John Shadegg

Mr. SHADEGG

Mr. SHADEGG. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I watched the gentlemen engage in this hour earlier and felt I ought to come down and try to add to it, perhaps bring a different perspective, articulate some of our concerns in a new way. I want to thank my colleague from Missouri for his efforts. I want to thank my colleague from Utah for both his compliment and his hard work on the issues we confront. I really want to hit two parts. Most importantly, I want to hit the final point that the gentleman from Utah hit, which is what should be the process for passing legislation of this significance to the Nation. And I think the gentleman from Utah had it right. It needs to be an open process. It needs to be an opportunity where everyone can surface their ideas, and there needs to be a dialogue. And, quite frankly, that has not happened. It just has not happened. The gentleman led off in his discussion on this point by listing all of the different bills. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin has a bill. Tom Price of Georgia has a bill. I have a bill. There are many, many Republican bills out there. And, shockingly, the media doesn't tell the American people that there are any Republican ideas out there, and yet there are. And I think the gentleman from Utah said it well. There really is a great philosophical divide on a part of this issue, but it's really just a part of this issue. There are subsets on which there's agreement. When we talk about where the divide is, I think the gentleman from Utah said it well, that the divide is between the notion which the President is advancing that the only way to fix the problems we have in health care today, and Republicans agree there are deep problems in the delivery of health care services today, but the Democrats and the President say the way to fix that is massive government intervention in and, quite frankly, taking control of the entire health care system and the entire health insurance industry.

Mr. SHADEGG. And the grocery stores. No question about it. All the farms, all the grocery stores, you name it.

Mr. SHADEGG. I would have been offended, and I don't think it would have solved the problem. I want to make the point that the Republicans are being portrayed as being allies of the health insurance industry in this fight. Bunk. The President in his remarks the other evening talked about special interests. Some of the biggest special interests in this Nation have thrown in behind the President and are pushing this bill. The big insurance companies, they have signed on in support of this bill. There's one piece of it they don't like. They don't like the public plan. But by gosh, they like the idea of an individual mandate, which is an issue I think we ought to be discussing. And the big drug companies, the big drug companies are in this hook, line, and sinker, so much so that they spent $100 million or maybe more over the August break advertising their support for the President's plan. But let's go back to the basics here. The President and the Democrats say the solution is massive government intervention. Republicans say, well, now, wait a minute. What is driving costs and what will bring costs down? And the gentleman from Utah said it correctly. The reality is cost is being driven, I would argue and most Republicans argue, because you and I don't have patient choice. We can't make the kind of decisions like we could in any other market to drive costs down by buying a product that is less expensive and provides better service.

Mr. SHADEGG. We don't because the costs are hidden. Now, why are the costs hidden? The costs are hidden because the current structure says, if you get your health insurance from your employer, it's tax free. If you buy it yourself, then it's taxed. So the insurance industry never runs an advertisement trying to get the gentleman from Utah or the gentleman from Missouri or the gentleman from Arizona to buy an insurance policy from them. They don't have to advertise for our business. They know our employer picks our plan and the plan picks our doctor, and they don't much care about us. Compare that with the auto insurance industry. In the auto insurance industry, you leave this room right now or anybody watching this at this moment flips from this channel to a commercial channel and within seconds they will see an add for GEICO or Allstate. I saw an ad for Allstate not 3 minutes before I walked over here. Or State Farm. Now, why?

Mr. SHADEGG. One of the biggest outrages, and I think it is immoral, is that this government says that the least among us, those in this society just barely getting by, working for an employer who can't afford to give them insurance, we say it would be responsible for you to buy health insurance, and we are so concerned about your well-being that we are going to smack you down and make you buy it with aftertax dollars, making it at least one-third more expensive. That is immoral and it is a policy of this Congress, and I don't see the Democrats proposing to equalize that tax treatment.

