Date: 2011-01-19
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

I thank the gentleman. Mr. Speaker. I yield myself the balance of my time. I want to thank all of our colleagues who participated in this debate today. I think it has shown some fundamental disagreements and some fundamental differences. First of all. there is the strong suggestion here from an NFIB study that was done before this law was ever written. that has nothing to do with this law. saying you might lose jobs. But what do we see since the law has passed? We see that for employers of under 10 employees. health care coverage has risen by 10 percent because weve made it less expensive for small businesses to offer that health insurance. That is not a selfinterested study. What you see from United Health Care. the largest health insurer in the country. 75.000 new customers to their health plans from employees of small businesses because the small businesses find it affordable to extend health insurance as a benefit of working for that small business. Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Kansas City says the number of small businesses buying insurance since April. the first month after the legislation was signed. has jumped 58 percent. Small business employers are for the first time able to extend affordable insurance to their employees. and that is why the job creation that Mr. ANDREWS referred to of a million jobs since the passage of this bill has continued and expected to continue. That is why it is different than the history prior to the Obama administration where over 8 years almost 800.000 jobs were lost during those years of the Bush administration. But there is something more important in this legislation. and that is whether or not families will have the control of their health insurance destiny. whether they will have the freedom to make these choices. Many on the other side of the aisle said this is a bureaucratic system. Has anybody. any family in America. any single mother. any spouse. any child. any grandparent. met a more bureaucratic system than the American health insurance system? There is no more bureaucratic system. When you send in your premium. they tell you you sent it to the wrong place. When you send in your bill. you sent it to the wrong person. When you send it to the right person. they say that person has left their job. When you say. I went to the doctor. they say you shouldve called us first. When you say. I had emergency surgery. they say. you shouldve called us first. were not covering it. You want to talk about bureaucracy. ladies and gentlemen. and that is why this legislation is growing in popularity. because small businesses see. senior citizens see. parents with children under 26. they see a chance to liberate themselves from the most arbitrary. the most capricious system in our entire free economy. and that is the insurance companies. Everybody has been run around the block by their insurance company. It is something that they all share. It is almost the same problems they share with their cable company. not quite. That is not as dramatic as here because this is life and death. This is the security of your family. This is whether or not you can change jobs. This is whether or not your children will be protected. This is whether or not your parents will be able to afford their prescription drugs. because that is what this legislation enables and gives the freedom to American families to have. Repeal. we go back into the clutches. the clutches of these bureaucrats spread across the world. In the insurance company. you call for help and you reach somebody in another country. in another time zone with no understanding of the emergency that your family. your child. your parent. your grandparent faces. Nobody wants to go back there. ladies and gentlemen. Nobody. They have been there for 50 years. and health care costs have gone up faster than any other segment in our economy. Faster than anything you can imagine. Faster than a speeding rocket. faster than a speeding airplane. Faster than Superman. health care costs have gone up because of insurance bureaucracies.