Health Care and the Deficit

Floor Speech

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Mr. WELCH. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and welcome. I want to also thank the gentleman from New Mexico and welcome him back. Your comments about trying to work together and bipartisanship, that all makes an awful lot of sense to me and I hope to all of us. But welcome back, sir.

We are going to have an opportunity, Mr. Speaker, to use this Special Order half-hour to talk about health care and also about the deficit. We do want to be bipartisan, but we also want to be real. Our job, as you know, is to legislate, and we will be judged by our actions, by our deeds, more than by our rhetoric.

Let me just say that the aspirations that have been enunciated by many of our Republican leaders are ones I quite admire; an open and transparent Congress, more open rules, fiscal discipline, things that are absolutely, fundamentally important to this country, and the question now is whether there is going to be a follow-through on those stated goals. The best way to start looking at it is what is going on with the health care bill, and the decision of the leadership is to repeal health care.

Now, that is a very radical decision, because as much as there are legitimate issues, many legitimate issues about that health care bill, a wholesale repeal as a policy is going to do real damage to real families in this country, in every district in this country, and it is also going to immediately increase the deficit by $230 billion.

As is known, that is not the opinion of a Democrat or Republican; that is the conclusion of the impartial arbiter, the Congressional Budget Office. So if we are dedicated to fiscal discipline, if we have got to bring down spending, how can we have as our first act as a Congress passing a bill that the Congressional Budget Office says will increase the deficit by $230 billion? It doesn't add up, obviously.

I am going to pause here because I have some of my colleagues who are going to be called to other locations. I want to start, if I could, with the gentleman from Colorado, Mr. Perlmutter.

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Mr. WELCH. I want to talk about this question of will promises made be promises kept. It was the recurring question that was asked by our colleagues on the other side of the aisle when we were in the majority. Sometimes it may be uncomfortable because it's a legitimate question. And we have had to be judged according to our deeds and whether they matched our promises.

But there's this rules process under way on this health care bill. There are three issues that have come up. Number one, the fiscal issue. The Congressional Budget Office has said that this legislation will increase the deficit by $230 billion. And the Congressional Budget Office is the neutral arbiter. And we either--both sides--go by the CBO estimates, or we just say we're going to play this game without a referee and we're going to make up whatever numbers suit our political agenda. That is absolutely wrong. We cannot afford to add $230 billion to the deficit. My colleagues on the Republican side agree with us on the Democratic side that we cannot do that. It's irresponsible to do it. And this legislation that repeals health care will add $230 billion to the deficit.

Secondly, there's this question of the open process. As the Member from Maryland said, if we're going to have an open process, there has to be an opportunity for you, for the Member of Colorado, for every Member to offer their amendments, yes-or-no, on whether we can continue protection to folks whether they have a preexisting condition or not.

Right now, the law is if you have cancer, you can go out and buy insurance. Right now, the law is if you have a son or daughter getting out of college or getting out of high school, going into the labor force, they can stay on your policy. Right now, the law is if you have a mom or dad who's on Medicare and you're trying to get preventive care, they can get it for free. Right now, the law is that if you have diabetes or you have cancer, you have a serious long-term medical condition, there's no lifetime cap to cover the medical care that you need.

The repeal legislation would take away from every single American who now enjoys those insurance protections. It would take it away from them suddenly, abruptly, and with nothing to replace it. That's not right.

Now, this is real, by the way. Congresswoman Edwards gave a couple of stories--and we all have them in all of the districts, including those who are advocating for repeal. I spoke to Donna Watts who's from Plainfield, Vermont. She works in Burlington, Vermont, with 20 other employees. Four of those people that she works with, along with her, now have their children on their health care policies. Her son got out of high school, got a $10-an-hour job that came without health care, as most entry-level jobs do.

And the worst happened. He had a car crash: $20,000 in medical bills. Those are still largely unpaid--and this family takes seriously their obligation to pay their bills. They didn't have insurance. With the passage of the legislation last year on health care reform, Donna Watts was able to put her son, still uninsured, on her insurance. And she is asking me, Peter, does this really mean if we repeal health care that my son loses insurance? And the answer is: Yes. That's not right. We do not need to do this.

And it raises the other question, If this has not got a political agenda attached to it, we have gone from a campaign to governing. And the majority did a great job in the campaign and beat us up pretty good and have the majority now. But with that, of course, comes the responsibility of governing in a responsible way. If you're acting responsibly when you see a problem, you fix it. You don't abolish everything. You don't abolish a banking system in order to correct the problems in the financial world. You don't abolish all of the good things in this health care bill to deal with the things that need to be addressed.

So this is a very, very serious decision that's being made. It's going to be a template for the future of this 112th Congress. Are we going to actually deal with fiscal discipline even when that's inconvenient with our political agenda? The answer to that for the American people has to be: Yes. Are we going to protect the progress that we have made that benefits all of our constituents when it comes to these insurance reforms, and are we going to have an open process in this body so that those of us who have a different point of view are going to have an opportunity for an up-or-down vote?

By the way, that's not about giving us the opportunity to present our amendments. That's about letting our constituents know where we stand. Because at the end of the day that's the only basis upon which they can decide whether to send us back here or send us packing.

At this time I would like to recognize the gentleman from North Carolina, Representative Price.

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Mr. WELCH. Well, I thank my colleagues for being here.

The bottom line is, anytime we pass a major piece of legislation, we should have the humility to acknowledge it can be improved--and we all do. We can make it better. We can make it stronger. But this totally destroys things that we have been fighting for decades to achieve on behalf of the American people: help for seniors with their prescription drugs, extending the financial viability of Medicare, changing and encouraging a new way of delivering health care services, moving away from fee-for-service, volume-driven to patient-centered, performance-based care, and then insurance reforms that put the patients in charge, which acknowledge that we are all in it together. This takes away the absolute unilateral power of for-profit insurance companies to decide whether your daughter or mine has health care.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate your consideration.

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