Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of a bill that will correct the mistake that the House made last week when it voted to repeal the estate tax. Not only that, but the Save Social Security First Act will also restore some credibility to the commitment that both parties in this House have made to safeguarding the Social Security trust fund.

In March of 2001, Speaker Hastert said, ``We are going to wall off Social Security trust funds.'' Two years later, our fiscal stability has eroded and we are racing towards half-trillion dollar annual deficits. Rather than protecting it, we are now dipping into the Social Security trust fund to finance another round of tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. The wealthy few in our country are benefitting at the expense of the millions of seniors who currently rely on Social Security and the millions of American workers who will rely on it in the future.

The question is a simple one, Mr. Speaker. Would you rather add an additional $588 billion to the Social Security trust fund over the next 20 years, or give that money to families whose wealth already dwarfs the lifetime earnings of many Americans? The answer seems obvious. I believe that this House should keep its promise to protect Social Security and stop sacrificing the needs of the vast majority of Americans for the benefit of the privileged few. It is for these reasons that I have introduced the Save Social Security First Act.

The act will accelerate estate tax relief while not entirely repealing the tax. It raises the exemption amount to $3 million per person, or $6 million per couple, beginning in 2004, and dedicates all estate tax revenue to the Social Security trust fund. Many of those who voted to repeal the estate tax last week argued that the tax unjustly forces small business owners to sell their business in order to pay the tax rather than be able to pass the business on to the next generation. According to a Treasury Department study, however, this is very rarely the case. In only 1.6 percent of taxable estates did a family-owned business comprise at least half of the value of the estate, and that was with an exemption just one-fifth of what is proposed by the bill I have introduced. We do not need to fully repeal the tax in order to keep it from unfairly impacting small businesses.

Under the Save Social Security First Act, only the truly wealthy will remain subject to the estate tax, while 99.5 percent of families will be exempt from it. The whole country will benefit from the $588 billion that this bill will put into Social Security over the next 20 years. Over the next 75 years, it will make up for almost one quarter of the projected shortfall in Social Security funding.

Mr. Speaker, it's about time that we got our priorities straight. This bill says that even if you feel that fully repealing the estate tax is a priority, it is not a higher priority than ensuring the solvency of Social Security. It says that we should be committed to the growing number of seniors in our country. It says that we should be committed to today's workers who are depending on Social Security for their retirement. And it says that we should be committed to our children, who should not be forced to foot the bill of our fiscal irresponsibility.

I strongly urge this House to join me in supporting the Save Social Security First Act. We have two futures to choose from: on the one hand, we can make a tiny sliver of the wealthiest people in the country even wealthier. On the other, we can help save a program that will benefit untold millions of Americans for generations to come. This should be one of the easiest choices that we have made in a long time, and I hope to see my colleagues on both sides of the aisle join me to support this important bill.

Mr. Speaker, on April 22, 2003, I missed rollcall vote No. 211. Had I been here I would have voted ``nay'' on rollcall No. 211.

Mr. Speaker, May is both Mental Health Month and Older Americans Month, and no time to make sure that older adults are getting the mental health care they need. Not only do we owe our seniors dignity and good health, but providing good mental health care to older Americans is good policy. Failure to treat mental disorders leads to functional dependence, nursing homes, poorer health outcomes for other chronic conditions, and suicide.

According to the National Institutes of Health, seniors commit suicide at a higher rate than any other age group. And in 20 percent of those cases, seniors killed themselves the same day they visited their primary care doctor. Seventy percent of senior suicides have been to a primary care physician the same month.

There is a severe misunderstanding of mental illness in older adults, even among those with medical training. The President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health has identified the failure of seniors to receive mental health care as a major problem. The Surgeon General's Report on Mental Health found that almost one in five adults over 55 experiences a specific mental disorder that is not part of the ``normal'' aging process.

