Health Insurance Industry Fair Competition Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. WEINER. You know, you got to love these Republicans. I mean, you guys have chutzpah. The Republican Party is ..... That is the fact. They say that, well, this isn't going to do enough, but when we propose an alternative to provide competition, they are against it. They say that, well, we want to strengthen State insurance commissioners, and they will do the job. But when we did that in our national health care bill, they said we are against it. They said they want to have competition, and when we proposed requiring competition, the Republicans are against it. They are ..... That is the fact.

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Mr. WEINER. I thank you very much. But the point is very simple. There are inequities in the present way we distribute insurance, the way we distribute health care. There are winners, and there are losers. The winners are the insurance industry. And our efforts to reel in the insurance profits, not just because they shouldn't make profits--they're doing what they're supposed to. But what they're doing is driving up taxes, they're driving our economy into the ground, and we need competition and choice to deal with that. That's what this legislation does, and the motion to recommit undermines it.

I've heard a couple of times today, well, we have an effort for bipartisanship here. No, there is not bipartisanship on this fundamental issue; and that is, the people who sit on this side, at the risk of offending anyone, generally support the idea of standing up for the American people in their daily battles against high insurance. And the people, generally speaking, who sit on this side of the Chamber, and specifically speaking as well, in a lot of cases, simply won't permit that to happen and haven't for a generation.

That's going to end now. That is going to end because we are going to have competition. We are going to make sure that there are regulations, and we're going to make sure that the American people aren't gouged. That's what the American people stand for. And time and time again people say, well, I don't really want to undermine this bill, I just want to weaken it to the point that it's meaningless.

And then I've heard my good friend from Texas say, well, this doesn't do anything. But every single time we've tried to do something, like a tiny sliver of competition called the public option, they've said, no; we can't withstand competition. We can't have that.

Enough of the phoniness. We are going to solve this problem because for years our Republican friends have been unable to and unwilling to. Deal with it.

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