On the recordFebruary 24, 2010
Mr. Speaker, this is an important, important issue. It is at the crucible of this entire debate on health care. And the crucible is this: We must bring down the cost of health care. And in a free economy, the surest way of bringing down the cost of a product or a service is through competition. The antitrust laws were put on the books during Standard Oil with John D. Rockefeller to break that up so we could bring competition. Here we have now, almost a hundred years later, the only industry that is exempted from antitrust is the insurance industry, the health insurance industry. Surely we can agree on this. Mr. Speaker, let me just say one other thing, too, to my friends on the other side of the aisle. It was a great Republican who said a house divided against itself shall surely fall. Well, this Nation is tired of seeing us divided. They want to see us find something, one or two things, that we can agree on. America is yearning for Republicans and Democrats to come together on something that will help bring down the cost of health care insurance, and nothing will more surely do that than to remove this exemption from antitrust that is beholden to the insurance companies. As long as they have it, they are free to do the monopoly. They are free to price fix.
