Floor Statements

Mr. President, I rise to speak today on this extenders bill that we will vote on here on a point of order that I will make in just a few minutes. The purpose of this point of order is this: Not too long ago in this Congress, we passed legislation called pay-go, and what pay-go is supposed to mean is that we will pay as we go in this Congress; that when we create a new program, we extend a current program, we will pay for it; that we will not continue to borrow against our children's future. I was here in the Senate when we had that debate. It was a debate that came down to a purely party-line decision.

I am new to this body, and I wanted to vote for this because I believe pay-go might actually be something that limits the out-of- control spending of Washington. I talked to my colleagues, and some of my colleagues who have been around longer than I said: Look, Senator, it is not really going to do anything. They are just going to move to waive it every time it comes into effect. They are not going to play by the rules. They are not going to pay for things as you go. It is just cover.

I wanted to vote for it. I struggled with it. In the end, I did not vote for it. And here we are just a few months--2 months past February 12 when the President signed this pay-as-you-go legislation--only 19 days after that, we waived it on a bill very similar to this, and now we are going to seek to waive this legislation again to spend $19 billion and put it on the tab of our children and our grandchildren.

Let's talk about what this bill is. It would extend unemployment compensation and it would extend COBRA, which is health care benefits for people who lose their jobs. If we were to vote on this and pay for it, I think 100 Senators would vote for it. Shortly before the recess for the holiday break, there was an agreement in this Chamber between Republicans and Democrats that we would find the money to pay for this so that we wouldn't have to put it on the backs of our children, so that we would not have to borrow the money from China, so that we wouldn't have to increase our growing debt and deficit.

Our national debt is now nearly $13 trillion. It has gone up $1 trillion in the short time I have been here in the Senate. To give you reference on that, it took until 1980, from the founding of this country until 1980 for us to amass our first trillion dollars in debt.

The system of spending is unsustainable. I spoke on the floor this morning about it. But don't just take my word for it; take Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, who testified today before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress and said this government must begin to make difficult choices to address its deficits and warned that postponing them will only make them more difficult. So here today we are going to spend another $19 billion and put it off on our children, and they will have to pay for it because we are going to have to borrow this money.

We are not supposed to be able to waive this rule, this legislation, unless it is an emergency. This is no emergency, and that is the basis of my point of order I will make here in just a few minutes.

What is an emergency? Well, most of us think it is what Merriam- Webster says it is: an unforeseen combination of circumstances resulting in a state that calls for immediate action--an unforeseen combination of circumstances. Has it been unforeseen that we were going to have to extend unemployment compensation? Was it unforeseen that we were going to have to extend COBRA? Of course, it is not. We knew we were going to have to do this, but there is an unwillingness in this Congress to pay for things. There is a willingness to put the debt upon our children and our grandchildren.

The Budget Act of 1974 that we operate under says that an emergency is necessary, essential or vital, sudden, quick coming into being and not building up over time, urgent, pressing, compelling, unforeseen, unpredictable, not permanent, temporary in nature. None of those requirements are met by this attempt to waive the pay-as-you-go requirements. Why do we have pay-go if we are just going to waive it every time we think we need to spend more money?

This is no emergency. This is just part and parcel of the problem we have in Washington of continuing to spend in an unsustainable way. And when, 5 years or 10 years from now, we are in the same situation Greece is in; when we have failed this country for our children; when we have $900 billion in interest payments alone in 2020 on our current course, which will not allow us to spend money on anything else because that plus mandatory spending will be all there is in the budget; when our economic system fails because we have failed to make the decisions to control our spending, you will know why--because of the decisions that are being made today, in 2010, in April, decisions to add another $19 billion to our national debt.

I yield the floor. I reserve my right to speak shortly before the vote is called at 12:30.

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

Mr. President, I thank my colleague, the chairman of the Finance Committee. I appreciate his comments about the need for this body to enter into a discussion about fiscal discipline. I offered legislation today to have a requirement that we would have a debate every year to talk about bringing spending back to 2007 levels, prior to the stimulus, prior to the recession, certainly a time when this country had a much better economy than now. If I asked Floridians if they could live off of what they had in 2007, they would be happy to have that much money. Whatever the architecture is, we need to get into that. Our budget deficit and the debt are cascading out of control.

I disagree with my colleague that we can wait until the recession is over. While I am optimistic that we will soon be turning the corner, times are very tough in my State. I don't know if it is

going to be next year or the year after that we are out of this recession. We have the worst unemployment we have had since we have been keeping records in Florida, 12.2 percent. I don't know that we can wait, especially when we hear the Chairman of the Federal Reserve say we must act now.

Recently, we were in a situation where bonds went out to issue, and the Wall Street Journal reported that the yield rate the Federal Government had to offer on those bonds, the interest rate was more than Warren Buffett had to offer. Warren Buffett was a better investment than the United States. Why is that? It is because the world is beginning to believe the United States can't manage its debt. Places such as Brazil have had their stock market increase 100 percent in the last year because they are now seen as a better investment than this country.

We can't wait. We can't wait for 6 months or a year from now. Perhaps the time has already gone too far.

I raise a point of order pursuant to section 4(g) of the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010.

I raise a point of order against the emergency designation in the pending substitute amendment and note this is not a budget point of order. It doesn't kill this provision. It only requires that it be paid for by the end of the year. Everybody is for extending unemployment compensation. Everyone is for paying for COBRA. The point is, pay for it.

I have raised a point of order. I repeat, pursuant to section 4(g) of the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010, I raise a point of order against the emergency designation provision in the pending substitute amendment.

Mr. President, I thank my friend and colleague from Alabama. Senator Sessions has been an outstanding leader on many issues but specifically on this issue of fighting against this debt. He and I often talk about these concerns. He comes to the floor, and he articulates these concerns so the American people can understand how dangerous this situation is. But he does not just come and talk about the problem; he offers real solutions to cap our spending, to find mechanisms to get this Congress on the right course.

As my friend mentioned, I am new to the Senate. I was appointed and came here in September of last year. My experience is in business and my experience is in State government back home in Florida. The comparisons to how Congress manages its money--your money--versus how a family does or a business does or even a State government does, those comparisons are striking because this is the only institution I have ever been a part of where we do not have to make ends meet, where we just spend money we do not have, where we never have a discussion about, well, if we raise this budget for this particular part of the money we spend, how much are we going to have to lower this budget. That discussion does not happen in the U.S. Congress.

In 2011, we are going to take in an estimated $2.2 trillion in revenue from taxes--money that is coming from you, the American people--but we are going to spend $3.8 trillion. That is like a family in my home State, say, in Ocala, who makes $22,000 a year and they are going to spend $38,000. Oh, by the way, they have $1 million in debt. It is unsustainable.

The way the American people run their families, the way businesses have to run their budgets, the way State governments that are constitutionally required to balance their budgets have to cut spending in tough times--we do not have those mechanisms in this body, and we do not have enough people, such as Senator Sessions, Senator Chambliss, my friend from Georgia, and Senator Coburn from Oklahoma, who come to the floor and bring forth good ideas to talk about this spending problem.

This current bill to extend unemployment insurance and add money for doctors who give Medicare services--a lot of those folks in my State in Florida--and for money for COBRA, which is health care when you are unemployed, so government can put in that portion your employer would normally pay for--these are all good things. Every Member of this body, all 100 Senators, all 41 Members of the Republican side want to vote for this bill.

Last night, as my friend from Alabama said, we had a deal worked out with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to pay for this. What a novel idea: We are going to spend new money, and we are actually going to cut money from someplace else in the budget so we do not add to the deficit and the debt--shockingly good idea in Washington. But the deal fell apart because our friends in the House of Representatives, the Democratic leadership, would not agree to it.

Let me tell you, there is probably no State in the Union that needs this money more than Florida. I want to vote for it, but I cannot vote for it because it is not paid for.

My friend from Georgia just talked about the unemployment number that came out--more than 10 percent unemployment in Georgia. He has a new number coming out today. The number came out in Florida. We are at 12.2 percent unemployment announced today--12.2 percent, the worst unemployment in the history of keeping records in Florida. The second worst time was in 1973 to 1975, during that recession. There are 1,126,000 Floridians out of work. By the way, that is just the unemployed number. We know those who are underemployed--people who lost their jobs and now have to work part time and cannot get full-time employment--we know that number, if you add it with those who are unemployed, is probably 17, 18, 19 percent of the people.

When I go home to Florida and I am walking down the street, one out of every five people I see of working age and ability either does not have a job or does not have enough work. That is the issue on which we should be focused. But we cannot continue to pay for things here that we cannot afford. We cannot continue to burden our kids and the next generation with debt they will not be able to pay.

The hour of awakening and the hour we will be responsible and feel the impact for this spending is not just 5 or 10 years from now; it is now, it is today. Let me give an example.

Today in the Wall Street Journal, there is an article by Tom Lauricella. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record this article in the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. President, the article talks about the fact that when we are selling our debt, which is what the Federal Government does when we do not have enough money to pay for our expenditures, when we spend more than we have, we borrow and we issue debt instruments-- bonds, Treasury notes. Now we find out in today's Wall Street Journal that the demand for our debt is falling. As my friend, Senator Sessions from Alabama, said, Warren Buffett now is a better investment than the U.S. Treasury. What an important statement that is for us to think about, that we no longer are the best investment, that an individual in this country is a more worthy investment.

Now Treasury note demand is down. What happens when less people want to buy our debt? When they turn their nose up at our Treasury offerings, the bond prices go down and the yield goes higher. The interest rate goes up. That does a couple things. One is that we have to spend more money on interest payments. That means more of our spending in the year will go to pay for our debt. The third or fourth-- depending on how you count it--biggest expenditure every year in our budget is our interest payments. There is more than $200 billion a year in interest payments alone. That is money that could be sent back to you, the taxpayer, or could be used to pave roads or hire teachers or send kids to college, and we are sending it to finance bad decisions we have already made. But now, with the interest rates, the yield rates going higher on the debt we are offering, guess what it is going to do. It is going to increase the cost of borrowing money, which is going to increase the cost of mortgages.

So here I am from Florida, and I sure want to extend unemployment insurance to folks who are suffering, but I also don't want to do any more damage to our real estate market. We have some of the worst foreclosure rates in the country. So what is going to happen when that family of four in Naples, FL, who has been struggling through this economy, has a problem keeping a job? Maybe mom lost a job and now she is underemployed and dad is unemployed, and they are trying to make their mortgage payments. They have an adjustable rate mortgage and their interest rates are going to go up. What happens if someone wants to buy a new house in our struggling real estate economy? They can't go buy that house because that house is now more expensive because the interest rates have gone up.

So the problems of our debt and our deficit are not just going to be visited on our kids, they are being visited now. Other countries around the world, their economies are booming. Their growth is coming back-- places such as Brazil are on fire. Their stock market is up incredibly because the world is finding it a better place to invest than the United States. Our debt is making us a bad investment. So not just for our kids or our grandkids, right now this economy is going to have problems recovering because of the debt we have now.

But let's talk a second about the future. Sometime between now and Monday my wife and I are going to have our fourth child. I have the cell phone in my pocket. If it rings, I have to go. That baby is going to be born in a country where he or she will be responsible for about $40,000 in debt. What is the future of our baby, along with our other three sons who are 6, 4 and 2, going to be like in this country with all of this crushing debt, with $10 trillion more in debt expected by the end of this decade?

We are going to pay $800 billion in interest payments by the end of this decade if this spending continues. That is more than we spend on the defense of the United States, more than our Defense Department budget. More and more will go to interest; less and less will go to spending. Then what will happen? Taxes are going to have to go up, and by the way, 70 million people are going to retire and they are going to go into Medicare. Those two programs right now don't have enough money in them.

So while I am high on the American people, and I am optimistic this country can do anything, I am seriously worried about this government. I am seriously worried about the fact that we spend money we don't have, and I am seriously worried about the fact that there are too few Members of this body and the body down the hall who want to make the tough decisions to start cutting our spending now to save our future.

By the way, it wouldn't be that hard to do. It wouldn't be that hard to do for us to come together, Democrats and Republicans alike. The American people should know we have colleagues on the other side of the aisle who want to do this. We talk to them. They are concerned too. But we have to come together and address this, and we are going to have to make, as the President would say, grownup decisions about the future of this country. Some things are going to have to get cut, and we are going to have to spend less.

Let me give an example of the framework--for when we come back from the break--of a piece of legislation I will introduce to give us the mechanism for doing this. If we went back to the spending that we had in 2007, which is just 3 years ago, and we froze spending at that level for the next 10 years--until 2020--we would balance the budget in 2013, and we would cut the deficit of $12 trillion in half by 2020.

