Small Employers Health Benefits Program Act of 2006

Mr. President, I wish to comment a little bit on that. I think there is plenty of blame to go around for any delays that are happening around here. When we are talking about incorporating in this bill, which deals with small business health plans, an opportunity to give small businessmen a chance at negotiating in the market to bring down costs, with an alternative being proposed--when we are being asked to incorporate into this and put all the weight of the stem cell debate or drug reimportation or Medicare Part D on top of this as a full-blown debate, everybody in this body knows that any one of those would easily take up not just a full week but probably 3 weeks because there would be other kinds of motions and parliamentary objections and processes that would drag any one of those out for that time.

The difficulty with being able to debate anything around here is the

length of time as a result of the right to offer any amendments that anybody wants on any topic. So we do make some efforts to try to keep them relevant. If we do cloture, then they are germane. Germane is a much tougher test, but relevant is not any health care idea in the whole world that could be amended and amended and amended and debated and have processes put in against it that would keep us from ever getting to a decision on small business health plans.

So we are trying to stay with small business health plans. I know Senators Durbin and Lincoln have an alternate approach. The alternate approach ought to be voted on, but the alternate approach should not be voted on to the exclusion of ever getting to a vote on this. So we don't want to have just one of them vote and one side feel very good because they got a vote for that one and the other side never gets to their vote. We are trying to find a way to make sure there are votes on both sides on the issues and that not just one side is taking the tough votes but that we do something so we can get to a conclusion for small business. Yes, we are trying to focus this on the problems of small business.

I would like to speak a little bit on the managers' amendment that is before us because there are some changes to the bill that I think the other side of the aisle will like. In most respects, this amendment corresponds very closely to the underlying bill reported out of the HELP Committee in March. It enables small businesses to pool together to save costs and increase access. It allows small business health plans and other plans to offer more affordable coverage options. It will also help streamline the current hodgepodge of health insurance regulation. However, the managers' amendment does make a number of new and important changes to the bill, most importantly in the area of premium rating.

Before I address the managers' amendment, I want to first emphasize, as I have throughout this debate, that I am eager to start sorting the amendments my colleagues might want to offer. As we start the amendment process, I look forward to debating all amendments from my colleagues on both sides of the aisle that are relevant--I mean relevant to the goal of more affordable health insurance for small business owners and their employees and their families.

I have reviewed some of the amendments Members have filed and want to offer. There are many that don't have any place on this bill and only serve to obstruct or delay passage of the bill--amendments addressing the energy efficiency of hybrid cars, Medicare benefits, hate crimes, and environmental air standards. They don't have any place on this bill. This bill is about health insurance for small business owners and their families and their employees and their families. I stand ready and willing to debate all relevant amendments to this bill.

For instance, Senator Snowe will file an amendment on the issue of benefit mandates. Her amendment would ensure that benefits and services which have been mandated by a majority of States would continue to apply to small business health plans and other insurers. I know there is a lot of strong feeling on all sides of this issue, and I look forward to a lively and serious debate on it. I will have more to say about the Snowe amendment later.

For now, I will focus on what we have done in the managers' amendment to address the concerns raised by many Members of this Chamber. The main change we have made is related to how health insurance premiums are priced for small business. Most States do have rating laws. Those laws limit the amount of variation between premiums charged to different small businesses. Some States allow a great variation; some States allow very little variation.

During debate on this bill yesterday, I heard my Democratic colleagues make a number of speeches on this issue. They expressed their concern about how the bill, as reported from our committee, would affect the health insurance market in their States. They expressed concerns about how the rating rules in our bill might affect businesses with older workers or workers who have serious or chronic illnesses. I also heard these concerns in private conversations with a number of my colleagues over the past few weeks. I don't believe everybody should have to pay exactly the same amount for health insurance. Rules like that hurt young families and lower income workers. They get hurt because they get priced out of the affordable health insurance market.

But I have listened to my colleagues. I have also consulted with some of my colleagues on our committee and with Senator Nelson of Nebraska, who coauthored this bill with me. I value his perspective as a former State insurance commissioner. I also reviewed the bill Senators Durbin and Lincoln have offered. I have talked with experts in the insurance markets and insurance regulation, and they don't think the bill Senators Durbin and Lincoln have offered would create new and affordable options. In fact, some of those experts think that bill would make things worse, not better.

I will speak some other time in more detail on that. I prefer to go in the direction that we know can work. We know small business health plans will work because they worked in the past before the thicket of conflicting State laws made it too cumbersome to offer such plans.

Our committee heard testimony on this last year, but Senator Nelson and I looked at the Durbin-Lincoln bill anyway to see if there were some ideas we could harvest, some ideas we could incorporate.

After talking with Senator Nelson and my colleagues on the committee, we have developed an amendment that should address the concerns of most of my colleagues on the issue of rating.

The managers' amendment would do two things: First, it would permit States to limit the allowable variation in premiums to a much narrower ratio between the highest and the lowest rates as compared to the bill my committee originally reported.

Second, it would allow States to continue to require community rating of the health insurance policies. What that means is that the bill would allow States to prohibit small business health plans or insurance companies from using the health status of a group of workers as a factor in determining the group's premium.

If States want to allow health status as a factor, they can allow it; if they don't, they can disallow it. This means two things: First of all, most States would be unaffected by the new rating threshold of the managers' amendment. As a matter of fact, we estimate the rating provisions would have no impact on approximately 40 States. The vast majority of those States have reasonably competitive markets, although those markets would be even more competitive if we allow for the creation of small business health plans, allowing small business to band together across State lines to increase their leverage and to cut administrative costs. That is a huge factor.

Second, the managers' amendment preserves much of our original intent to create greater affordability for low-wage workers and for younger workers and their families, but it also allows States to retain reasonable limits on what high-risk groups can be charged. The managers' amendment sets a different threshold for allowable variation in premiums.

The new threshold is similar to the model act published by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and updated in 2000, its most recent model, and it is what Senators Durbin and Lincoln used as the basis of their bill.

So under the managers' amendment, the States use community rating and could continue to use community rating. That means these States could still prohibit the use of health status as a rating factor as long as their system is adjusted to the point that it maintains affordability for low-wage workers and young people and families.

Under the managers' amendment, States would also be permitted to limit small business health plans and other insurers from setting rates that vary by more than a 5-to-1 ratio. In other words, the highest rate for a group in a particular insurance pool could not be more than five times the lowest rate. That would ensure that the insurance pool has a better and more stable balance of risks in the pool while ensuring meaningful limits on premiums for higher risk groups. This is an adjusted community rating standard used in the bill authored by Senators Durbin and Lincoln.

Again, just like the Durbin-Lincoln bill, the managers' amendment follows the most recent model from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. The Durbin-Lincoln standard works out to the same 5-to-1 ratio between lowest and highest rating. So I hope my colleagues understand that here is an area where we have tried to strike a compromise, where we tried to work with them.

I should point out that most States don't use community rating. They use what is known as rating bands. These bands allow for a variety of factors to be used in setting premiums, including health status. We will allow States that use rating bands to continue to use rating bands. None of these States would be required to use community rating if they don't want to. They can continue to allow greater premium variation than the 5-to-1 ratio if they choose. It is a very important point.

The managers' amendment allows States to continue the use of two systems for rating health insurance policies. They can use either the community rating or what is known as rating bands. All the managers' amendment asks is that community-rated States follow the model set forth in the Durbin-Lincoln bill. At least if some reasonable variation in premiums is allowed, young families and lower wage workers may be able to find affordable policies. Of course, affordability would be enhanced if their State markets became competitive enough to attract small business health plans. So we are saying in 10 States it may not attract small business health plans.

I know the rating is extremely complex. This is a very difficult issue to talk about. I kind of enjoy it as an accountant. But the bottom line is very simple. First, we need to maintain a minimum level of affordability in how premiums are set across the country. Young families and lower wage workers in certain States deserve access to affordable health insurance and, therefore, affordable health care, and they deserve the ability to join together with other employees as part of a pool of small business workers through the association in their industries.

Ensuring that all the States have competitive health insurance markets will enable small business health plans to create truly national pools so they can maximize the full size of their membership as they negotiate for better benefits and for better prices.

This is a major area of compromise, and I hope my colleagues recognize it. We have taken a major concept from the bill authored by Senators Durbin and Lincoln and we have incorporated it in the managers' amendment. We have done this because Senator Nelson and I and the other cosponsors of the bill are working in good faith to find common ground.

While rating is the most significant issue that we revised in the managers' amendment, it is not the only one. For example, the managers' amendment includes several provisions to make it clear that the scope of the bill's preemption of State law is very narrowly tailored to only three areas. Those three areas are rating, as I have already discussed, benefits, to enable small business health plans to offer national benefit packages, and administrative functions, to reduce some unnecessary costs of health insurance regulation.

It has been a key priority for my Democratic cosponsor, Senator Ben Nelson, that State oversight authority be retained to the maximum extent possible. We have a few former State insurance commissioners in the Senate, and I know they share Senator Nelson's opinion on that. There are also a few former attorneys general in the Senate, and I have listened to them. I have also listened to some of our current attorneys general who have voiced their concerns recently.

I mention that some of their concerns refer more to the House- associated health plans bill, and it is important for people to know this is different from that bill.

We have listened and done these appropriate changes. We have added new provisions that make it very clear that this bill does not preempt, affect, or even disrupt traditional State authority regarding consumer protection, plan solvency, and insurance oversight. That stays with the State.

Most importantly, it would be crystal clear that the bill does not limit in any way a consumer's right to petition their State insurance commissioner or the State courts. That is a very important point. I want to repeat that. It should be crystal clear that it does not limit in any way a consumer's right to petition the State insurance commissioner or their State courts.

The managers' amendment before the Senate represents a significant effort to find common ground. It addresses the issue of rating, which is one of the two major concerns that Senator Nelson and I have heard from colleagues. Senator Snowe's amendment with respect to State- mandated benefits is an attempt to address the other major concern.

So Members who have raised concerns about these two issues ought to see we are willing to work toward a compromise. There should be no reason we can't arrive at a solution over the next couple of days. Small business owners and working families I don't think are going to accept excuses.

The matter at hand is small business health plans. It is not stem cell research, it is not drug importation, and it is not Medicare. The matter at hand is about creating more affordable health insurance options for small business, and it is an issue that I think can be covered this week or a very small part of next week.

As a manager of this bill, I am willing to entertain any germane amendments. With the consent of my colleagues, I will even go further than that. I will consider relevant amendments. But stem cell research is not relevant to this bill. Drug importation is not relevant to this bill. Medicare is not relevant to this bill. What is relevant to this bill is amendments that address the 27 million Americans without health insurance who work for or depend on small businesses.

If my colleagues have amendments like that, Senator Nelson and I are more than willing to discuss them. Let's focus on the matter at hand. Let's take a meaningful step forward to give America's small business owners and working families more affordable health care.

In regard to some of the comments that have been made, as an accountant, I do remind my colleagues that this is not a case of subtraction. This insurance plan is addition. It will be bringing in newly insured people. When you go to the dry cleaners tonight to pick up your laundry, can you look that person in the eye and say: I don't think you deserve health insurance because you might not demand enough for yourself, so I saved you from yourself? Can you look them in the eye and say to the mom and pop running the business down the street from your home: You don't deserve health insurance either; you don't have it now, we're not going to make it more affordable for you; too bad, we had other things we wanted to discuss?

As you go home today, after you leave the Hill, think about the people around you, the regular people--the cab driver, the worker at the dry cleaner, the person in your neighborhood restaurant, all those people you may not notice who really make the world operate. Many of them don't have any insurance. Some may even own a little business just around the corner, be the owners of it, and still not be able to have insurance.

I am not talking about deluxe insurance, I am talking about any insurance. We are not talking about the employees at the big hotel chains or the big chain restaurants. We are not talking about the employees at Wal-Mart. We already said to them: You can form whatever benefits package you want. You don't have to answer to any State. You don't even have to have review or oversight by insurance commissioners. You don't have to meet any State requirements. We already said that to big business, and big business has done that. They haven't left out critical things. They said: Let's see, this is a competitive market. We have to be competitive. We want to have employees. And you know what. I think they included almost everything that has been talked about here. They did it because they wanted to compete.

Small business isn't any different. They need good employees. They want good employees. They know that if they are going to have good employees they have to do as much as they can afford.

Oh, yes, and when they are doing that, they can also pick up some insurance for themselves, and what they do for themselves, they do for their employees. We hear the estimates of how much this will or will not save. I would like to make a couple of comments on that. We have already seen that the big businesses, instead of paying 35 percent in administrative costs--35 percent--remember, each 1 percent of insurance costs drives 200,000 to 300,000 people out of the market. We are talking about 35 percent administrative costs. But those big businesses that we gave permission to do whatever they wanted to, theirs runs about 8 percent. Do you think they would be more competitive than the small businesses? What keeps the small businesses in business is their flexibility and how much less they make.

So I am not talking about deluxe insurance; I am talking about any insurance. Did you know that in several States there is only deluxe insurance? Did you know that in some States there may only be one insurance provider? Others have been driven out of the market. No, it hasn't been the competition that has driven them out; it could be well- meaning legislators wanting to make sure that everybody has everything they need.

There is a lot with our bodies that we ought to be doing on a regular basis. We ought to be taking care of our body like we take care of our car--well, maybe not like we take care of our car. But the way we usually take care of our body is similar to a rental car. We drive it until something goes wrong and then we take it into the shop. But there are regular services that we ought to provide for our own bodies, and we can do that.

The big companies get to do that tax deductible. It would be nice if the small businesses were able to do that tax deductible as well, and we can get into several of those issues later. We do have a plan here. We are willing to make modifications to it. We are willing to take relevant amendments. We do want to be sure that we get a vote on this bill, if we vote on an alternative measure. I think that is fair.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like a chance to answer the 45 minutes of accusations that were made about my bill and also bring up a few things about the Durbin-Lincoln bill that I have not had a chance to talk about yet, but could I inquire how long the Senator from Massachusetts will speak?

I almost hate to break the continuity of the debate when we are talking about some very specific things.

Probably about as long as it took Senator Durbin to cover the fallacies and to boost his bill. I ask that I be the next to speaker after the Senator.

That went a little longer than I anticipated. I have now listened for an hour and 25 minutes to the other side. I ask unanimous consent that our side have that kind of an opportunity.

I have an office that is kind of interesting. It is Phil Gramm's old office. He retired from the Senate after several years of mentoring a number of us and was a real force around here. Occasionally, when I am sitting in my office, some phrases will come by that he used. I grab them and I put them in a jar. I figure I will never have an opportunity to use them. But I think today I will pick out of the jar again. He said: When the Democrats talk about health care, they want national health care. The ship of health, they do not care who steers it, as long as it wrecks, and we can have national health care. That is a little bit about what we are talking about today, that plus a combination of saying we are not going to let anybody out there have anything unless they can have everything. That would be nice. I would like for the people of this country to have better insurance than we in the Senate have. That would be my dream.

I wish we could give them better insurance than we have.

Before I came to the Senate, I had better insurance than I have now. When the Democrats say that they want to open up the Federal employee health plans to everybody, they want everybody to have the same thing we have, they don't really mean that. They can't really mean that. I am willing to bet that if we were actually opening up that same pool and letting the Federal employee insurance be used by everybody in the country, the Federal employees would say: Whoa, not on my shift. The Federal unions would say: No, not on my shift. That is a closed pool. That isn't open to everybody. If it was open to everybody, it would be a whole different range of costs. And it is subsidized.

The Democratic alternative, S. 2382, is an open, voluntary pool purchasing agreement. That kind of an arrangement has failed nearly everywhere they have been tried. There is no evidence that they would succeed if they tried it now and would succeed where others have not. Many States have tried this. It is with very little success.

It may look like the Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan, but the Federal employees plan is a closed pool that provides premium support to all eligible individuals. The Democratic alternative is an open pool that would provide a tax subsidy to some of the eligible employers. In other words, it would be apples versus oranges.

A tax subsidy? Let's see, would everybody be able to get a tax subsidy for their health? No, you only get a tax subsidy if you buy the Durbin-Lincoln health plan, a one plan fits all for the United States.

Now, there was some discussion about whether it was $78 billion or $73 billion over 10 years. Let me tell you, they have never scored it, so they have no idea what it would cost. That is what some of the separate actuaries have looked at and said it would score. The Enzi- Nelson-Burns bill would reduce costs and increase coverage, and that is according to respected actuaries. No one can say for sure what that Democratic alternative would do--whether it is tens or hundreds of billions over 10 years.

The Durbin-Lincoln proposal eliminates the ability for national plans in that bill to offer uniform benefit packages. Why is that important? The plan I have put forth--the plan that has come out of committee-- allows small businesses to work across State lines to form bigger pools so that they can negotiate effectively against the insurance companies. That is where the savings are. We talk about mandates a lot in here, but the savings come from the ability to have a uniform package so that people in adjoining States can all be bargaining for the same package and have a big enough pool to go up against the insurance companies to be sure they get a better price.

The national plan--the Durbin-Lincoln plan--would still have to meet the requirements of each and every State, even down to the specific particulars of each mandate. Did you know that there are currently 1,700 mandates in the United States? Did you know that those mandates are seldom the same from State to State? They may have the same title, but they are not the same. So how do you put together a package where you say you have to do all of them and be able to go across State boundaries to form bigger pools? You cannot. You would have to do 1,700 mandates if you wanted it to be uniform across the United States.

