Phil Roe

Mr. ROE of Tennessee

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. I yield myself as much time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, I have spent the last 31 years before I came to Congress in the real world practicing medicine. So I know from where I speak. I have seen it, seen patients. I am probably one of the only people in this Chamber right now that has actually gone to an emergency room at 3 o'clock in the morning and seen someone without health insurance coverage and treated them, and treated numerous patients over the years without coverage. So I know that from a personal basis as a physician and just as a citizen. Obviously what we are dealing with now is we are dealing with a very complex issue, health care. It is not easy. There is no question about that. I think the difference that we have, the gentlelady from California just pointed out some similarities, and that is where I think the American people would like us to start instead of this incredibly complex bill that the gentleman from Alaska read just a minute ago, only a portion of, that is incomprehensible. There are two things you can do that would cover 20 million people, and we can do it on one sheet of paper and not have however many new bureaucracies and czars and agencies and IRS agents and all of that. And that is, which I wholeheartedly agree with, is allow young adults, I have had three in my only family do this, who graduated from college and didn't have insurance right after they got out, let those folks stay on, pick your number, 26, 27 years of age, on their family's health insurance policy. Simply sign up and adequately fund SCHIP, the State Children's Health Insurance Plan, and Medicaid. By doing those two things, you can cover 20 million people. This bill, as complex as it is, covers presumably 31 million people. My concern with the cost is that one of the things that this bill does not do, it does not address costs. And let me just give you an example. When Medicare was established in 1965, the government estimates at that time was that in 25 years that bill would cost $15 billion. The actual cost of that bill, $90 billion. That was in 1990. The actual cost today, Madam Speaker, is over $500 billion. And we know that this bill is going to remove $500 billion, or approximately $500 billion from this plan. Let me just tell you what begins to happen, and I have watched it in my own practice, in 2011. The baby boomers hit. Seventy-eight million baby boomers in the next 20 years, 35 million or more in the next 10 years, and you're going to provide the care they need with 500 billion less dollars. I don't think you get that math. The way I read that is that three things happen: Number one, you decrease access. Number two, if you don't get the access, you get decreased quality. And number three, you are going to increase costs because people are going to pay, if they can afford to, for the care that they are receiving. As my friend Mr. Lance brought out, malpractice reform is desperately needed. I am an obstetrician. I know that all too well, about how many of my colleagues have left the practice of delivering babies, one of the most fulfilling things. I have delivered almost 5,000 babies. And when I left my practice to come to Washington, I never felt like I had a job. It was a privilege to take care of patients and bring those young people in and watch them grow up and flourish in the community I lived. Young doctors are not able to do that now because of the cost. And it is not in here at all. In our own State, where we have a mutual company, an insurance company, State Volunteer Mutual Insurance Company, which insures the doctors of Tennessee, since the inception of that company, over half the malpractice premium dollars have gone to attorneys, not to the injured party. Less than 40 cents on the dollar. Many of my good attorney friends have said, we need to do something about this. I agree. So we don't disagree about what needs to be done; it's the method to get there. We are going to have a large government bureaucracy that is expanding a plan that is not working, which is Medicaid. And I have some very good ideas about what we should do for that. We shouldn't treat our Medicaid patients different than we treat other patients. I absolutely agree with that. Therefore, I would argue also we have the insurance industry--I am not going to sit up here and be a shill for them. I have argued with them for 20 years, 30 years about care. But I will point out one thing. You can take all the profits, that is what I have heard for the last 3 weeks up here is the evil insurance companies, you can take every nickel that they make and it will run our health plan in America, our health, for 2 days. So what are you going to do the next 363 days? Only 2 days. Take them all and put them out, you only cover people for 2 days. So that is not the solution. It is just demonizing them. They need to shape up, there is no question about that. And competition will help that happen. I know this is a great vote. I think it is one of the biggest votes that we have had in the last 45 years in America. The people in my district overwhelmingly oppose this bill by about 8-to-1. I am going to vote against this bill for the reasons that I have stated, and certainly would be willing to work with the other side, and asked to do that. One of my great frustrations in coming to Washington, D.C., was to have spent over 30 years in the practice of medicine and not be included in the decision. The physicians caucus on our side, 10 doctors, 14--we have other folks other than M.D.s in that caucus--and the two Senators who are M.D.s, none were included in this discussion about health care. I think that was wrong. I think it was a mistake on the other side, and would have certainly liked to have brought over 300 years of experience to the table and discuss with them real solutions, positive solutions for health care. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. Madam Speaker, I would like to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Paulsen).

