The Official Truth Squad
Floor Speech
THE OFFICIAL TRUTH SQUAD -- (House of Representatives - July 23, 2007)
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Mr. GARRETT of New Jersey. I thank the gentleman from Georgia for coming to the floor this late hour, although on the west coast it is just early evening, and so we welcome all those who partake in these forums that we have that are educational to not only the American public, but also to our colleagues who may be in their chambers learning a little about SCHIP as we go along.
I was listening to your opening comments, and you were right on point on this one, as you are always right. I have great respect for your ability to have a strong grasp of the situation on a whole slew of topics. I sort of focus on certain areas like the U.N., which is one of my pet peeves, or financial services, or education and No Child Left Behind. But I know whether on the floor or at home, I can watch and be assured that you are covering thoroughly a topic of importance to the American people. And SCHIP is one of those topics.
You were just beginning to address the issue of the number of children that will be on SCHIP and the direction that the government is going in this area. Your chart makes the point abundantly clear.
Red is usually a warning sign to people. When the red flashers go off or the red lights flash, you know something is amiss, and I guess you chose the appropriate coloration of your charts that something is amiss.
We see back in 1998, less than a decade ago, a little over a quarter of the kids in this country were under a government-run plan, and now we are looking to see almost three-quarters of the children in this country under a government-run plan.
That is fine. That would be fine if you thought that the U.S. government, if Washington is in the best position to take care of and administer the health of our children.
But you know, you don't have to listen to The Official Truth Squad here on the floor each week to know that things are oftentimes amiss when it comes to the efficiency and the accountability of the Federal Government.
Heck, just look a couple of years ago when the whole issue of Katrina was coming on, there was railing from both sides of the aisle, rightfully so, when we realized that the Federal Government couldn't get into an area where it had an obligation to, and that is, to help out people in a tragic situation, whether it's home settings or others or in a health situation.
Likewise, I think I recall there was railing again against the Federal Government when, again, in an area that the Federal Government does have a distinct responsibility, and that is taking care of our veterans and our men and women who are in the military or returning back from the military to the facility just down the road a piece from here, and there was a question as to the conditions of those medical facilities and whether we're giving those brave men and women all the facilities and care and comfort and proper medical care that they deserve.
Yet, when we know that all those problems exist, there are some, especially from the other side of the aisle in this House and certainly on the other side of the aisle in the Senate, who would say that the solution to the health dilemma in this country is not by turning it back to a patient-doctor relationship, but instead of turning it to a Federal Government/doctor-patient relationship. So we are going in the wrong direction with regard to that.
I'd like to come back to that in a moment or two, but at this point I yield back to gentleman if he would like to speak.
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Mr. GARRETT of New Jersey. The last point you make as far as the area of intrusiveness of the Federal Government and how they are sometimes basically out of step with what is appropriate between the normal doctor-patient relationship, maybe that's because the Federal Government and all governments in general always lag behind the private sector, whatever field you might consider, as far as innovation and moving ahead and new areas.
I mean, think about it. You can go to the store tonight and buy any item that you possibly want, whip out your credit card and slip it through a machine. Within seconds that transaction is created, and they know your credit rating and whether you have money in that bank account to pay for that item. It's all done just in the blink of an eye.
Go to your local town hall or go to the IRS or go to anybody else like that and see whether they are up to date with that technology, and you will find out they are not. Those are okay, because that's not a life-and-death situation. But you, as a physician, know that when it comes to a life-and-death situation, or we all know, that we want our children and our spouses to be able to have the most up-to-date, the most innovative, the most advanced technology available to them.
I think that is going to be found on the marketplace of ideas that is in the general marketplace, as opposed to the convoluted, Byzantine system that we call this, the Federal Government.
Mr. Ryan just stated that what the Federal Government is attempting to do here, with the expansion of this program, as we come to the floor tonight, we mark approximately the sixth month of control of the Federal Government under Democrat leadership. As we mark this sixth month, we have seen the largest expansion in taxes, the largest tax increase in U.S. history. I guess, as we discussed here on the floor tonight about the Democrat plan for the expansion of the SCHIP program, we see the largest expansion intrusion into the family and personal life by the health system, by the expansion of the SCHIP system.
The point I just wanted to make, though, is take a look at how the system has worked so far with respect to the system, the distribution of money to the States. If you go back to I guess it was 1968 or 1969, the first couple of years under the Nixon administration, and he came up with a program of distributing money to the States that was called revenue sharing. That was a new idea at the time, and after a time we realized it didn't really work exactly the way Nixon intended it to do. In fact, he tried to do it in certain areas like education and was never able to get it into legislation. Yet the same sort of idea here, in the original version and the version that will be coming out in the Senate as well.