I need to tell you, too, that some of these mandates we are talking about are screenings. We heard about mammography over there. That is very important. I hope women get mammographies. But did you know that in Wyoming, we really emphasize at this time of year--and I will mention it because Mother's Day is coming up, and this is a huge program in Wyoming to encourage people to buy that for their mother for Mother's Day. It works well. People know exactly what they are buying and exactly how much it costs. It isn't one of many mandates that are in the package that they pay for even though they don't use it.

Somebody said that mandates only add 3 to 4 percent to the bill. No. In the State with the minimum amount in mandates, it adds 5 percent, up to Massachusetts, which adds 22 percent in mandates. Now, I am not suggesting that any of those mandates should not be done. The bill I worked on does set up the ability to have a basic plan. Would people necessarily do the basic plan? They can do the basic plan up to whatever they think is responsible coverage for the people in their association. That doesn't mean nothing; it means they can pick.

You get the impression here that if you allow a basic package, everybody in the country is going to jump on the basic package and say: I can really sock it to my employees; I don't have to provide them with anything anymore. That is not America, and that is particularly not small business America. In small business America, they know they need their employees. Of course, as somebody pointed out, sometimes the only employees are mom and pop. They would like to be insured if they could possibly afford it. So we have to find some way for them to be able to afford it. But this notion that just because there is a mandate out there, everybody will use it, and this notion that just because there is a mandate out there, if we don't require it, it will be dropped--you know, we allow big business in this country to do whatever they want. And do you know what. They provide those basic things.

Now, one of the things which has been mentioned is colorectal cancer screening. Again, the facts suggest that health plans cover important tests like this regardless of State mandate, so it is likely that small business health plans would cover them as well.

In 2004, the Government Accountability Office found that 20 States had laws mandating coverage of colorectal cancer screening tests, which are strongly recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force for people 50 years or older. Now, the GAO then surveyed 19 small employer plans in 10 of the States without laws mandating this coverage--without laws mandating that. This is an opportunity for those small businessmen, if they are the way they are accused of being here, to just drop it for everybody. Now, despite the absence of State mandates to cover colorectal cancer screening, all 19 small employer plans in those 10 States provided the benefit. Can you believe that? If you have been listening to the discussion this week, you would think they would just drop it. They didn't drop it. They said: Our employees are valuable, and we need to do whatever we can afford to to help them.

Now, how do we help them to afford it better? Let's see. If we could join up with all of the other realtors in the United States-- incidentally, the realtors are coming to town next week to their regular annual meeting. As I understand it, 9,000 of them will be here next week, coming to a national convention. Oh, how I wish they would have come 1 week earlier. They could have explained their case. But we have a whole bunch of small businesses out there that really think it is important to be able to band together and get a better deal. It works.

Part of the discussion we have heard today has gone off on some other tangents. That is one of the reasons we are talking about relevant amendments. One of them that we went off on is prescription drug Part D and how, by Monday, people need to sign up for a plan. I really appreciate the coverage we have gotten to get that word out to people across America to make that decision this week. Make it this week. Don't have a penalty because you missed the deadline.

Now, for months I have listened to the Democrats say: This is terrible; this is confusing; this doesn't work; we need to do something different; we have to make it simpler for our seniors. Let's see. Let's just have one Federal plan for them to pick from. It sounds like Phil Gramm again, doesn't it? Ship of state wreck so we can have a national opportunity.

Let me tell you what happened. I was really worried about this prescription drug plan. Wyoming has such a small population--less than 500,000--and we keep hoping we will get off that mark. So far, we have never gotten a city big enough to kind of feed on itself and grow. I said that Wyoming just doesn't have any luck attracting businesses for competition, and we probably won't have any luck on prescription drugs, so I wanted to make sure there was an underlying thing that says if nobody is interested in Wyoming, the Federal Government will take care of it. Do you know what. Wyoming got 41 plans--41 of them. Competition works.

Now, that is what causes the confusion the Democrats keep talking about on prescription drugs. They say that there are too many plans out there for people to make a logical choice. That makes it confusing for seniors. If we infuriate them, we can really get them storming. They have done a pretty good job of that.

You know, I did town meetings, and I tried to help them out. Not only were they appreciative, but a whole bunch of people already signed up and were getting far more benefits than they ever dreamed of. I said: How were you able to make such a critical decision all by yourself? They said: There is this 800 number, and all I needed was to know my prescriptions and the dose and whether I want to buy them locally or do them by mail order, and I got a list of four plans that line up, line by line, that I can make a comparison on. So I know exactly what I am buying, what it is going to cost, and I know what it will be in the long run. How difficult is that?

Oh, but the telephone isn't your only opportunity. You can also go online. There is an online spot that will do the math for you, provide this same kind of list for you to make the comparison. I did it for my mom. Quite frankly, a lot of seniors are going to need help from their kids--kids who are young like me--and they will go through the process and find out how it works. There were things I had questions about, and I got ahold of Health and Human Services and got some changes to make it easier. At first, it looked as if you were signing up before you knew what you were buying, but they changed that so you could get the evaluation first.

Did you know that competition brought down the price by 25 percent even before the first person signed up? That is what those 41 companies who were competing did. Yes, the Democrats say: Wait a minute, there is this penalty and there are a whole bunch of people who don't need any drugs now, so they should not have to sign up now. That is not how insurance works. You buy insurance in case something happens to you. This is a Federal program, so we built in a benefit so that if you had something already happen to you, you can still get low-cost insurance.

In Wyoming, there is a package you can buy for $1.87 a month and avoid all penalties. It gives you assurance that you have coverage in a number of areas. And this is something that would only happen on the Federal level, too. If you come up with something that changes your whole drug prescription thing and it goes up dramatically, every November 15 to December 30 you can change plans. You can go to somebody who will provide all of the benefits you need--the cheapest possible plan. Again, you can have Medicare do the math for you.

So one-size-fits-all doesn't bring prices down. Competition brings prices down. I know that the dream of every person is not to have to sit down with every insurance agent and try to work out something or even understand what their package is. That is where the confusion in the Medicare prescription plan comes in--that possibility of having to sit down with 41 different insurance agents. How many evenings will that take you? There has to be simplification. The simplification we provide in the bill I have been talking about is the ability for your association to work across State lines, build a big pool that is competitive, and to be able to sit down and talk to all of those insurance agents so you can come up with the best possible plan for your association and to save administrative costs.

I am not talking about eliminating the mandate to save the 5 percent to 22 percent--although when they are doing those, they don't only use 25 percent of them, so maybe there is some consideration there. I am not worried about that part. That is not where the savings come in. The savings come in being able to negotiate in a competitive way and reduce administrative costs. Right now, a small businessman pays 35 percent in administrative costs. Big companies that do their own plans pay 8 percent. That is a pretty nice savings, especially if every 1 percent in costs brings 200,000 to 300,000 more people into the market. Let's find a way to bring them into the market. So 35 percent minus 8 percent is a 27-percent savings. Multiply that by 200,000 and see how many people it brings into the market.

We have small businessmen out there--22 million of them--who work in small businesses who are uninsured. That is counting the owners and the employees in the small businesses. We have another 5 million who are self-employed who are uninsured. That is 27 million people in whose lives we can make a difference because they can work through their associations to get better prices--not by eliminating mandates. They want those for their employees. They need those for their employees, to keep their employees; otherwise, they move on to bigger companies. Employees are the heart of the business, and small businessmen realize that more than big businessmen.

But there is another reason the Durbin bill won't work. He has taken away the ability of plans to form these uniform benefits on a national basis, like the national Federal employees plans can do.

So there is not going to be this national pooling because they are not going to be allowed to do what our Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan does because there would not be any insurers who would want to offer a national plan without the same freedom from State mandates that exists for national plans under--get this--the national plans under FEHBP, what we are proposing and what is referred to as the Enzi bill. I like to think about it as the small working peoples bill.

This bill would just create 50 State pools, no true national pools, and all of the 50 State pools will have all the other problems we cited. The Enzi-Nelson-Burns bill trusts small business owners to band together to negotiate for good benefits, while the Democratic alternative gives small business no say in the matter.

They say: The Federal Government is right again; we are going to do what the Federal Government does; oh, but we can't do what the Federal Government does or anything like what the Federal Government does, but that is what you have to settle for.

The Democratic alternative will create a new insurance pool that will operate under a different set of rules which creates the same opportunity for cherry-picking which is adverse selection that Democrats claim the House bill creates. You have to look because the Enzi-Nelson-Burns bill solves that. It solves that cherry-picking. It levels the playing field. It doesn't just grab the best customers from the insurance companies and move them over into the health plans. It allows the insurance companies to compete and also to reinsure, but they have to work with a bigger group.

The Democratic alternative sets up a dual Federal-State regulatory structure that would create confusion for consumers and participating insurers. I will probably cover that a little bit more later. I made a lot of notes on points I ought to cover.

There is one very important one. We were talking about childcare a while ago, and everybody considers childcare to be extremely important. We talked about newborn care. I think everybody considers newborn care to be extremely important. When they talk about eliminating mandates, they like to expand that well beyond what the bill ever allows.

There are requirements in States for who are covered persons. This doesn't change that one bit. Newborns who are covered are not touched-- not now, not ever, no intention to do that. So if they are covered now, they will be covered then. It is the law.

I have several other people who would like to use a portion of this time that I just reserved a while ago. I yield time to Senator Burns who has been very patient. I yield Senator Burns 15 minutes.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Montana. I thank him for all of the work he went through during the past year as we talked with the insurance companies sitting down with us and the insurance commissioners sitting down with us, trying to work out a plan. I appreciate the efforts of those two groups and all of the associations, and I will talk about those a little bit later.

At this time I yield 15 minutes to the Senator from Texas, Mr. Cornyn.

Mr. President, I do have several things I need to cover. I think I have another speaker or two on their way down. People are talking about being able to offer amendments. They can offer amendments. We want to have discussion, debate; we want to cover objections, answers, proposals on this bill, and we are willing to do anything that is relevant.

There has been a lot of talk about needing to talk about drug reimportation. That is important--at least a 3-week topic. Prescription drugs, that one best wait until after Monday until we see what the exact problem is before we do it. And stem cells, that is probably another 3-week debate.

It took us a year to be able to get this one to the floor so we could talk about small business health plans.

I need to make some comments in regard to a couple of the letters that were read earlier because I am aghast at what was in the letter. The American Cancer Society, as part of that, said: No matter what is done to the Enzi bill, don't vote for it.

That means that should we have an amendment that does everything that is done across the United States for cancer at the present time, they are still urging people to vote against it? It is a little early to say that. It is a little early to say there are not going to be any changes because we will have votes. It may require cloture in order to stay with germane ones instead of the ones that I mentioned and also to make sure--I want to have a vote on the Durbin-Lincoln bill. But I want to have a vote on my bill as well. I think we both ought to have them.

If we release the Durbin-Lincoln one for a vote now, then they can put all kinds of blockages on there so I can't ever get to a vote. And the only vote that we will have had will have been theirs.

We are trying to have some fairness, and so far we have not been able to get to that point.

Another one was the diabetes letter. Again, it said: No matter what you do to the Enzi bill, vote against it. That means, if we instituted every single thing that is being done for diabetes in any State in the Nation, they are still suggesting that they will vote against the bill? Wow. I mean, I have never run into anything such as that.

We looked at the diabetes thing and we said: How do we do this? Because out of the States that do it, there are no two that do it alike, so how do we get these agreements across State lines so they can pool into bigger pools and be able to negotiate against the insurance company so they can bring down rates through negotiation and they can bring down rates by eliminating administrative costs? We are not talking about bringing down rates by eliminating mandates. We are allowing

them to have some flexibility in the mandates so they can come up with a common package, and I am sure that it would include that, just as I did the thing on colorectal cancer. All 19 places that they have been allowed to do that, they included that, even though it wasn't a mandate. They were excluded from that.

I also wanted to put into the Record an editorial from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. It was in the ``Opinion'' section. It says:

Ever face a really tough decision like where to attend

college, or whether to take that new job, or should you go

with the lasagna or the meatloaf for lunch? So you get out

the yellow legal pad and make a list of the pros and cons,

right? Well, maybe not for the meatloaf vs. lasagna bit. Some

things are a simple gut decision.

But it helps to compare and contrast. And it sure helped to

compare and contrast the two bills now floating around the

U.S. Senate to make it easier for small businesses to offer

health-insurance to their employees. One bill is co-sponsored

by Arkansas' senior Senator, Blanche Lincoln.

You could find the comparison on page 2A of Wednesday's

paper. There was Senate Bill 1955 (sponsored by Mike Enzi of

Wyoming) on one side, and Senate Bill 2510 (Blanche's bill)

on the other.

Both sounded fairly similar.

Both promised to make it simpler for businesses to band

together and buy cheaper health insurance.

Both promised to save businesses money and cover more

folks.

Then we got down to the bottom, to the very latest, biggest

question, and, boyohboy, talk about a pro and a con.

The question: What would it cost the Federal Government?

The answers: Nothing for the Enzi Bill.

For the Blanche bill, oh, somewhere in the ritzy

neighborhood of between $50 billion and $73 billion over 10

years.

When an estimate for new government spending has a margin

of error of some twenty-three billion dollars, you know that

new program is just gonna bleed money.

What's worse, or at least as bad, is that Senator Lincoln's

bill creates a national health program that'll be under the

administration of the federal Office of Personnel Management.

Translation: We the American Taxpayers will be in charge of

the care and feeding of yet another bloated bureaucracy.

Why? Why do we need another federal program under federal

so-called management adhering not just to federal rules and

regs but all the state rules and regs, too? (It gives us a

headache just thinking about filling out those insurance

forms.)

We suppose it's because some politicians, who may have the

best intentions in the world, can't imagine a health plan

that doesn't have the government deciding what should and

should not be offered at every single bureaucratic level.

Thank goodness that isn't required of private employer plans.

Can you imagine the red tape? Perish the pencil-pushing

thought.

Senator Enzi's proposal, unfortunately entitled the Health

Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act,

takes a freer-market approach. His bill would let small

businesses band together and get better deals on health

insurance through trade associations.

Now for the devilish detail: Senator Enzi's bill would be

regulated by the feds but largely exempt from individual

state mandates. The better to offer these plans nationwide

and keep costs down.

Remember, the idea is to help small business, not burden

them with more state regulations.

Besides, it's nothing new. Major companies like General

Motors long have been granted exemptions from state laws

regulating insurance--it's called an ERISA exemption, because

they have employees all over the country. They couldn't very

well insure their employees from sea to shining sea while

abiding by every queer detail of every law in every state.

Especially when employees move or get transferred and want to

keep their insurance.

But won't the absence of state regulations lower standards?

Not if the small businesses offering the insurance want to

keep their employees. It's in businesses' interest to have

good health insurance for their workers, or their workers

will go somewhere else. It's how the free market works.

Think of these small-biz health plans like charter schools.

They'd be free of, to quote Senator Enzi, ``the current

hodgepodge of varying state regulation.'' That way, small

businesses across the country can band together and negotiate

group health insurance on their terms. Which would be more

affordable for the businesses, the employees and, unlike the

Blanche bill, the taxpayers.

If we gotta have a federally regulated Small Business

Health Plan, we sure don't need one as costly as Blanche

Lincoln's. And, yes, we gotta have a Small Business, etc.

Because what we've got now isn't working.

Look at the numbers: Of the more than 45 million uninsured

Americans, 60 percent are employed by small businesses or are

in some way dependent on those businesses. But it's getting

harder for a small business to offer health plans because

insurance premiums cost so much these days. Since 2000, the

cost of health-care premiums for employers has gone up almost

60 percent, including some 11 percent in 2004 alone.

Pass the Enzi Bill and, according to a study by a Milwaukee

consulting firm, small businesses would save 12 percent on

health insurance premiums. Even more important, some 900,000

uninsured folks would finally get coverage.

Hey, sounds like a plan. Blanche Lincoln's bill, meanwhile,

sounds like an expensive, bureaucratic pain in the

pocketbook.

I would like to have you see the small business organizations that are supporting the Enzi-Nelson bill. There are a couple of hundred of them here--12 million employers, 80 million workers.

I would like for you to see the small business organizations that are supporting the Durbin-Lincoln bill. Oh, there are two. OK.

I want to share a letter from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners as well. They are writing in response to our May 2 request for a review of S. 2510 Small Employers Health Benefits Program sponsored by Senators Durbin and Lincoln.

I ask unanimous consent the letter be printed in the Record.

The experts on S. 2510, the Durbin bill, from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, write:

S. 2510 creates an unlevel playing field . . . could create

an unworkable market in some states. . . . Few carriers would

want to participate in this program. . . .

Again, people can read the entire letter, and I am sure they will find that very enlightening. There is a lot more detail there.

Last, I ask unanimous consent to have a letter from the National Association of Health Underwriters printed in the Record.

Again, it is a much more extensive letter. I hope people will take the time to read the Record, but it is from the National Association of Health Underwriters. These are the experts on health insurance. They look at this stuff all the time.

It says:

``2510 creates the worst kind of unlevel playing field;''

``the cost of coverage would be predictably high;'' ``an

increased number of people being priced out of coverage;''

and, ``Bottom line: More rather than fewer people would be

uninsured.''

That is the National Association of Health Underwriters.

I wish to have some time to go over the good comments, too. But I have been joined on the floor by the majority whip. I will relinquish a few minutes for him to say a few words.

Mr. President, I thank Senator McConnell. I appreciate all of his effort and help. I appreciate the Senator bringing up Senator Talent. I need to mention Senator Snowe as well. They were the original sponsors of associated health plans on this side. They asked for a hearing. We held a hearing. After the hearing, people on my committee were saying, Golly, this is a problem for small business. What can we do to solve it?

