Floor Statements

Offered By: Mr. Weldon of Florida

Amendment No. 20: At the end of the bill, add the following

new section:

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman's yielding to me, and let me just add to what the gentleman was saying. There is a lot of active research on this, and the research is not conclusive, so we do not need to act right now.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to express my strong support of H.R. 5 and my interest in seeing that one significant concern is addressed, should this bill move through the Senate.

As a practicing physician I know how important this bill is to ensuring that Americans have access to good medical care. For too long too many limited resources have been misdirected away from patient care and have instead been spent to unnecessary malpractice awards and the practice of defensive medicine. Defensive medicine offers little in terms of better patient outcomes, but it adds billions of dollars to the cost of medical care. I know this not only because studies show this is the case, but I used to practice defensive medicine every day.

This bill makes sure that there is fair treatment for those individuals who do suffer serious adverse medical outcomes, while ensuring that our legal system is not overwhelmed with frivolous lawsuits.

A serious concern I have with the bill, and an issue I have raised with the chairman and others, is how it treats liability reform for manufacturers of drugs and vaccines. With respect to pharmaceuticals we are often unable to recognize all adverse reactions until we have post- marketing information. This post-marketing safety data, such as in cases like Vioxx, is provided to FDA on a voluntary basis by the manufacturers. I agree with the intent of the bill which is to ensure that Americans have greater access to potentially live saving pharmaceuticals. However, it is equally important that we fully examine the implications of such provisions on safety and the willingness of manufacturers to come forward with adverse information.

I am also concerned that H.R. 5 offers significant liability protection for vaccine manufacturers, while failing to fix the broken vaccine injury compensation program (VICP). It is critically important that these two not be separated. The VICP is very broken and it would be wrong to cut off access to the courts without addressing the serious deficiencies that exist in the compensation program today. As it operates today, the VICP has essentially imported the tort system into the program. That was not how the program was designed to operate. If both the liability problem and the VICP deficiencies are not fixed fairly, then our nation's immunization program will suffer serious problems and parents could increasingly reject childhood immunizations for their children.

Mr. Speaker, due to the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery early Tuesday morning, I was unable to be present for votes on Monday evening. Had I been present, please let the official Record reflect that I would have voted in favor of the following three bills: H.J. Res. 59--Sense of Congress with respect to the establishment of an appropriate day for the commemoration of the women suffragists; H. Con. Res. 181--Supporting the goals and ideals of National Life Insurance Awareness Month; and H. Res. 376--Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the Federal Trade Commission should investigate the publication of the video game ``Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas''.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to salute the men and women of NASA and the contractor community for a successful launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery following a 2\1/2\ year hiatus in the operations of our space shuttle program.

Yesterday morning I had the pleasure of witnessing the launch at the Banana Creek viewing site along with First Lady Laura Bush, and it was truly a beautiful sight to see our space shuttle flying again.

As shuttle commander Eileen Collins and the crew of Discovery work to complete their mission, we here in the House of Representatives, and I am sure every American can join me in this, wish them Godspeed and a safe return to planet Earth.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time; and as he stated, I practiced internal medicine, but that was not the only type of medicine I practiced. I also practiced defensive medicine.

We can talk about medical malpractice premiums and the costs for doctors, and we can talk about suing drug companies, and we can talk about high premiums in States like West Virginia, which we heard about from the gentlewoman from West Virginia, how specialists leave the States. We had that problem in Florida. We had the neurosurgeons in Orlando threatening to leave because of the high premiums in Orlando. The trauma center would have been downgraded from a level one to a level two center.

But those are really not the issues. The real issue here is the incredible, incredible cost of defensive medicine. And I practiced it every day. I confess, I ordered extra tests to keep myself from being sued. And if you think this is just anecdotal, it is not, my colleagues. This was studied very nicely at Stanford University.

This is old data. It was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1996. They looked at California, and they looked at just two diagnostic codes, unstable angina, eschemic heart disease; and the study showed after the medical malpractice reforms went in place in California, the charges to the Medicare plan declined significantly. Guess what? Morbidity and mortality did not go up. Quality was maintained.

They estimated in that study, in 1996 dollars, that defensive medicine cost our health care delivery system $50 billion a year. It is estimated by today's dollars that it is well over $100 billion a year.

