Full-Year

Floor Speech

Mr. BUTTERFIELD. I thank the gentlelady.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to King amendment No. 266.

It has been said that we are the sum total of our experiences, Mr. Chairman, and that is certainly true. My experience consists of growing up in a low-income minority community whose history dates back more than 150 years since slavery. I represent that district, the First District of North Carolina, the fourth poorest district in the country.

My constituents, Mr. Chairman, overwhelmingly support the Affordable Care Act. Why? My constituents know that their insurance costs are soaring, exceeding more than 18 percent per year in increased costs. For those constituents who don't have insurance, they know that they will be able to qualify for Medicaid if their income is less than 133 percent of the Federal poverty line.

My rural hospitals, Mr. Chairman, know that finally when patients walk into their emergency rooms, the hospitals will be paid for their care, and they will not continue to face bankruptcy.

Mr. Chairman, this assault on the Affordable Care Act is unfounded, it's unnecessary; and I ask my colleagues to defeat this amendment.

Mr. BUTTERFIELD. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment. As part of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, the Consumer Product Safety Commission was charged with creating a publicly available, searchable database for complaints regarding consumer products. The amendment offered by the gentleman aims to bar the Commission from moving forward with this database.

The Food and Drug Administration and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration both have publicly available databases for consumers to report harms or potential safety problems about cars and medical products. Those databases don't provide any due process to manufacturers to contest those claims. However, this database provides exhaustive due process, including allowing manufacturers to refute ``materially inaccurate'' claims and, if found to be inaccurate, have the complaint removed. The Commission database also allows manufacturers to issue a response and have those responses appear along with the consumer complaint.

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