It was also obvious from the discussion that there were some difficulties with the true AHP approach which we modified in the meantime. That is how we got to the position we are now in.

Mr. President, I don't have any idea. I spent a lot of hours and my staff people spent a lot more hours. Senator Nelson's staff and Senator Burns' staff worked on this for so long that I actually thought maybe their staff people worked for me, too.

I was pleased spending days on end and sitting down, understanding all of the parts of this and getting it to work.

Another important part of this, Senator Durbin asked me to talk to him about his plan. I made an appointment that same day and met with Senator Durbin and Senator Lincoln. We tried to work some of the principles which they had into this format. Eventually, we were kind of invited to leave by staff. We need to resolve more of that.

I thank the Senator.

Mr. President, as an accountant I have to remind people that this bill is not a case of subtraction. This insurance plan is an addition. It will bring additional insurance to people. There are 27 million people out there who are uninsured. This will bring a number of them into the market. It will also allow people who are already insured to increase the amount of insurance which they have because they will be able to save some dollars. I am sure they will put that back into insurance and into more benefits for people. So it is an addition, not a subtraction, and it will bring in newly insured people.

One of the things I ask people is, when you go to the dry cleaners tonight to pick up your laundry, can you look that person in the eye and say, I don't think you deserve health insurance because you might not demand enough for yourself? So I am going to save you from yourself. Can you say to the mom and pop who are running the business down the street from your home, You don't deserve health insurance?

As you go home today, as you leave the Hill, think about the people around you, the regular people, the cab driver, the worker at the dry cleaner, the person at the neighborhood restaurant, all of those people who often you may not notice, the real people who make the world operate. Many of them do not have any insurance. Some may even own the little business around the corner and still are not able to have insurance. We always assume that if people own a business, they make a lot of money. There are times that the employees make a lot more than the owner of the business. They always have to pay themselves last.

As Senator Burns said, when he was in business he provided health care to his employees, but he couldn't afford it for himself and his wife. But you do that to keep employees. I am not talking about deluxe insurance, I am talking about any insurance.

When people get the kinds of screenings that they would like to have, or even get the screenings they would like to have, and then find out there is a problem, if they don't have any insurance, they can't get anything done unless they pay for it.

We are not talking about the employees at the big chain hotels or the big chain restaurants. We are not even talking about the employees at Wal-Mart. We already said to them you can form whatever kind of benefit package you want. You do not have to answer to any State. You don't have to have review or oversight by the insurance commissioners.

Those are all things we provide for in our bill. You don't have to meet any State requirement. So instead of 35-percent administrative costs, you only pay 8-percent administrative costs. I am not talking about deluxe insurance, I am talking about any insurance.

Right now in several States, there is only deluxe insurance. Did you know that in some States there may be only one insurance provider because others have been driven out of the market?

I hope people will take a close look at this bill. I hope the other side will offer some amendments which are relevant to this bill and let us work through the bill. I hope, if the only way we can maintain germaneness is through cloture, that they will join in cloture because there are thousands of businesses out there that need insurance. They need hope. They want to ensure their employees. Think about that--27 million uninsured.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, one of the difficulties around here is the process we have to use. Another one is that nobody listens to anybody's debate. We have covered this in some detail earlier today, that relevant amendments would be accepted. The Durbin-Lincoln bill ought to be voted on. But it should not be voted on and then S. 1955 precluded from getting a vote. That is one of the possibilities in the organization and the rules that we have around here, that we could wind up voting on that one and skipping the vote on S. 1955 and saying: Look, all these people voted against that; that means they don't like health care for small business. But they wouldn't have gotten to vote for the one that they might have liked.

I went through a number of the reasons why S. 2510 has some problems. I object to people saying we ought to give everybody the same health care the Senators have. We ought to give them better health care than the Senators have. The only problem is we can't do either of those things. The bill that is on the floor by Durbin-Lincoln doesn't do either of those things. It is a different plan that uses kind of the same structure so we build the same kind of bureaucracy, except a lot bigger bureaucracy to handle all the people in America, and it limits all of the pools to each State because they will have to meet all of the mandates of each of those States instead of what we have in the Federal plan which is a national level of mandates.

We have our own level of mandates. We don't go by what the States do. But that is not what is in that bill. In that bill they would still have to go State by State, and if you go State by State, you can't form the kinds of pools that we need to be able to have the clout to negotiate a better price and to bring around the administration.

People say you want to get rid of mandates so that will save money. No. Every experiment, every minilab that has happened out there where small business people have been given the opportunity to band together and to do something, they have covered those mandates. They didn't give those mandates up.

How do you save money with this thing? Small businesses pay 35 percent for their administration. Big business, which we already excluded from all mandates, we excluded them from Federal control, we excluded them from State oversight and consumer protection, which is in my bill--it still has the State oversight and consumer protection in there--we gave the big businesses the wave on all of those things. They still kept the mandates. But where they saved the money is in administration. It costs them 8 percent to administer their plans. So 35 percent minus 8 percent means they save 27 percent over what a small businessman will do. And every 1 percent we can save on insurance brings 200,000 to 300,00 people back into the market.

That is why we want to have associations to be able to offer plans under State consumer protection, under the insurance commissioner's oversight.

But with some kind of a blended plan, they can cross State lines and have a uniform package, and they can have a big enough group so they can negotiate. That is what 1955 is about. We need to have a vote on that as well.

As far as mandates, Senator Snowe is putting in a bill that will cover those basic things people are talking about.

The letter that the Senator read from--the American Diabetes Association--I talked about that a little bit earlier today. One of the difficulties we had in trying to do something with diabetes is that 42 States--it may even be 47 States--are doing something with diabetes, but no two do it alike.

Again, how do you blend across State boundaries unless you can get some kind of basic package? I know they will cover diabetes. Under the Snowe amendment, they will for sure.

The distressing part of their letter was, no matter what changes are made to the Enzi bill, defeat it. That is not a very reasonable approach by any disease group. That means that if I have an amendment that said find out everything that is done for diabetes and do everything for diabetes that is done anywhere, they would still be suggesting voting against my bill. I don't think that is a reasonable approach by any group.

The American Cancer Society wrote pretty much the same letter and said pretty much the same thing.

We are not trying to subtract, we are trying to add. We want people who are uninsured to come into the market, and we want people who already have insurance to be able to get more and better insurance for the same dollar. That is what employers are able to afford. We are trying to come up with a system such as that.

The only thing about filling the tree--which I agree with the Senator is gobbledygook--the only thing with that is to stick to small business health insurance.

There are another dozen things on insurance and health care that we ought to be debating. Each of them would take about 3 weeks to debate. At this point in the season, we are not going to get 3 weeks to debate anything. I am lucky to put together a few days to be able to talk about this. I hope to make more progress on that.

I have been working hard with everybody to try to come up with some kind of mechanism that will work. That is where we are on the bill. If we could do the things that are relevant to this, or also germane after cloture, then we could stay on the bill a little longer and keep working on it. If we don't get cloture, we are probably done with this discussion for the whole year. That will probably be the end of health care for the year. People have to keep that in mind when they are voting on cloture.

Even individual mandates can be brought up one at a time and put into the thing, or at least be voted on. The desire is not to keep votes from happening but to stick to small business health plans.

These folks have been asking us for 15 years for a change and some way to handle it. They have been encouraged several times because eight times the House has passed the association health plan. That was very exciting for them. They said I think we can get it. It never made it out of committee on the Senate side because there are some problems with the basic plan that the House passed.

When I got this chairmanship, I said we are going to do something to change this. We are going to find out what the objections are and see if there isn't a way to get something done that will get relief for the small businessman. The insurance companies were convinced that we were going to do something, so they sat down with me. The insurance commissioners had concerns, and they have always been one of the stakeholders. They sat down with me, and they had their representatives sit down with us days on end to work on some kind of a compromise. This is one.

Nobody is raving about it except the small businesses because they see it as an answer--not the final answer, not the total answer, but an answer--that moves closer to what they can afford to do. Again, it isn't by cutting mandates.

Yes.

Not quite.

Even during the course of today and any other debate we have on this bill, we have said if there is a relevant amendment, we would consider taking that up and voting on it. One exception we have on that is the difficulty with Durbin-Lincoln. If we vote on that, that might be the only vote we ever get because the other side can block any further votes from happening because you would have to have unanimous consent to have a vote. So we would be blocked from ever having a vote on our bill.

No, I wasn't suggesting that S. 2510 would pass. I was saying that a lot of Democrats would vote for it and it would fail. Then there will be no further votes on it. You folks could all say we voted for small business and the Republicans didn't vote for small business. It would be because the Republicans wanted S. 1955 with a few amendments which can be offered by both sides. That would happen postcloture. The only thing that happens postcloture is amendments have to be germane. That means they actually would have to apply to the bill. The Durbin-Lincoln bill is germane. Many of the things people talked about would be germane. What wouldn't be germane are some of the long-term debates and things people would like to do, namely the stem cell debate which we are going to have a debate on. They promised a vote on it. We don't know how much debate there would be with that; prescription drugs, Part D, and those would not be germane to the bill. Each of those would take about 3 weeks to debate.

The Senator certainly is not the only one. I would love to have a lot of time. We have had a lot of bills that came out of committee already that could be brought up. We have some more that are going to come out next Tuesday. A lot of those I think would pass here by unanimous consent. I would love to have some agreement. The Senator knows how hard it is to get 1 week around here. We spent 3 days getting cloture to proceed. That is to proceed; that wasn't to actually do any votes on the bill. So we were offered the moment, but between the two sides we didn't get the moment.

It was 98 to 2.

If there was no problem with it, why did we have to wait 3 days to get the vote?

I am talking about time limits and that sort of thing. Those requests were made between leaders to come up with some tight time agreements. It is beyond my pay grade.

There were a lot negotiations to try to stick to small business and have some kind of a mechanism where the votes from both sides could be done. But there was not any agreement on that, so we are stuck in this kind of a situation where small business may be penalized once again.

If we get cloture, we could have a lot of debate on the small business stuff, not all of other ones. If we could get in a situation where we started doing these things a little quicker, with more time agreements, some of the more difficult ones could probably get some floor time. I am for that.

I am with the Senator.

Yes, it would be nice if we could wrap up something for small business. I think there is a plan there. I think there is a way to get there. I don't think it is going to happen without the cooperation of both sides in either coming to some time agreements or passing cloture.

We will have to wait and see what happens. I would wait until the end of next week to have a vote on either of them as long as we can do amendments. And I am excited about doing amendments. There are always perfecting things. No bill is perfect when we finish it. Even after conference it is never perfect. But it is usually much better than when we started. We need to have that process.

I thank everyone for their participation today.

Will the majority leader yield for a question?

I ask the majority leader to clarify something in his remarks. He referred to amendments as ``Christmas tree amendments.'' There is one amendment on this side of the aisle that he supports on stem cell research. If this is Health Care Week, it would seem that this is a related issue. Does the majority leader characterize that amendment as a ``Christmas tree amendment''?

Mr. President, let me say at the outset that I salute Senator Enzi from Wyoming. He has shown extraordinary leadership and political courage to bring this issue to the floor. The last time we had a serious conversation about health care for American families and businesses was in that one brief shining moment when the Democrats were in control and brought the Patients' Bill of Rights to the floor; otherwise, during the time that I have served in the Senate, we have run away from this issue. I salute Senator Enzi. Although I disagree with his bill, and I will explain why, I admire his political courage and vision to report a bill from his committee and bring the issue to the floor. I have said that before the press, I have said it at home, and I want to say it on the floor on the Record. Although we may disagree on approach, I respect him very much for being willing to bring this complex and politically controversial issue to the floor.

I think if you put it up for a vote as to when a week ends in America, we might not reach a consensus. There are some people who would argue: Why, a week ends on Friday night. That is the end of the week. Others say: No, a week ends on Sunday night. But what we have found is that Health Care Week in the Senate ends at 2:30 on Wednesday afternoon because that is when the Republican majority leader came to the floor and filled the tree, which means closed down amendments on the health care debate.

The Republican majority leader felt there were only two issues relevant to health care in America. The first was the issue of medical malpractice and preempting the States that traditionally regulate medical malpractice. For I believe the fourth time, Senator Frist offered the medical malpractice bills at the beginning of the week, and they failed again, this time failing to even attract a majority of the Senators supporting either bill that he brought. Then the Senator moved to the health care issue before us: small business health insurance. Then the majority leader came today, having given us all of about a day and a half to consider this issue, and said that is the end of the story. No more amendments. We are not going to consider any other health care amendments in the bill before us. We are closing down the Senate when it comes to health care issues.

That is interesting because what the Republicans have done is to close down debate on stem cell research. Senator Frist came to the floor and said: We don't want Christmas tree amendments. Christmas tree amendments--stem cell research. I don't know if Senator Frist has been back in his State. I have. They have roundtable discussions about stem cell research. They sit at a table surrounded by men and women who have their hopes pinned on medical research, those who are suffering from juvenile diabetes and the serious problems that come with it--a mother who gets up several times during the course of the night to wake her young daughter and to test her blood to see if she needs insulin, if she needs to eat something; another family with a young man with Lou Gehrig's disease who has reached the point now where he cannot communicate. All he can do is sit in his wheelchair, this young man in his 20s, with tears rolling down his face, as his mother says: Senator, please, please do something about stem cell research. It may not save him, but it may save someone else. Parkinson's disease--to have my colleague and closest friend in Congress, Lane Evans, a young man stricken with Parkinson's, forced to end his congressional career, who had the strength to come to the floor last year in the House and beg for stem cell research and others suffering from Parkinson's and spinal cord injuries. Think of those people whose lives have been compromised and slowed down because of these injuries. All they want is a chance for a vote on stem cell research.

This President has prohibited stem cell research beyond a single line of available stem cells and has virtually closed it down as a Federal undertaking. We have decided, as a matter of Federal policy, that we will not do this research. We have been asking for over a year for a vote on the floor of the Senate on stem cell research. We were heartened when the Senate majority leader, Senator Frist, came to the floor in July of last year and said: I may be switching my position, he said, but I am going to support stem cell research. It meant so much because we respect him, a heart transplant surgeon, a man with his medical credentials, to break from the President on this issue, on stem cell research and say he would join us in the fight. But how disheartening to hear today as the Senator from Wyoming and the Senator from Tennessee refer to debate on stem cell research as not relevant to health care. Not relevant. It may not be relevant to their lives, but it is relevant to the lives of thousands of Americans.

We in the Senate know what is at stake. If we don't bring this matter up for a vote this week on stem cell research, the chances of seeing the bill before the end of the year are slim to none. When we think of all of the families counting on us to step up for stem cell research, I want to ask you, Mr. President, isn't this worth a fight? Isn't this worth a fight on the floor of the Senate, to make sure that we get a vote this week on stem cell research, for the people who are counting on us, whose lives are compromised and broken because of disease and illness? Isn't this worth a fight in Health Care Week? Obviously, not on the other side of the aisle. They have declared stem cell research not relevant to Health Care Week.

And what else? They have decided that Medicare prescription Part D is not an important part of Health Care Week. Medicare prescription Part D, where some 9 million Americans in 5 days, if they don't sign up for this program, will face a lifetime penalty. Medicare prescription Part D is a program written by pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies, a program which has been one of the worst that has ever been dreamed up on Capitol Hill. When we want to take a few moments to fix some basics and take the penalty off seniors, the Republican leadership says, now, wait a minute. That is not relevant to a Health Care Week debate. Prescription drugs for 9 million seniors, that is not relevant to a health care debate.

Of course, we have heard Senator Dorgan of North Dakota repeatedly

asking for the opportunity to reimport drugs into the United States so that people have a fighting chance to pay for the drugs that keep them alive. He has been stopped by the Bush administration. He has fought for this opportunity to bring this issue to the floor time and again and insists on it this week in Health Care Week, and the Republican leadership has said, affordable prescription drugs coming in from foreign countries is not relevant to Health Care Week.

So, Mr. President, I think you can understand why many of us come to the floor at this point disappointed. First, we were encouraged by Senator Enzi's decision to bring this matter forward, and then when Senator Frist said we are going to make it not just the Enzi bill, it will be Health Care Week, we finally said: Here is our chance, a chance for all of the people who have been waiting on us and who have been counting on us. Well, that chance was snuffed out at 2:30 this afternoon with Senator Frist's procedural motion. Health Care Week turned out to be too good to be true.

It is interesting as well when we consider the basic underlying issue of health insurance. Do you know what the two competing issues are on health insurance? It is very basic. I don't have to explain it to my colleagues in the Senate, and I will tell you why. The proposal that I and Senator Blanche Lincoln have brought to the floor of the Senate to make available to every business across America is exactly the same health insurance that Members of Congress have. If it is good enough for Members of Congress, we think it is good enough for American families. But I listen as Senator Enzi and Republicans stand up and talk about what a terrible idea this would be, to offer to every American the same kind of health insurance that Members of Congress and Federal employees have. Well, if it is so bad, I wonder how many of them have decided not to sign up for it themselves. My guess is they have all signed up for it.

Do you know why it is so good? It is not a government plan. It is a plan administered by the Government at less than 1 percent administrative cost that offers private insurance plans to Federal employees and their families, retirees, and Members of Congress. Private insurance offered by the Government. It is so good that it has worked for 40 years.

Now we have the Republicans coming to the floor, Senator Enzi and others, saying what a terrible idea this is, the same health insurance that protects the Senator arguing against it. You have to ask yourself why, if it is so good for us, can't we offer it to American families? Instead, Senator Enzi has come forward with a plan which makes dramatic changes, not to the health insurance we might offer to the uninsured but in reducing protection, reducing coverage, and increasing costs for people who are already insured. If you thought to yourself for a moment, that is an interesting debate on health insurance, but I am not worried about it, I already have my plan, think twice, because the Enzi bill which he brings before us is going to make your health care less valuable, less protection, and more cost. That is the Enzi plan. That is unnecessary and unfair.

