Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding the time to me.

I will tell you the argument that this is unconstitutional just isn't true. I urge the Members on the other side of the aisle who oppose the measure to read Judge Teilborg's opinion, just having been released, where he goes very carefully and says this doesn't prohibit abortions after 20 weeks, it limits them, clearly within the purview of Roe v. Wade and the subsequent case law, where the Gonzalez case says, for instance:

Government uses its voice and regulatory authority to show

its profound respect for the life within the woman.

Now, the Flat Earth Society on the other side would have you believe that no medical advances have been made in pain and the perception of pain since Roe v. Wade has been issued. But, in fact, they have. About 15 years ago, a huge discussion about whether preterm infants at 23 to 25, 26 weeks, being cared for by the thousands in our neonatal intensive care units, perceive pain to the point where pain medicine would be required to be administered to those patients. Pain medicine, that if it weren't required would be dangerous, but the decision--this has been decided. These infants are being treated for pain.

The opposition would hold up a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association from 2005, written by pro-abortion proponents, which suggested that until 30 weeks, there was no perception of pain. Mr. Speaker, that's been settled in hospitals around the country where 23- to 25-week fetuses are being treated. This bill sets that 20-week limit for two reasons. One is, as the judge says in his findings, everyone concedes that pain receptors are present at 20 weeks throughout the fetus. Mr. Speaker, God didn't put those there if they weren't there for a reason, and it is to perceive pain. Secondly, the risk to the mother increases exponentially as you get out of the first week of gestation, the risk of abortion to the mother. That's clear. That's demonstrated. That's epidemiology. That's not ideology; that's science. That's science clearly understood.

Mr. Speaker, this bill is founded on very basic scientific principles that the fetus has pain receptors throughout their body at 20 weeks and that the risk to the mother increases after 20 weeks.

If the gentleman from Louisiana will just leave that one up so the American public that is watching just understands because a picture says a thousand words.

That picture is the growth of Medicaid for the next generation. My son is 12 now. When he reaches age 65, he'll be at the right-hand side of that graph. And although none of us like to think of it, we all remember when we were 12, we never thought we would retire, but here we are nearing retirement age. So it's not that far off in the future.

If I read that graph correctly, our current entire budget, in 2010 dollars, is $3.5 trillion--our entire Federal budget, paying for everything. That graph indicates that by the time my child reaches retirement age, every penny of that budget would be taken up by Medicaid, every penny--not a single penny for Medicare; not a single penny left over for Social Security; not a single penny left over for interest on a debt that is now $16 trillion and growing; not a single penny left for defense; not a single penny left for Pell Grants; not a single penny left for anything.

The gentleman is correct. Every single program that we have, whether it's the elderly with health care, the elderly with Social Security, whether it's food stamps, whether it's unemployment insurance, whether it's to do the things this government has to do, like pay the interest on an ever-growing debt, whether it's Pell Grants, whether it's K-12 education, which your last slide showed, every single program that we have is threatened by this one single program, a program that the President's Affordable Care Act ballooned out of control.

The gentleman is absolutely right. What we have done is we have once again made promises to people we know we can't keep. We know because that graph--and I'll yield to the gentleman to answer the question--that's from the Congressional Budget Office. That's a non- partisan group that objectively looks at the effect of Federal laws and policies and projects the anticipated costs. Is that correct?

So what we have here is we have a third party looking at what's going on and saying the emperor has no clothes; that, in fact, if we continue the current policy with Medicaid--which, as the gentleman well knows, roughly doubles the number of people eligible for the safety net program under the Affordable Care Act--we will not only bankrupt the Medicaid program, future generations will no longer have the ability to be confident that Social Security will be there when they retire, that Medicare will be there when they retire.

The ratings agencies, whether it's Moody's, Standard and Poor's, all the various rating agencies will look at us and say: you don't have the ability to pay the interest back on your debt.

We know when that bill was passed, we know what happened. We know the cornhusker kickback. We know what went on--the buying and selling of votes at the expense of future generations and the ability of the Federal Government to keep their promises to future generations--the promises of Medicare, Medicaid, again, Pell Grants, K-12 education.

