Kevin Brady0:00
So the bottom line on this is today, and I'll tell you, I talked to Peter Wakefield up at the Lake Con Rotary this week. He grew up in Sussex, England, and told me about his uncle, 72 years old, needed hip replacement because he had polio as a young child. No, he was too old; it wasn't cost effective anymore to give him a hip replacement. Well, they fought it, they fought it and fought in the English system. Seven years later, finally got a hip replacement. When they finally fixed it, a total of 10 years later, he had Alzheimer's. As Peter said, my uncle could have had 10 quality years of his life; it was taken from him under this system. You're going to hear more about this rationing today. But the point of all that is, when you and I get sick today, we ask some pretty hard questions: how bad is it, how long will my treatment last, how much will it cost? But under this healthcare plan, you're going to have to ask yourself another question. When the government starts picking winners and losers in healthcare, which will you be? This area here, this whole area right there crossing the chart, that's all new regulation, not in lieu of what we have today, not in place of it, on top of it. America's healthcare system, as our doctors and Freddy with the hospital and anyone who's in the system knows, is one of the most overregulated, red tape industries around. One of the reasons we pay more for healthcare and really get less outcome for patients, and I can't imagine adding more regulation is going to provide quality healthcare in the country today. And right here, final part of the chart, those are all the new tax increases and the new mandates on small businesses, on individuals. So 8% mandate on businesses who don't provide healthcare for their workers. I met with a gentleman at the Black Walnut Cafe two days ago; he has three small businesses in Montgomery County. He will drop his healthcare fund if the mandate to provide it is just cheaper to send his workers to the government-run system. The 22% tax on people to buy insurance is going to hurt a lot of the middle income and lower income workers. And the taxes they put in here, the way they pay for this bill, by the way, $800 billion of new taxes mainly on professional and small businesses, and then $500 billion in Medicare cuts. $500 billion in Medicare cuts. By the way, if they took those savings from Medicare and applied it to Medicare, it'd make it almost 20% more solid, but they don't; they apply it to this new healthcare plan. I offered the amendment in committee to remove all the tax increases, because these tax increases, they say it's on the wealthy, but it's really on professionals and small businesses. Half of all small business income in America is filed in these tax brackets that they're going to tax increase. It's going to cost our small businesses over 4.5 million jobs in America. So when they talk about inserting end-of-life counseling in this bill, they ought to have end-of-job counseling this bill.
And what scares me, we sort of wrap this up, what scares me is that with these new tax increases, in 39 states your state and federal income tax levy will be above 50%. The reason I say that is, I'm always when I'm working in Washington, I am always looking for what I call tipping points. For example, when more people get back from the government than pay into it, it's a tipping point. And right here, when we go above 50% in America, that means the government has a greater claim to your life's earnings than you do. Every hour you work, every dollar you earn, every extra effort you make to provide for your family, the government has a greater claim than you do. Not in America. That ought not happen here in America. This bill runs huge deficits; it doesn't lower healthcare cost at all. We know this from Massachusetts, we know it from France, and the Congressional Budget Office confirmed it. Healthcare costs will increase. It isn't a break-even plan. This will run our country at least $4 trillion in debt in the first 10 years. But even that is underestimated. Here's why: the way they figure, they have a lot of budget gimmicks in Washington, which I know doesn't surprise you. But how this bill works is that for the first four years, nothing happens in healthcare, just the tax increases, and then from the fourth year to the 10th year, it just skyrockets. So over the first 10 years, they said well, it only runs a quarter trillion dollar deficit. What's this look like? Isn't that like an adjustable rate mortgage or those credit cards where there's no interest payment? Remember, at the beginning, the question isn't what the first payments are, it's what the last payments are, and can America afford it? We are so deep in debt, it is scary. We may not see a balanced budget again in our lifetime, and these guys are ready to add another trillion dollars in the first 10 years. But our children and our grandchildren will never be able to pay this back. We can do better than this healthcare plan. And by the way, final amendment we offered in our committee was to certify that every member of Congress read this bill and the American public could read this bill, and they told us that was a bad idea. We're reading this bill today. Thank you very much for having me today.
Kevin Brady. Just say no.