Mr. SHADEGG. I think the gentleman knows well that I have been arguing for a freer market, a free market for health insurance for a long time. I have proposed allowing people to buy policies offered in other States and to make those policies available in the State where they live. The President stood before us and said it is clear we need health care reform, and it is clear we need a government plan because, and he cited, I believe it was Mississippi, he said 75 percent of the insurance plans sold in Mississippi are sold by just five companies. His answer is one new government plan. My answer is let's let dozens of private insurance plans come into Mississippi and bring about real competition. Let me point out that just today there was development on that issue. Senator Baucus released his plan. Senator Baucus, I don't think he is a true friend of free markets, but Senator Baucus in a nod to this idea that has been out there, he included in his bill the notion of allowing cross-state health insurance sales, increasing competition so that somebody who lived in Utah might have 30 plans to pick from rather than five. Or somebody who lived in Arizona might have 100 plans to pick from rather than eight.

Mr. SHADEGG. I wrote a number of years ago a bill that is loosely described as allowing people to buy an insurance policy across State lines. It really doesn't do that, but it does increase competition and make more policies available in a similar way. The idea came to us because some people living in New Jersey were discovering from friends and family members who lived just down the street in Pennsylvania that the cost for health insurance for a family in Pennsylvania was a fraction of the cost of that same policy in New Jersey. Same four-member family, four times, five times, even eight times as expensive.

Mr. SHADEGG. You have to move to a different house, so people were shopping with their feet, literally defrauding the insurance industry, perhaps understandably so, by saying their address was their brother- in-law's address over in Pennsylvania. What I did was I wrote a bill that said you have to meet a financial standard for financial solvency and for appeals, and then you meet the standards of one State in terms of what you provide in the policy, and you can file that policy in all 50 States. And by the way, if you sell it in Missouri, then you are subjecting yourself to regulation by the Missouri insurance commissioner to protect the people in Missouri, and the Missouri courts to protect the people in Missouri. If you sell that policy in Utah, you do the same. But you write one policy and sell it in 50 States.

Mr. SHADEGG. If the gentleman will yield, first of all, it is a tall step given the track record of the Nation. The track record is that the government does not do these functions very well. We had a vote here to bail out the pension fund for postal workers just a few days ago because we are in trouble there. We had a lot of demonstrated history of the ineptitude of the government in solving problems having to do with the hurricane that destroyed much of the southern portion of the country. The government didn't do it well.

Mr. SHADEGG. The next one is we just did Cash for Clunkers, and we flat failed at that miserably. So the track record of government doing these things isn't very good.

Mr. SHADEGG. How about the efficiency of Cash for Clunkers?

Mr. SHADEGG. To ensure energy independence.

Mr. SHADEGG. The other way.

Mr. SHADEGG

Mr. SHADEGG. Mr. Speaker, I believe in health care reform. I have been fighting for it since I got here in 1995. I came to the floor this morning to talk about this amendment. It's an amendment that was rejected by the Democrats last night. It says that no Federal employee should be able to dictate how a medical provider practices medicine. And it was rejected by the Democrats. Apparently Democrats in their health care bill want Federal employees, bureaucrats to dictate how your medical provider practices medicine. I think that's shocking. I don't want a Federal bureaucrat between me and my doctor or between you and your doctor. But I got here and discovered that we are not supposed to ask, Where are the jobs? I don't get it. What's embarrassing about that question? It's a fair question. Where are the jobs? When the Obama administration was sworn in, unemployment was 7.6 percent. When the stimulus passed, it was 8.1 percent. And today, it's 9.5 percent. And we're not supposed to ask where are the jobs? I think it's a legitimate question. I guess it's an embarrassing question. I'd like to know where the jobs are.