The gentleman showed a slide that showed a 3 percent increase in the cost--an average of 3 percent in the States' budgets--the cost of Medicaid over the past only 3 years before the President's health care bill kicks in. Well, as the President may know, 3 percent doesn't sound like much, but in Maryland that's a $1 billion increase. That's an increase we can't afford. That's an increase that means that property or income taxes would have to go up, further strangling our economy.

As the gentleman fully recognizes, this is why the President's policy with regard to Medicare and the Affordable Care Act is poorly thought out, is going to bankrupt the Nation, and really ought to be repealed and rethought.

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker, and I will yield to the gentlelady from Wyoming.

Thank you very much to the gentlelady from Wyoming for bringing up that point about what Medicaid does to State governments and about what the potential is to State governments and all the other programs that they have to fund.

I will tell you that, with regard to what happens, what we know is that access under the Medicaid program is already suffering, the access of patients. Again, passing the Affordable Care Act puts an insurance card--a Medicaid card--in the hands of probably 10 to 12 million Americans, but that doesn't guarantee access to health care.

As a physician, I've taken care of Medicaid patients for almost 30 years, but increasingly what I'm finding is my colleagues who are facing decreased payment reimbursements by the governments that are under financial hardship now. Even under current conditions, as this chart will show, there are very few States in the Union that actually have extra money around to fund that Medicaid increase. This chart shows various specialties and how Medicaid patients have access to them.

Under the current reimbursement, which of course will get nothing but worse for specialists under the new Affordable Care Act, among all specialists, 89 percent of patients with private insurance have access to all specialists and only 34 percent of medical assistance patients, or Medicaid patients. That's true whether it's orthopedics, psychiatry, asthma, neurology, endocrinology, ear, nose and throat, or dermatology. In all cases, access to a physician is restricted because, when a government controls the health care budget, the way it contains costs is by decreasing reimbursements to providers.

Those are the facts. That's what happens. That's what's going to happen under Medicaid. We know, with the Independent Payment Advisory Board, that that's what's going to happen under Medicare.

I yield to the physician from Tennessee.

So what you're saying is that you had patients under TennCare who had insurance cards. You just couldn't find anyone to take care of them.

You may or may not be aware of the study done early last year that showed that, actually, whether patients have private insurance or no insurance or Medicare or Medicaid, when you compare the outcomes, Medicaid patients have the worst outcomes. In fact, they are 93 percent more likely to die of their illnesses than patients with private insurance. They were more likely to die than even patients who had no insurance. I don't know. Is the gentleman aware of that finding?

I thank the gentleman.

I would love to bring the gentleman from Texas into the discussion, because women actually are specifically affected by the shortfalls in Medicaid because the reimbursement rates for women's health care is frequently so low that it's actually hard to find an obstetrician to take care of those patients. I know in Maryland this is a problem we had.

In the First Congressional District on the eastern shore of Maryland for a while, before we did Medicaid payment reform, women who were pregnant in that part of the State had to drive 3 hours to find an obstetrician to take care of them because the reimbursements were so low. And we know the Affordable Care Act does nothing for medical liability.

We also know, for instance, that we have a cesarean section rate that is 35 percent now, the result of medical liability. We have obstetricians who have left the practice later in their careers of obstetrics and gravitate toward just doing gynecology where they

join frequently large group practices. So we've left the practice of obstetrics to be an impersonal practice with people who generally don't have as much experience as those who have left the practice. And because of the lack of liability reform, we have a cesarean section rate that has roughly doubled over my career in dealing with obstetrics and obstetric anesthesiology.

I would like to hear the gentleman's comments on medical assistance and what it's doing for this country and for the women's health care in this Nation.

If the gentleman would just yield for a very brief question.

Do you think that's the kind of health care that the women of America deserve?

I thank the gentleman from Texas.

Again, we have on the floor with us now two obstetricians and an obstetric anesthesiologist. If women are ready for childbirth, we're ready on the floor of the House tonight.

The gentleman makes a great point that in the end, having an insurance card doesn't guarantee access and having an insurance card doesn't guarantee affordable care. As we know, what the Affordable Care Act did is to again pretend that, really, economics don't exist, to pretend that the laws of mathematics don't count; that we can expand this program, as the gentleman pointed out, a program that was meant to be a safety net for the poor elderly, for women, for children, and we expanded it well beyond that to the point where, as we brought up earlier in the hour, if gone unchecked, it will bankrupt everything else in government.

