Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to a period of morning business with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be recognized for such time as I may consume.

Mr. President, we now are in about the sixth month of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. We have over 11 million people who have received health care--who previously had not been able to receive it--either through the private exchanges, which have signed up 4 million people all across the country; through the expansion of Medicaid, which has reached millions more; or through all of the young people who are able to stay on their parents' plans until they are 26 years old.

Taxpayers are saving money. In fact, CBO has redone their estimates for the 10-year period after the passage of the Affordable Care Act to suggest that we are now going to save $1.2 trillion on Federal health care spending, in large part because of the reforms in the Affordable Care Act.

Across this country millions of Americans who had been kept out of the ranks of the insured because of a preexisting condition now have access to health care, and tens of millions of seniors are paying less for their health care because they get checkups for free and they are able to access prescription drugs for 50 percent or less than the original cost when they reach that doughnut hole. So the Affordable Care Act is changing lives.

When you reorder one-sixth of the American economy, there are going to be bumps along the road. No one should come to the floor--even those of us who are the most vocal proponents of the law--and suggest there are not going to be some people who are not going to have the perfect experience. Of course there is no excuse for the way in which the Web site operated for the first several months. But it is time for proponents of this law to tell the real story, and the real story is that the Affordable Care Act is working. It is working for millions of Americans who now have access to health care. It is working for taxpayers who are spending less than ever before as you look at annual rates of growth in Federal health care spending.

Today and this week my colleagues and I are focusing on the benefits for one specific group of patients, one specific set of families all across this country, and those are patients and families dealing with cancer diagnoses.

So I will start this off--I will be joined later by Senator Stabenow and some of my other colleagues--and I want to talk first about a family in Indiana. I will talk about some families in Connecticut as well, but the Treinens have a story that is, frankly, not unique. They had insurance and they thought they had really good insurance. They didn't pay too much attention to the lifetime cap of $1 million that was in their insurance policy because they just figured, as a relatively healthy family, there was no way they were ever going to spend $1 million on health care over the course of their time on that insurance plan.

But as millions of families across this country know, cancer can interrupt your plans, and that is what happened to the Treinens. Their doctors diagnosed their teenage son Michael in 2007 with an aggressive form of leukemia. The treatment called for ten doses of chemotherapy that cost $10,000 per dose. A 56-day stay in an Intensive Care Unit alone cost about $400,000. So Michael and his family reached that $1 million lifetime maximum in less than 1 year, and it was then left to this brave family to go out and raise money in solicitations in their neighborhood, in their community and all across the country, which miraculously allowed them to bring in $865,000 in 6 days to keep their son's treatment going.

Needless to say, that avenue is not available to every family. But due to their ingenuity and their passion, the Treinens were able to raise almost $1 million from private donors in order to keep their son's treatment going. But the story doesn't end well, however, for the Treinens. Even though money came in from all over the United States, and as far away as places such as Germany, Michael's cancer eventually stopped responding to chemotherapy and he died May 25, before he could receive the transplant they all hoped would save his life.

The reality is that insurance companies have been getting away with this practice for years--lifetime or annual limits that for 105 million Americans were preventing them from receiving care when they really got sick. That is what insurance really is supposed to be for. For those of us who buy insurance, we get it in the hopes that should we get very sick, that insurance plan will be there to help us. But with annual and lifetime limits, when people got really sick, especially with cancer diagnoses, that help wasn't there.

Tom Bocaccio, who is a retired police officer in Newington, CT, is still dealing with the consequences of lifetime caps. His wife past away after an 8-year struggle with adrenal cancer. After her death, the husband she left behind was saddled with a $1.5 million bill because the Bocaccios, over that 8-year period of fighting cancer, had exceeded their lifetime cap. That changes Tom's life in a myriad of ways. He has lost his wife, and there is no way to describe the pain that comes with that, especially after that brave, courageous battle of almost a decade, but now his entire life is upended by the fact that he has a $1.5 million bill he has to pay, and he doesn't have the resources to do that.

So first and foremost, for cancer patients all across this country, 105 million Americans no longer face lifetime limits on health care benefits. For cancer patients, not only does that deliver financial security, but it delivers mental and psychological security as well--to know in the midst of dealing with this diagnosis and all the pain that comes with confronting this disease head on, they do not also have to worry about skimping on treatments, about cutting back on hospital stays that might harm the recovery or treatment of the patient simply because they are trying not to get above that annual or lifetime limit.

The benefits to cancer patients extend beyond just that protection on lifetime and annual limits. In addition, cancer patients are going to be able to keep their health care because of the ban on discrimination against families and individuals with preexisting conditions.

I have spoken about the Berger family many times on this floor. They are a family that explains exactly why we need this protection. The Bergers, from Meriden, CT, had a son who was diagnosed with cancer during the 2-week period in which the husband, through which the family had insurance, didn't have a job. He switched jobs, and during that 2- week period in which he was waiting to get insurance through his new job, their son was diagnosed with cancer. The new insurance policy decided it was a preexisting condition. The Bergers had to pay every dime of that treatment and they lost everything. They lost their savings, their home. Their lives were transformed because of the misfortune of having a cancer diagnosis at the wrong time.

No family anywhere in the country dealing with a cancer diagnosis will ever have to go through what the Bergers went through because here ever after the law of this land says that if you have a preexisting condition, you cannot be discriminated against.

There are all sorts of other benefits that matter, whether it be the fact you don't have to pay for preventive health care any longer so you can get a checkup without cost or clinical trials are now covered which many cancer patients enjoy the benefit of. Life changed for cancer patients and families dealing with cancer when the Affordable Care Act passed.

Senator Stabenow, myself, and others had a press conference earlier this week in which we heard the story of David Weis, a senior at Georgetown University who was diagnosed days before his 19th birthday with thyroid lymphatic cancer. David talks about the difference the Affordable Care Act makes for him, not only in financial terms but in terms of how he thinks about his future. David now can go out and get a job, search for and pursue a career based on what he wants to do with his life rather than based on what job will provide him with adequate benefits to treat his cancer should it reoccur.

I have a constituent who talks about it the same way. He was 14 when he was diagnosed with a form of leukemia. He went through treatment for over 3 years. His family now knows that with the Affordable Care Act-- because he is only covered on his mom's policy until he is 26--after he ages out of his mom's plan, he will be able to pursue his dreams no matter what kind of insurance plan his prospective employer has.

What we have learned over the years is there is a connection between the mind and the body. If you are stressed out about things such as how you are going to pay for treatment of your disease, it does have an effect on your body's ability to fight that disease. Unfortunately, for millions of families dealing with cancer, their treatment has been restrained, their body's recovery has been curtailed because they are obsessively--and appropriately--always worried about what will happen if their insurance runs out.

The ACA says never again. No family will have to worry because that will be guaranteed, and discriminatory policies of annual and lifetime limits disappear.

