Justice for Medicare Beneficiaries Act of 2005

Mr. President, I rise today along with my colleague Senator Baucus from Montana to introduce a bill that will help bring about a more reliable system of medical justice for all Americans.

In the last Congress, we had three robust debates on a critical issue--medical liability reform. Though a majority of the Members of this body wanted to begin working to pass legislation, we didn't have the 60 Senators necessary to invoke cloture and begin the real work on the bills. That was disappointing, because skyrocketing medical liability insurance premiums are forcing doctors to move their practices to States with better legal environments and lower premiums. This is endangering the availability of critical healthcare services in many areas of Wyoming and other states.

Throughout our debate, I heard many of my colleagues say that they wanted to work on this issue, but that they simply could not support the bill as it stood. While I disagreed with their positions then, I respected their opposition. I also trust that they sincerely wanted to help solve our Nation's medical liability and litigation crisis.

During those debates, I noticed something interesting. While we argued the ``pros and cons'' of the bills, no one stood up to defend our current system of medical litigation. In fact, even some of the lawyers in this body agreed that our medical litigation system needs reform.

Why didn't we hear anyone defend the merits of our current medical litigation system? It's because our system doesn't work. It simply doesn't work for patients or for healthcare providers.

Compensation to patients injured by healthcare errors is neither prompt nor fair. The randomness and delay associated with medical litigation does not contribute to timely, reasonable compensation for most injured patients. Some injured patients get huge jury awards, while many others get nothing at all.

Let's look at the facts. In 1991, a group of researchers published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study, known as the Harvard Medical Practice Study, was the basis for the Institute of Medicine's estimate that nearly 100,000 people die every year from healthcare errors.

As part of their study, the researchers reviewed the medical records of a random sample of more than 31,000 patients in New York State. They matched those records with statewide data on medical malpractice claims. The researchers found that nearly 30 percent of injuries caused by medical negligence resulted in temporary disability, permanent disability or death. However, less than 2 percent of those who were injured by medical negligence filed a claim. These figures suggest that most people who suffer negligent injuries don't receive any compensation.

When a patient does decide to litigate, only a few recover anything. Only one of every ten medical malpractice cases actually goes to trial, and of those cases, plaintiffs win less than one of every five. In addition, patients who file suit and are ultimately successful must wait a long time for their compensation--the average length of a medical malpractice action filed in state court is about 30 months.

While the vast majority of malpractice cases that go to trial are settled before the court hands down a verdict, the settlements even then don't guarantee that patients are compensated fairly, particularly after legal fees are subtracted. Research shows that for every dollar paid in malpractice insurance premiums, about 40 cents in compensation is actually paid to the plaintiff--the rest goes for legal fees, court costs, and other administrative expenditures.

To sum up: most patients injured by negligence don't file claims or receive compensation. Few of those that do file claims and go to court recover anything, and those who are successful wait a long time for their compensation. And those who settle out of court end up receiving only 40 cents for every dollar that healthcare providers pay in liability insurance premiums.

It's hard to say that our medical litigation system does right by patients in light of those facts. Unfortunately, our system doesn't work for healthcare providers either.

Earlier, I spoke about those Harvard researchers who found that fewer than 2 percent of those who were injured by medical negligence even filed a claim. As they reviewed the medical records for their study, the researchers also found another interesting fact--most of the providers against whom claims were eventually filed were not negligent at all.

That's right--most providers who were sued had not committed a negligent act.

In matching the records they reviewed to data on malpractice claims, the Harvard researchers found 47 actual malpractice claims. In only 8 of the 47 claims did they find evidence that medical malpractice had caused an injury. Even more amazingly, the physician reviewers found no evidence of any medical injury, negligent or not, in 26 of the 47 claims. However, 40 percent of these cases where they found no evidence of negligence nonetheless resulted in a payment by the provider. Basically, the researchers found no positive relationship between medical negligence and compensation.

That study was based on 1984 data. The same group of researchers conducted another study in Colorado and Utah in 1992, and they found the same thing. As in the 1984 study, they found that only 3 percent of patients who suffered an injury as a result of negligence actually sued. And again, physician reviewers could not find negligence in most of the cases in which lawsuits were filed.

Now, I assume that the patients who sued had either an adverse medical outcome, or at least an outcome that was less satisfactory than the patient expected. But our medical litigation system is not supposed to compensate patients for adverse outcomes or dissatisfaction--it's supposed to compensate patients who are victims of negligent behavior. It's supposed to be a deterrent to substandard medical care.

It's not fair to doctors and hospitals that they must pay to defend against meritless lawsuits. Nor is it fair that they must face a choice between settling for a small sum, even if they aren't at fault, so that they avoid getting sucked into the whirlpool of our medical litigation system.

It's not hard to understand why physicians and hospitals and their insurers want to stay out of court. When they lose, the decisions are increasingly resulting in mega-awards based on subjective ``non- economic'' damages. The number of awards exceeding $1 million grew by 50 percent between the periods of 1994-1996 and 1999-2000. Today, more than half of all jury awards exceed $1 million.

As a result, when a patient suffers a bad outcome and sues, providers have an incentive to settle the case out of court, even if the provider isn't at fault. But is this how our medical litigation system is supposed to work--as a tool for shaking down our healthcare providers?

Let's face it--our medical litigation system is broken. It doesn't work for

patients or providers. Even worse, it replaces the trust in the provider-patient relationship with distrust.