Now, the question I ask when I am back in Florida talking to constituents is--as my friend from Georgia said--whether at a supermarket, at a townhall meeting, or at a church--would you be able to live off the money you made in 2007? Well, the answer unanimously is, yes; it is more than I am making now. The economy didn't go into recession until December of 2007. So why can't government go back to what we spent in 2007 and cap it? Then we could do something we don't do in this Congress: We could look at the money we are spending now as opposed to trying to spend new money and find out whether we are doing it efficiently.

We could cut the wasteful programs. My colleague from Oklahoma has already been identifying hundreds of duplicative programs in government. We could go and find ways to combat waste, fraud, and abuse. For example, we know there is $60 billion to $100 billion a year in Medicare fraud--health care for seniors. My State, unfortunately, is the leading place for health care fraud in the country.

I have a proposal I have talked to my friend, the chairman of the Finance Committee, about--Chairman Baucus--and other Democrats, and I think we are going to get some bipartisan support to pass that this year, and that may save us $20 billion by stopping waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare. Does anyone think there is not waste and fraud and abuse throughout the spending of government? When is the last time someone went and looked under the hood of one of these agencies and said: Could we do the same work with less? Do we need to spend as much money as we spent last year?

Businesses do this every year. They are doing it right now, just as families are doing it. They are saying: Do we really need to do what we did last year? We have less money; what do we cut? Government doesn't do that.

Our friends on the other side are more interested in new programs. We should all spend a year or two focusing on the programs we have. My friend from Oklahoma, Senator Coburn, is a champion at oversight and gets under the hood of these agencies and looks at the spending. It is not just in the social services agencies, it is in all the agencies--in the Defense Department and everywhere.

We have a duty to the American people to make sure that every dollar we spend, we spend wisely. Let's spend a couple of years questioning the money we are spending now. Let's have our agency heads, our Secretaries, our Cabinet members, instead of devising new programs, go into the programs they have and see whether they are helping the American people. If they are not, let's cut them. Let's freeze hiring across the Federal Government. A lot of folks are going to retire out of the Federal Government when the baby boomers retire. It is an easy way to shrink the size of government, to let those folks retire and not replace them. Technology in the private sector gives us great opportunities to do more with less. In government, we do less with more.

So I am appreciative of my friend from Oklahoma for bringing up this point and objecting. It is not politically popular to do. None of us wants to stand in the way of unemployment compensation. I need it in Florida for my folks who are out of work. But we are impacting our way of life now, and we are going to impact our children's lives. When my baby is born this weekend, or on Monday, I am going to be extremely happy--and I know my wife is--about bringing a fourth child into the world, but it will still be in the back of my mind: Is he or she going to inherit the same America I have, with all the same opportunities I was able to enjoy? I hope so.

With that, I yield the floor to my friend from Oklahoma.

Madam President, I rise to commemorate Red Cross Month. The American Red Cross is an exceptional organization, dedicated to helping people in time of need and providing a level of services that no other agencies provide. Led by volunteers and guided by its Congressional Charter and the Fundamental Principles of the International Red Cross Movement, this group provides relief to victims of disaster and helps people prevent, prepare for and respond to emergencies.

The American Red Cross has an expansive and influential reach around the globe and in our neighborhoods at home. From assisting victims of house fires or catastrophic storms here in my home State of Florida to helping those affected by the devastating earthquake that took place in Haiti a couple of months ago, the American Red Cross is there, mobilizing our fellow Floridians in its mission to alleviate human suffering and to assist us in disaster preparedness, lifesaving training and addressing an array of emergencies. Locally, the American Red Cross is also a leader in providing aquatic safety programs-- something of great importance to the State of Florida. Every day the Red Cross trains our friends and neighbors in lifesaving CPR, first aid, swimming lessons, drowning prevention and water safety instruction.

Globally, the American Red Cross International Services Program reestablishes communication with loved ones separated by armed conflicts or natural disaster. Recently, the Red Cross provided family linkages from Haiti earthquake survivors to family members living abroad. In addition, our American Red Cross is unique in its mission to use archives located around the world to trace missing Holocaust family members.

A community-funded and supported organization, the American Red Cross provides around-the-clock emergency services, every day, 24/7. When the American Red Cross arrives on the scene, its staff and volunteers are armed with compassion and support. As we saw during the response to the earthquake in Haiti, you can always count on our Florida chapters of the American Red Cross to be in the forefront when our community needs them, time and time again.

I am proud to join with my colleagues in recognizing the Red Cross and thanking the staff and volunteers for their many contributions to our neighborhoods, communities and State.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to temporarily set aside the pending motions and amendments so that I may offer an amendment which is at the desk.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, I rise in support of the amendment I am offering today.

I wish to thank my colleague from Virginia who asked us to think about the practical aspects of this health care reform. I just listened to my freshman colleagues on the Democratic side talk about all of the good things, in their opinion, this bill is going to do. There is one thing I didn't hear them speak about. I didn't hear them speak about the fact that half of the new people who are going to be covered by health care in this country--some 16 million of the 30-some million who

have the opportunity for health care under this law--are going into Medicaid.

The practical impact my friend from Virginia asked us to think about is that our States right now are finding themselves in bankruptcy, realistically, because of the obligations of Medicaid. Our States, unlike the Federal Government, have to balance their budgets. Medicaid is a program that the States pay some 50 percent of, and they can't make it work. We are finding out in Florida right now that this program--this new law--will cost Florida $1 billion in the next 10 years. Because they balance their budget and because they can't print money, that means the dollars will go away from teachers, away from students, and away from police.

The point I wish to make today and the amendment I am offering is this: Several times, as I have been on the floor and heard from my Democratic colleagues, they have made this point: Why shouldn't the American people have the same health care that we in the Congress enjoy? Why shouldn't they, as do all Federal employees, be able to pick from a comprehensive and rich plan of benefits in order to take care of their health and the health of their families?

That is a good point, but what is going to happen to these 16 million new Americans? They are going to go on Medicaid. That is not the plan we have. That is not the rich benefits the Members of Congress enjoy. Medicaid--health care for the poor, which will now have some 50 million Americans in it after these 16 million join it--is a program in crisis. It is a program that is failing.

Let me give my colleagues some real examples. Right now we know patients on Medicaid can't find doctors who will treat them. We know in California, for example, 49 percent of family physicians do not participate in Medicaid.

I entered this document into the Record last week. On March 17 the Seattle Times reported that Walgreens will no longer take new Medicaid patients in the city of Seattle. On March 15, the New York Times reported about Mrs. Vliet. She is in Flint, MI. She has cancer. For 2 years she has been receiving treatment, but now her doctor is dropping her from Medicaid. He says:

But after a while you realize that we're really losing

money on seeing those patients, not even breaking even. We

are starting to lose more and more money, month after month.

All across America, health care providers are dumping Medicaid, and we are about to add 16 million new people. So I wish to take a page from my friends on the other side because they say the American people should have the same rich benefits we have.

What I am proposing today with this amendment is that 535 Members of Congress should have the same benefits as these 16 million new people and these 50 million Americans. Under this amendment, the Members of Congress will go into Medicaid. If it is good enough for 50 million Americans, it should be good enough for us.

So I have offered amendment No. 3586. It will require that the benefits that are paid for health care by the Federal Government for the 535 Members of Congress go to the State Medicaid agencies, and then we can all enjoy this program that 50 million people in America are struggling with. If it is good enough for 50 million Americans, it is good enough for Members of Congress.

I wish to call upon my distinguished colleague from Arizona whom I know wishes to speak on this issue as well.

I thank my friend and colleague from Oklahoma.

How could anyone in this body not vote for this amendment? Why should we have better health care than the 16 million people whom we are going to put into Medicaid, and now will be 50 million Americans? Why should we have it better? Why should we have a gold-plated premium health care plan?

Look, I have a family of five. We are going to have a baby any day-- could be today--so it will be a family of six. I pay $400 a month on the government program--$5,000 a year. Could I get that in the marketplace? Of course I couldn't. There is a doctor here in the Capitol, a whole staff of them, anytime I want to see a doctor. I get fantastic health care as a Member of Congress.

Why shouldn't we have the same health care we are subjecting 15 million new Americans to and 50 million Americans in total? As my friend from Oklahoma says, certainly won't that make the point to us that this health care system is failing? What will happen when a Member of Congress tries to find a doctor and can't find a doctor who will take him? What is going to happen when he tries to find a specialist and no specialist will take him? You don't hear our friends on the other side talking about the fact that half of the people getting coverage under this legislation are going into a failing system. That is not one of their talking points, but it is the truth. So I challenge my friends who say that they should walk among the least of us to vote for this amendment.

I want to turn again to my colleague from Arizona. He and I have expressed our distress about this bill for lots of reasons, but a specific reason is that we both represent States with lots of seniors.

We have this Medicare Advantage Program that is going to get $200 billion cut out of it. That will really affect our two States. So I wonder--and I would ask my colleague, the distinguished Senator from Arizona, to speak on this issue--how is this going to affect seniors in Arizona when we are raiding Medicare to start this new program?

Mr. President, I have heard my friends on the other side of the aisle talk about 30 million new people in America having health care. What they are not talking about is 16 million of those folks are going into Medicaid. Medicaid is a program that doesn't work. Forty percent of physicians according to MedPac no longer will see Medicaid patients. Pharmacies will not fill prescriptions. You cannot find a specialist.

I have also heard our friends on the other side of the aisle come to the Senate floor and say the people of America should have the same great health care that we have in this body. The corollary should be true as well. We should have the same health care that we are willing to put 16 million new Americans in and 50 million Americans in total. We should all be on Medicaid.

My amendment says 535 Members of Congress, as well as the Vice President of the United States, will go into Medicaid. If it is good enough for them, it should be good enough for us. We talk the talk around here a lot, now let's see if we will walk the walk.

Pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and section 4(G)(3) of the statutory pay-as-you-go act of 2010, I move to waive all applicable sections of those acts for purposes of my amendment, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I am here to speak on this FAA bill and on an amendment that I filed on this bill concerning the space program.

For decades, the space shuttle has been a symbol for American innovation and ingenuity and the pioneering spirit that has made our Nation the most technologically advanced country in the world.

Today, our space program, however, stands at a crossroads, between one project and the next. For years, we have had soaring aspirations about space without funding. Now we have a plan that includes the money but lacks the vision.

In our Nation's space program, we cannot have money without ambition. The result will be directionless spending. As sure as winter follows fall, that directionless spending will lead to cuts in spending and eventually, I believe, the demise of our space program.

In 2004, the Constellation Program was announced as a followup to the space shuttle program. That vision was endorsed by Congress in 2005 and in 2008. In both years, we directed NASA to focus its efforts on returning to the Moon by 2020 and someday sending Americans to Mars and worlds beyond.

In fact, I have here the public law that was passed just about a year and a half ago, October 15 of 2008. It is Public Law 110-422. If I may read from it, it says:

The Congress finds, on this, the 50th anniversary of the

establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space

Administration, the following:

It goes on to say that one of the points they find is:

Developing United States human space flight capabilities to

allow independent American access to the International Space

Station, and to explore beyond low Earth orbit, is a

strategically important national imperative, and all prudent

steps should thus be taken to bring the Orion Crew

Exploration Vehicle and Aries I Crew Launch Vehicle to full

operational capability as soon as possible and to ensure the

effective development of a United States heavy lift launch

capability as soon as possible and to ensure the effective

development of a United States heavy lift launch

capability for missions beyond low Earth orbit.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have that portion of the public law printed in the Record.

That was a year and a half ago. This is now. The President's 2011 budget cancels this program, the Constellation Program, and what it does, in effect, is put our efforts for space exploration in severe jeopardy, potentially risking the jobs of more than 7,000 rocket scientists in Florida as well as jobs throughout this country in more than 20 States.

I understand there are many private conversations going on between Members of this body and the administration concerning this topic. But I think it is important to reflect back upon what then-Senator Obama, then-candidate Obama said about space exploration and compare it to what his administration has proposed in his budget.

In August of 2008, Senator Obama was campaigning in Florida, in Titusville, FL, on our space coast. He said this:

One of the areas where we are in danger of losing our

competitive edge is our space program. When I was growing up,

NASA inspired the world with achievements we are still proud

of. Today, we have an administration--

He is referring to the Bush administration--

that has set ambitious goals for NASA without giving NASA the

support it needs to reach them. As a result, they've had to

cut back on research, and trim their programs, which means

that after the Space Shuttle shuts down in 2010, we're going

to have to rely on Russian spacecraft to keep us in orbit.

He goes on to say:

More broadly, we need a real vision for space exploration.

To help formulate this vision, I'll reestablish the National

Aeronautics and Space Council so that we can develop a plan

to explore the solar system--a plan that involves both human

and robotic missions, and enlists both international partners

and the private sector. And as America leads the world to

long-term exploration of the moon, Mars, and beyond . . . .

And he goes on to say a few more things.