That's why today, my good friend from Maryland, our Minority Whip, and I are introducing the ``Positive Aging Act of 2003''--to improve the accessibility and quality of mental

health services for our rapidly growing population of older Americans. While we have made great strides in extending the life span, we continue to face the challenge of improving the quality of life for America's senior citizens. This legislation is designed to integrate mental health services with other primary care services in community settings that are easily accessible to the elderly.

We can effectively treat many of the mental disorders common in older Americans, but in far too many instances we are not making such treatments available. Unrecognized and untreated mental illness among elderly adults can be traced to gaps in training of health professionals, and in our failure to fully integrate mental illness identification and treatment with other health services. Mental illnesses are poorly recognized in many care settings and knowledge about effective interventions is simply not reaching primary care practitioners. Research has shown that treatment of mental illnesses can reduce the need for other health services and can improve health outcomes for those with other chronic diseases. These missed opportunities to diagnose and treat mental diseases are taking a huge toll on the elderly and increasing the burden on their families and our health care system.

Mr. Speaker, I recognize that the stigma associated with mental illness, the lack of Medicare coverage for prescription medicines, and Medicare benefit discrimination related to mental health services also limit appropriate care for the elderly. I am committed to address these broader problems through Medicare reform legislation as soon as possible. In the meantime, we can and we must take other steps. We must increase opportunities for effective diagnosis and treatment of mental illness among the elderly. This legislation is intended to do just that.

Mr. Speaker, I strongly believe there are immediate opportunities to improve mental health care for older Americans. This legislation can help to target our resources on identifying and treating a population at high risk for disability and dependence. We have an obligation to take what is known about effective treatments and improve the quality of life and overall health of millions of seniors. It's not only the right thing to do; it's also an investment that will return enormous dividends in terms of more economical use of health resources, improved patient outcomes, a better quality of life for older Americans.

I am grateful for the support of my colleagues who have joined me in introducing this bill, particularly the gentleman from Maryland, and for the many advocates out in our communities across the country who are leading the way with strong initiatives and good examples. I particularly would like to recognize the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry for their tireless leadership in the area of mental health for seniors.

I hope that this House will join me in honoring the citizens who have built this great country by ensuring that they get the full range of health services they need.

Mr. Speaker, I want to commend both sides for working out a good bill that passed unanimously from the committee. I want to commend the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Burns), my good friend and colleague, and his office for working very closely with all of us in trying to ensure that we were able to address the needs of families and children in school.

When I travel around my district in Rhode Island, I find school teachers telling me that the biggest single problem they have is addressing the emotional and social development of the kids in their classrooms. These kids come to school often from broken families, family violence, situations that none of us can even begin to imagine, and to think that these children are going to learn and not be able to shut out these things from their mind about what is going on at home is just not being realistic. These kids need assistance, they need help, and they need counseling. That is why I think we have done so well by trying to ensure that there are more school counselors, but we still need to do more.

In terms of the mental health part, I think this is an important part of development. I think this bill does a lot to ensure that we do not tie the hands of teachers and principals and administrators insofar as their consulting with parents. In many respects teachers have a window into what is going on in that child's life, and they are best equipped to be able to talk to those parents and be able to consult with those parents about what those children might need. Obviously, none of us wants to see a situation where instead of getting these kids the necessary emotional and social support, all they give to these kids is medication. We do not need to do that, but we do need to

ensure that for those kids who do need medication who do have those kinds of chemical imbalances that make it very difficult for them to learn that they can get the needed support.

I think overall the biggest challenge that we have in this area is ending the stigma of mental health. Somehow, having any kind of range of mental illness is a stigma. I myself suffer from depression. I take medications for it. It is nothing I feel ashamed of. I also have asthma. I take medications for that. And yet in this country we still have this pervasive view that somehow if one has kind of an emotional problem that that is their problem, that is of their own making, that it is not some part of their brain chemistry. Just as diabetes or asthma or any other chronic disease would not be their fault, neither is any mental illness.