I will end with the notion that it is important to remember every time our Republican friends come down to the floor and talk about how awful they believe the Affordable Care Act is, their proposal is to return cancer patients and families dealing with cancer back to the reality in which they had lifetime limits which ended their coverage-- for this family I talked about from Indiana, after only several months--and they want to go back to the days in which families such as the Bergers lose everything, their savings, their home, because of a mistimed cancer diagnosis.

This week the House of Representatives voted for the 50th time to repeal all or part of the Affordable Care Act. I was a Member of that body for 6 years, and I probably participated in about 40 of those votes. Despite the fact I heard lots of my Republican friends come down to the floor and say: We are voting to repeal and replace, they never voted once to replace the Affordable Care Act because their agenda is not to replace it. Their agenda is simply to repeal it and go back to the days in which cancer patients were treated with this kind of carelessness.

Our colleagues on the Democratic side who voted for the Affordable Care Act understand there are places where it can be better. We understand there is a process of perfecting it. But we understand-- because of families such as the Barrows, because of families such as the Weises, the Treinens, and the Bergers--for cancer patients and the families who love them, they know the ACA is working, and they know they never want to go back to the days in which their lives were put in jeopardy by a health care system which didn't work for them.

I yield the floor.

First, I associate myself with the remarks of the majority leader. I certainly understand the concerns of those on the Republican side about the individual who has proposed to spend a certain amount of money supporting the global warming cause, but it pales in comparison to the money that has already been spent by the Koch brothers, who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars and will continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into these races, completely dwarfing any amount of money that is spent on the other side.

Madam President, I am on the floor to talk about the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. I am pleased to have Senator McCain on the floor because it is very hard to describe the sensation both he and I felt at the end of the last year when we got the chance to travel to the Maidan--Independence Square--in Kiev and speak to about 1 million people. It is even harder to describe the sensation of hearing that group of people yelling back to us in unison:

Thank you, U.S.A. Thank you, U.S.A.

But that was the reality we were able to experience.

It is important to note that Senator McCain and I didn't go to the Maidan that day to advocate for President Yanukovych's removal even though the end of that process resulted in that fact. In actuality we spent 2 hours that night meeting with Yanukovych, pleading with him to reverse course on his decision to abandon plans to join the EU so that he could win back the support of the hundreds of thousands of people who had gathered on that square to support our European integration and domestic political reforms. But President Yanukovych didn't listen, and instead he lost his legitimacy as a ruler when he turned his security service on his own people, resulting in the murder of over 100 Ukrainians who simply wanted to compel their leader to follow the wishes of the Ukrainian people.

I was proud to author a resolution that passed unanimously in this body that declared our support for the ability of Ukrainians to peacefully air their grievances against their government and to oppose the use of force against them. Then, I was equally proud to join Senator McCain and some others in a bipartisan call for sanctions against Yanukovych when he began his murderous crusade against the protesters. I was even prouder of President Obama, who through the State Department sent a clear, unwavering message to the Ukrainian people that the United States stood with them in their desire to see a better future for Ukraine, aligned with Europe and the West.

This strong bipartisan approach here in America to the Maidan movement helped the people of Ukraine as they charted their own path toward a new government. We didn't dictate the

terms of Ukraine's future; we simply supported the right of the people to determine it for themselves.

But now, despite the success of the Maidan, the crisis in Ukraine has changed its face. It hasn't dissipated. And today Secretary Kerry was greeted in Kiev by Ukrainians pleading for the continued support of the United States.

Having been so clear-voiced in our support of the Ukrainian people thus far since the protests began last November, now is the moment when Democrats and Republicans should stand united in this Congress so that years from now, when a group assembles in Kiev marking the anniversary of this grave crisis, they will celebrate Ukraine's political sovereignty and economic rebirth with more chants of thanks to the United States.

In what shape should this support come?

First, we need to stand together in the next week to deliver serious financial assistance to a Ukrainian economy that is weak and is growing weaker as this crisis persists. A $1 billion aid package is a good start, but our real work must happen within the structures of the IMF, which can provide potentially tens of billions of dollars necessary to fully right the Ukrainian economic ship. While Ukraine does need to undergo economic and budget reforms from within, I would caution the IMF to be gentle in the timing of the conditions applied to this aid. Difficult steps need to be undertaken to right-size gas prices and trim budget deficits, but Ukraine should be given a long enough lease so that these necessary reforms don't strangle a nation today dealing with threats to its very existence.

Second, Crimea. Russia has invaded Ukraine, make no mistake. They have done so in violation of the United Nations charter and the very accord they signed in 1994 guaranteeing Crimea's territorial security. No doubt Vladimir Putin was sore at losing his erstwhile ally in the Ukrainian President's office. No doubt he didn't like the fact that the United States voiced its strong support for the right of a sovereign Ukraine to make independent decisions about its future partnerships. No doubt he is infuriated that the Ukrainian people are now on their way to getting their way. But this is not a schoolyard. You don't get to push weaker kids around just because you don't like them. This is the 21st century.

The reason we belong to organizations such as the United Nations or the reason we negotiate treaties such as the Budapest memorandum is because now we understand, after centuries of European war, how destabilizing this kind of behavior is.

The irony for Russia, of course, is that this invasion demonstrably weakens, not strengthens, their nation's position in the world. Let's say for argument's sake that the end result of this crisis is a Crimea that is more closely aligned with Russia than with Ukraine. What does that accomplish for Russia? Well, it will have won the occupation of 2 million Ukrainians while the majority of the other 43 million continue to orient themselves permanently toward the European Union.

If the United States and Europe make good on sanctions threats, which I hope we will, it will devastate the Russian economy, leaving millions of Russians out of work and adding political instability to Putin's own land at a time when he really can't afford much more instability, and it will make Russia an international pariah, shunned by the industrialized nations that help form the future path of global, political, and economic values.

Given this reality, why did Putin do it? He didn't do it to protect Russians in Ukraine because the only threat to their safety is due to the military crisis of Russia's own making. He did it because, like the schoolyard bully, he doesn't see past his own nose. He believes that he wins by temporarily flexing his muscles and by capturing the world's attention. He doesn't look to the long-term, potentially dire consequences to his own political standing and to his own people. He pulls punches because it feels good today no matter how bad it will hurt tomorrow.

But that being said, no matter the irrationality of Moscow's behavior, we need to make sure in the case that Russia does not correct its mistake, and correct it soon, the consequences do hurt. I believe Congress should authorize broad authority for President Obama to enact strong sanctions on Russia through penalties to its banks, its oil companies, and its political and economic elite. I believe the President should only be allowed to use this authority in the case that this illegal incursion into Ukraine continues and that we should give Moscow the opportunity to reverse course or join with the international community to address their concerns about the safety of Russian citizens in Ukraine.

Let's give Russia a chance to make this better and deliver a clear message of the consequences if they don't. This, of course, can't happen without the support of our European allies. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on European Affairs, I will be on the phone this week with European Parliamentarians urging them to join us in proposing new sanctions on the Russian economy.

