Steven Bassion -- memetics k marketing™
I’m House Republican Leader John Boehner. At the beginning of this year, I told President Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi that Republicans would be ready to work with them whenever possible to address the nation’s biggest challenges. I also said that, where there are differences, it was our obligation as a party to explain to the American people how we would do things better. And on the "stimulus," the budget, the energy bill, and health care, we have done exactly that.
Instead of using Republican ideas, President Obama and Speaker Pelosi have made each of the problems facing the United States worse.
They have passed thousand-page bills to spend enormous amounts of money to make the economic statistics look better but they haven’t fixed the economy. Americans continue to lose jobs in record numbers.
They have proposed dozens of conflicting ideas for taxes and rule-changes, making it impossible for businesses and employers to plan for recovery.
They have bowed to union pressure and union campaign contributions to make it impossible for industries to make meaningful changes (including the American auto industry).
But President Obama and Speaker Pelosi claim that the Republican Party is being obstructive because we refuse to help them make things worse.
As a matter of fact, only Republicans have offered real solutions to each of the problems facing the United States. But, today I want to talk about just medical care.
Medical care is your medical care. The issue is to lower health care costs and make it easier to obtain high quality, affordable coverage without imposing a massive burden on individual families or impossible debt on all of us together.
We first released our health care plan in June, and over the last six months, we have introduced at least eight bills that, taken together, would implement this blueprint.
There is no need to fix everything at once. A massive law and a massive change create pointless confusion. This is your medical care. We should be careful with it.
We have proposed four three major changes:
Number one: let families and businesses and insurance companies compete nationally, instead of only within a single state. This increases competition and lowers costs.
Number two: Lower insurance costs by allowing individuals, small businesses, and trade associations to pool together for better health insurance at lower prices, the same way large corporations and labor unions do today;
Number three: end junk lawsuits that may constitute one third of your current medical bills (in unnecessary procedures and sky-high doctors’ premiums). Replace it with a fair compensation system for the small number of patients who are actually harmed by medical care. This is resisted by President Obama and Speaker Pelosi because the Trial Lawyers Association – like the labor unions – is among the Democrats largest financial supporters.
Instead of four three simple and fundamental modifications to health care in the United States, President Obama and Speaker Pelosi propose a complete takeover of healthcare – your healthcare - by means of a 2,000-page law that they haven’t read, more bureaucracy, more rules, more limits, more taxes, unelected boards, bureaus and commissions ruling on what drug and what treatment you get when.
The estimated costs of this takeover of healthcare are enormous and no one believes that the published estimates are high enough. Who will pay for it – when and how? New jobs will be killed by costs and regulations. Senior citizens’ Medicare will be cut.
The answer to the takeover of medical care by President Obama and Speaker Pelosi is “NO.”
This coming week, Republicans will continue to stand on principle, defend freedom, and fight for our better solutions to make health care more affordable and accessible for American families.
Thanks for listening.
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#3 in the original address was vague to the point of meaninglessness; moreover, in number one you want a national market and here you want to give tools to the states without a simple explanation.