Then, when courts and juries render verdicts with huge awards that bear no relation to the conduct of the defendants, this destabilizes the insurance markets and sends premiums skyrocketing. This forces many physicians to curtail, move or drop their practices, leaving patients without access to necessary medical care. This is a particular problem in states like Wyoming, where we traditionally struggle with recruiting doctors and other healthcare providers.

Perhaps we could live with this flawed system if litigation served to improve quality or safety, but it doesn't. Litigation discourages the exchange of critical information that could be used to improve the quality and safety of patient care. The constant threat of litigation also drives the inefficient, costly and even dangerous practice of ``defensive medicine.''

Yes, indeed, defensive medicine is dangerous. A recent study found that one of every 1200 children who receive a CAT scan may die later in life from radiation-induced cancer. Knowing this puts a physician faced with anxious parents in a difficult situation. Does the doctor use his or her professional judgment and tell the parents of a sick child not to worry, or does the doctor order the CAT scan and subject the child to radiation that is probably unnecessary, just to provide some protection against a possible lawsuit?

We have a medical litigation system in which many patients who are hurt by negligent actions receive no compensation for their loss. Those who do receive compensation end up with about 40 cents of every premium dollar after legal fees and other costs are subtracted. And the likelihood and the outcomes of lawsuits and settlements bear little relation to whether or not a healthcare provider was at fault.

We like to say that justice is blind. With respect to our medical litigation system, I would say that justice is absent and nowhere to be found.

During our debates in the last Congress, I said that the current medical liability crisis and the shortcomings of our medical litigation system make it clear that it is time for a major change. I also said that regardless of how we voted, we all should work toward replacing the current medical tort liability scheme with a more reliable and predictable system of medical justice.

Today, Senator Baucus and I are introducing a bill that would help achieve that goal.

Most of us are familiar with the report on medical errors from the Institute of Medicine, also known as the IOM. Many of us may be less familiar with another report that the IOM published in 2003. That report is called ``Fostering Rapid Advances in Healthcare: Learning from System Demonstrations.''

Our Secretary of Health and Human Services at that time, Tommy Thompson, challenged the IOM to identify bold ideas that would challenge conventional thinking about some of the most vexing problems facing our healthcare system. In response, an IOM committee developed this report, which identified a set of demonstration projects that committee members felt would break new ground and yield a very high return-on-investment in terms of dollars and health.

Medical liability was one of the areas upon which the IOM committee focused. The IOM suggested that the federal government should support demonstration projects in the states. These demonstrations should be based on ``replacing tort liability with a system of patient-centered and safety-focused non-judicial compensation.''

The bill we are introducing today is in the spirit of this IOM report. This bill, the Fair and Reliable Medical Justice Act, would authorize funding for States to create demonstration programs to test alternatives to current medical tort litigation.

The funding to States under this bill would cover planning grants for developing proposals based on the models or other innovative ideas. Funding to States would also include the initial costs of getting the alternatives up and running.

The Fair and Reliable Medical Justice Act would require participating states and the Federal Government to collaborate in continuous evaluations of the results of the alternatives as compared to traditional tort litigation. This way, all States and the federal government can learn from new approaches.

By funding demonstration projects, I believe Congress could enable States to experiment with and learn from ideas that could provide long- term solutions to the current medical liability and litigation crisis.

In introducing this bill, I wanted to provide some alternative ideas that would contribute to the debate. As a result, the bill describes three models to which states could look in designing their alternatives.

For instance, a State could provide healthcare providers and organizations with immunity from lawsuits if they disclose an error that results in an injury and make a timely offer to compensate an injured patient for his or her actual net economic loss, plus a payment for pain and suffering if experts deem such a payment to be appropriate. This could give a healthcare provider who makes an honest mistake the chance to make amends financially with a patient, without the provider fearing that their honesty would land them in a lawsuit.

Another idea would be for a state to set up classes of avoidable injuries and a schedule of compensation for them, and then establish an administrative board to resolve claims related to those injuries. A scientifically rigorous process of identifying preventable injuries and setting appropriate compensation would be preferable to the randomness of the current system.

Still another option would be for a state to establish a special healthcare court for adjudicating medical malpractice cases. For this idea to work, the State would need to ensure that the presiding judges have expertise in and an understanding of healthcare, and allow them to make binding rulings on issues like causation compensation, and standards of care.

We already have specialized courts for complicated issues like taxes and highly charged issues like substance abuse and domestic violence. With all the flaws in our current medical litigation system, perhaps we should consider special courts for the complex and emotional issue of medical malpractice.

I believe one thing in our medical liability debate is absolutely clear--people are demanding change. The States are debating liability reform, and a number of states have enacted new laws. States are heeding this call for change, and Congress should support those efforts.

My own State, Wyoming, had had a number of lively legislative debates on medical liability reform over the past few years, but we have a constitutional amendment that prohibits limits on the amounts that can be recovered through lawsuits. The Wyoming Senate has considered bills recently to amend our State's constitution to create a commission on healthcare errors. That commission would have the power to review claims, decide if healthcare negligence had occurred, and determine the compensation for the death or injury according to a schedule or formula provided by law.

According to the key sponsor of these bills, Senator Charlie Scott, one of the biggest obstacles to passage is the uncertainty surrounding this new idea. No one has any basis for knowing what a proper schedule or formula for compensation would be. No one knows how much the system might cost, or how much injured patients would recover compared to what they recover now.

