Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my friend from Pennsylvania for yielding me the time, the chairman of the subcommittee, for making this possible to bring this bill to the floor today. I want to thank Chairman Upton of the full committee and Ranking Member Waxman of the full committee for also making this possible. It has been a lot of hard work getting us to this point. Chairman Upton talked about delays. I would just point out that there has been yet another delay, the delay of the closure of the risk pools because--let's be honest--the Affordable Care Act is not ready to take on those people who have preexisting conditions, so they felt it necessary to keep the risk pools open for an additional length of time. I want to talk to my friends on the Democratic side of the aisle. I particularly want to talk to those who have only been here one or two terms. The last time we had a bill like this on the floor of the House, Democrats were in charge. Mr. Dingell was chairman of our Energy and Commerce Committee. He brought a bill to the floor, H.R. 3961, which was an SGR repeal bill. This bill had already been rejected by the Senate, so it really had no chance of going anywhere. This bill was not paid for. The policy was awful and would have given us two SGRs, instead of one; but nevertheless, that bill came to the floor. It only garnered one Republican vote. I was that vote.…”