Let me tell you what two organizations have to say about Senator Enzi's proposal, his health insurance plan. You might expect I am going to read something that has some political ring to it. Who is this organization that Senator Durbin is quoting? They must have some political agenda. I would like to quote from a letter, dated May 10-- today--from the American Cancer Society. The American Cancer Society is hardly a political organization. How do they describe the Enzi bill before us?

It is our view that the basic construct of this legislation

is fatally flawed and therefore, we ask you to oppose it,

regardless of the amendment process on the Senate floor.

Consumers will be at the risk of losing important cancer-

related protections such as guaranteed insurance coverage of

colorectal cancer screening and clinical trial participation.

They go on to say:

It is our view that the Enzi bill will not result in

increased access to quality care for most people.

That is from the American Cancer Society.

Now let me go to another letter, and you decide whether this is a political organization. It is the American Diabetes Association. The American Diabetes Association believes that:

The proposed approach in the Enzi bill is fundamentally

flawed and must be opposed in all forms in order to protect

your constituents with diabetes. Any preemption or weakening

of State laws is a major threat to the well-being and lives

of people with diabetes and should not be acceptable to the

Senate.

And listen to these statistics: Every 24 hours, 4,100 people in America are diagnosed with diabetes--4,100 every 24 hours. There are 230 amputations from diabetes every day in America. There are 120 people entering end-stage kidney disease programs, and 55 people go blind every day from diabetes. We lose 613 Americans daily and 225,000 annually due to this epidemic. Diabetes continues to grow by more than 8 percent each year. And listen to this: One in three of our children will be diagnosed with diabetes in their lifetime--one in three of our children will be diagnosed with diabetes in their lifetime.

They go on to say:

. . . we cannot allow for any loss of ground in this

battle.

Signed by the chairman of the board and the chief executive officer. They say:

Accordingly, we ask you to stand with us in full opposition

to [the Enzi legislation], no matter which cosmetic changes

may be proposed on the floor.

This is a stark and clear choice for the Members of the Senate, what we offer to small businesses and Americans presently uninsured: the same quality health insurance that protects our families as Members of Congress have or we offered them a watered down health insurance program that has been rejected by the American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association, the American Association of Retired Persons, the AFL/CIO, AMA, the American Nurses Association--I could go on for three pages of health groups in America that reject the Enzi approach because it will reduce coverage.

We know what the problem is. It has been a long time since we have even taken up this issue. During that period of time, we have seen the number of uninsured Americans grow from 37 million in 1993 to 46 million today--46 million uninsured Americans. But this is the wrong medicine. This Enzi bill will put the insurance companies, not the doctors, in charge of health care. People will be worse off, with less protection.

Yesterday, Senator Kennedy and I went down to a press conference a few blocks from here. A beautiful young lady came up. She was from Cleveland, OH. She brought her guide dog with her and she told the story about how her diabetes, untreated, resulted in her blindness-- young, beautiful lady. She said: I didn't have coverage for it in my health insurance, and as a result my life is much different. She said: I almost died. I am lucky to be alive and thankful to be alive. But when you talk about diabetes protection, you are talking about that young woman and others who could be just like her.

Another young woman came to speak to us and told us how she was a young mother, healthy as could be, but tired from raising those three little kids. Somebody suggested to her to get a mammogram. She thought about it because she had a history of breast cancer in her family, but she said to herself: How much is it going to cost?

They said: $250.

She said: We don't have that. I need $250 for my kids.

She said to her husband: Check the health insurance and see if it covers mammograms.

Her husband called her the next day and said: You can get the test the next day for free.

This beautiful young woman went to get a mammogram and learned within 24 hours that she had the earliest stage of breast cancer. They did a lumpectomy. She went through months of chemotherapy.

She said: I lost my hair, but I got through it all and I am here and I am alive and I am safe and I am going to be a mother for these kids for a long time to come.

So when we talk about cancer screening in health insurance, I don't think that is deluxe care. I don't think that is luxury care. I don't think that is going overboard. Whether it is prostate screening, colorectal screening, or

mammograms, that is basic preventive medicine that saves lives and spares suffering and cuts the cost of health care.

Unfortunately, many of those benefits are casualties in the Enzi approach. As I travel around Illinois, health insurance is the No. 1 issue and has been for years for businesses large and small, labor unions, individuals, families, parents whose kids reach the age of 23 and they finally realize: They are not going to be under my policy. How are they going to be covered?

Between 1993 and 2003, annual premiums Americans paid for health insurance in that 10-year period increased by 79 percent. Employer contributions to their employee insurance increased by 90 percent. These premium increases make it tough for businesses to survive and offer health care protection.

Let be me give an example of one family I know, Jim and Carole Britton. They own the Express Personnel Services in my home town of Springfield, IL. They are good folks, good hard-working businesspeople. They have 24 employees. They pay 85 percent of their employees' premiums. They want to keep doing it. They really believe it is the right thing to do.

Like many small business owners they shop for a small business policy every year because premium costs keep going through the roof. They have been forced to raise the deductible to keep premiums manageable. Last year, the deductible doubled from $500 to $1,000. To save money, Jim and Carole offered a health savings account, which many on the other side of the aisle think is the salvation, a health savings account. I won't go into it in detail, but it is a perfect health insurance plan if you are wealthy and never expect to get sick. They offered it. One of their employees decided they would sign up for a health savings account. That employee now regrets the choice because his wife is pregnant and he wishes he had better, real health insurance coverage.

To those who say solving the health insurance problem is too complicated or too expensive, look beyond the obvious. We already have the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program. It has worked for 40 years for every Member of Congress and 8 million Federal workers. Small business owners and their employees deserve nothing less.

I, along with my colleague from Arkansas, Senator Blanche Lincoln, have introduced legislation to give small businesses affordable choices among private health insurance plans and expanded access to coverage. We call it the Small Employers Health Benefits Plan. We presented it to Senator Enzi. It has been a while now, a few months ago, that we said to him: Take a look at it. You know what this plan is all about. You live with it. We all live with it. We love it. It is a wonderful plan that has competition and real choice from private insurance.

We didn't convince him. I am sorry we didn't. Maybe someday we will. We will keep working on it. But let me tell you why we think it is important, why there are many advantages to the Federal employees program model. This chart spells them out.

Nationwide availability. It covers Federal employees from one coast to the other. Young and old, rich and poor, black, white, and brown, healthy and sick, every Federal employee is covered by it.

Consumer choice. There are more than 278 private insurance companies that bid for this Federal employee coverage. For these private insurance companies, they believe this is a good deal, to get in a pool of people this large.

Group purchasing discounts for small employers: In our bill, we create one nationwide purchasing pool of small employers and self- employed people, which means they can fight for premium discounts just like the Federal Government.

Low administrative costs: Do you know what it costs the Government to run the health insurance program for 8 million Federal employees? Less than 1 percent a year. Some of these plans we are talking about that private businesses have to turn to charge 25 to 30 percent administrative costs each year. You wonder why the costs go up? They are making more money, charging for administration. We don't have the administrative overhead. We use private insurance plans already there.

There is strict oversight and regulation in the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program. We know it works. We like it so much that every single one of us is protected by it.

Two economists have examined our proposal, Dr. Len Nichols of the nonpartisan New America Foundation, and Dr. John Gruber, Ph.D, from MIT. They estimate that our bill could save small businesses between 27 percent and 37 percent on health care premium costs every year, just offering to these small businesses the same health insurance deal that Members of Congress and Federal employees currently receive.

That means Jim and Carole, whom I mentioned earlier, currently offering a policy for a family of four that costs $10,000 a year and paying $8,500 of the premium, could save anywhere from $3,000 to $3,100 as employers and $400 to $500 for each employee. That is before any tax credit, which we propose in our bill, for low-wage workers.

Under our plan, premiums would not be government subsidized, but employers will receive an annual tax credit for contributions made on behalf of workers making $25,000 or less per year.

There is a big debate in this town about tax cuts. If you read the morning paper, you may have noticed the chart on the front page of the Washington Post. The new tax cut proposal from the Bush administration, when it comes to capital gains and dividend incomes, is a very generous proposal to a very small group of Americans. Let me tell you what I mean.

If you are making less than $75,000 a year, the Bush tax cut proposal, warmly embraced by the Republican majority in the House and Senate, means about $100 a year in tax breaks. There is that old $100 check they wanted to give you last week for your gas bill. Here it comes again. That is your tax cut if you are making less than $75,000.

But the same Bush Republican tax cut proposal which will come through Congress now gives to those who are making $1 million a year in income almost $42,000 in tax cuts. I don't recall receiving a single letter from a millionaire saying: Would you please give me a tax cut?

They are insistent on it. We must do this. We have to give them a break. But when Senator Lincoln and I suggest giving a tax cut to a business that offers health insurance to low-income employees: Oh, that is a terrible Federal subsidy. How could you consider doing that?

Senator Thune from South Dakota came to the floor yesterday and said it was going to cost us $78 billion over 10 years. Today he came and said it would cost $73 billion. We are gaining some ground. But the bottom line is there is no estimate in that range, anywhere near that range. My challenge to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, if you believe in tax cuts, why wouldn't you believe in tax cuts for small businesses that provide health insurance for their employees? Isn't that closer to the American dream than a $42,000 tax cut for somebody making $1 million a year? I think it is fairly clear. Obviously they don't.

There are more than 26 million Americans making less than $25,000 a year working in small businesses; 12 million, 40 percent of them, have no health insurance. Is it valuable for America that these people who get up and go to work every day in the small shops and small businesses across our country have health insurance.

I go around Illionis and talk to all kinds of different groups-- downstate in my home area, small towns, rural areas, the big city of Chicago. Whenever I say to people: Wouldn't it be part of the American dream that every American had health insurance, it never fails to get a round of applause. That is really an aspiration and a dream which many of us share. We can't reach that dream if we insist on giving tax cuts to millionaires who aren't asking for them and don't provide a helping hand to businesses that are doing the right thing, providing health insurance to low-wage employees.

The tax credit we propose would equal 25 percent of the cost to that business for self-only policies, 30 percent for employees who are either married or single with a child, and 25 percent for family policies. So if a family of four working for Jim and Carole in Springfield make less than $25,000 a

year, there would be an additional savings of $1,874 to $2,172.

Under the Durbin-Lincoln bill, private insurance plans would compete to offer insurance to small businesses, just like they do in the Federal employees program. This chart shows the potential savings that come from the current system and what might occur under the Small Employers Health Benefit Program that Senator Lincoln and I will offer. Currently, many of these businesses, like the one I described, pay 85 percent of insurance costs, so on a $10,000 policy they are paying $8,500.

Look at how it drops for family coverage under the plan we are proposing--to $3,230 for family coverage. It shows the dramatic savings for each business and the opportunity for them to offer real health care.

A lot of people say: Are you talking about a government insurance plan? Let me show you the choices that my wife, Loretta, and I had when it came to health insurance this year as Federal employees and Members of Congress. Look at these plans: There are 13 plans that we had to choose from as Federal employees.

I will tell you what happened to one of my employees. She chose a plan 1 year, didn't like the way they treated her, and when open enrollment came the following September she dropped them and picked up another plan. What a luxury, real competition. You don't treat me right, you don't get my business next year. It is like shopping for a car and having some real choices.

Most small businesses and most Americans have no real choices, so when we come up with this plan, the Federal employees model plan, and those on the other side of the aisle dismiss it as unrealistic, unfair, deluxe, it is exactly the same health insurance coverage they are living with right now.

If it is good enough for us, why isn't it good enough for the rest of America? That is the bottom line.

All Federal employees receive a booklet every year about the choices that are available for coverage. If you want to take an expensive plan, they will take more out of your paycheck. For the basic plan they take less.

I have a lot of young people on my staff. Krista Donahue, my staffer on this issue, gets up and swims every morning. She picks her health plan. She signed up for a very cheap HMO. My wife and I, maybe not in the same physical condition, sign up for more coverage. That is our choice.

That is everyone's choice in the Senate and the House of Representatives and throughout the Federal Government.

What is wrong with giving that choice to America? Senator Enzi's plan does not give that choice to America. This bill we are proposing has been supported by many groups. It isn't just a matter of Senator Lincoln and I coming together.

Look at some of the groups that have endorsed the Lincoln-Durbin plan, or the Durbin-Lincoln plan, depending on whether you are from Arkansas or Illinois: The American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatricians, the American Cancer Society, the American Medical Association, the American Osteopathic Association, the American Psychological Association, Consumers Union, Families USA, Federation of American Hospitals, International Chiropractors, March of Dimes, the National Association of Community Health Centers--the list goes on and on.

And the indication is that these men and women and groups that focus their professional lives on health care reject the Enzi approach which offers less coverage and less protection and believe, as I do, that the plan being offered to Federal employees should be offered to businesses across America.

Sadly, the Enzi plan will wipe out benefit requirements.

I will concede that what I am about to say may have changed somewhat in the managers' amendment. To his credit, as Senator Enzi has realized the weaknesses of his legislation, he has added more protection. If I am going to cite something that has been changed in the managers' amendment, I apologize and will stand corrected on the Record. But what I am about to read is based on our best knowledge of what was in the Enzi bill. Maybe it has been changed. I want to give the Senator a chance to correct me, if I misread it.

The Enzi bill will wipe out benefit requirements, including diabetes supplies, mental health coverage, cancer screening, maternity coverage, and child immunizations for 84 million Americans. That includes almost 4 million people in the State of Illinois. The number of Americans who will lose benefit protection under the Enzi plan, S. 1955, each one of these ``stick'' pictures represents 1 million Americans who will lose benefit protection. These are not people who currently have no health insurance. These are people who are gathered here and watching this and have health insurance who think they are part of this debate. Surprise. The Enzi bill has brought you into this debate. Your health insurance is about to be reduced in coverage. The things that you thought you had signed up for, the things that you had bargained for as part of your union that you believe were covered in your plan will be reduced. The coverage will be reduced by the Enzi bill.

His belief is, if we can just lower basic health insurance coverage to a lower level, we can say everybody has it. But what good is it to have health insurance if it isn't there when you need it?

That is the point he missed. If we miss the most basic things in terms of protecting Americans and then sit back and fold our arms and say: Well, we took care of that uninsured problem, sure, we took care of it until someone desperately needs health care and can't afford it because their health insurance plan doesn't cover it.

The idea behind Senator Enzi's bill is if you provide less benefits and less coverage and less protection, it should cost less. That is right. It is reasonable. But if the insurance doesn't cover your illness, if you are left exposed to paying for it out of your own packet, what are you going to do?

One of the ladies who came to our press conference yesterday is a perfect illustration. Her husband had bought a health insurance plan that he thought was a good one, one through an association. He even signed up for a chemotherapy rider on the plan because there had been a history of cancer in his family. Guess what happened. Sadly, he developed virulent lung cancer which required a lot of treatment. They went to their health insurance plan, and they said: We are glad we bought that rider.

Then, in the fine print, there was a limitation on how much they would pay. The poor man lived for years and died an agonizing death. His beautiful young wife from California was there yesterday. When he died, she was left with medical bills of $480,000.

Is that deluxe coverage--what we heard earlier--luxury coverage of health insurance? Would you want to find yourself and your family in a situation where you needed cancer therapy to survive and your plan didn't cover it?

Unfortunately, the Enzi bill moves in that direction, and it doesn't have it. All of the benefit cuts result in about 3 percent to 4 percent savings on premium costs. These are not expensive when they are spread across large populations. They are expensive when they are borne by one family. But if there are millions of people being covered, and a small percentage need it, you spread out the cost. That is what insurance is all about. It is a point that is missed in the Enzi legislation. That is not much of a savings--3 or 4 percent--when you are talking about diabetes, maternity coverage.

Maternity coverage. I know a little bit about that, being the father of three. I can tell you that one of the toughest moments in my life was as a law student--I got married in law school. Yes. We used to do that back in the old days. Loretta was pregnant. The baby came along and she had a serious health problem. We had no health insurance. We went to Children's Hospital in Washington. God bless them. They couldn't have treated us better. They finally said after a while: You are not going to be able to afford to pay this, Durbin. You either sign up for welfare, which you can do because you don't have any income, but get ready to go bankrupt. You won't be able to pay these bills. There is one choice. There is another choice you can consider. You can go to a clinic for people who are uninsured.

Sure enough. I had to leave my law school and cut a class, drive out to

Maryland, pick up my wife and our little baby girl and sit in a clinic for hours to get a doctor in rotation--never knowing who you would see and sure you would never see them again. They would ask you all the same questions. Let's go through the history again. You tell them over and over--you want to give them everything.

That is what life is like when you don't have health insurance.

When it comes to maternity care, you have to be careful. I will tell you why.

Twenty-five years ago when I was an attorney working in the Illinois State Senate, it came to our attention that there was a company selling health insurance in Illinois with maternity benefits, but when you read closely, the maternity benefits did not cover the newborn infant for the first 30 days of life. Do you know what that means? In our case, in my family's situation, a situation just like it, that sick baby dramatically in need of expensive care for the first 30 days wasn't covered. We put a provision in the Illinois State law which said you cannot offer maternity benefits saying you will pay for the delivery of a baby unless you cover that baby from the moment it is born. That is a requirement in law.

