Health Care Centers Renewal Act of 2008

Floor Speech

HEALTH CENTERS RENEWAL ACT OF 2008 -- (House of Representatives - June 04, 2008)

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Madam Speaker, I'm a medical doctor. As a physician, I have been a medical director in a National Health Service Corps community health clinic. I have given away hundreds of thousands of dollars of my services to the poor over my 30-some-odd years' career of practicing medicine in rural southwest Georgia, as well as in northeast Georgia where I currently live.

Health care costs are issues that particularly poor people have a tremendous difficulty dealing with. And it certainly is a very important issue. We've got to solve the crisis we have in health care financing today. We don't have a health care quality problem, we have a health care financing problem. And a lot of this is due to an overregulation on the health care system, on doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and other entities.

But an issue that actually affects poor people more than health care today is the tremendous cost of energy. Right now today, we're drilling for ice on the ground in Mars, and we can't even drill for oil in America. It's got to stop. We've got to bring down the cost of gasoline. And we can do that. We can do that by drilling offshore. We can do that by tapping into the oil sources we have throughout the west and in Alaska. And it's absolutely critical.

The cost of gasoline is hurting everyone. It's driving up the cost of groceries in the supermarket. It's driving up the cost of all goods and services, including health care. So if we're going to lower the cost of the health care, if we're going to lower the cost of food in the grocery store, we've got to lower the cost of gasoline by drilling now and streamlining the permitting process to get refineries so that they're producing more gasoline and we can bring the cost down. So I encourage my colleagues to push for drilling for oil now.

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