Health Care Choice Act of 2009

Mr. President, I am delighted to see that my good friend and colleague from Tennessee is here.

Let me say, there is not a word the Senator from Tennessee has just said--I listened to his remarks--that I disagree with. In fact, I agree with everything he just said. I hope that mentality and attitude will prevail in the coming week or two we are going to be engaged in this discussion. I was thinking--when the Senator was talking--about an article I read the other day. It was making the same point the Senator from Tennessee is making; that is, that of the 50 largest banks in the world, 4 of them are located in the United States, 5 are located in our neighbor to the north, in Canada. Canada has a much smaller economy. Obviously, it is a smaller country than ours. They did not suffer any of the difficulties we have gone through during the last couple years during this economic crisis. They had a downturn. I do not mean to say it was all working beautifully for them, but, nonetheless, they did not have the problems within their financial structures we have had, despite the fact they have actually 1 more than we do of those 50 largest banks.

Paul Krugman, of the New York Times, whom I do not always agree with, has written about this point as well. I do not know if my colleague has seen his articles. Size, I understand, is important to people, and that may be one way of looking at all this. But it is excessive risk, it is a question of whether there is proper regulation of activities. It is leverage. It is capital requirements. It is liquidity. It is all these other factors--the ones we are trying to keep an eye on--because size then can become a problem.

But size may not be the only issue. You could be a small institution engaging in the marketing of products that put the system at risk. So we need to get focused on exactly what are the issues we are trying to address in all this. That is what we have tried to do. Again, my compliments to both the Acting President pro tempore and the Senator from Tennessee for their tireless work. The Senator from Tennessee knows he and I worked and spent a lot of time talking about all this as well. A lot of what is in this bill is a reflection of the Senator's labors. I realize it is not exactly everything he wants, but I think it is 90, 95 percent of what we are talking about. My hope is in the coming days we can try to close whatever concerns and gaps people have that do not do any underlying damage to the overall thrust of what we are trying to improve.

I wish to pick up on a second point as well because I think it is very important. I have said the three goals I have for this bill. I hope all of us have for this bill. One is to try to close the gaps where we have this unregulated part of our economy that went kind of wild out there and caused so much of the difficulties our country has been going through. So to the extent we can do that--recognizing it is not our job to regulate. I always say there are two things we do not do very well in this institution: One is to set accounting standards or necessarily write regulations. It is not within our pay grade to try to do all that. We try to focus on institutions that have that responsibility and then demand the accountability. But I, clearly, want to see us plug in those gaps so we do not have shadow economies operating that can put us at risk.

Secondly, to try to see if we cannot create--there is always some danger in trying to do this and I commend both my colleagues because they have been the principal advocates of this--some sort of an early radar warning system. I do not know how perfectly it can work or how well it can work but at least having the idea that we have people with eyes who will bring a different perspective to all this, to kind of keep an eye out to the Greeces, the Shanghais, as well as to what happens here because we live in that global economy, as my colleague from Tennessee has just articulated.

So if this next crisis comes--and it will come as certain as I am standing here, maybe long after we are gone from here--there will be another economic crisis, some bubble, I suppose, someplace--the question is, Can we identify it early enough before it metastasizes--I use that word--into the rest of the economy or globally, as is Greece, for instance, today. It is the downgrading of their debt that all of a sudden caused the Euro to decline, and Europe finds itself, once again, on the precipice of an economic disaster, spilling potentially over to the rest of the world. So that is the second point of the bill.

But the third point is equally important; that is, to make sure, in our determination to satisfy point 1 and point 2, we do not end up strangling a financial system. We need to make sure the creativity, the innovation, the flow of credit and capital that are critical for job creation, wealth creation, and economic growth are going to be there.

That is a very difficult sense of balance to maintain. No one has ever gotten it absolutely right. It is always one side or the other that seems to be dominating the other. But those are my three goals, in a sense: to make sure we satisfy those first two, while simultaneously making sure we do not end up making it more difficult for that kind of innovation and creativity to spring forward.

So it is exactly as the Senator from Virginia and the Senator from Tennessee and many others have done--because they had an idea, they had imagination, they had determination to go out and to create an idea, to see an idea that would put people to work, to solve problems for people, whether it is a medical device or a prescription drug or creating a new widget that improves the efficiencies of how we function as a country. There are all sorts of ideas that have been the wellspring of what has made America such a unique place in the world, particularly in the 20th century.

So before we begin this whole amendment process--I will repeat this as many times as I can--those are the goals. I think they are the shared goals. I believe they are the shared goals we all have. Obviously, there are debates about whether certain points advance those goals or cause some retreat in them, and I believe honest people can disagree about how to do that.

In our job, which is the hardest thing in the world--I am speaking about a former Governor and a former mayor. They have come out of the executive side of the government, where it must be awfully frustrating to be sitting in a body with 98 other people who are also, in a sense, executives--we are all coequals--to bring forth our ideas to try to forge, out of a body such as this of 100 people, some clear, focused vision of how to achieve those goals.

But that is the challenge we have in the coming weeks. Again, I am very grateful to both my colleagues for the contribution they have made. I say that with complete sincerity and appreciation for their efforts. This can be, I hope, a good, honest discussion and debate. Hopefully, we can agree on some things. Others may have to have that debate and those votes to see where it lies and not try to bind up the place in filibusters and other things. It is not an unlimited debate. We do not have unlimited time, obviously, to do it. But we can spend the next couple weeks to try to get this focused in a way where we can come out and, again, not solve every problem. This bill does not take on every imaginable financial institution and issue out in the country, but we think it focuses on some of these critical ones that are important.

I appreciate my colleague from Tennessee coming over and sharing his thoughts. Again, I agree with him on our goals. That is my point.

Mr. President, again I wish to thank my colleague from Tennessee for his comments and thoughts. I won't address each and every point, but I wish to make a couple of suggestions.

Most people I have worked with over the years, many of whom have long since left this Chamber since the day I arrived here in January of 1981, I think people believe this about me, which is that I never chaired a committee before 36 months ago, 37 months ago, despite being here for 30 years. I had the wonderful privilege of sitting next to some people who have had longevity, both politically and healthwise, so I ended up having the wonderful experience of being a junior Member for virtually my entire service. Only about 37 or 38 months ago did I become a chairman of a major committee the first time, the Banking Committee. It was through the departure of my great friend Paul Sarbanes who has now retired, the elevation of Joe Biden to the vice presidency, and the passing of my best friend in this Chamber, Ted Kennedy, that created an opportunity for me for the first time in a quarter of a century to actually chair a committee.

But I have managed bills on the floor in the past, either as a subcommittee chairman or for other matters. In every single instance, with the exception of one or two, I have always had a Republican partner in what I have done. Kit Bond and I did family and medical leave together, along with Dan Coats of Indiana. Orrin Hatch and I wrote child care legislation 27 years ago. I worked on private securities litigation reform with Phil Gramm of Texas. Mitch McConnell and I did the Help America Vote Act together. Lamar Alexander and I did premature birth infant screening. There is a long list without exception. I don't have a public partner yet on this one here and, again, I think it is a reflection on the times we are in, in terms of people's willingness to come together and say this isn't exactly what I would write, anymore than this bill is today, but to sit down and help manage something through so we get to that point of getting the best result we can under the circumstances in which we live, the times in which we live.

So over these coming weeks, while I don't have a partner yet in all of this, I will certainly be reaching out the best I can to people to say, Come along. Again, if you are looking for perfection, if one side wants to totally dominate the other, obviously, you don't get that. But my experience, with some success over the years, includes in our own committee where during the last 37 months we have had 42 measures come out of the Banking Committee. Now 37 of those 42 measures are the law of the land today because Richard Shelby and I have been able to work together with others on a wide range of issues, by the way. We worked on transit security, terrorist risk insurance, port security, a lot of major balls, Iran sanction legislation, and the like. So I am hopeful that will happen here in the next couple of weeks, and I am reaching out to people so that will be the process.

Let me mention specifically a couple of things. I agree with my colleague, I hope we can resolve the derivatives issue. I commend Blanche Lincoln for her efforts, and Chuck Grassley. By the way, the only bipartisan proposal that is on the table right now is the one Senator Lincoln forged and managed to get some bipartisan support for. So I commend my colleague from Arkansas for her work on that committee.

It is going to involve all of us here to come up with some answers on derivatives. Despite the fact that my friend from Tennessee would love to sit in that chair of his over there and have a good laugh, as we end up having a battle here--no, sir, the Senator from Tennessee is going to be involved in that whether he likes it or not if we are going to end up resolving it.

On the issue again of too big to fail, the Presiding Officer and the Senator from Tennessee have done about 98 percent of the work. There are a couple of issues we are going to try to work ourselves through over the next couple of days and present to our colleagues what we believe is a fair resolution of that matter that will deal with those issues and that will guarantee I hope once and for all the end of the debate about whether anything in this bill is designed to perpetuate the too-big-to-fail concept.

Let me mention the issue of underwriting, because we have written-- and of course the Federal Reserve has now written underwriting standards, at long last, by the way. I was around in 1994 when we passed the legislation mandating the Federal Reserve to promulgate regulations against deceptive and fraudulent practices in the residential mortgage market. They never promulgated one in all of those years, so we ended up in this unregulated part of the economy, again, where a lot of these brokers and others were out there luring people into complicated matters. I get a kick out of this: Having owned several homes in Connecticut--two, actually--over the last 30 years, and one home here, we have all been to those closings, when we sit down across that table and there is usually a stack of papers with tabs on them and someone who is representing the buyer and seller is asking us to sign. I have yet to meet anybody, whether it is a banker, a lawyer, a Senator, or a Congressman, who reads all of the details in those things. We sort of assume whoever is representing our interests has protected us. Well, we can imagine an awful lot of people in the country who lack the understanding or even the financial literacy who appreciate what they are reading.

Clearly underwriting standards are important. How do we achieve that? For the first time, what these community banks like about our bill is we are not going to have that unregulated part of the economy, so they are going to play by the same rules. That has been unfair to those who have been regulated. I can't speak for community bankers in Tennessee or Virginia, but I can tell my colleagues in my State of Connecticut, I forget the numbers, but it is so infinitesimal, the number of foreclosures that occurred or subprime lending that went on within my community banks, and I presume that is pretty true nationwide based on the evidence I have heard over the last

number of months. So we need to get that unregulated shadow economy regulated.

We also know what has happened. In securitization, the difference between Canada and the United States and Europe and ourselves is we have had a deep appreciation for the ability of the average American to buy a home because we have understood how much that meant to people. The idea that they can have their own home has been the greatest source of wealth creation for most Americans, an acquisition of equity in a piece of property that would ultimately provide a source of revenue to help educate your children, provide a cushion in your retirement. It stabilizes families, stabilizes neighborhoods and communities. Look at neighborhoods where you have renting and where you have people who have a financial interest in that property in which they live, and the differences are huge. So we are different. I know in Europe and elsewhere you get 5-year loans and so forth. We are the only country in the world, the only one, that provides a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage for people. It has been a remarkable tool to provide stability and wealth creation for people. Other countries don't do that.

I certainly believe you have to have underwriting standards. You have to have them. The question is how do you get them and what is the standard, because as my friend points out--and he is absolutely right about this--having that 15 percent or 20 percent may be absolutely critical under one set of circumstances, but for someone else it may not be necessary. You may actually have a zero down, again, based on the FICO scores and other factors that are there to apply one standard over another. What we want is underwriting standards that will take into consideration the ability of that borrower to meet those obligations so they understand what they are getting into.

The securitization of the real estate market has provided a source of capital and liquidity that has allowed for a further expansion of home ownership. So I am not opposed to securitization at all; it is a question of whether it can be done responsibly, the rating agencies that brand these bundled products as being AAA or AA and whether the institutions are actually marketing products that they are going to be concerned about what happens to them. We all know what has occurred for a lot of the unregulated brokers. We recall we had those hearings in which they showed their Web site where the first rule of the broker was: Convince the borrower you are their financial adviser. Of course, we have learned they were anything but in many cases their financial adviser. They are being paid rather quickly. The banks that are writing the mortgages hold on to them on average 8 to 10 weeks. That is the average time. So basically in that 8 or 10 weeks they bundle these together and sell them off, so they are out of the game; they have been paid. The broker is paid, the bank is paid, and some unsuspecting investor has just acquired something that has a brand on it of AAA or AA and they feel pretty good. Home mortgages have been a pretty reliable investment over the years. People pay their mortgages. And of course no one was sitting there insisting that we look at exactly whether that borrower could afford to do this under these circumstances or looking at whether it was a fully indexed price or looking at all of these other teaser rates and things that went on in there.

We will have someone there who will now be accountable, because we are going to keep an eye on you. There is a cop on the beat who says to the broker that you have to do this right. We are saying to institutions out there you are going to, one, either put up skin in the game, because I know if you have skin in the game you will pay more attention to what you are doing; you will not expose yourself to losses if you have skin in the game or--and this is where we need to come together--meet some underwriting standard. Make the choice. If you don't want to do that, put some money on the table, because I want you to bear some loss if that thing goes out the door and you have allowed it to happen because you decided you didn't care. I prefer to have the underwriting standards. That is one option I looked at, and I invite my colleague to look at this, to get good underwriting standards, in the absence of which we might have an inability to move forward. I raise that as one thought.

On the consumer side of the equation, a lot more gets made of these issues for the very reason my friend from Tennessee worries about. I find people sort of pumping up politically trying to fire up people because they have other motives in all of this. I am aware that people can demagog on the issue of what we are trying to do. For the first time in our country, seven agencies have had a consumer protection responsibility, and virtually all of them have failed. It is not a priority. There is always something else that comes in that takes a priority position, including those who have the prudential responsibilities of safety and soundness. I acknowledge that safety and soundness is critical. I am also painfully aware that for quite a bit of time, between 2005 and 2007, people were saying: Our institutions are safe and sound. What are you talking about? How do you know that? Look at how much money they are making--when, in fact, it was rotting from within, because of the very things my colleague talked about: lack of underwriting standards, people were pushing this stuff out the door, and there were unregulated sections of our economy running wild. It was hardly safe and sound; nobody was watching what was happening at the most fundamental level--that person who picks out a home for their family and decides this is what we would love to have; they pick out colors for the rooms and get excited, and then they are across the table and they close on the deal. It is hardly a level playing field.

For the overwhelming majority of Americans, it is hardly a level playing field. When you are excited about it and you are convinced this is the right thing for your family, you can get lured into those deals. I am not excusing the consumer. We all have to be more responsible. Senator Daniel Akaka has spent time talking about financial literacy. We tried to include provisions to raise the level of financial literacy. My colleagues know I have two young children--an 8-year-old and a 5-year-old. My 8-year-old is in second grade here in a public school in the District. They are trying to get them to talk more in math classes early on about how to balance a checkbook, so that we start raising a generation that will understand financial responsibilities at an early age.

I don't discount the moral responsibility and the financial responsibility people have. That is where a lot of this began. All we are trying to do here is say that average citizen has an advocate in this process.

We saw what happened to the credit card industry, which was gouging people right and left. That bill passed 90 to 5 here, trying to do something about that issue. I worry that sometimes people glom onto these ideas and say the sky is falling, and what a dreadful thing we may do, when that is hardly the intention at all.

I am prepared to listen to ideas on how we can make this work better. I don't want someone to exaggerate what this means and then suggest somehow that the bill should fall because maybe we are trying to do a little more in this area of protecting people, who have very little protections out there in the world today.

I am not talking about what happens at some community bank level. In fact, the community bankers--again, providing regulatory coverage to those nonregulated areas is important, as we are talking about here; it is not the Federal regulators. If your financial institution's business assets are less than $10 billion--and I only have one in Connecticut that has assets in excess of $10 billion--then your cop is that local involvement, not the Federal Government or some national consumer protection agency jumping all over you. It is going to be done at a local level. Again, we will have to watch it and see how it works. I think we would be remiss in the bill if we didn't end up with something that says to the American consumer: What do I get out of this?

Lastly, I don't like the bashing that goes on. I realize that happens. To make a point, sometimes people engage in that. My colleague said this at the outset of his remarks, and I commend him. The idea that we want to provide that capital, that credit for that person, with an idea that if someone

wants to expand a plant, we need to have a Wall Street that helps that happen. This is too circular. It was all happening within the sort of closed circulatory system, where little of that capital was moving out. Basically, people were thinking how to scam it. By making bets for and against certain things, their wealth increased, but very little of it got out through that mechanism to that person you are talking about there--maybe that person you went to as a young man of 25, who took a chance on you and said that guy has a good idea and I am going to get behind him. That is the idea we ought to have more of, where a person with a good idea can come through the door, and someone may be interested in your idea.

That happens in venture capital and equity markets. My colleague from Virginia can bear witness to what angel investors can do. I spoke last evening with our colleague from Missouri, Kit Bond, who cares about it, as Senator Warner does. We will have amendments on that. We possibly went too far in the bill in that area. We need to fix that so that the venture capitalist who thinks you have a good idea can get behind it. Too much of Wall Street gave up on that. No customers were coming in the door as we know them here, and it got so self-absorbed in its own capacity to generate wealth for itself that it lost sight of what this is supposed to all be about. That is what makes people so furious.

I thank my colleague from Tennessee--this is probably not something he wants to be thanked for, but having been charged, he has been very involved in this. I will never forget as long as I live that morning meeting about six of us had. He was included. It was on the first floor. We met to figure out how to do this thing in the fall of 2008, to put us into a position where we don't find a financial meltdown and collapse. We will never know the answer as to whether that would have happened. But when you have pretty important people telling you we are on the brink of that, we had to respond. We stepped up and managed to write something that I think made a difference. But the ability to come together and get that job done, to move us away from that, and then to watch, after we stabilized these institutions and kept them on their feet, provided the kind of security and predictability, turn around and sort of almost disregard all of that and get into these silly arguments about how much of a bonus I can take, in the midst of everybody else suffering, is where this arrogance comes in, which people in the country got so irate about.

