Letter to the Editor about Paul Broun

Broun Jr. – Thinking (?) on his feet 

Ever feel like you had fallen into the scrambled depths of a running washing machine? That’s how I felt after Congressman Paul Broun Jr.’s rambling response to one Republican-sounding woman at his Town Hall meeting last week in Eatonton. I recorded her statement and his five-minute-plus, talking-pointed,  flight-of-ideas. How could a Democrat or English teacher ever feel comfortable at a Broun Town Hall?

The woman was concerned“…that Social Security that has been paid into for years by people who are retired now is in the same category as SSI… I’d like to know about the bill for Medicaid, which is a welfare program.”

Broun Jr.’s response: “OK…well the, um, in the Ryan budget…let me see if I can get this right…because the only thing that was dealt with in the House-passed budget… The Senate hasn’t passed a budget in over 800 days. They haven’t even tried. In the last Congress Nancy Pelosi didn’t even try to pass a budget. The Ryan budget, which I voted for…and I didn’t agree with the budget because it wouldn’t balance the budget for 26 years…um… I also voted for the RST budget, the Republican Study Committee budget that would balance the budget in nine years, which is better… In fact there is a new bill that I am first-cosponsoring… In fact I had to, um…almost flip a coin to see who was going to do it, between Representative Connie Mack from Florida and I, uh, introduced a bill called the one cent solution, which would balance the budget in six years, if we continue deficit spending (    ) all. I also introduced a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution in the last Congress and in this one…cause the balanced budget is going to be the long term solution. Back to your question about Medicaid. That wasn’t… I don’t think that… I’m not sure if that was dealt with in the Ryan budget. I don’t recall. But, I know, in talking with Paul Ryan at length, his idea was to block-grant those funds to the states, let the states administer those funds. We’ve got to deal with Social Security and Medicare. We’ve got to make sure that we secure Medicare, secure Social Security for our seniors…for the future. Now I’ll do everything I can to make sure that we secure Social Security, to make them so that they’re gonna be available for those that need it. I don’t know what the long term solution is. What I hear from, from, um…and Medicaid is the same way, because we, we… The Democrats in the Senate did not… The Democratic leadership over there did not even deal with the Ryan budget. They didn’t pass a budget of their own. They haven’t developed a budget over there at all. So, none of that’s law… The budget is just kind of a blueprint of how we spend money. I wonder if that’s the reason we didn’t see a blueprint from Nancy Pelosi, cause she didn’t want to go there, she just wanted to continue to spend money. Um, but I don’t know. The, uh, she didn’t tell me. I haven’t talked to her about that. But, uh…the, um, the thing is, all those so-called entitlements, and social security… I don’t like the word “entitlements” for a lot of the welfare programs, because…um, I hear Democrats…and I’ll give you some examples - Maxine Waters, uh, from California, um, Shelia Jackson Lee from Texas, Peter Defazio from Oregon, um, Markley from Massachusetts…I can’t remember, a whole bunch of them…gone down and said people have a God-given right to own a house, whether they can afford to pay it or not. That’s an entitlement. We need to find a different word to use. If y’all have a different word that we can use for those non-discretionary funds for the different programs, I’d appreciate your input about that. But we’ve got to deal with all this - Medicaid, Social Security, Medicare, VA benefits, uh, SSI, um, what we call PeachCare here in Georgia. It’s the, uh, SCHIP, the state child health insurance programs - all of those included in the entitlement programs. So, we need to deal with those. Maybe I think the best way to deal with it is not the way the Democratic health care plan does, because what it does is it is going to increase the roles, and it’s going to break the budgets in the states. We already…just yesterday the Governor said that we, that every state agency is going to expect a 2% cut. The biggest two expenses for the state government today is Medicaid and education, and if we add a lot more people to the Medicaid roles, then it’s going to…then it’s going to hurt all of us. It’s going to hurt our economy here in the state. It’s going to be awful. The bottom line answer to Medicaid as well as Medicare and all these health care issues is not to…to continue the same track we’re going, but actually to lower the cost of health care. I in-, I introduced a bill in the last Congress before the Democrats’ plan was ever passed that I called Patient Option Act, that would - it was patient-centered - allowed you as a patient to make decisions with your doctor…uh, you and your doctor would make decisions…the Federal Government wouldn’t…no bureaucrat in Washington DC tell you what…when you go to the hospital or not…like they tell me as a doctor today. If you’re on Medicare…and some even, if you’re in managed care, private insurance, the insurance agents or the insurance companies will tell me if I can admit a patient in the hospital or what drugs I can give…and that’s not right. It should be made by the patient, the patient’s family, and the doctor. And that’s what my Patient Option Act is all about, and it would actually lower, lower the cost of health care, instead of just bending the curve as we talk about in Washington. Yes ma’am, quickly. 

“But, when you’re dealing with 70% of children being born out of wedlock and most of those are on Medicaid… All right. To me that is one of the biggest businesses we have going, is the Medicaid, which is not paid into. I pay into Medicare. I paid into Medicare for years. Alright, but to me that part of the budget needs to be looked at very, very carefully, because we are in a crisis to me, with the fact that we have over 50%, well over 50% of our children being born out of wedlock and being on the Medicaid budget.”

“Well, there are a lot of children born in wedlock that are on Medicaid. There are a lot of illegal alien children that are on Medicaid today too. But the law says that they can’t. Yet…but they do. I know that as a practitioner. Next question.”

Patsy Harris is a member of the Morgan County Democratic Committee.