[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 69 (Thursday, May 16, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H5268-H5275]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




         PROGRAMS THAT HELP PEOPLE MOST GET BIGGEST BUDGET CUTS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 
12, 1995, the gentleman from New York [Mr. Owens] is recognized for 60 
minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we have just completed phase I of the most 
important process that takes place here in the Congress, and that is 
the budget of the United States of America for a 1-year period that 
deals with the fiscal 1997 budget, which will run from October 1, 1996 
to September 30, 1997.
  It is important that the public understand that the budget that we 
have discussed today in the budget process is only the beginning. It 
sets the upper limits in terms of expenditures in broad categories, 
that the real spending process which gets into great detail is the 
appropriations process.
  Now, the Committee on Appropriations oversees the appropriation 
process, and the way the budget appropriations process was handled in 
the first half of the 104th Congress, it may be that the Committee on 
Appropriations could just send the rest of us home and take over and 
run the rest of the session because the other committees have very 
little power in the decision making, and this particular Congress, 
controlled by the Republican majority, we have less power than ever.
  You know, if Congress really were to be truthful about the way it is 
organized, about who has real power, then it is the Committee on 
Appropriations, it is the Committee on Ways and Means, the two or three 
committees that the way they have stacked the deck and the way they 
guarantee control from the top have all the power. The Committee on 
Appropriations has far too much power.
  You could organize Congress another way. Each one of the committees 
that

[[Page H5269]]

has jurisdiction and authorization could also have the power to 
appropriate because they have the knowledge, they deal with the 
particular functions in an ongoing fashion, they have the oversight 
responsibility. They know more about each one of the functions than the 
Committee on Appropriations knows.
  For example, in education you have a Committee on Economic and 
Educational Opportunity, which has existed for years under another name 
called Education and Labor Committee, and members of that committee 
know a great deal about education legislation, they know a lot about 
how the schools operate, they know a great deal about policies and 
experiments and research and the knowledge that has accumulated on that 
committee. But when it comes to making the vital decisions about how 
money is going to be appropriated, it is the Committee on 
Appropriations which will make the decisions about how money is 
appropriated for education.
  Now, most corporations would go out of business if they were 
organized that way, where the greatest amount of knowledge and know-how 
is concentrated in one place and the decision making, which is vital, 
is concentrated another place. But that is the way it operates.
  So the budget starts the process, education is function 500, and this 
budget sets the parameters in terms of we cannot go over the figures 
that are set in the budget process for education. Of course, the 
figures are set not just by this House of Representatives, but the 
Senate also will have to deliberate and pass their own budget bill. 
There will be a reconciliation, and then the Senate and the House 
together will have the final say on this particular budget process 
because it does not go to the President.
  The President started the budget process when he sent a budget to us, 
and these are reactions and responses to his budget. So when the budget 
process is finished, he does not get it back; he will not have a chance 
to veto the budget. Each one of the appropriation bills that then comes 
out of the budget process will go to the President in each one of these 
functions: Labor, education, health care, et cetera.
  I think it is important to take note of this at this critical point. 
We are often to the process which matters most to the American people. 
How will the Federal dollars be allocated? How will the dollars that 
flow into the Federal Government from all over America--they are not 
Federal dollars; that is the wrong term--all dollars come from 
neighborhoods, they come from families, they come in individuals. The 
dollars that make up the Federal Budget are our dollars, and how will 
they be allocated to meet our needs, to meet the needs of the majority 
of the people? That is a critical question.
  There has been a lot of talk about States rights and States rights to 
do various things, and in many cases States are assuming rights to 
spend money that comes back to them from the Federal Government, great 
amounts of money that did not flow out of their particular State. There 
are a large number of States that get far more money from the Federal 
Government than they pay into the Federal Government from their 
population.
  That is the way the American system is structured. We are one Nation, 
and the money does not flow to the States on the basis of their 
contribution, it flows based on many different factors. Some States are 
more fortunate than others at landing defense contracts. Some States 
are more fortunate than others in having big power projects. The TVA is 
not located in New York because we did not have the kind of situation 
where the water and the necessary conditions to create a Tennessee 
Valley Authority was there. So Tennessee Valley Authority was a Federal 
project that poured large amounts of Federal money into Tennessee. For 
various reasons, NASA is located in Florida, and part of it is located 
in Texas, and on and on it goes.
  The Speaker's district has the largest contract to manufacture 
fighter planes. F-22 fighter planes are manufactured in Marietta, GA, 
which is part of the Speaker's district.
  So you have large amounts of money flowing to the States from the 
Federal Government, and the States now said they want the right to do 
everything themselves. I would be willing to listen to that argument 
and say that in this budget-making process let us give States the right 
to spend money that they generate; the amount that they receive from 
the Federal Government, which is above the amount that came out of the 
State in terms of taxpayers, let us cut that off and give it back to 
the States which are generating the money.
  I have made this argument many times because I really am very 
concerned about the fact that traditionally New York State has always 
been on the giving side and the giving has been very great, you know. 
It rose as high as $23 billion in 1993, and in 1994 it is $18 billion. 
We are sending to the Federal Government more than $18 billion more 
than we are getting back from the Federal Government. Before that, in 
1993, we were sending $23 billion, and I am very concerned about this, 
and I keep speaking about it and bringing it up as often as I can 
because I think that New Yorkers ought to know this, people in New York 
ought to know this, and I think the people in the other States on the 
other end who are receiving the money ought to know this, that if we 
have States' rights, the people in New York would be far better off if 
they kept their $18 billion at home, and the States that are receiving 
the extra money, let them fend for themselves.