So we know the Congress passed a law that was reaffirmed in 2008, on October 15, that said we were going to go into low-Earth orbit with the Constellation Program. We know the President of the United States, when

campaigning for this office, said we must be exceptional in the space program, continue with our vision, properly funded, go to the Moon and Mars and planets beyond.

But today the President's budget scraps that plan. We have no plan to get into low-Earth orbit after the Space Shuttle is retired. We are going to rely upon the Russians to take us to the International Space Station--exactly what candidate-Obama said we should be worried about.

So to this end, I have filed an amendment, an amendment to the FAA Reauthorization Act, to prohibit NASA from terminating the Constellation Program. It is the prerogative of this institution, the Congress--that our Founders put forth--it is our prerogative to deem how money is spent, how programs are funded. This Congress twice has said we will fund the Constellation Program, that we will fund these programs for the next generation of spacecraft to take us into low- Earth orbit.

This amendment reiterates the Federal law prohibiting NASA from using funds in fiscal year 2010 to cancel Constellation contracts. Several of my colleagues have joined me in this amendment: Senator Wicker from Mississippi, Senator Shelby from Alabama, Senator Sessions from Alabama, Senator Hatch from Utah, and Senator Bennett from Utah.

The problem is, NASA is ignoring the will of Congress in already beginning to cancel the Constellation Program. That is not their right. They must follow the law, and this amendment intends to hold them to that. The amendment sends a clear message that there are no loopholes, exclusions, or other routes the agency can use to kill the program.

I say publicly here on the floor of the Senate, whether this amendment passes on this bill, whether this amendment passes in the coming weeks, the law of the land is this: fund the Constellation Program. NASA is on notice that it is their legal requirement to do so, that they should not cancel contracts, they should not tell contractors to stop working. They cannot do that until the Congress makes a change in the law, and to do so would be unlawful.

The ultimate determination on the future of the space program rests with Congress, not a budget proposal submitted by this administration or, in fact, any administration.

As candidate-Obama agreed, without Constellation, the United States will be relying on Russia for any manned space missions. The United States has led the world in space exploration since the early 1960s. We cannot, and we should not, cede this leadership to any other country. We must summon the same vision that guided President Kennedy whose vision put a man on the Moon at the end of the 1960s. He said: Why should we settle for anything less? To quote him:

We choose to go to the moon . . . because that challenge is

one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to

postpone, and one which we intend to win. . . .

It is my sincere hope we will adopt this amendment, if not on this bill, on another bill soon. I hope my colleagues and our President will also come to say we choose to continue to be the leader in space exploration to the Moon, to Mars, and planets beyond because the challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Madam President, I have come to the floor to again talk about the health care bill that is being worked on over in the House that will potentially be voted on--we are hearing this weekend--and to talk about the myths around this bill, what is being told to the American people and what the facts are, so the American people can know what this Congress is trying to get them into. In this past week, I came to the floor and spoke about 10 myths about this health care bill. I do not wish to go through in detail all those myths today, but we have some new information about a couple of them that I wished to focus on and go over the list of those myths.

Myth 1 was: You get to keep your health insurance if you like what you have. The President has been saying this all around the country. We know that is not true because, according to the Congressional Budget Office, between 9 and 17 million people are going to lose their health insurance from their employer when their employer is going to drop that insurance and make their employees go into the new public system. So you are not going to get to keep it.

We know folks on Medicare Advantage are not necessarily going to get to keep their Medicare Advantage because we are going to cut Medicare Advantage by $120 billion. To the more than 1 million people in Florida who have Medicare Advantage, Medicare Part C, which offers them wellness benefits, hearing benefits, eyesight benefits, programs they like, we know over time they are not going to get to keep that in the way they have it now.

We also know health insurance premiums are not going to go down. That is myth No. 2. The very reason why this country wanted health care reform, the No.1 reason: to lower the cost of health insurance. We know health insurance has gone up more than 130 percent in the last 10 years. Yet this bill does little or nothing to lower the cost of health insurance for the 159 million Americans who have health insurance.

Some may see their rates go down 3 percent--that is the best it gets--while those in the individual market may see their rates go up 10 to 12 percent in the next 10 years. We are supposed to be about the business of health care reform, and we are not going to lower the cost of health insurance.

We talked about whether this would just lower the overall cost of health care itself. That was the third myth we discussed. But we know that Federal outlays for health care are going to increase by more than $200 billion in the next 10 years.

This idea that this health care plan is going to reduce the deficit, that is just funny math. We know this bill has 6 years of spending, 6 years of benefits, if you will, and 10 years of taxes. Only in Washington could someone try to say you were going to spend $1 trillion and save $100 billion.

We know it does not even take into account the fact that we have to give doctors more money in the Medicare system. The Democrats put that in a separate bill, so we do not score that $300 billion cost because, if you did, there would be no deficit reduction. We also know emergency rooms are not going to be less burdened. If we look at the example of Massachusetts that instituted health care reform, they are seeing just as many people crowd their emergency rooms because the folks there tell them it is more convenient than to wait in line to see their doctor.

See, when you push more people into the system and do not provide adequate funding for more health care providers, you do not change and make the system more user friendly, so the folks still show up at the emergency room.

Another myth we busted is that this plan takes on the insurance companies, when, in fact, it is going to put millions of more people into an insurance program. That is why the insurance companies like it.

We also busted the myth that this health care reform is going to improve the doctor-patient relationship. It is not. There is still going to be a third-party payer. We still fundamentally miss the opportunity of getting you, the patient, back involved in the consumer decision.

If we would have taken a page from what we proposed on our side of the aisle and given you a tax credit to let you go in the market and buy insurance yourself, we know that would have driven costs down because you would have been a consumer.

Right now, my wife and I are about to have our fourth child any day now. I remember getting those bills from the hospital on our previous boys when they were born. Similar to most folks, you do not read it, you just look at the bottom and see what you owe. You do not look at all the line-by-line items. You would have to hire someone to help make sense of all that. We have to put consumers back in the health care game. We have to know what we are buying and what we are paying for because we know as consumers we will make a good decision.

We do it in the car insurance market and guess what. The companies that

compete nationally, unlike health care companies that compete only within certain States, they are advertising to us on TV: ``So easy a caveman can do it.'' ``Do you have 15 minutes? You can save 15 percent on your car insurance.''

We know all these slogans because the market is working. The market does not work in health care, and this legislation does nothing to fix it.

We know that eventually under this program, the taxes will go up not down because every government program we put together, certainly entitlement programs, always cost more than we think. They always cost our children and our grandchildren more as we have this ever-increasing national debt, now $12 trillion, a debt our kids are going to have to pay and our grandchildren, a debt that could make this country not the same place of opportunity that we all have experienced and we all enjoy.

But I wished to specifically talk about a couple of the myths that there has been some recent information about. One thing I talked about earlier this week is this idea about premiums. The President of the United States, this week when he was campaigning, said that health care overall, lower premiums will be achieved by this legislation and that those premiums will go down double digits.

The fact is, that is not true. As we talked about before, the fact is, the best it is--and I put this chart from the Congressional Budget Office into the Congressional Record earlier this week--the best it is, is 3 percent down.

I ask unanimous consent that this article from the Associated Press called: ``Fact Check: Premiums would rise under Obama plan,'' by Mr. Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, be printed in the Record.

This article goes through specifically these points. The President of the United States campaigned this week saying that:

You'll be able to buy in, or a small business will be able

to buy into this pool. And that will lower rates, it's

estimated by up to 14 to 20 percent over what you're

currently getting. That's money out of pocket.

Then he says:

Your employer, it's estimated, would see premiums fall by

as much as 3,000 percent, which means they could give you a

raise.

They later corrected the record to mean $3,000, your premiums could fall $3,000. Well, with all due respect, there is no evidence of this in an analysis of this bill. That is what the Associated Press says in their fact check.

In fact, for those in the individual marketplace--and this is not the Senator from Florida speaking, this is the Congressional Budget Office--increases of up to 10 to 13 percent; for everybody else, either stays the same, goes up a little or maybe goes down 3 percent, and that is if they got it right.

So it is important to bust this myth. Your insurance is not going down under this plan. If you thought we were going to enact health care reform and you were going to have a lower cost of health insurance, you, unfortunately, similar to many millions of Americans, were given the wrong impression because this bill does nothing of the sort.

Let me talk a minute also, if I may, about what this is going to mean and what sort of the future of health care is. The system does not work now for the point I made a moment ago, which is that we as consumers are not involved in the equation. I can't think of anything else in our life where we have so little knowledge of what we are buying, and we have so little knowledge of what the cost is.

Do we know what the cost of these procedures are that we undertake? If we have to get an MRI or a CAT scan or a stent put in our heart, do we know what the market price for that is? We do not. The reason why is because the system has become so complex with a third-party payer. What that means is either your insurance company pays or your government pays through Medicare, Medicaid or the VA, and we as consumers do not pay.

Because of that, we have broken what we know works in the marketplace. You want to control costs, you have to put the consumer back in the driver's seat. That is why our proposal on this side of the aisle to give consumers who cannot afford health insurance now a tax credit to let them go in the marketplace and to shop around and get involved in their health care decisions, we know that would lower costs. This plan is not going to lower costs. In fact, it is going to raise costs.

But let me tell you where we are going with this new government plan. I am an optimist about this country, so I hate to talk about something that is pessimistic. But it is my responsibility to tell you facts. We have three major

health care programs in this country: Veterans, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Medicare is health care for seniors. Medicaid is health care for the poor. I wish to talk about the latter two. Those systems are not working, and they are increasingly not working for more and more Americans. The reason why is, they are not properly funded. There is no way to control costs. So what are we finding? We are finding that doctors are not taking Medicare and Medicaid anymore. If you want to know what the future of Medicare is, which is health care for seniors, take a look at Medicaid, which is in worse shape than Medicare.

We know both these programs are huge entitlement programs that, under their current form, we cannot afford. We know there is going to be this huge debt that our children are going to have to pay. It may not be our children, it may be here in the next few years because we have not properly funded these programs and we have not controlled costs.

I ask unanimous consent that this article be printed in the Record. It is from the March 17, 2010, Seattle Times, an article by Janet Tu, which is entitled: ``Walgreens: no new Medicaid patients as of April 16.''

So here we are. Walgreens, a major pharmacy in Seattle, is not going to take Medicaid anymore. Why are they not going to take Medicaid? They are not going to take Medicaid because the Federal Government is not reimbursing enough for them to make any money.

Medicaid is a Federal-State match. But more and more we are seeing the health care providers will not take Medicaid. We know that in major metropolitan areas, if you are a new Medicaid patient and you are looking for a specialist, that 50 percent of the doctors will not see you.

There is another article here that came out this week in the New York Times, March 15, 2010. It is an article by Kevin Sack: ``With Medicaid Cuts, Doctors and Patients Drop Out.''

It is a story from Flint, MI. It talks about a lady by the name of Carol Vliet, about her cancer. She has tumors metastasizing to her brain, her liver, her kidneys, and her heart.

The President of the United States and my colleague on the other side of the aisle like to give individual examples about people who are suffering without health insurance. Here is a lady who has Medicaid, a government-run program. The only solace she has is she has found a doctor she likes, Dr. Sahouri.

He has given her a regimen of chemotherapy and radiation for the past 2 years that is giving her some relief, but she was devastated when she found out from Dr. Sahouri a couple months ago that he could no longer see her because, like a growing number of doctors, he had stopped taking patients with Medicaid.

It is not just Medicaid; it is also now Medicare. We know that if you are trying to get into Medicare, only about 78 percent of providers are taking Medicare. Here we are, we are about to create a huge new government entitlement program to put 31 million more Americans into a health care system funded by the government. In the programs we have now, doctors and health care providers are dropping the patients. These programs are broken. Yet we are going to create a new one. We are going to create a new one by taking money out of Medicare, a program where the health care providers are increasingly more and more not seeing patients. We are going to take more than $500 billion out of Medicare. In fact, we have found out, from this new bill that came from the House today, that the number has gone up, that it is now more than $500 billion that is going to be taken out of Medicare. We are going to take money out of a program already having problems to start a new one. It makes no sense.

This is why the American people are extremely upset with this health care proposal. There isn't a Senator who doesn't want health care reform. There isn't a Member of Congress today who doesn't want to provide more access and lower the cost of health care insurance for those who have it. But this plan does not do that, and it creates a huge new entitlement program by robbing Peter to pay Paul. We are going to jeopardize health care for seniors and turn Medicare into Medicaid, a program where pharmacies and doctors are dropping patients.

I am new to the Senate. My experience is in State government and business. There are men and women of good will in this body. I believe if we could get together and work in a good faith fashion, we could figure out how to do this in a step-by-step approach, to lower cost and increase access without breaking the bank and putting a huge burden on the children in a world where we already have a $12 trillion debt. But the people of this Chamber and the one down the hall have to get about the business of doing the people's work and remember they are the boss and that we work for them. The time for partisanship is over. The time for getting things done and being problem solvers is here. I am one Senator--and I know there are many--who is willing to work with anyone on the other side on any important issues facing the country who is willing to work with me.