Senator Scott wrote me to say that federal support for finding answers to these questions might help the bill's sponsors sufficiently respond to the legitimate concerns of their fellow Wyoming legislators. We should be helping state legislators like Senator Scott develop thoughtful and innovative ideas such as the one he has proposed. That's one of the reasons I am offering this bill.

Clearly, the American people and their elected representatives have identified the need to reform our current medical litigation system. There is a real medical liability crisis, and Congress needs to act sooner rather than later.

My cosponsor Senator Baucus and I voted differently on medical liability reform in the last Congress, but we

both agree that we ought to lend a hand to States that are working to change their current medical litigation systems and to develop creative alternatives that could work much better for patients and providers. The States have been policy pioneers in many areas--workers' compensation, welfare reform, and electricity deregulation, to name three. Medical litigation should be the next item on the agenda of the laboratories of democracy that are our 50 States.

No one questions the need to restore reliability to our medical justice system. But how do we begin the process? One way is to foster innovation by encouraging States to develop more rational and predictable methods for resolving healthcare injury claims. And that is what the Fair and Reliable Medical Justice Act aims to do.

In the long run, we would all be better off with a more reliable system of medical justice than we have today. I know that my fellow Senators recognize this, so I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will work with me and Senator Baucus on this legislation.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, today we introduce the Specter-Leahy Personal Data Privacy and Security Act of 2005. Reforms are urgently needed to protect Americans' privacy and to secure their personal data. There have been steady waves of security breaches over the past 6 months, with the latest involving a database containing 40 million credit card numbers at a company that most Americans never knew existed.

These security breaches are a window on a broader, more challenging trend. Advanced technologies have improved our lives and can help make us safer. Private data about Americans has become a hot commodity. This personal and financial information about each of us suddenly is a treasure trove, valuable and vulnerable, but our privacy and security laws have not kept pace. The reality is that in the digital era, a robust market has developed for collecting and selling personal information. Today, all types of corporate and governmental entities routinely traffic in billions of digitized personal records about Americans.

The data broker market has exploded in size to meet this demand. Insecure databases are now low-hanging fruit for hackers looking to steal identities and commit fraud. We are seeing a rise

in organized rings that target personal data to sell in online, virtual bazaars.

In this information-saturated age, the use of personal data has significant consequences for every American. People have lost jobs, mortgages and control over their credit and identities because personal information has been mishandled or listed incorrectly. This trend raises new threats to our personal security as well as to our privacy. In one disturbing case, a stalker purchased the Social Security number of a woman with whom he was obsessed, used that information to track her down. He killed her, and then shot himself.

Americans everywhere are wondering, ``Why do all these companies have my personal information? What are they doing with it? Why aren't they protecting it better?'' And they are right to wonder. It is time for Congress to catch up with the data market and to show the American people that we are aware of these threats and will protect the privacy and security of their personal information.

Chairman Specter and I have worked closely together over many months to craft comprehensive legislation to fix key vulnerabilities in our information economy. We thought through these issues carefully and took the time needed to develop well-balanced, focused legislation that provides strong protections where necessary. We also provide tough penalties and consequences for failing to protect Americans' most personal information. Reforms like these are long overdue. This issue and our legislation deserve to become a key part of this year's domestic agenda so that we can achieve some positive changes in areas that affect the everyday lives of Americans.

First, our bill requires data brokers to let people know what information they have about them, and to allow people to correct inaccurate information. These principles have precedent from the credit report context, and we have adapted them in a way that makes sense for the data brokering industry. It's a simple matter of fairness.

Second, we would require companies that have databases with personal information on Americans to establish and implement data privacy and security programs. Any company that wants to be trusted by the public in this day and age must vigilantly protect databases housing Americans' private data. They also have a responsibility in the next link in the security chain, to make sure that contractors hired to process data are on the up-and-up and secure. This is critical as Americans' personal information is increasingly processed overseas.

Third, our bill requires notice when sensitive personal information has been compromised. The American people have a right to know when they are at risk because of corporate failures to protect their data, or when a criminal has infiltrated data systems. The notice rules in our bill were crafted carefully to ensure that the trigger for notice is tied to risk and to recognize important fraud prevention techniques that already exist. But our priority was making sure that victims have that critical information as a roadmap providing the assistance necessary to protect themselves, their families and their financial well-being.

Fourth, our bill provides tough new protections for Social Security numbers, which are the keys to unlocking so much of our financial and personal lives. The use of Social Security numbers has expanded well beyond the intended purposes. Some uses provide important benefits, but others have made Americans vulnerable. Social Security numbers are for sale online for small fees. Earlier this year, it was reported that a payroll and benefits company put the Social Security numbers of 1,000 workers on postcards--on postcards--brazenly visible for anyone to see. Worse still, those postcards described in detail how those Social Security numbers could be used to access employee benefits online. This is unacceptable, and this bill would make that kind of disregard and sloppiness illegal.

Finally, our bill addresses the government's use of personal data. We are living in a world where the government is increasingly looking to the private sector to get personal data that it could not legally collect on its own without oversight and appropriate protections. So ingrained has the data broker-government partnership become that a ChoicePoint executive stated, ``We do act as an intelligence agency, gathering data, applying analytics.'' While these relationships can help protect us, there must be oversight and appropriate protections.

