Tim Ryan

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. You brought up the immigration issue, and I think it's important is we have put through the homeland security bill and a variety of other bills, more border patrol on the border, Mr. Speaker. We're trying to continue to try to make sure that people who come into this country come in legally, and that is a major issue. But because the resources that we are trying to provide are going down to the border to try to prevent illegal immigration, at the same time we do not have the resources to provide the kind of oversight and to make the kind of investments given the history of corruption in many of the industries and in the Mexican Government that lack oversight. So here we are saying, well, we're going to let you come into our country, but they are not providing the oversight. We don't have the money to provide the oversight with the budget deficits that we're running now. So this is a critical, critical issue. And like I think most issues of globalization, things happen too quickly, where the infrastructure is not in place in many countries for labor, for health, for the kind of protections that we want. We like having our truckers in safe trucks. We like knowing they've got the proper amount of sleep. We like knowing the proper environmental advances are going to be made so the air is cleaner. Those are good things. I like clean air and clean water. I don't think I'm really out on a limb on this one. But what we are saying is, if you want to do business in our country, you have got to come up to our standards. And for too long, we've been dropping ours to meet everybody else's, especially wages, which is a whole other Special Order that we could talk about.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Without having this system in the infrastructure in place to say that every truck in the future that is going to go on the road, this is just maybe fixing up trucks and picking the right people to make sure you get the right results.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. It is called cherry-picking, and you are getting the results. But at the end of the day, you don't have a system in place in the Mexican domestic government, the civilian side, to monitor this to say that every truck that comes through or at least minimize. Now, we have truck accidents in this country. You are probably never going to be able to eliminate all of it. But, at the same time, we have these strict enforcement mechanisms. And we all deal with trucking companies in our district; they have got to go through a lot, logging miles and hours and sleep.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I want to in closing just say that hopefully, and I think this has, that there is a real move afoot in Congress, whether it is with your bill regarding transportation and Mexican trucking, Rosa DeLauro talking about food safety, toy safety coming in from China. There is a lot of movement coming in Congress to say, hey, we have got these standards here. We were one of the first countries to implement them. They were important to us. We like the standard of living that we have here, and we want to keep it moving. That is why I think this is such a key piece of legislation. So I am happy to support you and continue to talk about this and keep pushing.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And it is a tedious task. People can make a few bucks doing it, I have noticed, but at the same time it is very rigorous. But at the end of the day, we decided as a country we would rather have safer roads. These trucking companies do not want the insurance payments if they would cause an accident, so they are inclined to abide by it. So all we are saying is let's lift everybody up and let's all play by the same rules, and we would be happy to do business with you.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And it makes our roads less safe. I mean, that's why you're here. That's why I'm here. We care about jobs. We care about economic development. We care about all these things, as we'll continue to talk about tonight, Mr. Speaker, but the bottom line is this. We have unsafe trucks that will be coming in that are now through the pilot program, will continue to come into our country, lack inspection, lack the safety standards that we're accustomed to in the United States. That puts those kids who are riding in cars in the other lane, or in front or behind or whatever the case may be, in jeopardy. We have certain standards in the United States.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that, and I appreciate all your work on this particular piece of legislation that we have a lot more work to do convincing our friends on the other side of the Capitol to act on this. But what I find interesting is we're just standing here. You're from Kansas; I'm from Ohio. This is not a border State issue where we're directly across the border from Mexico. This is an issue that affects all of us all across the country. So, whether it's manufacturing in my district or, you know, in someone else's district across the country, this is an issue, as you said, that represents America. We sign a lot of these trade agreements, and many people don't even know what's in the fine print, and here we find out 15 years later about this little program that's going to go on that really, I think, does several things. One, it's a real threat to U.S. jobs in the trucking industry. And then as your bill pointed out, why it is, I think, such an important piece of legislation, and Mr. Speaker, this is the Safe American Roads Act of 2007, H.R. 1773, sponsored, pushed, advocated for by the gentlelady from Kansas who's been such a strong advocate on this issue. But basically, what we're trying to do from our vantage point is put some responsibility into this thing, to make sure that there are certain standards that are met. And I know that was the key impetus for this whole piece of legislation from the beginning is let's have some standards, Mr. Speaker, where if you want to compete in the global economy, we're all playing by the same rules. Now, all of the sudden we have American truckers who have drug testing and there are certain standards for the trucks and certain training that needs to happen and equipment and on and on and on down the line. Now, all of the sudden they're going to be competing with folks who just don't have to abide by the same rules.