It makes sense, doesn't it? It would be wiped out as one of the State requirements under Senator Enzi's approach. You can buy maternity care. You may be on your own the first 30 days. Heaven forbid you are in a situation with a sick child--and I have been there. It is no fun at all. It took us years to pay those medical bills. We were glad to pay them, and they couldn't have been nicer waiting to be paid, but there were a lot of anxious moments when this father sat in that waiting room wondering if he would ever get to see a doctor for his little girl.

There was a study in the New England Journal of Medicine in the years after President Clinton required that the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program cover mental health benefits. I can't go to a town meeting in my State and mention mental health clinic benefits where I don't have the following occur. I can guarantee you that in any large group this will happen: I will say that health insurance ought to cover mental health benefits--and I think it should. Senator Paul Wellstone, that great champion, used to sit in that back row and stand and beg for health care to cover mental health benefits.

If you mention that at a town meeting in my State or any other State, do you know what happens when the meeting ends? Two or three people are going to wait for you. They will want to talk to you privately. It has happened time and again. They say: Senator, we have a teenage son with a serious mental health problem. We don't know where to turn. We can't get health insurance. There is no coverage for him.

Every time you mention mental health, you find that across America there are people in need of mental health benefits.

When it came to mental health benefits, it was one of the first casualties in the Enzi bill. About 42 States currently offer mental health benefits as part of their health insurance. And that State requirement would be wiped away in the Enzi bill.

Is that deluxe coverage? If you have a bipolar teenage son, a schizophrenic daughter, someone suffering from grave depression in your own household, is that deluxe and luxury coverage? I think it is basic. I think it is what we should be about in America: taking away the stigma of mental disease and offer mental health coverage.

We received letters from organizations such as the American Nurses Association--God bless them--the American Cancer Society, AARP, and the American Diabetes Association. They are all opposed to the Enzi watered-down approach.

In a letter to Congress, 41 attorneys general, including my own attorney general, Lisa Madigan, in Illinois, have publicly opposed this bill.

Another way the Bush-Enzi bill would make people worse off is that it sets Federal rules of how insurers can charge people. I will try to explain what I understand Senator Enzi just did.

Right now in America you can charge health insurance premiums based on a number of factors: Are you well? Are you sick? Are you young? Are you old? Where did you live? What is your injury?

You can be charged different health premiums depending on how you answer those questions. The disparity in health insurance premiums between well people and sick people can be 26 times as expensive for sick people as it is for well people.

There are nine States--most of them in New England, except for North Dakota and Oregon--that have community ratings, which means that everybody in the State of Massachusetts represented by my friend, Senator Kerry, is in the same pool, everybody just like the Federal employees pool. So everyone is charged the same premium, young and old, regardless of their medical history. Senator Enzi comes and says: We just want to change this slightly. We want to be able to say that you can charge five times as much for someone who is sick than someone who is well, even in States with community ratings--five times as much.

They tried that in New Hampshire a few years ago, increasing the premiums for sick people. They dropped their coverage, and 21,000 people were dropped. In a year New Hampshire dropped the plan, saying it is not a good idea. It wasn't a good idea in New Hampshire, and it is not a good idea in the Enzi bill.

That is what is being proposed. Let me show you a study. The Lewin Group, a nonpartisan actuarial firm, shows rates would rise dramatically for businesses with a higher number of older Americans or women of childbearing years.

This shows the average premiums for community-rated States, the average cost per contract. You can see this yellow line. What is happening because Senator Enzi is allowing this divergence and differing amounts of premiums to be charged, you can see a dramatic range of increase that could occur in any given State.

So there is no protection on the upside below 5 to 1. There could be a 5-to-1 difference in premiums charged the lowest rated person in the State to the highest rated person. It is a significant difference.

The Lewin study found that small businesses in strictly regulated States are currently paying the average of $7,738 per month for health insurance for their employees. Under the Enzi bill, businesses with a high number of older people or women of childbearing years would see their premiums increase to more than $20,000 a month, while companies that have a disproportionately high number of healthy, young people would see a decrease in their premiums to $3,096 a month.

Finally, the Bush-Enzi bill will not help the self-employed. Self- employed people are the worst off. They are forced to purchase insurance in the individual market which has the least amount of State oversight. The Enzi bill will take away what little protection self- employed people already have in benefit mandates, which means if you are on your own--you own your little business and looking for health insurance, and you at least know when you are offered a policy it has to provide the basic coverage that your State requires--Senator Enzi wipes that away. It will not give self-employed people a way to pool with larger businesses.

The Enzi bill prohibits self-employed people from being pooled with larger businesses, so they miss out on the discounts of the larger groups. Right now, we believe the realtors who are pushing the Enzi bill ought to step back and take a close look at that provision and ask themselves what percentage of the membership of realtors across America is self-employed. The coverage and protection is not there for you. This may sound good for their members until they take a look at the policy and there is no protection.

Individuals would be pooled with other individuals, so they may save on marketing costs, but they will be priced the same way they are today: individually. Under the Enzi bill, self-employed people can still be denied coverage if their State law permits it, and they can be charged exorbitant rates based on their health status, gender, age, or industry.

Diane Ladley of Aurora, IL, is self-employed and has a chronic condition called fibromyalgia, which causes

chronic pain and fatigue. She has been denied insurance in the individual market. She is currently cutting her pills in half because she cannot afford them.

The Bush-Enzi bill will do nothing to help Diane. Even if she joins an association health plan, an insurer could deny her coverage. If she is offered coverage, insurers will still be able to exclude her current condition or charge an amount so high she could not afford it.

The Lincoln-Durbin bill would allow Diane to be pooled with other small businesses in one national pool. She would have access to the same negotiated discounts as all other small businesses in the pool.

We can make health insurance for small businesses more affordable without slashing benefits or charging people who need insurance even higher prices. My bill, with Senator Lincoln, is an example of how it can be done. It is a reasonable approach.

I will come back to my starting point as I close my remarks because I know there are other Senators in the Senate waiting to speak. This is a matter of simple justice. If Members of the Senate and the House of Representatives take advantage of the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program because they believe it is fair and right for their families, why won't they offer that same opportunity to other Americans who need health insurance? Why should we give ourselves the status of a privileged class when it comes to health insurance? Why should we say that people across America shouldn't have the same protection our wives and our families have? We ought to offer them in good faith an approach that is the same as our own. If this health insurance we use is good enough for Members of Congress, it is good enough for American families.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, am I right that we are prepared to proceed to the text of the conference reconciliation report?

Mr. President, before I explain what is in the conference report, I want to make clear what the tax policy is we are talking about. For 90 percent of the legislation that is before us, we are talking about maintaining existing tax policy as it has been, either from the 2001 Tax Reduction Act or the 2003 Tax Reduction Act. The reason I want to take some time to explain that--and that is not part of my explanation of the conference report--is because the public listening in and/or my colleagues are going to be confused over the words ``tax cuts.'' For 90 percent of this legislation, we are not cutting anybody's tax bill. What we are trying to do because of sunset is we are maintaining for the next year, or in some cases the next 5 years, existing tax policy. So I don't want anybody to come over and say we are cutting taxes.

If we don't pass this legislation in the year 2006, or in some cases in the years 2009 and 2010, people are going to get an automatic increase of taxes without a vote of Congress. So we are talking about maintaining existing tax policy. The reason we are talking about maintaining tax policy would be for two reasons. In the case of dividend and capital gains tax policy, the tax policy we adopted in 2003 is the reason we have created 5.2 million jobs.

That is why the economy is rolling. I know the public is listening. When they pay $3 for gas, the $3 for gas blinds them to the fact that we had 4.8 percent growth last quarter. It blinds them to the fact that we have 4.7 percent unemployment, which is practically full employment, and some economists would tell you it is full employment, or that we have a low inflation rate.

It seems that when my constituents, and probably constituents in every State, see high gasoline prices, that is all that is on their mind. I don't blame them because I put gasoline in my car--I don't have some driver do it, I put it in myself--and I know what the price of gasoline is. I know a lot of my constituents go out of the same convenience stores I do with a bottle of water. Bottled water, if you buy it in these small containers, you are paying about $8 a gallon for water and never complaining about the cost for water but complaining about $2.63 gas that you can buy in Des Moines, IA, this very weekend.

We are talking with regard to capital gains as maintaining existing tax policy. Just so everybody understands, we are not cutting anybody's taxes below what they are today. We are maintaining existing tax policy. But if we didn't take the action we are taking today, taxes would automatically go up in these areas by 33 percent, and for low- income people, who have zero capital tax gains, they go up--what would that be? One hundred percent. If they are not paying taxes today and they start paying taxes at the rate everybody else pays, it is a 100- percent increase in taxes.

I don't know why people would argue with us, when we have a zero capital gains for lower income people, that you would want to tax lower income people. But if we do not continue this tax policy, that is the case.

I wish to emphasize again what Chairman Greenspan has said about the 2003 tax policy we are continuing today, and that is that it is responsible for the economic recovery we have had of 18 quarters of economic growth and 5.2 million jobs being created.

The other part of the bill is to continue tax policy existing since 2001. That existing tax policy is that 22 million Americans--well, no, I better say it this way. That tax policy since 2001 has been that when we reduce people's taxes here on the one hand, we are not going to take it away from them on the other hand by having them hit by the alternative minimum tax. I am going to explain this in greater detail, but up front, a good part of this bill is to maintain the policy Senator Baucus and I have had in place since 2001 of holding people harmless from the alternative minimum tax. In other words, if you get a tax decrease here, we are not going to have the same people pay a tax over here on the alternative minimum tax.

As far as the alternative minimum tax is concerned, I think the best policy is what we did in the late 1990s when this body sent to President Clinton a bill to repeal the alternative minimum tax, and he vetoed it. I don't know how many Democrats we are going to have condemning us for not doing more on the alternative minimum tax. What more could you do than what we did in 1999 and repeal a very bad tax policy, the alternative minimum tax? And a Democratic President vetoed it. But they will probably be the ones complaining and crying the most because we are not doing more.

What we are talking about here today is maintaining present tax policy through this reconciliation bill for roughly 90 percent of it. Ten percent of it would be some change in tax policy. If people want details on that, I will be glad to go into that.

Maybe another thing I ought to explain--and it is more personal because I am going to be the chief negotiator for the Senate on this bill because I am chairman of the Senate Finance Committee--I have negotiated for a long period of time with Chairman Thomas, and everything has worked out fine as compromises have to work out fine, and I think I have done a very good job of protecting the Senate's position.

Let me remind everybody, all of my colleagues, particularly Republicans, particularly about a telephone call from the President on the Thursday before we began our Easter break--the exact date I don't have in mind--and in meetings with the leader and the Speaker and all this, we were just very anxious to get something done before Easter. At that point, the position of the House was that we were not going to have hold harmless on AMT. Consequently, I didn't agree to this agreement. I believe I probably disappointed a lot of my colleagues and the leader and the Speaker and the President of the United States because I just didn't, how would you say, surrender to a House position that we were doing too much on AMT.

Our policy since 2001 has been hold harmless, and I believe that is what we passed three times on the floor of the Senate: in November last year, January this year, February of this year, as the Democrats made us go through three periods of 3 days of debate on the same tax bill that ended up passing by a bipartisan majority of somewhere between 64 and 67. So it has been the policy of the Senate since 2001, reaffirmed by three votes of this body in the last 6 months, to hold harmless.

I didn't believe I was doing 66 Senators a favor by agreeing to something which would have 3.5 million--let's say more accurately 2.5 to 3 million taxpayers being hit by the alternative minimum tax out of the 22 million to whom I have already referred. So it took a little longer, and here we are--what, May 11, 1 month later than when it originally happened. But we have hold harmless in this bill. Hold harmless is in this bill.

Everything is going smoothly between Chairman Thomas and me. Nobody is going to believe that because if you read the papers, we are always at each other's throat. You know, those characterizations are entirely wrong. He has strong convictions about tax policy, and he is the negotiator for the U.S. House of Representatives. He has a right to stand firmly for their positions, but I have a responsibility to stand firmly for the Senate position, with the understanding that someplace there are some compromises. I guess enough said on that point.

I have mentioned, in summation, before I go into explanation about the conference report, and this is the third time, but it cannot be said too many times because I don't know how many times you are going to hear today--in fact, we ought to count how many times we are going to say we are cutting taxes, we are cutting taxes, we are cutting taxes. Would you keep track of that for me? I want to hear how many times that is used. We are not cutting anybody's tax. Maybe we ought be cutting people's taxes, but we are not. We are maintaining existing tax policy as expressed by this body in the 2001 and 2003 tax bill so 22 million Americans don't get hit by the alternative minimum tax and so that we have incentives for investment and taxes don't go up, and capital gains and dividends, without a vote of the people in 2009 and 2010; so that we keep the incentives Chairman Greenspan said are the reason we are having the economic recovery we have had for 18 quarters, creating 5.2 million jobs, 4.8 percent economic growth, 4.7 percent unemployment, et cetera.

We have moved to the final step in the tax reconciliation process to which I have already referred that we dealt with three times and probably 3 days each time during November, January, and February. We have an agreement of the conferees from the House and Senate on a conference report. The basic objective of this conference was to produce a conference report that will pass both the Senate and the House and be sent to the President.

To achieve that objective, we needed to focus our efforts on a true bipartisan, bicameral compromise. As I said and will probably say again today--but you have heard me say it over the last 3 months to my colleague and friend, Senator Baucus--a compromise must be bicameral. Likewise, I said to Chairman Thomas of the House and to House conferees that the compromise should be bipartisan.

In the Senate, we passed a reconciliation bill for the second time but the contents of the bill for a third time, on February 2, with a bipartisan vote that included 66 Senators. So that obviously includes a vast number of Democrats.

My preference was to continue working in conference to produce a bipartisan compromise that could pass in the Senate. Unfortunately, I doubt if we will get 66 votes for this conference report. But I am very hopeful that we will pick up some Democratic votes.

Going into conference, everybody knew that the House bill and the Senate bill were significantly different. The centerpiece of the House bill was a 2-year extension of the 15-percent maximum tax rate on dividends and capital gains and the zero percent tax rate that will apply to taxpayers in the lowest two tax brackets. Such an extension would continue the bipartisan tax policy enacted in 2003, a policy which has been vital to our economy's recovery and continued growth.

The centerpiece of the Senate bill was a 1-year extension and modification of the alternative minimum tax hold-harmless provisions. This provision would keep 15 million American families from being hit by the stealth tax. The AMT is a stealth tax because you really never know when you are going to be hit by it. Hitting Americans with such a stealth tax, the alternative minimum tax, is wrong. So, as I said before, the AMT should be abolished. It is not abolished. We did vote to abolish it in the late 1990s, but President Clinton vetoed that. So here we are, since 2001, working in a bipartisan way to do what we call hold harmless.

As I said at that particular time, my highest priority was to make sure we kept our promise to make certain that no additional taxpayers are brought into the AMT system on an annual basis, and that is the purpose of the Senate's hold-harmless provision on alternative minimum tax.

I will expand on that notion for a moment and be somewhat repeating myself from my extemporaneous remarks,

but exactly 5 years ago today, May 11, 2001, Senator Baucus and I announced the bipartisan deal that became the basis for historic 2001 bipartisan tax relief legislation. I say historic because taxes were as high as they had ever been in the history of the country as a percentage of the gross national product.

When newly elected President Bush released his budget for that first year in 2001, his tax relief plan did not contain a general hold harmless on the alternative minimum tax, and the House passed a bill that did not have hold harmless provisions for the alternative minimum tax. When Senator Baucus and I were negotiating the bipartisan plan, we agreed on that bedrock principle of hold harmless--hold harmless on AMT so no new people would get hit with it. Because they got a tax decrease over here, we should not take their taxes away over here.

We agreed to make sure the AMT would not take the tax relief we were providing. This is how we came up with the concept we refer to as hold harmless. To me, it goes to a fundamental principle of transparency in government: Don't promise taxpayers relief that you know they are not going to really get.

Some of my friends on this side of the aisle--meaning Republicans-- rightly complain about doubletalk on alternative minimum tax that we hear from Members on the other side, Democratic Members, the Senators from so-called blue States. You remember the blue-red map in Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004? Blue States generally go for Democratic candidates for President, red States go for Republican candidates for President.

I am going to refer to the blue States which are those that generally vote Democratic. Senators from these States are generally hostile to the tax relief we have provided in 2001 and provided again in 2003, and seem to be sympathetic to tax hikes. They take this position despite the fact that their constituents in these blue States, and represented for the most part by Democratic Senators, tend to bear the highest per capita Federal tax burden. The hostility of these Members seems to grow to a white-hot intensity when anybody above, say, $100,000 in income benefits from any tax relief package.

It has always been a strange disconnect to those of us on this Republican side of the aisle because that intensity--and at times what appears to be outright anger--seems to grow as the States' shade of blue grows much darker. Ironically, the per capita income, living costs, and Federal tax burdens tend to rise as the shade of the State tends to get a darker blue. The implication appears to be that constituents in these blue States should be happy to bear this high tax burden as their Senators fight against tax relief for them. In fact, Members from blue States seem to have no limit to the level of Federal taxes they believe folks in their States should bear. Taxes can never be too high, goes the rationale, as long as we keep growing the public's dependence on more Federal programs.

When Members on the Republican side hear demagoguery on taxes emanating from Members from blue States on a daily basis that we shouldn't have tax cuts for high-income people, they ask, Why do these folks then seem to change their mind when we are talking about the alternative minimum tax? As you tend to get intense debate that we ought to do something about the alternative minimum tax from the same Senators who are complaining because we are giving too much tax relief to high-income people in their various States, and the AMT happens to most dramatically impact taxpayers between $100,000 and $500,000. How is this any different from other forms of tax relief? They are hot and heavy to have the AMT which helps their taxpayers in blue States, but they are not hot and heavy to have tax relief in the first instance when you vote to reduce tax rates.

