Floor Statements

Well, last week the House and Senate adopted a policy that admits that supply does matter. We voted to stop putting 70,000 barrels of oil each day in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the world's consumption of oil. Then Iran announced it was going to slow down production.

In the meantime, the U.S. has massive supplies of oil that we're saying ``no'' to, and Congress continues to say we're not going to drill. Well, ``no'' is not an energy policy. Begging the Saudis for oil is not an energy policy. Just yelling in cathartic sessions at oil executives is not an energy policy.

America's families know, America's truckers know, let's drill for our own oil. Let's use America's own resources. Let's lower the price of gasoline and make this affordable.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize the Greater Latrobe Ice Cats who were crowned Pennsylvania Ice Hockey State Champions on Saturday, March 29.

This is the first championship won by the Ice Cats in their 28-year history and only the second time in school history that a team has won a state championship.

The Ice Cats defeated the Conestoga Pioneers at Memorial Arena in Johnstown.

Head Coach Ron Makoski, who led the team to victory, reminded the players that, win or lose, playing in a State championship would be something that each of the players would remember for the rest of their lives. I have no doubt that each of these players will remember this experience with great pride.

So congratulations to the Ice Cats, the players, the coaches and parents for capturing the Pennsylvania Cup Class AA Championship.

I know the school and community join me in best wishes to the team for their tremendous victory and distinguished season.

Mr. Speaker, I also thank the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Capps) for her thoughts and input on this bill, which I'm pleased to be a cosponsor today.

Appropriately, National Women's Health Week began this Monday, May 12, the day after Mother's Day, and this past Monday was National Women's Checkup Day. To this end, we encourage all women to discuss with their doctor the importance of regular checkups, self exams.

We also should note that the government has a Web site on this; it's www.womenshealth.gov/whw. There they recommend several tests that women should get on a regular basis.

Also like to mention, as we're focusing on women's health, as my colleague, my friend from California stated, this is also of interest and importance to men. Whether you're fathers or spouses or relatives, it's important to also be supportive of women's health and be supportive of exams they may need to have.

As we focus on this, I want to mention a few other conditions that impact women and the importance of Federal research funding. Fibromyalgia, for example, is a chronic pain illness characterized by widespread musculoskeletal aches, pains and stiffness, soft tissue tenderness, general fatigue and sleep disturbances.

Depression is another very important condition to highlight. Women, during and after pregnancy, for example, are at much greater risk to develop depression, and folks who have a chronic illness are at risk to develop depression.

Oftentimes, we neglect these important symptoms and aspects of health care when meeting with a physician. It is very important to review any concerns that anyone has, that women have when they have their annual exams, such as sleep problems, changes in appetite, mood changes, persistent sadness and other things. These are treatable conditions and not ones to shun in bringing up and discussing openly and honestly with their physician.

We have other things to comment on this, but at this point I will reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I now yield as much time as she may consume to the gentlewoman from Tennessee (Mrs. Blackburn), a leader and advocate on women's health issues.

Seeing as we have no more speakers, we're willing to close at this point and again draw attention and thank Mr. Hinchey for his support on this resolution. I ask all Members to be supportive of it.

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 258, I inadvertently voted ``nay.'' I intended to vote ``yea.''

Personal Explanation

Madam Speaker, on Saturday, March 15, the Jeannette High School basketball team from my district won the State's Class AA championship. The Jeannette Jayhawks became the second high school in all of Pennsylvania history to reach the achievement of winning both the state basketball and state football championships. Led by players Terrelle Pryor, Shaw Sunder, and Jordan Hall, and Coach Jim Nesser, the Jayhawks won a game that will go down as one of the best in PIAA history and cap a remarkable season in which the team went 25-4.

This is a great accomplishment for a small school district in southwestern Pennsylvania which has excelled in the classroom. McKee Elementary was named a Blue Ribbon school, and all the district's schools received the Keystone Achievement Recognition this year, with the school district getting the bronze medal.

Congratulations to the entire Jeannette school district and to the entire Jeannette community.

Mr. Speaker, recently I met with a number of independent truckers in my district who said that many of their businesses cannot survive the current cost of diesel fuel. And many of my constituents have also said they cannot continue to pay these rising prices of gasoline, the rising prices of food.

What much of this comes down to is: Congress has to end its embargo on American oil. To say we cannot drill in the gulf coast, the Atlantic coast, the

Pacific coast, in the Colorado area with the shale oil, or Alaska, has reached a point where OPEC has continued to grab us by the throat and continues to fund both sides of the war on terror.

