Sheila Jackson Lee: “I just want to raise a Texas issue. Many of the Members are aware that there were fires burning in Mexico. There was the…”

“I just want to raise a Texas issue. Many of the Members are aware that there were fires burning in Mexico. There was the glaze that was reported in the news, I think the national news, a small glaze that was covering Texas, and it may come back again, with heavy air, and causing a lot of symptoms for our asthmatic citizens down there and our constituents down there. Under HMOs, the other point of their fiscal responsibility is to limit the number of visits one can go to a physician for during a certain period of time. There are certain regulations along those lines. You are then interfering, because of an environmental problem that was exacerbating those people with asthma or respiratory illness. They were filling up the emergency rooms. They were not heart attack cases, they were not accident cases, not the comatose case, which obviously rings a bell with everyone, but they were coming in because they were in a confined situation, a bad haze, and it was exacerbating their problem.”