Government is Reason for Expensive Health Care

 Mr. Speaker, before the Federal Government got heavily into health care in the mid-sixties, medical care was cheap and affordable for almost everyone. Doctors even commonly made house calls. We took what was a very minor problem for very few people and turned it into a major problem for everyone.

   The people want medical care that is less expensive and less bureaucratic. The bill that we will apparently vote on later this week is 1,990 pages of bureaucratic gobbledygook. It will make health care even more expensive and even more bureaucratic. As Senator Joe Lieberman said on Face the Nation, this bill ``will actually hurt the economic recovery and our long-term financial situation.''

   The pattern seems to be that the Federal Government makes a problem so bad that the only solution people can see is for the government to take it all over. But a famous man once wrote that there is a simple solution to every human problem, one that is neat, plausible and wrong. This bill is the socialist approach, and all it will do over the long haul is make a bad situation even worse.