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

Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Oregon for his good words tonight and for his approach in trying to do things in a bipartisan way.

There are some good things in this jobs bill. I think the issue we on this side of the Chamber have had is we would have liked to have offered some amendments. The 18 million people I represent in Florida expect that we have the opportunity to offer amendments, to bring up ideas, good ideas, and let those ideas rise and fall depending upon their merit. Unfortunately, we did not have the opportunity to have amendments. My colleague, the Republican leader, said earlier what was done on the majority side was something called filling the tree. What does that mean? It means we do not have the opportunity to bring forward our good ideas. The people of Florida, the people of all of our States, expect that we get to do that. So while there are some good things in here, it is a shame that we could not have made this bill better.

What I really want to speak about tonight is the debate Americans are having around their living room tables and around their kitchen tables about this health care bill. This is a trillion-dollar bill that is being discussed in this country and that we now hear is going to go through the House of Representatives and possibly come back to this Chamber through a procedure called reconciliation.

It occurs to me that what we are dealing with here is a little bit of fantasy land. Why do I say that? This weekend, I took my kids to see ``Alice in Wonderland.'' That is a famous story. It occurred to me that we are creating our own sort of wonderland here in the Senate.

A lot of things have been said about this health care bill, what it does and what it does not do. I thought tonight it would be important to go through the representations that are being made to the American people as to whether we should pass this health care bill. Let's go through all the things we have heard, things that President Obama has said, things that Members of the majority have said in this Chamber as to why we should pass this health care bill.

Let me first say that everybody believes we need health care reform in this country. We have 4 million-plus Americans who do not have health insurance. Nearly 4 million Floridians do not have health insurance.

We know the cost of health insurance is too high for those Americans who have health insurance. In the last 10 years, health insurance costs have risen by 130 percent. That is unsustainable. It is something that is afflicting the people of Florida and all across this country.

It is hard to make ends meet when your salary may be going down or you may have lost your job but your health care costs continue to go up. So there is no debate within this Chamber that we should do something. Of course, we should do something. The debate is about what we should do.

On this side of the aisle, we would like to take a step-by-step approach. We would like to go after the cost of health care. We would like to increase competition in health care so that costs could actually go down. We would like to put patients back in charge of their health care purchasing decisions.

We know if the consumer is back involved the price of health care will go down. But we find ourselves having to vote on this massive new government entitlement program, a program that I cannot support because I do not believe it will be in the best interests of Floridians.

Last Monday I was down in South Florida, down in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. In Fort Lauderdale I had the opportunity to have a townhall meeting where we specifically talked about health care. In that meeting I had many Floridians come up to the microphone and ask questions. Most of them were bewildered about this plan. They wanted to know why we cut a $\1/2\ trillion out of Medicare. Medicare is health care for seniors. Why would we create a new program by cutting a program we have now that is already in financial trouble?

We know in the next 7 years Medicare is going to have its own solvency problems. Why would we take money out of health care for seniors--more than 3 million Floridians in that program--to start a new program?

They want to know why we are going to raise taxes on medicine and health care devices which we know will increase the cost of health care. They want to know why we are creating a $1 trillion new entitlement program when we cannot afford the entitlement programs we have, when we cannot afford the $12 trillion debt we are saddling upon our children and our grandchildren.

So with that, I would like to go through some of the myths, some of the myths that have been created in this wonderland I spoke about before, and try to debunk those myths and say what is in this bill and let the facts speak for themselves.

The first myth--and the President likes to say this; he said it again today in a rally--if you like your health insurance, you can keep it under his proposal. Well, it is simply not true. The Congressional Budget Office has said between 8 and 9 million people who would be covered by employment-based plans under current law would not have the offer of such a proposal. Why is this going to happen? Because under the incentives and penalties this bill creates, businesses are going to drop health insurance for their employees and put them into the government-subsidized system.

So for those 8 or 9 million Americans, they are not going to get to keep the health insurance they have now. They are not going to be able to keep the health care they want.

Rick Foster, the CMS Actuary--and those are the folks who administer Medicare and Medicaid--says the number could even be higher. He concluded that 17 million people will lose their employer-sponsored coverage. Seventeen million people will not be able to keep the health care they enjoy today. So what the President says is simply not the case.

Second, we know under this myth that you will be able to keep the health care if you like it, that people who have Medicare Advantage, Medicare Part C, a lot of them will not be able to keep their program either. Medicare Advantage is a promise that offers extra benefits for folks on Medicare.

If you sign up for it, you get wellness benefits, you get hearing benefits, you get dental benefits oftentimes. People like it. We have more than 1 million people in Florida on Medicare Advantage. This bill cuts $120 billion out of Medicare Advantage.

Now, I am not sure how it is going to impact Florida. There was this Florida fix that was going to be an off-ramp, not an exit. But over several years they would be in the same situation as the rest of the folks in America. I do not know whether that is going to make it into the final bill. But I do know we are going to cut $120 billion out of Medicare Advantage. When that happens, according to Rick Foster, the CMS Actuary, lower benchmarks will reduce Medicare Advantage rebates to plans and thereby result in less generous benefit packages.

He estimates in 2015, enrollment in Medicare Advantage plans would decrease by about 33 percent. So for many folks, they are going to get dropped by their employer and not be able to keep the health care plan they have now. For many folks on Medicare Advantage, they are going to get dropped as well, as much as 33 percent by 2015. You are not going to be able to keep the health insurance you have now.

We also know these mandates that exist in this bill are going to change your health insurance policy. If the government deems that your health insurance plan does not pass muster, they are going to mandate that your health insurance plan change.

Now, you may like your health insurance plan the way you have it. You may have a high deductible. You may have bought catastrophic insurance. You may not want to buy a comprehensive health insurance plan that is soup to nuts; you may only want certain things covered.

Well, under this plan, under this bill, there are going to be certain mandates put in place, and you may not be able to keep the type of insurance you have. So for those three instances alone--for people who are going to get dropped by their employer and get forced into the public plan, for people who are Medicare Advantage, and for people who have a certain type of insurance plan--they may not be able to keep it.

So we know, unfortunately, what the President is telling us about this bill is not true. Myth No. 1 is busted.

Myth No. 2: Your health insurance premiums will go down. Why did he get involved in this whole debate to start with? What was told to the American people during the Presidential campaign in 2008 and since the time that we have discussed this health care plan? That we were going to lower the cost of health insurance for most Americans.

That is not going to happen under this plan. We are not going to lower the cost of health insurance. In fact, for some Americans the price is going to go up. Table 1--I hate to get into the weeds, but let's look at the facts.

We have the CBO report I cited earlier. There is a Table 1 on page 5 of that Congressional Budget Office report that analyzes this plan. It goes through what people have in the current insurance market.

There are about 25 million people in the small group market. There are 134

million people in the large group market. That is 159 million Americans who have health insurance. So the small group market, it is estimated the cost increase or savings is between a 1-percent increase or down 2 percent.

For those in the large group, it is zero to potentially minus 3 percent. So this is not reducing the cost of health insurance in any meaningful way. For individuals who are out there who are not in a group, who are purchasing insurance individually, the Congressional Budget Office says their cost of health insurance will go up 10 to 13 percent.

So the whole very reason, the primary reason we are about the business allegedly of debating health care and passing this big bill was to lower the cost of health insurance for most Americans. Not only is it not going to lower the cost of health insurance for most Americans, it is going to increase it for those who are in the individual market.

I ask unanimous consent that Table 1 be printed in the Record.

So you are not going to be able to keep your health insurance, for a lot of Americans, if you like it, and the cost of health insurance is not going to go down. Those two myths have been busted.

Myth No. 3: This plan, the Democratic plan, will lower costs, lower the cost of health care overall. We have all heard about--and I said before the rising cost of health care, 130 percent in the past 10 years. There is an expression, ``bending the cost curve down,'' making sure that we can get control of costs. This plan is not going to do that. This plan does not have mechanisms, true mechanisms in it to really control costs.

In today's Washington Post, Robert Samuelson takes on the President's claim that his plan will control costs.

In this article, he talks about the fact that when people get insurance they use more health services; that spending rises and by the government's latest forecast health spending goes from 17 percent of the economy in 2009 to 19 percent in 2019.

According to the CMS Actuary, he estimates overall national health expenditures under this bill will increase by an estimated total of $222 billion during 2010 to 2019.

It is also going to increase the government's share of health care spending. According to the CBO, under the legislation, national outlays for health care would increase by $210 billion over the next 10 years. So we are just chasing our tails. We are going to put a lot more money into health care, but we are not going to reduce costs.

How could we reduce costs? How do we get at the problem of increased health care? Well, we could try to foster more competition among health insurance companies instead of creating these subsidies, which is going to plow more money into the insurance companies.

We could make the insurance companies compete across State lines. That is one of the ideas the Republicans have brought forward. We also could go after meaningful lawsuit reform. There is one estimate we would save more than $50 billion a year if we had meaningful lawsuit reform.

My colleague, Senator Coburn from Oklahoma, talks about the fact, being a practicing physician, that doctors are engaged in defensive medicine, and when thousands of kids across this country this year get hit in the nose with a baseball they are going to show up at the emergency room. Instead of just watching the patient and making sure the kid is going to be OK, they are going to order a CT scan even if one is not necessary because that has become the standard operating procedure in order to protect the doctor from lawsuits.

The CBO says if we had real medical malpractice reform, we could save as much as $54 billion over the next decade. We also do not have transparency. Here is the essential problem with health care costs. We do not know what anything costs.

In the next couple of days my wife and I are going to be fortunate enough to have our fourth child. She is due any day now. When we go to the hospital, we are going to get back--after that baby is born, just like we have done with the last three kids, we are going to get back a bill. It is going to be page after page after page of things that we cannot understand.

At the bottom of the bill, we will pay some small fraction because we have good health insurance in the Senate. We will pay some small fraction of the total bill, and we will never question the pages and pages and pages of line items of information we do not understand.

We will not because we do not have to pay for it, and we, as consumers, have been removed from the transaction in health insurance because of third-party payers, whether it be Medicare, Medicaid, or insurance companies. We are not involved in that transaction.

Now, let me give you a different example. If we had to look at that bill because we were responsible for a portion of it because we were given, say, a tax credit to go out and buy insurance, and we were trying to get the most bang for the buck, and they tried to add $75 for a bedpan or gauze or for Band-Aids, Mrs. LeMieux would not pay for that. Mrs. LeMieux would be in there saying: Wait a minute. I can go to Target and I can get Band-Aids for $1.50, not $75.

I guarantee you that the men and women of this country, if they really had to look at those bills because they really had to pay them, we would not have these exploding costs. We also would not have all of the cost shifting that is going around.

The dirty secret about health care is that if I have insurance, my full payment on insurance or close to the full payment is going to pay for the Medicare patient and the Medicaid patient because Medicare and Medicaid do not pay enough for the services they render.

The hospitals cost shift all the money around. At the end of the day, we don't have a transparent system or a market-driven system. What we should do is give every American who needs it a tax credit to buy health insurance on their own. If they were out in the marketplace, that would lower cost, because competition would reign and they would insist on bang for their buck. But that is not in this bill. We know now that, one, you will not be able to keep, in a lot of cases, your health insurance, if you like it. We know, two, it is not going to reduce your cost of health care. And we know, three, it will not lower the cost of health care in general. Those myths have been busted.

Let me go to the next one, myth No. 4: The Democrats' plan will reduce the deficit. We have heard this estimate that over $100 billion is going to be saved over the next 10 years. Not true. The way this is scored or evaluated by the CBO is that whatever you send them, they have to give you an answer back on the confines and the specifications of what you sent. So the Democrats' bill has 6 years of spending or benefits and 10 years of taxes. If they have 10 years of taxes and only 6 years of spending, then they can get to a situation where the CBO will come back and say: It is going to reduce the deficit. But if you compare apples to apples, spending to deficit, if you compare spending to taxes, we know it is going to run a deficit. You cannot create a new entitlement program and not run a deficit. It is going to cost us, by some estimates, more than $400 billion over a 10-year period, in the first 10 years, and $1.4 trillion in the next 10 years. We know that myth is busted. It is not going to reduce the deficit.

Let me also say this is going to be a budget buster for States. The States, unlike the Federal Government, have to make ends meet. The States have balanced budget requirements. As we increase the requirements of Medicaid, which this bill does, then we will be putting increased burdens upon our States. Our States are going to have to find more money to put into Medicaid. They can't print money like the Federal Government. They can't spend more than they take in. What is going to happen? They are going to have to cut other programs, or they will have to raise taxes. What is going to get hurt? I can cite the example of Florida where they are suffering under a huge and emerging Medicaid problem. Medicaid and Health and Human Services is the No. 1 portion of the budget of the State of Florida. It grows every year. So what loses out? Education, money for teachers and schools, law enforcement, protecting the environment, and economic stimulus. Florida has to live

within its means, unlike the Federal Government.

