Madam President, Senator Byrd has time that has been reserved. He has indicated to me that he is going to speak for 2 hours. He will be here at 12:30 to begin his important discussion about the bill now before the Senate. I understand the…
Madam President, Senator Byrd has time that has been reserved. He has indicated to me that he is going to speak for 2 hours. He will be here at 12:30 to begin his important discussion about the bill now before the Senate.
I understand the intensity and sincerity of the feelings of the Senator from New Mexico. As Senators know, he and I have worked together for many years on the Appropriations Committee, the Energy and Water Subcommittee, which is a very important part of our Government. He has been chairman, I have been chairman, and we have worked together and developed a tremendous amount of affection for each other. I repeat that I know how strongly he feels about this legislation. There may be some who feel differently about this bill, and whether their feelings are as intense as his is not important. But there are people who feel very strongly about this and they have problems with this bill. I hope before this year's end we can work toward having an Energy bill for this country.
There are things in the bill that are extremely important to the State of Nevada. I have personally told Senator Baucus and Senator Grassley how I think they have done remarkably good work, generally speaking, with the tax provisions of the Energy bill. So I hope that at some time we have the ability to work something out on this legislation. I know I will make myself available to the Senator from New Mexico to see if there is a way we can narrow the gap. As the Senator from New Mexico knows, there may be two, three, or four Senators who are crucial to coming up with finality to this bill. If we can work something out to satisfy those individuals and not lose some on the other side, maybe we can do something.
I want to say this, though, to my friend from New Mexico, not in relation to the Energy bill but to the underlying bill. The Senator went to some length talking about things that both bodies did not agree on and people are upset that it is not in this Energy bill. Well, I can understand why the Senator from New Mexico, being the legislator that he is, cannot understand why if the House and the Senate by their bodies assembled have not approved legislation, how in the world you think the conference committee can stick it in when both bodies have not agreed to it. With the omnibus bill, you have the opposite situation. In the omnibus bill now before the Senate, you have the Senate and the House duly assembled who have voted overwhelmingly to support provisions, and the President and his minions go to the conference committee and say you are going to take these things out or you are not going to get a bill.
Are they things that don't matter? No. They are very important. For example, overtime. The President wants people who make more than $22,000 a year to not be eligible for overtime pay. The House and the Senate said we don't agree with the President, and we passed legislation by virtue of amendments in this body and in the House which said you cannot do that, Mr. President. The President said: I don't care what you have done in these two legislative bodies. I want it out.
Now, if that wasn't bad enough, he goes to an issue that is so important--and I repeat on the Senate floor today that Monday night we had a little family gathering, which we call ``family home evenings.'' We had our children and we went to this Caribbean restaurant with my three grandchildren who live in Washington, and my daughter and son-in- law, Landra and I. My little 13-year-old granddaughter has had mononucleosis. She has been sick and has missed a lot of school. She came to dinner. She is feeling better. She attended school yesterday. She was real hungry Monday night. One of the things with mono is you don't have an appetite. She was hungry. She ordered something she really liked, steak and fries. It had a fancy name for it, but that is what it was. She ordered steak and fries.
While we were in conversation, I heard her say to her brother who is 8 years old: Aiden, would you like some mad cow? Here are my grandchildren. They know this is bad. We know there is no way to prevent the beef that goes into this restaurant from coming from Argentina, Mexico, or Bolivia. I don't know where else they raise beef. Canada. We know they raise beef there. Even my grandchildren are concerned about mad cow disease.
In the bill that we wanted to come before this body, there was a provision in it that said you have to have a country-of-origin labeling on the meat that is sold to consumers. The President said: I don't care what the House and Senate have done; they passed these overwhelmingly, but I don't care because I want to take care of my corporate friends, and my corporate friends say country-of-origin labeling is not good; I don't care about mad cow or hoof-and-mouth disease; if you want a bill, you take this out. The Republican leadership in the House and Senate said: OK, Mr. President. And they took it out.
