Providing For Consideration Of Motions To Suspend The Rules
Floor Speech
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Mr. FATTAH. Let me thank my colleague from the Rules Committee for yielding me some time. The beauty of sports--you know, we're entering into March Madness; we just witnessed the Olympics. When you get to sports, there's a scorecard. All the talk and all the bravado really doesn't matter. You kind of look at what the score is. And we had a Republican President, we had a Republican House, a Republican Senate for 6 years. And on the question of providing insurance to tens of millions of Americans who didn't have it, they did zero. On the question of reining in
insurance companies in terms of excess costs, they did zero. In terms of dealing with the practices of insurance companies taking away coverage on a preexisting condition, because they say pregnancy is a preexisting condition or acne or domestic violence, the Republican President and the majority in the House and the Senate for 6 years did zero.
Now we have a Democratic President and a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate. In less than 16 months, we have provided health care to over 10 million children, even against the tobacco lobby and all of our Republican colleagues, many of whom voted against it. We prevailed. We in this House voted to take away the antitrust exemptions from insurance companies. Within just a few hours, some 72 hours from almost this moment, we are going to provide over 32 million of our fellow citizens with health insurance coverage through a health care reform proposal. We're going to rein in the worst practices of insurance companies. We're going to eliminate lifetime caps and yearly caps. We're going to make sure that children with preexisting conditions can't be denied coverage, and then down the road, adults.
So we are moving to look now at the scorecard. All of the talk is wonderful. I heard my colleague say, Well, they've done this and they tried to do this. Whatever the Republican President and majority did over those 6 years is overwhelmed by what was left undone. And we have begun this work. We're going to finish this work. And we're going to make sure that in this country we join the rest of the industrialized world in providing insurance for all of our citizens. We began this fight, and we're prepared to vote about it in just some 72 hours, all of this talk notwithstanding.
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