So that is why I think this bill is important in that it does not stigmatize those families and children that may be suffering from emotional and social challenges. So with that I ask for support for this legislation and commend the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) for her good work.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize native Rhode Islander, Mr. Rocco Baldelli, of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and his accomplishments during this past month of April. As a rookie this season, Rocco has demonstrated his baseball savvy and athleticism while drawing on experience from his outstanding high school career at the Bishop Hendricken High School. We hope that this achievement serves as an inspiration to Rhode Islanders of all ages.

The Devil Rays's 6th pick in the first round of the Major League Baseball draft, this centerfielder recently, on April 30th, hit his first home run in the major leagues against the Minnesota Twins. This day also marked a special occasion, as Rocco's fortieth home run set a record for the most runs hit by a rookie in the month of April. He now has a fantastic batting average of .364 with 40 hits, and 20 runs batted in. As the House Resolution from the Rhode Island General Assembly I've included notes, Rocco reminds spectators of a young Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, or Willie Mays.

I congratulate Rocco on his spectacular achievements so far this season, and look forward to following his continued success.

[H. 6396: State of Rhode Island, in General Assembly, January Session,

Mr. Chairman, I rise today to oppose this amendment, and let me just basically state the reason why.

We have in this country right now 4,000 young people who kill themselves every year in suicides. It is the third leading cause of death in this age group. We need to consider that two-thirds of young people who suffer from mental illness never even get help. Why? Because there is a stigma. People do not believe that there is any truth to mental illness.

While I am sure the gentleman who authored this amendment did not intend for the amendment to have this impact, what I worry about is that the impact of this amendment will be to further add to the stigma that exists towards people with mental illness by saying, basically all these kids really need is a good swift kick in the butt

and they ought to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

The fact of the matter is we know that there are some serious emotional disturbances that these young people are facing. To suggest that teachers right now in the classroom, administrators and principals do not already know which children need special ed and which children do not, I think is using the heavy hand of Congress to micromanage what school districts are trying to do to help these children.

So I would just ask the Members of the House to take a good hard look at this amendment and to consider the ramifications of voting for this because I think there is an unintended effect of passing this amendment that will further stigmatize people with mental illness.

Mr. Chairman, right now we have no child psychiatrists in this country because there is no reimbursement because we have a discriminatory health care system that does not acknowledge mental illness as a health matter at all. So how we expect a very, very limited number of people who are experts in this area to somehow begin to determine all of these caseloads, I think, is absolutely impractical, unless the gentleman would commit to me that he would work with us to get mental health parity passed so we can get more clinicians in the area of mental health.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Obviously the gentleman understood what I was saying. There are hardly any. Ask any of your friends, and they will say there is a fraction of a percent in this country.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to work with the gentleman to see us be more constructive with our funds. We know there are a lot of ways to identify children that are going to have emotional disturbances and learning disabilities as a result early on before they get put into special education. This Congress and others ought to be focusing more on putting in intervention services for those children. That is where I think our attention should be, not unintentionally making mental illness a stigma.

Mr. Chairman, the problem we have in this country right now is not that there are too many people who are overidentifying themselves as having mental illness; it is that it is too few people. And the notion that people are readily just going in there and saying, oh, my child is disabled or I have a mental illness, you have got to be kidding me. Two thirds of those who need the help are not getting it, and if my colleagues think that the people who really are going to be at the lower-end socioeconomic levels are going to be able to go to a doctor, pay for it to try to get identified so they can get this program, who do they think is going to get it under their bill? I will tell them who. People with health insurance and money. They are the only ones who are going to be able to afford to see a doc to get this designation. In addition to that, this mentally detectable and diagnosable, physiological condition, that has got stigma and stereotype written all over it. It is language that is basically for those who are concerned about this issue, code language for discrimination against people with mental illness; and that is a fact. And my colleagues can talk to anyone who leads any mental health organization in this country, NAMI, National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, any of those, and they will say this language here plays upon the age-old stereotype of people with mental illness. And I urge my colleagues to reject this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, once again I would just say, as my good friend has just said, the reason that doctors are not trained in identifying mental illness is that we still are living in a country where mental illness is not regarded as part of the body. In other words, brains are not considered an organ of the body currently in this country for purposes of insurance. So why should we be surprised when there are not any doctors out there who can have the training to do this? What the gentleman is doing is not helping us. It is hurting us. So I would just ask my colleagues once again please vote ``no'' on the Tancredo amendment.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to remove the name of the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Hastings) as a cosponsor of H.R. 953, the Paul Wellstone Mental Health Equitable Treatment Act.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to have my name removed as a cosponsor of H.R. 898.

