I don't think so. And the tide has been turning. The national polls, which I think are reflective of Tennessee at least on a percentage basis, have shown that it's gone from 10 points up on people that want to repeal this bill to where it's even, as many people for it as against it in this country. There's been a 10-point switch in the last 2 weeks as people have looked at the possibilities of the repeal of the law and seen the benefit.
What I thought about, Mr. Garamendi, I was in New York, New York City, about 2 weeks ago, and I went in the Time Warner Building. They had an exhibit there of Salvador Dali; surreal, things looking out of space. Strange, strange pictures and thoughts. It's hard to think of this Congress and the Republican majority that's come in trying to repeal a bill that's going to become as popular, once it gets implemented, as Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare have over the years, that they are so out of touch with America today and its needs and the future. Because while this may seem to be important to the minority, the tail wagging the dog in that party, the tea party that's wagging the dog, saying repeal health care, the fact is down the line, people are going to embrace this bill like they embraced the Great Society's Medicaid and Medicare and the New Deal's Social Security. It's going to be a short-term possible victory but a long-term defeat. And the myopia of the other side, let alone the hypocrisy of some of its members, is hard to fathom. But you can only see it through the eyes of Salvador Dali, because obviously they are Salvador Dali, and they're saying things in a surreal way.
The nonpartisan, bipartisan Congressional Budget Office says it's going to save us $230 billion the first decade and $1.2 trillion thereafter, and they say, ``Well, they can have their opinion.'' Those are facts. Those are nonpartisan facts of people we hire to give us the truth. They don't like the truth so they summarily dismiss it. They say it's a government takeover of health care, a big lie. Just like Goebbels; you say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually people believe it. Like blood libel. That's the same kind of thing. The Germans said enough about the Jews and the people believed it and you had the Holocaust. You tell a lie over and over again. And we've heard it on this floor; government takeover of health care.
PolitiFact, nonpartisan, Pulitzer prize-winning, 2009, St. Petersburg Times, said the biggest lie of 2010 was government takeover of health care, because there is no government takeover. It's insurance.
I look at my Facebook regularly and I've got some people I communicate with on different issues on Facebook. I respond to them whether they take my side or not, obviously. And one lady has been constantly talking negatively about health care. I responded. She keeps going on with the line that obviously she hears and she's taken as her mantra; and that is that this is a government takeover of health care. Well,she's drunken the Kool-Aid, and that's just not true. We heard in August 2009 that there were death panels and killing grandmother. Everybody agrees now, that was a big lie; just like government takeover of health care is a big lie. And it's amazing the lies: denying the effect on the deficit, claiming it's a government takeover, claiming there were death panels.
This lady on my Facebook page talked about the fact that it was going to take insurance companies out and there was a public option. Well, there is no public option. And the exchanges aren't a public option but the exchanges are private insurance where people can come together and get better rates that they couldn't get if they were dealing as individuals on the open market.
People don't understand. If you read Paul Krugman today, or yesterday--today in Memphis, we get it a day late--but yesterday in the New York Times, he talked about the errors in arithmetic, basically the lies that are being put out about how it will affect the budget. And Krugman, who's only a Nobel prize winner, says it's just not true, and what it comes down to, the bottom line, is there is a group in America that don't feel like they have a responsibility, a social responsibility, a moral responsibility, to those 32 million Americans who can't afford health care and right now are seeing death panels, the death panels that say you won't have insurance and you won't have health care.
As we are just one day beyond Dr. Martin Luther King's holiday, America's holiday celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Dr. King was not only for social justice, which everybody embraces today and talks about kumbayah and integration, but it was also economic justice. And economic justice involves health care, and it involves giving everybody an opportunity to stay alive, to get educated, and to get a job. The first priority I have always believed of government is to keep people alive, their health care. The second is to get them educated. And the third is to get them a job. This rhetoric on the other side of the aisle about whatever they want to call it is not only false--read Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner--but it is the third priority. The first thing is keeping people alive. And you want to tell those 32 million Americans we don't want you to have insurance, we don't care about you.
That is wrong. Dr. King wouldn't approve of it. I don't approve of it. America won't approve of it.
And it is as I started with, surreal to think that the first thing that this Republican Congress is doing is trying to repeal what will be known down the years as one of the great acts ever passed by this United States Congress. It will be to the fortune of the Democrats because like Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and voting rights and civil rights, they are Democratic initiatives that brought America forward, progressive initiatives that have been brought forth by this side of the aisle. And the myopia of the other side is politically welcomed, if not policy-wise sad.