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Well, that's kind of like the President during Katrina; he flies in. He says, Hey, you're doing a great job, Brownie. Well, maybe you should look and see what he did before you start making the comments. So there's a little bit of a pattern that this administration may have.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Look at the vote on your bill, 411-3.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, the President said the other day, these kids can go to the emergency room.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. This is about making our country more competitive, period. This is a moral issue. This is an issue that needs to be handled, and needs to be addressed. But as our friend from Cleveland was saying, this is about those kids in Cleveland and Youngstown and Miami becoming more competitive because they are healthier, they go to school healthier, they are not getting all the other kids sick, and therefore everyone in the classroom is at a better starting point to learn. When you talk about competing with China, you talk about competing with India, 1.3 billion people in each country, and we only have 300 million, we need to get everybody on a level playing field. That is what this Children's Health Care Program does. Mr. Speaker, look at what the President would do by not signing this bill. Our bill will cover all of these kids. It is a bipartisan bill, the congressional bill that passed; 3.8 million additional kids. Now if the President gets his way, in his budget 840,000 children will lose their SCHIP coverage, because health care costs are going up, more kids are going into the system, the poverty rate is going up. So this is about making us more competitive by making sure that the poor kids, middle-class kids in our country, have an opportunity to get a little bit of health care.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Yes.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I want to say that the most important point that I'd like to highlight before we leave, because I know time is running out, all of the waste over the past 6 years under this administration, with the nonsense with FEMA and trailers sitting in Arkansas somewhere that have rotted, the billions of dollars wasted in Iraq where unbid contracts, Halliburton wasting money, losing hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, the tax cuts that went primarily to the top 1 percent, corporate welfare that goes to the oil companies, $14 or $15 billion, we are starting to rein all that in and the President picks children's health care to draw the line in the sand and say we're spending way too much money? That is unacceptable, Mr. Speaker. That is unacceptable. All of these opportunities wasted, and now you pick these people? You don't take on the oil companies. You don't take on the top 1 percent billionaires who got tax cuts. You're going to take on little kids? That's the message? That's your legacy? God bless you.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. How about the fact, before I go to my friend, my good friend, how about the fact that we want to help these kids before it's an emergency. You're saying to go to the emergency room. Mr. President, we don't want to wait. Mr. Speaker, we don't want to wait for it to be an emergency, for God's sake. Now, we understand that the way things have been run by this executive branch over the past 6 years, everything does seem to turn into an emergency. There is always a crisis going on with these guys. But this is about preventive care, saving the taxpayers money, and making very smart, prudent investments with the hard-earned money that people send here.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Those groups want it.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. One of the arguments we get from what is a shrinking minority of Members of the House that aren't helping the override proceedings is that this is socialized medicine. And Bush is saying that this is somehow socialized medicine. When this bill passed in 1997, there was a Republican House and a Republican Senate and a Democratic President. So what you are saying is Newt Gingrich and friends during the 1990s were for socialized medicine because they started it. It is an inaccurate argument. The government is not taking over anything. You are still going to go to your doctor and find out where you want to go, kind of like Medicare. But this is about providing children that are poor with health care. The President is trying to say that he wants to clean it up and he is trying to say that he wants to negotiate. This is different than the House bill that passed. This is the Senate version. The Senate has enough votes to override the veto. As the gentlewoman from Ohio said, there are all these Republican Senators. We have a bunch of Republican House Members. And the other day when we were debating it, there were very few Republican House Members that even wanted to come down here and make the argument about what is going on here. We continue today, and we will next week and the following week continue to urge the President. But we need the American people to stand up and say can't Congress at least agree on health care for children. And the only roadblock is the President's veto pen and a group of Republicans in the House. Before I yield, I want to be sure to say that the socialized medicine argument is a red herring because the Republicans created this bill in the 1990s, signed by President Clinton, but in a Republican-controlled House.