The recent decision to award ChoicePoint an IRS contract highlights this tension. It is especially galling right now to be rewarding firms that have been so careless with the public's confidential information. The dust has not yet settled and the investigations are incomplete on ChoicePoint's lax security practices. We should at least take a pause before rewarding such missteps with even more government contracts. This bill would place privacy and security front and center in evaluating whether data brokers can be trusted with government contracts that involve sensitive information about the American people. It would require contract reviews that include these considerations, audits to ensure good practice, and contract penalties for failure to protect data privacy and security.

The Specter-Leahy legislation meets other key goals. It provides tough monetary and criminal penalties for compromising personal data or failing to provide necessary protections. This creates an incentive for companies to protect personal information, especially when there is no commercial relationship between individuals and companies using their data.

Our legislation also carefully balances the need for Federal uniformity and State leadership. States are often on the forefront of protecting privacy and spurring change. The California security breach law has been an important lesson. My State of Vermont was among the first--if not the first--to require individual consent before sharing financial information with third parties, and to require a person or business to obtain consent from individuals before reviewing their credit reports. The role of States is important, and our bill identifies areas that require uniformity while leaving the States free to act elsewhere as they see fit. We also would authorize an additional $100 million over 4 years to help state law enforcement fight misuse of personal information.

This is a solid bill--a comprehensive bill--that not only deals with providing Americans notice when they have already been hurt, but also deals with the underlying problem of lax security and lack of accountability in dealing with their most personal and private information.

I commend Senator Specter for his leadership on this emerging problem. A number of us have been working on these issues--Senator Feinstein, Senator Nelson, Senator Cantwell and Senator Schumer, among others. I appreciate and recognize their hard work and look forward to making progress together. I am pleased to work closely with Senator Specter on this and believe that we have a bill that significantly advances the ball in protecting Americans.

I ask unanimous consent that a copy of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, along with Senator Collins and 28 of our colleagues, today I am introducing this resolution to halt the Bush administration's flawed and dangerous new rule on toxic mercury emissions. I am pleased that another leading cosponsor of this resolution is the ranking member of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, Senator Jeffords.

The Bush administration's new rule will continue to allow mercury, a substance so toxic that it causes birth defects and IQ loss, to continue to poison children and pregnant women. This disastrous rule should not be allowed to stand as the law of the land.

The bipartisan work that produced the Clean Air Act and the 1990 amendments established a process for us to begin cleaning up the toxic mercury spewing out of dirty power plants across the country. The 1990 amendments require the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, to control each power plant's emissions of mercury and other toxics by 2008 at the latest. The act requires each plant to use the ``maximum achievable control technology'' on every generating unit. That is the law of the land. Anything less means more pollution.

But instead of working to enforce and implement the Clean Air Act, as two previous administrations had, the Bush administration has turned the Clean Air Act on its head. With this rule the administration revokes a 2000 EPA finding that it is ``necessary and appropriate'' to require that each power plant apply technology to reduce mercury emissions.

Let me repeat those plain, startling facts: By revoking the earlier EPA finding and deciding instead to coddle the biggest mercury polluters, the administration is saying it is no longer necessary or appropriate to adequately control mercury emissions. Although I am somewhat impressed that they can make this statement with straight faces, I am appalled at their audacious disregard for the health of the American people, and, like the scientific community, I am baffled by their gymnastic arguments.

The plain and simple truth is that this rule will allow more mercury into our environment than does the current law. Hundreds of the oldest, dirtiest power plants will not even control mercury emissions for more than a decade. That is what this rule gives us: More pollution, for longer than the Clean Air Act allows.

This rule is all the more shameful because the evidence of public health and environmental damage from mercury and other toxics is clear enough for action right now. We do not need to wait 10 or 20 years to know the facts about mercury's threats to human health. In fact EPA itself admits these threats. Look at EPA's own estimate of the number of newborns at risk of elevated mercury exposure, which has doubled to 630,000. EPA also found that 1 in 6 pregnant women has mercury levels in her blood above EPA's safe threshold. The National Academy of Sciences has confirmed scientific research showing that maternal consumption of unsafe levels of mercury in fish can cause neuro- developmental harm in children, resulting in learning disabilities, poor motor function, mental retardation, seizures and cerebral palsy.

Yet it seems the majority in Congress and this administration want to avoid any public daylight on this flawed rule. The Environment and Public Works Committee has refused to even hold a single hearing on this rule. Their aim is to keep the public in the dark, and I would guess that most Americans in fact do not yet know what EPA and the big polluters have been up to with this rule.

One reason for the administration's lack of candor clearly is the discovery that this rule has polluting industries' fingerprints all over it. EPA's first proposal for these rules lifted exact texts from memorandum provided by utility industry lobbyists. Another reason may be because the American people would find a process where the lobbyists are shut in and the public is shut out, where the scientific and economic analysis was manipulated, and where the public's health was ignored.

But the administration's arrogance does not stop there. EPA's own inspector general and the Government Accountability Office criticized almost every aspect of how EPA drafted this rule. Unfortunately, their recommendations to improve it were also ignored. So were more than 680,000 public comments--a record for any EPA rule. So were the comments of many state environment departments, attorneys general, doctors, educators, sportsmen groups and EPA's own advisory committees. And, although it should not come as a surprise after 4 years working with this administration, the comments of 45 Senate and 184 House members were also ignored.