There was a notion that having written that check for $700 billion to stabilize and provide certainty that we weren't going to collapse--you would have thought at that moment, for a couple of years, leaders of these institutions would say: Thank you, America, thank you, average Joe taxpayer, you kept this country alive. You stood up and made that choice. We thank you for doing that. By the way, for the next few years, we are going to take some hits for ourselves, self-imposed. We will not take huge bonuses of millions of dollars. We are going to roll up our sleeves and figure out how we can do a better job of doing like Bob Corker and Mark Warner did. Someone stood behind them and with them, and they grew a business, employed people, and created jobs in our country. I don't recall hearing one voice say that during all of this--not one stood up and said: Thank you, America; thank you for writing that check to help us stabilize our economy. It was the arrogance of it that drove people to distraction. I don't disagree. We need to move on in the debate. But it is also important to understand what happened here and why people are so angry and upset. Jobs have been lost, lives have been ruined--absolutely ruined--because of what happened over the last 18 months, and a little before that. They are never going to get it back again. That retirement income is gone, the home has been lost, and that job has disappeared. So they are never going to get back on their feet again.

When they hear somebody saying that is the way life is, and I hope one day life gets better for you--why not have a consumer protection agency to keep an eye on these things. Obviously, some people aren't going to watch out that closely for you. Maybe that is part of our job to do that. I don't want to create a situation to take small businesses and others--I know there has been a lot of talk about that, but that is not the intention. We can make it clear that that is not what we are trying to do at all. Too often sometimes we get insulated from what is happening out there. I understand that level. The tea party people-- many were at every event with ``dump Dodd'' signs and flags and bumper stickers. Certainly, it hurt personally that people would say that about me after 30 years of service. But I kind of understand it, too. I understand the average person. It wasn't about me personally, necessarily. They were deeply upset and frustrated. They are not bad people. Maybe there is some leadership out there and others who are frankly dangerous elements. I worry about that. I have a feeling that an awful lot of people who are not at a rally but are watching it on TV and reading about it feel that way too. They may say: I am not going to join in a crazy demonstration saying outrageous things, but I feel that way too. I think we need to acknowledge that in all of this. They are out there, and they are not Democrats, Republicans, Independents; they don't think about political affiliation every day. They wonder if anybody is watching out for them. Who cares about me? When these debates happen and people talk about systemic risk, derivatives, credit default swaps, and currency swaps, they say, what are you talking about? I don't understand what you are talking about. I presume it is important, but how does that affect me? I want to know is anybody in that place going to write anything here so when the credit card company or that bank, that is not necessarily the best guy in town--is someone standing up for me and giving me a shot that I don't end up in the ruinous position so many people did when we were going through a safe and sound period, when we were anything but safe and sound?

That is at the heart of all this. I will listen to ideas on how we can do a better job. If anybody claims they have all the wisdom, I get nervous about those people. We are not going to write something that will necessarily satisfy everybody. Hopefully, we can do something that makes sense.

I didn't intend to talk this long, but that point of not losing sight of our job here--it is about big companies that sell all over the world. I know that. Being able to have big financial institutions that they can stay with and compete in the global economy. But in our interest in satisfying that, let's not forget that person who is not a big company, a big corporation, who is going to work every day trying to raise their families and make sure if somebody gets sick, they will be OK, and they can retire with dignity and security, and maybe buy that home or take that vacation. They are not looking for much out there. They want to know in this debate, in this bill here, which has my name on it--the only name on it is mine at this point. There is only one name up here, and I will be the last to say there is anything Biblical about this. It is our best efforts to try to address some issues here. There are flaws in here, I will guarantee you. Sometimes things don't work as well as the author intended. But is there something in here that speaks to that individual out there, who is not a banker, not a Wall Street guy, not a big corporation, just a consumer in the country, and they would like to know we have them in mind.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, while we are on the subject matter, I appreciate the thoughts of my friend and colleague from Tennessee. Let me note one quick observation the Senator said. It goes back to the issue that Wall Street could have used a public relations firm. In a sense, that is the problem. When you have to hire a public relations firm, if you do not understand this yourself, then there is something fundamentally wrong. You do not need to hire a public relations firm if you are taking multimillion-dollar bonuses and 8.5 million people have lost their jobs and 7 million homes are in foreclosure, in no small measure, because of the problems you created. I don't think you need a public relations firm. Where is the sense of decency and ethics and morality that says: The average citizen made it possible for this institution I am running to stay alive? If I have to insist we hire a public relations firm, we are in deeper trouble than I could imagine.

That is usually the answer when things go wrong: hire a public relations firm. Just stand up and tell the truth. That might not be a bad idea. They always say it is the best defense on these matters.

I presume my colleague shares my view on this subject, that they should not have needed a public relations operation to do it. I could not resist responding. One would have thought a good look in the mirror would have done it, and saying to themselves: Why are people angry? What can we do to help get back on our feet?

That is what is going on out there. I thank my colleague. I did not mean to dwell on that point.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

That is correct, yes.

None whatsoever.

Amendment No. 3736

Mr. President, before he leaves the floor, I wish to commend our friend and colleague from Hawaii. I have had the privilege and pleasure of knowing Senator Akaka for a long time. He is consistent in his issue cluster, if you will. He obviously has issues to deal with in his State, but I have never known another individual who has been as dogged as the Senator from Hawaii has been about seeing to it that people get that clear, understandable information, the ability to learn more about their own financial activities, that literacy he has consistently talked about for such a long time.

There are other accomplishments he has achieved. He is a wonderful member of our committee. He has made a significant contribution to this bill. This bill can bear his name on it as having contributed a major portion of the effort we are trying to achieve. I thank him for that.

We have a ways to go now on the floor in the debates that come here, but I am grateful to him for his consistent support, his ideas he has brought to the product we have now before us. I thank him not only on behalf of his colleagues but on behalf of the American people. He may represent one State, but his language here affects every State and every person in it. That is a significant contribution. I thank the Senator for it.

Mr. President, I did not get a chance to respond to our colleague from Virginia, Senator Webb, and, first of all, to commend him. His wonderful service to our country in uniform is known by many, but every year he comes to the floor and takes a moment to talk about the conflict in Vietnam, where he played such a significant role in the fall of Saigon. We are grateful to him for his service to our country.

We are a better Chamber because of Jim Webb's presence here and the knowledge and understanding he brings. I know the Presiding Officer, as his colleague from Virginia, appreciates the relationship he has with him and the difference he has made in the Senate by being here. So I thank Jim Webb for that.

He has offered an idea, as well, to this financial reform package, one to which I am very sympathetic. There are some constitutional issues we have with tax measures that have to originate on the House side rather than on the Senate side under the Constitution. I know my colleague from Virginia is probably aware of that, but nonetheless his ideas have some merit. Obviously, when he brings it up, we will have a chance to talk about it, but I would be remiss if I did not mention that particular issue.

I see my colleague from North Dakota, who is here with some thoughts.

I yield the floor.

Will my colleague yield?

One of the powers of the systemic risk council is, in fact, the power to break up large financial institutions. It is not one of the things they would do, but it is a power which resides in our bill for them to do that. I couldn't agree more about the excessive risks that institutions have taken,

but there is a distinction. I always think it is more about what risks these institutions pose. Do they have capital standards, leverage standards, liquidity standards that are in place? As we were discussing earlier, of the 10 largest financial institutions in the world, the United States has 1. Of the top 50, 5 are in Canada, a country with which my colleague is more familiar than most. We have four. They have had very few financial problems during this crisis, not because of the size of their institutions so much as they are far better regulated in terms of what they can do, what risks they can assume. There are other things they engage in as well.

The point my colleague is making is a very sound one, to make sure we are not seeing our system exposed to the kind of actions that can bring it down. But I wanted to at least mention to him that we do have the power to divest, and we are trying to work on that issue of excessive risk. I appreciate his comments.

That is true.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, we have been having a conversation this morning. Senator Corker of Tennessee was on the floor, a member of our Banking Committee, and he and I engaged in a conversation about our legislation. Senator Akaka from Hawaii, a member of the committee as well, was here to talk about the bill. Senator Dorgan was here talking about arms control, but also about our legislation. Senator Jim Webb was also here this morning to talk about provisions in the bill. While there are no votes today, it was an opportunity for people to come and talk about either what they are in support of or what they object to and what additions they may wish to make.

Let me emphasize again my hope that today and over the weekend and Monday, Members who have amendments to this bill, Democrats and Republicans, if they would let us know what those amendments are so we can begin to process them and possibly accept, hopefully, as many as we possibly can as additions to the bill, and modify some, making them acceptable, without having necessarily to go into votes. Of course there will be some that will require a debate and discussion and votes on the floor. We wish to accommodate as many Members as we can over the next couple of weeks on these matters. I know the leader has indicated to me that his intention is to come in very early every day and to stay late next week and the week after if necessary so we can accommodate as many Members as possible in this debate. I know the floor staff of the Senate is delighted to hear those comments about being in early and staying late, but obviously we want to get this bill done if we can. It is an important piece of legislation. I know there are others who want to be heard on it. Obviously it is an emotional issue, given what our country has gone through over the last 2 years. So I lay that out as a backdrop for my colleagues and ask them to let us know how we can be helpful to them.

I will also respectfully ask that when Members bring up their amendments, if we can limit the time of debate so we don't have extended debate. A good, strong debate can occur over a half an hour or 45 minutes and might be more than adequate, and to then give our colleagues an opportunity to vote.

Briefly, this afternoon, before closing out this discussion, I wish to talk about a very important part of this bill. We have been hearing a lot of discussion about too big to fail and about the derivatives sections of the bill and the early warning system. One of the major attributes of this legislation is the establishment of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or division. We have never had one before. In fact, we have had many of them, but not one. We have around seven of them at the Federal level, various prudential regulators. I have great respect for the people who work in these divisions.

Candidly, as I think many of them would attest, the predominant function of the regulator has been the safety and soundness function, and the consumer side of that equation has always been sort of relegated to a second-class status in too many cases. As a result, over the years we have seen that consumer protection has not had, when it comes to financial services, the elevated status it deserves. So I wish to talk about briefly what is in our bill. I wish to take great exception to some of the falsehoods that are being bandied about to describe what is in this bill, address them each directly by quoting from the bill. Members themselves can then read the legislation to determine whether they think the language is adequate. Obviously we don't want to overly burden anyone, nor do we want to leave a situation where people are burdened, tremendously so, when their homes, their incomes, their retirement have been lost because consumer protection was not being considered at all during the time the economic crisis was emerging and during the time it exploded.

I would be very surprised if any Member of this body comes to the floor and says, Well, I don't think we need to put a focus on consumer protection. Virtually everyone I have spoken to has said this is very important. We need to have consumer protection in the financial modernization and financial reform bill. After all, I think it is widely understood that it was a failure of consumer protection that was at the very heart of the financial crisis. It was, of course, these bad mortgages that were being sold and that people were being lured into that caused the fires that began and that consumed our economy, or nearly consumed our economy. Over the last year and a half, in fact, as the Banking Committee has held a long series of hearings on the root cause of the crisis, the pattern has been clear. Americans, as we now know painfully, were sold mortgages they never understood and could never have afforded.

The very first witness we had before the Banking Committee when I became chairman in January and February of 2007--I had never been chairman of a committee before, until the retirement of my great pal and friend and wonderful chairman, Paul Sarbanes, who had served as chairman, and as Richard Shelby, my now ranking member had been chairman. In February the very first hearings we held were on the mortgage crisis.

The very first witness we had was a woman named Delores King, who is an elderly woman from Chicago. She is retired. She worked all her life. She had lost her husband, as I recall, but they had been able to buy a home years before. They had lived in that home and raised their family. She tragically lost her husband and she was on in years. She had a very small amount of debt. I don't know whether it was a credit card debt or utility debt, but I am talking small--$2,000 or $3,000, as I recall now. Three years ago she appeared as my first witness as chairman of the committee to talk about the mortgage crisis in January and February of 2007.

What happened to her happened, unfortunately, over and over again. A mortgage broker came and said: I know how to take care of that debt you have, Mrs. King. What we will do is rewrite your mortgage for you on your home. Here she was on a fixed income as a retiree in our country, trying to make ends meet. She had not a lot of retirement income. I think she may have worked in the postal department. She worked in the library. I thank my staff member here recalling from 3 years ago who was with me that day. She worked in a library in Chicago, obviously not making a lot of money as a librarian, or working in the library. So she was on a very fixed, narrow income as a retiree. That mortgage this guy sold to her ended up exploding on her in a matter of months to the point where it consumed 70 percent of her fixed income and she lost the home. Here is a woman who had done everything right, and that went on over and over again.

If you want to know why we are in the mess we are in, although things are getting better, it was Delores King's story being repeated over and over and over and over and over again that

caused the situation we are living in today.

So when I say the root cause of what happened to us financially began in the living rooms of Delores King and those like her, that is exactly what happened. There are other factors as well, but that is the root cause. So to talk about drafting a bill on financial reform and excluding the kind of protections that would have avoided Delores King losing her home and going through the financial turmoil as a retiree must be a critical part of this legislation and why I feel so passionately and strongly about this in our bill.

The regulators today we have in place simply can't get this job done. I won't dwell on it. I have great respect for people who work in our respective public sectors at the local, State, and national level. I am sure there are many good and talented people. But when you are subjected to a division or a bureau that kind of separates you out in sort of the basement or wherever else you are, if not physically at least how you are treated in the context of everything else, you get some flavor of what has happened here. Their jobs in these seven other regulatory bodies have been divided up among different regulators where consumer protection is an afterthought to their primary safety and soundness missions and responsibilities. So the legislation we have before us replaces that failed setup with a single regulator, with the independence and authority to do the job right. That is what we are trying to do.

This regulator will be a watchdog with a bark and bite, one with the ability to take meaningful action to stop the ripoffs and the mission to empower consumers to make good financial decisions.

The bureau will force large banks and credit card companies to explain their offerings in plain English so that you do not need a master's in business administration to be an informed consumer. It will shut down the scam artists and the sleazy lenders--and they are out there in droves--before they can take advantage of the Delores Kings again. There would not, of course, be scam artists and sleazy lenders if these abusive practices were not profitable--and they are profitable--when we have large Wall Street firms that have earned-- ``earned'' is not the right word--gained, they gained billions of dollars by engaging in these practices. Don't think they were not. They were not the broker who walked into Delores King's house. They were not the small banks that decided to write that mortgage. But these large firms were involved in the securitization, the marketing of these products all bundled together.

We have now learned even in the hearings last week that they knew what crummy bundles they were. There was a lot of junk and trash in there. Delores King was given a mortgage knowing she could not pay, she was on a fixed income, they knew it would balloon to the point that it would consume 70 percent of her income--don't tell me they did not know what that was. And expecting that 80-year-old woman to read and understand all she was going to be subjected to in the fine print of the mortgage contract is ridiculous. Yet that is how this daisy chain worked and why we ended up in the mess we did. This consumer bureau must be a part of our bill.

The Chamber of Commerce is circulating some talking points about what this bureau is and how it will impact American businesses. Tom Donahue and I are good friends. I have known Tom a long time. We have worked on issues together. He runs the chamber. It saddens me that an organization such as that would put out a piece of paper with that much false information. I know they do not like consumer protection at the Chamber of Commerce. That has been a standard, unfortunately, for too many years. I don't mind them taking on and arguing with me about the bill if they want to, and you are entitled to all the opinions you wish to have, but you are not entitled to your own facts, as the old saying goes. What they put out is factually wrong.

I want to spend a couple of minutes addressing each one of their false accusations in the document they are spreading around and address them directly.

The chamber claims that the bureau would regulate ``virtually every business that extends credit.'' Suddenly, they will have you believe that anyone who bills you at the end of the month will be caught up in sweeping new regulations. That sentence is totally false.

You may not accept what I said, that it is totally false, so let me read from the bill. The bill is here, this tome, these 1,400 pages. Let me read from the section of the bill that covers this particular point. I will read it carefully:

The Bureau--

Speaking about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau--

may not exercise any rulemaking, supervisory enforcement, or

other authority under this title with respect to a merchant,

retailer, or seller of nonfinancial goods or services that is

not engaged significantly in offering or providing consumer

financial products or services.

I don't know what part of that sentence they do not understand, but that is about as clear as it could possibly be. You must be significantly involved in the selling of financial services and products. A dentist, a butcher, a retailer who sells you products and allows you to pay later or on some delayed paying process is not in the business of financial services and products. Allowing their clients, their patients, their customers to have some delayed payment process does not bring them under the purview of this law.

The line that ``virtually every business that extends credit'' is a completely false sentence, and yet it is in the talking points of the Chamber of Commerce.

I will read the sentence again in the bill:

The Bureau may not exercise any rulemaking, supervisory

enforcement, or other authority--

Other authority, Mr. President--

under this title with respect to a merchant, retailer, or

seller of nonfinancial goods or services that is not engaged

significantly in offering or providing consumer financial

products or services.

What does that mean? If you run a tab at your butcher or grocer, you are not covered. Again, merchants, retailers, sellers of nonfinancial services are not covered. If a doctor charges you a late fee, that is not covered. If a retailer refers a customer who has not paid his bill to a debt collector, that is not covered under this bill. If a store accepts credit cards, that is not covered. If your dentist or retailer or merchant allows you to pay your bill over time, they are not covered under this bill.

The consumer bureau is not going to regulate accountants and orthodontists. It is not going to regulate anyone who--and I will quote again--``is not engaged significantly in offering or providing consumer financial products or services.''

Any time we hear a Member of this body--and some already have--come to this Chamber to object to this bureau by invoking a small business in their State, keep your ears perked. The strong likelihood is that the false talking point is surfacing yet again.

The second falsehood in the chamber's epistle: I heard people say that this is a wild new bureaucracy with powers that ``extend far beyond traditional financial services products to the entire economy. In short''--this chamber letter goes on--``In short, it creates a new regulatory overlay over the entire business community.'' Not true. Completely false.

The powers under this bill already exist. I am not writing new powers under this bill. They exist under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the Truth-in-Lending Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, the Home Ownership Equity Protection Act, and RESPA. There is a long list of legislation that passed years ago that is out there. This bill says those laws must be enforced. We are not writing new laws. These are the laws that are on the books.

We add one new word. ``Deceptive and unfair practices'' is covered, and we had the word ``abusive.'' I acknowledge that. There is one new word called ``abusive'' that we add to the litany of the kinds of practices that have caused consumers the difficulties they have been through. There is no other new authority. The rest of the authority exists in current Federal law under the statutes I enumerated and there are many others, by the way, that are presently covered.

All we are saying is, what is the point in having these laws? They are

on the books designed to protect people. The issue is whether anyone is able or willing to exercise the authority.

Financial firms, I believe, will benefit from this in many ways when we streamline and minimize regulatory burdens. There are seven other agencies responsible to one degree or another for this list of existing Federal law. It seems to me the financial services sector will benefit by having a single regulator with the ability to enforce this collection of laws I described. It seems to me that would be a welcome opportunity rather than having so many different regulators to deal with. The single new agency will easily be held accountable for its performance as well.