Americans understand that whoever controls the supply can demand whatever price they want. And now with gasoline being over 70 percent of the cost of oil, isn't it time that America took control of its own economy and began to use its own resources in an environmentally responsible way?

Let's end the embargo on American oil. Let's take back control of our economy. Let's take action on this.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues today to support H.R. 5613, the Medicaid Safety Net Act. There's a lot of misinformation about what this bill does. Here are the facts.

When CMS put forth regulations to cut Medicaid service to save money, Mr. Barton's and Mr. Dingell's leadership not only prevented its cuts, but we actually saved more money than the cuts did.

We can't keep doing business in Washington the same way. Cutting services to save money the easy way, but not always the right way. We cannot cut programs for seniors on fixed incomes, for disabled children, for the medically needy.

Without this bill, North Carolina loses $2.5 billion, Missouri $1.4 billion, Florida $665 million. But with this bill we provide health care and cut waste, fraud and abuse.

I encourage the President to look past the rhetoric, withdraw his veto threat and encourage my colleagues to support this bill and support families in need.

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 218, I inadvertently voted ``yes'' and had intended to vote ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that my name be removed as a cosponsor of H.R. 1665.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member.

The CBO doesn't score savings. If it did, it would note that drug and alcohol addictions cost $400 billion each year, that depression costs employers $51 billion each year, that depression increases the risk for chronic illness, and that chronic illness and untreated depression doubles the cost of health care. It would also note that caffeine withdrawal and jet lag are not something that insurance companies pay for. In fact, they are not medically necessary. It is not occurring here.

But let's see what really happens with a person with mental illness, and I am saying this as a psychologist, as someone who has seen this time and time again, how the symptom really works. A person with a deadly disease such as anorexia or bulimia withers away until malnutrition and dehydration puts them in the hospital. Once the hospital stabilizes them, they come out. Maybe they will have a visit or two with a counselor or psychiatrist or psychologist. Maybe their primary care physician will put that person on some medication. And 75 percent of psychotropic drugs are prescribed by nonpsychiatrists, by people not trained in the field, because they don't have treatment possibilities under their health care plan.

I oftentimes have a somewhat tongue-in-cheek agreement with obstetricians: I don't deliver babies, and they don't treat mental illness. Unfortunately, that may be all the plan allows for.

But let's look at us as Members of Congress. Out of 435 Members of Congress, out of the 10,000 employees on our side of the Hill, we know that there are hundreds, thousands of people, quite frankly, who at some point in their working career will have some mental illness. What do we do with a well-trained employee? Do we say, you're fired? Do we say, go out and suck it up? Do we send them out into the unemployment system? Do we send them out into the welfare system? Do we take our children and send them out to the educational system and say, let the school take care of it? If it is a family member, do we say, well, be part of the criminal justice system, perhaps go into the emergency room system? No. We have the situation as Members of Congress where we can say, no, you can get help and you can get treatment.

Why not for the rest of the country? Why not look at this as a cost- saving measure? This is more than just a compassionate measure. I speak as someone who has treated the mentally ill all my professional life, for 25 years. I know time and time again, when the people who are trained in this field to do something are told, no, you can't see this patient anymore, what do you say to the autistic child's parents? What do you say to somebody suffering from depression? What do you say to that person with anorexia or bulimia or any host of other problems when you have to say you are not covered, and so they are treated by someone with nothing in terms of experience in that field?

If we really want to save money, if we really are looking at things to help business, let's look at and see what AT&T and Pepsi and PPG and other corporations have said, that it saves them millions of dollars in indirect costs, billions of dollars.

Let's be honest about this. If we leave the system the way it is, we will see more wasted money. We will see more deaths. We will see more people mistreated or lacking treatment. Let's do the right thing.

I thank my friend from Tennessee for yielding.

Madam Speaker, when we look at the economy that our Nation is facing and what we should be doing about it, quite frankly, in the area of energy, what we need to see is our Nation take on the issue of energy as a scientific challenge of our time. Really, it should be nothing less than the Apollo Project of our time where our resources for research and development and our educational institutions look to answer the question: How do we make our country energy secure in a way that is respectful of the environment and our public health?