Many of us in the Senate have spent the past 2 years--working with 3 different administrators--trying to make the administration follow the Clean Air Act and produce a rule that puts the public's health over the profits of special interests. A rule that heeds the science and encourages available technologies to solve this problem. They failed on all fronts, big time.

Instead they produced a rule that will do nothing for at least a decade, despite years of analysis by EPA showing the need for quick action. According to EPA's own regulatory impact analysis, we will be lucky if 1 percent of power plant capacity will have mercury controls by 2015, and only 3 percent by 2020.

As a Vermonter I know it is ``appropriate and necessary'' to limit the pollution plumes from grandfathered power plants. You cannot even see my state on EPA's maps showing mercury pollution because so much of it is being dumped on us from upwind power plants. Vermonters and New Englanders have been waiting for decades for EPA to take action so that our lakes can be cleaned up.

For all their talk of family values, the administration has yet again put the value of corporate contributions--not families--first. It is not a family value to tell a whole generation of women that their health is not important. It is not a family value to put another generation of young kids at risk of learning disabilities. These mercury rules do just that.

It is time to put people first, and to stop letting the big polluters and the special interests write the rules and run the show over at EPA.

This resolution will ensure that the health and safety of U.S. citizens are fully considered, before EPA rescinds its commitment to protect public health from the dangers of mercury pollution. To leave mercury pollution from power plants as the only source of toxic air pollution that is allowed to avoid rigorous emissions standards under the Clean Air Act is a risk to the public's health that we need not, and should not, accept.

I urge my colleagues to support this resolution.

Mr. President, I am proud to join the chairman and the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee in cosponsoring the Personal Data Privacy and Security Act of 2005. This bill is a much- needed solution to the daunting problem of ensuring the privacy and the security of our personal data, which has become such a precious commodity.

As we enter the 21st century, several forces are converging to make our personal information more valuable--and vulnerable--than ever. The world is going digital, and so is our personal data. In this day and age, almost everything we do results in a third party creating a digital record about us--digital records that we may not even realize exist. We seek the convenience of opening bank accounts and making major purchases over the Internet, often without ever speaking to another person face to face or even over the telephone, making identity theft easier and more lucrative. Businesses, nonprofits and even political parties are personalizing their messages, products and services to a degree we've never seen before, and they are willing to invest significant amounts of money in collecting personal information about potential customers or donors. And we are living in an age where identity-based screening and security programs can be vitally important, resulting in more information being collected about individuals in an attempt to identify them accurately.

As a result, personal information has become a hot commodity that is bought, sold, and--as so often happens when something becomes valuable--stolen.

We are at a crossroads. We all know about the security breaches that have been on the front pages of newspapers all over the country for the past 6 months. They have placed the identities of hundreds of thousands of Americans at risk.

But this is about much more than just information security. Until California law required ChoicePoint to notify individuals that their information was compromised and they might be vulnerable to identity theft, many Americans had never heard of this company. As news stories focused on the data broker business, many Americans were surprised to discover that companies are creating digital dossiers about them that contain massive amounts of information, and that these companies sell that information to commercial and government entities. The revelations about these security breaches highlighted the fact that Americans need a better understanding of what happens to their information in a digital world--and what kind of consequences they can face as a result.

When I am back home in Wisconsin, I hear from people who do not understand why companies have the right to sell their sensitive personal information. I hear from people who are shocked to discover that personal information about them is available for free on the Internet.

There is no question that data aggregators facilitate societal benefits, allowing consumers to obtain instant credit and personalized services, and police officers to locate suspects. But these companies also gather a great deal of potentially sensitive information about individuals, and in many instances they go largely unregulated.

Too many of my constituents feel they have lost control over their own information. Congress must return some power to individual Americans so that we can all better understand and manage what happens to our own personal data.

The Personal Data Privacy and Security Act takes a comprehensive approach to the privacy and security problems we face. It gives consumers back some control over their own information. The bill requires data brokers to allow consumers to access their own information, and to investigate when consumers tell them that corrections are necessary. And it requires companies to give notice to affected consumers and to law enforcement if there is a serious security breach, so that individuals know their identity may be at risk and can take steps to protect themselves.

In addition, the bill increases penalties for those who steal our identities. It provides grants to State and local law enforcement to help them combat data fraud and related crimes. It requires companies that buy and sell information to have appropriate data security systems in place. It provides protection to Social Security numbers by prohibiting the sale, purchase or display of Social Security numbers, with certain exceptions, and preventing companies from requiring customers to provide their Social Security numbers in order to purchase goods or services. These protections will help safeguard against future privacy violations and security breaches in the commercial data industry. But that is not all this bill accomplishes.

The bill also contains some critically important privacy and security provisions to govern the Government's use of commercial data. This is an aspect of the data broker business that has not yet gotten as much attention in the wake of the recent security breaches. The information gathered by these companies is not just sold to individuals and businesses; Government agencies of all stripes also buy or subscribe to information from commercial sources. The most recent example was the discovery that the Pentagon has a contract with a marketing firm to analyze commercial and other data about high school and college students.

While I believe the Government should be able to access commercial databases in appropriate circumstances, there are few existing rules or guidelines to ensure this information is used responsibly. Nor are there restrictions on the use of commercial data for powerful, intrusive data mining programs, an issue I have been particularly concerned about. The Privacy Act, which governs when Government agencies themselves are collecting data, does not apply because the information is held outside the Government and is not gathered solely at Government direction.