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. I would like to associate my remarks with Dr. Snyder, the gentlelady from California, and the gentleman from Ohio. Madam Speaker, I, myself, have been in exactly the same position that the gentlelady from California spoke of when I ran for Congress and I left my medical practice with $1,800 a month for my health insurance. I was fortunate I could pay that, as the ER physician was able to do that. You can do a couple of things to make those rates go down immediately. One is letting an individual deduct their health insurance premiums just like huge corporations do. That would make it 30 to 35 percent cheaper tomorrow for every person out there trying to buy affordable health insurance. Number two, it speaks volumes for allowing you to buy insurance across the State line because that one single ER physician could group in an association health plan with numerous other physicians--perhaps hundreds or thousands of other physicians--and bring those costs down. How do I know that? Because I started my medical practice with four physicians. We now have 70 physicians with 350 employees, and our costs came down. One of the ways we help keep our costs down was a health savings account which was about 30 percent cheaper than the regular insurance. I am going to finish by reading a letter from Governor Bredesen, a Democrat from Tennessee, who wrote Senator Corker and Bart Gordon: ``The problem that we're facing is simple: by 2013, we expect to have returned to our 2008 levels of revenue and will have already cut programs dramatically--over $1 billion. At that point, we have to start digging out--we will have not given raises to State employees or teachers for 5 years, our pension plans will need shoring up, our cash reserves (`rainy day fund') will have been considerably depleted and in need of restoration, and we will not have made any substantial new investments in years. There will have been major cuts to areas such as children's services that we really need to restore. On top of these, there are all the unusual obligations to be met--Medicaid, for example, will continue to grow at rates in excess of the economy and our tax revenues. It's going to take at least a full decade to dig our way out and back to where we were prior to the recession.''

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. ``In this environment, for the Congress to also send also along a mandatory bill for $750 million for the health reform they've designed is very difficult. These are hard dollars--we can't borrow them--and make the management of our finances post-recession even more daunting.'' This is our Democratic Governor who's asking us not to pass this legislation.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Lance).

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Roskam).

Mr. ROE of Tennessee

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. Madam Speaker, I rise in support of this resolution to designate tomorrow as National Day of Recognition for Long-Term Care Physicians. And ironically the same weekend we're honoring these physicians, House Democrats are simultaneously destroying their ability to practice medicine by enacting a Washington takeover of the patient's decision-making power. Let me just give you the short and sweet of it. We started health care reform in Tennessee 17 years, and I know what I am talking about here because we've experienced this. We wanted to control cost and increase access, and we began a plan called TennCare. What's happened during that plan is that it has decreased our access because of the payment to physicians and to providers. This year our plan has begun to ration the care. And how it's done that is, it's limited the number of patient visits and the amount of money that TennCare will pay for a hospitalization, no matter how much money the bill is. So those costs are shifted over to the private sector. I've seen this with my own eyes, as I have paid $10,000 for a visit to the hospital, no matter what the bill is.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. Madam Speaker, this week Speaker Pelosi and the House Democrats are trying to ram through one of the most ill-conceived pieces of legislation of all time, and they are considering not allowing Members an up-or-down vote on the bill. One House Democrat recently said, ``I don't need to see my colleagues vote for the Senate bill in the House. We don't like the Senate bill. Why should we be forced to do that?'' Good question. This attitude perfectly sums up the Democrats' push to have Washington bureaucrats take over our health care system. President Obama and the Democratic leadership don't think the rules apply to them. First, the House Democrats had to twist arms enough to get Members to vote for their bill despite a 40-vote majority. Then, Senate Democrats had to give a sweetheart deal to Senators from Louisiana, Nebraska, Florida, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and so on. Now the House Democrats are preparing to pass this legislation without even having an up-or-down vote. It is no wonder the American people oppose this bill by such a wide margin. They feel like they are being duped by the Democratic leadership. It is time to reject this Democratic health care and start over.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. You can talk about one page, and you're talking about 18, 19, or 20 million people.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. It is shocking. And the people from the outside who look at it, the people from Nebraska and Louisiana are fair people. I have heard the governors say this. They will pay their own way. They didn't ask to be cut into a special deal, and that is exactly what this is. What we are looking at in Tennessee is that what this special deal will cost us in Tennessee is a billion and a half more dollars, in addition to what we are doing now, of dollars we do not have. Neither does the State of Arizona, and most of the other states. It doesn't mean that we can't do something for health care, but this is not the right way to do it. Another thing, in Tennessee we have a law called the sunshine law. I as a mayor--that was my last political job before I got here--could not discuss with other members outside a public meeting, totally transparent, any city business. So the camera was on or it was an open meeting. Every single thing we did. Was it cumbersome and hard to do? Yes. But guess what didn't happen? This kind of nonsense didn't happen. I woke up on December 24 when the Senate voted on this, and I knew what was in there, and I told my wife, I said I worked very hard to gain my reputation throughout the years as physician, and I was very proud to be a Member of the U.S. Congress. It made me ashamed to be part of an organization that would cut a backroom deal like this.