I know there is hesitance in Europe due to the integration of Russia into the European economies, but this crisis should, frankly, matter more to Europe than it matters to us. Five years ago it was a laughable proposition that Russia would invade Ukraine, but it is happening now. It may be unthinkable today that Russia, in 5 years, is going to move on a NATO ally, but if this aggression goes unchecked, then the future can be very perilous, even for our friends in Europe.

Finally, a word on the politics of this crisis. I have listened to some of my good friends on the Republican side try to score political points in connection with the Russian move on Crimea, trying to paint this somehow as Obama's fault. This is a ridiculous contention. Putin marched into Georgia in 2008 under a Republican President, who many of my Republican colleagues considered to be strong on foreign policy, and now he is doing it with a Democrat in office. President Obama is considering steps in response that seemingly weren't even considered in 2008.

What has me feeling even more suspect of the criticisms of President Obama is there doesn't seem to be any real difference between what the Republicans want the President to do and what he is actually doing. It is easy to say it is Obama's fault, but history tells us otherwise, and these political attacks mask the fortunate fact that there is pretty solid bipartisan agreement on what to do next.

Ukraine can remain whole and free and it can stay on a path to join Europe. When that day emerges from the smoke and the fire of the crisis, if we play our cards right, then they will have America and our European allies to thank, in part, for that new day.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I appreciate my colleagues--Senator Warren, Senator Schumer, and Senator Murray--joining us on the floor today. I think we will be joined by Senator Stabenow in a few moments. I also appreciate that they were at an event we did yesterday in which we were kicking off the Affordable Care Works Campaign. The campaign is designed to tell what has been untold for much of the last 6 months, which is the increasing good news about the millions of Americans for which the Affordable Care Act is working and, indeed for many of them, changing their lives.

An announcement was made this week that 4 million Americans have now signed up for the private health care exchanges. There are now over 10 million Americans all across the country who now have insurance today that didn't have it prior to the passage of the law either because of these private exchanges or increased eligibility of Medicaid or the law's provision that young men and women under the age of 26 can stay on their parents' insurance. Over 10 million people all across the country now have access to insurance that they didn't have before we passed this law.

As Senator Schumer said, there is even more good news because we now know that the second promise of the act, that it was going to reduce the deficit, is true as well. CBO tells us that from the 10-year period covering the enactment of the law to a decade later, we are going to save about $1.2 trillion beyond what we initially estimated.

At current trajectories, we are going to be $250 billion under CBO's initial estimate for Federal health care expenditures on an annual basis. That is a big savings to the American taxpayers. When you combine that with the millions of Americans who have coverage, you can see how the Affordable Care Act is working.

There is still work to do. There will be debates on the floor of the Senate about ways in which we can change and fix the Affordable Care Act. Because we are reordering one-sixth of the American economy, there is no doubt there will be bumps along the road, and no doubt there will be places where we can find bipartisan agreements on how we can fix the act to make it work even better.

The answer from our Republican colleagues has been pretty simple so far. It has been to simply repeal the law. They say they want to repeal and replace it, but we have yet to see any evidence of that replacement. I think when the Presiding Officer and I served together in the House of Representatives, we probably witnessed about 30 or 40 different votes to repeal all or part of the Affordable Care Act, and never once was there a vote to replace that act.

The American people don't want this bill repealed so we can go back to the days when the insurance companies ran our health care. They don't want to go back to the days when the 10 million Americans who have insurance are uninsured. They want this act to be implemented. They want it to be perfected. They want us to work to make it better. But they are understanding day by day that the Affordable Care Act is working.

Specifically for seniors there are some pretty unique benefits, many of which have been glossed over. At the outset of the implementation of this act, some pretty important things happened--sometimes while people weren't even looking.

First, the doughnut hole was cut in half almost overnight. The first year anybody who was in the doughnut hole got a $250 rebate check. The second year, their drugs--when they were in the doughnut hole--got cut by 50 percent. By the end of this decade, the doughnut hole will be completely eliminated.

The average savings for a senior, as Senator Stabenow will talk about, has been $1,200. People often don't know that is because of the Affordable Care Act. When you go in and your drugs all of a sudden cost 50 percent less than they did, there is no stamp on that bill that says courtesy of the Affordable Care Act.

The fact is that without the Affordable Care Act, seniors--over the course of the last 3 years--would have spent $9 billion more on drugs than they have. The number is so big that it is kind of hard to fathom. The Affordable Care Act has saved seniors $9 billion, an average of $1,200 per senior.

On top of that, when seniors go in to get their annual checkup or for a cancer screening or tobacco cessation program, those preventive health care visits are now free. Twenty-five million seniors have access to those programs all across the country.

In my State of Connecticut, 76,000 people with Medicare have taken advantage of free annual wellness visits under the health care law. So we are seeing tremendous benefits for seniors all across the country. This is not just about the doughnut hole or preventive health care.

In 2012, the Medicare Part B deductible dropped by $22 to $140. That is the first time in the history of Medicare that the Medicare Part B deductible has actually been reduced thanks to the efficiencies that are being garnered in the Medicare Part B program by the health care law.

Second, Medicare Advantage plans now can't charge more than Medicaid for things like chemotherapy, skilled nursing, and other specialized services, which results in saving thousands of dollars for seniors.

In the first 3 years of the Affordable Care Act, Medicare recovered $15 billion in fraudulent payments under Medicare because of new tools designed to root out fraud and waste and abuse in the Affordable Care Act. Older Americans who have not yet reached Medicare age are saving money because the act reduced the amount of discrimination in premiums against older Americans by saying that insurance companies can't charge older workers more than three times what they charged younger workers.

For seniors, in particular, we are trying to make it clear that some of the

unnoticed benefits, such as the fact that nobody is asking you for a copay when you go in for a Medicare checkup and that you are saving money every time you go into the pharmacy--that didn't happen magically. That didn't happen because of Republican health care policies. It happened because of the Affordable Care Act.

Finally, before I turn it over to my colleague Senator Stabenow, I want to address some of the mythology we have been hearing on the floor of the Senate in the past few days about Medicare Advantage.

There is no doubt that there were reductions in the payment from the Federal Government to the Medicare Advantage plans in the Affordable Care Act. Why? Because we were overcompensating private health care companies for running the Medicare Advantage plan. We were giving them 13 percent more than it cost Medicare itself to run the Medicare program. That just doesn't make a lot of sense.

Private companies were telling us they could do things for the same price or less than the Federal Government. In this case we were paying Medicare private insurers a lot more than it costs Medicare to run the program. So we decided to eliminate that subsidy.

Guess what. The news has been pretty remarkable. In fact, 30 percent more seniors are on Medicare Advantage plans today than when we passed the law, and premiums under Medicare Advantage have come down by 10 percent during that time. More people are on Medicare Advantage plans, there are less costs in premiums, and the average Medicare participant has 18 different plans to choose from.

All of this apocalyptic talk about what was going to happen when we passed the Affordable Care Act with respect to Medicare Advantage and all this new apocalyptic talk about what will happen when the subsidies get further reduced has not come true. We now have cheaper Medicare Advantage plans, more seniors on them, and plenty of across-the-board availability.