As a result, there is a great deal we do not know about Government use of commercial data, even in clearly appropriate circumstances such as when the agency's goal is simply to locate an individual already suspected of a crime.

We don't know under what circumstances Government employees can obtain access to these databases or for what purposes. We don't know how Government agencies evaluate the accuracy of the databases to which they subscribe, or how the accuracy level affects government use of the data. We don't know how employees are monitored to ensure they do not abuse their access to these databases, or how those who misuse the information are punished. And we don't know how Government agencies, particularly those engaged in sensitive national security investigations, ensure that the data brokers cannot keep records of who the Government is investigating, records which themselves could create a huge security risk in light of the vulnerabilities that have come to the forefront in recent months.

That is why I am so pleased that this bill includes provisions to address the Government's use of commercial data. A comprehensive approach to data privacy and security would be incomplete without taking on this piece of the puzzle. The bill recognizes there are many legitimate reasons for Government agencies to obtain commercially available data, but that they need to be subject to privacy and security protections. It takes a commonsense approach, pushing Government agencies to take basic steps to ensure that individuals' personal information is secure and only used for legitimate purposes, and that the commercial information the Government is paying for and relying on is accurate and complete.

Specifically, the bill would require that Federal agencies that subscribe to commercial data adopt standards governing its use. These standards would reflect long-standing basic privacy principles. The bill would ensure that Government agencies consider and determine which personnel will be permitted to access the information and under what circumstances; develop retention policies for this personal data and get rid of data they no longer need, minimizing the opportunity for abuse or theft; rely only on accurate and complete data, and penalize vendors who knowingly provide inaccurate information to the Federal Government; provide individuals who suffer adverse consequences as a result of the agency's reliance on commercial data with a redress mechanism; and establish enforcement mechanisms for those privacy policies.

The bill also extends to other screening programs the existing protections that already are in place to govern the Transportation Security Administration's possible use of commercial data for its identity-based airline passenger screening program, Secure Flight. If the Federal Government is going to rely on commercial data to screen Americans and decide whether to permit them to travel by air or engage in other common activities, it should do so only subject to explicit congressional authorization, as this bill provides. In addition, agencies should have to provide a redress process for those wrongly affected, and should have to operate under rules that govern the access, use, disclosure, accuracy and retention of that data.

The bill also directs the General Services Administration to review Government contracts for commercial data to make sure that vendors have appropriate security programs in place, and that they do not provide information to the Government that they know to be inaccurate. And it requires agencies to audit the information security practices of their vendors.

These are basic good Government measures. They guarantee that the Federal Government is not wasting money on inaccurate data, and that vendors are undertaking the security programs that they have promised and for which the Government is paying.

We live in a new digital world. The law may never fully keep up with technology, but we must make every effort we can. I am proud to be involved in this comprehensive, reasoned approach to privacy and security. I congratulate Chairman Specter and Ranking Member Leahy for their excellent work on this bill. This bill is important and it deserves very serious consideration by the Senate.

Mr. President, I rise today during National Home Ownership Month to introduce the Housing America's Workforce Act.

Affordable and safe housing plays a vital role in creating and sustaining healthy communities and a vibrant workforce. The Housing America's Workforce Act creates incentives to expand employer-assisted housing initiatives across the Nation. I thank Senators Smith, Martinez, Reed, and Durbin for their co-sponsorship of this important legislation. I would also like to thank Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez for her leadership in introducing the companion bill in the House of Representatives.

The sad truth is that across our Nation, working full-time no longer guarantees that a family will be able to afford a secure and comfortable home. The shortage of workforce housing has become a national crisis as housing costs have far outgrown the rate of inflation in many markets and as the gap between wages and housing costs widens. The result is that affordable housing is out of reach for a growing number of working families. As a result,

people who provide the backbone services for our communities--teachers, firefighters, police officers, and nurses--often cannot afford to live in the communities in which they serve. A recent workforce housing study released by the National Association of Home Builders found that for the most part, workers who provide these vital community services can only find housing they can afford in less than half of the nation's top 25 metropolitan areas.

Across the Nation, the number of working families with critical housing problems (defined as those paying more than half of their income for housing and/or living in dilapidated conditions) has increased by 67 percent between 1997 and 2003 to approximately 5 million families. Families that spend more than half of their income on housing have little income left over for other essentials such as food, healthcare, and transportation.

And despite overall improvements in home-ownership trends since 1978, working families--employed households with children earning less than 120 percent of Area Median Income--have actually experienced a decrease in homeownership rates. A 2004 Center for Housing Policy study shows that the homeownership rate for working families with children was at 62.5 percent in 1978, and only 56.6 percent through 2001.

Employer-assisted housing, EAH, is a local, innovative solution that a growing number of employers are using to meet the housing needs of their employees while increasing the competitiveness of their businesses. There are several types of EAH products, including homebuyer education, down payment assistance, rental assistance and loan guarantee programs. Employers often combine these products to meet their employees' specific needs in the most effective ways.

The benefits for employees and employers are impressive. The employee, in addition to receiving financial support from an employer to buy or rent a home closer to work, also regains extra time--formerly spent in traffic--for family or community life. The employer likewise benefits from a more stable workforce when employees live near work. They enjoy the advantages from the improved employee morale, lower turnover rate and reduced recruitment costs result in bottom line savings that the increased proximity brings. Furthermore, EAH programs benefit not only the workers and employers, but also the entire community. As former commuters buy homes near the jobsite, the surrounding community which previously suffered from traffic congestion, now enjoys new investment and property tax revenues.