I was noticing today that oil is trading at $100 a barrel. This will probably continue to climb. It will continue to climb as long as we continue to embargo our own oil resources off the Atlantic Coast, the gulf coast, the Pacific Coast, the Western States, and Alaska. And, yes, we need to do a great deal to improve the efficiency of automobiles. We need to do a great deal to improve the efficiencies of our highways, which waste massive amounts of fuel. But in terms of our economy, we cannot continue to have our families suffer the high prices that come when we say we will continue to be more and more dependent upon importation of foreign oil sources. We also are more and more dependent upon the marketplace with regard to natural gas. When we see our chemical companies shutting down plants in America and instead saying they'll build plants in the Mideast because the cost of natural gas is so much cheaper there, perhaps 25 cents to $1 per million Btus, whereas here it may fluctuate to $6 or $8 or $10 or $12, it is something that's costing jobs and costing our economy.

It is something that is costing jobs and costing our economy. It is difficult to see our President of the United States go and talk to Saudi leaders and ask them to increase production of oil recognizing that we are at their mercy as OPEC continues to set prices. We can change that by saying we will explore in environmentally responsible ways Americans' oil resources.

Let's look, for example, to shale oil in Colorado. Estimates are 2 trillion barrels of oil there, 2 trillion barrels of shale oil. We cut that off in our omnibus spending bill. This is forcing us to continue to import oil, some 60 percent. We limit development on natural gas. We also have situations where we are hurting our coal development. Our energy bills that we are facing this week and have faced for a while have not done much to improve our use of coal, but we have some 300 years' worth of coal.

What we ought to be doing is focusing our research and development dollars into using coal and cleaning it up so it does not have emissions, so it does not have large levels of CO2s, so it does not pollute. That is a scientific challenge of our time. That is something we should be challenging our students as they go through school to think about how they can solve these issues, how they can create clean energy from our abundant resources of coal, how they can continue to find ways of using oil resourcefully and with environmental respect.

This is not something we are doing enough of. So what happens? It costs families more to go to work, it costs families more to feed their families. Look at what is happening with wheat prices. Yes, there are problems with wheat production in other parts of the world, but a big part of those costs has to do with the cost of transporting things. Last summer, flour was sold at about $16 per hundredweight. Now it is $40 or so, probably climbing to $60. How will we handle it if a loaf of bread doubles on top of the increased prices people have to pay driving their cars to get to the grocery store? It is too much of a burden.

If we treat our energy needs as our Apollo project of this 21st century, of this decade, we would find jobs and more jobs and more jobs come out of this. The best economic stimulus package is a job. That is where we should be focusing. What can we do to build our infrastructure there? What kind of jobs come from building energy power plants? What happens when we start to put all our laborers, carpenters, ironworkers, boilermakers and electrical workers to build these plants?

Let me tell you how big this demand is. We have 400 old coal-fired power plants with inefficient or no pollution controls on many of them. We need to replace those 400 coal power plants, and because our energy demands of this country are going to double by 2050, we have to build an additional 400. We have to replace 100 nuclear plants and build an additional 100.

What that means is, starting in 2010, a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open up a new coal-fired power plant every 2 weeks and a new nuclear plant every 2\1/2\ months. These are massive jobs for America. We should be making those investments so we have those jobs. And the best thing we can be doing is finding ways to clean up our resources. Why, the Pittsburgh coal seam alone, as my friend from Tennessee knows, overlaps my State of Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama. And that is just one of our vast resources.

Let's focus our energy on doing what is right for the long-term for America, for America's jobs and America's economy, and stop saying ``no'' to energy security.

Mr. Speaker, here's today's grisly toll. 235,626 cases, 11,661 deaths, and a cost of $5.89 billion. What I'm talking about here are the number of people who obtain and die and the overall cost of infections in our hospitals every year, from MRSA, from pneumonia and other infections. It is time that Congress got serious about this.

In the last 3 years since I've first introduced this bill, 90,000 people have died each year from infections they pick up at hospitals. It is time we pass the Healthy Hospitals Act, H.R. 1174, and work to make sure our hospitals are safer.

Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 65, I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. Speaker, we are facing massive problems with regard to the price of energy. Energy costs money, and expensive energy costs jobs, and we are seeing that now happen in our economy.

We are standing at a critical crossroad, and if we fail to deal with our energy needs in a responsible way, we will face not only the concerns about the environment, but we will face and we are facing economic recession threats and major job losses.

Earlier today, the Department of Commerce released December's trade deficit numbers, which, once again, strongly underscored the need for American energy independence. The good news is that the trade deficit shrank by 6.9 percent to $58.76 billion. But the bad news is that energy imports continue to make up over half of our trade deficit, over half, 55 percent. In November, it was the reason why we had major increases.