I am really pleased to have been joined here by about a half dozen of our colleagues to tell the story about what the ACA has meant for seniors.

We are going to come to the floor every week. We are going to stand with patients and consumers every week to talk about the benefits for seniors, cancer patients, women, and taxpayers all in an effort to try to prove to the American people what millions of Americans are finding out, and that is that the Affordable Care Act works.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my legal fellow, Don Bell, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the calendar year.

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

Madam President, yesterday we received news that 4 million people have now signed up in private health care exchanges all across the country. In addition, it was released that about 12 million people have called the call centers in January alone, and 1.1 million people signed up to receive health care through the Affordable Care Act during that time. Young enrollment--the group of individuals for which there has always been a question as to whether they are going to sign up for these exchanges--grew by 65 percent.

It is time for this body to recognize the Affordable Care Act is working. It is working for people who have been desperate to get insurance. It is working for people who have been getting the short end of the stick from insurance companies, and it is working for millions of seniors all across this country who have been paying far too much for prescription drug costs and for preventive health care.

We have known this from the very beginning in Connecticut. Despite the hiccups over enrollment in the fall period, States such as Connecticut that had made a commitment to making this law work, rather than undermining it, have seen the success from day one. Connecticut, at the outset, said that we were going to try to enroll between October 1 and March 31 about 80,000 people. That was our goal. We just announced in Connecticut--a State that is working to implement the law, not undermine the law--that we didn't just hit 80,000, we didn't just hit 100,000, but we have enrolled 126,000 Connecticut residents in our health care exchanges and in Medicaid. Our projection is that we are going to enroll 150,000 people by March 31. That is nearly double our initial estimate. Last week, traffic on Connecticut's Web site rose 31 percent, and the daily enrollments rose by 67 percent.

The stories just keep on coming into our office about the lives that are being changed as people, for the first time in their lives, get access to affordable health care. People such as Susie Clayton, who has been dealing with a cancer diagnosis for over a decade--a crippling, preexisting condition that for most of her adult life has kept her out of the ranks of the insured. I have known Susie for probably two decades. Almost every single conversation I have had with Susie over those 20 years has been about her daily struggle to try to deal with her illness and her preexisting condition. Every single day, every single week, she has thought about whether she is going to be able to pay for her health care if she has a reoccurrence of her cancer and whether during that time she is going to have a job that provides her with insurance.

Susie had been paying about $1,700 a month at last count for an insurance plan she could afford. Her life changed on January 1. She now is paying a couple hundred dollars a month in premiums. She finally gets to wake up every day not having to worry about whether she is going to be able to afford coverage, whether she is going to be able to see a doctor to deal with her very difficult diagnosis. With 4 million people now enrolled in these exchanges across the country, that story can be replicated over and over.

A bunch of our Republican colleagues have come to the floor over the last couple of days--I was in the presiding chair yesterday listening to some speeches--regarding some new information about Medicare Advantage. Everybody knows by now that included in the health care bill was an end to the subsidies given to Medicare Advantage plans. The private sector in health care and in other industries always tells us they can do things more cheaply than the Federal Government--and a lot of times they are right about that--but it was exactly the opposite when it came to Medicare Advantage. We were paying private insurance companies 13 percent more than it costs the Federal Government to run Medicare. This was a source of enormous profit for the insurance companies. It didn't make sense to oversubsidize insurance companies to run a program the Federal Government itself was running for 13 percent less money. So we ended those subsidies, and part of the elimination of those subsidies has gone into effect.

But the story that is being told on the floor today isn't true. The fact is that since the Affordable Care Act was

passed, even as we have been implementing these cuts to these overly generous, unjustifiable subsidies to insurance companies, Medicare Advantage enrollment has gone up by 30 percent. Thirty percent more seniors are now enrolled in Medicare Advantage, even as these cuts have been imposed. Premiums are down. Medicare Advantage premiums have been reduced by 10 percent.

Over the course of the debate on the Medicare Advantage cuts, I heard Republican after Republican, when I was in the House of Representatives, come to the floor and tell us that the sky was going to fall when we ended these subsidies to insurance companies. I will be honest. A lot of them are in my State of Connecticut. Not only has the sky not fallen, it has risen, with 30 percent more seniors in Medicare Advantage with 10 percent less in premiums. To the argument I have heard on this floor that there will be less choices available to seniors because of these cuts going into effect, let's just be honest: The average Medicare beneficiary has 18 different Medicare Advantage plans to choose from--18 different plans. That is a pretty robust market.

Let me just add that Republicans have voted for these cuts themselves. The Ryan budget, which has essentially been the budget standard for Republicans in both the House and in the Senate--endorsed by hundreds of Republican legislators--the Paul Ryan budget included the cuts to Medicare Advantage subsidies because Republicans have agreed with Democrats that there is no reason to subsidize insurance companies instead of subsidizing beneficiaries.

So what happened when we decided to stop subsidizing Medicare Advantage? Enrollment went up 30 percent. Premiums went down 10 percent. The average beneficiary still had the choice of 18 different plans. But we took that money we saved in padding the pockets of health care insurance companies, and we told seniors that when they show up to get a preventive health care visit, they are not going to have to pay anything out-of-pocket. So since the ACA has been passed, here is how much a senior has to pay for their annual checkup: Nothing. So 25 million people have gotten free preventive care since the Affordable Care Act has been passed.

What else did we do? We decided that this doughnut hole in the prescription drug bill, whereby people got coverage up front and then they had to pay for a certain amount of drugs themselves and then they got catastrophic coverage, didn't make sense. So we eliminated the prescription drug doughnut hole. It will be gone by 2020. It has been cut by more than half already. Since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the average senior has saved $1,200 in prescription drug costs thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

So as I listen to my Republican colleagues come to the floor and complain about the cuts to Medicare Advantage--cuts, in fact, that many of them have supported--I think we have to ask ourselves: If we had a choice to provide a 13-percent subsidy to for-profit insurance companies or pass along $1,200 in savings to American seniors and eliminate the costs that many of these fixed-income seniors pay when they go in to get preventive care, what would we choose? This is really all about choices in this body. It is about choices in terms of where we put the money we spend on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries. To me, it is a no-brainer. To the American public, it is a no-brainer. Instead of subsidizing insurance companies, let's subsidize hard-working seniors, who have built this country, with $1,200 in drug savings and 25 million people who have gotten free preventive health care.

For Republicans who have come down to the floor and said they want to repeal the Affordable Care Act or that they want to repeal the cuts to Medicare Advantage plans, essentially they are saying they want to return billions of dollars to the insurance companies and take away that money from seniors in this country. I do not think that is a choice the American people are going to accept.

This week a group of us in the Senate are launching the ACAworks campaign. Later today I will be joined by a number of my colleagues around the corner as we launch a new effort to make clear to the American people that now, with 4 million people enrolled, and millions of people saving money--notwithstanding the legitimate difficulties that were encountered in the first days of the Web site--the Affordable Care Act is working. It is working for millions and millions of people across this country who are finally getting care.