The Housing America's Workforce Act is inspired in great part by lessons learned in States and local communities across the Nation, where EAH has proven to be an effective tool to promote housing affordability for working families and community revitalization. Through EAH programs, the private sector becomes part of the solution, investing in housing assistance for employees while experiencing bottom line benefits. This is clearly a public-private partnership that is proven and makes sense.

The Housing America's Workforce Act provides incentives to increase private sector investment in housing in three important ways. First, it offers a tax credit of 50 cents for every dollar that an employer provides to eligible employees up to $10,000 or six percent of the employee's home purchase price, whichever is less, or up to $2,000 for rental assistance. Second, to ensure that employees receive the full value of employers' contributions, the Act defines housing assistance as a ``nontaxable benefit,'' similar to health, dental and life insurance. Third, the act establishes a competitive grant program available to nonprofit housing organizations that provide technical assistance, program administration, and outreach support to employers undertaking EAH initiatives.

In New York and in other parts of the country, EAH has caught on with the local business community, elected and appointed officials, and the broader housing arena. Its expansion indicates a growing understanding among the private sector that it pays to invest in workforce housing. I have worked with employers across my State to launch county employer- assisted housing programs in places such as Long Island, Rochester and Westchester.

I have met many of the families that have already benefited from Long Island's EAH program, which I helped launch in 2002. People like the Isaacs family, who were able to buy their first home in North Amityville in 2002 thanks to their employer's participation in the program. Pamela Isaac, like so many employees on Long Island, works as a Dietician at Our Lady of Consolation, part of the Catholic Health Services Network. Catholic Health Services' participation in the employer assisted housing program enabled Pamela and her husband Bartholomew to stay on Long Island and raise their three children in their own home.

I also worked in collaboration with Mayor William A. Johnson of Rochester to jumpstart the City of Rochester's EAH initiative. The City provides $3,000 for its own employees and also encourages other employers to provide a home purchase benefit by offering to match that benefit dollar for dollar up to a maximum of $3,000. Therefore, if an employer offered the maximum benefit of $3,000, he or she would produce a $6,000 benefit for his or her employees with the city's matching funds.

The Westchester County EAH, which was spEAHheaded by the Business Council and Fannie Mae, brings together the following Westchester County nonprofit organizations: Housing Action Council, Westchester Residential Opportunities, Westchester Housing Fund and Community Housing Innovations. Each of these nonprofits provides standardized, comprehensive education and counseling support to participating employers. The initiative also provides matching funds of up to $3,000 from Westchester County or from the cities of Yonkers, New Rochelle, White Plains or Mount Vernon. In addition, the nonprofit collaborative offers down payment and closing cost assistance programs that can match employer contributions.

The creation of Federal incentives to expand employer-assisted housing has been a consistent recommendation of experts in the broader housing arena, including the Millennial Housing Commission. In addition, former HUD Secretaries Henry Cisneros and Jack Kemp, along with Nic Retsinas and Kent Colton of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies recently released a bipartisan platform for national housing policy, which includes EAH as one of its recommendations.

According to the Society for Human Resources Management's 2004 Benefits Survey, 12 percent of employers offered home ownership assistance in 2004, up from 7 percent in 2002. Since 1991, Fannie Mae has offered a nationwide EAH program through participating lending institutions and employers. Fannie Mae has helped about 750 employers of various sizes implement EAH programs and nearly 570 have been launched since 2000. Freddie Mac launched a similar national program in 1999, which it expanded in 2004. Several states have enacted EAH tax incentive programs, including Illinois, Connecticut, Missouri, and New Jersey.

Employer-assisted housing programs offer a fresh approach to addressing our Nation's housing challenge by allowing the private sector to play a direct role in promoting housing affordability. I hope every Senator will recognize that the Housing America's Workforce Act will create opportunities for us as a Nation to expand these public- private partnerships and will make a profound impact in the lives of our workforce, and I hope that you will support this important piece of legislation.

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Lead-Free Drinking Water Act of 2005 with my colleague Senator Sarbanes. We are joined by our colleagues, Congresswoman Norton, Congressman Waxman, and others, who will be introducing the House companion bill today. Today, we introduce this bill for the second time.

Last year, we shared the shock felt by DC residents when it was first reported that lead levels in the DC public water system were significantly higher than Federal guidelines, and had been so for at least 2 years.

We sought answers to the same questions everyone was asking themselves--How much water did I drink? How much water did my children drink? What are the effects of lead in our bloodstream?

We shared the outrage felt by many DC residents, asking ourselves-- why were we not told about this sooner? How did this happen? What are we going to do about it?

In the 108th Congress, we attempted to answer those questions. We held a hearing in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and listened to the concerns of DC parents worried about their children's health.

We listened to experts who identified weaknesses in the Safe Drinking Water Act and the lead and copper rule, governing how the public is informed when lead is present in a drinking water system and what corrective actions public water systems must take.

One of the most disturbing points is that many of the things that happened in Washington, DC, were within the boundaries of the existing rules that purport to protect the public from lead in drinking water.

We responded by introducing the Lead-Free Drinking Water Act of 2004, which sought to correct the weaknesses in those rules.