Now, my colleagues want to take care of the uninsured and they want prescription drugs for senior citizens? Then do something about this very costly system.

Mr. Speaker, the study earlier referred to follows:

[From Forbes Magazine, Jan. 27, 1997]

Rx: Radical Lawyerectomy

(By Peter Huber)

How do you trim $20 billion a year from Medicare? That's

about what it will take to stave off bankruptcy. The easiest

way: amputate lawyers.

It can be done. In 1995 Congress immunized community health

care centers from malpractice suits. The federal government

now covers the claims incurred by these federally subsidized

clinics--claims are heard by a judge, not a jury, and there

are no punitive awards. The clinics save an estimated $40

million in malpractice insurance. That funds treatment for an

additional half-million indigent patients.

Why stop there? The country spends about $8 billion a year

treating elderly heart-disease patients. Cap awards, abolish

punitive damages, implement a few other direct, financial

limits on medical malpractice suits, and you reduce hospital

expenditures on cardiac patients by 5% to 9%.

If limits like these had been written into federal law,

nationwide spending on cardiac disease in the late 1980s

would have been $600 million a year lower. Extrapolate these

results to medical spending generally--a debatable but

reasonable enough basis for estimation--and you find that

tort reform would save the country as a whole well over $50

billion a year.

But how much more negligent medicine would that encourage?

How many more cardiac patients would die? How many more would

get inferior treatment and suffer a second heart attack as a

result? The best estimate: None at all. Nor would any true

victims of negligence go uncompensated. The reforms we're

talking about here don't eliminate liability, they just place

sensible limits on windfalls and double-dipping. They are in

fact already part of the law in many states.

The numbers I cite come from a very important paper, ``Do

Doctors Practice Defensive Medicine?'' written by Daniel

Kessler and Mark McClellan, both of Stanford University. The

paper appeared in the May 1996 Quarterly Journal of

Economics.

The authors analyze data on all elderly Medicare

beneficiaries hospitalized for serious heart disease in 1984,

1987 and 1990. The study correlates spending for medical care

with state tort laws. About three patients in five were

treated in states that placed no direct limits on rights to

sue. But two in five were hospitalized in states that did.

Direct liability limits have clear, strong effects on medical

spending, the study concludes.

But that's just the first half of the story. Previous

studies--most notably one conducted by Harvard Medical School

in 1990--asked panels of doctors to review patient files and

attach subjective judgments about adverse outcomes and

deficient treatment. Much of the ``negligence'' identified in

this way had no significant impact on the ostensible victim.

Studies like this didn't reveal much about the consequences

of malpractice litigation because they didn't pin down the

consequences of malpractice itself.

With elderly cardiac patients there are objective standards

for assessing ineffective care: Patients die, or they end up

back in a cardiac ward not long after discharge. Analyzing

the record on these solid criteria, Kessler and McClellan

reach a second, clear conclusion: None of the liability

reforms studied ``led to any consequential differences in

mortality or the occurrence of serious complications.''

If liability doesn't force doctors to provide better

treatment, why does it boost the cost of medicine so sharply?

Unlimited liability gets you more medicine, not better.

Lawyer-shy doctors administer tests willy-nilly, and hand off

patients to specialists with great alacrity. They know that

the surest way to avoid liability is to dispatch your problem

patient to someone else--a lab technician or another doctor.

This can go on indefinitely. It's very expensive. And

medically useless.

Congress has generally left medical malpractice reform to

the states. But when Medicare and Medicaid patients sneeze,

it's the federal Treasury that catches cold. No principle of

federalism requires federal taxpayers in Montana to pay for

Mississippi medicine ordered up by the lawyers there, not the

doctors or patients.

The best place for Congress to balance the Medicare budget

is on the backs of trial lawyers. These lawyers are not old,

not poor and not needed.

Mr. Speaker, due to the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery earlier today, I was unable to be present for several votes. Had I been present, I would ask that the official Record reflect that I would have voted in favor of the following bills: H.R. 2977-- Paul Kasten Post Office Building Designation Act; H.R. 3200-- Servicemembers' Group Life Insurance Enhancement Act of 2005; and H.R. 3283--United States Trade Rights Enforcement Act.

