Health Care Reform

Floor Speech

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Mr. BROUN of Georgia. Dr. Gingrey, thank you so much for yielding to me. I, indeed, went down to the park where all these physicians were. I know Dr. Gingrey and our colleague Dr. Tom Price, also from Georgia, was at that same meeting with the physicians. This was a group of physicians from all over the country that are very concerned about ObamaCare, about the direction that they perceive that the Congress is going. They see H.R. 3200, the ObamaCare bill here in the U.S. House, as well as the bill that Max Baucus has over in the U.S. Senate, as being a tremendous attack on their ability to practice medicine, to be able to make the decisions along with their patients of how health care is delivered within their offices and how they can deliver surgery, prescriptions, and the tests and procedures that they need.

I think they're exactly right. Dr. Gingrey, I know you spoke with them before I did. But Mr. Speaker, when I was down there, I spoke to these physicians, and I told them that they and their patients around this country are what's going to stop this steamroller of socialized medicine that's going on here in the House of Representatives. I reminded them that if we can generate enough grassroots support all over this country to ask particularly the leadership here in the House and the Senate as well as the President to open up this process, to listen to all of the second opinions that Dr. Gingrey and others are putting forward.

I know you are going to talk a little while tonight about your health care bill of rights and the 10 Prescriptions for a Healthy America. I applaud you, Dr. Gingrey, for bringing this forward, but the only thing that's going to slow down this process of the Federal Government taking over the health care system is the ``We the People.'' The Constitution of the United States starts off with three very powerful words, ``We the People.'' Up here we're supposed to be representatives, not rulers, and we, the people, need to stand up and say, Whoa, this is an issue that is too important to rush through. We should not have any deadlines. The Speaker and the President have talked about trying to get a bill on his desk before Thanksgiving. This is too complex of an issue to rush it.

What we, as physicians here in Congress, are trying to do is to offer a second opinion. Actually, we've got many opinions that Republicans have introduced. Dr. Gingrey, you have been very instrumental in fostering the idea of health information technology, digitizing electronic medical records and that sort of thing, which would help save money. We have to find a way to lower the cost. In my private practice of general medicine, I couldn't afford to buy health information technology for my patients. We've got to lower the cost of that, but we have got to lower the cost of everything in health care.

The Republicans have many ideas. I, as well as you and the other people on our side, want to see us open the process so that all the ideas are put on the table, and unfortunately, neither the President nor Speaker Pelosi are allowing that to happen. The American people just need to stand up and say ``no'' to ObamaCare. Let's put these ideas all on the table. Let's discuss them, find ways to lower the cost of health care without creating a big Federal debt, which ObamaCare, H.R. 3200, will do. The President said it wouldn't, but that was not true. He also said that it would not give free health care to illegal aliens, and that is not true. A lot of things that he said that night were not true. In fact, the only person who said the truth that night in that speech was Joe Wilson, our dear colleague from South Carolina.

But the thing is, the American people are in charge. That's what I told the doctors, Mr. Speaker, when I was down there is that the physicians in this country and everybody who is concerned about where we're going in health care--and particularly the elderly--need to say no to this H.R. 3200, which is going to be disastrous for everybody. And let's open up the process, and in a bipartisan way, in a bicameral way use the House and the Senate together, let's find some commonsense market-based solutions that lower the costs for health care.

And in doing so, let the doctor-patient relationship dictate how health care decisions are made, not through some government bureaucrat, as in the House bill right now. The ObamaCare bill here in the House will put a government bureaucrat between a doctor and a patient. Let's find ways of lowering the cost of medicine in the drugstore. Let's find ways of doing the things that make sense economically without stealing our grandchildren's future. We can do that, and we can do that in a bipartisan way if the leader of this House and the leader of the Senate would just open it up and let us do so.

Dr. Gingrey, I applaud your effort, because you've been a leader, right on the forefront in this process of trying to offer second opinions. You've been here week after week, as well as many others. A lot of physicians in the House have been here on the floor week after week offering second opinions. Republicans are the party of K-N-O-W. We know how to solve the health care financing crisis here in America. We know how to solve the energy problems in America and make America energy independent without having this huge energy tax that the cap-and-trade--I call it the tax-and-cap bill--will put on the poor and elderly, those on limited incomes who will really be hurt by that energy bill. We know how to stimulate the economy without creating a bigger government and without bailing out Wall Street. We need to bail out Main Street.

So we are the party of know. We have got about 10 physicians and medical personnel who are a part of the Republican Doctors Caucus, and we are offering many second opinions, really. So Dr. Gingrey, I applaud your effort. I applaud everything that you're doing. You're the chairman of the House Doctors Caucus on the Republican side, and I am honored to be one of your two cochairmen on that group. The American people should know, need to know, that there are alternatives beside the ObamaCare bill, and the American people need to stand up and say, Let's do this in a bipartisan way. Let's stop all the partisanship, the bickering, the discord and all the things that are going on in this country, and let's do it so that people can manage their own health care along with their doctors.

Dr. Gingrey, I will yield back, and I thank you for what you're doing.

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