  You know, that is an argument in States' rights that nobody has 
offered, but we ought to take a close look at that.
  So as we go into the budget-making process, the appropriations 
process will follow that. It is important to understand some of these 
basic contradictions and facts. But understand also that for the 104th 
Congress under the leadership of the Republican majority, this is now 
phase II, phase II of the drive to remake America.
  You know, Speaker Gingrich always says that politics is war without 
blood and that we are in a war to remake America. Those analogies and 
the comparisons with war are the Speaker's comparisons, and we have to 
live with them, I guess, and certainly they have prosecuted the effort 
so far as it was war. We have had a situation where the Republican 
majority has moved in a way that you move in war, you know, with a 
rapid movement. You know, it is revolution, it is extremism, it is not 
letting up, pushing to try to accomplish a great deal over a short 
period of time. There is a sense of desperation introduced into 
legislative process. They want to remake America, and they see 
themselves as having 2 years to remake America.
  Automatically you have a process by which mistakes are bound to be 
made, dislocations in great amounts are going to take place. Maybe a 
great amount of people are going to suffer. The Speaker says that it is 
war without blood, but maybe some people are gong to bleed as a result 
of the rapid movement of our Government to remake itself.
  So far in phase I, I would say that the Republican majority has been 
very successful. I apologize to my Democratic colleagues who like to 
say that we have succeeded, but if you look at the situation in terms 
of the budget process, the Republican majority, the juggernaut, the 
great Wehrmacht of the Republican's war machine that has moved forward 
and established beachheads and gone for the jugular in so many cases 
laid out a plan where they were going to cut the budget by huge amounts 
of money and moved in very radical ways, very extreme ways, to 
accomplish that. As we all know, at one point they even shut down the 
Government, we shut down the Government more than once, as a result of 
the extremist agenda that they were trying to accomplish.
  Well, it was all over, and we finally got all of the appropriations 
bills passed. Too many Democrats have said that we won a major victory. 
We did not win a major victor. The Republicans achieved $23 billion in 
cuts. There were $23 billion in cuts, and you might say, well, we 
wanted to downsize and streamline the Government, so why not call it a 
victory for everybody? Problem is that all the cuts are concentrated in 
nondefense areas. It is the programs that help people most that receive 
the biggest cuts.
  Yes, we won some victories in terms of phase I in this war to remake 
America, we made them back away from $5