Also, I would have voted in favor of the Obey Motion to Instruct Conferees on H.R. 2361--Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act for FY 2006.

Mr. Speaker, an issue I often hear about from my constituents is concern about the high cost of health insurance and the need for affordable insurance coverage. We all know health insurance premiums continue to increase substantially each year. As such, many small businesses are unable to afford health insurance for their employees. Furthermore, for those who can afford insurance for their employees, rising costs make U.S. products more expensive, harming U.S. competitiveness and costing American jobs.

Small businesses are the backbone of our economy, but the financial viability of many small businesses is being hurt by the escalating costs of health insurance. This hurts job creation and economic growth. The U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy found that administrative expenses for small health plans make up about 35 percent of total costs. This is not good for small business owners, their employees, or the American economy. Congress must address this problem, which is why I support H.R. 525, the Small Business Health Fairness Act.

By passing H.R. 525 Congress will be leveling the playing field between small businesses, the self-employed, and large corporations. This allows organizations of individuals and businesses to enter into Association Health Plans, AHPs. Under AHPs, small business can pool their resources and purchase group health care similar to the way large corporations do today. They can get better bargaining power in terms of costs and benefits for their employees. It gives workers, who do not have health insurance today, the opportunity to obtain health insurance coverage.

Whether it is a small business a trade association, a farm bureau, or a local community organization that is seeking to purchase more affordable health insurance, this legislation will help them. They can join together with other groups and purchase health insurance at much more affordable rates and have better negotiating power with insurance providers.

It is generally reported that there are over 40 million people in America without health insurance at any given time. According to the Congressional Budget Office, a more accurate estimate of the number of people who were uninsured for all of an entire year is 21 million to 31 million. Regardless, almost 60 percent of those individuals are employed by a small business. As health care costs increase, fewer employers and working families will be able to afford coverage, and more Americans will be without health insurance. Those who work for small businesses should have the same type of access to health insurance that their counterparts in large corporations already enjoy.

I urge Congress to pass H.R. 525. Congress must pass this bipartisan legislation to give much needed relief to American small businesses, farmers, and hard working families.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of H.R. 2863, The Water Resources and Development Act of 2005, WRDA 05. I commend the chairman for including in this bill provisions I requested that are important to Port Canaveral and my constituents in Brevard County, Florida.

This bill includes several provisions that are important to the residents of Brevard County as a whole and those living in what has been referred to as the ``Mid-Reach'' or ``wormrock'' area in particular.

First, the bill makes it clear that the Corps of Engineers is to accept the ICE report that was completed by and independent panel assessing the true impact of Canaveral inlet on the beach south of that inlet. The ICE report concluded that considerably larger share of the costs of the Brevard County Storm Damage Protection Project should have been borne by the federal government. The provision in WRDA 05 will ensure that Brevard County, Florida is able to recover, as a part of future renourishment activities, that portion of the costs of the original renourishment project that should have been borne by the Federal government.

Second, the bill corrects an error that has been promulgated through several Corps documents since the mid-1990s and in WRDA 2000 that incorrectly calculated the length of the ``MidReach'' section of the Brevard County Storm Damage Protection Project as 7.1 miles rather than 7.6 miles. This encompasses the shoreline from the north end of the ``South Reach'' of the Brevard Beach project to the south end of Patrick Air Force Base. The correct length of this section of beach is 7.6 miles and it is important that references to this section of beach be corrected in law.

Third, H.R. 2864 directs the Corps to expedite the General Reevaluation Report, GRR, for the Mid-Reach section of the Brevard shoreline. This section of beach will be included as a part of the original project and mitigation and storm damage protection efforts can be undertaken.

Finally, H.R. 2864 includes an important provision to ensure that a sediment trap can be constructed as a part of regular operation and maintenance at Port Canaveral. This sediment trap south of the approach channel and east of the south jetty will reduce the probability of a repeat of severe shoaling in the event of future hurricanes. It is appropriate to accomplish this work under the operation and maintenance since this measure is being taken to reduce future maintenance dredging of the Federal navigation channel. There will be cost savings if this is accomplished together with regular scheduled maintenance dredging.