Mr. Chairman, on rollcall No. 79 I was receiving a briefing on the war in Iraq with Secretary Rumsfeld and General Meyers. That occurred simultaneously with this rollcall.

Had I been present, I would have voted ``no.''

Stated against:

Mr. Speaker, I rise in favor of this resolution to support our men and women in harm's way serving this country.

Mr. Speaker, our Nation has been blessed for more than two centuries. At no time in the history of mankind has a society prospered like ours has. Through an industrious spirit, a deep sense of entrepreneurship, and a land teeming with natural resources and human talent, we have created a nation that is the dream of those in the world who lack our good fortune. We have led the world in the area of biotechnology and medical research for almost an entire century. There is no place else on Earth where people flock by the thousands to obtain the best that the arts and sciences of medicine have to offer.

With that said, there has been, however, a well kept secret regarding our nation's healthcare system, which was only recently brought to light by former United States Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher. In his landmark 1999 report, Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General, Dr. Satcher describes the crisis faced by our Nation's children who suffer from mental illness. According to this report, one out of every five children in America suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder, yet only one-third of them receive mental healthcare treatment.

Part of the reason for this alarming statistic is that mental health services specific to children are in very short supply. I hear time and time again the frustrations of pediatricians who cannot find available mental healthcare professionals for their patients who require psychological evaluations. There are many parents in our nation who are forced to relinquish custody of their disturbed children because outpatient psychiatric services are either not available or the wait for an appointment is weeks to months away. In my own state of Rhode Island, a physician affiliated with a leading psychiatric children's hospital told me recently that on any given day, up to one-third of the hospitalized youth could be home if only outpatient services were available.

That is why today Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and I are introducing the Child Healthcare Crisis Relief Act. This is a bill designed to help alleviate the paucity of mental health services for our nation's youth by providing incentives for mental healthcare workers to specialize in the treatment of children and adolescents.

The statistics are quite startling:

13,700,000 of America's children and adolescents have a diagnosable mental disorder.

There are 6,000,000 to 9,000,000 children and adolescents in the United States who meet the definition of having a serious emotional disturbance.

Approximately 5 to 9 percent of children and adolescents in the United States meet the definition of extreme functional impairment.

The demand for the services of child and adolescent psychiatry is projected to increase by 100 percent between 1995 and 2020.

There are approximately 513 students for each school counselor in United States schools. This ratio is more than double the recommended ratio of 250 students for each school counselor.

The Child Healthcare Crisis Relief Act creates incentives to help recruit and retain child mental health professionals providing direct clinical care, and to improve, expand, or help create programs to train child mental health professionals through the following mechanism:

Loan repayment and scholarships for child mental health and school- based service professionals to help pay back educational loans.

Grants to graduate schools to provide for internships and field placements in child mental health services.

Grants to help with pre-service and in-service training of paraprofessionals who work in clinical mental health settings for children.

Grants to graduate schools to help develop and expand child and adolescent mental health programs.

This bill also allows for an increase in the number of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists under the Medicare Graduate Medical Education Program and extends the board eligibility period for residents and fellows from four years to six years.

The Child Healthcare Crisis Relief Act is not only about providing incentives for health care workers, it is also a bill about expanding treatment options for children in need. Expanding treatment options expands the opportunities that children with mental health concerns have to grow and become happy and productive members of our society.