[[Page H5270]]

billion in education cuts. Thanks to the common sense of the American 
people and their understanding of what was going on in education, they 
rallied, they let their Representatives know that they understood the 
nature of the education cuts, and they put enough people on the spot to 
make the majority retreat on $5 billion worth of education cuts.
  But there were $23 billion in other cuts that were made. Some of them 
might have been legitimate. There is always waste in a government as 
big as ours, and nobody is going to argue that you cannot cut a lot of 
waste out. But we wonder if they really zeroed into places where the 
waste is. Pentagon is not downsizing. The Pentagon military 
establishment, as we know it, is not streamlining. In fact, in this 
budget, phase II of the new budget that was passed today, there is $13 
billion in increases for military expenditures. So they are not 
downsized.

  In this budget there is no mention made of the CIA bringing it under 
control and guaranteeing that you never have a situation again where 
the CIA will accumulate $2 billion in a petty cash fund. I talked about 
that before. Our auditors discovered that $2 billion was accumulated in 
the CIA petty cash fund.
  What steps are we taking to see that does not happen again? We have 
the Federal Reserve, that had $3.7 billion accumulated in what they 
call the rainy day slush fund, the rainy day fund for the Federal 
Reserve Bank, and in 79 years they never had a rainy day. The General 
Accounting Office said they never had losses in 79 years. So that is a 
place where waste is taking place on a large scale; $3.7 billion in the 
Federal Reserve.
  There is nothing in this budget that talks about efforts to collect 
money that is lying around in various agencies like that.
  So we have phase II now beginning, and the budget that has been 
introduced by the Republican majority for phase II in their war to 
remake America, this budget is as extreme as the first one was. There 
are a few trimmings here and there, but basically there is no change in 
direction. So anybody that thinks that we have stopped the juggernaut, 
that we have contained the war to remake America, the extreme war to 
remake America, you are dreaming. It is not happening. In this cut 
there are extreme--in this budget there are extreme cuts.
  I am glad to see that again we made a breakthrough on education. 
There are no proposals to totally eliminate the Department of Education 
anymore, so that is a plus because we were in a situation where we were 
about to eliminate the Department of Education and become the only 
industrialized nation in the world not to have a central department of 
education.