The hurricanes that occurred in September 2004 caused severe shoaling in the approach channel to Port Canaveral. This led to the shutting down of the port due to inadequate channel depth. This caused the loss of business and serious problems for cruise ships that had to be diverted to Miami, for oil tankers that could not deliver fuel to the port, and for the power station and cargo ships carrying

lumber and other building materials that were needed for repairs and reconstruction after the hurricanes. This also impacted access to the Navy submarine base and Port Canaveral.

I thank the chairman for including these important provisions in this legislation and I look forward to passage of this legislation in the Senate.

Mr. Speaker, today I wish all the best for NASA and the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery and the men and women of Kennedy Space Center on attempting to launch tomorrow. Those of us who support the program understand how critically important it is for the United States to have a continuing human presence in space.

After the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia in February of 2003, we have not been able to launch our astronauts into space for almost 2\1/ 2\ years. With a successful launch tomorrow, we will once again show the world that our program and the dedicated people behind it are second to none and that our space shuttle fleet is unrivaled when it comes to technology and mission capability. This launch will be an important first step, a first step in the new vision for space exploration articulated by President Bush in January of 2004, a vision that is not only taking us back to low Earth orbit and the space station but that will lead us back to the Moon and one day on to Mars.

Again, I know I speak for all Americans when we wish the crew of Discovery God speed and a safe mission.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Florida for yielding me this time.

I always take a keen interest in these debates on veterans' health care issues. I actually work in a veterans' health care facility. I volunteer once a month; I see patients. And I have been doing it for years, and we have seen for years a tremendous explosion in demand for access to our veterans' health care system. And some of it has been generated by this Congress. We relaxed some of the access requirements. Some of it has been generated by the high cost of prescription drugs. A lot of the new patients coming into the system are people who do not have a prescription drug benefit. And, of course, now we have increased demand with the consequence of the war.

And I want to commend the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Putnam) on this rule. I think it is a good rule, and I want to commend the gentleman from New York (Mr. Walsh). He has worked very hard to address this shortfall. And, personally, I think we, as a Congress and as a Committee on Appropriations, need to take a very close look at the bill that we have already passed to address the 2006 needs, and this situation that we are dealing with today, I think, is the right thing for us to do. It is the best thing for our veterans. I know in the State of Florida, where I work and where I live, it has more than doubled, the number of veterans that have come into the system in the last 6 years, and it is truly breathtaking the number of people who are coming into the veterans system on a regular basis.

So I commend the author of this supplemental, and I believe it is the right thing for us to do for our veterans. We are in a state of war, and we need to send a signal to young people who want to enlist, to people who are serving and the people who have served that the Congress is going to stand with them and we are going to address these needs properly.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to use the time of the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne).

Mr. Speaker, the bioethical issues that we have been debating for the past several years, and particularly over the last couple of months, deal with fundamental questions about the value of human life and the meaning of human dignity. Every poll conducted on the subject of human embryo cloning for research indicates that 70 to 80 percent of the American people oppose human embryo cloning for research purposes. Cloning advocates know that the American public is adamantly opposed to their goals, so they have crafted new speech in an attempt to deliberately mislead Members of Congress, the media, grassroots advocates and the American public.

One of the leading patient advocacy groups for human cloning research is the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and they have been sanitizing the language and playing semantic games with a willing media and an unaware American public.

Let me give you a few examples. Last year when representatives of the JDRF stopped by my office, they shared with my staff that they endorsed stem cell research involving somatic cell nuclear transfer. When my staff replied that somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT, was the cloning of human embryos, the JDRF advocates in my office responded that they had been told by those training them for their Hill visit that SCNT did not create a human embryo because sperm was not used. Indeed, the literature in their own hands stated the following: ``When scientists use SCNT to create stem cells, no sperm is used and the resulting cell has no chance of developing into a human being because it is never placed in a uterus. This is a fundamentally different procedure from reproductive cloning, as was used by scientists in 1996 to create Dolly the sheep.''

This statement is misleading on several counts. JDRF is flat-out wrong when they state that SCNT is a ``fundamentally different procedure from reproductive cloning, as was used by scientists in 1996 to create Dolly the sheep.'' Dr. Ian Wilmut, Dolly's own creator, does not agree with the JDRF statement. Dr. Wilmut stated clearly in a peer- reviewed article, ``the unique feature of Dolly was that she was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic body cell.'' Then he goes on to say, ``The success of somatic cell nuclear transfer was used in creating Dolly.''