Children who do not receive adequate treatment for mental health problems start out in life with an albatross around their necks with significantly reduced opportunities. These children have a high probability of becoming involved with illicit substances, dropping out of school, and committing felonies including homicide. Just as tragic, many of these children will never make it into adulthood because of suicide.

The hope and the potential for endless possibilities that we, as a people, attribute to children are diminished with each child struggling with mental illness who does not receive adequate treatment. We may choose not to see their struggle out of ignorance or fear, but as an old English proverb says: ``We never know the worth of water `til the well is dry''.

Mr. Speaker, we cannot in good conscience sit back and allow the well to dry up when we know how to find a spring that can feed it. I, therefore, ask my colleagues to lend their support for my Child Healthcare Crisis Relief Act.

Mr. Speaker, I voted for the resolution authorizing the forcible disarmament of Iraq, and I continue to agree with the President of the United States that we should disarm Iraq by force, if necessary, in order to protect American lives. But I also recognize that if we go to war right now, the war will have little legitimacy in the eyes of the world community, and that increases the risks. I, therefore, believe that it is in our security interests to support Great Britain's latest proposal to establish specific unambiguous disarmament benchmarks and a firm deadline. Failure to comply with all requirements would trigger military action without further debate.

If Iraq does comply, we would have achieved our aims without the need for war, everybody's first choice. If Iraq again fails to meet its obligations, our

good-faith effort will have helped restore some of the U.S.'s lost credibility, thereby strengthening the coalition supporting the war as well as improving our ability to prosecute the war on terrorism, as well as decreasing the risk and cost of rebuilding Iraq after a conflict.

I urge my colleagues to support this reasonable approach to the crisis.

Madam Speaker, I, too, want to join my colleague, the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Langevin), in offering our heartfelt condolences to the families of the E2 Nightclub in Chicago for their tremendous loss. It is utterly ironic that the footage captured in Rhode Island of The Station nightclub on that terrible night was footage that was captured because a cameraman was following up on the local angle of club safety in light of what happened in Chicago. Those terrible images that we saw beamed across the country would not have been caught had it not been for our State trying to prevent what had happened in Chicago. How tragic it was that that is just what ended up happening.

Madam Speaker, it is with great regret that I stand on the floor of the House today to offer my sincerest condolences and heartfelt prayers to those who lost loved ones, to those who were lost, and those still recovering from the effects of the tragic fire in my State of Rhode Island. I know that there is nothing that we can say, no resolution that we can pass that will take away the consuming grief and the sense of loss that so many Rhode Islanders have felt and are feeling; but it is my hope that these condolences of the House, along with time, will help to heal those wounds.

I would like to say to my colleagues who have been watching the coverage of these sad events over the past days that you have no doubt heard several Rhode Islanders say that ``everyone in Rhode Island is separated by one and a half degrees,'' a play off of the well-known ``six degrees of separation'' adage. Rhode Island is a small, but proud, State. There are fewer of us in Rhode Island than in Los Angeles, Dallas, Fort Worth, or Philadelphia. In Rhode Island, everyone knows everyone. Ask any Rhode Islander, and they will tell you their State is not so much a State as a community, a community where people are born, raised, educated, and eventually raise their own families in this place that will always welcome them home.

To my colleagues, and especially to my colleague, the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Langevin), who I thank for bringing this resolution to the floor today, I say that the atmosphere under which we are at this time

and place, where generations of American representatives have marked tragedies and triumphs in the halls of this Republic, today we mourn the worst of those disasters ever to afflict the people of Rhode Island. To date, we have lost 99 of our families, friends, and neighbors to this terrible tragedy. That is nearly half as many Rhode Islanders as were lost in the entire Vietnam War in our State of Rhode Island.