Today, we are reintroducing the Lead-Free Drinking Water Act of 2005.

Our bill will overhaul the Safe Drinking Water Act to strengthen the Federal rules governing lead testing and regulations in our public water systems to ensure that our most vulnerable citizens--infants, children, pregnant women, and new moms--are not harmed by lead in drinking water.

Specifically, the bill requires the EPA to reevaluate the current regulatory structure to figure out if it really provides the level of public health protection required.

The bill calls on the EPA to establish a maximum contaminant level for lead at the tap, and if that is not practical given the presence of lead inside home plumbing systems, the bill requires EPA to reevaluate the current action level for lead to ensure that vulnerable populations such as infants, children, pregnant women, and nursing mothers receive adequate protection.

I look forward to working with EPA on this evaluation to determine which approach is most feasible and which provides the greatest level of public health protection.

EPA has three choices: keep current standard, an ``action level'' at 15 parts per billion; lower the current action level below 15 parts per billion; establish a ``maximum contaminant load.''

For example, it is clear that a maximum contaminant level, which is measured at the water treatment plant, would do little to protect people from lead-contaminated drinking water at their faucets. Our bill requires that standards be measured at the tap.

A low lead action level measured at the tap could provide more protection than a high MCL measured anywhere in the system if there were extremely strong and effective public notification procedures in place.

Public notice is the key to success of any lead regulation--parents say to me, ``If only I had known, I could have protected my family.'' It is our job to be sure the public notice system we have in place gets people the information they need when they need it.

The bill will require information such as the number of homes tested, the lead levels found, the areas of the community in which they were located, and the disproportionate adverse health effects of lead on infants, be made public immediately upon detection of lead.

In addition, the bill requires that, as part of routine testing conducted, any residents whose homes test high for lead receive notification and appropriate medical referrals within 14 days.

Finally, we don't want the day of an exceedance to be the first time people have heard about lead in drinking water. The bill establishes a basic public education program to ensure that people have a basic understanding that lead may be present in drinking water and what the corrective actions might be even before their water system detects a problem.

The bill requires increased water testing and lead remediation in schools and day-care centers nationwide. This provision exists in law today, but it was affected by previous litigation. This bill corrects the problem by requiring the Administrator to execute this program if states choose not to. It is wholly unacceptable to do anything less than provide a learning environment for our next generation that does not degrade their intellectual capacity. Our bill provides $150 million over 5 years for this program.

And we strengthen existing requirements to ensure that all lead service lines will be replaced by a public water system at a rate of 10 percent per year until they are gone.

This is common sense--let us get rid of the lead in our systems and get rid of the lead in our water.

Our bill makes water systems responsible for replacing lead service lines, including the privately owned sections, once a system exceeds lead standards. Homeowners have the final say in whether their line is replaced.

We provide $1 billion over 5 years for lead service line replacement.

The EPA estimates that our Nation needs $265 billion to maintain and improve its drinking water infrastructure over the next 20 years.

If we do not address this, we will be facing more and more health and environmental issues as our Nation's water infrastructure degrades.

Lead service lines are only one part of the picture. Leaded solder was banned in 1987. However, ``lead-free'' plumbing fixtures are currently allowed to have 8 percent lead.

Our bill makes ``lead-free'' mean lead-free. It defines the term as trace amounts of lead -0.2 percent. It prohibits the use of pipes, or pipe or plumbing fitting or fixtures that are ``high lead'' which our bill defines as 2.0 percent lead within 1 year. And within 5 years, it prohibits the use of any plumbing components with anymore than 0.2 percent lead. This is a huge step toward making our water systems truly lead-free.

Our bill strengthens existing requirements for leaching by requiring independent third-party performance certification.

Finally, our bill requires that the existing requirements for leaching be revised to be as protective as the existing leaching standards in California which have set the bar for plumbing fittings and fixtures.

We urge our colleagues to support this legislation.

Last year, Good Housekeeping independently ran a piece about the Lead-Free Drinking Water Act and gave its readers information to contact us with their support. We received over a thousand responses from individual readers in 48 States and the District of Columbia.

In the 18th century, almost 300 years ago, Ben Franklin concluded that lead was poisonous. In a biography written by Edmund S. Morgan, this story is recounted:

At the request of his friend and English publisher Benjamin Vaughan, he wrote out a proof of what he had once casually mentioned in conversation: his conclusion that lead was poisonous. After detailing his own and other printers' ailments from the continuous handling of lead type, he went on to describe his observations of the grass and plants that died from the fumes near furnaces where lead was smelted, of the effects of drinking rainwater that sluiced off lead roofs, and of his queries to sickened plumbers, painters, and glaziers in a Paris hospital. His observations of the toxic effects of lead, he noted, were nothing new; and he remarked wryly, ``how long a useful Truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally receiv'd and practis'd on.''

We have known lead is a poison for centuries. What are we waiting for? As we learned from the incidents in Washington, DC, and Boston, there are large deficiencies in Federal safe drinking water regulations. It is time to plug the holes in these regulations and fully protect the public from this poison. It is time to get the lead out.

Safe drinking water is not a privilege; it is a right--whether you live in Washington, DC, or Washington State or Washington County, VT.

I urge my colleagues to join us in working to pass the Lead-Free Drinking Water Act of 2005 to get the lead out of our pipes, out of our water, out of our families, and out of our lives.