Ed Whitfield: “Thank you very much. Over the last year particularly, great attention has been paid in this country to the state of our…”

“Thank you very much. Over the last year particularly, great attention has been paid in this country to the state of our economy; and despite all of the efforts of the bailouts, the stimulus spending and other efforts, our unemployment rate is still above 9 percent nationally. We were told that when we adopted the bailouts, when we made money available for the stimulus plans, that unemployment would be reduced in the U.S. to a maximum of 8 percent. Well, that has not come to pass. And as you talk to business leaders large and small around the country, they will tell you that one of the primary reasons that our economy has not been stimulated is because of the uncertainty that has been caused by this administration. Now, the uncertainties that I'm talking about are, number one, all of those uncertainties that are related to the health care legislation that passed in the last Congress. We know that that health care bill will not be fully implemented until the year after the year 2014. We've been told that CMS and HHS and others have already written 8,700 pages of additional regulations. It's quite clear from discussions with physicians, hospital administrators, and other health care providers that they do not know what to do. Businesses do not know what to do because they are not able to determine what the cost of health care is going to be because they still do not even know what is in the health care bill.…”