If I go to some extent talking about this contradiction, it is a contradiction that affects and bothers a lot of people on the Republican side of the aisle. It is an argument we do not understand. Frankly, it is a sentiment I have to overcome in my caucuses as I argue for the AMT and for tax relief; and I have had to argue this contradiction particularly with my House counterparts as we go to conference to negotiate differences between the House and Senate and try to explain to them why we need to do a hold-harmless provision on

Mr. President, first, I will respond to some of the things that Senator Baucus brought up in his opening statement. He complimented me in our working through this, and I always have a good working relationship with Senator Baucus. And 90 percent of the time, or maybe more, he and I are on the same side of the fence. I remind people in the Senate that on three occasions, in November and January and February, we were on the same side of the fence on this issue.

The difference between us now is related to the extension of the capital gains and dividend tax credit that was not in the Senate bill at that particular time. And since it is not in the conference report, that is one of the reasons he and I are on separate sides of the fence.

I will respond to some of the points he made on extenders because they are not in the conference report. Senator Baucus's criticism is right that they are not in this bill. They are, however, covered in a collateral agreement between tax-writing committees and congressional leadership. And on a document basis for my saying that we will be dealing with those, even though they are not in the conference report, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a joint statement on a collateral extenders agreement, that they will be in a follow-on piece of legislation that ought to be before the Senate very quickly. These are not in dispute between the House and Senate. This is a product under negotiation, but these issues are no longer under negotiation.

Mr. President, on Senator Baucus's criticism of the charts that I used, let me say that the

charts reflect the data of the Committee on Joint Taxation. I explained how the Committee on Joint Taxation is a professional group, not a Republican group or a Democrat group. They are paid by the taxpayers of this country to be experts on tax policy. I challenge many of my critics, and the sympathetic ears that these critics have in the east coast media, to also use the joint tax data because in a lot of the presentations already, and today, we are going to hear statistics that don't come from the green eyeshade people who have no political ax to grind in the Joint Tax Committee but, quite frankly, come from liberal think tanks who do have a political ax to grind.

I ask Democrats to use Joint Tax Committee data. I think my friends on the other side have an issue with the perspective of the charts. The charts I used earlier take into account the tax savings taxpayers enjoy relative to their tax burden. Democrats tend to look only at the tax benefit. They ignore the taxes people pay. That is where there is a very real difference. It is philosophical. The charts I used are accurate.

On the number of taxpayers by State, the source is the Internal Revenue Service, not a conservative or liberal think tank.

Finally, on the need to do an extension now, just ask folks in the market whether this decision to extend the capital gains and dividend tax provisions ought to be done now or in the year 2008. We hear that it is very important to have a long-term tax policy if you are going to encourage investment, and that is why we are extending this now at this particular time.

I would also like to refer to some comments that were made by the Senator from New Mexico. He spoke about the impact of one of our offsets for policy long term, speaking about the Roth IRA being the wrong kind of policy to put in this bill.

It is interesting to hear my friends on the other side criticize the Roth IRA conversion provisions in the conference report. One would be led to believe that this protaxpayer provision is somehow an evil Republican idea that the Democrats have never seen before. But I am afraid that my friends on the other side of the aisle have a short-term memory. They are giving this Finance Committee chairman and my Republican colleagues too much credit.

I wish I could take credit for what is called the Roth IRA. Maybe it could be called the Grassley IRA. But I can't. There is another Finance Committee chairman, not a Republican, who first laid out the exact IRA conversion proposal that is in the conference report we are going to vote on today.

Way back in 1991, there was a chairman of the Finance Committee, a famous Senator from Texas, by the name of Lloyd Bentsen. He introduced the identical provision as part of what they called the Tax Fairness and Savings Incentive Act of 1991. If the Roth IRA--later named the Roth IRA--was tax fairness in 1991 when the Democrats wrote it, it is tax fairness in 2006 as it comes back in a conference report.

Chairman Bentsen's bill would have allowed all taxpayers, regardless of income, to convert amounts from traditional IRAs into the new Roth- styled IRA account that he also proposed. In fact, the only difference between Democratic Chairman Bentsen's original proposal and the provision in the conference report is Chairman Bentsen's bill would have given taxpayers 4 years to pay tax on converted amounts compared to the shorter 2-year period under the provisions in this conference report.

But some may ask: Was Chairman Bentsen just a lone Democratic voice in the wilderness on this issue without support from fellow Democrats at that time in 1991? Not surprising to those of us who had the honor of serving with Senator Bentsen, it wasn't just his idea. His bill was introduced with 13 Democrats as original cosponsors, and it has a prominent list of Democratic cosponsors, many of whom are still serving with us in the Senate today. In fact, I can point to my good friend from Montana, Senator Baucus, as one of the original cosponsors of Chairman Bentsen's bill. Let me name some others: Akaka, Dodd, Inouye, Lieberman, Mikulski, and Senator Pryor's father was also an original cosponsor. So this is not a new idea, nor is it a Republican idea. It is an idea which has had bipartisan support in the Finance Committee and the Senate for the past 15 years, ever since Chairman Bentsen first proposed it. Indeed, the Bentsen bill was just the beginning of a long bipartisan history of this provision. So why today is there not bipartisanship on this issue?

In the next Congress, after Senator Bentsen became Treasury Secretary under President Clinton, the bill was introduced. Senator Roth--who would, of course, later become Finance Committee chairman--introduced Senator Bentsen's former bill, including the proposal that would become known as the Roth IRA conversion proposal. Senator Roth introduced this bill with a bipartisan list of 57 original cosponsors, 24 of whom were Democrats.

In the next Congress, Senator Roth reintroduced his bipartisan legislation with 52 cosponsors, and 18 Democrats were cosponsors of that bill, including Minority Leader Reid and Senator Kerry. It was a good proposal for the Democrats then. So why is it not a good proposal today?

Democrats say they are concerned about the budget deficit, but we all know our deficit was much larger as a percentage of GDP in the early 1990s than it is today. The real question is, Do my Democratic friends really oppose this protaxpayer provision that merely creates a level playing field when it comes to access to retirement plans or do they only have this objection because the provision is part of a progrowth tax relief bill that the Democratic leadership has decided to oppose today?

The bipartisan history of this concept didn't stop when Democratic Chairman Bentsen became Secretary of the Treasury. Roth IRAs became law in the Tax Relief Act of 1997. The Senate version of that legislation allowed all taxpayers to convert traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs, the same as the conference report before us this very day.

That bill passed the Senate--now listen, that bill passed the Senate. The exact thing we are doing today passed the Senate by an overwhelming 80-to-18 bipartisan vote.

When an income limit was placed on Roth IRA conversions during the conference negotiations in the 1997 act, the Senate came back the very next year in the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act and again showed bipartisan support for expanding the eligibility for Roth IRA conversions. Expanded Roth IRA conversion eligibility was part of the Senate bill which passed unanimously 97 to 0. So obviously Democrats voted for it then. It was also included in the final conference report which passed the Senate 96 to 2.

I hope this makes it very clear that this isn't a provision which came out of thin air. This isn't a Republican proposal. This isn't a budget gimmick. This is a provision which Democrats have long supported. This is a provision which was proposed by a Democratic chairman of this committee. This is a bipartisan provision. And most importantly, it is a good provision. Good policy makes good politics. It is a protaxpayer provision. This is a provision which means all Americans have access to the same retirement plans. This is a provision which brings in real revenue to the Federal Government. This is a provision which will increase tax compliance in an area in which there is much room for improvement. This is a provision which rewards those who work hard, pay their taxes, and do what we need to do more of: save for retirement. That is why it has such a long history of bipartisan support. It also is why it is a very good part of this conference report.

I would think people on the other side of the aisle would be ashamed of damaging the very good image Senator Bentsen had as a U.S. Senator, as a Democrat, as chairman of the Finance Committee. Why don't they honor his reputation as a Senator and vote for provisions he had that are in this conference report rather than being so partisan?

Mr. President, my friend from Montana referred to a report published by Federal Reserve staff, and I would like to make a few comments on that.

The report compares U.S. and European stock values during brief periods of time before and after the lower rates were announced in late 2002 and enacted in 2003. Since U.S. and European stock values moved together, the report concludes that the lower rates had

no effect on the aggregate market value of U.S. stocks.

The report was written by members of the Federal Reserve staff. It does not represent the views of the Federal Reserve itself. In fact, Chairman Alan Greenspan has repeatedly testified before the Congress that lower rates on dividends and capital gains represents good tax policy, and Ben Bernanke has cautioned that not extending the rates soon could negatively impact the economy.

I am not an economist, but it seems to me that the analysis of these Fed staffers is overly simplistic for at least four reasons:

First, the analysis covers a very short period of time--2 months surrounding the President's proposal in January 2003 and 4 months surrounding enactment of the reduced rates in May 2003. Looking at such a short period of time, the Fed staffers only tried to determine if the news of the tax cut had an effect on the U.S. market. Now, I am a believer in the efficient capital markets theory to some degree, but it can't be that simple. Surely, the broader, longer term benefits of these lower rates on the economy should be considered more than simply the news of their enactment.

Second, the analysis essentially assumes away all other factors during that short period of time could affect U.S. markets and European markets differently. It is hard for me to understand how this assumption could be valid. If that was true, then why would anyone consider investing in European stocks as a diversification strategy?

There is a multitude of factors that would seem to affect the U.S. and European markets differently, given how complex the U.S. and European economies are. The Wall Street Journal article that described this report noted a few things that ``might have contributed to a rise in European stocks or a drop in the U.S. market during the review periods'':

In the U.S., some companies reported weaker than expected earnings, while some European firms reported strong earnings;

There was a terrorist bombing in Saudi Arabia that ``rattled'' the U.S. market;

There were concerns about the weak dollar.

Third, the analysis assumes that the impending war in Iraq would affect U.S. and European stocks equally. Again, I am not an economist, but I find this assumption hard to believe.

Fourth, the Fed staffers' analysis does nothing to convince me that taxing something less doesn't make it worth more. It is common sense that people value assets based on how much those assets put in their pockets on an after-tax basis. So if the Government taxes certain investments less, it makes those investments worth more, relative to other investments. Of course, there are many other factors besides tax policy that affect investment value. But we should do what we can in terms of tax policy to promote economic growth.

The Wall Street article concludes with a quote from Michael Thompson, director of research at Thomson Financial, that ``attributing stock market gains to one isolated factor risks being `intellectually dishonest' ''. It would be just as intellectually dishonest to point at this simplistic study as a reason to raise taxes on dividends and capital gains.

Mr. President, my friend from Montana criticized the charts I showed earlier that showed how lower income taxpayers, relative to their tax burden, have more at risk than higher income taxpayers. In light of Senator Baucus' criticism of those charts, I want to go into detail regarding how the statistics were calculated by my Finance Committee staff.

To get a clear picture of the relative benefits of this tax policy, I have taken another step in the distributional analysis.

I looked at the size of the tax benefits in relation to the total tax liabilities that these taxpayers bear.

The results of this analysis show that, among taxpayers who benefit from this tax policy, those with less than $50,000 of AGI benefit more from this tax policy, especially when the lower income tax rate drops from 5 percent to zero percent.

According to the JCT data, 6.3 million tax returns with adjusted gross income of less than $50,000 benefited from the reduced tax rates on dividends.

The aggregate total income tax liability of these taxpayers was $12.4 billion, which is an average of $1,968 per tax return.

In 2005, the lower tax rates on dividends saved these taxpayers $600 million in the aggregate at an average of $95 per return.

In 2008, if we assume the same data, the elimination of dividend taxes for lower income families will save them an additional $350 million, which is an average of $56 per return.

In total, this tax policy will save $950 million, or an average of $151 per tax return.

That produces a savings of 7.6 percent for these taxpayers.

Tax returns with more than $200,000 in adjusted gross income would save $6.5 billion in the aggregate, or an average of $2,964.

These numbers, of course, are much bigger than the savings numbers for the less than $50,000 of AGI category. But these numbers represent only 2.2 percent of this group's total tax liability.

The estimates for capital gains show that 3.6 million tax returns with under $50,000 of AGI will report a savings of $680 million from lower tax rates on capital gains, or an average of $189 each, producing a 10.2-percent tax savings.

Those with $200,000 or more in AGI will save $13.7 billion in the aggregate or $11,421 each on average. To be sure, these dollar numbers are much higher than the less than $50,000 group, but as a percentage of total tax liability, it is only 7.6 percent, lower than the savings of the less than $50,000 group.

And what about seniors?

2.4 million tax returns filed by seniors with adjusted gross income of less than $50,000 benefited from the reduced tax rates on dividends.

The aggregate total income tax liability of these taxpayers was $4.4 billion, which is an average of $1,833 per tax return.

In 2005, the lower tax rates on dividends saved these seniors $500 million in the aggregate at an average of $208 per return.

In 2008, if we assume the same data, the elimination of dividend taxes for lower income seniors will save them an additional $250 million, which is an average of $104 per return.

In total, this tax policy will save seniors $750 million or an average of $312 per tax return.

That produces a savings of 17.1 percent for these taxpayers.

Four hundred thousand tax returns for seniors with more than $200,000 in adjusted gross income would save

$2.7 billion in the aggregate, or an average of $6,775 each, representing a 5.7-percent savings.

The estimates for capital gains show that 1.5 million tax returns will be filed by seniors with under $50,000 of AGI, reporting a savings of $305 million from lower tax rates on capital gains or an average of $204, producing a 13.2-percent tax saving.

Seniors with $200,000 or more in AGI will save almost 3.8 billion in the aggregate or $12,633 on average representing a 10-percent savings.

Now, I have a couple charts that summarize the tax savings as a percentage of total income tax liability across AGI levels.

This chart illustrates the relative savings from reduced dividend taxes across AGI levels.

Opponents of this policy want to persecute these taxpayers by taking back their 2.2 percent savings.

But at the same time they will punish these taxpayers by taking away their 7.6 percent savings.

And they will punish these seniors by taking away their 17.1 percent savings.

This chart illustrates the relative savings from reduced capital gains taxes across AGI levels.

Opponents of this policy want to persecute these taxpayers by taking back their 7.6 percent savings.

But at the same time they will punish these taxpayers by taking away their 10.2 percent savings.

And they will punish these seniors by taking away their 13.2 percent savings.

As this data shows, the tax policy enacted by Congress in 2003 to lower taxes on dividends and capital gains has provided meaningful benefits to taxpayers across the income spectrum, not just the rich.

In fact, lower income taxpayers will save more than higher income taxpayers when measured as a percentage of total tax liability.

These lower rates have allowed millions of taxpayers to keep more money in their pockets to spend or add to their savings through reinvestment in the economy, rather than give it to the Federal Government to spend.

I yield the floor.

Not that long, maybe 15 minutes, something like that. Hard to say entirely.

I welcome it. It is not often a debate breaks out in the Senate anymore, so I am happy to welcome it. I ask, through the Presiding Officer, how long the Senator from Wyoming might think he would engage in debate?

I appreciate that. Maybe that will work because I will just add to some of the things the Senator will probably want to answer, and he can take it all in one bundle.

I thank the Chair, and I thank my colleague from Wyoming.

I listened carefully, and I hope a lot of other folks did, to the comments of the Senator from Illinois and from other colleagues in the Senate over the course of the last days.

I wish the Senate were engaging in this issue in a serious way that allows Members to debate the merits of individual approaches to small businesses being covered. Regrettably, that is not the choice of our friends on the other side of the aisle. What they have done is come in with a series of amendments, with second-degree amendments, and, in the language of the Senate, filled the legislative tree, which basically means blocked out the ability of Democrats to bring amendments, to have a real choice between plans as to how we approach small businesses. That is point No. 1. That is irrefutable and damaging to the prospects of trying to deal with the health care crisis we face.

Two years ago, when I was traveling the country as a candidate, no matter what State I went to, no matter what town or what size community or what the political definition of that community was, you always felt a profound sense of responsibility was thrown at you by the people you met from all walks of life.

I met people in town meeting halls, in VFW halls, in rope lines at rallies, in visits to factories, in visits to medium-sized businesses, large businesses. A whole bunch of folks would come up and tug at my sleeve, often with tears in their eyes, look at me, and say: Senator, you have to help us on health care. You have to do something to help us be able to afford health care. They would show me a photograph and say: Look, this is my sister, or this is my mom, and they would tell you about a loved one who could not afford the medicine they needed or who lost their health care when a factory shut down or when a business closed or moved overseas. The faces of those people stay with you forever. Their names do, too.

People--many of them Republicans, many of them conservative small businesspeople--were pleading not for a dumbing down of the system, not for an automatic reduction in coverage, but for a way to expand the ability to have the level of coverage they have today and be able to pay for it. They were looking wearily to this city for help.

I met an awful lot of poor folks who obviously do not have any health care, and the numbers are climbing. More importantly, there is a change in the fabric of our society. I met an awful lot of working Americans who are increasingly watching health care costs go up, education costs go up, energy costs go up, and their wages either stay the same or go down. That is not a sustainable equation in our country.

Increasingly, those workers are being pushed out of the middle class into the working poor or downward within the middle class itself. There isn't one of us who has not met a mother of a child who would describe situations in which she would make life choices for that child, about whether to let her kid play football or some other sport--hockey-- because she was afraid she could not afford the medical care if her child broke a leg or somehow were injured.

I heard again and again stories from teachers who would tell me about kids who get no preventive care, they do not get routine exams. Schools have cut nurses, so you do not have a nurse in the school now to take care of someone.

