Affordable Care Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, 435 Members of the House of Representatives spent the last 10 days back in their districts. I suspect, like me, they had a chance to meet with their constituents to talk about the issues of the day and to see America's real progress, the progress that is taking place in our communities.

I would like to share some of those experiences that I had over the last 10 days with the Members of this House because they are instructive about what we ought to be doing here in the House of Representatives.

Every person I talk to, probably more than 30 meetings, many of them public in nature, townhall meetings, meetings at manufacturing plants with the workers, meetings at the universities, all of those people had the same agenda. Frankly, it ought to be our agenda because it is America's agenda.

They want this economy to grow. They want this economy to provide the job opportunities that Americans must have. Those good hardworking American families, they want to go to work, they want to have a decent wage, and they want to be certain that when they are sick they have an affordable health care policy.

We hear a lot of rhetoric here about the Affordable Care Act and ObamaCare, but back home people are trying to figure out their insurance programs, just like they do every time at this time of year. Every year it is time to renew your insurance policy and people look at new policies. They put aside the old policy. They get a notice that their old policy, the cost has gone up or the coverage has changed.

Now they are in the same situation, but we have a name for it now. We call it ObamaCare. Americans always in the fall have a high level of confusion as they try to figure out what to do with their health care for the coming year.

At one meeting I attended this last week with a group of doctors and administrators, they said: This will work it out, this is no different than we have seen every year. We know that at the end of this process the health care insurance will go on and people will have coverage. Then they added: But this year, there will be far more people with health care coverage, and in our hospital there will not be as much uncompensated care, that is, people that don't have insurance. So they said: Just keep working at it, let this thing settle down, let it go forward because we know that in California millions of our citizens and our neighbors will finally have health care insurance.

But hey, this is a place of rhetoric, this is a place where we create problems like the new crisis that is going to come up in just 2 1/2 months. Oh yeah, we have manufactured yet another crisis. On January 15, we are going to have to go through our quarterly funding of the strongest government in the entire world. Hello, you said. You mean you are actually funding the United States Government once every 3 months? You don't have a full year funding? That's right, we don't. So we have yet one more manufactured crisis.

Be aware, January 15 is coming. Is there another government shutdown? The American people, my constituents in my district, said: Don't let it happen again, don't let it happen again. It hurt us, it hurt us. In our businesses, we had to lay off people. But Mr. Congressman, what we want is a steady, steady policy out of Washington. We want to know what the long-term looks like. We want to know what the long-term tax policy is. We want to know what the funding programs are going to be for the military, for the social welfare programs. We don't want to have to--as one constituent told me as I visited their Head Start program--we don't want to have to lay people off, we don't want to have to tell the children, the 600 in my district that are no longer in the Head Start program: Oh, I am sorry, you can't come to school next week because funding from Washington was cut.

It is time for us in the House of Representatives to settle down. It is time for us to put aside all of our rhetoric. We know we have to work together. It is time for us to come up with some long-term solutions for America's problems. Tonight I would like to talk about how we can build jobs here in the United States, how we can rebuild the manufacturing sector of the United States economy, a sector of the economy that just 15 years ago employed just under 20 million Americans with solid jobs, where the wife or the husband could go to work each day knowing that they would bring home a paycheck sufficient to pay the mortgage on the house, to buy a car, and they had a health insurance policy provided by their employer. Now, we are somewhere near 11 million Americans in manufacturing, and many of those health insurance programs have disappeared.

What we need to do is go back to the basics. We need to go back to those critical investments, both public and private, that have created this incredible economy. Even though manufacturing is smaller, nonetheless the economy of the United States remains the biggest in the world. But if we continue with this 3-month funding of the Federal Government, if we continue to withdraw the critical public investments and the critical inducements to the private sector to make their investments, we will see our economy slip away. We will see the strength of this Nation ebb, and we will wonder down the line what happened.

Well, there are several things that allow America to build these kinds of things. That's a modern locomotive, an electric locomotive destined to be on the Amtrak lines here on the east coast. It was the first modern locomotive made in America, 100 percent American made in probably the last 60-70 years. How did it come to pass that this locomotive and about 77 other locomotives just like it will be on the tracks here on the east coast, 100 percent American made? How did that happen?

Well, it happened with government policy. And so the men and women and children who ride the trains here on the eastern corridor are going to have a new system available to them. Critical investments were made over the years, critical investments in each one of these issues, and these are the ways in each of these areas, in international trade, in tax policy, in energy policy, labor relations issues, education, research, and infrastructure. Oh, by the way, none of this is new. These are not new things. These have been in place in America since George Washington's time. Indeed, George Washington reached out to Alexander Hamilton shortly after he was inaugurated as the first President of the United States, and said, Hey, Alex, I need some help here. I want to build the American economy, Alex, so what can we do?