The third false claim. I quote again:

The bill gives the consumer financial product agency

authority to write rules, enforce rules, conduct

examinations, require new review and approve disclosures

regarding consumer financial products, impose fees or

assessments on all covered persons, and require reports from

any covered entities.

Again, false. Not true at all. This bill does not give this new bureau any authority to charge anyone a fee or assessment. There are no fees or assessments in our bill--this bill--on any of these entities. Yet the report that is out there indicates it does. Completely false. It does not create a new government power.

What it does do is allow the Bureau to write rules that create a level playing field for small community banks and credit unions which today face unfair competition from largely the unregulated shadow banking industry. We heard from our community banks over and over about this point. Where is the level playing field? We get drawn in, we do our job, we are regulated, we operate carefully, and then you have these operators out there totally unregulated, and the reputation of everybody in the financial services sector suffers because of some of these unscrupulous payday lenders, these check-cashing operations that do not have any regulator at all. They are functioning, they are abusing or deceiving people. And that regulated bank on the corner is saying: Why isn't that guy being regulated? I am regulated.

Our bill changes that situation. We apply those same rules, and that is a great advantage to the community banks in the country to have a level playing field. Because this new bureau will be able to write rules that prohibit unfair and deceptive practices in the shadow banking sector and conduct examinations and gather information from nonbank lenders and brokers. Those shadowy firms will not have an unfair leg up on our community banks, allowing those smaller institutions to compete more effectively and to provide capital more freely.

The fourth false claim is the following, and again I am quoting from this document:

The consumer financial protection agency would set the

floor, not the ceiling, regarding State consumer protection

laws. This will create a new regulatory regime companies will

be subject to and consumers will be lost in the maze of

Federal regulations and disclosures, 51 State laws and State

attorneys general interpreting and enforcing Federal law at

State level. This is directly contrary to the goals of

streamlining, modernizing, and simplifying the regulatory

system (and disclosure to consumers.)

That is the claim. A Federal consumer law has historically established a minimum standard, and that is what this bill does as well. Ever since the Truth in Lending Act passed in 1968, Congress has allowed the States to adopt consumer protection laws as long as they do not conflict with Federal law. State attorneys general have always been on the front lines of consumer protection, and they will continue to play that role.

Meanwhile, this single bureau will help to streamline, as I said a moment ago, and simplify disclosures. For instance, two agencies regulate mortgage laws, meaning consumers and community banks are forced to contend with two different Federal mortgage disclosures. Under our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we will eliminate that unnecessary duplication and create one single form.

Fifth: The Chamber claims:

The consumer financial protection agency will have the

authority to mandate that any company offering a consumer

financial product has to offer a product with terms and

conditions set by the government. Alternative products cannot

be offered unless the ``plain vanilla'' is extended. This

gives the largest banks a significant competitive advantage

over smaller banks, limits consumer choice, and will

significantly increase the cost of any alternative products

that are tailored for specific needs.

This one is entirely made up of whole cloth. There is no such thing in our bill. None. I don't even know from where it comes. It is one thing to disagree over the wording of something, but when you make up one out of whole cloth entirely, I don't know how to address that. I don't know what they are talking about. This one comes out of the blue.

Finally, I wish to address the claim that ``the bill gives the consumer financial protection agency the authority to request and hold reports from any covered entity--including reports from banks about their types of accounts and the balances in each account.

In fact, just as regulators today collect and share information about the companies they oversee, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will be able to collect information and share it with other regulators. There is nothing new about that at all. But, unlike some of the claims that have been made that this information will be made public or sent to Wall Street--the idea is that this new government entity will be collecting private information about your finances and making it pubilc, that is not true either. That is false.

Strong privacy protections are included in our bill to make sure that proprietary, personal, or confidential consumer information is kept just that--private.

Think about this for a moment. Opponents of this new bureau are actually suggesting it will benefit consumers for regulators to have less information about what the companies they regulate are doing.

I have said before people are welcome to their opinions but not their facts. Again, I am more than happy to consider ideas people have and how they think we can make this consumer bureau work better. I have not shut the door on any ideas people may want to bring up. But what I can't tolerate is people making totally false accusations to inflame the passions, to incorrectly and falsely cause great concern among retailers and merchants and others across the country. That is the intent of all this. I know what it is. They do not want to take on the bill itself and what it does, so they are out there propagandizing with false information about this to undermine what we are trying to achieve. Again, some of those very businesses are the ones that pay an awful price.

I had a wonderful couple last year in my State who had started a business 40 years ago. They are a family-run small business. They were late by 3 days for the first time in 40 years on a credit card payment--the first time in 40 years, 3 days late. They watched their interest rate go from 5 percent to 22 percent, and it put them out of business--after 40 years. That is a small business that extends credit, works with customers and others. They were taken to the cleaners because there wasn't anyone around to say: No, you can't jump from 5 percent to 22 percent. That is unfair and that is wrong.

I tried for 20 years to pass a credit card bill in this Chamber and was never able to get it up even for a vote, except on amendments to bills. Last spring, we were able to bring it up, and it passed 90 to 5 in this Chamber, although it was a highly partisan vote coming out of the Banking Committee. As a result, today we have protections in place for that family in Connecticut, similar to so many others who have watched fees and interest rates skyrocket for almost no reason at all. In fact, the language of the contract says they can do just that, for no reason at all.

Every time consumers get taken to the cleaners, it shouldn't take 20 years to pass a law to address it. The power of the credit card companies was such they were able to stop me, year in and year out, from getting that bill passed. Why can't we have protection for consumers who purchase and use--as we all do today for toasters, cars, and other products--financial products?

I have used the example lately of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. We have one in place. We all read the tragic stories recently of a car company that had problems with an accelerator. What happened? There was a recall of those automobiles to protect

people against the harm that could befall them if that happened to them while they were driving that automobile.

When someone marketed a crummy mortgage in an unregulated sector of our economy and took Dolores King to the cleaners and ruined her life-- she lost her home, lost the earnings she had--where does she go? Nowhere. There is nowhere to go. Maybe some sympathetic banker might take pity on her. But why should Dolores King be subjected to financial ruin, when the producer of an automobile that is faulty is protected or a toaster or a television? For all these products, if they are faulty or deficient in some way, there are places we can go to get our situation addressed. Yet in the world in which we live today, of mortgages and credit cards and financial products, there is nothing that exists to give people a chance to get the protections they deserve.

Our bill isn't perfect. I will be the first to admit there may be better ideas on how to do this. But I am not going to sit around and listen to people issue false statements about what is in this bill and inflaming innocent people who want good legislation that this bill will do them harm. It does the opposite.

So next week we will begin the debate. I am sure there will be a ton of amendments that will try to undermine the consumer protection bureau we have established. But I would hope my colleagues--Democrats and Republicans--will join in an effort to write a good, strong consumer protection bill, along with the other pieces of this legislation, so we can provide at least a better sense of security.

I will end on this note. I wish to pick up on a point Senator Dorgan talked about in his remarks earlier this morning--something I have addressed occasionally over the last number of days, but I don't think I have emphasized it as much as I should. I have been reciting statistics--8\1/2\ million jobs lost, 7 million foreclosures, 20 percent decline in retirement, 30 percent decline in home values, $11 trillion lost in household wealth. I hear the numbers and I have said them so many times I can recite them. But I don't have a number for-- and this actually worries me far more than those statistics, as devastating as those numbers are--I don't have a number for what the cost is to our country because the American people have lost faith and confidence in our financial system. I don't know how to put a dollar sign on that one for you. I don't know if anyone could. I don't believe anyone can.

But I know this much. People don't trust and don't have faith that the system is going to work for them when they see, as we all have, these stories of these credit card fees and charges and every gimmick you can think of to reach into the pockets of hard-working families. You begin to understand why people have lost faith, when they see and hear stories about Dolores King and others who have done everything right in their life and someone comes in and decides to take advantage of them or they read these e-mails, as we had last week, of these arrogant characters up there laughing about the widows and orphans they have taken advantage of at a major investment bank. What do you do about that? What is the number to put on that one?

I will tell you this much. We can write all the bills we want, we can pass all the regulations, but if we don't get back that confidence and faith, which has historically been very much a part of our system--I remember once I talked to a man who was not a citizen of our country, but he invested here. He took his money and invested it in the U.S. financial system. I said: Why do that? He said: One, you people are a strong economy and you do well. But more importantly is the second reason. He said: I have never lost a wink of sleep because I was investing in an economy or a structure that was unsafe. I may make a bad bet and lose because of that, but I have never worried about ever losing a nickel because someone in this country in your financial system would take advantage of me.

A wonderful reputation to have had, and that reputation has been shattered, not just for some foreign investor but I think for people here at home. I am not suggesting that by the passage of this bill we will miraculously change all that, but I think it moves us in the right direction.

I know my colleagues have a lot of good ideas. Some like what I have done, some don't think I have gone far enough, and some think I have gone too far with the bill. But what I have tried to do over the past few months is to put together the best ideas I could and to attract broad support from the 100 of us in the Senate. Ultimately, if I can't produce 60 votes or whatever we have to get these days, no matter how good the ideas are, they will not go anywhere. So I hope my colleagues will read this, and if they have constructive changes to make to the bill, I welcome those.

I apologize for taking so long on this, and now, if I can, I wish to conclude the business of the Senate.

The last hour just ended, and you heard the admonition at the end of the hour that it is extremely important for people to pay attention. And during this hour, I am going to echo that thought. It is important for people to pay attention, Mr. Speaker, and, yes, I will direct my remarks to the Chair. But, Mr. Speaker, if I could talk to the American people, what I would tell them is now is the time, it is late at night, but now is the time for you to be keeping this House under intense scrutiny and watch what happens here over the next 72 hours as we drag this carcass of a health care bill across the finish line.

Now, how did we get here? It's probably useful to think about things for just a moment. We had a big election in 2008. People said they voted for change. Right before that election in 2008, in the other body, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee held a big meeting over in the Library of Congress and had all the big players and the stakeholders in health care in the room, and came up with what was called a white paper on health care reform. For all the world, it looked like a bill. For all the world, it looked like it would be the bill that was brought forth in the Senate should the Democrats take control of the White House, the House and the Senate. Indeed, the election was held, and they did.

I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, I was somewhat surprised that there was not a health care bill, no health care bill came forth in those early days after the election. I thought perhaps we would see one in December of 2008 during the holiday season, but no health care bill. No health care bill in the weeks that the Congress was getting organized. We had a big inauguration, no health care bill. We had a designee named to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. Still no health care bill was forthcoming. Well, surely it will come along right after that confirmation for Health and Human Services. But as it turns out, that individual had some tax problems and that nomination was withdrawn before it ever got to the confirmation vote in the full Senate. So we were left without a Secretary of Health and Human Services for several months, no health care bill.

Suddenly, it was early summer. There was a letter sent from the other body from the two committees of jurisdiction, the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee over in the other body, and the Senate Finance Committee in the other body, they sent a letter to the President and said, We will be producing a health care bill within the next couple of weeks. In fact, the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee did produce a bill. The coverage and cost numbers were quite startling when they were revealed: A cost of $1 trillion. It left a lot of people uncovered as the original plan was unveiled, and then several weeks were spent in what was called the markup of that bill over in that committee over in the Senate.

Then the three committees of jurisdiction in the House had a health care bill that was rapidly brought forward. We didn't really get a lot of time to look at it. There was certainly no subcommittee markup. It came straight to our Committee on Energy and Commerce for a markup. And to give credit to the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, we did get a little more time than the other two committees, the Committee on Education and Labor and the Committee on Ways and Means. They each had a day, a 24-hour period, to mark up this bill. Think of that. This bill, this legislation that's going to affect the lives and livelihood of Americans for the next three generations was allowed 1 day in markup in Ways and Means, 1 day in markup in Education and Labor. We at least had 8 days in Energy and Commerce. Four of those days were spent recessed because we couldn't agree on some things, but we did have more time in the Committee on Energy and Commerce than in any other committee in the House.

Think back, Mr. Speaker, to the Clean Air Act in the early 1990s. I'm told it was an 8-month markup for the Clean Air Act, 8-month. Think how the people on those committees must have hated each other at the end of those 8 months. But what did they get? What did they get for that 8 month investment? They got a bill that had support from both Republicans and Democrats, eventually passed the House, eventually passed the Senate, eventually was signed into law by George Herbert Walker Bush, and the Clean Air Act became the law of the land and arguably has been successful since that time. So that's the way the process is supposed to work.

Let me take one step back. The House passed a bill, the Senate passed a bill, they went to a conference committee, had a continuation of that long and drawn-out process, but the conference committee produced a conference report that was endorsed by the Senate, endorsed by the House, again bipartisan majorities on either side, the bill then went to the President for his signature, and that's what we now know as the Clean Air Act.

But think of the difference between that major piece of legislation that had a great and far and reaching affect on the lives and livelihood of every American, contrasted with what we've done over the past year.

And quite honestly, Mr. Speaker, it's not that we didn't have time. It's not that we didn't have time. After all, we have been working on this thing nearly 15 months. We actually had time to do a real markup in each of the three House committees. We had time to do a real markup. We had time to do a real conference committee.

Look at the timeline of this bill. We got it in Energy and Commerce in the middle in July. We didn't have a lot of time to deal with it before, but when we got it, we worked on it, we worked hard. I offered a multitude of amendments. I had 50 amendments prepared in committee. Five of those were accepted by the time the bill passed out of committee, all of those on a voice vote, so presumably a unanimous vote, and every one of those amendments was stripped out when the bill went to the Speaker's Office before it came back to the House, to the House floor in late October, and then we had the vote in the House in early November.

The Senate had their bill. The Senate Finance Committee completed their work in the fall. They brought their bill to the Senate in the month of December. It was voted upon, famously, on Christmas Eve, and then the normal sequence of events would be for the bill to go to a conference committee. And there in the conference committee, yes, the Democrats have substantial majorities in the House and the Senate. The Democrats would have had a significant advantage in the conference committee. The idea of the conference committee is to meld the differences of those two bills to create a product that can be endorsed by both Houses in the Capitol.

But they didn't do that. They thought, well, that was hard to get that one through the Senate. Let's not go through regular order. Let's try something different. And that something different was, maybe we can just get the House to pass the Senate bill because the Senate bill was, in fact, a House bill. It has a House bill number. In fact, it was our appropriations bill, I think, for Treasury Department appropriations last year. It did pass the House as an appropriations bill, went over to the Senate for work on their appropriations bills. That never happened, but the bill was then used as a shell. The legislative language for appropriations was stripped out, the health care language was put in, so the Senate passed a House bill on Christmas Eve, and then that bill can come back through those doors, come into the House, and the Speaker of the House will say, the business of the House is now, will the House concur with the Senate amendment to H.R. whatever it is, the House agrees by a simple majority, at that time 218 votes, and the bill goes to the President's desk.

But House Members didn't want to do that. They didn't like the Senate bill. For some it didn't go far enough. For some it went way too far. But the Senate bill was not seen to be an acceptable product. So while all of that discussion was going on, there was a little-noticed, to that point, election that took place in the State of Massachusetts, and the election was to fill the vacancy that was created when Senator Kennedy died. And that election was won by Scott Brown, who is a Republican who said he would be the 41st Republican vote against this health care bill.

Whoa. Now, a lot of doors are closed over in the other body. They can no longer go to a conference committee and expect that they will have their 60-vote majority to pass anything they want. In fact, to take any bill back to the Senate now, and under Senate rules where you need to have 60 votes to cut off debate, that is going to be a pretty tall order because they only have 59 votes, 41 votes on the Republican side.

So what to do? We do still have the bill that was passed by the Senate. That Senate bill passed with a 60-vote margin, so it is still quite viable. If there is just some way to convince the House to vote for that bill. Now the Republican side, we didn't vote for it in the first place, we are not likely to vote for it in the second place. But on the Democratic side, if they can put together enough coalitions and enough votes, now the number is only 216, with some unfortunate deaths we have had on this side and some people who have left the House of Representatives, so 216 is the simple majority in the House. That is all that is required. So, well, look, maybe if we could do some technical corrections, we can't really do them to the bill because the bill has already passed the Senate, and if we took those corrections back to the Senate, we would have to have 60 votes to cut off debate. But there is a Senate process called reconciliation to deal with budgetary and fiscal matters. And under reconciliation, only a simple majority is required in the Senate. Maybe we could do those technical considerations in the Senate under reconciliation and pass that through the Senate with 51 votes.

And if we, the Senate, do that, will the House then agree to pass our bill with the understanding that these technical corrections would quickly be instituted? That is the big question right now. And are there going to be any problems with any of those technical corrections to be done under reconciliation?

Well, there might be. There might be. Because, remember, reconciliation is to pass those very tough budget and fiscal bills that are really hard to get the number of votes because sometimes you are actually cutting spending, sometimes you are actually irritating a constituency back home because we are reducing Federal spending in some of those reconciliation bills.

If it deals with budgetary issues and spending issues, then it could pass under reconciliation with 51 votes. The Vice President gets to vote in the case of a tie over in the Senate. So 50 Senators plus the Vice President would actually pass any of those reconciliation provisions, unless, unless someone makes a point of order over in the Senate that they don't deal exclusively with budgetary issues, that they are in fact changes in policy that are outside the budgetary process. Then the Senate has rules that say if a point of order is made, that it would require 60 votes to put that provision into the reconciliation bill, the so-called Byrd rule initiated by Robert Byrd, the dean of the Senate many, many years ago, to keep just this type of problem from happening. Didn't want the Republicans if they got in charge to be able to do things like this.

So the Byrd rule has been in effect for a number of years; and the Byrd rule would say, well, say you have a contentious issue in the House bill. Say there is some issue with the language regulating the Federal funding of abortion. Say there is some question of what do we do as far as dealing with people whose legal status in this country may be in some question. Well, those issues are beyond budget and may in fact be subject to a point of order and may require 60 votes to then be included in the reconciliation bill.

So it is not a given that everything that is wanted by House Democrats in changes in the Senate bill for the House to agree to pass the Senate bill, they may not be there when those technical corrections are finally voted on in the Senate. And that will take some time, because every amendment in the Senate may not necessarily be debated, but every one will be voted on; and all of that is going to take some significant time.

So where we are in the House tonight is that my understanding is the Rules Committee is to meet soon, if they are not already meeting, and the Rules Committee will come up with the language for that reconciliation bill. None of us have seen that yet. It hasn't really been scored by the Congressional Budget Office, so no one really knows what this bill will cost yet. So all of that is still hanging out there.