We will be joined today, as well, by a couple of Medicare recipients who are glad they now have the protection when they get into the doughnut hole. They are glad they now get free preventive care. And they will take the choice any day of this Congress and this government investing in them instead of investing in big for-profit insurance companies.

None of us deny there are bumps in the road as you rework one-sixth of the American economy, which represents our health care economy. None of us will deny there is no excuse for the fact that for the first few months there were a lot of people who were not able to enroll who wanted to. But now that the enrollment site is working, now that outreach efforts are up and running, record numbers of people are signing up for health care because there is an almost insatiable demand for quality, affordable health care that is now being met as the Affordable Care Act is working.

I yield back the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, earlier this month, a Hartford icon, Walter ``Doc'' Hurley, passed away at the age of 91. For some, Doc was a teacher, for others a coach, and for many more he was a dedicated philanthropist and friend. No matter what role he played at any given time, Doc Hurley worked his entire life to positively impact the Hartford community, and he will be sorely missed.

Doc led an eclectic and inspiring life. After attending Weaver High School in the North End of Hartford, he served in World War II as a marine. Upon coming home from the war, he finished college, worked as a teacher in Virginia, and spent a brief stint as a professional football player in the All-American Football Conference before finally returning to Hartford in 1959.

It was when he became vice principal at Weaver High School in Hartford that he began in earnest his lifelong goal of inspiring students to pursue a college degree. The most visible piece of Hurley's lasting legacy in the community is the Doc Hurley Scholarship Foundation and the renowned Doc Hurley Scholarship Basketball Classic. Over the years, Doc's foundation was responsible for awarding more than $570,000 in scholarships to 550 high school seniors. Many of these students who went on to successful careers owe their start to Doc Hurley and his scholarship foundation. Doc was a once-in-a-generation mentor, coach, teacher, and positive inspiration for Hartford's youth.

Last October, I held an antiviolence basketball tournament for nearly 1,000 kids with the University of Connecticut men's basketball team in the field house that bears Doc Hurley's name at Weaver High School. I was proud to have had the chance to work with him on that basketball tournament and, more importantly I will work to continue his legacy of encouraging Hartford's students to achieve their highest potential.

I join everyone in Hartford and around Connecticut in celebrating the life of Walter ``Doc'' Hurley and mourning the loss of this great man.

Mr. President, I join my colleagues in support of the nomination of Jeffrey Meyer of Connecticut to be a U.S. judge for the District of Connecticut. I thank the chairman of the Judiciary Committee for his hard work in shepherding Mr. Meyer's nomination through the process and thank my colleagues and leadership for bringing it to the floor today.

Before I make brief remarks in support specifically of Meyer's nomination, I want to associate myself with the remarks of Senator Leahy and Senator Blumenthal.

There are essentially two ways to try to shut down the government from within. You can try to defund it--and we have seen that effort play out in real terms at great cost to the American people over the last year and a half--and you can also try to depopulate it. You can try to very slowly and methodically take people out of positions by either denying them confirmation into the administration--as we have seen, as a long list of nominees to agencies throughout the Federal Government are being delayed by Republicans--or you can try to keep the judiciary understaffed so it cannot do its work as well.

So I, unfortunately, believe this is part of a pretty methodical policy and strategy on behalf of those who feel as though they have been elected to destroy government from within, to both try to defund the organs of government and then also to depopulate its ranks. That is part of the reason I think we are laboring under delay tactic after delay tactic when it comes to our Federal judiciary. Today, though, hopefully we can unite around a nominee who is singularly qualified to serve on the district court.

I am proud to support Jeff Meyer's nomination--someone who comes from a family with deep roots in public service. Mr. Meyer has worked in the legal system but also has a history of helping the poor and the voiceless in Connecticut throughout his career. Both Senator Blumenthal and I know his father well, Ed Meyer, who served with me in the Connecticut State Senate.

Jeff Meyer comes from a world-class educational background, in part because he got a lot of it in Connecticut. He is a graduate of both the college and the law school at Yale. He has an extensive academic and teaching background. After he graduated law school, Mr. Meyer clerked at the Supreme Court for Justice Blackmun, and then for Judge James Oakes, the former chief judge of the Second Circuit. Currently, he teaches the Supreme Court Advocacy Clinic at Yale Law School, where he provides pro bono legal services. Before that, he taught at Quinnipiac Law School, where he was honored with their Excellence in Teaching Award.

But even more impressive than his academic background and training is Jeff Meyer's long history of working for a fair and just legal system in Connecticut and, frankly, throughout the Northeast. Even as a law student Jeff Meyer showed a commitment to helping disadvantaged groups by giving legal assistance to homeless clients through the Yale Law School clinic. He actually received an award for his work there from the City of New Haven. Later, he worked as a staff attorney in Senator Leahy's home State of Vermont at Vermont Legal Aid. In Connecticut, he helped keep our State safe by serving as an assistant U.S. attorney for 9 years. Since 2008 he has served on the Connecticut Judicial Ethics Committee--a fairly thankless task, I might add--and he has served on a range of other important State and local committees, including the Advisory Committee for the Selection of the Connecticut Federal Public Defender, the Independent Accountability Panel for New Haven's police department, and the U.S. Attorney's Police and Urban Youth Task Force.

Aside from his academic and community work, Jeff Meyer has also managed to find time in between to litigate complex commercial issues and investigate foreign aid issues. He served as an editor and counselor of the Independent Panel Review of the World Bank Department of Institutional Integrity. And he did an incredibly important tour of duty as the senior counsel of the Independent Inquiry Committee into the United Nations Oil for Food Program. He also wrote a book on the U.N. oil for food scandal. Along with his book, Mr. Meyer has an impressive body of legal scholarship that includes a wide range of law review articles and opinion pieces on topics ranging from criminal justice issues, to foreign aid, to workplace safety.

I will point out that Jeff Meyer is exceptional in the sense that he has sought work that others in the legal community might avoid. The work he has done on Connecticut's Judicial Ethics Committee or in the independent review process of the New Haven Police Department or even in his work investigating the Oil for Food Program was tough stuff-- issues that were controversial that some other lawyers may have avoided. But Jeff Meyer sought places in which his talents were needed and in areas in which others may have looked the other way.

The District of Connecticut is currently about 13 percent understaffed, and this confirmation would fill a vacancy that has existed now for almost 2 years. Because Jeff Meyer has such stellar qualifications, I cannot think of any reason why people in this body would oppose his nomination. I urge all my colleagues to support him.

I yield the floor.

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

I try to come down to the floor every week or so to give voices to the victims of gun violence. All across this country, every day and every week, dozens, hundreds, thousands of Americans are gunned down on our streets and in our homes, in part because the Congress does absolutely nothing, has done absolutely nothing over the course of the past several years, over the course of the past decade, to try to curb this scourge of destruction that plagues virtually every corner of our society. Eighty-six people a day die at the hands of guns; 2,639, approximately, people every month. We lose 31,000 people every year. There is not another first-world country in the world that can come close to the level of gun violence we have here in the United States.