Well, Alexander Hamilton said, Let me work on it.

He came back about 2 months later with a report. Our reports are usually 2,000 or 3,000 pages. His was maybe less than 50. He said there are things that we can do at the Federal level to grow the American economy, to build the manufacturing sector of America. He called it manufacturers, and he said trade policy. We need a trade policy that protects American manufacturers against cheap imports coming into the United States, against those who would subsidize their businesses to the detriment of American businesses. He said trade policy. We need a trade policy that protects American manufacturing.

That was Alexander Hamilton in his report to George Washington in the first months of the first administration of the United States Government.

Tax policy was also there. He said that in tax policy we shouldn't be taxing ours, our manufacturing products. We should be taxing those products that are coming from overseas. Those are called duties, and so tax policy was part of it.

Actually, energy policy wasn't on the list at the time so we can kind of put that aside, although that is an extremely important discussion for today; but for the purposes of today, we will let that go.

Labor at the time was not such a good thing. There were no laws protecting the men and women who worked, and certainly there was slavery and all the horrible things that went with that; but labor policy was also not part of what he talked about.

But he did talk about education. This was probably a conversation that I'm not sure Hamilton and Jefferson had, but education was very much a part of the early effort in the American Government to stimulate economic growth, manufacturing and the like.

Interestingly, research wasn't specifically called out; but while they didn't use the term ``research,'' they used the word ``patent,'' ``patents,'' and ``patent policy'' which was also part of this report. While they didn't say ``research'' formally, what they did say was out of the innovative and inventive mind of Americans would come new ideas and there needed to be a patent policy to allow those new ideas to mature and inure to the benefit of the inventor and the entrepreneur.

So way back at the very beginning of this Nation's economic future, certain policies were laid in place that actually led to the extraordinary growth in infrastructure. Hamilton specifically said, and George Washington agreed, that there needed to be a transportation policy for the United States. We are calling that infrastructure today. Then they called it canals, ports, roads. Today we call it canals, ports, roads, airports, we call it Internet, we call it telecommunication systems. It is the infrastructure upon which the economy then grows.

Way back in the 1780s, these ideas were presented to the Congress of the United States, some of them enacted by the Congress, some of them enacted by the various State governments. And over the years, as generations have gone by, as new men and women have come to sit here in the Halls of this great Congress and in the Senate, and new Presidents, there has been a constant drumbeat of critical investment by the United States Government in the foundation of economic growth.

And today, in the debates that are occurring here on the floor of this House and across this Nation, there is a debate about the role of the Federal Government in the

future economy of the United States. You just heard part of that debate from some of my colleagues who preceded me here on the floor saying that the United States Government really ought not be involved in health care too much. Okay, they didn't like the Affordable Care Act. They want it to disappear, repealed, defunded or otherwise gone. Well, okay. But there is this thing called Medicare. I don't hear anybody on the floor saying--well, they actually did call for the repeal of Medicare, but that hasn't gone very far.

But the Federal Government is involved in many, many aspects of American life; and in those things that create economic growth, you will find us now involved soon in a debate about trade policy. Should we have unlimited free trade in which the American businesses are open to unfair competition from around the world, from workers that are paid virtually nothing in some of the less developed countries of the world where there are no laws about working conditions, where factories collapse? Should American businesses have to compete with that kind of competition? I think not. So I would use the words ``fair trade,'' not free trade, but fair trade--trade policies that are fair to the American worker, that give the American worker a chance to compete in the world markets rather than having our business simply run away chasing the cheapest wage rate in the world.

So trade policy is going to be discussed here with the Trans-Pacific partnership program and perhaps a similar one for Europe. We must be very careful, very, very careful as we analyze this that the American worker is not put in a disadvantageous position and situation where they will lose their job to competition, unfair competition from around the world. So it has to be fair trade.

Let me move down here to the infrastructure issue. My district is 200 miles of the Sacramento River Valley. I probably have 1,000 miles of levees that protect farms and ranches and cities from floods. We have had disastrous floods in California over the years and over the centuries. Those levees are critical, a critical infrastructure to protect not only human life and property, but to allow businesses to grow. Right now without proper levees, farmers who want to put in a feed mill, farmers in my district who grow rice who want to put in a rice drying facility and a silo in which to store that rice, or even a cow barn for their dairy, find it difficult and in many cases impossible because the levee that holds back the floodwaters from their farm does not meet the 100-year flood standard set by the Corps of Engineers and FEMA. Therefore, they can't build unless they get insurance, and the insurance program is unaffordable.

So we see right here that the growth in the agricultural sector in my district is retarded from lack of investment in the levees, upgrading and maintaining those levees so they meet the minimum standards. This is something the Federal Government has played a role in forever, it seems. Certainly for the last century and a half, the Federal Government has been involved through the Army Corps of Engineers in building levees to protect cities, whether it is on the Ohio River, the Mississippi, the Missouri, or in California, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin Rivers in that central valley and beyond.