A disaster of this magnitude in a community like Rhode Island has tested the limits of our collective comprehension, resilience, and grief. While we mourn, we still hold out the hope, and offer our prayers, to the 190 men and women still fighting their injuries across New England, as many as 40 in the hospital. Their struggles will be difficult, the road ahead challenging; but the people of Rhode Island have proven that community togetherness and family can see us through anything. We offer them our support and encouragement today, and we promise that we will still be there in the months and the years ahead to ensure that we never forget that they are going to be living with these injuries for the rest of their lives.

Madam Speaker, but for the brave first responders who came immediately and professionally to their call to duty, many of those in the hospitals today would no longer be with us, and most assuredly the number of those still recovering from their injuries would be much, much higher. The emergency personnel on duty who rushed to the scene, to those who simply passed or heard through the grapevine about the tragedy and selflessly responded, the men and women of this House today say ``thank you'' to all of them. They worked without thought for themselves that freezing night, and afterwards, not only to free the trapped from the inferno, and tended through their own tears to the cries of the wounded, but long past the tragedy to tend to the emotional and psychological wounds that continue to inflict these victims.

Madam Speaker, what we ask of first responders in these situations is to be superhuman in the face of staggering human suffering. Most of us spend our lives doing our best to keep ourselves and our loved ones out of situations that the police, fire, and medical personnel rush into every single day, day after day. Their heroism in this tragedy does not go unnoticed. It might be added that with so much evil emanating from the events of 9-11, it is fitting to acknowledge that our State would not have been able to react as quickly as it had were it not for the lessons learned in that tragedy.

Also, the leadership shown at so many levels of government is inspiring to those of us who believe that there are indeed good and honorable people in government service. I want to join my colleague, the gentleman from Rhode Island, in recognizing all those who he recognized in his remarks; but I too want to pay particular attention to our new Governor, Governor Carcieri, who has shown tremendous leadership under pressure. The compassion and personal touch that he has brought to our State has truly been inspirational. More than any other person, the Governor has held our State together through this tragedy.

So while we continue to mourn for those who have walked on from this world and offer our prayers to those still fighting to return to good health, let us help to lessen their grief by showing our gratitude to all those who have helped them through this adversity.

There will be, unfortunately, no shortage of time to grieve for the mother that will not be able to open the presents with her children at the holidays. There is no shortage of time to grieve for the brother who will not walk down the aisle with his new bride. There is no shortage of time to grieve for the spouse who will not celebrate her next anniversary with her husband, the grandfather who will not see his grandchildren graduate from college, or the child who will take his first steps without his parents to see him. Many Rhode Islanders will have the rest of their lives for these somber memories. Now is a time for remembrance of how the human spirit, above all, arises in times of tragedy, because that is the only thing, besides the passage of time, that will help ease our current pain.

Unlike other no-less-painful losses we experience in the course of our lives, too many young lives were lost this horrific night. This incident has reminded me of the words that my father spoke at my cousin, John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s, memorial service. He said: ``He was lost on that troubled night, but we will always wake for him, so that his time, which was not doubled, but cut in half, will live forever in our memory, and in our beguiled and broken hearts.''

Madam Speaker, our hearts are broken; and those who are lost will no doubt live forever in our memory.

I want to thank the gentleman from Rhode Island once again for all the work that he has done representing his district through these difficult times. I know that the people who have entrusted their faith to him have been well served, and I appreciate this opportunity to rise in support of his resolution and strongly urge my colleagues to give it the support that it deserves.

Mr. Speaker, on February 25, 2003, I was in my Congressional District in Rhode Island and consequently I missed two votes.

Had I been here I would of voted:

Yes on H. Res. 46

Yes on H. Con. Res. 40

At this time I would ask for unanimous consent that my positions be entered into the record following those votes or in the appropriate portion of the record.

Mr. Speaker, on February 26, 2003, I was in my congressional district in Rhode Island and consequently I missed two votes.

Had I been here I would have voted: ``yea'' on rollcall No. 35, and ``yea'' on rollcall No. 36.

At this time I would ask for unanimous consent that my positions be entered into the Record following those votes or in the appropriate portion of the Record.