On top of these numbers are the horrific trendlines on mass shootings. Over the course of January, we saw a school shooting essentially every 2 days that school was in session. ``Luckily'' is not the word to ascribe to this sentence, but luckily, in each one of those instances, the damage was relatively minor to the potential damage that will unfortunately one day come when a shooter walks into one of these schools and is able to perpetrate the kind of violence that Adam Lanza did in Newtown, CT. We are sending a message of complicity when the Senate and the House of Representatives stand absolutely silent in the face of this violence.

I have come to the floor almost every week, and I hope that almost every time I arrive at the floor, I let my colleagues know that I don't expect that any law we pass is going to reduce 31,000 or 2,600 or 86 to zero. I understand that the reality is there is no law we can pass that will end all incidents of gun violence, that there is no panacea to this problem that Congress can offer, but we send a very clear message when we do nothing. When the Senate does not act, when the House does not act, we tell people in this country that we must be OK with the numbers that continue to accrue and move upward. I know that isn't the case. I know my Republican colleagues are just as sickened as I am at 86 people dying every day from guns. I know that supporters of the NRA, gun owners themselves, can't stand that this number is so high at 31,000 a year. But if the stats don't do it, then hopefully the voices of these victims will. So I offer four more recent victims, all from the streets of our cities in Connecticut.

Varnouard Hall was killed just a few days ago in New Haven, CT, January 31. He was shot and killed on the corner of East Pearl Street and Pierpont Street in New Haven. Emergency personnel were dispatched shortly before 10 p.m., and they found Hall lying on the ground, unresponsive, with a gunshot wound to his head. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Hall was the third homicide victim of the year, 31 days into January.

A couple of days later about 60 people gathered at the corner where Hall was shot. He had a lot of family, he had a lot of friends, and they mourned together. His family members and friends remember him as a very kind person. The family says: We don't want retaliation; we want justice.

Hall's sister Renee Evans said:

I need people to stop being afraid to say what they see. If

you see it, say it; you don't need to give your name. . . .

Anyone who knows something should call the police.

He was a well-liked person all across the neighborhood.

Varnouard Hall, shot dead, was 33 years old.

Durell Patrick Law was killed 10 days earlier in New Haven. He had just started attending church regularly, the Faith Revival Temple Church in West Haven. He had gone to one of his first services on January 19, and he didn't make it to the next service--not by choice but because he was shot dead on Eastern Street on January 20. This was the city's first homicide of 2014. Mourners packed that church, where he was a new parishioner, to mourn him. They said he was a good man who liked to goof around, especially with his many family members.

Durell leaves behind a 1-year-old son. He was very active in sports in high school, and he was only 20 years old. In high school he had participated in football and track.

Justin Mariano was 29 years old when just before the new year he was killed in Bridgeport, CT. He was shot on the evening of November 9. Police responded to Bridgeport Hospital, where Mariano later died from his injuries. He had just started working at a barbershop called Sharp Cutz, and he was remembered by the people who worked with him and the folks who trained him at a local cosmetology school as talented, bright, and energetic.

Jerome Copeland was 22 years old when he was killed on the streets of Hartford. He was the 16th homicide victim in Hartford when he was killed in the late summer of 2013. A woman who knew him said that ``he was a young father, struggling, trying to make ends meet.'' He leaves behind a son, a brother, two sisters, and a loving girlfriend who described him as ``an energetic man who loves music.''

When I was at Central High School in Bridgeport a few weeks ago, I was sitting with a group of kids who wanted to see what they could do to end the violence on the streets of their city, to feel a little safer when they walked to school in the morning. I asked them all: How many of you know someone--a close relative or friend--who has been killed by guns? They looked at me strangely; in part, because every single one of them raised their hands. At Central High School you just accept at some point before you reach the age of 18 you are going to know somebody--a close friend or relative--who has been killed by guns in that city.

At a similar meeting of high school students in Hartford, CT, one young girl said the signs of police sirens at night were her lullaby growing up. She just knew there was a pretty good chance on any night someone was going to be killed in her neighborhood and she had come to accept the signs of crisis response as just the pitter-pat of raindrops outside.

To these kids, they look at their lives, in which they fear for their safety when they walk to school, in which they accept the inevitable fact they will lose someone close to them over the course of their teenage years, and they do not understand the complacency of the Senate.

A recent study of Cook County hospitals in and around Chicago showed of all the people they treated for episodes of violence, nearly half of them displayed signs of PTSD. The fact is, in these neighborhoods, PTSD is a reality in the same way it is for our troops who serve us overseas because they witness horrific acts of violence in neighborhoods that are supposed to be safe for our kids. We shouldn't have to compare the levels of PTSD in the neighborhoods our kids transit in the same way we look at PTSD on the field of battle.

It is time we did something--whether it is an investment in new mental health resources or beefed-up background checks to make sure criminals aren't buying guns or a recognition there are some weapons that probably deserve to be in the hands of the military rather than in the hands of everyday citizens. It is time for us to have an answer. These numbers--31,000, 2,600, and 86--are too high. If the stats don't do it, then hopefully over time the voices of victims will.

Madam President, it was fascinating to watch the headlines change over the course of the day after the CBO report on the status of the implementation of health care was released. At first, the headlines flashed that the CBO report said the health care reform law was going to cost 2\1/2\

million jobs, and Republicans ran to the cable networks to trumpet that number. In fact, many mainstream newspapers actually ran initial headlines suggesting the same. But then, as people actually started to read the CBO report, they discovered the truth. They discovered the fact that the CBO report actually says the economy is going to grow because of the health care law. And to the extent there are reductions in the hours people work, it is going to be because individuals are now no longer required to work simply because they need to get health care. They can now make decisions about what they want to do with their life, the kind of work they want to do and the amount of time they want to devote to it, not simply because they are job-locked due to health care insecurity.

So I wanted to come to the floor today, as some of my colleagues have, to set the record straight on what the implementation of the health care law really means for the economy and to specifically focus on this issue of what it means to individuals who for decades have been forced to make decisions about their labor connected only to the kind of job that would provide for health care for them and their families.

I think back to a day not long after we passed the bill, a day that I was taking my little then-2-year-old son to our community pool in Cheshire, CT. I was in the pool splashing around with my son, and a guy not more than a few years older than I came across the pool and tapped me on the shoulder.

He said: I am really sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to say thank you.

I said: That is nice. ``Thank you'' for what?

He said: I wanted to say thank you for passing the health care reform law because I have a little son too, and he has a congenital heart defect. We spend a lot of money trying to take care of his illness. First, the health care bill is going to save us a lot of money, but that is not really why I am so thankful for what you did. What I am truly thankful for is the fact that I can rest easily at night now knowing that my son's life and that his career won't be dictated by his illness; that my son can now live out his dreams, do whatever he wants to do with his life rather than spending his life searching for a job that will cover his illness and worrying about whether a small gap in employment will forever take him off the rolls of the insured forever.