So what are we doing today? Well, we passed a Water Resources Development Act a couple of weeks ago. Good for us. The Senate has passed their bill. We need a conference committee. I understand the Senate has named conferees. The House of Representatives has yet to do so. All of that is good. We will set out a good policy, I hope, one that sets proper controls, provides for prioritization, a policy that would make sure that there is no waste, fraud and abuse, and that efficient and effective policies are the ones that would be funded by the American taxpayer. All good. But there is a problem. The problem is, where is the money to pay for this? It is not there. Why? Sequestration and severe budget cuts.

We are actually seeing a very rapid decline in the amount of money that is available for infrastructure investment and for other programs that the Federal Government has carried out over many, many decades.

So we can put the best policies in place; but unless we have the money to build these structures, then those farmers that want to improve their operation are not going to be able to do so. So we ought to think seriously about infrastructure investment, in this case protection for floods. The same thing goes for the cities in my district and across this Nation. We know there is a big brouhaha going on around here about the increasing cost of flood insurance. Yes, it is a real problem: like quadruple, in some cases there is a ten-fold, increase in the cost of flood insurance in certain communities around the Nation. Everybody goes, We didn't mean to do that. Indeed, we didn't mean to do that; but it did happen. Now we have to back that off. As we back that off, we need to consider the fact that it is not just flood insurance; it is the protection from floods.

And so when Superstorm Sandy comes again, will the east coast be prepared with the necessary flood walls and facilities to repel the flood? Only if we adequately finance the infrastructure investment in this case for flood protection.

Highways and bridges, well, I don't know, there is probably several thousand bridges in the United States that you want to cross very quickly, or you don't want to be on that bridge with a very heavy truck. We have deficient bridges in every part of the United States. We have seen those bridges collapse with catastrophic results, people losing their lives, cars into the rivers, trucks into the rivers. These bridges have to be repaired. And drive on any highway in the United States, you will see some new asphalt, some new concrete, but you are going to see a whole lot more new potholes. You are going to see the deterioration of the highway system in the United States. There is insufficient money even to maintain the repair and good state of those highways. It goes on and on.

Where will we find the revenue? We are continuing to see a decline in the willingness of the Federal Government, us, Members of Congress, to fund these programs.

Infrastructure, critically important in many ways, and I have only dealt with two of those issues here tonight.

I want to pick up the one that is really the genesis of economic growth, and it is research. I mentioned earlier that George Washington, while he didn't use the word ``research,'' used the word ``patent,'' which comes from research being done by some individual or group that created a new product. They got their patent on it so that they could then use that in the commercial marketplace and hopefully make a profit.

Research has been around a long time. Most of the research in the early days was probably mostly in the area of the military, done in part by the military, dating way back, in trying to upgrade their weapons. But beginning in the 1860s, Abraham Lincoln signed a law called the land-grant college program and established, across the United States, a series of colleges and universities who had a specific function of researching for agriculture.

Over the years, that has grown into an extraordinary research capability within the United States. And now, not only do we have the agricultural research--and I must say, with some pride, that I represent the University of California, Davis, which is the largest, most successful, most advanced in total--I am not putting down anybody else--agricultural research program in the world. There are a lot of other great programs out there, but in terms of size and reach, the University of California, Davis is way out front.

What other kinds of research are there funded by the United States Government? The National Institutes of Health. How do we keep people healthy? What about disease? What about heart conditions, cancer? The National Institutes of Health; the National Science Foundation; NOAA, dealing with oceans and atmosphere; NASA, dealing with space. All of these research projects are fundamental to economic growth, and all of them have Federal funding. Some of them have partnerships with State, some with private funding, but these partnerships have created the foundation for economic growth.

I had the pleasure of being at the University of California, Davis earlier this last week, meeting with the heads of four departments, each of them engaged in a different kind of research--earth science research in some cases, water research in others. Everybody knows that California has its water issues, and right now we are in the early stages of what I hope and pray is not a drought.

We have these researchers out there and other research on health issues. All of them are saying that the sequestration and the budget cuts of the Federal Government are severely impacting critical research that was about to mature into a solution for a health problem, into a new way of conserving water or a new energy system using hydrogen or solar. But those projects that they were working on have been stalled and, in some cases, set aside, so the opportunity for economic growth coming from that research is slowed or stopped. We can't allow that to happen. Not only is it immediate jobs, but that is the research that will create future jobs.

I want to give one example of the way in which research actually works out together with regulations, regulations to protect our air, regulations to protect our water--the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and other regulations. Some of them are now dealing with the issue of climate change.