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. Let me just point out that when you pointed out Louisiana, Nebraska, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Connecticut, all of these special deals, what that is saying is that those Representatives and Senators from there realize that this is a bad idea if it is going to cost the State money.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. Our State Governor, who is a Democrat, has said that this is the mother of all unfunded mandates. And let me give you an example of what has happened in our State. We are now being asked, if this bill were to pass as is, to have a massive expansion of government-run health care. It would cost the State $1.5 billion. In our State, we have 50 less State troopers than we had 30 years ago, and we have 2 million more people. We are not doing a single new capital project on the campus of a university this year in our State because we cannot afford it. So it is a matter of not do you do health care reform, it is a matter of can you afford this. And when I have heard the President say that premiums will go down, well, I beg to differ. If you look at the Tennessee experience, I can assure you if you extrapolate our experience with what they are proposing nationwide, I did the math this morning on the way into the office, it will be exactly twice what they are saying. And if you look at the estimates that the government has done on health care plans, let me just run through a couple of those for you. When Medicare came on board in 1965, it was a $3 billion program. The government estimated, the CBO didn't occur until 1974, but the government estimate in 1965 was that by 1990, Medicare would be a $15 billion program. It was a $90 billion program. And today it is a $500 billion program in 2010. That particular plan, Medicare, will go upside down, there will be less revenue coming in than going out in 6 or 7 years depending on current estimates. What we are proposing in this, and our senior citizens get this, is that one of the proposals in this plan is to take out $500 billion. Here is a news flash. Next year the baby boomers, which are a large number of people, hit Medicare age. That is 2011. They will begin at the rate of several million, tens of millions in the next 10 years, to be in a plan that is now underfunded by $500 billion. One of the things that the Senate plan does have, which I totally agree with, is that we should have been doing this instead of, are the fraud and abuse. There is no question that anywhere there is fraud and abuse in the Medicare plan, we should be going after it. I couldn't agree more. Also, in this plan, the new taxes that are in the plan over the next 10 years which equal about $500 billion, this is the absolute worst time on the planet Earth to have new taxes when the economy is still reeling from the worst recession since the 1930s. To increase taxes on business, whether it is device makers, or whatever it may be, is absolutely the wrong time.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. Thank you very much, Mr. Shadegg. I appreciate the opportunity to be here on the House floor, Mr. Speaker. When I was elected to Congress, I had a 31-year medical career, and was coming to the tail end of that. I had been an obstetrician/ gynecologist and surgeon. And I had seen various changes from the late 1960s, when I was in medical school, until now. I had seen absolutely incredible changes in the way we deliver health care and what we can do for our patients. Just a brief example. When I graduated from medical school in 1970, there were about five high blood pressure medicines, five antihypertensives. And three of them made you sicker almost than high blood pressure. Today, 40 years later, there are probably 50 or more, and with relatively minor side effects. And patients now have the opportunity with high blood pressure, with diabetes, with heart disease--we have just seen recently former Vice President Dick Cheney and former President Clinton get state-of-the-art health care. The question is, how can we get this health care to the majority of our people and not bankrupt the country? Because it is not the quality of care we are talking about, whether it is heart disease or cancer or any other cadre of diseases that we are talking about. In the mid eighties we started seeing a shift in the way we discussed and delivered health care. What fee-for-service health care is, is that you as a patient come to me, and I see you, and I give you a bill when you leave, and you pay the bill. That is fee-for-service health care. We saw that that was creating a situation where there was overconsumption of the services, we didn't have enough money in the system to provide that, so a new system of, quotes, ``managed care'' came along where insurance companies said, look, we can manage this care and we can do this by limiting the number of visits and very specifically saying what we are going to pay for in this particular health care contract that you have. That is your insurance plan. And there were various methods out there to do this. In Tennessee, we saw costs rising ever so slowly, but rising faster than our inflation was. We tried to control these in our State Medicaid program called TennCare. We got a waiver from HHS, the Health and Human Services here in Washington, to try an experiment with managed care. We had about seven or eight different plans that were going to compete for your health insurance business. What happened to us was that it was a very generous plan, as this plan is as we