The time has come, as the gentleman has pointed out, for us to reconsider whether that Affordable Care Act was the right approach.

We know that just today the Congressional Budget Office has rescored the President's Affordable Care Act and has said that, as a result of the Supreme Court decision--because one of the goals was to insure as many Americans as possible--that an additional 3 to 4 million individuals will not be insured as a result of the Supreme Court, because the States will make a rational decision that they can't afford to let their budgets go bankrupt through this Federal Government- mandated expansion that does nothing to control costs. It does nothing, really, to increase access, other than putting a card in someone's hand.

And as the graph shows, that card doesn't help all the people who are in these pink bars. They're the ones with the Medicaid card currently, and their chance of seeing a specialist is somewhere between 17 percent and 57 percent because the government payment is so low and because these programs are so expensive and never adequately budgeted for, just as in the case of the Affordable Care Act.

Now, we're joined this evening by my colleague from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey), who is also an obstetrician, who has spent years taking care of patients and understands what it will take to fix the health care system in the United States. I'm very interested to hear your perspective, Dr. Gingrey, on the topic we're discussing tonight, Medicaid and its expansion under the Affordable Care Act.

I thank my colleague, the obstetrician from Georgia, who points out that on the graph, as the gentleman from Louisiana showed before, Medicaid expenditures now exceed K-12 education. And as the other chart we've seen shows, we're over at the left-hand side. It will only get worse over time.

I yield to the obstetrician from Texas.

I thank my colleagues for their participation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for yielding the time.

Madam Speaker, my, my, my. Former Speaker Pelosi was so right when she said Congress had to pass this bill so Americans could just find out what's in it.

Well, Americans have learned a lot since we first tried to repeal the President's health care act last January. We learned that it still continues to stifle job growth as we learn more and more about it, and that's why we have to attempt to repeal it once again.

Earlier this year, Americans discovered that the law creates a new nationwide mandate for coverage that doesn't allow people to opt out when they have a religious or moral objection to those covered services, a violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act duly passed by this Congress and, more importantly, a violation of their First Amendment rights. These inflexible mandates jeopardize the ability of institutions and individuals to exercise their rights of conscience, one of the most basic rights, and, yes, we discovered this since we voted on the repeal last January.

Mr. Speaker, by now Americans have learned enough about this bill. They want it repealed, and we should listen to them. We should pass the rule and pass the bill.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, this amendment would prohibit the use of funds for many of the international projects in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy--that's EERE--including the President's plan to spend $600,000 on ``sustainable cities'' projects in China and India. My amendment is identical to one I offered last year that was successfully adopted by this Chamber.

I would also like to congratulate the chairman of the committee for his own action regarding this issue. The chairman's bill reduces funding for EERE by $428 million from last year's level. He makes the hard choices required to address our country's deficit and spending problems.

This amendment supports language in the report that accompanied the FY 2012 appropriations bill. In that report, the chairman was able to retain much of last year's amendment by directing the DOE to only fund projects that directly benefit the United States, such as increasing American energy self-sufficiency, furthering United States research efforts or reducing domestic pollution.

Unfortunately, the Department of Energy is failing to follow these clear instructions. Instead, they are choosing to spend money in China and India on foreign sustainable cities projects, even as we borrow money from China to pay our national debt.

Mr. Chairman, we must take great care how we spend our constituents' paychecks. I don't believe these projects make the best use of hard- earned taxpayer money. There are greater needs that remain unmet and a massive Federal debt and annual deficit that continues to drag down our entire economy, as was demonstrated in today's Congressional Budget Office report. I urge adoption of the amendment.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Offered By: Mr. Harris

Amendment No. 18: At the end of the bill (before the short

title) insert the following:

Offered by: Mr. Harris

Amendment No. 18: At the end of the bill (before the short

title) insert the following:

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to congratulate the Salisbury University Men's Lacrosse team on winning the 2012 division three lacrosse national championship with a 14 to 10 victory in the 2012 NCAA tournament final over Cortland University, on May 27th, 2011.

The Salisbury Sea Gulls join an elite group of Division III programs in NCAA history in collecting at least 10 national championships.

