we need in our market in order to move things forward. So I think what you and others have been saying tonight is crucial in terms of that sense of not just a shift in policy but a shift in each of us as consumers, as politicians and others, about whether we're going to reward the responsibility of the deferred gratification that the Greatest Generation understood and which will make us stronger than ever before and whether we're going to recreate that comparative advantage. With that, I yield.

Mr. PERRIELLO. Well, I would just echo, I think you and I both come from similar roots from the mother country in Italy, the motherland, but also what we took from that immigrant experience of our grandparents was that idea that if you work hard and play by the rules, there will be an opportunity for you in this country. When this country rewards hard work and responsibility, this country is better than any on Earth. But when we get away from those fundamental ideals of American hard work and responsibility, we undermine so much of what makes us different, what makes us special. I was meeting with various members from the EU who were here today in part because Chancellor Merkel was speaking to us. They were talking about that quintessentially American spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship. The great threat to that in our society right now is not one administration or one policy. It's when the influence on this body and that on the other side of this building is such that it rewards what has worked for the last 20 years instead of what we could be 20 years from now. Capitalism is based on the idea of innovation, on the idea of competition and yet too much in our system we see a rewarding of what has worked, not what could work in the future. If we are going to deliver for the middle class and the working class of this country, for districts like yours and mine that once had strong factories and manufacturing bases, we must have the courage to think again about not just the financial sector policy, but an industrial policy, an agricultural policy, a jobs policy for this country. But the first piece of that has to be putting in place the rules that will allow lending to begin flowing again, not just on the macro-level, but to the small and medium-sized businesses that create two-thirds of the job growth in our areas in Ohio and Virginia. But the key to that is predictability. Predictability means that we have a system of rules that people can work within. Entrepreneurship works within a system of predictability. We need to have that system of accountability so that those who act according to those rules are rewarded for their innovation and success. That is a quintessentially American idea. Here we are challenged today because both parties in the Congresses before us have failed to live up to that standard. Many on Wall Street have failed to live up to that standard. But as Congressman Driehaus mentioned, the line we will draw is not between the right and the left, but between right and wrong, not between one side of the aisle or the other, but whether we will solve the problem. What we will hope people will judge us by is did we step up to the challenge of the time and try to solve that problem. I believe the people on this floor tonight are dedicated sincerely to the idea of problem-solving, not to ideology or to the next election cycle.

Mr. PERRIELLO

Mr. PERRIELLO. Madam Speaker, today I recognize the untimely passing of Kathryn Russell, who was killed in a car accident on the evening of October 22, 2009. She will be sorely missed by her friends, family, and community as well as independent farming advocates throughout the country. My heart goes out to her husband Wayne and their children Holly, Lynn, Laura, Emily, Beth, Charlotte, Caleb, and Hannah. Kathryn returned to her grandparents' roots by beginning her farm over a decade ago and was a valued member of the North Garden community in Albemarle County, Virginia. As the owner of Majesty Farms and a founder and leader of the Virginia Independent Consumers and Farmers Association, she worked to protect family farms, locally grown food, and to promote ecological and economic sustainability. Kathryn took great pride in her work and believed strongly in the importance of community-based farming to create a vibrant local economy and a healthy citizenry. I can personally attest to her fearlessness and tirelessness in promoting traditional farming. She was an ardent skeptic of big government and corporate agriculture, and often saw through attempts by both to consolidate power at the expense of consumers and small farmers. While she was a strident advocate, she was also patient enough to help those of us who needed a little extra educating to get up to speed on these issues. Today, there are too few farmers like Kathryn Russell and her husband Wayne. I have strong hopes that she has passed on her legacy to her eight children and four grandchildren, and that they will maintain her memory by continuing the work toward lasting rural communities for generations to come.