will discuss later, John, in this hour. When you mandate what is in a particular plan and you provide more health care in it than someone needs to consume, it costs a lot of money. What our plan did in Tennessee, it was first dollar coverage, all prescription drugs paid for, so the patient had no cost in this. They had no so-called ``skin in the game.'' In 1993 when we instituted this plan, the State spent about $2.6 billion on health care for the entire State. Ten years later we were spending $8 billion. Every new dollar that the State brought in, we spent on health care. There was no money in our State for schools, for new construction in colleges, and so on, new capital, other things that the State does; roads. We had to rein those in. And our Democratic Governor did that. The way we did that wasn't a very good way. It was basically we rationed care by cutting people off the rolls. Today in the State of Tennessee, and the other unknown about these Federal plans, is they never pay for the cost of the care. In Tennessee, the State TennCare plan paid about 60 percent of the cost of actually providing the care. So the more people you got on that plan, the more costs that were shifted to private insurers, forcing those plans to charge higher premium benefits. So we shifted the costs with a hidden tax over from the government plan to the private sector, forcing costs to be passed onto businesses, and businesses much like I had. Today what we are doing in Tennessee is that in this particular year right now, our State legislature is in the process of looking at our State health insurance plan. They have cut the cost down to about $7 billion. And how did they do that? Well, they simply just disenroll people. And what the plan is paying for this year are only eight doctor visits. In the State of Tennessee, if you have that type plan, you can only come to a physician eight times that the State will pay for. And they will only pay for a total of $10,000, no matter what your hospital bill is. That means that cost is being shifted. John, in our State this year, the hospitals are going to have a bed tax. They will pass a tax on again to other paying patients to be able to make the Medicaid match that they have right here in the State. So an expansion that the Senate bill currently has of Medicaid will be disastrous for the State of Tennessee. We cannot pay for the plan we have.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. You can't change. If you dot an ``i'' or cross a ``t,'' that is not the same bill, so they can't strip it out.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. I would think so. I think the thing that bothers the American people, the fairest people in the world, as long as we are all treated the same--we have fought for that equality. And we expect equality in health care. We are trying to provide the same high quality health care for all of our citizens, but this is not the way to do it. I am telling you, this is a prescription for rationed care over time. I have seen it happen in my own State. The people understand it. They get it. A couple of things that I would like to talk about. The financing of this bill, it is really a shell game. You've got 10 years of taxes to pay for about six-plus years of care which, when you stretch out over $1 trillion dollars, $100 billion a year, really you are putting that $1 trillion in 6 years worth of spending. The other thing that this bill doesn't do, there is a little thing called the sustainable growth rate for physicians. Right now, doctors are expected to have, in the next month, if we don't kick the can down the road again, a 21-percent cut in their Medicare payments. If that happens, and I have talked to my own doctor, colleagues around the country, three things are going to happen. Number one, you are going to decrease access because the physicians can't afford to see those patients. Remember another government program, Medicare, doesn't pay for the total cost of the care; it pays about 80 to 90 percent of the cost. Number two, when you do that, you will decrease access and quality. And, number three, you're going to increase the cost to our seniors, who cannot afford it. So I think that's a thing that people get. This doctor fix, which is left out, is about a $250 billion or $260 billion additional cost to health care. And how you can take physician payments of Medicare out of the health care bill and say you're reforming it is beyond me. I yield back.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. We do have a high-risk pool, and that is how they work. And just so people understand, a preexisting condition is a problem in the individual. If you're an individual like I was 2 years ago out trying to buy insurance, or, number two, in the small business pool, if you have 10 employees or 12 employees, it's very difficult. If one person has an illness, it just runs your cost up so high you can't afford it. So how do you make small groups or individuals large groups? One of the things that Congressman Shadegg has brought up makes absolute sense to me--I cannot understand why anybody but an insurance company wouldn't want you to do it--to remove the State line. What you do, you can buy car, your life, your home, everything else across the State line except health insurance. Well, if I'm Blue Cross Blue Shield in Alabama and I've got 84 percent of the market there, I don't want that to happen, but I bet the consumers in Alabama or Tennessee, or wherever it may be, would like that. Allow us, as consumers, to go on the Internet, look and purchase across the State line and form pools which make small groups large groups and preexisting conditions go away. I yield back.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. We absolutely could. As we say, you don't eat an elephant in one bite; you take a bite at a time.