They became the seventh squad under head coach Jim Berkman to complete a perfect season with 23 wins and no losses. Also, senior midfielder Sam Bradman was named the Most Outstanding Player in the NCAA Tournament for the second consecutive season.

Salisbury University is located in the heart of the Eastern Shore of Maryland and is a Maryland University of National Distinction. I am honored and proud to represent them in Maryland's 1st Congressional District.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, this discussion is not about safety, and it's not about making projects safe or making them more efficient. This is about politics. This is about an Executive order the President put in place that takes

jobs out of the First Congressional District of Maryland and other districts where there may not be union workforces.

Mr. Chairman, the unemployment rate is high enough in the First Congressional District.

No, I will not yield.

The unemployment rate in the First Congressional District of Maryland--lower shore of Maryland--is higher than the national average, and we don't have union workers. So if some bureaucrat in Washington, because of a Presidential Executive order, says we have to have a project labor agreement on a project under this bill, under this appropriation, unemployed workers in my district aren't going to work on that project, and the hardworking taxpayers in my district, as the gentleman from Michigan has said, will be paying 12 percent to 18 percent more of their hard-earned tax dollars to pay for a project labor agreement in a district that they don't want that some bureaucrat in Washington decided they needed.

Mr. Chairman, we can't afford that. This country can't afford it. We have a $1.3 trillion deficit. We have a debt that approaches $50,000 per person in this United States. And we're debating tonight about whether just to be neutral about language regarding project labor agreements.

The gentleman from Arizona is absolutely right. This is plain English reading. It just says that the bureaucrat, for curing that contract, can't require a project labor agreement. If someone wants to know bid on it, they can bid union labor. They can bid all the union labor they want. It just says you can't require it as a condition of the contract.

Mr. Chairman, we got sent here to do the right thing for our hardworking taxpayers back at home, those who want to have a job, who want to be involved in some of these Federal contracts. Without this provision, if this amendment passes, and this provision is struck from the underlying appropriations bill, people in the First Congressional District, those unemployed workers are not going to have the opportunity to work on those projects for the simple reason that they don't belong to a labor union.

That's what will disqualify them. Not that they're unemployed, not that they don't want to work, not that they don't know all the safety rules, not that they can't do the job, not that they don't have a plumbing license or an electrician's license, because they all have to have that license to hold a job. And the proponents of this amendment know that full well.

It's only because they don't belong to a labor union. That's what this fight is all about.

Mr. Chairman, I hesitate to rise to oppose the amendment of the gentleman from New York, but in the First Congressional District of Maryland this hurts our unemployment situation. This hurts our hardworking taxpayers. I rise to oppose the amendment because in districts around America, just like the First Congressional District of Maryland, this amendment doesn't do justice to those unemployed workers.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I rise with my colleague from New Jersey to discuss the funding provided to the Department of Energy for unconventional fossil energy research and development.

I first want to commend Mr. Frelinghuysen, the chairman of the subcommittee, for his strong support of the unconventional fossil energy research at the Department of Energy. As the committee report notes, the United States' oil shale reserves are estimated to exceed 2 trillion barrels of oil, more than five times the proven oil reserves held by Saudi Arabia. However, additional research is necessary to enable economic and environmentally safe production from this incredibly plentiful domestic resource.

In order to accelerate the safe and effective development of the Nation's oil shale reserves, this legislation provides $25 million for oil shale technology research and development activities.

As chairman of the Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, I recently chaired a hearing to examine the challenges and opportunities associated with expanding the development and use of unconventional oil and gas production technologies. The subcommittee received testimony from expert witnesses about the need for targeted government research to address specific issues associated with developing these unconventional oil resources.

These research areas include but are not limited to: oil shale resource characterization, the minimization and reuse of process water, the use of high-end computing applied to the physics and chemistry of oil shale production, the modeling and simulation of oil shale exploration and production technologies, and surface and groundwater protection.

It is my hope that the funding provided in this bill will address these and other key science and technology areas that are critical to enabling oil shale production and will be used to advance the environmentally sound and efficient production of our resources rather than a regulatory agenda aimed at restricting such production or limiting access to oil shale reserves located on Federal lands.

I would now like to yield to the gentleman from New Jersey.

Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chairman, first I want to congratulate the committee for doing its work to help curb the rise in government spending.