I heard instance after instance of kids who had some form of acting- out in the classroom as a consequence of either an earache or some other chronic disorder. Some of them went to the doctor for the first time when they were 9, 10, 12 years old, and it was too late; they discovered they had a permanent hearing impairment as a consequence. I met the head of pediatrics in the State of Washington at an event we did in Seattle for children's health insurance who told me specifically of kids she had examined who had permanent hearing impairment, and now they will be in special needs education because we did not care enough to give them early intervention.

I met a lot of small business owners who would like to be able to provide their employees with health care but cannot afford it and who know the health care costs are so high that they are standing in the way of being able to hire more workers because they do not have the flexibility and the ability to be able to expand the business and try to cover people or pay even a portion of the health care.

In New Hampshire, I met a woman who had breast cancer. I got to know her pretty well. She told me how she had to keep working day after day right through her chemotherapy no matter how sick she felt because she was absolutely terrified of losing her family's health insurance if she did not show up for a day or two.

In Erie, PA, I met a man named Albert Barker who wonders how he is going to pay literally thousands of dollars in medical bills that he cannot afford. And after he suffered a heart attack and he underwent surgery, guess what. His employer just stopped his health coverage because it was too expensive because he had gotten sick. So they cut him off at the moment of need, and he was basically at that time facing bankruptcy as a consequence. His wife said at the time that she was

reduced to hoping and praying that nothing else happened.

In Council Bluffs, IA, I met a woman named Myrtle Walck who at the time did not know what she would do if the price of medicine rose any higher--which it has--and she paid a huge chunk of her Social Security, which was not very big and was her only source of income, her Social Security check, to the drugstore every month just to cover the cost of her two daily prescriptions.

In Jacksonville, FL, Renee Harris, who owns a schoolbus company that was in her family for over 50 years, was forced to sell the company because she could no longer afford to insure her workers and felt compelled to want to be able to do so.

I heard daily about workers' fears of losing coverage because they either could not afford the higher premiums, the deductibles, the copays, or they thought their employers would drop the coverage altogether.

I talked to people who told me what it was like to live knowing they were one medicine bill, one hospital visit away from bankruptcy. That is the real world we are living in today. That is the real world the Senate ought to be debating. All of these problems are in our health care system today. Yet there is so little time devoted in this Congress to finding the common ground, to finding solutions to get something done for those people who want to believe we will do something to help them.

Instead, what do we have? We have a so-called Health Week in the Senate. This is Health Week so that Senators can come to the Senate and give speeches--not legislate but give speeches. We have speech after speech in a stalemate where the whole week is going to go by, and everyone knows what will happen at the end because we are not really legislating because we are not really here to solve problems. The people I have met deserve to have a Congress that insists on a real debate, really getting the job done.

In all the 22 years I have been here, this is one of those peculiarities of a moment in American history where the Senate is about as dysfunctional as it has been in that whole period of time. Serious efforts to try to deal with problems are just not on the table.

What are we going to have? We are going to have one up-or-down vote on a flawed bill with no chance for Democratic amendments. I know the Senator from Wyoming is going to argue it is a good bill--and we will go through some of those details in a minute, et cetera--but what we have been reduced to doing here is spending an awful lot of time trying to stop bad things from happening instead of putting the competent energy of a lot of people who think a lot about these issues, some of whom have extraordinary expertise, into trying to fix them and move toward a positive health care agenda for our Nation.

Right now, we are fighting to fix the devastating changes that have been forced on the Medicaid Program. We need to overturn the rules allowing increased cost sharing that has been imposed on families who cannot afford it. And we need to prevent new rules from tossing out the early periodic screening diagnosis and treatment protections for children on Medicaid.

Who wrote to the Congress and said: ``Kids in America have enough coverage. We ought to cut out early periodic screening''? Every doctor you talk to worth their salt in this country will tell you what we need is more preventive care, wellness. We need to teach wellness in America. We need to be doing preventive care instead of treating people when they finally get sick, at a time when it is far more expensive than if we intervened early.

On diabetes alone, if we had diabetes screening for every person in America, you could probably save $50 billion. You would avoid a lot of amputations. You would avoid a lot of dialysis. And you could treat it in a far less expensive, more easy way. Are we talking about that here?

We also have to fix the Medicare prescription drug debacle and extend that May 15 deadline for signing up without penalties. Why? Because it has been confusing to seniors all across this country. Because the implementation has been exactly what a lot of people predicted. The result is a whole bunch of things that ought to be happening to reduce the cost for seniors are not happening.

A simple thing would be bulk purchasing to negotiate lower prices on prescription drugs. We ought to be simplifying the enrollment procedures. We ought to be making the benefit more comprehensive, by closing the gaps in coverage.

But the bottom line is, it would be a tragedy if all we did was try to stop these bad things from happening, when everybody knows we have a health care system that is increasingly in extremis, a health care system that is in crisis and imploding on itself in many ways.

This bill, I regret to say, because it deregulates in a selective way all of the insurance delivered in the States, is going to create chaos for people as States choose different offerings and the rules go out the window.

I might add, for a group of people who traditionally have come to the floor to defend States rights, they have, in the last years, proven themselves remarkably selective in where and when they want to protect those States rights because State after State across the country has passed a certain standard of health care. Why? Because they know it works. Because they know it reduces costs. Because they know it helps people have greater quality of care and a better quality of life. Instead, this bill is going to open up the opportunity for people to reduce the level of coverage for people.

There are a whole series of real health care initiatives that the Senate ought to be dealing with. I am convinced we can find an ethical way of dealing with the thorny issue--I recognize there are ethical considerations--but we could find, if we wanted to, an ethical way to deal with a host of in vitro embryos who, regrettably, are going to be discarded altogether, thrown out into the garbage and lost, rather than applied to the possibility of saving life. It seems to me there is a way to fully fund, in a limited way, the appropriate research of initiatives at the National Institutes of Health.

We also need to take up real legislation to get at the heart of racial and ethnic health disparities. We need to make it legal to import prescription drugs from Canada. We need to put medical decisions back in the hands of doctors and nurses and patients, not insurance company bureaucrats. We need to address the nursing shortage by fully funding all the programs under the Nurse Reinvestment Act that we fought so hard to enact.

We need mental health parity, which I heard the Senator from Illinois talk about. We need to address our growing childhood obesity problem which is going to increase the cost of health care all across the country. And we definitely need to reauthorize the State Child Health Insurance Program.

But this is Health Week, and we are going to have a Health Week on the floor of the Senate. It is not going to deal with any of those issues. It also avoids giving families and small businesses access to the same private health insurance that Members of Congress give themselves. I heard the Senator from Illinois talk about this.

I raised this all across the country in 2004. What is it about being a representative of the people, elected by the people to come here to represent the interests of the people, that empowers us to abuse that privilege by giving ourselves the best health care in the world, at less expense, with a nice Government match, bigger than what most businesses can afford, and we are not willing to allow that to happen all across the country? What kind of values does that represent for those who run around talking about values?

It seems to me we ought to stand up and make it clear that every single family's health care is as important as any Member's of Congress. We ought to be offering every single person the opportunity to at least buy into it. Why shouldn't they be able to buy into it and get the coverage? Why shouldn't we open up Medicare and let people who are 55 or older buy into Medicare early? That could happen, and a whole bunch of people would get coverage and we would reduce costs to America.

All you have to do is talk to any hospital administrator in America. First of all, they are dipping into their reserves. A lot of them are on the brink of bankruptcy. Many of them get refunded so late and with such difficulty,

it is hard to plan and come up with a business plan for the hospital. Most importantly, none of them can afford the massive investments in technology that would, in and of themselves, reduce the cost of health care and raise the quality of life.

Something like 45,000 to 50,000 to 90,000 people a year die in hospitals because of medical error. And often, that medical error is the result of pain management or pain mismanagement. The VA has a terrific system. I have been in the VA hospitals. I have seen it. Why do they have the system? Because it is the VA. It is a Government health care plan, and the Government made certain they could invest in these pain management computerized systems. The result is, they have reduced the incidence of mistaken pharmaceuticals being taken, people getting the wrong medicine, getting too much, getting it at the wrong time, getting it even when they took it already--all of these kinds of things that happen.

This week, unfortunately, instead of bringing up a bill that would grant real relief to our small businesses, we are considering a bill that 41 attorneys general of the United States have written to say is bad policy and will only exacerbate the problems in States today. Why are we doing that? Attorneys general are looking at the regulatory process. They are looking at the overall ability of a State without regard, in many cases, to the politics of it but to the law and to the implementation of what happens. And 41 attorneys general have written to say this bill is going to exacerbate current troubles. I hope the Senator from Wyoming will address all of the concerns expressed in the letter of the attorneys general of the United States.

We have also seen the numbers. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that the number of firms offering health benefits has declined from 69 percent in the year 2000 to 60 percent in 2005. Forty-seven percent of firms with fewer than 10 employees offer health insurance, compared to 90 percent of firms with 50 employees or more.

So everybody agrees something ought to be done. The problem is, the plan offered by the Republican leadership today is not going to help the small businesses to be able to gain coverage for their employees, unless, of course, they give up a whole set of things that currently they are covered for and then without regard to what the pricing is going to be for that. It is a wholesale deregulation of insurance markets. And a wholesale deregulation of insurance markets is, in fact, going to put consumers at risk. The studies show the approach we are being offered will, in fact, have a better chance of increasing the numbers of uninsured, rather than offering small businesses a lot of the relief they so desperately need.

The proponents argue prices are going to drop once we get rid of the benefit mandates created and enacted by State legislatures. Well, first of all, that claim, frankly, does not stand up. There are two separate studies that show benefit mandates are estimated to increase health premiums by a small total of about 3 to 5 percent. Juxtaposed against the annual double-digit premium increases that we have been seeing, it is clear a benefit mandate is not at the heart of the problem. If the benefit mandate is only a 3- to 5-percent increase, but we have been seeing double-digit increases over a period of time, something else has happened.

More importantly, why do we have mandates? What happened to the right of a State to make a decision, as Massachusetts has in the last weeks, that they want to make certain every person is going to be covered and to mandate a system by which businesses have agreed and the legislature has agreed they are going to fund it and people are going to be covered?

Now, the people who have often argued about the heavy unfunded mandate hand of the Government--the people who have most objected to the Federal solution for individual States--are now going to come in and literally give this great gift to some small businesses to be able to go out and do whatever they want and take away from States the ability to guarantee a quality of care for their citizens.

Forty-nine States have passed laws mandating that insurers cover mammography services because they are proven to save lives. Twenty- seven States have passed laws requiring cervical cancer screenings because too many women are dying as a result of poor detection. Forty- six States have passed laws requiring diabetes supplies to be covered because 20.8 million Americans are living with this disease and they have a basic need for care.

So the Senate is going to come in and say: Those mandates are not important. You do not have to do that anymore. And companies are going to be able to create this unbelievable morass of different offerings which are going to confuse and, I predict, infuriate the consumers of this country, just the way the prescription drug medicine Part D program has infuriated seniors across the country.

Now, the numbers I cited about cervical cancer and mammograms and screening, those are not just numbers in a report. We have seen, every day in Massachusetts, how those things make a difference.

Kirsten Paragona of Ipswich discovered, in a routine pap test, that she had developed stage 3 cervical cancer. She was 23 years old. And because that pap test was included as a mandatory benefit in her health plan, Kirsten is alive today, with a 2-year-old daughter, instead of living without a reproductive system.

For all those in the Senate who want to talk about a culture of life, that is a culture of life. And that is a culture of life worth fighting for.

And then there is Gracie Bieda Javier of Jamaica Plain. She lost her mother to breast cancer in 1987. Without mandated coverage for treatment, Gracie's mother was unable to afford the service. And now Gracie is dedicated to helping other women avoid her mother's fate. And because Massachusetts now requires mammography and treatment services, Gracie screens and treats more than 800 low-income women a year. That is because it is mandated.

What is going to happen when you open this up to so-called market forces? People who cannot afford it are really going to get hurt. In her own words: ``[Gracie] could not think of a better way to honor [her] mother on Mother's Day than to make sure we maintain these lifesaving mammogram services.''

I think she has it right. It saves lives.

Under this bill, 2.3 million people in Massachusetts alone will lose guaranteed health benefits. So what are we going to do? We are going to go back and tell them: Gee, the Senate, in all of its wisdom, deemed that these things that the State thought were important for you--they are not important for you. And the State does not have to provide them.

Typically, the great thing about a democracy is that if there is a better idea, people get to hear it and they get to perhaps choose it. They get to debate that kind of alternative on the Senate floor and engage in a debate on the merits of each of these approaches. What is so fundamentally frustrating about this week's discussion is that differing approaches are not really allowed to see the light of day except in speeches.

Frankly, there are a lot of ways we could approach the small business issue. Senator Snowe and I have had hearings in the Small Business Committee. We have worked for a number of years to try to narrow down options on AHPs. A lot of people don't like them because of the mandate issue. We have tried to wrestle with how do you deal with the mandates and still lower costs. There actually is a way to open regional pooling for States and allow a State that doesn't want to lose its mandates to opt out. Why can't we have that discussion on the floor of the Senate? You could create pooling. You could create a regional effort to reduce costs. But you could allow people the right to also choose to hold onto the benefits they want, if they want, and not deprive the States of that option. There were a host of other ideas that we have been working on.

I regret enormously that all of the effort that went into those negotiations and discussions is not going to see the effort of real legislation by voting on those different amendments. We also had hearings which suggested a whole bunch of different ways which we could provide and help small businesses without doing harm to the system. None of that has been incorporated or is going to be incorporated here.

In 2004, I offered America a plan that would provide every single American the same health insurance enjoyed by Members of Congress. Since that time, Senator Durbin and Senator Lincoln have taken that idea and turned it into a bill that creates the Small Employers Health Benefits Program which he discussed. I am a sponsor of that. Under that bill, small businesses could join a national pool and could take advantage of the same Federal administrative functions and bargaining power that is enjoyed by 8 million Federal employees across the Nation. Why should we discriminate against them? Those small businesses could have the ability to pool, to come in and negotiate less expensive health care and provide better benefits to their people and do it with the same leverage that the 8 million Federal employees do. Most importantly, it would protect the State mandates that individual States have decided they want to put in.

Republicans argue that that alternative does not provide the savings that small business owners desperately need. The facts tell a different story. We all want savings. We have to reduce the burden of health care on small business. I understand that. That is why Senator Snowe and I have been working to arrive at a way to do so. But experts predict that premium savings for participating small businesses could reach as high as 50 percent higher in the first 2 years, if it passes. It seems to me there is a way to approach this. If you go with the idea of Senator Durbin and Senator Lincoln, we would actually be able to reduce those costs by almost 50 percent.

If this week was actually an effort to provide relief to small businesses, we would be discussing all of the options to provide that relief. I don't think that coming up with a precooked, one-size-fits- all, one-ideology, one-approach, one-party plan is the way to help businesses. It seems to me that what is going to happen is, a lot of our small business owners and about 25 million uninsured Americans who work for them are going to get caught up in this political show of the week. It is obvious there is a partisan disagreement in what is keeping the Senate as divided and as incapable of doing real legislative effort. And that is a shame. It doesn't have to be that way, if we mapped out enough time and actually worked across the aisle to try to find the common ground. This is one of those issues where you have to put the politics aside. That is how you are going to win one for struggling entrepreneurs.

There are a couple of places we ought to be able to find that common ground pretty quickly. First, how about for children in America? The example I gave earlier of a mother who makes a decision about a child not playing a sport or a child who comes up with a permanent impairment is replicated tens of thousands of times over across the country. We have 11 million children who have no health insurance at all. Sure, if they get extremely sick, they will wind up being taken care of in a hospital and somebody will ultimately see them, if it isn't too late. But the fact is, by that early screening and by involving ourselves early in their lives, educators and medical experts tell us that kids who are properly fed, who have good nutritional practices as a consequence of their meeting with doctors and mothers, learning about those kinds of things, do 68 percent better in school and, in fact, reduces the cost in the long run because they begin to learn good health practices as a consequence of that exposure.

Why couldn't we be using Health Week to talk about the most fundamental value of all, which is caring for our children and providing every child in America with health insurance? You would reduce unnecessary hospitalizations by 22 percent, and you would replace expensive critical care and inexpensive preventative care. Obviously, we would do much better in the classroom and much better in families if that were the case. We are the richest Nation on the planet. Yet one in four kids in America goes without immunizations. One in three children with asthma don't get the medicine they need. It is unbelievable to me that there is as much talk about family values as we hear in the political dialog, such as it is in the country, but then you have 11 million children who don't have any health care, and the country is content to let it stand.

You could insure every single child in America for less than it costs to roll back the Bush tax cut for the wealthiest people. That is the choice. Every child in America could be covered with health insurance if people earning more than $1 million a year didn't have to get another tax cut. But Washington chooses the tax break for the few who don't need it instead of health care for the 11 million who need it desperately.

A 2005 Mason-Dixon poll found the following: 82 percent of respondents think that every child in America should be covered by a Federal health program, if their parents can't afford it; 90 percent of voters believe that 11 million uninsured children in America is a serious problem and Congress ought to address it and resolve it; 79 percent agree that it is our moral responsibility to ensure health care for every child and for the Federal Government to invest in such programs.

In addition, the poll found that when voters are presented with a description of Kids First, the specifics of the bill that would provide kids with health care, 75 percent of voters support it and support its passage by a margin of three to one. They have said overwhelmingly that providing health care to kids is more important than providing the next round of the tax cuts and making them permanent.