In a similar situation that we can all relate to, say you have four kids in your family, and you are going to give them all $40 to spend each week. So you give each one of your children $10 each. So here, Child One, Two, Three, Four, presumably you have better names than that for them, here is $10 each. You each get to spend it on anything you want during the course of this week. But, mind you, when the weekend comes, if you don't spend it, if one of the other ones here happens to go over their budget, and you didn't spend it all, what we are going to do is redistribute those funds to the other child there.
What do you think that your kids are going to do? I would imagine that each one of them is probably going to go out as soon as they possibly can, spend that full $10, and maybe even spend $11 just hoping that there will be some money left over from their siblings there to spend it.
Well, children, not to make the comparison here to the States, but the States here are a lot like children in this situation. This system was set up with $40 billion initially spread out to all the States. It was done, you might say, as fair as the Federal Government goes, as far as how many children may be in the program versus how many children are under other programs. But what happened immediately after that, when they told the States, now, look, if you don't spend your money, we are going to take your leftover money and send it to the other States? Well, initially, in the first couple of years, a number of States did not spend all their money. In 2001, only 12 States exhausted their entire allotment. However, once they saw how that all came down, in 2006, 40 States used all available funds. In that same period of time, unused State funds dropped from $2 billion to only $170 million.
So, finally, in this past appropriations, we had to step in, because there was too few States not spending all their money, too many States spending it. So we had to come up with spending of an additional $393 million that was recently appropriated to address the 2007 shortfall. That just goes to show you one of the inherent problems in the system and the way it has been administrated in the past and, I believe, will continue under this system as well.
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Mr. GARRETT of New Jersey. I know that the gentleman from Wisconsin would be able to elaborate on this in much more detail, but in the best case scenario, would that the Federal Government be awash with cash right now, and would that we had no mandatory spending problem going on in the Federal Government right now, maybe some people would want to sit down right now and say, how can we spend our extra dollars around the country?
But as the gentleman can elaborate in much detail, and we have seen in the Budget Committee for the first months of this year, testimony after testimony after testimony, expert after expert after expert from all spectrums of authority, we are now in that situation where we find ourselves with the Federal Government and mandatory spending going out of control. There are legitimate groups within that that the American public would agree with, or those that we should be targeting, to make sure that they do.
The aged, the poor, the infirm, who desperately need medical care and are not able to cover it by themselves and are not fortunate enough to be able to work any longer, and who are not working now and covered by an employer plan, and did not unfortunately work for a company that provides for a company-sponsored plan after their termination at work, those are the people that the American public would ask that's where our focus would be.
But do we find ourselves in our situation right now where we can say that we have all the other mandatory spending under control that we can address this now?
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Mr. GARRETT of New Jersey. If the gentleman would yield, And lest anyone following this get confused when we talk about the tax increases, the gentleman from Wisconsin set it out and you followed up with quite some detail, as far as the tax increase necessary in order to pay for those entitlement expansions over time. That would be in addition to what we have already seen has occurred during this first 6 months in office.
In other words, we have already seen the largest tax increase in U.S. history. And the current tax increase means that 115 million taxpayers are going to see a $1,716 increase in their tax bill in just a couple years; 84 million women would see their taxes go up by $1,970; 42 million families with children, which is what we are down here talking on the floor about right now, those children, trying to be sure they have health insurance. Those 42 million families with children will see an increase of over $2,000 in their taxes already this year because of what the Democrats have done. And what you are speaking of is going to be in addition to and on top of that.
In trying to just throw some numbers to the percentages that you were throwing out there before as far as this expansion of children that will come under this program now, those children who may be just living across the street from us who their dads or moms work for a company right now that provides them insurance, all of a sudden those companies don't provide it anymore because now the government, we are going to pay for it.
Or those children who have parents who have retiree benefits and are getting insurance for them now, they will no longer have to get it from their retirement pension programs; the government, meaning taxpayers, will pay for it.
The CBO just came out with some numbers on this, and real numbers means that for the first, just the expansion of the program as far as additional dollars means 600,000 new children who used to yesterday have coverage under the private sector will now look to the taxpayer to pay for it; and another 600,000 children yesterday who had insurance, whether through pensions or their parents' employers, will now look to the Federal taxpayers. So 1.2 million children. Now, that is under the House version. That number, I haven't gotten a CBO estimate yet, would be even greater under the Senate version as far as children expanded into this program who are already covered.
Mr. PRICE of Georgia. I appreciate your pointing out the issue of taxes, because there has also been work that has laid out the tax increase for the average citizen in every State across this Nation. And in Georgia, that average increase is $2,700 average tax increase when those tax increases go into effect if they are not changed. They were included in this budget that included no entitlement reform. In Wisconsin, the average number was $2,964. And New Jersey is a big winner, average increase $3,779.
Mr. GARRETT of New Jersey. We are number one in a number of things, in the number of taxes that we pay and the number of taxes that the Democrats are going to make us pay in the future as well.
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