Cloning supporter and then-NIH Director Harold Varmus testified in 1998 stating, ``in the Dolly experiment, a lamb was produced using the technology of somatic cell nuclear transfer.''

JDRF implies that sperm is necessary to develop an embryo capable of growing into a human. This notion is completely inaccurate, as hundreds of animals have been created through SCNT using no sperm. Was Dolly not a sheep because sperm was not involved? JDRF characterizes the resulting product of SCNT as merely a cell with no chance of developing into a ``human.'' But President Clinton's own Bioethics

Advisory Commission disagrees with this statement. In 1997 his commission stated, ``the commission began its discussions fully recognizing that any effort in humans to transfer a somatic cell nucleus into an enucleated egg involves the creation of an embryo, with the apparent potential to be implanted in utero and developed to term.''

Many of the JDRF advocates that have visited Members of Congress are not to be faulted for this misinformation. They are simply sharing with you what those running JDRF's Hill advocacy program have told them. In fact, the patients and families selected to participate in the 2005 JDRF Children's Congress in Washington were required to assign a loyalty oath agreeing to support the JDRF position on these issues. The loyalty oath found on that application, which I have blown up, and I have next to me right here states, ``If there is a discussion of such controversial topics as embryonic stem cell research, I will either embrace the JDRF legislative position on such topics or will not work against the JDRF position.''

This statement clearly calls for applicants to be willing to embrace ethically questionable research or be willing to muzzle their personal and moral convictions. Let us have an honest debate on embryonic stem cell research and let us have an honest debate on human cloning and what it is. It is somatic cell nuclear transfer.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of this bill. As we all know, this is a difficult budget year. The American people have expressed, both Democrats and Republicans, strong concern about the budget deficits and are asking Congress to

move in a direction of a balanced budget. That is what this bill does, and the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf) needs to be commended. It has a slight decrease in the State Department and Commerce Department funding, a slight increase in Justice Department funding, and as has been pointed out an increase in the science account.

I specifically rise to speak in support of the NASA accounts. We, in the congressional district that I have the privilege of representing, launch the space shuttle into space, and that space shuttle is America's space shuttle. It is not a Republican or a Democrat space shuttle, and it is poised to return to flight soon. We need to make sure that it completes the remainder of its assigned mission safely and safely brings the crew back to Earth. And this bill funds the shuttle at the needed level. It also has adequate funding for the space station. We have not completed the construction of the space station, and we have engaged in partnerships with European countries and with the Japanese and the Russians; and once the space shuttle is flying again and with the funding level the chairman and the ranking member have put in this bill, we should be well on track to complete construction of the space station.

I would like to also rise and speak in support of the initiative in this bill to increase aeronautics funding. And my colleagues, the United States has dominated the world in aeronautics. We are the home to the Wright brothers. And today we are being eclipsed. Today, Airbus has a greater global market share than Boeing, our sole remaining commercial airline manufacturing company. And this is critical seed corn if we, as a Nation, are going to be able to continue to have our edge in commercial aviation and in the whole field of civil aviation and aeronautics.

I would like to specifically address the issue of the President's space initiative. And one of the things that I have been increasingly concerned about in my position as a legislator is the fact that people in education tell me we just do not have enough American kids going into science, mathematics, and engineering. And those same educators tell me over and over again the thing that motivates kids more than anything else to go into those fields is the space program. And for years, NASA languished because many people criticized it for not having a clear vision. President John Kennedy gave it a clear vision in the 1960s; and, finally, today, we have that vision again. We are talking about going back to the Moon and on to Mars. President Bush gave us that vision, and now is not the time to cut back.

We have a critical situation where, in many of our colleges and universities, the majority of people pursuing graduate degrees in science and engineering fields are foreigners. They are not Americans. We are not graduating enough American citizens in these fields, and there is no better way to motivate our young people, young kids in grammar school, in secondary school.

Let me just say one other thing to close out. A lot of this space exploration is about the spirit of being an American citizen. We are a Nation of explorers, and if we are going to turn our back, or if we are going to delay, and I am very sympathetic to what the ranking member is trying to do with more funding for police, and I would certainly hope we may be able to do that in conference. But if we are going to remain a Nation that is always on the cutting edge of science and exploration, we desperately need NASA and what this bill is about.