I rise to offer an amendment to provide level funding for NOAA's Climate Portal program, rather than the increase in the funding requested by the President and included in the bill as it currently stands.

The Climate Portal program is actually a Web site run by NOAA; and in committee testimony, Dr. Lubchenko suggested that this was a science Web site. This is where you can share climate science information and make decisions.

Madam Chairman, the request is a 56 percent increase in funding. Now, the only thing that's gotten a 56 percent increase over the last 4 years is the size of the Federal deficit and the debt. So my amendment merely reduces the level of funding to the current level.

But I want to read, as you click on some of these topics, what the science is at this port. I am going to read from an article just published on the Web site on May 2. It talks about farming.

``The rain was as loud as pennies falling on the roof of the truck's cab.'' Later on in the paragraph, ``We had been watching Johnson work in his field until the fat drops of rain sent us racing for cover.'' Next paragraph, ``The machine behind the tractor makes it easier than ever for him to roll the grass into submission, thousands of stalks pointing accusingly at the device that just pancaked them.''

Madam Chairman, that's not a scientific article. That's something I read to my children at bedtime. But this is what NOAA is advancing as a scientific Web site to share scientific information and is asking for a 56 percent increase in their funding.

My amendment is simple. Let's just level-fund the Web site. Let's revert it to a truly scientific nature and come back next year, if and when our finances are better.

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Offered By: Mr. Harris

Amendment No. 10: Page 13, line 2, after the dollar amount,

insert ``(reduced by $542,000)''.

Page 13, line 14, after the dollar amount, insert

``(reduced by $542,000)''.

Page 13, line 15, after the dollar amount, insert

``(reduced by $542,000)''.

Page 101, line 10, after the dollar amount, insert

``(increased by $542,000)''.

Mr. Chairman, I want to thank Chairman Ryan for yielding 3 minutes to talk about such an important subject as the health care of our seniors.

You know, the other side of the aisle wants to play pretend. Let's pretend that we have a program sustainable for all future generations. Let's pretend that all our seniors right now have access to all the medical care and physicians that they want. Let's pretend that the Medicare program that the President's health care reform bill establishes for our seniors allows seniors and their doctors to choose what care is best for them.

But, Mr. Chairman, we would have to be playing pretend because, in fact, we know that the program is not sustainable for all generations. This graph here is not from the Republican conference. This is from the Congressional Budget Office. This is what happens, the red. It's no accident that it's in red. This is what happens to Medicare spending under the President's proposals.

We are right here in the middle. This is when my children reach their middle age. This is when they retire. This is when my grandchildren reach their retirement. It's not sustainable. Anyone looking at that graph knows it's not sustainable. We can't play pretend.

We would have to play pretend that all seniors have access to physicians. Go into my district in rural areas where seniors tell you they don't have access to primary care already because the Medicare program currently squeezes the payments, the providers to where providers no longer choose to take on as many Medicare patients as they can. The President's plan makes it even worse.

Finally, we would be pretending that patients get to choose and their physicians get to choose their care because under the President's plan, there are 15 unelected bureaucrats who decide, that President's rationing board, who decide what care my mother now will get, what care I'm going to get in 10 years, what care my son is going to get in 39 years when he reaches retirement age. Fifteen unelected bureaucrats, Mr. Chairman, by law only a minority of that board can ever have practiced health care. The majority are bureaucrats never having taken care of a patient. That's the plan that we have now.

Mr. Chairman, it will break if we don't take care of it.

I applaud the chairman of the Budget Committee for the bravery; and, Mr. Chairman, you know what the ads are going to be. You can see it now. You can hear all the talking points. America knows health care in America needs repair. They know the Medicare program needs repair if we're going to preserve it for future generations.

I urge my colleagues to choose this as the repair for our future generations.

Mr. Chairman, I think the gentleman from California just said what this is all about: The IPAB is about cutting expenditures for our seniors on Medicare when they need their health care.

The IPAB is no straw man. It's a health care policy bureaucrat's dream and a Medicare patient's nightmare. It's 15 bureaucrats--and the gentleman from California called it right--insurance company representatives, pharmacy company representatives, benefit managers, employers, all those people who really have the care of an individual patient in mind.