This is not a Republican or Democratic issue. Governors of both sides of the aisle are very concerned about the increased mandates placed upon States. Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee called this bill the mother of all unfunded mandates. The head of Washington State's Medicaid Program believes that States facing severe financial distress may say they have to get out of the Medicaid Program altogether.

CBO released its first estimate of expected discretionary spending under this bill, confirming that $10 to $20 billion in discretionary spending over the next decade will be used to implement this legislation. We are going to spend $10 to $20 billion to implement this bill; $5 to $10 billion to the IRS and to Health and Human Services. Also in terms of this topic, of looking at how the plan will reduce the deficit, which it will not, we know this is going to be a $1 trillion program over time. With rare exception, when this Congress creates a program, especially an entitlement program, it does not stay within its estimates. It grows and grows.

We have a debt. When I first came to the Senate and had the privilege to serve here back in September of last year, we were at something like $11.6 or $11.7 trillion. Now we are already at $12.4 trillion. It is unsustainable.

The fifth myth: Medicare cuts won't affect seniors. This bill cuts half of a trillion dollars out of Medicare. Some say this is savings. The money that is going to be saved is not going back into Medicare to prolong the life of Medicare. We had an amendment from my colleague Senator Gregg who said that any savings would have to go into Medicare. The majority party defeated that amendment.

It makes no sense to me that we would take half a trillion dollars out of Medicare to create a new entitlement program. I can't go back to my seniors in Florida, more than 3 million of them, and say: Your Medicare Program is already facing insolvency in about 7 years, but we are going to take a half a trillion dollars out of it now to create a new health care program.

This could not be good for seniors. On its effect on Medicare, there was a letter from the CBO Director to the majority leader, Senator Reid. He warned that while the effects of the cuts to Medicare remain unclear, they could reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care. Let's go through the cuts: $135 billion from hospitals; $120 billion from Medicare Advantage; nearly $15 billion from nursing homes; $40 billion from home health agencies, $7 billion from hospice. The CMS Actuary says that many of the Medicare cuts are unrelated to the providers' cost of furnishing services to beneficiaries. That means it is not about savings. That means the money is being taken from Medicare, robbing Peter to pay Paul. He concludes it is doubtful that providers could reduce cost to keep up with these cuts. The CMS Actuary also finds that because of the bill's severe cuts to Medicare, providers for whom Medicare constitutes a substantive portion of their business could find it difficult to remain profitable and might end their participation in the program.

What does this mean in plain language? We are not paying these health care providers enough under Medicare, but we are going to take out still more money, and they will not be Medicare providers anymore. They will not provide health care for seniors. If you want to see the future of this, look at Medicaid. Medicaid is even one step worse in trouble than Medicare is. We know now that folks who are entering into the Medicaid system who are trying to find a specialist in a metropolitan area, half of them can't find a specialist. We know in Medicare, according to a June 2008 Medicare Payment Advisory Commission Report, that 29 percent of the Medicare beneficiaries it surveyed had trouble finding a primary care doctor. That is up from 24 percent in 2007. If the doctor is not in, it is not health care reform.

How can I go back to my seniors in Florida and say: We are creating a new program by taking money out of your program, and you may not be able to find a doctor who is going to see you anymore? That is not conscionable.

Florida will be disproportionately affected by these cuts. It has the second highest population of seniors and highest concentration of seniors in the Nation at 19 percent. Let me tell you how it will specifically hurt one portion of health care for seniors, home health care. I talked to Ron Malone, vice president of Gentiva Health Services, one of the largest providers of home health services in Florida. He said: Look, it is not going to hurt us so much. We are a big company. We can spread costs. We will get more market share. But it is going to hurt the smaller companies, and a lot of the smaller companies are going to go out of business.

How is that health care reform? Who do we owe an obligation to provide health care more than to our seniors?

I recently visited with the president of the Florida Medical Association, which is the largest physician association in Florida, with 20,000 members. They say:

. . . this legislation does not adequately fix what's wrong

with our current system. It contains many provisions that

would allow government bureaucrats to interfere with patient

care decisions and actually raises the cost of health

insurance unnecessarily.

This is from the doctors association in Florida. They say it is going to interfere with the doctor-patient relationship and increase costs. Why are we doing this?

The sixth myth I want to tackle is this idea that emergency rooms are going to be less burdened. You hear this justification. People now are uninsured. They go to the emergency room to get health care. If we give folks insurance or they have the ability to purchase insurance at a subsidized rate, they will stop going to the emergency room, and that will lower the cost of health care because emergency room procedures are expensive. It will free up the emergency room for its intended purpose, for people who really have an emergency. But according to the Urban Institute, after Massachusetts adopted a somewhat similar plan, emergency use remained higher than the national average. More than two- fifths of the visits in these emergency rooms were nonemergencies and, of these, the majority of adult respondents said it was more convenient to check into the ER. More convenient?

We know we are going to be paying health care providers less. What does that mean? There is going to be less of them providing health care. That means your lines at the doctor's office, which are already too long, are going to get longer. So what are folks going to still do? They are going to still show up at the emergency room. If we look at the Massachusetts model, that has happened. We also know that ultimately we are going to have a severe doctor shortage. We have not prepared, nor does this bill prepare, to make sure we will have sufficient health care providers to meet new demands.

Seventh myth: The Democrats' plan takes on the insurance companies. You have heard the President say we are going to fight against the insurance companies; we are going to make sure that we are putting the patient first. Basically what we are going to do, in reality, is create a lot of new business for the insurance companies. This subsidy plan is going to force a lot of new people into health care with an insurance company. That is why the insurance companies are for it. What we need to do is empower individuals. What we need to do is give individuals money that is in their own pocket and let them go out and be consumers. If they were consumers, it would lower the cost of health care. What we need to do is let insurance companies compete across State lines so we as consumers have more choices. Look at auto insurance. It is so easy a caveman can do it. In 15 minutes, you can save 15 percent on your auto insurance. These folks are out there competing. We need that in health care. Why do I only get to pick from the insurance companies that are in Florida? If there is an enterprising insurance company from South Carolina that wants to come into my State and offer cheaper prices, why should I not have that opportunity as a consumer? There are commonsense things we can do, market-driven things we can do that will lower the cost of health insurance and, by doing so, when it is less expensive, more people can afford it and you have more access.

The eighth myth: It has been said that this bill takes an unprecedented step to fight health care fraud. It is

going to go after waste, fraud, and abuse, and we will save billions of dollars. In fact, the $500 billion being cut from Medicare is often described as an elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse. It is not. It is just taking money out of that program and putting it in this program. To be fair, there are some provisions of this bill that go after health care fraud. They are good, but they go around the margins. They are going to save a billion or two, which is a lot of money, I will grant you that, but it is not the kind of money we need to save. We believe there are $60 to $100 billion of fraud in Medicare every year alone, not talking about Medicaid, not talking about veterans health care, just Medicare, $60 to $100 billion, $1 out of every $7 spent. What we need to do is implement a plan that is going to stop the health care fraud before it starts.

I have a bill, S. 2128, that has bipartisan support, has more than a dozen Senators who sponsor it. It would do three things. One, it would create a person at HHS who would be the No. 2 person at the agency for Health and Human Services, appointed by the President to be the chief health care fraud prevention officer of this country. No other job, not focused on worrying about H1N1, not focused on anything else that should be done in health, focused on stopping health care fraud, someone we could measure against performance to make sure we are doing everything we can to stop wasting the people's money. The second thing it does is it takes a page from another business that exists in the marketplace that does an excellent job at stopping fraud. There is another business that is about the same size as health care, about $2 trillion a year. That business, instead of having a $1-in-$7 fraud ratio, has a ratio of 7 cents out of every $100. That is the credit card industry. We have all had this experience. You go somewhere to use your credit card and you get a phone call or an e-mail that says: Did you mean to make that purchase? If you do not say yes, they do not pay.

What we do in health care is we pay, and then if we think something is fraudulent, we chase. When we chase, the money is gone. The credit cards stop the fraud before it starts.

Now, why couldn't we implement that kind of computer technology? In health care, it is called predictive modeling. So when someone tries to sell a wheelchair 100 times in an hour, the bells go off, the phone call is made, and if it is not verified, we do not pay.

We have people--unfortunately, a lot of them in my home State of Florida--who are bilking the system for tens of millions of dollars a year because it is much easier to steal from Uncle Sam than it is to steal from anybody else because nobody is watching.

One group in town that has evaluated my bill with this predictive modeling system, where we would set up a computer program to stop the fraud before it starts and make people verify when there is a questionable transaction, has said it will save $20 billion a year.

During the health care debate we had last December, I asked to amend my bill on to the main health care bill, and my colleagues on the other side of the aisle objected. Why we wouldn't implement real waste, fraud, and abuse reform is beyond me. But this bill we are talking about does not have it. That myth I, too, believe is busted.

The third part of my bill is, it will require background checks for all health care providers. Can you believe we do not do background checks on people who bill Medicare and Medicaid in this country? We have folks who are convicted felons who are billing alleged ``health care'' providers. It is so bad that in reimbursements for AIDS treatment under Medicare, while south Florida only has 7 percent of the AIDS population, they bill 78 percent of the treatment--only 7 percent of the population and they bill 78 percent of the treatment. It is just fraud, and it should stop today.

The ninth myth I want to tackle is that this Democratic health care reform bill will not impact the doctor-patient relationship. In fact, it will. I agree with my colleague, Dr. Barrasso, who supports a patient-centered approach. Real health care reform should ensure a doctor and a patient can work together to the best efforts in the health of the patient. As I said before, we are still going to have third-party payers. We have to put the patient back in charge of their health care. That is the only way we are going to reduce costs.

There is a common thread throughout our governmental programs that has led entitlements to expand and expand and expand; that is, people do not have what is called skin in the game. If I am not paying, I do not care. But if I have to go out as a consumer, if the government would give me a tax credit to go buy health insurance, all of a sudden I am in the game. If I have a reasonable deductible where I have to pay a little when I go to the doctor, all of a sudden I am in the game and I am not going to ask for a procedure I do not need. I am going to sit there and talk with my health care provider about whether this is something I really need. Now, if you tell me it is free, I will take it. And if you advertise to me on television every drug in the world, I will go to my doctor and say: Sign me up for that because I get it for free. We have to change the whole structure of how we do health care because this will just continue to expand. Medicare will continue to expand. Medicaid will continue to expand. If this program passes, it will continue to expand.

While it might be great to throw all this money into these programs, we cannot afford it. We cannot afford the programs we have, let alone the programs the majority in this Chamber want.

The tenth and final myth I want to tackle tonight is that taxes will not go up. This is a jobs bill for the tax collector. We already said there is going to be $5 billion to $10 billion to the IRS and HHS to implement this bill. Remember, if you do not buy health insurance for yourself, you are going to have to pay a tax, a fine, a penalty to the IRS--$750 a person. Small businesses that do not provide certain levels of health insurance will be fined. And what do you think they are going to do? Pay that fine or drop to under 50 employees so they do not have to pay the fine anymore, which will cause more people to be out of work.

Can you believe that in the United States of America, we are going to tax you if you do not buy health insurance for yourself because the government cares more about you than you care about you? If the government can tax you for not buying health insurance, what else can they tax you for not doing? Not working out? Not eating your spinach? That cannot be what our Founders intended.

Remember, we give up our rights to the government. Our institution was created that it governs with the consent of the governed, that we have the inalienable rights. In our social contract, we give those rights up to the government. It is not the other way around. How is it the government can fine me for not doing something?

So at the end of the day, when this entitlement program increases beyond its means, when it is more than we can afford, and when the $500 billion we take out of Medicare starts to put Medicare in insolvency even quicker, what is going to happen? Is the majority in this Chamber really going to cut Medicare? Probably not. So what are they going to do to help pay for this new program without their cuts? They are going to raise your taxes--raise your taxes to levels that are going to be hard to imagine when you factor in what we are going to have to do for all the other entitlement programs we cannot afford, when you factor in what we are going to have to do with our $12 trillion debt that is estimated to be $10 trillion higher by 2020.

That is why the National Federation of Independent Businesses has said:

When evaluating health care reform options, small business

owners ask themselves two specific questions. First, will the

bill lower insurance costs?

We know the answer to that is no.

Second, will the bill increase the overall cost of doing

business?

The answer to that is yes.

They say:

In both cases, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care

Act fails the small business test and, therefore, fails small

business.

It has been my goal tonight to present facts. I know others have a differing view.

