WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), the Republican Whip and a member of the Senate Finance Committee, today delivered remarks on the Senate floor regarding health-care reform. The following are excerpts from his remarks:
“What the President and our Democratic colleagues want is what they call a public option – it’s a government-run insurance company to compete with other insurance companies. Now, to the extent that a lot of Americans don’t particularly like insurance companies…it’s easy to put them out there as a target and say, as the President has, ‘we need somebody to keep them honest.’”
“Well, let's examine that for a moment. Do we need to have government in every business in America in order to keep the privately run businesses honest? The government has taken over our biggest automobile manufacturers. It has gotten into the business of other [types of] insurance. It has gotten into the business of banking. It’s gotten into the business of student loans – in fact, it now has a monopoly in that. But I can't believe that the American people want there to be a government business to compete with private businesses in other elements of our economy. That is socialism.”
“The American people are becoming concerned about this [health care] as well. The more they hear about it, the more they don't like what they're hearing. I really resent those who say we have to do this quickly or it might not happen at all.”
“It’s a lot like the stimulus. We were told we had to do it quickly and nobody read that bill. It was over 1,000 pages, and it had a lot of stinkers in it. It had pork barrel spending. It made a lot of promises it couldn't keep. Going to cap unemployment at eight percent; it is on its way to 10 percent. It hasn't created the jobs and it is going to cost us over $1 trillion.”
“Fooled once, maybe it's your fault. Fooled twice, it's my fault. The American people say they aren’t going to be fooled twice. We're going to read it. We want you, the senators and representatives to read it. When you do, you'll find a lot of things in there you're surprised about and you don't like.”
“There a ton of good ideas on how to [improve] access [to] health care, and [they] don't require us to scrap the system that we have now and have a huge…government takeover of health care that results in huge expenses and [government] dictating what care we can get.”
“We'll have delay and denial of care and we won't be able to keep the insurance that most of us have and like. Those are legitimate concerns. And they shouldn't be answered by simply saying: ‘Well, we have to hurry up and get this done.’ No, we don't. We have to let the American people evaluate it and have them tell us what they want to be done.”
“If we approach our duties the way that we're supposed to, by carefully considering what our constituents want, asking whether we can solve some of the specific problems with some of the good Republican ideas, rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Tossing [out] what we know works for most people most of the time just because it doesn't work for everybody all the time in exchange for a government takeover – it’s a bad bargain.”