Then there is one more wrinkle thrown in. The Speaker of the House said it very well the other day: no one wants to vote for the Senate bill.

Well, that is a problem if you are going to need to get 216 votes in the House for the Senate bill to allow the reconciliation bill to then go forward to fix the technical problems in the Senate bill. I know this gets a little confusing, but no one wants to vote for the Senate bill.

Is there a way around voting for the Senate bill? Probably not. But, wait. What if we voted on a rule that allowed us to go forward with reconciliation, and within that rule we kind of made it like the Senate bill had already passed without actually having to vote on it?

Mr. Speaker, I would just ask the question: Do you really think the American people are not paying attention? The last Democrat who spoke here in the well of the House said it is time for the American people to pay attention to this process. I would submit that is exactly right.

Now, many people will recognize this icon, the Capitol Rock figure from when my children were young. This was the individual who was just a bill, and one day he hoped to be a law but today he was just a bill. But you can see today he is mad. He is angry. And why is he angry? He is still a bill. He wants to be a law. But he doesn't want to be deemed, and he doesn't want to be ``slaughtered,'' referring to the Slaughter rule that the House may vote on. By this time on Sunday the House may vote on the Slaughter rule which would deem acceptance of the Senate product.

Well, you can see why Mr. Bill is upset. He wants to go through regular order. He wants to go through committee, he wants to be voted on by the House, he wants to be voted on by the Senate. He really would have liked to have gone to a conference committee and have those two products melded together and then come back for an up-or-down vote in the House or the Senate. But as it appears tonight, he may not get his wish.

And is there a consequence to doing this? Now, you are going to hear people say that, oh, things have been deemed for a long time. This is nothing new. I will tell you, this is different. This is new. This is not something that, certainly in my short tenure, I have seen.

In fact, I recall a reconciliation bill in 2005 when the Republicans were in charge, it was called the Deficit Reduction Act, a very contentious bill, because we were trying to bend the cost curve on Medicaid spending. Does that sound familiar? You have heard the term ``bending the cost curve.'' We were trying to bend the cost curve on Medicaid spending from an increase of 7.7 percent year over year to 7.3 percent growth year over year. Not a heavy lift in anyone's book, but it was a big lift here in the United States House of Representatives.

Now, we were coming to the end of the calendar year 2005. In fact, it was coming up on to the Christmas holidays. People were anxious to get home and be with their families. We voted on that bill, as I recall, early on a Monday morning. We had been here through the weekend, up all night, debates, debates, debates. A lot of changes, a lot of moving things around on the chessboard. And then, in the final analysis, the bill passed very early in the morning on a Monday morning. I think it was December 19, so it was getting very close to that cutoff for Christmas.

Later in the week, that bill was voted on in the Senate. And this was a

conference report. We had voted on the regular bills, it had gone to a conference, so these were the conference reports that we were voting up or down on.

The House passed its version. The Senate passed its version on Tuesday or Wednesday, quickly left town, and were gone. The House had already vacated the premises. And it was found that there was a little discrepancy. There were some differences in wording between the two bills.

Well, as they should have done, the Democrats that were then in the majority went nuts and they said, You cannot send that bill down to the White House for a signature because the House and the Senate did not pass the same bill, the same identical language. And it was a big deal.

The reason I remember this so well is, remember the doctor fix that we talked about a lot? In fact, we did a little doctor fix today. We extended the time before the doctors get their big pay cut; we moved that from April 1 to May 1. Well, there was a doc fix in the Deficit Reduction Act. At that point, I think the doctors were facing a 6 percent reduction in Medicare reimbursement, and that clock ran out at midnight on December 31.

We fixed it in the Deficit Reduction Act, but there was a problem. The House bill and the Senate bill were not word for word identical. I don't even remember the number of words that were different. It was not many. It seemed like an awfully picky process. But in order to comport with all of the laws in our Constitution, the House and the Senate had to pass identical bills for the bill to be regarded as passed and be available to go down to the President for his signature. So the clock ran out on Medicare and the doc fix.

Now, everything else that was in the bill was not perishable, and it would keep until the House came back in January of 2006 and could fix the damage. In the meantime, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth here in the House on the then-minority Democratic side: this is unconstitutional. We will go to court. We will take this down. So the bill did not go to the President for his signature. It stayed and languished. And then, when the House came back, they passed identical language to the Senate. The bill was passed and went off to the President for his signature. The doc fix was taken care of a month late.

Dr. Mark McClellan, who was then the administrator for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told the country's doctors that he would make good and retroactively supply that difference in the bills that they had submitted; they would not have to resubmit. He tried to paper over the problem and make it as painless as possible.

But it was a big deal. It was a painful deal for the country's doctors. That is why I remember it so well, because so many were calling me in my district office and my staff here in Washington and voicing their displeasure that Congress really couldn't have gotten this right and passed the identical bill through the House and the Senate. But the fact is they didn't. And the fact is that that was a problem as far as passing a bill and getting it signed by the Senate.

Well, what are we doing today or this weekend? What are we doing? We are not even going to pass the bill. We just deem it as having passed. Because, you know, a lot of the things that are in the Senate bill are things that we have talked about a lot here in the past 14 or 15 months, and some of them we may have even voted on a time or two. So we can just deem it as having passed.

Well, no wonder, no wonder Mr. Bill is so mad. That is not what he signed up to do. He didn't want to be deemed or Slaughtered. Slaughtered refers to the chairwoman of the Rules Committee who has created the so-called Slaughter rule, which means that the rule that allows us to take up the reconciliation bill is a self-executing rule and will deem passage of the Senate product that passed on Christmas Eve.

Do you think the American people can't see through that, Mr. Speaker? Do you think there are many phone calls going into Members' offices over the past couple of days about this? I think so, because I have heard from a lot of people. They are not happy about a lot of things right now, but they are really upset about this, and I think rightly so.

We are supposed to do things by the book. That book is called the Constitution. And when we stray from that on something like this--and this is no small matter--this is going to affect one-seventh of the Nation's economy. This is going to affect the lives and livelihood of every American not just this month, not next month, not the month after that, but for the next three generations.

Think of Medicare, passed in 1965. How has that affected people's lives, for good or for ill? But this is sweeping legislation that has a long half-life and is going to affect the way of life in this country from this day forward, really long past my time on this Earth, and I suspect a long time past the life expectancy of almost everyone who is serving in this body.

So it is so important that we get this right. It is our obligation. It is the oath that we swore on this floor the early part of January of 2009 after those very famous elections, those historic elections that created the new Presidency, created a supermajority for Democrats in the House, created almost a filibuster-proof majority in the other body. A historic election.

We were signed in, we put our hands on our hearts, we put our hands on the Bible, we swore an oath to protect and defend and uphold the Constitution.

What happened to that, men and women who are here with me tonight? What happened to that oath? Did you not believe it then, or has something happened that you don't believe it now?

This is critical. I know it looks lighthearted. I know I have copied a figure from a children's musical. But this is critical. This is going to change the way of life for every American, not just now, but for far into the future.

Now, we don't even know yet the cost of this bill. There are multiple iterations of the reconciliation package that have been floated around the Congressional Budget Office. You call them up and try to get them to do anything at all and they will not because they are working on health care. Unfortunately, it has been that way now for well over a year. It is almost impossible to get any piece of legislation scored by the Congressional Budget Office, but we don't even know what this thing is going to cost.

We talk about bending the cost curve. The Commonwealth Foundation, the good folks at the Commonwealth Foundation, I attend a number of their seminars. I think they do a good job of trying to educate Members of Congress. They will talk in lofty terms about bending the cost curve. Well, we are just bending the cost curve, all right. We are just bending it in the wrong direction.

Now, this bill is supposed to cost on the order of $800 billion and change. I think it was $824 billion. But anyone will tell you that is not the real cost. In fact, when this reconciliation stuff gets scored, it is very likely that we are going to see a number in excess of $1 trillion.

You know, just a lot of this stuff people look at it and say, What is the plain truth here? You say that you are going to raise taxes by $500 million, you are going to cut expenses in Medicare by $500 billion, and you are going to cover 30 million more people. How is that not going to affect me? You say if I like what I have, I can keep it, but how in the world is it possible to do all of those things and it won't affect me?

And the President said this several times during the summer. He said: Many people look at this bill and say, What is in it for me? What do I see differently, either positively or negatively, after this bill has passed?

For one thing, we know what they will see is a lot of new Federal regulations. We're going to see new fees on insurance companies, new fees on medical devices, new fees on prescription drugs, new fees on insurance plans. All of those, of course, have to, by definition, drive up health care costs.

One of the things that we're not doing--and you've heard me reference the ``doc fix'' in the Deficit Reduction Act. We had a baby ``doc fix,'' if you will, for just the next month. But there is a looming 21 percent reduction in reimbursement for physicians who practice in the Medicare system, doctors

who take care of some of our sickest patients, our seniors who might have multiple medical comorbidities. We've asked them to do this, and yet we come at them every year with a formula that says we're going to pay you a little less this year than we paid you last year.

Now maybe that's okay if you're fortunate enough to practice medicine in a location where energy prices are falling by 5 percent every year, labor costs are falling by 5 percent each year, cost of capital is no concern because the banks are just giving away plenty of money at a zero percent interest rate. Maybe if you live in that area, this is not a problem.

But most of the doctors who live in the real world, the same world as you and I, know that their costs of labor are going up. Their cost of capital is going up. In a doctor's office, you don't make a great many large capital purchases, but you sometimes hire a new doctor; and in order to do that, you sometimes have to go down to your friendly banker and secure either a loan or a line of credit. So the cost of capital goes up for those physicians' offices year after year.

Energy costs go up the same as they do for every other American. Even the cost of the doctor buying the health insurance for their employees will go up. Believe it or not, the insurance companies don't come into the doctor's office and say, Doc, you know what? You've done such a good job at taking care of all the people enrolled in our insurance company that we're going to enroll your employees for free or at a very reduced rate. It doesn't happen.

In fact, what happens in doctors' offices across the country every year is the insurance underwriter comes in and says, Hey, you've had some claims activity. Your rates are likely to go up in your small business here. And the doctor says, Well, maybe that's okay because maybe my reimbursement rates are going to go up enough to match it. But then most private insurance companies actually peg their reimbursement rates in the private sector to Medicare. So if Medicare is reduced by 5 percent, 8 percent, 21 percent, as we're scheduled to do this year, guess what? Insurance reimbursement rates go down. So the poor doctor is left scratching his or her head, saying, How come it costs me more to insure my employees and my reimbursement rates are going down? How's that going to work out for me?

The cost of doing business in a medical office is no different than any other small business in America, and doctors' offices simply cannot continue to survive if we continue to impose this draconian pay formula upon them, and yet nothing in this bill fixes that problem. We had a temporary fix today. We talked in grand terms about this great and wonderful fix that the House passed last fall, but we all knew over here in the House, even those of us who voted for it, we knew that the Senate was never going to take it up and pass it. In fact, they had already rejected it. As a consequence, this provision has been left out of this big, gargantuan health care bill, this 2,700-page bill, and there is no fix for the problems that the doctors face in the Medicare reimbursement system. There is no fix in the bill.

It's a simple arithmetic problem. The simple arithmetic problem is that it costs somewhere between $280 billion and $350 billion to fix that problem. Well, clearly, if you're trying to keep the cost of your bill under a trillion dollars, and I'm not sure that they have done that, but if you're trying to do that, a $350 billion addition to the price tag is not likely to make your life any easier.

There is a cost for simply repealing the sustainable growth rate formula, as it's called. Medicare part B has an additional problem in that, by law, seniors are charged 25 percent of the actual cost of their premium. The Federal Government picks up the other 75 percent very generously. But if the cost of the Medicare part B program increases, then Medicare part B premiums, by law, have to increase, and they have to increase by a formula which, again, is 25 percent of the actual cost.

Now we hear a lot of talk about insurance companies raising the rates. They do. Can they justify it or not? There are supposed to be State insurance commissioners to oversee that process. I know we had a big hearing in my committee on Energy and Commerce a few weeks ago on the Anthem, WellPoint rate increases that occurred out in California, but I honestly don't know where the California insurance commissioner was when all of that was going on. And the people at Anthem did say they submitted their paperwork to the insurance commissioner. I don't know what happened there. I honestly don't know what the disconnect was, but there are rules in place where these types of increases are supposed to be justified.

But the fact is that part B recipients will likely get a big increase in their premiums this year because the cost of paying for the part B program goes up every year, and, just interestingly enough, that increase is likely to be somewhere in the order of 12 to 16 percent. The President is very critical of private insurance companies that will do that but, wow, he is the CEO of the biggest insurance company in the world. It's called Medicare. And he's raising his rates by 12 percent this year. In fact, over the last decade, over the last 10 years, those premiums have increased almost 150 percent. Again, it's by law. It's no one doing something that they shouldn't be doing. It is just the cost of delivering that medical care has, in fact, increased over time, more people making claims on the system. And as a consequence, those costs have gone up, and, by law, the seniors who are participants in the part B program are obligated to pay 25 percent of the cost of the program in their premium.

So when people tell you that the cost of insurance is going to increase, that's true whether you're talking about a Federal program, such as Medicare, or programs in the private sector.

One of the things that concerned a lot of us as the debate was going through the House this summer was the appearance of what was called a public option. At the time, a lot of concern by, actually, Members on both sides of the aisle--probably voiced more consistently by people on the Republican side--about what this public option was going to do to pay for insurance coverage in this country. Many people on the Democratic side said, Oh, it'll be competition for the insurance companies so it'll bring their prices down.

Well, here's part of the problem. One of the reasons that the insurance companies are raising their prices is because there is a cross-subsidization, that there is a shifting of cost from the government sector onto the private sector. Medicare reimburses at a rate that's far lower than most of the private insurers for both doctors and hospitals. In order for those doctors and hospitals to keep their doors open, that means they need to charge a little bit more to those patients who come in who have actual insurance coverage. So that cost shifting or cross-subsidization exists because the government isn't actually carrying its share of the load today. So if we expand that part, how are we going to help keep the costs low on the private side? Because, again, it's a cross-subsidization that we're already doing in the existing public plans--Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, and the variety of other programs that exist. Those public programs are not filling the holes that are being dug, the overhead holes that are being dug at hospitals and doctors' offices, and those holes have to be filled with dollars from private insurance.

So right now it's about a 50-50 mix. Well, that's not fair. Fifty cents out of every health care dollar that's spent in this country today is already spent on one of those public options--Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, add the VA, Federal prison system. It's about fifty cents out of every dollar that is spent on health care, and it is going up. The other 50 percent is not all private insurance. Some of it is paid out of cash flow for some families; some of it is paid out of savings for some families, and some doctors and hospitals just simply have to write off some debt because it will never be paid. They certainly do contribute more than their share of charity care.

So the government, which has about 50 percent of the health care dollar right now, is not carrying its load, which drives up the cost for people with private insurance. So we're going to expand that part and expect that the cost for private insurance is somehow going to go down. You're talking about magical thinking. That's just never going to work out. There's no way it can work out.

And sometimes you step back and you look at this and you think, Wow, the people who want a single-payer, government-run system have really set the wheels in motion to accomplish just that. Let's create another public option, bleed off more dollars from those greedy folks on the private side. Their prices go up. The President, whoever the President is at that point, says, Well, I tried. We tried to keep the private sector involved, but look what they've done to you. There's nothing we can do about it. We will just have to take over everything. At that point, you have a completely nationalized health care system in the United States of America.

A lot of people look at that and say, No, that's not what we want. You said, if you like what you have, you can keep it. That's what we want.

Sixty-five percent of Americans have insurance either through their employer or in the individual market, and they like what they've got. They're concerned about cost, to be sure. They want costs to be held down, but they like what they have and they want to keep it. So it does concern them when they look out over the horizon and say, What might have happened with this public option?

Now, the Senate bill, at least in theory, does not have the public option written into the bill. It does. It's kind of hidden. You kind of have to look for it a little bit. The Senate bill sets up insurance exchanges across the country in order to ensure that everyone has access to at least two products in an insurance exchange. The Senate has said that the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, will ensure that there is at least one for-profit and one not-for-profit insurance company in each of those exchanges. Well, what happens if no one shows up on the day they hold the auction to sell the insurance? Office of Personnel Management will find a for-profit company and a not-for- profit company, and if they can't find one, somehow they will make one.

Now, the Office of Personnel Management right now is a relatively small Federal agency. It administers Federal benefits. It administers things like the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan. It does a good job with that, arguably, but this is a vast expansion of their mission, a vast expansion of scope to then put them in charge of these various exchanges that are in place all around the country. The Office of Personnel Management could become the de facto public option, and in fact, as it was looking like this bill was getting very close to being enacted in the early part of January before that famous election in Massachusetts, the Office of Personnel Management was indeed gearing up to take on that responsibility.

So whether you get the House bill or the Senate bill, there's still a possibility that you're going to see a public option. It may not be the so-called robust public option that you heard talked about here on the floor of the House ad infinitum last summer, but it will be a public option nevertheless, and it remains to be seen what happens to that over time. It may always stay a small part of what is available to the insurance market or it may grow significant.

What has been mystifying to me about that process, and you heard the President say earlier or last year in the fall, he cited there's a part of Alabama that you go to and you have only got one choice of an insurance company; and if you've only got one choice of an insurance company, there's not a lot of competition, so let us put a federally administered program on the ground to compete with that one insurance company.

But there's well over 1,000--in fact, over 1,300 insurance companies--in business right in the United States of America. What if we changed the regulations such that more companies could, in fact, sell in that market in Alabama? It looks to me like a market that companies might be interested in because, after all, there's not much competition there. That's the way to get robust competition in the market, and that is the way to get the types of cost controls that we would all like to see that could be delivered more efficiently by a competitive marketplace than it can be by government regulation and price-fixing.

We know what happens when you fix prices. Those of us my age who are old enough to remember gasoline purchases in the 1970s, when you put price controls on gasoline, you end up with gasoline shortages. You remove the price controls, and miraculously there's enough gasoline for everyone to buy. And as more gasoline becomes available, then the price comes down. It was a wonderful study in just how markets were supposed to work. You put the price controls on, it becomes very scarce and very expensive. And I can remember as a young resident at Parkland Hospital waiting for hours in line at a gas station because I did not want my gas tank to be empty and risk running out of gasoline on the way to the hospital in the middle of the night. It's something I couldn't afford to let happen to me. So I missed a lot of family time sitting in those gasoline lines. Fortunately, that didn't last long because the folly of that decision was recognized, the price controls were removed, and the price went up temporarily, and then it came back down as the supply of gasoline increased.