As a Senator from Florida with more than 3 million folks in Medicare, as a Senator who cares about health care reform and wants to create more access but also wants to lower the cost of health care, I cannot support this bill.

I hope my colleagues in the House who are being faced with this option of voting for this bill and then passing something on reconciliation will do the right thing. I hope they will not be pressured politically to change their votes from ``no'' votes to ``yes'' votes. I hope they will stand for the people of their State and for the American people.

We could get this right. We could work together on a bipartisan way, as all of the other big, important bills over time have been done, with 70 or 80 Senators working together to do the right thing for the American people. I sign up for that. I am standing ready to do that if that opportunity presents itself. But I cannot vote for this bill that will not lower the cost of health insurance for most Americans, nor will it put us in a situation financially that is tenable going forward.

With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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I yield the remainder of my post-cloture time to the Republican Leader, Senator McConnell.

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

I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Madam President, yesterday, the President was in St. Charles, MO. He talked about a new effort the Federal Government would undertake to go after waste, fraud, and abuse in the health care system. He focused on the use of payment recapture audits and the teams of auditors who will now go through the process of looking at the payments being made in Medicare, for example, health care for seniors, to make sure the money is actually going for health care to seniors and not going to criminals who are stealing money from the system. I commend the President for doing this. It is the right thing to do. Republicans and Democrats can work together. This is a good initiative.

But I would like to request of the President, as I have requested of this Congress, to take further steps and more bold steps to stop fraud in the system.

I thank Leader McConnell who, in his opening remarks this morning as the Senate opened its session, commented on a piece of legislation I have offered that will not only go after the fraud after it happens, which is what the President's proposal does--and I commend him for it; it is estimated by folks looking at his proposal that it might save $2 billion a year by going through and auditing and trying to find out where the bad guys have taken the money. I have some experience in that. When I was deputy attorney general in Florida, working under then-attorney general Charlie Crist, we had a Medicaid fraud control unit.

On the Medicaid side--health care for the poor--we did just what these teams the President is putting together now are going to try to do for Medicare. We had teams that looked at the data. We would break down the list of the top 50 folks who were receiving reimbursements from the Federal Government, and if the number and the amount of money they were receiving was abnormally high, we would look at it and make sure it was legitimate. You could go where money is. Right? They say: Look where the money is going. And if you can find out where the money is going, you can find out what the problems are.

We looked at the top 50 or top 100 folks who were receiving reimbursements from Medicaid, and we found problems. So the President's idea is effective. But let's not just do pay and chase. That is what we have been doing in health care for years and years and years.

The Presiding Officer, the Senator from North Carolina, agrees with me on this issue. She has been a leader in advocating that we stop the health care fraud before it starts. We were trying to change the health care bill last year at the end of the year to put in something more robust.

We do not have to start from scratch. There is an idea out there that already exists that is already working in another sector of the economy that is very similar to what could be done in health care.

Health care is about a $2 trillion a year business. We know that in Medicare, there is at least $60 billion if not $100 billion a year of health care fraud. That is worth repeating: $60 billion to $100 billion a year of waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare alone.

My colleague, Senator and Dr. Coburn, has been a leading advocate about trying to go after this waste, fraud, and abuse.

So what could we do with that money? We could put that money back into Medicare to make sure we are actually helping patients and make Medicare solvent for years to come, instead of where we are looking at it right now: that in the next 7 years Medicare is going to have a real financial crisis.

So how do we get at that $60 billion to $100 billion a year of waste, fraud, and abuse? Well, the health care industry is about a $2 trillion industry. Another industry that does a fantastic job of fighting fraud that is also an industry of about $2 trillion is the credit card industry.

In health care--at least in government health care--we believe $1 out of every $7 is fraud. In the credit card industry, they lose 7 cents on every $100. Madam President, $1 out of every $7 versus 7 cents on every $100.

How do they do it? They do not do just pay and chase; they do not just set up auditors and prosecutors to go after the bad guys after they have stolen the money. They stop the stealing before it starts. Technology is a wonderful thing, and it has created tremendous abilities for us to prevent fraud before it begins.

You all have had this experience. You have gone somewhere and used your credit card, and your credit card company has e-mailed you or called you and said: Was that really you making that purchase? And why is that? Well, a mechanism was triggered by their computers, where you were doing something you normally do not do. You were outside your normal spending habits. You were in Washington, DC, visiting, not at home in Orlando, FL. That is not something you usually do. A red flag goes off because they built a computer model that tracks your normal purchasing, and if something is out of normal--if you are traveling or you are purchasing more than you usually do, or you are buying things that are the target of people who steal credit cards--the model goes off, the phone call happens, and if you do not verify, they do not pay.

This is called predictive modeling, and it makes all the sense in the world that we put this into our health care system. And we can. I have a bill, S. 2128. It has bipartisan support in the Senate with about a dozen cosponsors.

It is a bill to do three things. One, create the predictive modeling system, set up a computer program where if we have health care fraud, we can try to detect it before it starts.

Let me give you an example. My home State of Florida is rampant with health care fraud--rampant. In fact, I think south Florida is the capital, unfortunately, of health care fraud. Here is one example to give you: We have in south Florida 8 percent of the Medicare beneficiaries with HIV or AIDS nationwide, but 72 percent of the reimbursements to these patients are sent there.

Is that because they are getting the best health care in the world? No. It is fraud. There are people in organized crime who are running these health care codes, stealing medical records from hospitals, finding out your patient information, saying that you have AIDS, running a $2,400 vaccine, and running those vaccines all day long, sending the bill to the Federal Government. The Federal Government is paying. It is a lot better deal for the crooks. It is a lot better than illicit drugs. We hear from these criminals they would much rather be stealing from the Federal Government. No one is shooting at them, and it is a lot easier to rip off Uncle Sam.

We have to stop this. So if you put this predictive modeling system in place, you could actually have a trend that occurred, and the computer would say: Wait a minute, this ``health care provider'' has sold this wheelchair 100 times in an hour, or they sold this other medicine, this very expensive AIDS medication. They have prescribed that more than anybody else. The model goes off and the payment stops until they are verified. We stop the fraud before it starts.

My bill does two other things. One is, it requires a background check for every health care provider in America that is going to try to bill Medicare or Medicaid. Can you imagine that we do not do that right now? We do not do background checks of people who are allegedly providing health care to our seniors and to the poor. Can you imagine, we have a convicted murderer in Florida who was an alleged health care provider who was scamming the system? There are bad guys scamming the system for $10 million, $20 million, $50 million, $60 million. So we have to do a better job.

The third thing this bill does is it creates some accountability. We are going to create an Assistant Secretary of Health at the Department of Health and Human Services whose only function will be to fight fraud so we have some person accountable who we can call in front of our committees and say: How are you doing in the battle to fight fraud?

As much as I appreciate what the President did today--and that could save $2 billion--a group here in town has evaluated this bill that has bipartisan support and they say it could save $20 billion a year. So why aren't we doing this today? I know this health care bill is very important. We have differing views on whether we should pass the big bill. But why can't we pass my bill now? Why can't we start preventing this health care fraud now and save $20 billion a year?

Imagine what we could do with that money. Imagine what we could do to put that money back in Medicare and make it more resilient so our seniors know their health care is going to be paid for.

I applaud the efforts of the President of the United States today. It is a good step. But it is on the pay-and-chase side. It is not on the prevention of fraud side. I keep coming to the floor and talking about this because I feel so passionately about it. It is a commonsense thing to do. It is problem solving. It is not partisan. No one is for fraud. Everybody should believe that we should try to spend the government's money more effectively and more efficiently.

With that, Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to speak in opposition to the tax extenders bill. I do so with a heavy heart because there are good things in this bill that would be good for my State of Florida. It would be good to extend unemployment benefits. It would be good to extend COBRA, it would be good to extend and help with Medicaid funding, and it is important to make sure we have enough money going to doctors in Medicare so that they can provide services. But I can no longer stand by, even on a bill such as this, and vote for it when it is going to add $100 billion to our deficit.

If the majority party in this Chamber did the right thing and paid for this bill, if we cut wasteful spending, if we cut duplicate programs in other areas and paid for this bill, 80 or 90 Senators would vote for it. But at some point, even though these programs may be good for your State, a Senator has an obligation to stand up and say: No more, no more spending our kids' future, no more putting debt on the next generation, no more bankrupting the promise of this country.

No more. We cannot afford it. We have a $12.4 trillion debt. We are supposed to have pay-as-you-go rules here. One month ago, we passed a pay-as-you-go law. The President signed it. And all of the language was laudatory: We are not going to spend our children's money anymore. We are going to be fiscally responsible. And then here comes this bill, $100 billion in spending, and we declare it an emergency so that we do not have to follow the rules. It occurred to me this weekend as I played with my 6- and 4-year-old sons that this is not pay-go, it is Play Doh--you can make whatever you want of it. But it is not real enforcement.

We in this chamber should pay for the spending so that we do not increase the debt on our children. So we should vote against cloture on this bill, not because the leadership has not allowed us to have amendments--they have, and I appreciate that. But we should vote against it because this bill should only pass if we can pay for it.

No matter how good the program is, it is not good if we saddle our children with $100 billion more in debt. The public debt in this country is going to double in 5 years and triple in 10. It is has now come out that the estimate of the national debt in 2020 will add another $10 trillion. The day of reckoning is at hand, and we just cannot stand by, even though there are good things in this bill, things that would help my State. On this occasion, I have to put country first.

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

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

I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. President, I rise today to speak about our relations with our neighbors to the south in Latin America. I recently had the opportunity to travel to Latin America and visit the countries of Honduras, Panama, and Colombia. These meetings were very productive.

During these meetings I had the chance to meet with the new President of Honduras, President Lobo, as well as our great ally and friend, President Uribe of the country of Colombia.

Our partnership and friendship with Latin America goes back many decades. In recent times we have used wonderful programs such as USAID and the Millennium Challenge Corporation to help build the infrastructure of Latin America as well as provide the tools to create jobs that will be sustainable in these countries.

Our goal in Latin America is simply this: We want them to succeed. We want strong neighbors with good democracies, with a respect for the rule of law, a place where their people can be free and prosper and hopefully establish great trading partnerships with us in the United States of America.

But the history of Latin America, even recently, is while there have been many successes, there have also been setbacks. We have recently had troubles in Honduras with President Zelaya, the former President who tried to stay in office, and then we had an ouster of him. There is a debate among us as to whether that was a coup or whether it was legally done. But, nonetheless, it was a disruption in that country's emerging democracy.

In meeting with President Lobo, I was impressed that he has put together a national unity government endeavoring to create those democratic institutions and strengthen the ones that Honduras was building upon and establish a rule of law that will give countries such as America and business people from our country the opportunity to transact business in that country.

I believe that under President Lobo's leadership, we have got a good chance for Honduras reemerging on the stage in Latin America as a good and healthy democracy.

I was pleased that Secretary Clinton recently recognized the democratically elected president. I encourage President Obama to receive President Lobo. We need friends in the region. We need friends for a number of reasons. We need friends in Latin America, specifically Central America, because of the devastating and harmful drug trade. The drug trade in Latin America that funnels drugs and guns to this country is not just a challenge in and of itself because of the deadly narcotics it brings to America, it is a challenge because of the violence and the organized structure of violence that goes with it.

Recently we saw drug gangs in Mexico extract the worst form of vengeance upon a family of a young military officer. A military officer died in Mexico killing the head of a drug cartel. He was celebrated by that country in what would be akin to a state funeral. And the drug cartel, to exact vengeance and to send a signal, killed all of the members of that soldier's family. That is terrible.

The money that is provided by these drugs that run from northern South America, the Colombia region, and then through Central America, these connections, that violent chain is very dangerous to this country. It is dangerous for many reasons, but there is an increasing danger. There is an increasing danger that has occurred with the entrance of Iran and its progeny into Latin America. We now know that Ahmadinejad is trying to show his sphere of influence in Latin America; that Hezbollah and Hamas, surrogate groups for Iran, who have done most of their damage in Lebanon and in Gaza, are now setting up shop in Latin America.

One of the reasons I am here to speak on the floor today is I am concerned that the same networks that transported violence and drugs and guns to this country could be used by Hezbollah and Hamas to provide a national security threat to us in this country and potentially bring terrorism to us in that way.

So our friendship with these countries such as Honduras, our friendship with countries such as Panama, our friendship with countries such as Colombia matter. It not only matters because we care about the human rights

of the people in those countries and we want them to be prosperous and free, but it matters because of our own national security.

Good, stable democratic partners are good for the United States of America. So we should continue to acknowledge President Lobo. We should restore the visas that were suspended during the Zelaya incident. We should do everything we can to encourage trade to continue with the Millennium Challenge Corporation, continue with USAID so that country can be prosperous and free and secure.