So now this bill, which will probably pass tomorrow, does not have that provision in it. Country-of-origin labeling is not in the bill.
I don't think that is a real good deal. It is too bad. But he did the same thing with how much ownership these big broadcasters can have.
I didn't come here to talk about this, but with what Senator Domenici said about if you don't put something in a bill, how do you expect it to be stuck in conference, I say if you put stuff in a bill that is passed by two duly assembled bodies, how in Heaven's name can the President in conference demand it be taken out? He has done it, especially on issues that deal with the average American: overtime and labeling of beef. It is another example of this President being the President for corporate America and not the people who work for those corporations.
Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the administration wants to increase Medicare payments to insurance companies and HMOs by a record 10.6 percent. This handout, which is five times as large as the typical increase, was mandated by the new Medicare law that passed this body by one vote.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates those extra payments to private plans will total more than $500 million this year and over the next decade $14 billion; $14 billion extra, added on that the taxpayers are going to shell out to insurance companies and these health care providers.
We could do a lot of things with $14 billion. Instead of this handout, maybe there are ways we could use the $14 billion to help Nevada. People in Nevada need health insurance. There are in America today 44 million Americans who have no health insurance, and Nevada is at the top of the list. We could cut health care costs paid by patients, improve the care they receive, and expand coverage. For example, the direct benefit created by the new Medicare bill is confusing and certainly inadequate. Instead of wasting $14 billion on this handout, we should use that money to give seniors the drug coverage they need and not give it as a sop to the insurance industry.
Under the new Medicare law, a senior must spend $810 out of pocket per year before he or she will receive a penny from Medicare. And a senior who spends $5,000 a year on drugs will be stuck with almost 80 percent of the bill. Essentially, this law will penalize our sickest seniors, the very ones who need help the most.
The new law has a huge gap in coverage. Listen to this. Once a senior spends $2,250 on prescription drugs, he or she will have to pay the full price for drugs until they get up to $5,100. Obviously, these people who are using $2,100 worth of drugs are sick. That doesn't matter. There is a hole, a big hole until they hit $5,100. They pay it all. But they have to continue to pay premiums the whole time.
Instead of a handout to the insurance industry, we could use the $14 billion to
protect senior citizens who will actually be worse off under the new Medicare bill. In Nevada, 15,000 seniors stand to lose the coverage they currently receive from former employers, and our poorest seniors in Nevada, those who receive both Medicaid and Medicare, will be forced to pay a copay under the new law, something they don't have to do at present. This will create a new expense which will be a significant burden for those with chronic conditions and disease who are struggling to make ends meet on fixed incomes.
We can use the money to provide a drug benefit now instead of waiting 2 years while our seniors struggle with the rising cost of drugs. It took less than a year to start the entire Medicare Program, and that was before we had computers. Surely, we can add a drug benefit in less than 2 years.
Finally, we need to expand health care coverage. As I said, there are 44 million people in our country who don't have health care coverage at all. In Nevada, a sparsely populated State, 600,000 people under age 65 were without health insurance last year. Most of these people, including children, are working families. They go to work every day, but they can't afford the peace of mind that comes with health insurance, so how can we afford an HMO handout of $14 billion?
My youngest son who is a lawyer and worked here in Washington got a new job in Las Vegas. He is educated. He has two little girls and, in a matter of days, is going to have a third little girl. He could afford the gap coverage until he got his new job. Most people couldn't do that. For just I think 2 weeks he had to pay $1,200 to have coverage for his family. Most people can't do that. Most people have these big gaps, and they are stuck when an automobile accident or something happens to them in the way of illness and they have no insurance.
I want to make it clear that I am not opposed to private health care plans in Medicare. I have received letters from senior citizens in Nevada who told me they are enrolled in Medicare HMOs, and they have told me they are happy with the care they receive.