We continue to see risk that oil was sold for only $50 a barrel a year ago and gas into $2.50, and is going to continue to climb.

As long as we continue down this road of importing foreign oil to the United States, we will be allowing OPEC nations to call the shots for our economy and becoming more dependent upon hostile countries for oil. When OPEC manipulates production, rural oil prices soar. And our President is left to go and ask Saudi leaders to produce more oil, more Saudi oil, not more American oil.

We have Venezuelan leader, President Hugo Chavez, threatening to cut off oil to the United States and Exxon. If they were to do that, the price of oil would increase throughout the world. Chavez himself predicted the cost per barrel would double to $200 and increase our prices. Such a move would show all of these oil-producing countries that they can control our actions by shutting down our access to oil. We've already seen natural gas prices manipulated by Russia. We've seen these energy prices increase. But when we buy oil from countries with a history of supporting terrorism, the worst part about this is we are funding both sides of the war on terror.

Meanwhile, what has Congress done in the last year or two? Well, it's put on an embargo on our own oil. It's blocked exploration for American oil. Congress has voted to prevent oil production, oil drilling in the Atlantic coast, the gulf coast, the Pacific coast, Colorado and Alaska. These bans on drilling for our own oil are particularly preposterous in light of the fact that China and Cuba are drilling within 60 miles of our Florida coast while we are not allowed to drill off our coast.

The U.S. contains 70 percent of the world's shale oil reserves, enough to supply our country with energy for hundreds of years if we are allowed to use it. But rather than turning to this resource that can lead us to energy independence and energy security, we once again turn our backs to it. Last year, we cut off access to 2 trillion barrels of shale oil in the western States in the omnibus spending bill. Such policies have forced us to continue this increase of importing oil.

What happens is the impact upon the American family in terms of costs. We see increased costs for food as we also try using corn for ethanol. But when 20 percent of corn is being used for ethanol, we see the cost of food go up. We see the costs of transporting food go up. We see the cost of wheat climbing because not only is it a concern with regard to shortages of wheat coming from other nations, but it's also a huge concern on the cost of transporting that wheat. So what was $16 per hundred weight last year for wheat for our bakers to use their flour, now it's $40, with anticipation to climb much more.

How will Americans react when they know that while Congress continues to embargo the American oil resources, a loaf of bread is going to climb from $1.50 to $3 a loaf. Americans don't understand why we cannot drill for our own oil.

Yes, we need to do so many things to clean up the air. Yes, we need to make sure we are investing in clean coal technology so that the 300 years' worth of coal we have in this Nation can be used to cleanly produce electricity. We have to make sure we are using clean nuclear energy. We have to make sure that natural gas is used for what it's supposed to be as a chemical product to make fertilizer rather than producing energy at a very high cost and thereby allow us to use it for making fertilizer and other products that can help also reduce the cost of our food products.

But instead, we continue to say no to American oil, and it just doesn't make sense. Here is what America's going to face by 2050: our energy demands are going to double. That means we have 400 coal-fired power plants that need to be rebuilt and an additional 400 built. We have 100 nuclear power plants that need to be rebuilt because they are old, and we need to build an additional 100.

That means starting in the year 2010, we have to open up a new clean coal power plant every 2\1/2\ weeks and a nuclear plant every 2\1/2\ months, and we haven't even started building them yet. It cannot be done. Instead, what we are probably going to face is rolling brownouts because the efforts we are doing are not going to suffice.

I hope this House will move forward, take the embargoes off coal, and begin to really move towards clean coal technology and stop the embargo on oil.

Mr. Speaker, on Friday, December 14, 2007, the varsity football team from Thomas Jefferson High School in Jefferson Hills, Pennsylvania, won the Class AAA State football championship in Hershey, clinching the Jaguars' second title in 4 years. With a final score of 28-3, the Jaguars finished a perfect season. Zach Decicco, Thomas Jefferson's quarterback, threw for 137 yards and two scores, ran for 11 yards and a score, and picked off a pass on defense.

Coach Bill Cherpak became just the third head coach in western Pennsylvania history to achieve a perfect win record in more than one appearance at the State championship game in Hershey.

Thomas Jefferson High School and the West Jefferson Hills School District also excel in academics, ranking in the top 20 of Pennsylvania's 501 school districts.

Congratulations to coach Bill Cherpak and the Thomas Jefferson High School Jaguars for being champions on the field and champions in the classroom.