We don't know where we're going on the cost of this bill that's before us. The one charge that the American people gave us was, We want you to do something about the cost of health care. The one thing that we're not doing in this legislation is moving in a sane way towards doing anything that would get control of those costs. In fact, some of the things we're doing may, indeed, lead to a reduction of availability, and that means a reduction of access for patients to medical care.

An interesting little article that I found online on the way over here tonight was about what will happen to health insurance premiums under the bill that has been proposed. And what got this reporter's attention was a Presidential speech where he said that the cost of insurance if the bill was enacted would drop by 3,000 percent. Later on, the White House clarified and said the President meant to say the premiums would drop by $3,000, and that is money that could be returned to the worker.

The next quote in the story is, `` `There's no question premiums are still going to keep going up,' said Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a research clearinghouse on the health care system. `There are pieces of reform that will hopefully keep them from going up as fast. But it would be miraculous if premiums actually went down relative to where they are today.' '' So next line in the story is, ``It could be a long wait.'' Indeed, it could.

I do urge people to pay attention. I do urge people to dig a little deeper in the story--don't necessarily accept what I am saying here tonight. But do look carefully into this story and understand what your Congress is doing because if it doesn't affect you the day after the bill passes, it will affect you at some time.

Now convincing reluctant Members to vote on this bill by doing the Slaughter rule and deeming the bill passed may be a way to trick some wavering Members into voting for the bill. But I promise you, it's not tricking anyone out there in America. You hear stories of people going to the supermarket at the checkout line, and the person who's checking their groceries will say, You are not really going to deem that bill as passed, are you? They get it. People understand it. They've been watching this. We've been working on this for 14 or 15 months. Goodness knows we're tired of it. The country is tired of it. People do understand and are watching.

Now tomorrow in The New England Journal of Medicine, it's been widely reported that they're going to have an article detailing the attitude of America's physicians towards this legislation that the House of Representatives is likely going to try to pass sometime this weekend. The numbers were somewhat startling, and I don't have the exact numbers in front of me. But if the bill were to pass, around 30 percent of practicing physicians would consider concluding their practice and finding something else to do with their time. And if a public option is included, that number gets significantly higher--45, 46 percent.

People who have been working in the trenches, who have been delivering the health care, understand how pernicious

it has been with the constant reduction in rates for Medicare, to be sure, Medicaid in some States. In most States, physician reimbursement is just an easy target. When those State budgets start getting stressed, that's one of the first places that the State legislatures will go to try to pull some of those dollars back in. They'll reduce reimbursement rates to physicians. And as a consequence, if it was difficult to keep your doors open and pay your overhead costs with the reductions that we were seeing in Medicare, it becomes an absolute certainty that those doors are not going to stay open if Medicaid rates are vastly curtailed.

One of the things we're going to do with this bill is significantly expand Medicaid. The cost to the States right now is somewhat in flux. Nebraska got a pretty good deal on the Senate floor right before Christmas that would kind of protect them against some of the dollars that the State would have to match into the Medicaid program. Now there's talk of extending that to every State and not just making Nebraska a special case but extending that to every State. I promise you, I promise you that is not going to make the cost of this legislation go down. It is going to make the cost of that legislation go up significantly.

If we don't do that, right now there is a Federal share and a State share of Medicaid expenses that are paid. It varies from State to State. In some, it's a 50-50 proposition. In some, it's much more generous from the standpoint of what the Federal Government contributes. On average, about 57 percent of the Medicaid cost is contributed by the Federal Government. The State pays 43 percent. In this bill, the language might be more generous than that, but there would still--unless the so-called Cornhusker kickback is applied to every State, then States are going to be hit with additional Medicaid expenditures.

I have received communications from senators and legislators back home in my State where that number could approach $20 billion for the 2-year budgetary cycle that we have in Texas. And although many people in Washington would consider that so small as to not even be worthy of consideration, in a State budget, it is significant, and that is why the legislators and senators have written to their Members of Congress to advise them of this that's occurring. That means money that's not going to be available to fund transportation projects in the State. That means money that's not going to be available to pay for educational activities in the State. These will be real dollars that are taken out of circulation in the State to pay for the expansion of Medicaid that the Federal Government is going to require.

The whole question of making everyone buy health insurance, the question of an individual mandate that is contained within the Senate policy, is something that this country has not done before. That is a new phenomenon. Now I know you hear people say, Well, look, look Massachusetts has a mandate, and it's working okay up there. Well, maybe. Maybe not. I think the costs went up a little bit because the insurance companies are now under no--there's no reason for them to try to hold costs down to attract customers because, hey, you've got to buy it. It's the law. But still, if a State wants to pass an individual mandate or an employer mandate, for that matter, within their State to cover health care costs, that's their business. They can do that under the 10th Amendment, that those powers not taken by the Federal Government are reserved to the States. That's one of those powers that are reserved to the States. So if a State wishes to do that, and the people who elect the Governor and State legislators and State senators in those States are saying, Well, that's okay with us, then good on 'em. That's what they should do.

But what's working in Massachusetts likely wouldn't work in Texas. It's a different demographic, different problems. So we can't apply a one-size-fits-all solution across the country, and the Founding Fathers recognized that. You will hear people say, Well, look, it's a mandate that you've got to have car insurance if you drive your car. But you are driving your car voluntarily on a public road, and that is a State mandate for the purchase of that insurance. Not every State has them. I think there are two States that don't have an insurance mandate. Texas didn't until a few years ago. I don't know if it's actually increased the number of people who carry insurance because you are forever hearing about some poor soul that was hit by someone else who carried no insurance. But that's a State issue. And the States make that requirement.

Again, those State governments have to be responsive to their citizens in the State. If the citizens get too upset by the liberties that are being taken from them by a State government, they are free to react against that. And that's what a democratic process is all about. That's what elections are all about. But never in the history of this country has there been required the purchase of a product just as a condition for living in the United States.

Now we do have to pay income tax, it's true. You don't have to earn any money. And if you don't, then you don't have to pay taxes. But in order to ensure that this program is administered effectively, we go to the meanest, biggest Federal agency of all, that very same Internal Revenue Service, and say that they're going to collect--they're going to enforce this individual mandate that you buy health insurance.

Just a thought on that in some of the moments that are remaining to us this evening. Does putting an individual mandate on people increase the number of people who carry, say, health insurance? Putting an individual mandate on for the requirement that everyone have health insurance, does that increase the number of people who have health insurance? Right now in the country with a robust employer-sponsored insurance program, people who are employed in the individual market, small businesses who provide insurance in the individual market for their employees, the compliance rate or the insured rate is about 85 percent. We hear the figure of the number of people uninsured in this country, and it works out to be about 15 percent.

In the Federal tax system, does everyone file and pay taxes who should? The answer is no, they don't. By the IRS' own estimates, by their own estimates, 15 percent of the population decides not to file or not to pay their income taxes. Now that's a pretty stiff mandate that the IRS puts on us. Most people don't know exactly what the penalty is, but they're pretty darn sure that they don't want to find out firsthand because they do know it to be severe. So with this very severe penalty hanging over people's heads, you still have 15 out of 100 who will say, No, thanks, I'll still take my chances. How many more people are going to buy health insurance who don't already have it if we put that on as a requirement?

And then one of the other considerations is, if the fine is not as much as the insurance policy itself, then someone who believes themselves truly to be at zero risk for any medical condition says, You know what, I'll just pay the fine if it's less money, and I'll worry about insurance if I get sick. Of course under the plan that's over in the Senate now, they can do that because there will be what's called guaranteed issue. If they get sick, they can literally purchase the insurance policy from the back of the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

You know, we heard a lot during the course of this debate on health care over these past 15 months. One of the things that I will never forget is the energy and enthusiasm that I encountered this summer in doing town halls during the month of August. As you will recall, we passed the bill out of the Energy and Commerce Committee sort of at midnight Friday night, July 31. We all went home to our districts. We started seeing the stories on the evening news of vast throngs of people showing up at Representatives' town halls, both Republicans and Democrats. Whether they had come out in favor or in opposition to the bill. We hadn't voted on the bill on the House floor at that point. Because I was sitting in the committee that voted on the bill, I could tell my constituents back home that I voted no in committee, and I would vote ``no'' when it came to the floor, unless there were substantial changes. And people supported that decision overwhelmingly in the town halls that I did this summer.

But it doesn't mean that they said, We don't want you to do anything.

They had some rather specific things that they would like to see Congress do to help them with the problems that they were having with either insurance companies or with their doctors or with their hospitals. There were some things they thought that Congress could do. Now bear in mind the approval rating for Congress is somewhere south of 20 percent. We do not enjoy a significant amount of political capital. In order to do something this big, you really have to have the American people behind you, but we don't. And therein is the trouble that the Democrats are having passing this bill. Right, they've got no Republicans, but then they really didn't try. They weren't interested in having any Republicans a year ago when this process was beginning.

So it's no surprise that at this point, a year later, they don't have any Republican support for their proposals. Their problem is within their own conference.

Now, they've got 40 seats on us. It really shouldn't be a problem. I'm sorry, they have 40 more seats than they need to pass this bill, because in the House it's a simple majority. It really should not be a problem. All you've got to do is keep 40 people from leaving you. That shouldn't be that hard. These are people who feel the same as you. They're members of your same party. They believe the same things you do. That shouldn't be a hard lift.

Why is it so hard?

It's hard because there's not the popular support for this bill that everyone assumed would be there shortly after the 2008 election. We had an election. President Obama won the election. Health care was a big deal during the election, so it was just naturally assumed that the American people would be with the Democrats no matter what they did, with, to or from health care. As a consequence, they didn't need any Republicans. They really couldn't be bothered. We were noisy and inarticulate in meetings, and they just wanted to write the bill they wanted to write, and they'd get it passed without any Republican votes.

Now they're up against an impasse with their own side. Very difficult to pass something this large that affects this many people without at least some input from both sides. That's never been done before, to my knowledge, in this country; and that's what we're trying to do tonight. You might be able to do that if you had the popular support of the American people behind you. You could say, well I've got the people with me. I don't need Republicans. And that would be true, but they don't have the people behind them.

So the fact that the Republicans are not supporting the Democratic bill is actually of no consequence. Their difficulty is the people don't believe what they're doing. And, quite frankly, I don't see how there is a way to change that equation between now and Sunday, the day we're supposedly going to vote on this monstrosity.

I did hear from people in town halls about things they do want done. I maintain a Web site that's devoted to health care policy. It's called healthcaucus.org, @healthcaucus.org. ``Healthcaucus'' is all one word. Healthcaucus.org. Under the issues tab, you see Dr. Burgess' prescription for health care reform. And I've listed there the nine things that people told me most consistently during the summer and fall that they wanted to see us do.

Number one thing, people sure do want some help with preexisting conditions. There are things we can do to provide some help, and it doesn't mean an individual mandate. It doesn't mean guaranteed issue. It means helping those people who need help. It does cost some money. The Congressional Budget Office scored an amendment that Ranking Member Joe Barton had on our committee. It scored at $20 billion. Nathan Deal, the ranking Republican on the Health Subcommittee and I have introduced legislation that captures the spirit of that amendment. We erred on the side of being more generous. That's a $25 billion authorization for that program. The Congressional Budget Office said $20 billion over 10 years. We plussed it up by $5 billion. Let's start it and see what happens.

After all, that Senate bill comes over here and becomes law, no one gets any help tomorrow. It's 4 years before they get help. Preexisting conditions are a problem today. We heard this over and over again in the summer time. This is something people actually wanted us to work on. We could work on this in a bipartisan fashion. We never even had a hearing on how to approach the problems of preexisting conditions without a mandate. We never even had one word of testimony about that in our committee leading up to this.

Does there need to be some fairness in the Tax Code? You bet. Why does someone in the individual market who's paying for their health insurance out of pocket have to pay with after-tax dollars when someone who works for a large multi-state corporation gets their insurance paid for with pre-tax dollars by their employer? That fundamental unfairness is something that has to be fixed. I'm not sure that I know the best way to fix that, but I know we haven't even tried. We haven't even had those discussions.

We do need some medical liability reform. It's working in Texas; it could work in other places around the country. It does help keep costs down, in spite of what congressional Democrats and the White House tell you.

Portability, the ability to carry insurance with you through life, is extremely important, especially to younger workers. Think of the relationship with your insurance company if you had a longitudinal relationship with that insurance company.

There are some things that we could be doing that are not that heavy a lift and don't cost that much money. Most importantly, we can show the American people we can deliver real value and work together while we're doing it. Then we could improve those approval rates, that low esteem that the country holds us in.

Dr. Burgess' Prescriptions For Health Care Reform

1. Insurance Reform

We should eliminate the bias against patients with pre-

existing conditions, outlaw rescissions except in cases of

fraud, and ensure states have well-designed high-risk pools.

H.R. 4019--Limiting Pre-Existing Condition Exclusions in

All Health Insurance Markets (Deal)

H.R. 4020--Guaranteed Access to Health Insurance Act

(Burgess)

2. Tax Fairness

Providing individuals the same tax benefits no matter where

they want to get their health insurance, and tax credits to

help individuals purchase insurance in the individual market.

H.R. 3218--Improving Health Care for All Americans Act

(Shadegg)

3. Medical Liability Reform

The success of Texas' 2003 reforms: Texas has licensed over

15,000 new physicians and Texas hospitals have delivered more

than $594 million in charity care.

H.R. 1468--Medical Justice Act (Burgess)

4. Portability

Allowing patients to shop for health insurance plans across

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Well, we have had quite a day here in Washington, D.C., in your Nation's capital. The 6\1/2\ hour health care summit that was held down at the Blair House right adjacent to the White House has mercifully concluded. And as the saying goes up in Washington, everything's been said, everyone has said it, so it was time to go home. But for those who haven't had quite enough discussion about health care today, maybe we can spend just a little while longer talking about some of the things that we heard today and some of the things that we maybe perhaps didn't hear today.

One of the things that I do want to stress, we heard several times in the past several weeks that the Republicans don't have ideas. In fact, that was one of the admonitions of the President on starting this summit was that the Republicans didn't have ideas, and he wanted to in fact show the country that the Republicans were devoid of ideas. But nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, we saw today abundant Republican ideas. Some may say there are too many Republican ideas, too many to fit in one room.

I wanted to spend a few minutes tonight talking about some of those ideas on our side. I have a Web site, Mr. Speaker, that is devoted entirely to health care policy. It is from the Congressional Health Care Caucus. The Web address is www.healthcaucus.org. And under the Health Caucus Web site, under the Issues tab, I think it is the second heading, is a Prescription for Health Care Reform. Anyone is free to go to that site and click on the Prescription for Health Care Reform, follow the links, and they will be taken to a one-page description of nine different bullet points on health care reform.

In fact, there is even a little segment to record comments if someone would like to leave their ideas or their thoughts on the paper. Or if someone thinks of other things that might in fact be included, we welcome those comments on the Web site.

I am just going to briefly go through this list, and then I have got some other observations that I want to make on the summit that occurred today. And we will be joined from time to time by other Members of Congress, and I want to give them an opportunity to speak. But under the Prescription for Health Care Reform, certainly everything I heard this summer was, we don't want a 1,000-page bill. People really didn't want a 2,000-page bill after we came back and revamped it after the summertime. But what did people want Congress to do on health care?

There are people who have legitimate concerns that the system is not functioning in an optimum fashion. We do have great health care here in America, but there are distributional issues. The employer-sponsored insurance system does work well for the 60 to 70 percent of the population that is therein covered, but in fact there are problems for people who are outside the employer-sponsored insurance system, and there are certainly problems that all of us face with the advancing cost and complexity of health care.

So just running down the list, insurance reform that would include limitations on insurance companies excluding people for preexisting conditions, and guaranteeing access to insurance. Now, one of the fundamental differences on the Republican and Democratic approach to this is that the Democrats want to have, and the President wants to have, a mandate. That is, you are required to buy a product, an insurance product.

It is interesting because during the campaign in 2008, President Obama, when he was a presidential candidate, actually moved away from mandates. Candidate Hillary Clinton during her candidacy was in favor of mandates. Barack Obama was less enthusiastic about mandates. He did feel that there should be a mandate for children. We don't hear much discussion about that anymore. In fact, I don't think I heard that during the 6\1/2\ hours of debate today.

But mandates really have no place in a free society. There's some argument as to whether or not it would even be constitutional for the Federal Government to require someone to purchase an insurance product that they might

not want. So there are legislative products out there. And this is the point I want to make. When people say, oh, we can't start all over, this would be too taxing. There are a couple of bills out there that I would encourage, Mr. Speaker, people to look at. H.R. 4019, a bill introduced by Nathan Deal of Georgia; H.R. 4020, a bill introduced by myself. Those two bills, taken in conjunction, would go a long way towards eliminating the problems with preexisting conditions.

Another bill to address the tax fairness or the tax inequity that exist in the health insurance market today introduced by John Shadegg, H.R. 3218, the Improving Health Care for All Americans Act, that would allow the same benefits, no matter where you get your insurance, whether it's through employer-sponsored insurance or in the individual market, the same benefits should accrue to an individual as accrue to a business.

Medical liability reform. Texas and California have taken big strides in medical liability reform. So why do I care? If Texas has fixed their problem with medical liability, why would I care about that? Well, I care because the cost of defensive medicine is significant. And since the Federal Government is the purchaser of about 50 percent of all the health care in this country, the costs of defensive medicine that drive up the price of Medicare and Medicaid, those costs need to be brought back under control, and medical liability reform is a way to do that.

Portability. Allowing patients to shop for health insurance across State lines, again, a bill introduced by Mr. Shadegg is H.R. 3217, the Health Choice Act.

To back up for just a moment to medical liability reform, H.R. 1468, the Medical Justice Act.

We're about to bump up against an important deadline on Sunday night, and that is the expiration of the prevention of a reduction in payment to doctors who take care of Medicare patients. We go through this time and time again. It is time for Congress to fix the physician payment reform, and H.R. 3693 would do just that.

Do we need to be worried about if there are going to be doctors there to see us when we get sick in the future? I think that is a concern, and I think that is something where Congress might play a role. Doctors to care for America's patients, the Physician Work Force Enhancement Act, H.R. 914. People ought to be able to know what the cost is when they go to the doctor or the hospital.