I am not opposed to competition. Make no mistake; competition is a good thing. It is a strong incentive for efficiency and productivity. I think this administration has a different definition of competition than I have.
They are all in favor of competition when it comes to a worker in a national park who might be making $30,000 a year. They think people like that should compete with private contractors to keep their jobs. But when it comes to big corporations, such as HMOs, the administration doesn't like competition. Why else would a company such as Halliburton get a billion-dollar contract without even submitting a bid? That is not competition.
Why does the new Medicare bill contain a provision that expressly forbids the Government to use its bargaining power to negotiate prices with drug companies? Is that how the free market is supposed to work? No. Now we have a handout for insurance companies.
We were told it would be good to let private companies compete with traditional Medicare because they would be more efficient which would allow them to provide better care and less costs.
While I am talking about privatizing, don't forget last night the President again in his State of the Union Address talked about privatizing Social Security. I have to hand it to him, he has a lot of nerve because it is rare I find anyone who wants to privatize Social Security. He had some buzz words, but that is what it all meant.
These private companies that compete with traditional Medicare now have their hand out for a 10.6-percent increase because they say it is the only way they can continue to serve Medicare patients. That does not sound very efficient to me. It does not sound like competition. It does not sound like a great deal for seniors who are struggling to buy medicine or for taxpayers. It certainly does not sound like real competition.
This HMO handout to the insurance industry and the managed care entities is an example of the way the administration has one set of rules for the big-money interests, the corporate interests, and another set of rules for people who work for these corporations.
Competition is OK for ordinary folks, but the fat cats get sweet deals like the HMO handouts.
This is a case of misplaced priorities, just like the misplaced priority of spending $14 billion on a corporate handout instead of using it to improve health care for ordinary Americans. This is just one more reason we need to work to fix the problems in Medicare so seniors will have the coverage they deserve. I hope the administration will take another look at its priorities and reconsider this ill- advised HMO handout. According to the State of the Union last night, he has his veto pen ready in case we try to do it.
Before I yield the floor and before Senator Byrd speaks, we have been gone for a few months and it is good that I remind myself on occasion how I have been educated in the years I have been in Congress, now more than two decades, by the senior Senator from the State of West Virginia. Better than any movie, any ball game, any recreational activity that I can think of, I have had more fun learning from the Senator from West Virginia. I still look back with almost reverence to his lectures on the line-item veto, on why it should not be done and why we would be like the Roman Empire. It would be the beginning of the end of legislative power. It would be the beginning of the end of this great Government that we so much admire.
I remind the Senator from West Virginia, those lectures--and I call them lectures because they were done by someone who knows as much as any professor about the Roman Empire--they were done so well that at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, the head of the political science department taught a course based simply on the lectures of the Senator from West Virginia. So whether he is talking about Iraq, as he has done so well, about homeland security, about the energy policy in this country, about the State of West Virginia and what needs to be done with transportation and what needs to be done in this country, all of these many subjects have been lots of fun for this Senator from Nevada. I have been educated, and I am a better Senator and a better person and the State of Nevada has done better by me as a result of learning so much from the Senator from West Virginia.
Senator McCain is scheduled to be here at 2 o'clock, and he has indicated he will be here, so I suggest the absence of a quorum pending the arrival of Senator McCain.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
Mr. President, we have been advised by the majority cloakroom that Senator McCain will not be here for a few minutes. We don't want him to lose any of his hour. He told me how important it is to him to have that hour. So I ask unanimous consent the Senator from Iowa be recognized. When Senator McCain does appear on the floor, Senator Harkin would yield to him.
I ask unanimous consent that Senator McCain be allotted his full hour.
Mr. President, the Senator from New Jersey, Mr. Lautenberg, has been waiting a long time. He is in the cloakroom. If we can have Democratic speakers in order, Senator Harkin, Senator Lautenberg, then Senator Graham, and Republicans to speak in between, that will certainly be appropriate. We have been going back and forth. Will that be OK?