Mr. PLATTS. Mr. Speaker, recently, I was asked during a radio interview if I thought legislation for health care reform would pass the House sometime this year. My answer was, ``I hope so.'' All of us want more affordable, better, more accessible health care for our citizens. The question is: How do we achieve this very important goal?
Unfortunately, the plan embodied by this diagram is not the way to do that. This plan will cost millions of jobs. It will cut almost a half trillion dollars out of Medicare, hurting seniors. It will raise taxes on small businesses, making it harder to provide health insurance. As the CBO has told us, when fully implemented, it will raise the cost of health care by over $200 billion. That's more than $2 trillion in 10 years.
Unfortunately, the House leadership who are promoting this plan and those who are supporting it have forgotten the physician's principle of ``first do no harm.'' This plan will do great harm to health care for each and every American citizen. We must defeat this plan, and we must enact legislation that will truly be about empowering the American citizen, and that will be about what is best for their health care. END