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I totally agree and that's the point. Every argument that has been put in front of this piece of legislation is a phony argument that doesn't stand the scrutiny of any kind of debate.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I think the debate, too, has gotten a little bit off track, and I quite frankly, Mr. Speaker, find this shameful. One of the statements made by the President: Democratic Members of Congress are putting health coverage for poor children at risk so they can score political points in Washington. Now, that's a shame that that kind of rhetoric's coming out of the White House at this point. When you look, as Mrs. Jones has stated earlier, all of the Republicans that are supporting this bill, this is a bipartisan bill. But there is a small fringe group in this House and the White House that will not allow this bill to pass. Score political points? We're trying to provide health care for kids. This is not where we have a debate and everyone gets little debating points as we go along, and there are a lot of Republicans in this House and in the Senate that want to support children's health care, and for the executive branch to make these kinds of statements I think totally poisons the debate. Here's another thing that some of our friends are saying on the other side, that SCHIP is incremental steps to a government-run health care program. That's just not true. These are children who are now eligible for the program but there's not enough money in it to actually cover them, we're trying to put the money in to cover them. They will go to private doctors and they will get private health care. They're not going to go to the VA, the government-run veterans hospitals. They're going to go to private docs. They're going to be involved in private health care plans.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. If you can get in. For many of the kids, you sit there and wait for hours and hours and hours, if you can even get in; and the cost, and this is the point that we are trying to make, we are trying to save the taxpayers money. There is a reimbursement that goes back to these emergency rooms when they cover charity care when people go in without health insurance. Mr. Speaker, now, many of us can go, and you talk to the CEO who runs a hospital, and I have one in mind in my district that I talk to all the time, where he tells me at every meeting we are at, whether we are talking about giving money to build another hospital or expand their facilities, or anything else, he always brings this up. I would rather give these kids a prescription for $20 or $30 than to see them two or three weeks later come into the emergency room with pneumonia, and it costs $20,000 or $30,000. This is what this bill does. This saves us money, not to mention the fact that the kid will miss school, the kid will go to school and get other kids sick. But to have a President of the United States in 2007 lack the sensitivity of what these families go through who do not have health care, to say, well, you can go to the emergency room. Mr. Speaker, the President doesn't have to go to the emergency room when he goes to a fancy Navy hospital. Many of us, we don't have to go to the emergency room. Many families who have health insurance, they don't have to go. But there is a segment of our population that is forced as a last resort to end up in an emergency room because they have nowhere else to go.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Can you imagine? I mean, this is just what is mind boggling. It is 2007, we're a couple of months from 2008, and the President of the United States of America says to the poorest kids in our country, you can go to the emergency room.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I mean, are you kidding me; to not have the understanding that we would save money if we gave these kids antibiotics before they end up in the emergency room 2 weeks later with pneumonia, that that doesn't save us tens of thousands of dollars, then you have no business vetoing this bill.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Throw it out there.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. These kids, these families. And we should get the quote for tomorrow, we should get the quote and we should have it out here, but these kids, these families should pay for it themselves. And they can't. And so we've got to make a decision as a country whether we're okay with that, whether we're okay with them not having the wherewithal to pay, and then no one is willing to help them. But we have made the decision, in the Democratic Caucus, and many of our friends on the Republican side, excluding the President and a small group of fringe Members on their side, that somehow they're going to stand on principle here. They sat here for 6 years and didn't squawk one time about excessive spending. The President didn't veto one bill that came from this House, Republican-controlled, and a Republican- controlled Senate, but now, all of a sudden. But the American people, and I know the people in my district, see right through it, and they understand what we're trying to do and how in the long term this will be very helpful. I yield to my friend.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And if she doesn't drink her coffee, see how grumpy she gets.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. How much?