How about a bill for ensuring price transparency? H.R. 2249, the Health Care Price Transparency Promotion Act. Prevention and wellness programs, we all agree, during the hearings this summer, the individuals that come in who worked at Safeway and talked about how health promotion and wellness was saving them money, firms like Allegiant in Omaha, Nebraska, brought in great stories about how they had involved their employees in living healthier lifestyles and reaped the benefits from lowered insurance costs.

An odd thing about the way we do things at the Federal Government, we're actually going to have to change the HIPAA laws, the privacy laws, a little bit in order to have this type of legislation be passed. But that's certainly within the purview of Congress and within the ability of Congress to do that.

But prevention and wellness programs, although I do not have the bill number attached to this, we had several amendments in committee and in the Rules Committee leading up to the passage of the Democrats' bill this fall that dealt with prevention and wellness. The legislative language is written. It is not in bill form right now because it would require a simultaneous modification of the HIPAA laws in order to allow that to happen.

And finally, I mentioned before, mandates. No place in a free society. And this is one of the fundamental differences between the President and myself. He wants to force everyone to buy an insurance policy. He said that's the only way to bring costs down. I would submit that if the insurance companies know you have to buy their product, their prices are not likely to go down. In fact, if you're required to buy their product under the penalty of law, with the IRS as the enforcer, it is very likely that the cost will go up because no one wants to run afoul of the Internal Revenue Service.

And then we make insurance companies lazy. Why bother to compete with a better product? Why try to create a program that people actually want? You've got to buy it anyway. The government's going to force you, you're going to buy my product, I don't even have to make it something that you want, and I can charge you more for it. Mandates make insurance companies lazy.

We actually have a model for what works in this endeavor, and that is when the Medicare part D program rolled out, then Administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Dr. Mark McClellan, required, out of six classes of pharmaceuticals, there were six protected classes of drugs. Within each class, an insurance company had to offer two choices, and using that as the parameter, the companies did produce the plans that people wanted. The product, part D, has been very popular. Ninety-two percent of seniors now have credible drug coverage under Medicare because of the flexibility and the desirability of these programs. The cost came in way under budget, and 92 to 94 percent of seniors are satisfied or very satisfied with their prescription drug coverage, so a program that indeed worked. And the whole emphasis was to make this look more like insurance and less like an entitlement.

Creating products people want is a better way to go about getting meaningful change in the insurance market than giving the insurance companies a license to steal, which is what a mandate would be, in my opinion.

I have some other observations on the day's activities, but I wanted to yield such time as he may consume to my good friend from Pennsylvania, Mr. G.T. Thompson, who in a former life was a health care administrator. I know it's odd that a doctor and a health care administrator would get along, but the two of us do get along very well.

G.T., I will yield to you such time as you may consume.

I thank the gentleman for his work on these issues. I thank him for always being willing to be involved in these. These are tough problems. These are complex problems.

You know, the activity today, I referred to it earlier today on a radio show as the Blair House project, not to be confused with the Blair Witch project. There were times when it did seem to be that there probably were some spells being cast.

The other thing that really had to strike you in watching the discussion today is that there are fundamental differences as to the role in government, fundamental differences as to the involvement in government.

You know you can't help but be struck. Here we've worked on this concept now for 13 months. The President was sworn in the 20th of January of last year. Here we are at the end of February, and still no bill is across the finish line. Boy, I thought it would have happened much, much more quickly. In fact, had the energy that was put into the stimulus bill been put into a health care bill, in all likelihood they could have passed whatever they wanted in February of last year. Instead, they chose to work on the stimulus first and then cap-and- trade and then gradually, gradually, gradually, their capital bled away to where they did not have the votes necessary on their side to pass one of these bills.

And this is the fundamental problem that is happening with the President's plans and the Democrats' bills in the House and the Senate right now is they do not enjoy popular support. Pick your number: 56, 58, 75 percent of the American people who do not support this 2,000- page monstrosity that literally required bribes to bring Senators down to the well to pass this bill Christmas Eve. The American people saw that and they rejected it.

They might trust us--I am not sure that they will--but they might trust us to work on some of these individual concepts one at a time. But at the very end of the summit today, the President decried incrementalism and said we have to be bold and we have to move forward with a large bill.

Why? Why do we have to do that? The programs to deal with preexisting conditions would involve risk pools to be sure. Reinsurance options for States, yes, it's going to require some Federal subsidy. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated $25 billion over 10 years. They may be a little bit light on that, but still we're nowhere near a number like a trillion dollars, which is scaring Americans to death.

We could provide some help in that market. The States could provide some help in that market. We could ask our partners in the insurance industry to voluntarily or by law cap their premiums at some level so that the person who was in this market did not find the costs so daunting that they simply gave up and did not get insurance.

Now, all of these great programs that the President and the Speaker talk about that they're going to give to the American people at no charge, none of these programs start for at least 4 years.

Now look, here we are 13 months into a new administration and the administrator at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is not there. He hasn't even been appointed, much less confirmed by the Senate. That is the individual who is going to be responsible for taking this 2,700 pages of legislation that we give them and turning the legislation into rules and the Federal rulemaking process. That is going to be an enormously difficult task. It is going to take 4 years to work through all of that and impugn all of the legislative intent and make those Federal rules and leave the rulemaking period open long enough so that people can comment on it. That is an enormous task. It's not going to happen overnight.

So the people that come to us and say, My premium's going up too much, I want you to take it over, they're not getting anything for at least 4 years.

Now, in the meantime, what if we took an approach--and, in fact, it was an approach that was talked about by

Senator McCain in the fall campaign of 2008. What if we took the approach of we're going to take existing risk pools of the States--34 States have already created. We're going to emulate the best practices of the best States. We're going to allow for some reinsurance options if companies are willing to take on higher-risk individuals so that no individual insurance company is tasked with too much in the way of financial loss, and we're going to cover this group of individuals.

I heard it over and over and over and over again this summer at town halls, Stop what you're doing. We don't want you to destroy the system that is working well for 65 or 75 percent of the country. We want you to concentrate on those individuals who, through no fault of their own, have suffered a tough medical diagnosis, have lost their job and employer-sponsored insurance, couldn't keep up with the COBRA payments and now find themselves having fallen into that dreaded category of uninsured with a preexisting condition.

While we're at it, we might look at the COBRA system. COBRA was placed as a protection to help people who had employer-sponsored insurance but they lose their job. So employer-sponsored insurance means the employer generally pays about two-thirds of the premium; the employee pays about one-third of the premium. When you lose your job, you can't continue that insurance. But in all likelihood, your employer is not going to pay their two-thirds any longer because you're no longer their employee. But for 18 months, you can pick up the whole premium and pay that with a small administrative charge--I think it's 102 percent of the premium--and you can continue your insurance for 18 months and not fall into the category of uninsured. And if you have a preexisting condition, you continue to be covered at that cost.

But that's a tall order for someone who just lost their job to continue to carry that degree of premium. What if we allowed people-- instead of you had to keep that same insurance your employer provided you, what if we allowed them into a lower-cost, high-deductible plan for those 18 months and still preserved their insurability during that time, so that when they found employment, they would not fall into that same category again. Or they might even decide to continue that high- deductible policy with a lower premium and continue to have the protection of health insurance without falling into a preexisting category.

But we never really worked on those issues. We just decided we were going to do this big bill, and it was going to have mandates, and it was going to have a public option, and this is the way it was going to be. But to tell you the truth, for 4 years there is no help. There is taxes. For 4 years there is the immediate Medicare cuts, but the benefits don't start until year 4 or 5 or possibly even 6. We don't even know how long it's going to take to set up those programs. And again, we don't even have the administrator at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The President needs to nominate one. The Senate will then have to confirm them. We may still be months away from filling that very important bureaucratic job over at the Department of Health and Human Services.

I'll yield back to my friend from Pennsylvania

I was criticized on a news show earlier today referring to this exercise as a 6-hour photo op. Probably I would fall into the category as a ``plummet.''

Isn't it interesting that, yes, premiums for the average family may increase for 10 to 12 percent, but that's okay. Instead of an apple, you get an orange, so you're coming out better in the deal.

Now, yesterday, in our Committee on Oversight and Investigations, we hauled in Anthem Insurance Company in California. And Anthem, to their great discredit, chose right now as a time to increase their premiums, and they have become the whipping boy and the poster child. And I will concede, I think they raised their premiums too fast. They were tone deaf. Their highest premium increase was 39 percent. Their average was 25 percent. Twenty-five percent. Okay, that seems high, but the President's already said 12 percent. Yeah, that's okay because you get an orange instead of an apple, so after all, you're good in that transaction.

So I guess if Anthem wanted to raise their rates, they probably should have stayed at that 12 percent rate. They would have been right in line with the President of the United States. They could have raised their rates and all been happy about the transaction. Instead, they overshot. They hit an average rate of 25 percent and, as a consequence, found themselves sworn in under oath in our committee having to absorb the ordeal that we put people through when they come before our committee.

It's interesting, perhaps the one thing that would provide the right impetus in the competition to hold down those costs we are not going to do, and that's the ability to buy across State lines.

In the individual market, buying a policy for a family of four in New Jersey is $10,000 a year. Your State of Pennsylvania, $6,000 a year, my State of Texas, $5,000 a year. As long as people know what they are purchasing, I don't see why it is reasonable to restrict someone from having a policy that may be more affordable.

My insurance premiums have decreased by about 50 percent over the last 2 years. Not because I am a Member of Congress and I get a special deal, but I said, you know what, I can no longer afford this high option PPO insurance that is available to us in Congress, so I have elected to go into what's called a high deductible health plan with a health savings account. I actually had one several years ago when I was in private practice. I liked it.

I liked the fact that I was the one who got to choose which doctors and facilities I got to use. I didn't have to call 1-800-California to get an X-ray preapproved. I wrote the check and I controlled the money, and I made the decision about who I saw and when. So I have gone back to that type of policy, and I will tell you I am very satisfied.

We have improved from the old medical savings account in 1986 to the Health Savings Account improvements that started in 2003 and continue to this day. Preventive care is now included as part of the benefit in a high deductible health plan because the insurance company has an interest in making sure if you have a problem that it is diagnosed early, while it is less expensive to treat, and I think ultimately that's a good thing.

I have chosen a plan that does not have prescription drug coverage because after we passed the prescription drug benefit in Medicare in 2003, one of the unintended consequences was we changed the market so that now many generic medicines are available at Wal-Mart for $4 a month. I try to find those bargains for those medicines if I should need one. I try to find those bargains at Wal-Mart or go to an over- the-counter variety, which is much cheaper than the name brand that is bought at the pharmacy, and you can actually achieve significant savings.

I am motivated to do that because it's my money that I am spending for those compounds. Yes, I could have paid more for PPO insurance and then, yes, I could have had a nice mail order, even gone down to my pharmacy and gotten brand names, but I have found that, hey Prevacid is over the counter now. It costs a fraction of what it used to cost a few years ago. Even before that, Prilosec was a similar medicine, not quite the same thing, but that was available in a generic form over the counter at that time at a fraction of the cost of the 30-pill bottle of Prevacid that I was taking before.

So it makes the consumer more informed and motivated. Here is how you hold down health care costs: Let me be the decisionmaker about that. Don't tell me from a comparative effectiveness board that, hey, this medicine is just as good as this medicine, and so this is all you get because this is what we are buying for you this month.

Let me have some of that money back to spend myself, the premium that I pay every month, a portion of that goes into the medical savings account. Every year that it accrues and grows larger it's tax deferred until--if I don't spend it on health expenses I would obviously have to pay taxes on it when I took it out. As long as I spend it for legitimate medical purposes, hey, that's pretax dollars. That's probably the best deal you could do in the individual market. So these are changes that we actually ought to encourage.

I was stunned today to hear the Democrats admit, you know, we agree on a lot of this stuff that we have got here on these sheets, but, well, we don't do the health savings account thing. My goodness, that is the one way to really start to bring--you talk about bending the cost curve, that's one way. Get a motivated patient, educate them about some of the options that they have, and, oftentimes, not oftentimes, almost always they will make the right decision. I cannot tell you how many times in my medical practice if I recommend a test, a CT or MRI scan, a CAT scan or an MRI scan, and the next question from the patient back to me was not, Doctor, is it really necessary, or, Doctor, is this safe to do this, the next question was, well, does insurance cover it? If it did, there were no more questions. Go ahead and have the test.

I, on the other hand, with the type of policy that I have, yes, I may have hurt my knee or shoulder bad enough to go get a CAT scan, or I may make the decision that, Doctor, with a little ice and tincture of time would this not perhaps resolve on its own? Yes, it could, and if it doesn't get better in a week we could still do the CAT scan and we won't have delayed beyond the therapeutic interval, so it is okay to do that.

I am happy to take that advice and not have the test. If I don't feel better in a week or 10 days or whatever the prescribed time limit is, fine. Go get the test, and I will still be able to write the check and have that done. Here is how you bend the cost curve down. You get the patient involved, put the power back in the hands of the patient. Let the patient and the doctor make those decisions.

Don't make them buy the insurance at 1-800-California, but don't make them buy across the street at Health and Human Services. Let the patient and the doctor make those decisions. Every doctor has had the unpleasant experience of having called a preapproval number and have their patient denied a test or a procedure or a surgery, and then you have got to go to bat for them and prove all of these things. It is an enormous nuisance, and I hated it every time it happened.

On the other hand, in the Medicare and Medicaid system, they go ahead and cover that, but maybe 3 or months from now, maybe a year from now, they call you back and say, you know, we don't think that hospitalization was actually necessary, and we are going to deduct what we pay to you from the next round of payments that we give you for your next round of Medicare and Medicaid patients.

That is beyond frustrating because at that point you may not have at your immediate disposal the documentation that you at least would have had with a preapproval process. Neither is a good occurrence in a doctor's office. We need to come to some sort of consensus. But, as much as I hated the preapproval process, I see now, dealing with these large, large Medicare and Medicaid outlays, why it is necessary sometimes to assess medical necessity and why it is necessary sometimes to seek that preapproval, perhaps in our Medicare system.

If we really were serious about bending the cost curve, instead of just cutting doctors' payments--and that's what we do, we say, well, we will pay 20 percent less this year than we did last year--what's the practical effect of that? Well, the doctors' costs are fixed. He is not paying less for electricity to light his office this year than he was last year. His office help certainly didn't come in this year and say, hey, you know what, we can all take a pay cut because we love working for you.

That doesn't happen. His costs go up every year. The reimbursement rate goes down because Congress says, hey, we are spending too much money. What is the practical effect of that? The practical effect of that is, you know, I was able to pay my bills and take something home last year seeing 18 patients a day. But you know what, this year I have got to see 25 patients a day. And maybe if I can squeeze an extra procedure or two out, maybe I should do that because I have got to make up that difference somewhere.

So we have gone about this the wrong way. We are ratcheting down costs at the provider, and yet the doctor, he or she is the one who picks up the pen and writes the prescription, orders the hospitalization. The most expensive item in the doctor's office is their ballpoint pen most of the times because the doctor is the one making the decisions about that medical care.

Wouldn't a different way to look at this might be to say, Doctor, we are not going to cut your pay this year. We are, in fact, going to pay you a little bit more. We hope you will see fewer patients and maybe take a little bit more care and a little bit more preventive medicine and education with those patients along the way. It would be a phenomenal thing to look at but we never tried. We just cut the doctor's pay and said, whew, we got through it this year, the doctors are all mad but maybe they won't remember come November, and we will cut them again at the end of the year.

We are probably going to bump up against the clock. I do want to make this point from what we talked about the cost of insurance at the hearing we had yesterday.

It is important to understand, I think, that Speaker Pelosi, Harry Reid, President Obama, their health proposals would not make health insurance significantly cheaper for America's families. Under the bill passed by the House in November, H.R. 3962, a family of three making just under $55,000 a year and buying now a plan in this new exchange that's going to be set up and created by the bill, they would have to personally contribute after a tax credit about $5,500 a year in premiums. Additionally, this family would also pay $4,000 of out-of- pocket costs exclusive of the premium--copays and drugs that weren't covered--so this family would pay about $9,500 for a family of three that earns $55,000 a year in the Health Insurance Exchange.

I think it's important for people to understand that when we pass these bills and it's all settled and done, it doesn't mean free insurance. It doesn't mean free health care. It means, yes, you have got a government option here for buying insurance, but it's still going to cost something. It is still going to be an expensive item in that family's budget every year, and we are misleading people by telling them that, hey, we need to pass this bill because too many people don't have health care.

True enough, the person who has no income and no job will now have access to Medicaid, which they may not have had before, but the average person earning a reasonable salary is still going to find that the cost, the expense they paid for health insurance, is going to be significant. Here is the rub: If we pass this bill, this won't be an optional expense in their budget. They will be required to buy this, and the enforcer is going to be the Internal Revenue Service.

Now, Mr. Thompson, you brought up the online purchase of insurance for automobiles that has the cute little lizards and cave men on the logos. People will sometimes bring up to me, well, why, why not have a mandate. After all, there is a mandate to buy car insurance in your State, so, what would be the matter with having a health insurance mandate?

Here is the key. In my State, this is a State decision that in the State of Texas, people have to carry insurance if they are going to exercise the privilege of driving on the roads of the State of Texas. Health insurance is a different animal, and for the Federal Government to require, not a State government, but the Federal Government to require the purchase of health insurance is taking us in the direction of loss of liberty that none of us have really ever encountered before. It is a new concept.

So if a State wishes to exercise a mandate, which they have done in Massachusetts, then that's a State decision and that decision will either be supported or rejected by the voters in that State, but for the Federal Government to create for the first time a mandate, a requirement that a person purchase a product just for the privilege of living in this country, again, we are going down the road of loss of freedom that, again, I don't think people really want to go there.

Now, you will also hear, and it's so strange to hear the comparison of we have got to have a mandate as you do with automobile insurance, and you know what, you can buy that consumable insurance online. What if, instead of, if we had our thinking right, we would let the health insurance be available online, let the plan finders be available online and, if people think it's necessary to have a mandate, let that be a State decision. Let that be a State decision if the exchange is--right now you have, and I don't know the precise number, 30 or 34 States whose attorney generals are drawing up legislation to prevent their States from or prevent their citizens and their States from being required to follow an illegal Federal mandate.

It just shows you the type of tension that we are going to set up between the State and Federal Governments if we were to pick up and pass either the House or the Senate bill and send it down to the President for his signature.

Mr. President, I wanted to, in a few minutes, talk about the START treaty. But before I do that, I would like to engage in some discussion with the Senator from Connecticut about financial reform.

