Date: 1998-06-09
Speaker: JACKSON LEE (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: Texas

If the gentleman will continue to yield. Mr. Speaker. the gentleman raises the obvious. That is what we hear when we go home. I just want to raise a Texas issue. Many of the Members are aware that there were fires burning in Mexico. There was the glaze that was reported in the news. I think the national news. a small glaze that was covering Texas. and it may come back again. with heavy air. and causing a lot of symptoms for our asthmatic citizens down there and our constituents down there. Under HMOs. the other point of their fiscal responsibility is to limit the number of visits one can go to a physician for during a certain period of time. There are certain regulations along those lines. You are then interfering. because of an environmental problem that was exacerbating those people with asthma or respiratory illness. They were filling up the emergency rooms. They were not heart attack cases. they were not accident cases. not the comatose case. which obviously rings a bell with everyone. but they were coming in because they were in a confined situation. a bad haze. and it was exacerbating their problem. In those instances. the questions of whether or not they would be accepted as having an HMO service because they were in there repeatedly. or they did not seem to be really an emergency case. this is what is happening around the country when we have a system that is not responsive to the physician treating the patient. the responsible physician treating the patient. My Indian doctors from India. doctors who treat a particular clientele in Houston. a very diverse community. have raised concerns about them being on an HMO list. I do not know if we have discussed that this evening. about the difficulty. sometimes. of physicians being able to get on a list. and particularly a lot of physicians in the inner city. These physicians who treat a certain patient clientele have had difficulty in maintaining their names on HMO lists so they can treat their patients and their patients can choose them. all kinds of problems that I believe reasonable men and women can come together and fix. so that the tragedies that the gentleman has mentioned. the humor that the gentleman has mentioned. that does not make it funny. can stop. Because the question becomes. who are we as a Nation if we cannot provide the kind of health care to -live up to our own reputation. with the excellent physicians? My own doctor. Michael DeBakey. traveled to Russia. and I think President Yeltsin is as fine and fit as I have seen him. That was a United States physician. trained in America. Dr. Michael- DeBakey. who left here to supervise that open heart surgery. Today the President of Russia is considered healthy and robust physically. as Dr. DeBakey shared with me after his last checkup. I think it is extremely important that we do not diminish what we have here in this country. We have it. We have the ability to be fiscally responsible with health care. and I understand that is important. and at the same time using the resources that we have to make our cbuntry one of the healthiest around. What a tragedy. and the gentleman is a physician and he knows. that we have such a high death rate in certain instances because we are not getting the care and the technology and the expertise to the patient. If the doorkeeper is in there diminishing that access. that is why people cry out for universal access. They throw up their hands.