The same goes for Panama. Panama is a wonderful friend and partner to the United States. The Panama Canal, which the United States had for many years but now is in the hands of Panama, is a tremendous trading conduit to our country, and the Panama Canal is expanding. Right now, dredging and other works are being put in place to allow larger ships to come through the Panama Canal. Why is that important to the United States of America? Well, no longer will these post-panamax ships from China have to go to California to let off their goods. No longer will they have to go around the bottom of South America. Now they can come through the Panama Canal and service the eastern seaboard of the United States.

For a State such as mine in Florida this is very important. So we have to do the work in this country to make sure we are ready for those, what they call post-Panamax ships, that our ports are dredged deep enough that we have the security and the infrastructure in place to make sure we can receive those large ships.

I have been an advocate for making sure that Florida's ports are ready to receive those ships, because that trade will create thousands of jobs not just in my home State but all across this country.

That brings me to the point of trade. We have pending trade agreements that have not yet been sent over by the White House to be ratified by this Congress; trade agreements with Panama that need to be ratified, trade agreements with Colombia that need to be ratified, and also with South Korea. It makes no sense not to ratify those agreements.

Let me turn my attention, if I can, to Colombia. We have no better friend in Latin America than President Uribe. President Uribe will go down in history as one of the greatest leaders in this hemisphere. He, in my mind, is akin to Abraham Lincoln to their country, because when he came into office about 8 years ago, we were on the verge of Colombia turning into a narcoterrorist state, in which the drug gangs would have taken over the country.

In fact, before President Uribe came to office, the previous President sought to negotiate with the FARC by setting aside a part of the country as a safe haven for the FARC. It was a disaster. I am told that when President Uribe was sworn into office, almost 8 years ago, that the FARC was shelling and bombing Bogota to try to kill him on his inauguration. It is hard for us to realize what a civil war would be like, but that has been the situation in Colombia.

Because of the efforts of the United States of America, and because of our military and trade support, and Plan Colombia, which we put $1 billion into, Colombia turned the tide. The good guys are winning, and the FARC, the narcoterrorists, are losing. We are doing a very good job of beating those folks back. President Uribe must be commended.

But of all of our friends in the hemisphere, we have not ratified the free trade agreement with Colombia. We have done it with Peru, we have done the Central America Free Trade Agreement, CAFTA, but not Colombia. This agreement is 4 years old. I have spoken to our United States Trade Representative and urged him to urge this administration to send these trade agreements here.

I know the problem is not the Senate. The problem is down the hall with our colleagues in the House. I know they are concerned about certain issues in Colombia. I want to point out for my friends in the House of Representatives, because they are concerned about organized labor in Colombia, that under the leadership of this government in Colombia, homicides of union members are down nearly 80 percent since 2002. Homicides, in general, are down 45 percent in 2008, the lowest point in 22 years. Kidnappings are down by more than 80 percent, and acts of terrorism are down 63 percent.

I had a chance to go to Bogota. It is a beautiful and wonderful city. It rises nearly 8,000 feet above sea level, which is 3,000 more feet than Denver. Yet it is green and verdant, and it is one of the world's most unbelievable places to grow flowers, and 75 percent or more of the flowers that come in this country that you get at your florist come to us through Colombia. When they come from Colombia, guess where they go through to get to the United States of America. They all come through Miami, which makes me proud as a Senator from Florida.

That trade we have right now, the Colombians benefit from free trade but we do not benefit in return. We must ratify this agreement. We must acknowledge our friends in Colombia. By not ratifying the agreement, the signal we are sending is that perhaps our relationship with them, under this administration, is not as good as it has been with previous administrations. We do not want to send that wrong signal to a model country for Latin America.

But let me again talk about this concern I have about the emerging threat of Iran and its influence in Latin America. There is a deadly combination forming between Ahmadinejad of Iran and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. I ask unanimous consent that this newspaper article which I am about to read from be printed in the Record.

This article from March 2, 2010, I believe it is a Wall Street Journal article, talks about the revelation that has occurred that Hugo Chavez and his government were involved with the Basque separatist group in Spain in an effort to assassinate the President of Colombia, President Uribe.

This article from March 2, 2010 says that:

Spanish National Court Judge Eloy Velasco alleged Monday

that the Venezuelan government had collaborated with Basque

separatist group ETA and Colombia's main guerrilla group

[which is the FARC] in a plot against leaders living in or

traveling to Spain that began in late 2003.

The allegations were part of an indictment that ordered 12

alleged members of ETA and of the FARC to stand trial on

charges of conspiracy to commit murder and terrorism.

This was an effort to assassinate the President of Colombia. And it was done, according to this judge, in combination with the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, who is just as bad as Raul Castro in Cuba. He is trying to spread the same tyranny to the country of Venezuela, a country that was formerly free. He is shutting down media, he is arresting college students, he is destroying the economy to the point where there are now brownouts because they cannot provide enough electricity, a country which has tremendous oil reserves and energy reserves.

But he is not using those to bring money into the country, he is shutting the economy down. He is bringing despair to his people. The Cuban Government is now involved in the operation of Venezuela. They are calling it Vene-Cuba. This is a danger to us. Who is received by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela? Ahmadinejad from Iran. And what do we believe and what are we concerned about? That Hezbollah and Hamas are now setting up shop in Venezuela, in the region as well.

I have another article that I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record from the Associated Press by Curt Anderson. ``Three men charged in Miami with financing Hezbollah.''

Three men were charged in an indictment unsealed Friday

with illegally exporting electronics and video games to a

South American shopping center that U.S. officials claim

funnels money to a Hezbollah militant group.

John Morton, assistant Homeland Security secretary for ICE,

said the arrests will disrupt a network in ``the illicit

trade of commodities that support terrorist activities and

ultimately threaten the national security of the United

States.''

In his book ``The Gathering Storm,'' Winston Churchill described all the failed attempts and all the missed opportunities of Europe in the years building up in the 1930s to World War II. The failure of courage, the missed opportunities to stop Nazi Germany in its rise, Winston Churchill described it as a gathering storm because there were signs all along the way of fascism and the war machine that Adolf Hitler was building. What did the allies do when Germany reestablished its presence in the land between France and Germany, in that Rhineland region, and sent their troops back in? They did nothing. What did the allies do when the Germans went into Czechoslovakia? They did nothing. There were these steps along the way. It was a gathering storm that was ignored until it was too late.

The point I am trying to convey is, we have an existential threat with Iran. Ahmadinejad is an existential threat to this country. We know he is trying to build the ability to have nuclear weapons. We know he is talking with Hugo Chavez about mining uranium. That is our concern, and the sanctions and the discussions we are having are not working. I give credit to Secretary Clinton on recently coming out and saying we don't even know that Ahmadinejad is in charge of Iran. It may be the Revolutionary Guard, the military, that is running Iran. But the time for talk is over. We have to work on the world community to impose sanctions against Iran. We need to stop trading as a world community with Iran. We need to stop buying oil from them. We need to shut them down until the people of Iran can take their country back, bring back human rights, democracy, the right to petition the government, the right to elect leaders, the right to free speech. Iran was a progressive society before 1979. We see the young people in the streets who have been beaten down, trying to express their views, trying to say the election of Ahmadinejad was not legitimate.

I explain these things because I believe Iran is trying to set up shop in Latin America. We need strong, bolstered friends in the region to defend against this. We do not need Hezbollah and Hamas posing a national security threat right here in our own hemisphere. There is a gathering storm. The steps we take today, if we are strong, bold and vigilant, can stop the storm from breaking upon us.

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

I appreciate my colleague, Dr. Barrasso, for referring that question to me.

Certainly, the people of Florida are concerned about this bill. They want their costs to go down. They thought the whole reason we were doing this health care bill was to address the skyrocketing costs of health care, which have gone up 130 percent on average over the past 10 years. But what we find out with this bill is not only does it not lower the cost of health insurance for Americans, some Americans are going to have to pay more.

So why would we undertake this huge enterprise of creating a $1 trillion new program, multitrillion dollars over time, a program that cuts $\1/2\ trillion out of health care for seniors, and raises taxes by $\1/2\ trillion, why would we undertake all of that if we weren't going to reduce the cost of health insurance for most Americans? That is what they think we are doing. They don't think we are creating some brand new entitlement program. They don't want us to do that. They want us to lower the costs.

So Republicans have put forward proposals, and some of them my colleague just mentioned: allowing insurance companies to sell across State lines, trying to get rid of junk lawsuits.

My wife Meike is pregnant with our fourth child. She goes and sees her doctor in Tallahassee, FL--not a big town. He is paying $120,000 a year in medical malpractice insurance. That affects not only the cost of care, but it also creates defensive medicine which runs up costs. We have some real, concrete, step-by-step solutions on our side of the aisle that will make things better and reduce the cost of health care.

One thing I have had the privilege of working on with Dr. Coburn is going after waste, fraud, and abuse. In the Medicare system, we know there is $60 billion a year--$60 billion--in waste, fraud, and abuse. My State of Florida, unfortunately, is the capital of this health care fraud. I will give my colleagues one statistic that I think says it all.

In Miami Dade County, we have 7 percent of the country's AIDS population. Yet reimbursements for health care for AIDS patients in Miami Dade County constitutes 83 percent of what is spent in the entire country. Now, why is that? It is because folks are committing fraud on the system. Health care providers in warehouses and strip shopping centers, or nonexistent offices at all--they are not providers; they are just scam artists running the codes, running these medical codes and submitting them to Medicare and Medicaid.

Why shouldn't the first thing we do be to fix the system we have, stop this bleeding of billions of dollars and put it back into Medicare and Medicaid which are programs that are going broke? The President is right. There is a health care emergency in this country, and the No. 1 emergency is Medicare and Medicaid, not creating a new program.

We should make sure that Medicare for seniors is viable. We should stop the waste, fraud, and abuse, and get the money back in Medicare. Then we should do the same thing for Medicaid. Once we have those programs more solvent and we meet the commitments we have already made, then we could take the step-by-step approach on trying to provide lower cost health insurance for people who have it and more access for people who do not.

We have offered solutions, but as we understand it, what is going to happen is they are going to take the Senate bill that was passed on a party-line vote in December on Christmas Eve, send it over to the House, and then try to convince the House Democrats they are going to have a makeup bill that is going to fix their problems and try to send that over here and make us vote on that on a simple majority, which is not what was intended by the rules.

I am new to the Senate, so I want to defer to my colleagues and perhaps the Senator from Oklahoma can speak to this point and whether that is appropriate to do, and also speak to the good step-by-step measures we have to combat the problems with health care.

Mr. President, the Baucus substitute amendment gives preferential treatment to the extension of three programs: unemployment insurance, COBRA, and what is known as FMAP, which is the Federal Government's aid that it provides to States in the payment of Medicaid. These are laudable things to do, especially in this difficult economic environment. In my home State of Florida, we have nearly 12 percent unemployment. It is the highest anyone can remember, and people are struggling. So these are laudable things to do. The challenge is we are not going to pay for these spending programs. We are going to put them on the backs of our children and grandchildren, as my colleague Senator Burr remarked in his comments.

A couple of weeks ago, we passed a bill here in the Senate called pay-go, and the President just signed this bill into law. I struggled with my vote on pay-go, being a new Member to the Senate and being very concerned about spending, and I thought about voting for it. I thought about voting for it because anything that cuts spending around here, on its face, seems like a good idea to me. But the challenge for me came in learning from some of my colleagues that we don't enforce pay-go. They came to me and said: Look, they are not going to use this as a real measure to control spending. So the bill passed along party lines. And although I didn't support it, I hoped for the best.

But here we are, a couple of weeks after the President signed the pay-go law, and I want to remind the Senate of the comments of Majority Leader Reid upon arguing for the passage of the bill. He said: This pay-go--pay-as-you-go rule--we are proposing for the government is the same one Americans use every day in their individual lives; the same ones we teach our children. In order to spend a dollar, we have to have that dollar in our wallet. This law will enforce that commonsense approach.

Sounds reasonable. Sounds like the right thing to do. The President, when he signed the law, said: You have to make hard choices about where to spend and where to save.

Well, here we are, a few weeks later, and unfortunately the prediction of my colleagues that this was not a true enforcement mechanism on spending has come true. Because we are going to designate the extension of these three programs as emergencies. They are emergencies. And if they are emergencies, then we don't have to make them play by the rules. We don't have to cut spending in order to pay for these programs.

Unfortunately, we seem to designate whatever we choose as an emergency and, therefore, we don't have to do the things Leader Reid said. We don't have to do the things President Obama said. But families sitting around their tables who have bills to pay can't say: This is an emergency; therefore, I can go and spend money I don't have. Families can't do that. Businesses can't do that. Even State governments, that have to balance their budgets, can't do that.