Even as I do that, and I will do that briefly, I wanted to say that not many Members of the Senate understand how much time and effort the Senator from Connecticut has put into this product of financial reform--Wall Street reform, as it is called. I, for one, very much appreciate the work that has been done. There is a lot in the bill that has been brought to the floor by Senator Dodd that is commendable and that is right on point. There are some areas where I, perhaps, will want to offer suggestions. Maybe the Senator will agree with them, maybe not.

I wish to say as a starting point that I am very pleased that we have the bill on the floor now, open for debate, open for amendment next week. I hope we keep it on the floor and improve it in areas where it can be improved, make modifications where necessary, but in the end be able to vote for a piece of legislation that will allow us to tell the American people: We understand what happened, and we have tried to take steps now to make sure it cannot and will not happen again.

One of the areas where I will offer an amendment--and I understand it will be a controversial amendment--is on the issue of too big to fail.

My colleague from Connecticut and others on the Banking Committee have constructed one approach on too big to fail, and I will be supportive of that approach. But I do think the too-big-to-fail issue at its root is, if you are too big to fail, from my standpoint, you are too big. And I come down on the side of one-fourth of the Governors of the Federal Reserve Board who have said this, and many others. I come down on the side of those who have said: If you are too big to fail, you are too big.

I think the council that is established under this legislation ought to at that point--once designating a company that has become too big to fail, that is too big to fail, that causes a moral hazard and an unacceptable threat and risk to our economy, then I think divestiture is in order of that portion of the company that puts this country at risk as a result of them being too big to fail. That is a different approach than is used by the committee but an approach that I think is still credible; an approach, in fact, that has been described by the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Greenspan, by, as I said, three members of the Federal Reserve Board saying: There ought to be divesture. That would be one of the amendments I will offer next week and discuss.

Again, what has happened leading up to and since the near collapse of our economy, as a result of unbelievable activities at the top of our financial food chain, the largest financial enterprises have actually become much larger because of actions of the Federal Government, among other things, to encourage them to become larger. I think an appropriate amendment would be for us to have a real discussion about, should we not just decide if you are too big to fail, you are just too big.

I am happy to yield.

First, the point the Senator from Connecticut made, which is so important, is effective regulatory authority. If we don't have regulations that work or regulators who care, what happens is what happened to us in the last couple years. We have a buildup of substantial risk, effectively allowing some to gamble rather than invest. We desperately need effective regulatory capability and regulators who care. I understand the risk council in the underlying bill is allowed to go toward divestiture but not require it.

My point is, I will offer an amendment that would actually require it at the front end, simply saying, if we have a category that is described as too big to fail, meaning this is too large an organization to be allowed to fail, which in my lexicon is no- fault capitalism, if they are now at such a size that they are too big to fail, they pose a moral hazard, a grave threat and risk to the economy, if they were to fail, then I say do as we have done on some other occasions. We broke up Standard Oil into 26 parts, and it turns out the value of the parts was substantially greater than the value of the whole. It turned out to be a pretty wonderful thing. We broke up AT&T for other reasons. I am not rushing to try to break up anybody, but if we are serious about describing that which we think creates substantial, additional risk in the future, then we should take action to eliminate those kinds of risks, if the risk is, in this case, too big to fail.

I would like to get rid of the category of too big to fail. The Federal Reserve Board has had such a category for a long time. We have always known that if one is too big to fail, they are at a significant advantage to virtually every other financial institution. They can do business. They can take risks, but they can't fail. They are too big to fail and, competing with them, they have a safety net. My amendment will be simply, if you get to that point where this council judges you to be too big to fail without substantial grave risk to the country's economy, then I think divestiture that is sufficient to get the institution back to an area where it is not too big to fail would be in the public interest. My amendment would require divestiture.

The other amendment I will be offering is one that is also perhaps controversial. That is on the issue of naked credit default swaps or what some people call synthetic default swaps. They have been described, accurately so, as betting or wagering rather than investing. I have heard the descriptions of the investment bankers about why they are useful in dealing with risk and so on. But it is not useful, from my perspective, to have the largest financial institutions collecting fees for the purpose of arranging wagers. There are places to make wagers, if we call the wager simply gambling. Las Vegas and Atlantic City come to mind. But with respect to credit default swaps, which is a new term in the discussion these days, credit default swaps themselves represent insuring against a bond default, for example. But a naked credit default swap means you have no insurable interest in anything. You are simply betting someone else about something that might happen with a bond issue, despite the fact neither of you own the bond. I began thinking about a column Mr. Pearlstein wrote in the Washington Post. He always writes interesting columns. He said: Why should there be allowed more insurance against bonds than there are bonds? Then I read a piece that in England they actually tried to categorize it, what percent of the credit default swaps were synthetic or naked, having no insurable interest? The answer was about 80 percent. Think of that. About 80 percent of these naked credit default swaps have no insurable interest on anything. It is just a way to wager.

I believe that is a category that ought not be allowed. I will offer an amendment on that. I recognize that that may also be a controversial issue but one, nonetheless, I think is important.

Nobody knows this better than the chairman of the committee. I think it is important we have a productive sector to produce things, to produce things that might have a label that says ``Made in America.'' It is important we have a financial sector because we can't produce without finance. Production is necessary for finance as well. If you look at a couple hundred years of economic history, you will find that, in some cases for decades, production has the upper hand and finance is out here sort of moving at the beck and call of production. Then, in other areas, the financing industry has the upper hand. You see it move back and forth. We have been through a couple decades in which finance has the upper hand and has been calling the shots.

It is critically important to have a system of finance, and that system includes investment banks, FDIC-insured banks, venture capital funds, a wide array of financial institutions. We desperately need that. We can't have an economy that grows without it. But it is very important that financial system be one that has proper, effective regulation so we don't see it spin out of control as we have seen in the last 10 or 15 years.

In 1994--15\1/2\ half years ago--I wrote the cover story for the Washington Monthly magazine. The title of my cover story was ``Very Risky Business.'' I took a part of a title of a movie back then. At that point, I think there was something like $18 or $28 billion notional value of derivatives out in the economy. I talked about the risk those derivatives posed to our banking institutions that were trading on their own proprietary accounts on derivatives. It is not as if I have just discovered this issue. With Senator Feinstein from California and others, I have been on the floor many times talking about the need to regulate derivatives and regulate hedge funds. We have been spectacularly unsuccessful in that over the years, but now at long last, with the legislation that is coming to the floor and the opportunity to have a wide-open debate with a lot of amendments, I think all of us can believe that if we are successful--and I believe we can be--we will do something that has merit for the future stability of this country's economy.

Again, I know there is a lot of language about banking and investment banking out there. I use some of it, perhaps, that is pretty hot language. Some of it is well deserved by a lot of people who made a lot of money, as they steered this country's economy into the ditch. But let it be known we need a financial system that works in order to finance production. All of us want the same thing. We want to put this country back on track and expand the economy and create jobs once again. That is the purpose of all this.

I used to teach a bit of economics in college. I always described to students that the economy is not like some engine room on the ship of state where, if you get down in the engine room and find the right dials and switches and push them all just right, that the ship of state will move forward. It is not that at all. It is about confidence. If the American people are confident in the future, they do things that manifest that confidence and expand the economy. They buy a new suit of clothes, a car, a house, take a trip. They do the things that manifest their confidence in the future. That is expansive to the economy. If they are not confident, they do exactly the opposite. That contracts the economy.

That is why this legislation is going to go a long way toward saying to the American people: You can have confidence this sort of thing is not going to happen again. That is the precursor

to allowing us to see an economy that expands because people have some confidence in the future.

I started by saying thank you to the Senator from Connecticut. I say, again, there is a lot of work that has gone into this. It is not perfect bill. There will be much that is controversial. I will offer a couple controversial amendments. At the end, I hope we will all have worked together to accomplish the same thing for the country--the opportunity for more economic growth and expansion and more hope and opportunity for American families.

I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for as much time as I may consume.

Mr. President, yesterday there was a hearing in the Senate on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty we have negotiated with Russia. I was not on the committee, but there was testimony by Dr. James Schlesinger and Dr. William Perry, two of the most veteran arms control experts, who came to the Foreign Relations Committee and said they support the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia.

I was in Russia a couple weeks ago and had an opportunity to tour a number of sites that we are actually funding from the United States through the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, the partnership we have with Russia in a number of areas, stemming from, among other things, what is called the Nunn-Lugar law, the Nunn-Lugar program. I have long supported the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program called Nunn-Lugar, named after two of my colleagues, Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar.

In the early 1990s, they wrote legislation that allows us to work with the Russians and other former Soviet states to deactivate nuclear weapons and to destroy delivery systems.

I wish to show a couple of the photographs and if I might show something I have had in my desk for a while. I ask unanimous consent to do that. This is a photograph of a blackjack Russian bomber being dismantled. This is the wing strut from that bomber. I have a piece that was sawed off from the bomber's wing strut in my desk simply because it was given to me, and I thought it was so significant that the wing of a Soviet bomber that used to carry nuclear weapons, part of that wing is now in my Senate desk, not because we shot the Russian bomber down; it is because we actually provided the funding to saw the wings off and destroy the bomber. That is success.

This is a photograph of a missile silo in the Ukraine. I have in my desk, as well, a hinge. This hinge came from that missile silo. That missile silo held an SS-18 missile with a nuclear warhead aimed at the United States of America.

Now, where that missile silo once existed, with a missile and a warhead aimed at America, is now a field of sunflowers. You can see from this picture the missile silo was blown up, dismantled. I actually have a piece of the hinge. What a great success. The missile silo did not have a missile delivered to destroy a city in America. We actually spent the money to pay for the destruction of the missile silo under the Nunn-Lugar program. What a spectacular success that is.

This next picture is of a submarine being dismantled. It is a Russian submarine. It is a Typhoon class ballistic missile submarine, and it would have carried missile tubes, and those missile tubes in that submarine under the water would have contained nuclear warheads that would have been used to destroy our country.

Here, in this picture, is an example of the missile tubes on that submarine. These too were destroyed. I have a little vile of copper wire that was ground up that came from that submarine. Now, we did not sink that submarine in an act of warfare. We actually paid to have that submarine dismantled and the copper wiring ground up. I have some of the copper wiring here in my desk, just to remind us how important this program has been.

Now, we have on this Earth about 25,000 nuclear weapons, roughly. This comes from the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2010. It is estimated Russia has about 15,000 nuclear weapons; the U.S. probably about 9,000-plus; China, a couple hundred; France, several hundred; Britain, a couple hundred. So here is the quantity of nuclear weapons on our planet. The question is, What would happen if someday in some way someone detonates a nuclear weapon in the middle of a major city on this planet? I know what will happen. It will change life on Earth as we know it.

So let me describe a story. And keep in mind, we have 25,000 nuclear weapons on the planet. Let me describe a story. One month after 9/11, a CIA agent nicknamed Dragonfire reported to the CIA that he had evidence that a 10-kiloton Russian nuclear weapon had been stolen and had been smuggled into New York City and was to be detonated. That was 1 month after 9/11. It was October 11, 2001, to be exact. Dragonfire reported that al-Qaida terrorists had stolen a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb from the Russian arsenal and may have smuggled it into New York City.

It was not reported at that point, but there was an apoplectic seizure here. The President and others who had this information were not sure whether it was accurate or not. It was a report from a CIA agent, and they--just in the shadow, 1 month later, of 9/11 of course-- were very much on their guard. Our country was pretty much shocked by everything that happened.

So this report by Dragonfire meant that Vice President Cheney moved to a secret mountain facility, along with several hundred government employees, we are told. So they were the core of an alternative government that would operate if Washington, DC, were destroyed by a nuclear weapon.

We are told that President Bush dispatched a nuclear emergency support team to New York to search for a weapon. To not cause panic, no one in New York City was informed of the threat, not even the mayor of New York. After a few weeks, the intelligence community determined that Dragonfire's report of someone having stolen a Russian nuclear weapon and smuggling it into this country was probably a false alarm.

But when they did the post-mortem on it, they all understood it was perfectly possible that a nuclear weapon could have been stolen from the Russian arsenal, perfectly possible that a nuclear weapon could have been smuggled in to New York City or Washington, DC, and possible for terrorists to disarm the safeguards and explode the bomb.

No one said it was impossible that a terrorist group would want to kill several hundred thousand Americans with one bomb in the middle of an American city. On the contrary, all of the experts knew this was possible. Now, all of that--by the way--all of that angst was about one 10-kiloton, rather small Russian nuclear weapon reported by a CIA agent to have been stolen.

But there is more than one nuclear weapon; there are 25,000 nuclear weapons on this planet. Think of the concern about the potential stealing of one, and then ask the question, What do we have to do to make sure that nuclear weapons that now exist are safeguarded, that there is adequate security, and, even more important, that we stop the spread of nuclear weapons to others, other countries, and certainly terrorist groups who want to acquire nuclear weapons?

The description of Dragonfire's report comes from a former Clinton administration official, Graham Allison, an expert on nuclear proliferation. He wrote about the incident in a book called ``Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.'' The description I have just read is a part of the book by Mr. Allison.

Now, even though the Cold War ended two decades ago, we still have, as I have indicated, about 25,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Mr. President, 95 percent of them are owned by the United States or by Russia. We are now operating under the Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty, also known as the Moscow Treaty. It requires the United States and Russia, by our agreement, to have no more than 2,200 ``operationally deployed'' strategic nuclear weapons by 2012. But it does not do anything to restrict nuclear delivery vehicles--bombers, missiles, submarines. And it does not have any verification measures. It expires in 2012.

A few weeks ago President Obama and Russian President Medvedev met

in Prague, the Czech Republic, and signed a new strategic arms control treaty. It is called START. It limits each side to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads--30 percent lower than the existing treaty. It limits each side to 800 deployed and nondeployed ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments--one- half of what the START treaty allowed. It sets a separate limit of 700 deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs, and deployed heavy bombers that are equipped. It has verification regimes for on-site inspections, telemetry exchanges, data exchanges, and so on.

Now, I know this treaty will be controversial in some quarters, but I want to describe what ADM Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said just in the last month, because some are worried about whether our nuclear weapons work, whether our stockpile is reliable. What if we use it? Can we expect it to work? Well, the other side of the nuclear debate is, if you use it, you probably will never be around to wonder whether it works. I think the face of this Earth will change if there is ever an exchange of nuclear weapons of any kind between adversaries that have multiple nuclear weapons.

ADM Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says:

I, the Vice Chairman, and the Joint Chiefs, as well as our

combatant commanders around the world, stand solidly behind

this new treaty, having had the opportunity to provide our

counsel, to make our recommendations, and to help shape the

final agreements.

So the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs says they are satisfied with this treaty, believe it is a good treaty.

Linton Brooks says something very important. He is the former NNSA, National Nuclear Security Administration, Administrator from 2003 to 2007. He says:

START . . . is a good idea on its own merits, but . . . for

those who think it's only a good idea if you only have a

strong weapons program, I think this budget ought to take

care of that.

He is talking about the budget the President has sent to the Congress for life extension programs and the other things we do to make sure the nuclear stockpile is up to date.

He said:

Coupled with the out-year projections, it takes care of the

concerns about the complex and it does very good things about

the stockpile and it should keep the labs healthy. . . .

He said:

. . . I would've killed for this kind of budget.

The reason I mention this is that we have people coming to the floor of the Senate now, and in public discussion--and Douglas Feith is an example of them. He says:

Since the administration is so eager for [the treaty], the

main interests of conservatives will relate to modernization.

Republicans are interested in the U.S. nuclear posture, the

political leverage they have will be the treaty. . . .One of

the hot issues is going to be the replacement warhead. . . .

What does that mean? That means we have had people in this Chamber and others--including the neocons, and Mr. Feith and others--they have always wanted to begin building new nuclear weapons. It started with: What we need to do is, we need to build new designer nuclear weapons. We need to build earth-penetrating bunker-buster weapons so we can use them. In Afghanistan there were some folks who were hold up down, well underground, and so: What we need to do is develop designer nuclear weapons, earth-penetrating bunker-buster nuclear weapons.

Well, Senator Feinstein and I and some others got that abolished. It makes no sense to me for us to be off building new nuclear weapons. It just does not make any sense. The fact that the bunker-buster earth- penetrator was not built--that does not matter--then they came with the RRW, reliable replacement weapons. Substantial costs of additional funding to build new nuclear weapons called the replacement weapons.

Here are some statements by some skeptical U.S. Senators about this START treaty:

Well, I can tell you this, that I think the Senate will

find it very hard to support this treaty if there is not a

robust modernization plan. . . .

Another Senator:

The success of your administration in ensuring the

modernization plan is fully funded in the authorization and

appropriations process could have a significant impact on the

Senate. . . .

It means you have to be building additional nuclear weapons, you have to spend X amount of money here and there in order for us to support the START treaty.

Another Senator says:

My vote on the START treaty will thus depend in large

measure on whether I am convinced the administration has put

forward an appropriate and adequately funded plan to sustain

and modernize the smaller nuclear stockpile it envisions.

Let my say what the JASON says about all this. It is an organization that really knows what it is talking about and issues a lot of reports with respect to the science of nuclear weapons, because some have said: We have to build a lot of new nuclear weapons here because the nuclear weapons we have--dealing with the degradation of the pits and other things--we are not going to be able to have confidence they even work. So here is what the JASON says:

JASON finds no evidence that accumulation of changes

incurred from aging and LEPs--

Life extension programs--

have increased risk to certification of today's deployed

nuclear warheads.

They are saying, quite clearly, there is no evidence there is an increased risk to be able to certify that our nuclear stockpile is reliable.

Lifetimes of today's nuclear warheads could be extended for

decades, with no anticipated loss in confidence, by using

approaches similar to those employed in [the life extension

programs] to date.

So to those who want to go off and spend a lot of money building new nuclear weapons, at a time when we are deep in debt, and leverage that in exchange for voting on the START treaty, I say you are wrong. You are just dead wrong. We have to get about the business of reducing nuclear weapons. We have to get about the business of agreeing to treaties like this because it is our responsibility. It falls on our shoulders here in the United States to be the world leader to steer us away from nuclear catastrophe.

Now, I understand nobody is talking about disarmament here. But we are talking about a circumstance where there is able to be certification that our nuclear stockpile is reliable. That certainly ought to satisfy the appetite of those who want to build more nuclear weapons. We should not be building more nuclear weapons. What kind of a message does that send to the rest of the world? We have 25,000 nuclear weapons on the planet already--the loss of one which caused an apoplectic seizure around this place, for those who knew it, because they wondered what would happen.

