Speech

Rep. Doggett's Full Remarks follow below:

Full text of Rep. Doggett's remarks as delivered follow below:

"With last year's important health insurance reform law, we provided real guarantees to American families against insurance monopoly abuses. Today, Republicans tell these families, ‘Forget the binding guarantees, we have 12 platitudes for you.'

Full text of Rep. Doggett's remarks as delivered follow below:

The choice here is whether to give more money to insurance monopolies or leave a little bit in the pockets of middle class Americans. But for House Republicans, putting insurance companies first seems to be a pre-existing condition.

This bill isn't repeal and replace, it is repeal and forget— forget the health care needs of millions of Americans, forget the hundreds of billions of dollars that they, with this repeal, add to our federal debt.

Full text of Rep. Doggett's remarks as prepared for delivery follow below:

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If you're hit by a truck this afternoon or your child contracts a dreaded disease, your future ought not to depend on the fine print in an insurance policy you didn't have anything to do with writing. No insurance monopoly should stand between you and your doctor.

"On Day One of this new Congress, the Republicans' first step is backwards. While professing such great concern about spending and debt, they abandon pay-as-you-go budgeting, returning to the Bush-Cheney approach— endless borrowing.

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"‘Cut-go' just cuts fiscal discipline and says, ‘Go borrow from the Chinese.'

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court overturned decades of precedent in a misguided court case freeing corporations to engage directly in political activity that had long been prohibited, including financing their own campaign commercials.  In response, the House today will vote on legislation, the Disclose Act, which requires stricter disclosure requirements on such political activity.  I spoke in support of the bill, stating "This is a vote for a fully informed, fully empowered American people. We want to keep America the best democracy, not the best democracy money can buy.