Greg Ganske

For a President to be effective, he must be trusted to tell the truth. I believe that the President should now do the honorable thing and resign.

I rise today to offer some thoughts on what sorts of meaningful managed care reforms Congress must pass before adjourning for the year. At the end of July, the House approved a Republican bill which was advertised as addressing consumer…

I oppose the Doolittle amendment. If I thought that the Shays-Meehan language would prohibit a voter guide like this one, I would not support the Shays-Meehan language. But when I read the Shays-Meehan language, it seems to me clear that…

I would sincerely hope that a discharge petition is not necessary, that the Republican leadership in the House would set a date certain for bringing this legislation to the floor and make sure that it is with a rule that is fair and not a…

I would hope that organizations like some of the ones that I have read tonight, all the other organizations that are signed on to passing this type of legislation this year would contact their Congressman and Congresswoman back in their…

I cannot speak. I am not a representative for that organization. All I can say is I am sure that that organization would like to see those provisions become law at some point in time, but the recognition is there that on this piece of…

A recent survey by Kaiser Family and Harvard interviewed 800 small business executives exactly on this issue. They found that even if there were a mild increase in the cost of a premium related to this, that only 1 to 3 percent of those…

I do not think I would want to be and I do not know too many of my Republican colleagues who would want to be on the record for giving an HMO legal immunity for causing somebody's death or disfigurement.

What is wrong with having some minimum safety standards for plans that Congress 25 years ago give a total exemption to?

Let us talk for a minute about the cost of liability. We have heard a lot of inflated estimates of this. Texas, as you know, passed a liability provision taking away the exemption for HMOs in Texas. So one of the HMOs asked its actuarial…

Coopers & Lybrand said that a cost of the legislation, Patient Bill of Rights, exclusive of the liability provision, and we will get to that in a minute, would cost a family of four for a year $31.

I have had a bill before Congress with over 300 bipartisan cosponsors that my Republican leadership will not allow to the floor. It would ban gag clauses which prevent doctors from being able to tell their patients all of their treatment…

The cost of a liver transplant, in total, would probably be in the range of several hundred thousand dollars. This is not something that the Packevicz can afford.

I know my colleague from Texas is an attorney, and I wonder, is this not a result of prior Federal law that we have this exemption, this exclusion?

Nobody is arguing to legalize illegal drugs. What we are talking about is a needle exchange program.

The bill I think is fair. It addresses the issue of reducing fraud and abuse in the system, and yet it establishes fairness for practitioners. In some of the original legislation, there were some concerns but they have been worked out…

The example that my colleague from Massachusetts is citing is exempted. It is the new use of a compositional material. It is specifically excluded in the amendment.

I am happy to join the gentleman I think on some of the principles that we want to accomplish. We want to accomplish an opportunity society. We want to help make government smaller and more responsive to the citizens. And we basically want…

But to interject, this goes back to the point that we have made several times before, and that is that the people who are always talking about cuts, cutting this, that you are cutting that, they are the people who, in essence, are arguing…

That is current law. However, there has never been any teeth in that current law, and we even have examples where in Chinese newspapers from the west coast, Dear Abby columns, you will have somebody writing in, ``My relative just came, got…

Nobody ever said it would be easy, and in the political process, our Founding Fathers devised a system that requires multiple steps and it requires eternal vigilance. As one of our Founding Fathers said, that is the price of democracy.

If I may add to that, in the welfare reform bill there are some significant other items that reinforce the fact that citizens need to be responsible. When a citizen sponsors an immigrant to come into the country, they basically are…

You get to meet people from every walk of life, and I thank my dad every time I see him for that, although at the time as a younger kid there were times when I probably would have preferred on those Saturdays to be playing golf or…

I think working in that grocery store was one of the best training periods of my entire life.

And for large areas of our country, we would also have an equalization in the funding that would be very important as well.