The Public Record
I appreciate the fervor and emotion that my colleague just spoke about, especially in dealing with the death tax situation, because we have many people back in my home State of Iowa that need this type of relief if, in fact, they are going…
I must give a lot of credit to C-SPAN, because it is bringing democracy into millions and millions of homes every day and has opened up the political process more than ever before. Sometimes I will give a special order and I will…
let me speak for just a little bit about the Patients' Bill of Rights and where we are. This continues to be a problem that is affecting millions of people, literally every day, the problem about being treated fairly by their HMOs. I want…
I notice the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Sandlin) and I want to thank him for his great work that he has done on patient protection. The gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Berry) has done a wonderful job on this issue, too. We have truly worked…
I am going to speak for a while today about an issue that has been before Congress for several years now and that will be an important issue in the 107th Congress that will start in January, and that is the issue of providing patient …
Well, Teddy Roosevelt was known as the trust buster, and what we were dealing with at that time was the big oil and the railroads. Probably one of the great books in American literature on capitalism is a book by the name of the…
I would point out that on the House appropriations bill, we have passed an amendment in a bipartisan fashion, 375-12, to allow the reimportation of prescription drugs back into the United States. And on the Senate side, the vote was about…
I hope that one of the questions that is asked Vice President Gore and Governor Bush is what would be their position on antitrust. I, too, feel like I am a member of the Teddy Roosevelt wing of the Republican Party, a progressive wing that…
Mr. Speaker, I want to talk tonight about a topic that I have come to the floor many, many times in the last several years to speak about, and that is on the issue of patient protection legislation as it relates to health maintenance…
In talking about other legislation on Capitol Hill, the bill that passed a couple of weeks ago says that the reduction in the award would be determined in a pretrial proceeding and that any evidence regarding this reduction would be…
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…
10 months ago this House of Representatives passed real patient protection legislation to correct HMO abuses. We passed the Norwood-Dingell-Ganske Bipartisan Consensus Managed Care Reform Act of 1999 with a vote of 275 to 151. So, Members…
Reclaiming my time, here is another loophole in the Senate GOP bill. Who gets to select that external reviewer according to the Republican plan in the Senate? On page 47, the plan gets to select that, quote, independent reviewer. That…
Let me just finish in reading the conclusion from Professors Rosenbaum, Frankford, and Rosenblatt. "The central purpose underlying the enactment of Federal patient protection legislation is to expand protections for the vast majority of…
Reclaiming my time, but I hope the gentleman will stay for a few minutes, because some of the things in that Senate GOP bill relating to the liability provisions are just amazing. Let me just relate a couple more for the gentleman. There…
I am going to speak tonight on managed care reform, HMO reform. About a week or so ago, the Senate had a short debate and voted on the Nickles amendment, which was the GOP Senate version of patient protection. Now, that amendment was given…
Here are a couple other provisions in the Senate GOP bill. Remember, this bill made its first appearance in the light of day about an hour before it was offered on the floor, and it was offered to the minority about 15 minutes before it…
well, here we are again with a difficult rule. We will see whether we can work this out. I think I need to spend a couple of minutes talking about why this bill should pass. Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Iowa controls the health care of 98…
this will be my only floor statement on the rule and the bill. I will vote ``no'' on the rule, ``no'' on the Democratic bill, and ``no'' on the GOP bill. Why? Number one, regular order has not been followed. The Committee on Commerce…
As a physician on this Floor, I have been asked many medical questions related to diseases caused by tobacco that is affecting members and their families. Tobacco is an addicting substance that causes lethal disease. It certainly has not…
Mr. Chairman, the International Space Station is a failure and it is a misuse of taxpayer money. In 1983, Ronald Reagan first presented the idea of the Space Station and NASA predicted the cost would be $8 billion. Between 1985 and 1993…
Yesterday the Senate said that stealth political committees have to disclose their donors and expenditures. These tax exempt 527s and other like groups could be the Communist Chinese, Colombian drug lords, the Mafia. Who knows? Both…
That is a good point. Now, what we are talking about then is for a group of physicians, for instance, that have seen abuses by that HMO to be able to get together, possibly to hire somebody to negotiate for them to go to that HMO and…
reclaiming my time, practically speaking, what has happened is this: we have seen a number of HMO abuses around the country. Eighty percent of the public thinks that Congress should do something to fix this problem. Almost everybody knows…
Let me just go back to the nitty-gritty of the bill, and that is that physicians cannot sue under this bill. The most recent cost estimates by the Congressional Budget Office are six-tenths of one percent. What we are talking about is a…
Politicians like Greg Ganske
