Mike Crapo

Madam President, I join the POW*MIA Awareness Rally Corp. of Pocatello, ID, in acknowledging National POW/MIA Recognition Day this September 18, 2026.

I am grateful for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency's, DPAA, steady and often challenging work to meet its responsibility of recovering America's servicemembers. Each year, the DPAA leads the creation of a poster commemorating National POW/MIA Recognition Day, as ceremonies are held across the country to honor those who were held captive and returned, as well as those who remain missing. The year's poster reads, ``Warrior Ethos: `I will always place the mission first . . . I will never leave a fallen comrade.' ''

Second Lieutenant Charles Atteberry, a World War II servicemember from Parma who had been missing and unidentified for 80 years, is one of the Idaho servicemembers most recently returned home. Through the U.S. military's use of DNA testing, Lt. Atteberry was identified from a mass grave in Taiwan and returned to Idaho in 2025. Lt. Atteberry's brother Lloyd also served in the military as a pilot during World War II and is still considered missing in action since he was reportedly shot down in 1943.

On June 10, 2026, the DPAA also accounted for U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Harold T. Thompson, 24, who was killed during World War II. The DPAA reported, ``In the winter of 1944, Thompson was assigned to the 718th Bombardment Squadron, 449th Bombardment Group, in Italy. On Jan. 30, he was serving as a gunner aboard a B-24 Liberator bomber on a mission to Udine, Italy. The plane was shot down while returning from its mission and was last sighted north of the Isle of Morgo off the Italian coast near the town of Grado. Three crew members made it out of the plane before the crash, but only one survived. The other seven members, including Thompson, were believed to have still been in the aircraft when it crashed.''

As we celebrate Idahoans' return home, we maintain hope for the return of Idaho's other servicemembers, including the eight who remain unaccounted for from the Vietnam war. This includes Major William Ellsworth Lemmons, who was on a visual reconnaissance mission in South Vietnam on June 18, 1967, when the aircraft he piloted failed to return from the mission for unknown reasons and was declared missing. Major Lemmons is memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, DC.

I thank America's servicemembers, veterans, and their families for their extraordinary commitment to our country, as I remain deeply grateful to those who keep attention on bringing every American servicemember and the DPAA and its partners working steadily to provide the fullest possible accounting of missing U.S. personnel to their families and our country.

To support these efforts, I continue to use every opportunity to press for enactment of the Bring Our Heroes Home Act. This legislation would help eliminate obstacles preventing families and caseworkers from accessing the records needed for recovering America's POWs and MIA.

We honor America's missing servicemembers and those they served beside by never giving up in our pursuit of finding them and bringing them home.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate immediately execute the order in relation to the Westercamp nomination.

Madam President, in response to the discussion that my colleague from Oregon has just engaged in, far too often, our Nation's healthcare system incentivizes low-value, high-cost services. For years, bipartisan policy makers throughout Capitol Hill and across administrations have endeavored to disrupt this flawed paradigm, especially in the Medicare Program. Unfortunately, despite progress to incorporate new value-based payment arrangements, Medicare's underlying reimbursement structure continues to rely heavily on the volume of services provided, rather than the quality of care.

In addition to failing patients and providers, Medicare's perverse financial incentives contribute to massive waste and abuse. Well- meaning clinicians often face opaque coverage guidelines that can result in denied reimbursements, while malicious actors exploit bureaucratic vulnerabilities to defraud the program.

Through the wasteful and inappropriate service reduction model--work WISeR--CMS is testing whether enhanced technology can help address these systemic failures. For a limited set of nonemergency services with a documented history of abuse and overuse, providers in select States must submit claims for review. Claims that meet existing Medicare coverage requirements are quickly approved, offering providers payment predictability.

When issues arise, board-certified clinicians--not technological machines, board-certified clinicians--intervene to make the final decision. The potential benefit of this ``detect and prevent strategy'' is substantial. For example, Medicare spending on skin substitutes, one of the chosen WISeR model services, increased and--hear this--increased from $256 million in 2019 to $10 billion in 2024. It doesn't even take a technological machine to tell you that something is wrong there.

Proactive, technology-based scrutiny could have detected this outlier spending growth and protected both patients and taxpayers.

Regrettably, misinformation about this model has sparked fears of delays in essential patient care and additional burdens on providers.

Later today, the Senate will proceed to a resolution to stop this important work of the WISeR model. Every Member of this body agrees that patients should have access to high-quality care, providers deserve predictable payment for services, and avoidable waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare should be stopped. Ending this pilot program prematurely will deprive CMS of a useful tool to accomplish each of those goals.

And I urge my colleagues to consider the facts and oppose this resolution.

I yield the floor.