I would strongly encourage all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to oppose any initiative to reduce the NASA accounts, to reduce the science accounts, to support the underlying bill. It is the right thing for our kids. It is the right thing for our competitiveness in the future. And it is the right thing to make sure that our space program stays on track.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time, and I rise in opposition to this amendment. Americans take great pride in the accomplishments of the manned space flight program and NASA going all the way back to its earliest days, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and beyond. And there always were people who came to the floor of this body proposing cuts to those programs, to NASA, and always shifting dollars to very, very worthwhile, or seemingly very, very worthwhile, entities.

I would just like to point out to my colleagues, do not be misled into believing that local law enforcement is going to be in a crisis if they do not get these additional funds. Better than 99 percent of funding to local law enforcement comes from State and local funding sources, and this amount of money is literally a drop in the bucket.

I would just like to also add that the Bush tax cuts that we passed out of this body and became law are causing a tremendous amount of economic growth and job creation, and there has been actually a surge of revenue into the State and local treasuries. Indeed, I am even told that chronically underfinanced New York City has a $2 billion surplus. My State that I come from in Florida, we are experiencing a surplus because of the robust growth caused by this tax cut package. Those local and State agencies can put more funding into COPS programs and fighting meth labs. They actually have much more resources to take care of the job.

Mr. Speaker, I commend the chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce and his staff, as well as the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith), for their diligent work on bringing this very, very good bill to the floor of the House.

What we are going to be voting for here will help create a banking system so that if a patient comes in to see me with a particular illness that is amenable to treatment with stem cells, I can enter their genetic information in a computer, find a match of cord blood that would be kept in a freezer, and actually treat the patient. It is really exciting, I have to say. I never thought I would live to see the day where we would be curing sickle cell anemia. And for those of my colleagues who do not know about sickle cell anemia, sickle cell is a terrible disease. You get these young people, kids, coming in your office with these horrible, painful crises where their bones are aching and you end up having to give them narcotics and transfuse them. It stunts their growth, horrible condition. We now have 10, 10 kids that have been cured of sickle cell anemia.

Just yesterday I was flying up here, and as I often do, I grabbed some medical journals to read on the plane. I was reading the May 19 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine and, lo and behold, another research article, this one on transplantation of umbilical cord blood in babies with Infantile Krabbe's disease, a rare disease, a terrible disease, the babies die; and this cord blood study shows if you catch it early, you can actually cure these kids.

I know there have been a number of Members coming to the floor talking about the embryonic bill that we are going to take up later; the embryonic stem cells have never been shown to be successfully useful in a human model. They do not even have one case. We have thousands of people who have been treated with adult stem cells and these cord blood treatments.

I just want to correct the gentleman from Alabama. He has implied some of us are against stem cell research. That is not the case at all here. We are just for ethical stem cell research.

Mr. Speaker, I rise again to set the record straight.

There have been some people who have implied there is limited capacity for these cord blood stems to be used successfully. They have been shown to be pluripotent. They can become all different cell types, and they have shown a tremendous amount of plasticity.

This poster is of a young lady who was paralyzed for years and had an adult stem cell transplant. She is able to stand up.

But I just want to clarify on the cord blood, it has been used to treat leukemia, adrenoleukodystrophy, Burkitt's lymphoma, chronic granulomatous diseases, congenital neutropenia, DiGeorge's syndrome, Fanconi's anemia, and these are just some of them, Gaucher's disease. Hodgkin's disease, cord blood has been used successfully to treat Hodgkin's disease; idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, which is a really bad disease. I used to see some of those. Krabbe's disease I mentioned earlier, that was just in the New England Journal this month. Lymphoma; lymphoproliferative syndrome; myelofibrosis; neuroblastoma, which is a form of brain tumor which has been successfully treated with cord blood. Osteopetrosis has been successfully treated. Reticular dysgenesis, severe aplastic anemia.

The list goes on and on. There are 65 different medical conditions that have been successfully treated with cord blood.

People have mentioned diabetes. Embryonic stem cells have not been successfully used to treat diabetes either, but actually in animal models adult stem cells have been used successfully to treat diabetes. I think most of the hope and success is in this cord blood. That is why this bill is very, very important.