So what is an emergency? What does the law tell us is proper to designate? Certainly we could think of circumstances that could be an emergency: a situation of war, the financial meltdown we had a couple of years ago. Certainly things such as that would justify being an emergency. Well, the Budget Act of 1974 lays out five different criteria that must be met. First, necessary, essential, or vital; second, sudden, quickly coming into being and not building up over time; three, an urgent pressing and compelling need, requiring immediate attention; four, unforeseen, unpredictable, unanticipated; five, not permanent, temporary in nature.

None of these three extensions is that. We saw these coming. To say this is an emergency is like putting $5 of gasoline in your car and then running out of gasoline and saying: I have an emergency. I couldn't foresee that the $5 wasn't going to get me very far.

Again, these are laudable programs, and the point of order I am about to make is not going to stop this going forward. All it is going to say is that you can't declare something an emergency that is not an emergency, and that we should pay for this by the end of the year. What a commonsense idea to bring to Washington and perhaps to the Congress, that we pay for the programs we decide need funding, that we don't balance it on the backs of our kids and grandkids. As Senator Burr said, we shouldn't borrow $10 billion to spend $10 billion. The spending in Washington is unsustainable.

Let's do these good programs, but let's take a novel approach and let's pay for them.

Mr. President, at this time I wish to make a point of order. Pursuant to section 4(g)(3) of the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010, I raise a point of order against the emergency designation provision contained in the pending substitute amendment.

With all due respect to my colleague, the chairman of the Finance Committee, my point of order will not stop these programs from being extended. What it will do is it will make sure we have to pay for them by the end of the year--a novel idea, that we actually pay for a program. So we will have to look at programs we have now, perhaps, and we cut other programs. Do we not think there is some inefficiency in the administration of the Federal Government? We had a proposal we tried to pass last year to require all the agencies of the Federal Government to cut 5 percent--just 5 percent--when they have had 5, 10, 15 and 20-percent increases year after year after year. Surely governing and leadership is about making decisions.

I voted for the 30-day extension. I want to vote for this bill, but I want to pay for it. I want to make sure we are not borrowing money from the children and grandchildren of Floridians and other Americans to pay for this bill. I want to make sure we are not going to be paying interest to the Chinese to pay for this bill. I think it makes perfectly good sense that we are required, by the end of the year, to find the money to pay for this.

Every dollar we spend is a choice. It is a choice on what we should spend it on. In this body and in this Congress it is a choice, unfortunately, to put a burden upon our children and grandchildren because we spend much more than we have.

I am supportive of extending unemployment compensation. I am supportive of extending COBRA, which is health care. I am supportive of helping out the States with Medicaid payments. All I am asking is let's pay for it. Surely, there is some other program, duplicative in government, inefficiencies we can find to offset this payment.

This is not a killer, this is just responsibility.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I made this point of order not because I am not in favor of the extension of the unemployment insurance or the COBRA or the money for Medicaid but only that it be paid for.

Just a few weeks ago, this Chamber voted to pass a pay-go bill, which the President signed, and it said we will pay as we go. But we have designated each of these three extensions as emergencies. They are not emergencies under the 1974 Budget Act requiring that it be sudden, quickly coming, unforeseen, or unpredictable. It is not an emergency.

All my point of order does is to say that by the end of the year, we will have to pay for these. It will not stop them from going forward, but it will make sure we have to pay for them, just as the pay-go law requires. These are nonemergencies.

I urge my colleagues to oppose the motion to waive the point of order.

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

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to speak on the issue of health care. Right now the leaders of this body, as well as the House of Representatives, are meeting with the President of the United States and members of his Cabinet at the Blair House to discuss the current health care reform proposal and where we should go forward to improve the health care of the people of this country.

I come to the floor today to talk about a specific portion of their discussion concerning health care fraud prevention.

Today, my colleague from Oklahoma, Senator Coburn, brought up with the President of the United States the issue of health care fraud prevention. As a Senator from Florida, this is something I have great concern about because, unfortunately, we are the capital of health care fraud for this country. I have put forward a proposal--S. 2128, the Health Care Fraud Prevention Act--to go after this very problem. Today, Senator Coburn brought up the fact that we believe that $1 out of every $3 spent on health care through Medicare or Medicaid or other public programs--$1 out of $3--is fraud, waste, or abuse--a shocking number. In fact, the belief is that $60 billion a year in the Medicare system alone--health care for seniors--is waste, fraud, and abuse.

Unfortunately, we don't have systems in place to go after and prevent that waste, fraud, and abuse. What we do in the Federal system when we think there is fraud is we send prosecutors and law enforcement folks out to

combat the fraud. These folks are doing a very good job, and there has been a lot of good work done in my home State of Florida. But the truth is, that is going after the fraud after it has already happened, and oftentimes there is no money left to collect. What we need to do is what I have proposed, and what the Health Care Fraud Prevention Act, S. 2128, accomplishes is it stops the fraud before it starts.

I was happy today that the President agreed we need to prevent health care fraud. He said we have already incorporated all of the good ideas on this. I hope that means we are going to pass S. 2128. It is a bipartisan supported bill. It is a bill that will stop the fraud before it starts. It is not, however, in the Senate bill we passed in December. When I tried to bring this measure to the floor as an amendment, it was objected to. Since that time, I have worked with my colleagues on both the Democratic and Republican side of the aisle to move this measure forward. Senator Baucus and I have spoken about it. In the 11-page memo the President put forward, it references doing in part what S. 2128 would accomplish. So I hope that in the new proposal, we will put forward S. 2128 and pass it.

Quickly, what does the bill do? It does three things:

One, it creates a chief health care fraud prevention officer of the United States. That person, appointed by the President, would work at the agency for health and human services, and their only job would be ferreting out fraud. When there is $60 billion in Medicare alone and potentially that much in Medicaid and across the health care system--we think $\1/4\ trillion a year in fraud, waste, or abuse--it is worth having one person whose whole job is to try to prevent that fraud. Remember, if this money is recovered, we can use it to provide health care, we can improve the quality of care because there will be more money going into actually helping our seniors, helping the poor, helping our veterans.

The second thing the bill does is it takes a model from the private sector--it borrows a page, if you will--because we have an industry in this country that does an excellent job of preventing fraud, and it is the credit card business. We have all had this experience. You go somewhere and use your credit card, and you get a phone call or an e- mail from your credit card company. They tell you some transaction has just occurred and ask: Did you really mean to have that transaction? Did you authorize that purchase? And you call them up and say either yes or no.

I have a young family, Mr. President, as you know. When I got appointed to the Senate, I brought my kids and my wife up here so we could be close. I have three children 6 and under and a baby coming in a month, so we are here in Washington, DC, most of the time. I had to do what any good dad would have to do: I had to go out and buy a television.

I went to Best Buy and bought a television. I live in Tallahassee, so before I left the store, my credit card sent me an e-mail. You live in Florida, is what this system is doing and thinking, and you are buying a television, which is a highly suspicious purchase, and you are doing it in Washington, DC. So I tell them yes, and the transaction goes through. If I tell them no, they do not pay Best Buy. They do not pay unless there is a verification on the front end.

We can use that same technology in health care to set up a predictive modeling system to prevent the fraud before it starts. I called the worldwide head of fraud prevention for MasterCard and asked him: Can we do what you do in health care? He said: Sure you can, and I will help you.

There is no reason we can't stop billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse.

Mr. President, before we go on to all the other issues in health care that we can't agree upon, we should call up this bill and we should pass it. We would get 100 votes, I bet, in the Senate, and we could save what one group here in Washington thinks is $20 billion a year. That is $20 billion we could use to maybe pay down the debt and the deficit or put it back into Medicare, which is hurting and is going to run out of money in a few years. We could do good things with that money.

The third thing this bill does is it requires a background check for every health care provider. Can you believe we don't check the criminal records of people who claim they are providing health care to our seniors? We don't check to see if they are felons. We had a guy in Miami who was a convicted murderer who claimed to be a health care provider. This would require we do a background check. And if you are a criminal, guess what. You don't get to provide health care. You don't get to dupe the system.

So I hope we will take up this bill. I am appreciative of Senator Coburn. I am glad the President recognizes we can all agree on this. If we can all agree, let's get something done. Let's call the bill up and let's pass it.

Haiti

Mr. President, I had the opportunity to go on a congressional visit to Haiti a couple of weeks ago--actually, 2 weeks from tomorrow. We were there on the 1-month anniversary of the tragic earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people. Two hundred thousand people died in Haiti. Myself and the other Members of the Senate and the House who went there were able to see some of the tragedy.

We visited the cathedral in Haiti. You often hear President Clinton talk about this wonderful Catholic cathedral in Haiti that stood the test of time but could not stand the test of this earthquake. In fact, really the only prominent part of this cathedral that still stood, unbelievably, was the cross.

We talked to the people who were there. They are a wonderful and resilient people, and it is amazing that they could go on with the tragedy they had experienced.

I had the great honor to visit the Gesco Ford Operating Hospital, staffed mostly by American doctors and nurses, some of them from Miami, some of them from Orlando, in my home State of Florida. They are doing wonderful work.

We met with the President of the country and the Prime Minister and Ministers of the President's Cabinet, and we talked about what are the next steps.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter I authored to the President of the United States, to which I will be referring.

Mr. President, this letter is cosigned by myself, Senator Nelson, my colleague from Florida, Senator Klobuchar, as well as Senator Lautenberg, all of whom were on the trip with me. The letter basically asks the President to do four things in trying to focus our help and relief for this country.

We have been involved in trying to help the Haitian people for decades, and the American people have opened their hearts and their wallets to help the situation in Haiti, but the situation is dire. I cannot think of a more complicated, difficult problem than trying to bring Haiti forward to a sustainable place.

Haiti was already in bad shape, but it had a path forward and progress was being made. Now, as you drive the streets of Port-au- Prince, it looks like a bombed area. It looks like a war zone. You will randomly see three buildings standing as if nothing had happened and then a building that is completely and utterly destroyed. Right now, thousands of people are huddled together in these makeshift camps in low-lying areas. My great fear for the short-term is that when the rains come, which they will in the next weeks in Haiti, there will be another great tragedy. So we have to be focused in our help.

So I, along with my colleagues, sent this letter to the President and asked the President to do four things:

First, create a long-term sustainable plan for Haiti and put in charge of that plan, on behalf of our relief efforts, a trustee, along with an inspector general, along with a board of advisers, to work in partnership with the Haitian Government to make sure the money is spent wisely. We cannot just send billions of dollars into Haiti and let the money evaporate in short-term solutions. There needs to be a long-term sustainable plan.

Second, we have to provide funds to the Haitian people directly. Small businesses need microloans so they can provide jobs for the people of Haiti. We can't just give the money to third-party contractors.

Third, we have to be focused on this orphan issue. We have to make sure it is done legally, and where it is done legally, we have to make sure we get those children to their adoptive parents as quickly as possible.

Fourth, we have to make sure Port-au-Prince is not the center of the entire population for the country of Haiti. We are putting too many people in one place when tragedy strikes. We need to encourage development throughout the country.

I had the honor of having the President of Royal Caribbean cruise lines in my office yesterday--a Floridian, Adam Goldstein--and we talked about tourism to Haiti. There is a beautiful citadel in Haiti that would be a wonderful attraction for cruise ship tourists. There have been all sorts of difficulties building a road to it and making sure it is safe and secure.

We need to find ways to create jobs outside of Port-au-Prince, outside that city, so that fragile humanity is not all focused in one place.

Finally, we need to make sure the Diaspora of Haiti, the Haitian- American people--for example, we have about 250,000 Haitian Americans in Florida--are involved in the rebuilding of Haiti. They need to be welcomed. They are dying to get involved. They are hungry to get involved in this process of rebuilding their home country.

So I hope the President will put together this commission, appoint a strong leader--a Colin Powell or someone of that magnitude--as the trustee to work with the Haitian people to rebuild the island of Haiti, and I hope we can get effort and energy behind that proposal quickly so we don't have any other significant challenges in the coming months ahead for the Haitian people.

With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, this week marks the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp. It was 65 years ago this week when the Soviet army entered Auschwitz and liberated more than 7,000 prisoners. It is estimated that a minimum of 1.1 million people were murdered in the camp as part of the Nazis' deliberate and systematic campaign to exterminate as many as 6 million European Jews and Roma. Winston Churchill called it a ``crime that has no name.''

Stories from the survivors are a chilling reminder of the unspeakable horrors that can be perpetrated by evil men when the forces of good are slow to respond. Some of these personal testimonies are preserved in museums around our Nation, including the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In 1948, the United Nations pledged in the Genocide Convention that the horrors of the Holocaust would ``never again'' be repeated. Sadly, this pledge has not been upheld. In Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sudan people have been murdered solely on the basis of their national, ethnic and religious affiliations.

I urge my colleagues and members of the international community to renew our commitment to ``never again'' allow genocide to take place. I also call upon the Obama administration to continue upholding our pledge to protecting the personal freedoms of individuals around the globe.