                              {time}  1800

  Our public education is very weak as it is, and we do not necessarily 
want the kind of bureaucracy that some of the other nations have, and 
we do not want to give the kind of power to our Department of Education 
that they may have in Germany or in Japan, but we definitely need to 
keep the Department of Education.
  Mr. Speaker, I applaud the Republican majority for backing away from 
the threat to eradicate the Department of Education. But it still has 
many education cuts. The budget eliminates many education programs.
  What is particularly troublesome is the deep cuts in training 
programs; for instance, the funding for programs in the careers bill. 
The careers bill is where they lumped all the training programs 
together in one bill, and they have cut that by 42 percent, 42 percent. 
That is going toward one-half. These are job training programs.
  Mr. Speaker, how do we expect to go forward into the 21st century and 
to readjust our economy to meet all the challenges of a high-technology 
economy if we are not going to give people training? How do we expect 
to have a work force that is being dislocated, downsized, and shuffled 
around? The legitimate term for it is ``churning''; there is churning 
going on in the work place, there is churning going on in the big 
corporations, and the workers in the process are being churned around, 
spewed out, and they can always find a job somewhere else, although 
they have lost their regular job that they might have been on 10 or 15 
years.
  So the churning process, if it is going to be humane and going to 
help people pick up and go on, it needs to have training programs, but 
the training programs have been cut by 42 percent in this Republican 
phase II budget.
  As I said before, the phase II budget is really a continuation of 
what we had before. It is not very different in every respect. It is 
still extreme. The retreat on education is only there because of the 
fact that we have gotten the American people alerted. They are watching 
to see what happens with education. They are on the job, they are 
letting their Representatives know, Republicans and Democrats, and they 
will not tolerate any drastic cuts in Head Start programs, they will 
not tolerate drastic cuts in title I programs. So we have that much 
accomplished, but everything else is still moving forward.
  The contract to remake America and the budget, the budget-balancing 
effort, is really an assault on the New Deal programs that were 
developed by Franklin Roosevelt. It is an assault on the programs that 
were developed in the Great Society, programs by Lyndon Johnson. It is 
a frontal assault of trying to wipe those programs out.
  Saving money is only secondary, if it is important at all, because 
they are proposing to put large amounts of money into star wars, which, 
of course, has accomplished very little. Billions have been spent there 
already and it has accomplished very little.
  There is no great hurry to invest large amounts of money in building 
a star wars system or a system to intercept missiles, when the 
technology probably will be far better if we wait a little later to do 
the building. So the President's proposal that we do research and we 
prepare is more than adequate. But they are going to waste money in 
that area, so money is really not the problem. Money is not the 
greatest concern.
  Destruction of the New Deal programs, destruction of the Great 
Society programs: They want to destroy Medicaid, they want to destroy 
Medicare, they want to wipe out programs that have benefited people for 
years, and they want to do this in the interest of a small, elite group 
that will make a great deal of money off the destruction of these 
programs and the replacement of these programs with other programs.
  So it is important to see the new budget as phase 2 of the war. The 
new budget is a blueprint for invasion, for destruction. The new budget 
is more of the scorched earth policy that started with the majority 
takeover in 1994. It is extreme, it is revolutionary, it is harmful. 
People will literally die as a result of what is being done in this 
area.
  In education and training, for example, the details can become 
important, depending on where you sit. Goals 2000, which they proposed 
to eliminate last time, is again eliminated in this budget. Innovative 
education programs, strategies, grants, eliminated. Bilingual and 
immigrant education programs are eliminated. New funding for Perkins 
loans, student-centered grants are eliminated. Howard University 
funding is eliminated.
  Libraries are cut 20 percent; libraries, which have a tiny amount of 
money, I think $110 million, a very tiny amount of money when you 
consider all the libraries across the country that exist and that need 
help as we go toward meeting the educational needs of the 21st century, 
they are cut 30 percent.

  Twenty-four other education programs are eliminated. Aid to 
education, institutional development, is cut $46 million. National and 
community service programs again are eliminated, AmeriCorps.
  That is a bargaining chip. They eliminate a program that they know 
has a high priority at the White House, and they are going to bargain 
later on to get the White House to accept some of these other cuts as a 
result of restoring that.
  The Davis-Bacon Act and the Service Contract Act are eliminated. The 
Davis-Bacon and Service Contract Act require prevailing wages to be 
paid on Federal construction jobs and in Federal facilities across the 
Nation, and that is eliminated; although what has happened is that the 
prevailing wages are very close, in most cases, to minimum wages in 
many parts of the country at this point.
  The Corporation for Public Broadcasting will be eliminated, 
privatized

[[Page H5271]]

by the year 2002. The National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, 
eliminated.
  So what is new? The battle plan remains the same, the invasion plan 
remains the same. The scorched earth policy remains the same. There is 
not very much that is new here.
  In energy, in a time of skyrocketing increases in energy prices, this 
budget proposes real cuts in energy funding by 47.05 percent. It wipes 
out all funding for research on fossil fuels, solar, and renewable 
energy and energy conservation, at a time when we are recognizing more 
and more that our environment and the dangers that the environment 
faces from pollution are not fantasies of environmentalists, they are 
very real.
  People have died of certain diseases. Asthma is increasing in our big 
cities in large amounts. The percentage increases are quite large of 
people suffering from asthma and other respiratory diseases. The 
handwriting is on the wall that the environment is not something to be 
left to a handful of people who have a vision, but the environment 
ought to concern everybody. Then we are going to wipe out all funding 
for research in the areas that will deal with the pollution factors 
that related to that increase.
  Transportation. It phases out funding that supports mass transit 
operations. Again, pollution will be increased, because in big cities 
people will drive cars more and more and use other vehicles above the 
surface because they cannot get money to keep supporting our subway 
systems. Even our bus systems above ground that do cause a problem with 
pollution, it is better to have more buses carrying more people than to 
have more cars carrying more people, because you get less of a 
pollution factor when you have buses instead of cars. But we are 
cutting the capital assistance to mass transit. We are eliminating any 
new starts, support for any new starts in the mass transit system.