In fact, that rationing board limits the number of health care professionals who can serve to a minority, a minority of people, and then goes further and says, And, oh, by the way, they have to actually stop practicing health care for the 6 years they sit on the board. How

close are they going to be to knowing what's going on in the care of a patient?

The gentleman from Iowa talked about the myth of defensive medicine. I want to ask anyone who cares to go in a labor and delivery suite and look what's happened to obstetric care, to our women in America over the past 40 years because we don't have effective tort reform.

I'm an obstetric anesthesiologist. I spent 30 years in a labor and delivery suite. In 1970, the cesarean section rate in this country was 5 percent. One in 20 women going to a hospital to have a baby would have a cesarean section. Last year it was 33 percent. I will tell you, not much has changed about childbirth in that time, but now a woman going into the hospital to have a baby has a one in three chance of having a cesarean section. Not only that, but 40 years ago--those of you who want to, ask people you know who delivered 40 years ago. Most obstetrics was delivered by a one- or two-person group where a woman got to know the obstetrician who was going to deliver her baby.

Go ask the folks in your district now what happens. You go into a group of about 10 or 12 people because they can't afford the malpractice insurance. They have to go into a big group so someone else can pay it. It's impersonal service. Go and try to find an obstetrician who is in their fifties or sixties and practicing obstetrics. They gave it up long ago because they can't afford the premiums. The most experienced obstetricians are no longer delivering care to American women.

The C-section rate is one in three, and a woman can't even expect to see her obstetrician every time she goes to those prenatal visits because there are eight or 10 in the group, and they all have to have a chance to see that patient. That's what the lack of tort reform has done to the delivery of care to women in this country.

We need to pass this bill and pass it now.

Mr. Speaker, as a physician, you know that buried very deep in the President's 2,000-page health care bill was the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB, an unelected, unaccountable 15-member rationing board appointed by the President for the sole purpose of cutting Medicare.

Who will the 15 members of the board be? Well, the law actually forbids them from being active health care providers. It only allows 7 members of the board to even have a health care provider background. In short, a majority of the board will be composed of people who have no experience in actually caring for patients.

Patients across the country, especially those in rural areas like my district, are already struggling to find physicians who will accept new Medicare patients. The IPAB will only make this worse. If Medicare beneficiaries are lucky enough to find a physician who will see them, the IPAB will place a government-rationing bureaucrat between them and their physicians. That government bureaucrat has no place in the physician-patient relationship in America.

We need to repeal the IPAB now.

I want to thank the chairman of the committee for giving me the opportunity to speak and the gentleman from Virginia for giving me the opportunity to cosponsor this bill. The gentleman from Virginia, of course, is from the southern end of the Delmarva Peninsula. I represent the middle part adjoining Accomack County.

We heard a lot during the State of the Union Address. The President stood just a few feet in front of you, Mr. Chairman, and talked about shovel-ready jobs and infrastructure. Mr. Chairman, there are shovel- ready jobs ready to go. This land adjoins Wallops Island, the launch facility which now is one of the places that launched private and public vehicles into space. It doesn't get any better than that for a poor county like Accomack.

The chairman of the committee mentioned an 8 percent unemployment rate. Well, Mr. Chairman, I wish that Worcester County, where half the employees in this industrial park will work, had an 8 percent rate. The unemployment rate was 15.6 percent in Worcester County.

The President stood there and said, We've got to get Americans back to work. Mr. Chairman, we need to cut through the red tape, just like the President said, and get projects like this going. There's no loss of recreation area. Accomack County has offered to, in fact, find another 32 areas to have the recreation area. So let's not pretend there's a loss. Let's not pretend this land doesn't belong to Accomack County. They hold the title. Like a poor stepchild they are coming to Uncle Sam begging for permission to create some jobs in Accomack County. And like the mean old uncle, Uncle Sam has said, No. There's red tape involved. We have a bureaucracy. You have to fill in all the blanks. You have to do this. Mr. Chairman, the 15.6 percent of Worcester County who are unemployed don't have the time for this red tape. We must do it.

The gentleman called this unacceptable and dangerous. Mr. Chairman, you're right, 15.6 percent unemployment is unacceptable. It's dangerous to our economy. The gentlelady said it's inconceivable that we're here. I couldn't have said it better. How could our Federal bureaucracy have failed so poorly?

We need to pass this bill, Mr. Chairman.