Free Enterprise, The Foundation Of America's Economic System

Floor Speech

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Mr. BURGESS. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

You know, I was on a conference call a little while ago when you started, and I saw you going through those charts. They do look terribly complex, and lest anyone who is watching your discussion of those charts thinks that, well, perhaps the good gentleman from Iowa is just engaged in a little political hyperbole or perhaps that he is overstating the case for the purposes of discussion, when you look at the bill, H.R. 3200, there are a lot of words contained in here.

We had this bill in my Committee on Energy and Commerce. It was also debated and voted on in the Committee on Ways and Means and in the Committee on Education and Labor. We all had the same bill. We all ended up with a little bit different product at the end. Well, this bill ended up being about 1,000 pages in my committee, so you could just imagine, with 1,000 pages, there is room for lots of twists and turns and rabbit runs and dead ends, as the gentleman from Iowa so eloquently expressed. That was July 31, and here we are near the end of October. So we have volume 1 and volume 2 of the same bill.

I would submit that the gentleman, if anything, is guilty of, perhaps, not having a graph that's complicated enough, because this bill has expanded beyond anyone's reasonable belief of what this bill should be.

Now, Madam Speaker, I would submit to you that 1,000-page bills scare people, and they scare people for a good reason. They scared people when we were in charge, and they scare people now. They scare people because they don't think we're going to read this. They don't think we're going to take this insurance ourselves. They know that their taxes are going to go up and that their freedoms are going to go down. So 1,000-page bills scare people.

We all agree that something needs to be done. Reform is necessary.

It would be so straightforward to pick those things that need attention, to work on those problems, to deliver for the American people, and not to scare them so close to Halloween with now a 2,000-page bill--or actually, it turns out to be about 2,400 pages. I realize parts of this are duplicative and that parts of this are even contradictory because no one has really gone through and has sorted out what Ways and Means did and what Energy and Commerce did. It's just kind of a merged product that we have now.

It really doesn't matter because this bill that was delivered to me on Friday afternoon really could go straight into the round file. The actual bill is being written in the Speaker's rooms even as we speak. I suspect the gnomes who work on bills are over there, crafting away on the legislative language, probably with heavy doses of input from down at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Certainly, if you looked around the room, I'll bet you wouldn't find any Republicans, and I'll bet you wouldn't even find any backbench Democrats.

Isn't it ironic that the President, who stood on the floor of this House and who said he'd be open and straightforward with the American people and who said that all of these processes would be aboveboard--in the daylight, on C-SPAN--has this all being conducted in the dark in the Speaker's office? The doors are closed and locked. Mr. King is not allowed in the room. I'm not allowed in the room. No Republicans are in the room. Again, I rather suspect many of the rank-and-file Democrats are not allowed in the room as well.

What will happen now is this bill, which will be written in the Speaker's office, will come to us at some point. They have graciously consented 72 hours for us to read the bill. Will it be this big? I don't know. It certainly could be. It was 1,000 pages when it left our committee. It was 1,500 pages when it left the Senate committee. It's not likely that it has diminished in size with all of these people working on it. We have 72 hours to review the bill. Madam Speaker, the people of America will have 72 hours with the bill up on Thomas to review what's in there. Then we'll vote.

We'll vote, and it will be a vote we will cast not just to affect the rest of health care in the rest of our natural lifetimes but in the rest of our children's natural lifetimes and in the lifetimes of our children's children. That is the implication of what is contained herein. The American people don't trust us with a 1,000-page bill. They don't trust us with a 2,000-page bill, but there are some things they want fixed.

Isn't it ironic we've got over 50 pages in this bill which are dealing with the types of language services you must offer in hospitals and in doctors' offices, but there is not a single word about liability reform? Yet the Congressional Budget Office, in a letter to Orrin Hatch last week--or in a letter to a member of the other body last week--said that we could save $54 billion if we would enact the right kind of liability reform. Why wouldn't we do that?

We also had the event last week where the Nation's doctors were told, Sorry, we can't help you. You're going to get some bad pay cuts over the next 10 years, but there's just nothing we can do to stop it because we don't have the money to do so.

Well, why not take that $54 billion? There's also other money we could find in other places. Why not find that money and why not help the doctors rather than say

we can't do it?

So here we're going to ask our Nation's doctors to be our partners with us as we go through this. They're going to have to live with whatever we pass for the next two or three generations of physicians, and we won't do those two simple things that are so important to the Nation's physicians--liability reform and payment reform in Medicare. It seems so simple. I would just have to ask:

Why is that too much trouble with all the king's horses and all the king's men working on this legislation?

I yield back to my friend from Iowa.

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Mr. BURGESS. I think you are accurate in your assessment. I spent the weekend talking to a good number of doctors back in Texas, and I will tell you there is a great deal of concern, a good deal of anxiety on the part of America's physicians as they watch us go through this process and recognize that at the end of the day their two biggest problems are no closer to being solved than they were when the President came to the American Medical Association and spoke to them in June of this past year.

It is, the gentleman mentioned, the monetary issues involved with liability reform. Those are truly significant, but there is no way to calculate the emotional toil, the emotional wear and tear that it takes on physicians and their families as they go through every episode of litigation. It is an unfortunate by-product of our system and, again, it is something where the Nation's doctors thought if nothing else, we'll give up a lot of our freedom, we'll give up a lot of our autonomy, but at least we'll have these two problems solved. It looks like at the end of the day they get to give up all that autonomy and all that freedom, and their problems are no closer to being solved than they were when we started this process.

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