That has been the reality in our country for too long. If you had a chronic illness or a genetic illness or a condition that was on the list of preexisting illnesses at America's insurance companies, A, you had a hard time finding a job because a lot of people didn't want to hire somebody who came with those high insurance costs, and then once you found the job, you could never leave because you couldn't risk losing the insurance that was paying your bills.

The health care reform law unlocks economic possibilities for millions of people all across this country who haven't gone out and started that business they knew could grow, they knew could result in dozens of employees being hired, because they couldn't leave their existing job and the insurance it provided for them and for their families.

That is what the CBO report says. The CBO report says that to the extent there are going to be less hours worked, it is because individuals will no longer be tied to their jobs because of their need to get health care benefits. That is the real story of the CBO report. In fact, the CBO report says this: Expanded Federal subsidies for health insurance will stimulate demand for goods and services, and that effect will mostly occur over the next few years. That increase in demand will induce some employers to hire more workers or to increase their employees' hours during that period.

That is economic growth. That is not economic contraction.

Now, this is a really simple chart. I am not going to claim that the numbers in it are a reflection simply of the legislation we passed. But for all my Republican colleagues who rushed down to either the floor or to the cable news networks to decry the CBO report and who in general have continued to make the case that the health care law is hurting the economy, this is about as simple a chart as you need.

In the decades before we passed the Affordable Care Act this economy lost 3.8 million jobs, and in the 45 months since we passed the Affordable Care Act this economy has created 8.1 million jobs.

Nobody is satisfied with the pace of job growth, but nobody can say the passage of the Affordable Care Act has hurt jobs. Anecdotally, anybody can bring one or two stories to the floor suggesting an individual businessperson decided to not hire someone because of the Affordable Care Act. But the CBO report also says this: In CBO's judgment, there is no compelling evidence that part-time employment has increased as a result of the ACA. That is a specific talking point that opponent of the ACA after opponent of the ACA brings out into the public debate, that what is going to happen is that because there is a requirement to provide insurance for full-time employees and not part- time employees, we are going to see millions of full-time jobs eliminated and put into part-time employment. CBO says, in CBO's judgment, there is no compelling evidence that part-time employment has increased as a result of the ACA. They say the effect of the Affordable Care Act will increase demand and induce some employers to hire more workers or to increase their employees' hours during that period.

But the news is even better because we are also getting definitive results on the amount of money we are spending as taxpayers when it comes to our health care budget.

Here is a simple chart that tells us what the current law projection was with respect to health care spending in this country. This builds out the trendline all the way to 2085. I will concede it is probably not worthwhile to necessarily predict what health care expenditures will be in 2085, but we don't even have to go there to see that pretty quickly the actual average of annual growth rate of health care is going to come in way lower than what the current law projection is. In fact, it is going to come in at such a lower rate because of the passage of the Affordable Care Act, we are going to be saving on average $250 billion a year. Not wholly because of the health care law but in large part because of the implementation of the health care law, we are going to be saving $250 billion a year just in Medicare spending because we are starting to build a health care system which focuses on prevention--every Medicare participant now gets free wellness visits-- and a system which rewards outcomes rather than volume, which rewards quality health care rather than just lots of health care.

So it is time that we start talking about the true economic impact of the Affordable Care Act. For all of the political and rhetorical bluster, CBO tells us that the economy will grow because of the act and that full-time employment will not turn into part-time employment.

To the extent there are less hours worked in this country, as the CBO report clearly says, it is because individuals are finally going to be empowered to make decisions for themselves about what the proper work schedule for them and their family is, not based on whether they can get health care.

I will share one story that illustrates the decisions being made out there right now today when it comes to the economic benefit that can accrue from the Affordable Care Act.

A small business owner in Enfield, CT, just wrote this:

I am a small business owner in Enfield who struggled for

the last 26 years with finding affordable, quality health

insurance coverage. For the last three years, I've been

paying our current carrier . . . $1,552.00 a month to cover

myself and my 17-year-old son. My son was injured in the fall

while playing high school football and required surgery on

his shoulder. My deductible for the surgery was $3,000.

Paying for health insurance and medical bills has been a

constant struggle. That's why I decided a week ago to check

out Access Health CT to see if I could get help going

forward. After I entered my information on the website, I

discovered that my son and I could stay with [that same

carrier] with a better package including eye exams and

glasses coverage for only $328 a month and a $500 deductible.

I signed up the same day. My new insurance starts March 1st.

This is far better than I ever thought it would be. I was

worried that health insurance would put me out of business

after all those years, but now I feel I can keep my business

going. I may even hire a new employee. I want to say thank

you to everyone

from the state to the federal level that has made Access

Health CT a reality. Don't believe the rumors--check it out

yourself. I am so glad I did.

Don't believe the quick snap headlines that get written when a complicated economic report comes out, as it did yesterday, because if we read beyond the headlines, we will find that the economic evidence-- the budget evidence is saying over and over that the Affordable Care Act is going to create jobs; that the Affordable Care Act is creating jobs; that the Affordable Care Act will save taxpayers billions of dollars; that the Affordable Care Act is saving taxpayers billions of dollars.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I want to bring to the attention of my colleagues an important accomplishment achieved by the American Institute For Foreign Study, AIFS, based in Stamford, CT. In 2014, AIFS will be celebrating its 50th year of providing unique cultural and educational opportunities to young people around the globe through its mission--``we bring the world together''. Through its study and travel abroad, high school exchange, camp counselor, au pair, and gifted education programs, young people from diverse backgrounds have interacted with others from different cultures, gaining a better understanding of their values and ideas.

Since its inception, AIFS has provided this educational opportunity to over 1.5 million people. In fact, over 800,000 American high school or college aged students have broadened their horizons by traveling abroad in structured educational programs. Whether it is through faculty-led educational travel programs or college semester/summer study abroad programs, young Americans have gained unique insights into a world that is rapidly shrinking.

Mr. President, I congratulate the leadership of AIFS for its tireless pursuit of its goal of achieving a greater global understanding. Working closely with the U.S. Department of State, AIFS' programs have positively changed the way their participants view the world as well as their place within it.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to engage in a colloquy with the Senator from Hawaii for up to 20 minutes.

Madam President, I am on the floor with my colleague Senator Schatz from Hawaii to talk about our recent introduction of a piece of legislation entitled ``The College Affordability and Innovation Act of 2014,'' which we introduced along with our good friends Senator Murray of Washington and Senator Sanders of Vermont.

By way of framing the conversation we will have today, I wish to speak about one particular college that maybe paints a picture of the crisis we are in today with respect to the mounting cost that confronts kids and families when they want to get a college education and the variety of outcomes--the frankly surprising and often shocking variety of outcomes--that students are getting when they show up at the doors of institutions of education, particularly institutions of for-profit education. Corinthian College is a school in California--not a small one but a pretty big college. It has about 100 campuses in 25 different States. Let me give some statistics about Corinthian College. After about a year, over half of the students who enroll drop out. When they are finished with their education, whether it be to a degree or not, about one-third of all students who go to Corinthian default on their student loans. If 56 percent isn't a bad enough number in terms of 1- year dropout rates, after 4 years, only 6 percent of all the kids who walk in

through the doors of Corinthian College get a degree--6 percent of those kids.

