Greg Ganske: “Now, Mr. Speaker, I want to move on to another topic, a number one public health problem. I think that HMO patient…”

“Now, Mr. Speaker, I want to move on to another topic, a number one public health problem. I think that HMO patient protection is very important, but the reason that this House is out tonight is because we are having the Congressional baseball game. I think that is a good thing, a little bit of bipartisanship, have a nice competition, but I will say what is going on on that baseball field right now. There are colleagues of ours that are chewing tobacco, and they are spitting that tobacco out there and there are a bunch of little kids that are in that audience and they are looking at dad out there chewing and spitting that tobacco and they are thinking, boy, that is kind of a neat thing. There are over 1 million high school boys in this country who chew tobacco. They probably watch some of the baseball stars do it. They certainly have been enticed to do it by the tobacco companies. Before I came to Congress, I was a reconstructive surgeon and I can say about some of the patients that I took care of who chewed that tobacco, who ended up with cancer of their gums and cancer of their jaw and I had to remove their lower jaws, and they ended up like Andy Gump, cannot talk right, if at all. They end up breathing through a hole in their windpipe. That is a stiff price to pay for watching somebody chewing tobacco that one respects. Mr. Speaker, more than 400,000 people die prematurely each year from diseases attributable to tobacco use in the United States alone.”