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. I tried last night. The other thing that I would like to bring up while we're talking about it is how you affect cost, because we started this hour talking about health care cost. And without meaningful tort reform, liability reform, you will never bend the cost curve. Let me give you an example. Years ago, when I was a resident in my training and after I got out of the Army and came back, we didn't make a lot of money as a resident so we would moonlight, work in emergency rooms. If you came into the emergency room and let's say you had some right-side, right-lower quadrant pain, I would examine you, get your vital signs, get a very simple, inexpensive blood test, a CBC. Let's say it was 10,000, a little bit elevated, your temperature is 99.2, a little bit elevated. I don't think you have appendicitis. And I say, well, why don't you come back in 8 or 12 hours and we'll reevaluate you. That was a very inexpensive visit. Today, if that person comes into an emergency room, you're not going to leave until you glow in the dark, I can tell you, because you're going to get a CT scan, ultrasounds, and every other thing in the world. It's going to be a $1,500 or $2,000 visit. And, John, I will guarantee you most of those are negative. The reason that the doctor orders them is that there is no reason I shouldn't do that because if that appendicitis patient does happen to get out there, you can just write the check with the zeros and the commas. I can tell you when you get sued, the cost of that is enormous in this country. And who pays for that? We all do. Every consumer of health care pays for that.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. Exactly. And you hear us being compared to Canada and England and so forth. They have tort reform. They don't practice defensive medicine there. As a matter of fact, there is a lot of medicine that doesn't get practiced there at all because of cost, but they don't because you can't sue the government. The VA has that system; you can't sue a doctor in the VA. That's another area where tort reform has worked. The reason that it needs to be done is that no one has argued not to compensate an injured person. Someone who has actually sustained an injury with actual damages, absolutely that should be done. In our State of Tennessee, since 1975, when we formed the State Volunteer Mutual Insurance Company, over half the premiums paid in by physicians into that company have gone to attorneys, not to the injured party. Less than 40 cents on the dollar have actually gone to people who have been hurt and about 10 to 12 cents on the dollar has gone to run the company and put back reserves. We need a system where we can actually help people who have been damaged. And the cost of this, I can tell you right now, I have a friend of mine in my local community, a great family practitioner, 25 years, got his first lawsuit on a 19-year-old woman who had a very rare situation that occurred. There was no malpractice involved, just a very rare condition. His first year after that, his referrals to doctors, to specialists went up 500 percent and his ordering tests went up 300 percent. And that happens all over the country.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. I think one of the things I have fought against for many, many years is that of the abuse of insurance companies. They don't get off free here. In one of the last cases I did in practice before I came to Congress, I spent as much time on the telephone getting a case approved as I did doing the case, which was a major surgical case. So there needs to be some meaningful insurance reform. How do you do that? Well, what also isn't in this bill works extremely well because I have used one myself, and 80-something percent of my 300 employees who get health care through our practice use this. It's called a health savings account. What it does is it puts me, the consumer, in charge of first dollar. The insurance company is not in charge of it; I am in charge of it. The argument is that only the wealthy will use a health savings account. That is not true. This is how my health savings account works and how it works for my employees: The business puts $3,000 away, tax deductible, into a plan that is yours. You have a debit card--and I have one right here in my pocket-- so, when I go and purchase health care, I buy it on the first dollar. The people I'm buying it from don't have to wait 2 seconds to get paid, so I want the lowest price. The one I used had a $5,000 deductible. I take good care of myself, and I've been fortunate. After 2 years, I had almost $8,000 left of my money. The insurance company didn't keep it as profit--I kept it--so I am incentivized to spend my health care dollars wisely. This is a very good way to bend down that cost curve when you put me, the consumer, in charge of my own health decisions.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. I agree with both of you. I'm not sure why I had kids first. I just need to go to grandkids. They are so much better. But I think that you can't imagine life--I know I have heard this right here--without our children and without our grandchildren. When you see a child out there--anybody that would abuse a child, I have no tolerance for them whatsoever. But to have a hug from a child, it doesn't matter whether that child is challenged or not, it's love. And I can't imagine life without mine and my grandchildren. I thank you for the opportunity to be here today.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. Exactly. Or a Heisman Trophy winner. And even though he is from the University of Florida, and I am from Tennessee, I have to brag about that young man, that great young person. But those are the things that I think we have to talk about. And the other thing that you hear discussed a lot, Congresswoman Schmidt, is that you will hear about third trimester abortions. It's about the life of the mother. And I have to say this right now, there are no medical indications whatsoever for that procedure, a third trimester termination of life. There are none. I will be willing to sit and debate with over 30 years of experience to tell you there's only one reason for that procedure, and that is to kill the baby. That's the only reason. And if anyone wants to debate that, I will be glad to do it here on this House floor or in a medical setting. But I want to make that a part of the Record today. We, again, are here today to advocate not only for the unborn but for the mother who bears the problem, the brunt of what happens to her.