So Americans know what we need to do. There is no more pressing need than improving health care for our children. That is why nearly 25 national organizations representing over 20 million Americans have endorsed the Kids First proposal. When I first sent an e-mail telling people about the Kids First, within 2 days, over 20,000 parents phoned in with recordings of why the Kids First Health Program is important to their families. Let me share one or two of those with you.

Jennifer from Central Islip, NY, called in and said:

I have a child who is on medication . . . that costs me

$250 or more a month. I have children who can't go to the

dentist. You know, it's the worst feeling in the world, as a

mother, to know that in order to afford health care, you're

not going to be able to afford the home you live in.

Jordan from Reading, PA, called in and said:

Nalani . . . my 3-year-old . . . was born with cataracts .

. . Eventually chances are she will be blind. Unfortunately,

times are really hard in my house and we don't have health

insurance and I can't afford to give her the surgery that

will fix the problem that she has. I just can't imagine

growing up knowing that there was a way that you could have

helped. But because nobody thought you were important enough

and because your parents didn't have enough money for health

insurance . . . you went blind.

With calls like this, it is extraordinary to me that Congress continues to offer a blind eye to these cries for help. This program that is being offered, I regret to say, is only going to confound and confuse and make worse the current delivery of health care in America.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am so happy to come to the floor today because the Senate is finally debating how we can help small businesses across our country afford health care for their employees. Just as Senator Gregg has mentioned how important it is to provide benefits to groups who want to invest, and to individuals and companies who want to invest and grow the economy, so too it is critically important that we provide small businesses the ability to invest in themselves. That is what I want to talk about today.

Small businesses are critical to this country. They are critical to rural States such as mine in Arkansas, but they are the engine of our economy in this great Nation. They are the No. 1 employers. That is why it is so important that we get this right, that we provide them with a tool that will allow them to reinvest in themselves and their employees and their communities, so that we can keep that engine going.

I applaud my colleague from Wyoming, Senator Enzi, for all he has done in bringing about this debate. He has worked hard and genuinely on this issue, and I appreciate very much what he has put into this. He has helped us make sure this is not a debate about whether this is a critical issue.

This reminds me of something I was taught by my father who said: If it is worth doing, it is worth doing right. It is worth doing correctly. That is what we are here to talk about today.

I believe very strongly that our small businesses are so important to us--our self-employed individuals in this country have the greatest spirit in the world--and it is so important that we should not offer them a second-rate opportunity. We should offer them the same opportunity we have as Federal employees and Members of Congress: The opportunity to build a pool that will offer them greater access, greater choice at a lower cost, by pooling all of themselves together across this great country, while maintaining the quality, which is what we do for ourselves. We maintain the quality of the product of the health insurance we receive or have access to as Federal employees and Members of Congress, and we should do no less for the small businesses and the self-employed individuals in this great country.

So I hope, as we continue this debate, we will remember those hard- working American families who are depending on us not just to do something, but to do what is right and fair, and offering what we see as fair tax policy and offering what we see as fair access to the same quality product of health care and health insurance that we as Members of Congress get.

The small business health care crisis is undoubtedly one of the issues I hear the most about when I return home to Arkansas. In fact, in every community in our Nation, as well as millions of working families across this country, we are seeing the difficulty of having access to quality health care and health insurance and the ability to pay for that.

There are approximately 46 million Americans currently without health insurance, including 456,000 Arkansans whom I am responsible for in terms of producing a product that is worthy of those individuals. Small businesses are the No. 1 source of our jobs in Arkansas. Yet only 26 percent of the businesses with fewer than 50 employees offer health insurance coverage. Workers at these businesses, which again are the engine of our economy, are most likely to be uninsured. In fact, 20 percent of working-age adults are uninsured in Arkansas. This number is alarming, and addressing this problem should be a national priority, and we should approach it as if we are going to do the best job that we are capable of doing. That is why we are here today, to talk about that.

Mr. President, 224 major organizations are opposed to the proposal that

Senator Enzi has brought before us. Two hundred-and-twenty-four is a huge number: everywhere from diabetes to mental illness to hospital federations. These individuals understand how important the years have been in allowing State insurance commissioners to be able to set mandates in order to cover what is important to individuals in their States, and what is important to small businesses and everyone in those States. Those States have the right and the ability to figure out what is important to them, and the majority of them have agreed on many of these major issues.

Those who lack health insurance do not get access to timely and appropriate health care. We know that, and we see it. We see it in the cost of Medicare when people don't get health care for 20 or 25 years when they are in the working marketplace as a small business owner or employee, and then they become more costly to us when they hit Medicare age because they haven't received the screenings, the timely visits to the doctor, and they haven't been getting the kind of health care they truly need. They have less access to these important screenings. They don't have access to the state-of-the-art technology that exists or prescription drugs, which is another piece of what can help keep down the cost of health care.

Working families need help with this problem. The Institute of Medicine has reported that 18,000 people die each year because they are uninsured. The fact is, being insured does matter. It makes a big difference. It makes a difference in our health care costs. It makes a difference in whether you are going to survive--longevity, the ability to care for your family. It makes a big difference. We have reached a juncture where we are going to debate how we deal with those who are uninsured, whether we are going to give them substandard coverage or whether we are going to give them the coverage that we have.

Again, I commend my colleagues, Senator Enzi from Wyoming and Senator Nelson from Nebraska, for their leadership. I appreciate their hard work on this issue. But I do disagree, because I believe that the devil is in the details on this issue, and I am deeply concerned about the very harsh and unintended consequences that will occur if S. 1955 were to become law.

Senator Durbin and myself have been working together for several years to come up with what we believe is a better health care plan for America's small businesses. What we have done is looked to a 40-year- old tested delivery system, and it is the one that we ourselves use. It is a Federal plan that takes the best of what Government can do and combines it with the best of what private industry can do. The private marketplace and the competition that it can create allows the Government to pool all of its Federal employees and use that pool as a negotiating tool to bring us greater choice at a lower cost.

About 3 years ago, I suppose it was, my staff and I were discussing the way we could help small businesses, and I thought about the way my Senate office operates. It operates much like a small business in my home State and here. As I looked at my employees, I saw that I had two employees, one with 26 years with the Federal Government, another with 30 years with the Federal Government. I had two women who had delivered babies and were on maternity leave. I had some, such as myself, with small children and a husband that is on my plan, and then I had a host of young, healthy staffers who were single. But I had a whole array of different individuals who needed a tailor-made insurance plan for their needs. While there are similarities in our Senate office and small businesses, there are also some obvious differences. One of the most glaring contrasts is access to affordable and quality health care. I saw what my office went through and realized that is what small businesses are going through. I knew we could do better. I knew we could take the plan of what we have and apply it to small businesses.

Last year, more than 8 million people were banded together in the Federal employees purchasing pool, and that gave us choices among 10 national health insurance plans and a variety of local insurance plans, and a total of 278 private insurance plans from the private marketplace. Not government-run--not government-run health care at all--but health care from the private industry, health insurance from the private industry that was created by competition of the multiple Federal employees across the country. It offered us greater access, greater choices at a lower cost.

So I am here to ask this question: Why don't we try to give small businesses access to that same type of private health insurance option that Members of Congress and Federal employees enjoy today? Rather than reinvent the wheel, why don't we create a program for small businesses that is based on our Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan, through the FEHBP, by pooling them, the small businesses, together in one nationwide pool. That is exactly what Senator Durbin and I have proposed in our Small Employers Health Benefit Program. By pooling small businesses across America into one risk and purchasing pool similar to the FEHBP, our program will allow employers to reap the benefit of group purchasing power and streamline administrative costs as well as access to more plan choices. The SEHBP, as we have introduced, lowers costs for small businesses in two key ways: It pools them into one national pool across the country, therefore spreading the risk between the healthy and the sick, the young, the old, those who live and work in the remotest parts of this great land and those who work in the most urban areas. Second, our plan significantly lowers administrative costs for small businesses.

Two economists have estimated that SEHBP would save small businesses between 27 and 37 percent annually, even if they don't take advantage of the tax cut that we offset costs with by insuring lower income workers. We provide a tax cut to small businesses, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why those on the other side of the aisle, for the first time I have ever noticed, will fight a tax cut for small businesses. Providing small business a tax cut to be able to engage in what is such an important tool in getting themselves and their employees insured makes good sense. What a great investment.

Senator Gregg was talking about balancing all of that and the economy. What a great way to balance what corporate America gets and their ability to deduct health insurance costs that they have and small business getting a tax cut for investing in their employees and health benefits for them. Under our bill, employers will receive an annual tax credit for contributions made on behalf of their workers who make $25,000 per year or less. And if the employer contributes 60 percent or more to the health insurance premium of an employee making $25,000 or less, the employer will receive a 25-percent tax credit. And the tax credits increase with the number of people covered and the proportion of premium the employer chooses to cover. Also, the employer receives a bonus tax credit for signing up in the first year of the program, because we know from the example of the Federal employees that the more employees who are in the pool, the greater advantage to everyone concerned. Small businesses will save thousands of dollars--even more-- under our plan.

Segmenting the market into different association pools, as S. 1955 does under Senator Enzi's bill, will not achieve these savings that would be created by instituting one large pool with all of those small businesses and self-employed individuals. Each association will be administering to a separate group with a different administrative structure and different costs, obviously. More funds would be going to administrative costs as opposed to serving the people with a quality health plan. Our SEHBP would have one administrative structure and could pool approximately 53 million workers together, therefore balancing the risk of sick and healthy, young and old, rural and urban, for affordable rates for everybody. Why wouldn't we want to make our pool as big as it possibly could be, as we do with the Federal workers?

I believe our plan takes a real moderate and balanced approach that combines the best of what Government can do with the best of what the private sector can do, and preserving important coverage for preventive health

care treatment such as diabetes supplies, mammograms, prostate screening, maternity and well-baby care, immunization, things that States themselves have decided are important enough to mandate coverage for and ensure that the people of their State are going to get the safe and important coverage of illnesses that are critical to them in their State.

Like the FEHB Plan, our program does not promote Government-run health care, but it harnesses the power of market competition to bring down health insurance costs using a proven Government negotiator in the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, which is the negotiator for our plan. We, once a year, as Federal employees, can choose among 270-plus plans. We are able to actually benefit from that proven Government negotiator and the harnessing of that power.

Our legislation, S. 2510, has been endorsed by many organizations-- the National Association of Women Business Owners, Small Business Majority, the American Medical Society, the American Diabetes Association, the National Mental Health Association, the Cancer Society, and many more that have realized how important it is to use a proven example, a proven structure that maintains quality but helps by pooling and bringing down those costs.

The Mental Health Liaison Group, representing over 35 national mental health organizations, wrote to us and said about our bill:

S. 2510 does not sacrifice quality of coverage for

affordability or allow the offering of second class health

insurance to small businesses. Within the FEHBP program,

small business owners, employees and their family members

would be covered by all the consumer protections in their

home states--including hard-won state mental health parity

laws and mandated benefit laws.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, writing to us on behalf of over 60,000 primary care pediatricians and pediatric specialists, wrote:

Through the benefits of pooling small businesses and

providing tax cuts to small employers, small pediatric

practices will be assisted in the health insurance market

without sacrificing health care services for children.

The American Diabetes Association wrote to us and said:

While other proposals seeking to provide health benefits

for small businesses . . . have exempted or eliminated

coverage for important diabetes care protections, [our bill,]

S. 2510, will allow individuals with diabetes to receive the

important health care coverage they require to remain healthy

and productive members of the workforce.

This is not just about quality of life, although many of us believe that is very important. We as Members of Congress enjoy a quality of life because of the very healthy health insurance program we are offered. We want our small businesses that are vital to our economy to enjoy that same opportunity. But it is also about economics. It is about making sure we keep our workforce, particularly our small businesses and their workforce, healthy and thriving and productive and in the workplace. It is about making sure America's working individuals and working families get the health care they need before they reach 65. When they hit 65 in the Medicare Program, then they are going to be more costly to Government because they are not going to have gotten the health care they needed and deserved in their working years.

I believe our plan is better in so many ways. I am proud we are having this debate, and I hope so many people will realize we can do better. We can do better and make sure we truly elevate small businesses and self-employed people to the same level we hold ourselves, in providing them the access to the same quality type of health care.

Our SEHBP bill offers tax cuts for small employers. Senator Enzi's bill does not. SEHBP relies on a proven program. It is based on the successful Federal Employees Health Benefit Program which has efficiently and effectively provided extensive benefit choices at affordable prices to Members of Congress and Federal employees for decades. For decades, we have had a proven program out there that proves you can harness the competitive nature of the marketplace, and with the oversight of Government and the State mandates, you can actually provide that quality of health insurance at a lower cost. By pooling small businesses together and allowing OPM to negotiate with private health insurance companies on their behalf, they, too, could have access to this wide variety.

On the other hand, Senator Enzi and Senator Nelson's bill establishes a new set of responsibilities at the U.S. Department of Labor, to administer an untried and an untested program. We don't reinvent the wheel. What we do is use what already exists. To invent a new section of the Department of Labor to administer Senator Enzi's bill is going to take time and money. We are not going to know how it needs to be administered through the Department of Labor. They have never done it before. Even the Department of Labor employees currently enjoy benefits from the health insurance program that is negotiated by the Office of Personnel Management. So it is hard to believe they are going to want to go to another system.

SEHBP offers individual self-employed workers the same access to health insurance that is offered to group businesses. SEHBP defines small businesses as groups of 1 to 100, so an individual self-employed person will be treated exactly as a business with 2 or more people. Any business with 1 to 100 employees is eligible to participate in what we are trying to do.

Under Senator Enzi's bill, the self-employed people are not pooled with the small businesses, unless they are mandated by State law. And there are not that many State laws that actually mandate that. But the self-employed people in 36 States, including Arkansas, will not have access to the same negotiated rates of businesses with 2 or more people. They will be pulled out of that pool and rated on their own. That means, if they are younger women of childbearing years or perhaps they are older workers at 50 or 55 and are diabetic, they will be rated completely separate from the pool, which means they will be segregated and treated differently. They don't get to enjoy the benefit of a larger risk pool which could bring down their costs and offer them greater choice.

Our bill also ensures access to health care specialists. Many States have passed laws requiring insurers to cover certain health care providers, including dentists or psychologists or chiropractors. All three of these and many more are required by our State of Arkansas law. I know the people of my State enjoy the assurance they have of knowing that their State regulator, their State insurance commissioner, is looking out for their needs. They can do that better on a State level. That is why we have always left those types of regulatory issues up to our State--because they know and can work.

Can you imagine being a small business, or better yet an employee of a small business, having to call some big, huge, Federal bureaucratic office to request or to complain or to have your concerns heard about what is not covered under your insurance plan? No, they call the State insurance commissioner today, and that is the way it should be. The State insurance commissioner can then respond to the concerns of their constituency and has done so very well over many years.

The coverage for diabetes supplies, mammography, and other important screenings are mandated by State law which would be preempted by what Senator Enzi is trying to do. Many States have passed laws requiring health insurance companies to cover these benefits because insurers simply were not doing it. It did not happen because the insurance commissioners just decided on a whim to do it; it is because the insurers were not covering it. Why do we have to go back and relearn that lesson?

For 40 years, the Federal Government has used the effectiveness of the pool of the 8 million Federal employees and been able to enjoy the protections that are there, guided by State insurance commissioners.

Our bill also prevents unfair rating on gender and health status. Under our bill, health insurers will be prohibited from ratings based on health status--whether you happen to be diabetic, whether you happen to have eating disorders--your gender, or the type of industry in which the employees are working. Under Senator Enzi's rules, that will be all preempted, even for the 15 States that don't allow ratings on these factors.

Our bill also frees employers to focus on running their businesses. They don't

have to go and negotiate these plans through their association or with their association. They are going to get sent a booklet just as we do, once a year, to review all that is available to them, and choices, and then figure out what is best for them. My employees--each of them picks something different. I pick coverage for a family with children. Some of them pick a PPO or an HMO. Some of them pick all different kinds of State plans and others that are offered to them in that process.

Absolutely.

How about if I just go ahead and yield to the Senator from Delaware because as a former Governor, he has some incredible stories to tell, and I think they really add to this debate. I will simply say to my colleagues that I hope they follow this debate very closely and certainly appreciate how important this is to the working families of all of our States.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Delaware.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I ask unanimous consent to continue until other Members arrive.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I will be glad to yield the floor when others are ready to speak.

I would like to add that the experience of many of our colleagues, whether they are former insurance commissioners, former Governors and others, brings to this table the understanding what the American people want, what our working families want. I think the debate is that small businesses definitely want more affordable health care. They also want to make sure that what they are providing for themselves and their families and their employees is quality service, quality coverage. That is what they deserve. That is what they want.

Even for those who feel so young and invincible, we also know that they may be one car accident or one diagnosis away from needing more comprehensive health insurance for the rest of their lives.

That is why we want to make sure--as I said in the beginning--that whatever we do is right, that we don't move forward on something that is going to be less productive and in the long run, unfortunately, put more people at risk.

My goal is to help small businesses while not jeopardizing the quality of health care for the 68 million Americans in State-regulated group plans that are already out there. We don't want to do harm there.

The fact is if we move forward on what Senator Enzi wants to do, which is preempting those State regulations and State mandates, we could do tremendous harm for those who are currently insured and the 16.5 million Americans with individual health insurance coverage who would probably lose some quality of coverage which they have.

If it is good enough for Federal employees, and if it good enough for Members of Congress, I think it should be good enough for millions of small business employees who are the economic backbone of communities throughout this Nation.

I applaud my colleagues for coming to the floor for this debate, and I hope we will have a serious debate so we can

move forward and actually do what is right for the American people.

Yes, absolutely.