Mr. President, 9/11 was several thousand people. What would happen if several hundred thousand people were murdered with a nuclear weapon being exploded in a major city--and not just a U.S. city, any major city on this planet? It will dramatically alter life on this planet.

So I just wanted to say, this START treaty--I commend the President: a job well done. This is a very good and important treaty for our country and for the world. I am going to be strongly supporting it. We will have sufficient resources--the President has seen to it-- sufficient resources for the life extension program to make sure our nuclear stockpile is reliable.

This President has said, to his credit, that our job, our responsibility as a world leader is to provide leadership to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, to do everything that is necessary to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists and rogue nations. Our job is to find ways to reduce the number of nuclear weapons on this planet.

The President of the United States hosted at the convention center here in Washington, DC, I think the largest gathering, perhaps, of its kind in history, of world leaders who came here to talk about securing loose nuclear materials and nuclear weapons. Some make light of that: Well, a little gathering; good for all them. No one should make light of that gathering. It was historic and unbelievably important. A very small amount of highly enriched uranium--the size of a 2-liter of soda in the store--is enough to build a nuclear weapon. The loose nuclear materials, highly enriched uranium and plutonium that is available around the

world, must be gathered together and must be safeguarded and kept out of the hands of terrorist organizations. That is what this President was doing: cementing together the will and the agreement with other leaders from around the world to do that. That is unbelievably important. No one should make light of that and everyone should understand the historic importance of what this President has done.

Finally, this START treaty, as I indicated, I think has much to be commended to this country, and this Senate ought not find itself in the kind of dispute it almost always has on everything these days. If there is anything this Senate ought to be able to agree upon, it is that it is our responsibility and in our interests--in our long-term survival interests--to find ways to reduce the number of nuclear weapons on this planet, reduce delivery vehicles, and reach agreements with adversaries and potential adversaries so all of us understand that we cannot allow a nuclear weapon to fall into the hands of terrorist organizations.

I commend the administration. I hope on a bipartisan basis we can give a very strong vote to the START treaty when the hearings are completed and when we have a debate on it on the floor of the Senate.

Mr. President, I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I know there will be a number of people talking about regulatory reform. The Senator from Virginia and I worked on a number of issues together in order to create a bill we think is solid and will stand the test of time. I hope that spirit continues.

One of the things many Members have been talking about is the size of institutions. There has been some movement to arbitrarily decide what size an institution ought to be. Everybody is frustrated by what occurred a couple years ago. There are a lot of ideas coming forth to try to prevent the same types of things that occurred a couple years ago, or a year ago, from happening again. What I hope people will keep in mind is that the reason our large financial institutions are the size they are is because we have companies that need to be large in order to be competitive.

Obviously, if it is a large company doing business throughout the country, what they want to ensure is that they have a financial institution that covers the entire geographic map of the country. They want to be able to do business in every State in a way that is easy and allows them to do what they do competitively.

Then we have to remember, especially as we continue to talk about other countries and the tremendous growth taking place in countries such as China and others, that we live in a global environment. In that global environment, some of the great companies that have been founded in this country need the ability to operate and do so in a way that creates American jobs. We need to have a banking system where we have institutions with the ability to operate throughout the country. Then we need the ability for these institutions to compete on a global basis.

What that means is, we have large, highly complex institutions that are able to do all the things necessary for companies to compete.

I hope as people look at arbitrary downsizing, as people look at lines of business in which banks can or cannot be involved, that they take into account that of the 10 largest financial institutions in the world--let me start with the top five financial institutions in the world--a place where companies have to compete. We have not one bank in that category. We have the largest gross domestic product in the world, the most competitive business environment in the world. Yet we do not have one institution that ranks in the top five in the world.

As a matter of fact, if we take it down to the top ten, we only have two financial institutions, two banks that are in the top ten, and they are toward the bottom of that ranking.

I know it sounds great to say we are going to take on Wall Street, but I think we need to remember that we may be taking on the heartland. For instance, if you are in Indiana or Ohio or someplace like that, and you are making some product out of metals, you probably want to know, if you have long-term contracts, that you have the ability to hedge the risk of metals going up or, if you are dealing with another country where you have a lot of shipments going, you want the ability to know that if you are selling it for what you think is a U.S. dollar, that U.S. dollar stays constant by having currency swaps and those types of things.

One of the great things about America--we talk about the American dream--is that people in this country have the ability--such as the Senator from Virginia. There is no better example. The Senator from Virginia had a dream he realized early on. I think he started with maybe $5,000 and might have lost that quickly. Then he had to reload again and figure out a way with small amounts of money to create a great company. He did that. He did it over and over again.

The reason he was able to do that was in this country, we have the ability to bring capital together around entrepreneurs. You don't have to be born in this country with a silver spoon in your mouth. I know I started exactly the same way with $8,000 when I was 25 years old. We have the ability in this country to have a dream and to accumulate ways to build around that dream with capital formation that creates jobs.

This debate is interesting. I know people can score political points; it is great to take on Wall Street. But what we have to be careful of is cutting our nose off to spite our face. The fact is, what makes this country great is all the companies across the country where people got up this morning and went to work. Some entrepreneur had an idea, built a company, and now it is employing people which I know all of us realize is probably the most important thing for all of us to care about. Heads of households then have the ability to raise their children, to pay for their education, to do the kinds of things that improve our standard of living.

So I am a little concerned, as I hear night after night after night, people coming down to this floor and they are bashing Wall Street. By the way, there are some things that certainly need to be corrected, and I know the Senator from Connecticut is trying to do that with portions of his bill. I know the Senator from Virginia and I worked on portions of the bill we hope will do that, but just arbitrarily saying we are going to create a system in this country of small banks--banks that do not have the ability to aid companies that deal around this world so we as a country can be globally competitive--that concerns me.

I hope that, again, in the name of political points, we will stop much of this

discussion and we will all come to our senses.

Well, I should not have said that; everybody has strong opinions and that was a misstatement by me. I hope we will look at the end results of our actions and what that may mean to the good people of this country who get up every day and work hard and depend upon--depend upon--those people who are willing to take risks for their families to be able to put food on their table, to educate their kids, and to live a life in America we can all be proud of.

I see the Senator from Connecticut. I know there is no one else on the floor. I will actually pause for a second. This may be the second longest speech I have ever given on the floor. So I will stop and take my breath.

I yield the floor, if that is all right, to the Senator from Connecticut.

Mr. President, I appreciate so much the comments from the Senator from Connecticut. I would like to sort of summarize the way I see things today.

I, first of all, would say, I think last week--or over the last short period of time anyway--probably has been the lowest point in my Senate career of 3 years and 4 months in just hearing all the rhetoric on both sides of the aisle, candidly, about this bill. I continue to hear it, unfortunately, in the evenings from this floor. The fact is, this is a serious issue, it is complex, and there are a lot of substantive issues that need to be addressed.

I guess the thing that frustrates me most about this body--it has nothing to do with having been a mayor or a businessperson--is the outlandish things people can say on both sides of the aisle just to try to cut herds out of Americans. So Americans who are busy raising their families or doing what they do on a daily basis--and, candidly, what we are doing is just a long way away and they hear pieces of it--it is just to sort of divide up our country. I do hope on this bill we can focus more on the facts, and we will see if that occurs. It certainly would be the first time in a long time if that were to occur, but I hope that happens.

As I look at this bill, first of all, on the too-big-to-fail piece, my sense is, the Senator from Connecticut is going to work with the Senator from Alabama and pretty well fix that over the course of this weekend. I have a feeling a manager's amendment is coming forth. There will be people on both sides of the aisle who think a resolution mechanism is not appropriate, I realize that, and there will be a push toward bankruptcy, which I know the Senator from Virginia and I wanted to strengthen in big ways. There are some committee issues that sort of keep that from happening as elegantly as it might happen. But I sure hope we will do everything we can to strengthen the bankruptcy laws so the default position for a major company is to go into bankruptcy. OK. That is the way our country works when a company fails.

But in some cases, I do believe there is a need for a resolution mechanism. My sense is, the Senator from Connecticut and the Senator from Alabama will come to terms over the next several days with ways of ensuring there are not those gaps. The administration gets a little involved in a bill, and they want to create some flexibility. I understand that. If I were on their side, I would want to do the same: Hey, I will take the power and we will solve everything. We need to sort of close that up so the things we intend to happen actually happen in this bill, and my sense is, I say to the Senator, you all are going to fix that over the weekend.

So then we have the issue of the derivatives, and I think all of us want to see derivatives cleared. There have been some issues, I know, that came forth out of the Ag Committee. This 106 issue is something that I think my friends on the other side of the aisle are going to figure out a way to solve and get back in the box, and I look forward to the debate you all will have amongst each other doing that. That will actually be humorous to watch. But I think the Senator from Virginia and the Senator from Connecticut and the Senator from Arkansas will figure out a way to get that one back in the tube, if you will.

So the derivatives issue, my sense is, will get to a place where it probably works. I know Judd Gregg and Jack Reed--smart guys on both sides of the aisle--have worked on this. Their work at some point will bear some fruit. I know Saxby Chambliss and Blanche Lincoln have worked heavily on it. I think we are going to get that right.

So at the end of the day, I think we know the issue that probably is going to divide this group, if we do not work it out--I am talking about this Senate body--is the consumer protection piece. Look, I want to see consumer protection take place. I do. I know the Senator from Connecticut knows I was serious about trying to resolve that issue in March. It is my hope we can come to terms on that.

It is my hope we can create a balance, an appropriate balance, so the consumer protection piece is in balance with prudential regulation. For people who do not do this on a daily basis, I am talking about those people who make sure our banking system is safe and sound, that our financial institutions are not at risk because of the rules and those kinds of things. Hopefully, we can get that in balance.

I do not know if the Senator from Connecticut wishes to speak to this, but that is the one issue I know has a lot of people concerned. I think many of us are concerned about an agency that, as it is written today, I do not think has appropriate checks and balances, and with the wrong kind of leadership, over time, could end up being something very different than even possibly what the Senator from Connecticut intends for it to be today.

Again, over the course of the debate, I hope we have the ability to deal with consumer protection in a way that achieves that balance, where people across this country, who awaken on a daily basis and are not necessarily directly involved in the financial industry, have no fears of this sort of reaching out and becoming unnecessarily involved in what they are doing. So that is the one issue, and I know the Senator from Connecticut realizes that.

I will digress slightly. I know the Senator from Connecticut referred to Canada and the large institutions Canada has and a much smaller GDP. One of the reasons they did not get into the same difficulties we had as a country is they have underwriting mechanisms there that determine what is appropriate for people to do as it relates to borrowing for their homes. Their underwriting standards are very different than exist in this country. I know the Senator from Connecticut has an approach to it--the 5-percent risk retention with securitizations. I have a little different approach to it and feel as though we shouldn't be securitizing loans in the first place that are written to people who can't pay them back.

I wish to get at the very base of this issue, and I hope that over the course of this debate we will figure out a way to merge what the Senator from Connecticut has proposed and maybe some real underwriting so that when the loans are written in the first place and end up getting spread across our country, we have made sure these loans are written in such a way that we know the people who have taken out these mortgages can pay them back.

Again, that is why Canada had no issues whatsoever as it related to this because in their country they have different underwriting standards. People there actually put down 50 percent, generally speaking, when they purchase their homes. I know we don't want to be overly proscriptive in this body. I hope the Senator from Virginia and the Senator from Connecticut and all of us can sit down and figure out a way to address that in a slightly different way. But candidly, as it relates to this issue, it is hard for me to believe that we have a financial regulation bill and are not addressing that, the underwriting piece.

But, again, as the Senator from Connecticut mentioned, we are not going to deal with everything. We cannot deal with everything. We know we have to come back around very soon and deal with Fannie and Freddie. I hate it that we are not dealing with that now. I think all of us would like to be dealing with that now. The fact is that at some point we ought to come back around and deal with that, have another bite at the apple to deal with many of these issues, when that issue is taken up.

Back to consumer protection. I think as a body we have a chance to pass a serious piece of legislation--a serious piece of legislation-- that a lot of thought has gone into. A lot of hearings have taken place. We have a chance to pass a serious piece of legislation in this body with potentially an overwhelming vote if we can figure out a way to come together on the consumer protection piece. I think the Senator from Connecticut knows where most Republicans wish to be on that issue. If you look at a 10 scale, if you will, I think where Republicans wish to be, or at least many on this side of the aisle, is an 8 on a 10 scale for people who care about and who think consumer protection is the issue. It seems to me that as a body, instead of trying to score political points and say if you vote against this bill, you are voting for Wall Street, which is ludicrous, all of us care.

I have something every Tuesday called Tennessee Tuesday. The Senator from Tennessee, Senator Alexander and I, greet people from Tennessee. I have to tell my colleagues, there are not any Wall Street bankers there. They are community bankers and credit unions who come to see us. Those are the folks who I think most of us care about as it relates to constituents in our State. I know these provisions that are in consumer protection are what scare them most about what that might become down the road.

So, again, instead of making this an ``if you are with us, you are against Wall Street; if you are against us, you are for Wall Street,'' I hope what we will do is at some point--I know these bills all sort of have a life and they ebb and flow and there is a time maybe when these kinds of negotiations can take place in a serious way, but I hope what we will do, instead of dividing this body over an issue we all care about, is unite this body by maybe figuring out a way to merge that issue a little bit more fully.

I realize there is a way that a bill can pass out of this body on a 62-vote margin. I realize that is possible, that there will be a couple folks who might have different sensibilities about particular issues and things. I realize that.

As a tribute, actually, to the Senator from Connecticut, who has been here many years, who is leaving this body at the end of this term, I hope what we do is figure out a way to have an 85-vote bill and come together on this one issue that I think ultimately has the potential to divide us--a piece of legislation that leaves this body on a party-line vote almost, or maybe it doesn't even leave because it is so divisive, but leaves on a party-line vote that I don't think this country respects much. I think they are over that, and I think they wish to see us work together in a way that solves things.

I am getting ready to yield the floor because I am beginning to talk way too long. I thank the Senator from Virginia. I thank the Senator from Connecticut. I hope within this body we are able to do something that seeks the appropriate balance and seeks to do something that truly is a bipartisan compromise that will stand the test of time.

I yield the floor.

I enjoyed listening to the comments of the Senator from Connecticut. I can certainly share with him some of the ideas he suggested. My other colleagues and I, to be candid, could change this bill and it would have numerous names on it. I hope we have the ability to talk about some of those over the course of the next several days. Apparently, it is not quite time for that.

I want to mention the issue of Wall Street and talk about public relations. There is no question that after what occurred, many of the folks on Wall Street could have used a public relations firm to help them. No question, the bonuses and things we saw, after getting taxpayer money to make sure they survived, no doubt that created a backlash.

As a matter of fact, the Senator from Virginia and I are working on an amendment that would say, if this ever happens again and we have to take one of these firms through resolution, which is part of the Dodd bill right now, the bonuses and other types of things in recent years would all be clawed back. You cannot make huge sums of money, take your company down the tubes, and do things to America in that way without paying a price. We are working on something I think is balanced and appropriate, hopefully not populace but something that is thoughtful. If somebody takes their company down and wreaks havoc on our country, that will make us use this resolution mechanism. I think that is appropriate to look at.

Also, back in the fall of 2008, had the resolution mechanism we have talked about that still has some imperfections been in place--and I realize Senator Dodd and Senator Shelby are going to fix it this weekend--had that been in place, that meeting might not have occurred-- right?--because we would have had a way to deal with some of the contagion that exists when a company goes down.

I want to go back. The Senator from Connecticut talked about the groups, when he was in Connecticut, who were upset with him. I say to the Senator, it is not those issues that he alluded to that made them so angry and made me angry. It is the huge expansion of government they are seeing take place. It is this huge role that Washington is beginning to play in their lives.

As we look at this consumer protection title Senator Dodd addressed a minute ago, the big guys on Wall Street do not care about that. This is not something that is going to affect the big guys on Wall Street. They have staffs and they have reams of people who have the ability to deal with these consumer laws. Those are not the people who are coming into our office. It is the small, the medium-sized folks who do not have the ability to deal with these in the same way.

If the Senator from Connecticut would be willing to sit down and talk about ways of ensuring that Americans should not fear this organization because this organization over time will become way involved in their lives--which I think is stoking most of the anger we are seeing across the country today, and I think rightfully so--if there is a way of achieving a balance where, in essence, consumers are protected--I know the Senator from Connecticut knows well I am all for working on streamlining, pulling these agencies together, making sure we have a voice that is out there dealing with that issue--if there is a way of doing that, I think the Senator from Connecticut would find that this body would come together, and very quickly.

There are a few issues--106. Maybe the Volcker language ought to be modified a little bit. Sometimes we do best around here when we study things before we take action. I know Americans might be shocked if we actually did that.

If we can moderate just a couple of things--I am talking about just a few sentences--and then look at consumer protection in a way that is balanced and does not stoke that anger, that rightful anger that exists across our country with the government taking a bigger and bigger role in people's lives unnecessarily, if we could fix that--and I think we can. That is what frustrates me. I think we can do that--then we will have appropriately dealt with the resolution. We will have appropriately dealt with derivatives. There are a few changes that need to take place, and both sides know what they are. If we can do that, then we will have a bill that I think will stand the test of time, and we will have a bill I think Americans will embrace and will do the things we set out to do.

I know we have had a long colloquy. I thank the Senator from Connecticut for indulging me and the Senator from Virginia, with whom I talked prior to coming to the floor. I hope in some form or fashion, we are able to deal with some of these concerns to ensure consumers are protected, to ensure that derivatives are clear and we do not end up with an AIG situation with huge amounts of money and having to settle up on a daily basis and we deal with the issue that when a company in this country fails, they fail.

I have to tell my colleagues, that is what Tennesseans care about. They do not understand because when a business in Bradley County or a business in Shelby County--maybe a mom or pop--fails, they are out of business. In this country, they see these large institutions on Wall Street fail and they do not go out of business. They consider that to be morally wrong.

I know we will get that right in this bill before it passes. I hope we can deal with these other issues appropriately.

Obviously, Mr. President, I was being humorous in talking about that. The Senator is right. The Senator from Virginia and I both know that in our businesses, we were the last ones to be paid. Everyone else was dealt with and our obligations were dealt with first.

I agree with the Senator from Connecticut. Something certainly went awry after the country had basically made these companies whole. It appeared to me the conduct was very unseemly. I agree with the Senator from Connecticut.

I yield the floor.