Mr. Speaker, as most of my colleagues know, I practice general internal medicine and I still do it. I have treated a lot of patients with diabetes, Parkinson's; indeed, my father died of complications of diabetes. My uncle, his brother, died of complications of Parkinson's disease.

Let us just talk a little bit about how we got here, okay? This body voted years ago, no Federal funding for research that involves the destruction of a human embryo. And President Clinton, towards the tail end of his administration, did an end run around the congressional prohibition, and they were having outside labs destroy the embryos, get the embryonic stem cells and send them over to NIH. And I sent the President a letter telling him, You are violating the spirit of the law, if not the letter of the law.

When President Bush became President, a lot of us alerted him to this problem, and he came out with his policy. And I thought it was really like a Solomon-like compromise. He said, We will not allow any more Federal funds to be used that involve the killing of human embryos, but we will allow research to proceed on the existing cell lines.

And I sit on the committee that funds this. We have funded this research to the tune of $60 million over the last 3 years, embryonic stem cell research, what you are asking for more of. And the only place that I can find the research results printed is, I have to go to the rat-and-mouse journals. And the results are bad. These things tend to form tumors. The plasticity that some of you extol in these embryonic stem cells make them genetically unstable. They tend to form tumors. We call them teratomas in the medical profession. They grow hair and they grow teeth. They are genetically unstable.

Meanwhile, on the adult stem cell line it is breakthrough after breakthrough after breakthrough. Indeed, the gentlewoman from Colorado said in her opening statement, there is no, no scientific evidence that will show that cord blood or adult stem cells will cure Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or Type 1 diabetes.

Parkinson's disease was successfully treated 6 years ago in Dennis Turner using an adult stem cell. He had an 80 percent reduction in his symptoms. This was described at the American Association of Neurological Surgeons annual meeting in April of 2002.

In 2003, Science-published Harvard researchers announced they had achieved a permanent reversal of diabetes in mice. This is now under human clinical trials today, while we speak. By the way, they tried to repeat that study using embryonic, mouse embryonic stem cells and it failed. And this lady was in a wheelchair and she can now stand up with adult stem cells.

We do not need this bill. It is ethically wrong. We should be voting ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me, and I commend the gentleman for his leadership on this issue.

We have heard a lot of discussion of the three known forms of stem cell therapies that are hypothesized to treat all these diseases. One of the nice things about adult stem cell treatments and why I think they have been embraced, and part of the reason they have been so successful is, if you use a cell from your own body, there are no tissue rejection concerns.

If you use a cord blood or placental blood stem cell, there are tissue rejection concerns; but it is felt by the advocates of the gentleman from New

Jersey (Mr. Smith's) bill, such as myself, that by obtaining the bank, we would be able to enter all of your genetic information and come up with a match. And one of the questions I have for my colleagues who have been an advocate for the Castle/DeGette bill is, how, if these embryonic cells were ever proven to be useful, and that has yet to be demonstrated in the literature, how would you override the tissue rejection concerns?

Mr. Speaker, it takes us to a very important part of this debate that we really have not dwelled on very much. They say there are 400,000 embryos in the freezers, but the truth is the vast majority of those embryos are wanted, and their own studies suggest only 275 cell lines will be available if this bill becomes law.

Mr. Speaker, the place we are going to have to go to make embryonic stem cell work, if it ever can be demonstrated to work, is creating human embryos for this purpose. And that really brings me to my point. If you are going to go down the road of creating human embryos, you really only have two options. You are going to need tens of thousands of women to donate their eggs, or you are going to have to clone. And that is why people like myself have been saying, wait to see what is next, because that is going to be the next debate.

If this becomes law, we are going to be asked to embrace Federal funding for creating human life for this research. No longer using the so-called excess embryos, but either exploiting women for their eggs or worse, we are going down the path of cloning. And I assure you, if you find those options objectionable, they will be cloaked with the same kind of arguments that have been used to support this bill. People will say it is for the purpose of helping the sick and suffering. And what I have been saying over and over again, if you actually read the medical journals, the promise and the potential appear to be in the ethically acceptable alternatives of adult stem research and cord blood research.

Reject this bill. Vote ``no'' on Castle/DeGette.