The Register sits down with U.S. Congressman Michael Burgess, M.D.

What are your focal points as a Congressman?

The biggest concern I have is for the implementation of this health care law that was passed. That is where the majority of our committee work is going to occur in the coming Congress. I’m the highest ranked Republican on the subcommittee of oversight and investigations. We’ve had no success in getting any of the relevant federal agencies into our committee to talk to us about how the implementation is going, and clearly that has to change. My hope is that it will in January.

Other than that, the big issues are going to be the focus on joblessness, and you heard several people (at Wednesday’s town hall meeting) comment on the fact that “I run a small business, but I wouldn’t hire anybody right now because you’re scaring me with the health care bill, you’re scaring me with what’s happening with tax policy, you’re scaring me with energy prices,” so they’re just not disposed to hire. And, as long as that mood is pervasive across the country, it’s going to be difficult to add the jobs that the economy needs to rebound.

And then of course the tax policy, and if we don’t fix it by the end of the year, it will have to be tackled right after the first of the year. It’s going to be difficult, but it has to be done and people need the stabilization for the tax code to be able to make the decisions that they need to make to run their businesses and run their lives.

How does being a doctor influence your view on health care reform and Congress in general?

This particular bill that was signed into law three or four months ago is not a health care bill, it’s a tax bill. I think I alluded to that in the discussion. Some of the concerns that people have do relate to the taxing provisions in the health care bill.

The bill on its face cut $500 billion from Medicare, added $500 billion in new taxes to fund a new entitlement. We can’t pay for a new entitlement, so we’ve already promised, clearly there’s a significant instability that’s just baked into the cake with this bill. It cannot possibly deliver all the things it’s promised to deliver and yet we’re going full speed ahead with the implementation.

Congress is being kind of shut out of that process and that is inappropriate. We need to be involved. My thinking on this is that it is so problematic that it almost can’t be done, and we’d be doing the agencies a favor by scaling this thing back. Do the things people asked us to do last summer, and it was pretty clear all last summer we were asked to help people with preexisting conditions, we were asked to provide some relief of the cost of insurance and perhaps buying across state lines and injecting more competition might be a way to do that.

We were also asked to look at tort reform in the country. Texas we’ve already done. Across the country people were concerned about that. But, all those things were things that could have been done with small 25, 50 page bills, it didn’t require this mammoth 2,300 or 2,700 page bill that’s going to turn everything on its head. And that’s why I think you get so much pushback and so much anxiety. Just the pervasive anxiety that people brought to the microphone about what may be facing them in this bill.

What do you do with the feedback that you get from having town hall meetings like this?

I go back and yell at my leadership and say, “How come you’re not being better?”

It’s important, certainly in every town you do its different, and there are different issues that come up but it is important to take all that information, distill it and take it back to Washington and when things come up in committee, when things come up on the house floor, I feel like I know how people feel about things back home.


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