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. Oh, certainly, there are. Again, thank you for having this conversation, because what you're doing today is that you and Michele are speaking for the unborn. They cannot speak for themselves, so you're here on the floor of the House speaking for them. Yes. I mean, throughout my career, I remember a case that I had--and I won't obviously disclose anything other than just a case I had in over a 30-year career--of a patient that I had known for years. She came in one day and had tears in her eyes. This was a woman in her fifties now. And she told me, she said, I have to tell you something. I had known her for a long time very well, even as a friend I had known her. And she told me, I had an abortion years ago, and I have got to share this. Many of the problems I traced back through the 20 years, 25 years I cared for her were directly related to that abortion and the psychological impact that it had on her and her life. And we had a long talk that day, just as a friend to a friend. I hope she left there that day and could go on and continue her life. So many women won't share things that are very negative--or people, not just women, but men and women both--a very negative part of their life that they're not very happy about and later realize it was a very bad decision. What we're trying to do here today is to prevent women from suffering that psychological damage. And the other thing that Congresswoman Bachmann just brought up a minute ago was adoption. As an OB/GYN doctor--that's what I do. I have delivered almost 5,000 babies. I can assure you, I can find hundreds of babies a home right now in one town. I can't tell you how many friends of mine that have gone to Eastern Europe, to Russia, and to China to adopt babies. And those are very lucky children who get to come and live with these families. But why are we doing that when we have babies right here in America that you can adopt? And I will assure you that it would be no cost to the families. Those medical costs will be cared for by these families who desperately need and want children. And what you brought out about a life that is lost, you never have the opportunity to find out what that person could and would be, boy or girl. Maybe they will be a Congressman or a President or a doctor or someone who discovers a cure for----

Mr. ROE of Tennessee. Thank you very much for holding this Special Order on health care and the life issue. As I was walking over here, I thought back to my medical school years and how this issue of abortion ever came up. I followed it from the time I was a medical student, when abortion was illegal in this country, until it was legalized. At that time, pregnancy was basically a mystery. It was described as tissue. I've heard of a human being described in a lot of different ways. But as ultrasound came along and we were able to view noninvasively inside the woman's uterus to see what was actually going on, an astonishing thing happened. I will tell you, after 30-plus years of practicing medicine, it will make your adrenaline flow to look at a baby and watch it grow from the time you see a flicker of a heart beat. We can see that around 28 days post-conception. I can remember the first time to this day. It's been over 30 years since I saw that. And to see that within weeks develop into a little person at around 12 weeks. And certainly now with the new 3D ultrasounds, it is amazing what you can see. This is a person there. You watch them move, you watch them breathe, you watch their eyes blink, and so on. They're people. If you have any question about what's in the uterus, simply look at an ultrasound and there will be no doubt in your mind that it is a person there. I know that in our area certainly a higher percentage than even 70 percent oppose abortion funding using their tax dollars to end life. That's exactly what it is. It's certainly illegal in this country now. But I think the pendulum is swinging. We have a very limited amount of resources for health care in this country. I think we will talk about certainly the need for reform. But abortion is not health care. It is not. And we should not be using our tax dollars, as precious as they are, to provide care. Let me just give you an example of what we're trying to do in our State of Tennessee right now. This year, because of the budget crunch, we're limiting our State health insurance plan; and Medicaid, or TennCare in our case, is limiting doctor visits to eight per year. So you as a patient, if you were a patient of mine in Tennessee and you had Tennessee Medicaid, you can only come see me, and that's all the State will pay for, no matter what your condition is. Also, we will only pay $10,000 per year, no matter how many hospitalizations. That's all you're going to get paid. So those costs are shifted. Right now, in Tennessee, with our Medicaid system, we're rationing care. What we should be doing before we massively expand the system is to adequately fund what we currently have. Certainly, funding abortion, not only is it just the public doesn't want it, it's the wrong policy. So I think the current bill that currently has this language in there should not be passed certainly in this body. I yield back.