I am a member of the Safe Climate Caucus, and there are many of us that belong to this caucus. We are trying to say we have got global warming. Whether the tragic typhoon in the Philippines was directly caused by global warming--I think it is no accident that we are seeing stronger storms just as predicted. Anyway, our Safe Climate Caucus is concerned that many here in Congress are trying to shut down commonsense Environmental Protection Agency guidelines that are designed to keep our air and our water clean and healthy and to reduce the disastrous consequences of climate change.

These regulations can actually drive technological development and they can strengthen our economy. When those policies are paired with the entrepreneurship, the inventiveness of the individuals and businesses out there, some really interesting things happen and jobs are created.

Last week I visited one such program in California. It is a program put together by Recology, which is a company that operates in my district and in San Francisco. They are a recycling, a composting, and a landfill company, and they have a landfill. They are involved in some very interesting and innovative ways to separate the waste, to recycle, all to the good.

But they have another project. They have teamed up with a company called G2 Energy. It has put in place a facility to take the methane gas that comes off of the landfill that at one point went up in the atmosphere--do keep in mind that methane gas is around a 20 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. They put in a project to capture that methane gas, take it out of the landfill, put it in a pipe with a vacuum, run it over to a Caterpillar engine manufactured in America--actually, it is a big marine engine that probably was driving some very large ship, but it now is sitting there next to the landfill, attached to a generator, and producing an extraordinary amount of electricity.

That is innovation, and that is the kind of things that can be done. That methane coming off the landfill into the Caterpillar engine and into the generator will replace more than a million gallons of diesel fuel that was once used to run that very same kind of an engine. That is the kind of innovation that can occur when coupled with research and wise public policy.

There are so many other pieces to all of this, and we will talk about it in the days ahead.

One of the things that I want to just kind wind up with is why it is important. So, do keep in mind trade policy, tax policy, energy, labor policy, education, research, and infrastructure. These are the foundational investments that any economy must make if they want to see sustained economic growth. Unfortunately, we are falling off the power curve on many of these policies.

Here is why it is important. Here is why this discussion is important. Here is why manufacturing and growth in the American economy is important. These are words that Franklin Delano Roosevelt put forward. He said:

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

We know that after the great meltdown in 2008 and 2009 that millions of Americans lost their jobs. We also know that, in the last 5 years, the economy has come back, that additional wealth has been created. We do know that the gross national product of the United States, which is its wealth, has grown. What most people don't know is where that wealth went. That wealth went to the top 10 percent. About 95 percent of the wealth generated over the last 5 years has wound up in the hands of the top 10 percent, the most wealthy people in America.

So the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt come directly back to a manufacturing and jobs policy for the United States. If we make the critical investments to grow the economy, to provide the infrastructure, to do the research, to deal with the international trade, to think back to what George Washington had in mind as a Founding Father, then we can begin to establish policies that grow the American economy, that reestablish America as the mightiest manufacturing country in the world, and, in so doing, create those jobs for hardworking Americans that go to work every day, want to pay their bills, want to pay their house mortgage, buy the car, see that their kids get an education, see that they have an adequate health insurance program. If we do those things, then these words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt will begin to ring true, and we will begin to add enough for those who, today, have too little. That should be our challenge.

It is not our place to make sure that the superwealthy and the billionaires and others get even more. It is our place that those who struggle every day, many in poverty--and the poverty rate in California is 25 percent or more--that those who struggle every day to provide for their family, that they have a chance of a good education, an opportunity to get that job, that middle class job. If they have that, then this country will prosper and the kinds of divisions that sometimes rake us over the coals and cause us great consternation and trouble will be abated. They will never disappear--I have no illusions--but they will be abated, and they will be less. That should be our goal.

As we approach the next fiscal crisis, just 2 months away, we should think about those men and women out there that I saw--and I suspect many of my colleagues saw as they returned home and went to their districts and went to all their meetings--who said: Can you just give us certainty? Can you stop the interminable fighting and the chaos that is causing us such concern, that is causing me not to invest in my business? Just give us certainty. Give us a program that builds a foundation so that my business can grow and prosper. Give us the tax policy that has the proper incentives, not just for those who have great wealth, but for those who are trying to grow their business. Give us a trade policy that is fairer to the American worker, fairer to the American business, that doesn't just give away this great country's wealth to some other company around the world, that doesn't encourage our businesses, our American corporations to go offshore. Put those policies in place so that we can grow the American economy, so that Americans can have a decent job and fulfill their own personal vision of the American Dream. They can get on that ladder, leading wherever they want it to lead, climb as high as they can, that the impairments and the impediments are not there. That should be our goal.

We have about 2 months to avoid yet one other crisis. As we avoid it, I hope we keep in mind those things that create real wealth and real opportunity for all Americans.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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