Providing for Consideration of the Senate Amendment to H.J. Res. 59, Continuing Appropriations Resolution, 2014, and Waiving Requirement of Clause 6(a) of Rule XIII with Respect to Consideration of Certain Resolution

Floor Speech

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Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Texas (Mr. Sessions) for yielding me the time, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is certainly right: we have been here time after time after time on this issue. But we are standing on the brink of the worst government shutdown in modern history. Unlike 1994, the pending government shutdown would reach across the entire Federal Government. In 1994, half of the congressional appropriations bills had been signed into law by the President; and as a result, those Federal agencies were able to operate through the shutdown.

But this year, because of the draconian budget levels included in the misguided sequester, the majority was unable to pass a single appropriations bill into law. In fact, they ran out of money about halfway--well, certainly after we got through the Defense budget and, for the first time since I have been in Congress, were unable to pass the Transportation bill. And because of that, again, we find ourselves in this terrible position. Now as a result, should the government shut down, it is going to be more harmful and more widespread than the last one.

Mr. Speaker, these are very real and very serious consequences that we face, and it is in the face of these consequences that the majority has chosen to continue what can only be described as dangerous partisan games. We have, indeed, been here before. The first time, the majority wanted to defund the Affordable Care Act, and second, they decided to just delay it. But then on that bill, they threw in a chance to do away with the medical device tax, which will create a trillion-dollar deficit increase over the next 10 years and will hit women's reproductive rights next time.

Just today, we saw the first lady of Texas, Ms. Anita Perry, who said in an interview that abortion should be a woman's right and that she believed that women should have the right to choose; and we thank her for that and couldn't agree with her more.

But now what are we coming up with today? Well, we are not going to back away from anything. We are just going to try to kill the health care bill, which we know we can't do. It's taking effect tomorrow morning.

What we are going to do now, they say, is to delay the mandate, which is a large part of the funding for the bill; and in addition to that, they have decided that Members of Congress and our staff will not be able to get the government copay that most people get. In fact, most people who have health care in America get it from their employer. And we aren't going to be denied from being able to do that because the gentleman from Iowa, Senator Grassley, who claimed that he made a mistake, inserted that into the bill when he said just this week that he did not mean for us not to be a part of the government health care system, but that somebody had misinterpreted his idea and wrote it wrong. So that's where we are with that today.

But the majority's proposal before us today is going to do that, and they are going to say to all these young people who come to Washington with such promise and such energy and such verve, really, to try to do something good for their country and who look forward so much to being able to have the great privilege of working in the Capitol of the United States that they're not going to have help with their health insurance, driving many of those, I think, to leave and to find other work and others to really not be able to get the health care that they need.

So why did we do that? Heaven only knows. But, frankly, I would be embarrassed--and I have mentioned this in the Rules Committee--to look around the room at the staff that we praise all the time for their ingenuity, for their faithfulness, for their willingness to stay, as we did Sunday morning until 12:30, without ever making a complaint at all and punishing them through health care.

As offensive as this proposal is, it's a fitting example of the vision for America that the majority has. It's a vision of an America where insurance companies are put back in charge of the health care system, where price-gauging and price discrimination go unchecked, where the most vulnerable among us, including cancer patients, the victims of domestic violence and children born with preexisting conditions, could be denied access to health care.

The New York Times did some wonderful pieces on that in The Sunday Times yesterday, talking about people who have been burdened so much that they are literally bankrupt from the cost of health care. This bill takes every step to avoid that in the future.

I'm not sure that people understand that what happens is that we have turned around what used to be the yearly cap that insurance companies would charge their clients and now say that if you are a single person with health insurance, that once you have paid out of pocket $6,400 for medical procedures and medicine, the insurance company then for the rest of the year will pay your costs. What's not to like about that? If you are a family, $12,000 is the cost.

After seeing what we saw yesterday and reading in The Times that people with cancer many times were unable at all to try to even get the care and that we know--and I know from the work that we have done with cancer patients--that many of them go untreated. If there's anything worse than getting cancer, being diagnosed with cancer, it has to be being unable to pay for treatment.

These are the things that the majority wants to do away with. I've never seen so much work in all my life to try to prevent 30 million Americans--our brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, everybody--from being able to have health insurance, many of them for the first time in their lives.

I met a woman in the last campaign who told me that she was so excited because she had just signed up for Medicare. The woman was born with cerebral palsy; and under the present insurance laws, she was not at all insurable. So she went through her whole life, bringing up children, running a household, driving a car, all the things that could cause the kinds of accidents that leave you permanently impaired without a dime's worth of health insurance.

She was not alone in that. Children who had head injuries or other members of the family could often use up their lifetime limit of about $1 million in less than a year, and they were never insurable again in the United States. We're not going to go back to that.

So there's something we can do here today. What we can do is vote this down, go back to the Rules Committee, take up the Senate's clean bill, which is over here at the desk, pass that bill in the House and the Rules, bring it here, pass it in the House in a bipartisan way--by the way, that wouldn't hurt. And then lo and behold, that bill is ready to go to the President's desk, and we could get that signed. A shutdown would be averted. Health care would be available to people who desperately need it and desperately want it.

We should not continue to be the only industrialized country on the face of the Earth that does not provide health care for its people. I strongly urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this rule and the underlying legislation and demand that we pass the Senate bill.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Ms. SLAUGHTER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Today is a truly shameful day in the distinguished history of this House. Far from the noble mission that some from the other side may claim, what is before us is an extreme--and extremely cynical--attempt to extract a ransom from the American people. They have issued their demands knowing full well they will not be met. Yet they are taking another step towards a government shutdown in order to deny 30 million uninsured Americans health care.

Time has run out. We are down to our last chance. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on today's rule and the underlying legislation, and ask once more that we be given the opportunity to vote on the Senate bill, a clean bill, that can go directly to the President.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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