Affordability isn't an argument in favor of this school either. For a legal assistant degree, they charge $28,000, but down the street at a community college a person can get that same degree for $2,500. They have a 35-percent default rate, a 6-percent 4-year graduation rate, and degrees that can cost 14 times as much as comparable local schools.

Guess what. The Federal Government rewards this school with $1.6 billion in Federal aid every year and $500 million in Pell grant money every year. So this example, which frankly can be repeated over and over, especially in the for-profit world, speaks to the challenge we have.

We have done a very credible job over the course of the last few years in keeping down the interest rate we charge students who want to take out loans to go to school. No one has worked harder on this issue inside this body and outside this body than the Presiding Officer. But we also have to have a concurrent conversation about the sticker price of college because it can't be enough that we are facilitating student borrowing; we actually have to try to engage in a real effort, using Federal leverage, for the first time perhaps in our history of Federal higher education policy, to push the cost of tuition down in the first place. That is what the College Affordability and Innovation Act seeks to do.

As Senator Schatz will talk about, there aren't a lot of issues that are much more important to the middle class than the cost of higher education. We both know that. We have partnered on this piece of legislation in part because not only are we not that far away from the time in our lives when we were in college, but we are paying back our student loans and saving for our kids' education, so we get how much of an annual budget can be taken up in paying for both prior and saving for future college. So we attack this problem in two ways--and I will just briefly speak about the first way and then I think the Senator from Hawaii can speak a little bit about the second method.

First, we think it is time for a little bit more innovation when it comes to the way in which college is structured. There is no magic to the fact that today one has to sit in a classroom for 4 years, taking a requisite amount of credits, in order to get a degree. There is a lot of interesting innovation happening out there where a small subset of schools are saying: Wait a second. Maybe there is a different way to do it.

For instance, maybe we should award a degree based on the competencies a student gets, regardless of whether the student needs 2 years or 3 years or 4 years to get that degree or, for instance, maybe we should give students who show up at their freshman year of school with prior learning more credit for that, whether they got that experience studying at a high school or in the work force or in the military. Some students don't have to start as a freshman; some students can start as a sophomore or a junior.

Maybe it is a renewed effort to consolidate graduate programs with undergraduate programs. I think President Obama is right; one doesn't need 7 years to become a lawyer in this country. It doesn't make a lot of sense that one has to essentially spend 10 to 15 years in education and training to become a doctor. We can consolidate graduate and undergraduate programs.

But whatever we do, we have to admit that one of the easiest ways to reduce the cost of a degree is to reduce the time it takes to get a degree. So the first part of our bill focuses on giving some grants to a small number of schools to build out the right way to do competency- based degree programming or initiatives to give greater credit for prior learning or consolidations of graduate and undergraduate degrees.

We introduced this piece of legislation because we think it is time to start having a real conversation about what the Federal Government can do to control and lower the price of college education. It is breaking the bank for families. We can do something about it. If we didn't have any tools at our disposal, maybe this wouldn't be a worthwhile conversation, but we give out $140 billion in Federal aid every year, and it is about time we start demanding some accountability for that money, whether it is accountability for cost or accountability for quality. It doesn't make sense for taxpayers to be sending $1.6 billion a year to a school with a 6-percent graduation rate, a 38- percent loan default rate, and prices that are simply not competitive in the landscape of college education.

I am pleased to be on the floor with my colleague Senator Schatz, and I am happy to turn the floor over to him.

I thank Senator Schatz.

Here is another statistic to think about: It was not so long ago that we ranked first in the Nation with respect to 25-year-olds to 35-year- olds with college degrees, and that was not only a source of immense pride for this country but really the genesis of our economic greatness--that we turned out more college-educated young people than any other country in the world. In a very short period of time we slipped from 1st to not 2nd or 3rd or 4th but to 12th. We are now 12th in the world with respect to the number of 25- to 35-year-olds with college degrees.

Part of the reason for that is that a lot of other countries have caught up to the United States. But the crisis in this country is no longer just a crisis of access. That was the buzzword for a long time, that we needed to increase access to college. We now have a crisis of completion in which millions of students are starting school and not finishing for a variety of reasons but largely because of the astronomical cost.

Today the majority of students are not graduating in 6 years. So the issue about affordability is not just about attracting more kids into the doors of college--because I will tell you, as I am sure Senator Schatz does, I talk to a lot of kids who graduate high school and do not apply to schools in my State because they are scared off by the cost and they do not believe they are going to be able to put together the family resources to pay for it--but we also are losing a generation of workers because it is taking young people now 6, 7, 8 years to complete a degree, and often many of them are never completing that degree while still taking on loan after loan after loan and getting stuck in the worst possible situation whereby they have thousands of dollars in debt and no certificate to bring into the workforce.

So our effort is an effort to address cost because we care about access, but it is also an effort to address cost because we care about completion, and that is one of the big problems we have in our system today.

Let's be clear as to what we are talking about here. We believe we are talking about a pretty light hand of accountability in the sense that we are really going after the true outliers. The Senator talked about the work happening at the University of Hawaii or the University of Connecticut. We do not imagine that any flagship university is going to run afoul of these accountability standards. I, frankly, do not believe many public universities at all are going to run afoul of these standards. We are really talking about the handful of outliers that have just absolutely abysmal retention rates, graduation rates, default rates, or tuition increase rates.

We are also talking about, we think, a pretty nuanced process to try to bring those schools around before they lose eligibility for funding. Our bill says that if you are not meeting these standards, you have a pretty long period of time in which you would be on probation with no practical effects, in which you could set upon an action plan to improve your affordability or outcomes. Then if, after that period of time, you still were not hitting your benchmarks, then you lose 10 percent of your Federal aid, then 20 percent, and then finally, in the fourth or fifth years, you would become ineligible. That is plenty of time for a university to correct. But if a school that is starting out with a 6-percent graduation rate cannot improve that over 5 years, why on Earth would we continue to send $1 billion to that school when it could be used for students who are attending schools that care a lot more about quality education?

As we wrap up our time on the floor, when my great- grandfather came to this country, he knew that without a college education he could get a job pretty easily that would be able to put food on the table, have decent health care for his family, even provide him with a little bit of a pension that would take care of him. His son, my grandfather, followed him into that same profession, working for a ball bearing factory in New Britain, CT.

While those jobs still exist, they are getting rarer and rarer. For the next generation to succeed, we know they need access to a college degree. They are not getting that access to completion because we have been woefully inadequate in using the tools at our disposal at the Federal level to try to put pressure on colleges to deliver on both affordability and outcome.

We hope the introduction of the College Affordability and Innovation Act will allow us to open a new front in the debate on higher education to promote the idea of reducing the sticker price of college.

I thank my colleague for joining me, and I yield the floor.