[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 2] [House] [Page 1800] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]HEALTH CARE SUMMIT The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Teague). Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from California (Mr. Garamendi) is recognized for 5 minutes. Mr. GARAMENDI. Tomorrow is an extremely important day here in Washington, D.C., and across the Nation. Tomorrow's a day in which the President will hold a summit on health care. The outcome of that meeting is of extraordinary importance to individuals, to families, and to millions upon millions of Americans, indeed, the entire Nation. A successful outcome would be one in which we have bipartisan consensus on the critical issues of health care, on how we're going to provide coverage for all Americans, how we deal with the pernicious and all too common insurance company practice of terminating policies when a person becomes ill or denying coverage because of some preexisting condition. Tomorrow's summit is extraordinarily important in that the outcome of that summit may very well give us insight into how we control the extraordinary increase of cost in health care, a cost that is not sustainable either for individuals or for this economy. We're currently spending somewhere in the range of 17 percent of our current GDP on health care. Compared to the rest of the industrialized nations, that's nearly 60 to 70 percent more than they spend of their wealth. Most every other industrialized nation spends 10 percent or less. We're giving away an extraordinary advantage to our competitors. Now, if our health care system actually produced extraordinary outcomes for all the population, we might say it was worth it, but the fact of the matter is that our health care system does not. Our population statistics, which are the statistics on how well we are, how long we live, how well our children thrive, how many of them die at birth and in early childhood, all of those statistics would indicate that this Nation's health care system is very, very poor. In fact, we rank below Colombia and other emerging nations around the world. So what are we going to do? This House passed a very important piece of legislation that goes to address many of these issues--the issue of how we contain our costs, how we improve our system, how we provide for wellness rather than just sick care--a very complex bill, but one that also provided a very, very important element, the element of a public option. I'm from California, and 2 weeks ago the largest insurance company providing policies, more than 80 percent of the single-person policies, said, well, I think we're going to increase our rates by up to 39 percent, and that was on top of a similar rate increase in the previous year; some 60 percent increase for those individuals that are not in a group that have to go out and buy insurance on their own, a totally unaffordable situation. And they also announced that in the intervening year, or the year after these increases went into effect, they would willy-nilly, and at their own will and their own desire, increase the cost of those policies, an extraordinary and new event. Those individuals, in fact, every individual in America needs a public option, a place to go to get a competitive health insurance policy that provides real benefits at an affordable cost. This House passed such a public option. Hopefully, at tomorrow's summit, that issue will be renewed. But the papers in this town say that that issue is dead. I think not, because in America we do have public options today--they're not readily available to all of us unless you happen to be 65--and that public option is Medicare. If you happen to be a Federal employee, like I and others in this room, you have a public option available to you. If you're in the military, you have a public option available to you, a military family. Public options are widely available in America. We need to provide that option for every American. We need real competition. We need WellPoint Blue Cross of California to have a competitor. They have none today. Fortunately, this House, today, took a step to end the monopoly, to end the antitrust exemption that the health insurance companies have. It will help, but it will not provide the solution that we need. We need that public option. We need the health care reform that this House passed. And hopefully tomorrow, at the President's summit, the outcome will say, follow the lead of the House; give us a public option, give us the controls on prices, give us the steps toward staying healthy, and let's finally put this Nation into a universally available health care system. ____________________