Mr. SHADEGG

Mr. SHADEGG. I just want to put up some charts, if I could. We have got boring charts here. I want to thank the gentleman for yielding. And hopefully we can do this where we are all in a conversation and no one of us talks in a monologue. That makes it more interesting. I want to thank the gentleman for standing up. I, like he, watched the Democrats in their Special Order that preceded this. And I thought some things were very interesting. On the one hand, there are things that I think we agree on. Our Democrat colleagues said that it is tragic when someone has a preexisting condition or a chronic illness and because of that preexisting condition or illness they can't get care. That's one of the reasons why we Republicans believe that the health care system in America desperately needs to be reformed. And the health care bill put forward by every Republican that I know of says we need to make sure that every American with a preexisting condition or a chronic illness can get health care costs at roughly the same price as Americans who are healthy. Indeed, I introduced and the Congress passed a number of years ago a bill called the State High Risk Insurance Pool bill that encouraged all 50 States in America to create high-risk pools so that for someone for whom they have an illness and that illness or that chronic condition has caused their health care cost to rise and they either can't get health care at all or they can only get health care at an extraordinary high price, they have the option of going into a State high risk pool and getting health care at the same cost. That's not an issue that divides us. That's an issue we agree on. In addition, they expressed concern about those who are uninsured in America. The bill that I've cosponsored, and I see several of the gentlemen and ladies who have cosponsored it with me today, the Ensuring Health Care for All Americans Act, that bill provides health insurance for every single American. It says we are going to provide care to everyone. And our Democrat colleagues say, Yeah, we think every American should be able to get care. There's another issue where we agree with our Democrat colleagues. But where we don't agree is how they propose to do it, because they want a top-down, government-controlled, one-plan-fits- all, you're-just-one-little-cog-in-a-very-large-wheel plan. And that's what the bill they introduced today will do. I have to ask a question. I think that the biggest issue in the health care debate is cost. Most Americans are pretty satisfied with their health insurance. Eighty-three percent say they're happy. But every American is concerned about cost. And I listened when the Democrats introduced their bill today. And the chairman of my committee, Mr. Waxman, said the big issue here is cost. And so the Democrats are going to fix that cost. Now I don't quite understand how they're going to fix that cost by raising taxes $1.5 trillion to create a massive new government, one- size-fits-all health care plan. But I really, really have this burning question. Anybody in America can answer it, anybody in the room can answer it, any of my Democrats colleagues out there watching tonight can answer it. Please show me the last time when we got government involved and took over a private sector activity, that the cost of something went down.

Mr. SHADEGG. Would the gentlelady yield?

Mr. SHADEGG. I just want to make sure I understand this. So, our Democrats colleagues say the big issue here is cost. Costs are going up too fast. The President said it's unsustainable. In Tennessee they put in a government-run plan, got the government involved, substituted the private market, and costs did not go down?

Mr. SHADEGG. I believe it's 1,100 pages long.

Mr. SHADEGG. The discussion draft was 600 pages. This is 1,100 pages. And if they do what they did on cap-and-trade, it will explode on the day of the vote to what, 1,400 pages with the last-minute 300-page amendment.

Mr. SHADEGG. Would the gentlelady yield just on that point?

Mr. SHADEGG. By the way, our colleagues are saying, let's go to a Canadian-style system, something that gets the government more involved. Well, we all know Canada has a single-payer system. Some of us believe that those on the other side of the aisle want to create exactly that, a single- payer system, but they just want to transition to it. I think it is very important, you said that the right to access to care is not the right to care. Actually that is exactly what the Supreme Court of Canada ruled about their single-payer system. The chief justice, and this is on this chart next to me which I thank the gentlelady for allowing me to put up, Chief Justice Beverly McLaughlin of the Canadian Supreme Court said in an opinion, which was issued in 2005, access to a waiting list is not access to health care, an opinion in which the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that you couldn't be forced to stay in their system, you had to be given the right to get outside of the government program and get the care you need. So to the point the gentlelady was making, access to a waiting list is not access to health care.

Mr. SHADEGG. She was no right-wing conservative.

Mr. SHADEGG. If you have to wait 12 months, it doesn't do you much good at all. I believe our colleague could comment on that more credibly than we could. I just want to make the point: we don't want this. We Republicans want a system that responds to patients. We want patient-centered care. We don't want to give Americans access to a government waiting list. We want to give them access to actual health care.

Mr. SHADEGG. I am shocked. As I stand here, I have to tell you I'm absolutely shocked. I understand that the gentleman from Georgia was reading from the bill just now? You're reading provisions of the bill that was released today?

Mr. SHADEGG. So you have read a portion of this bill?