  At a time when we are trying to get people off of welfare and get 
them to work, we are going to make it more difficult for them to get to 
work, because it is going to cost more to get to work. We also at the 
same time are going to continue polluting the air.
  In the area of crime and law enforcement, this budget defunds, wipes 
out the COPS Program, and abandons efforts to put 100,000 new police 
officers on the street by the year 2000. We thought we had settled that 
one, it is such a popular program across the country. We thought that 
the extremists would certainly yield to common sense and yield to the 
fact that the American people had made it clear that they want the COPS 
Program, they want the cops on the streets. But in this budget, no, we 
continue the same practice that was started in the first budget of this 
session. The extremist blueprint calls for an elimination totally of 
the COPS Program.
  The earned income tax credit, which is a way to give tax relief for 
low-income working people, we got a $20 billion cut in this budget for 
the earned income tax credit, which really provides great relief to 
people at the lowest levels. They say they want a tax cut, but the one 
tax cut that is already in effect, they take it away, in effect, for 
people at the lowest levels, they take it away.
  They still want a tax cut, however. It is being proposed for the rich 
in large amounts. Twenty billion dollars has been taken away from the 
earned income tax credit. This cut reduces the after-tax increase of 
almost 8 million households in America; 6.8 million children will be 
hurt by this cut. This change is particularly offensive in light of the 
Republican rhetoric about moving people from welfare to work. We ought 
to make work pay. We ought to reward people when they go to work, but 
the earned income tax credit, which was doing that, is being 
drastically cut.

  There is nothing in this budget about minimum wage. Minimum wage is 
not a function of government. The taxpayers do not have to pay for 
minimum wage, so it is not in the budget. It will not be in the 
appropriations bill. A minimum wage increase is a situation where 
employees pay additional wages.
  The proposal that was put forth by the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. 
Gephardt], the Democratic minority leader, and the proposal that was 
endorsed, sanctioned by President Clinton, is a proposal for a 45 cent 
increase over the present minimum wage; 45 cents one year and 45 in 
another year, 90 cents that will not be in the budget, 90 cents that 
the taxpayers do not have to shell out. So the minimum wage increase is 
not going to cost us anything. Seventy-four percent of the people in 
America say that a minimum wage increase is a fair approach to 
guaranteeing that people have the opportunity to earn a decent living.
  Nevertheless, the extremist blueprint, the invasion plan, refuses to 
entertain any increase in the minimum wage. I said before that this is 
about more than saving money, and the fact that the Republican majority 
has dug in and is adamantly opposed to a minimum wage increase is just 
one more indication that saving money and balancing the budget are not 
the only agenda.
  The agenda is designed to wipe out the New Deal programs, to wipe out 
the Great Society programs, and the agenda is designed secretly to wipe 
out the gains made by working people, to destroy the effectiveness of 
unions. A tax on working people, a tax on unions, are not part of the 
Contract With America. You will not find anything in there that says 
they want to destroy Davis-Bacon, that they want to change the Fair 
Labor Standards Act so that people cannot get their overtime.
  Nowhere in the Contract With America does the Republican majority say 
we want your overtime. But they do want your overtime. Not only are 
they moving in ways which deny a minimum wage increase to all workers, 
but the workers who have been working for years, the workers who have 
enjoyed overtime when they had the necessity to be employed overtime, 
they would get overtime pay, we are not being told that they should not 
get overtime pay, that they should get comp time.
  So the blueprint for the second half of the Republican war to remake 
America, it wants your overtime. One of the targets, one of the 
objectives is to take your overtime; nor to give you a minimum wage 
increase, but also to take your overtime. It is not in the budget. I am 
digressing from discussion of the budget, but it is part of the design 
to remake America.

  It is part of a situation where, to please contributors, to please 
certain elite groups, the workers must be sacrificed, the workers must 
be given the status of serfs, peons, or sharecroppers. The workers must 
be put in a position where they have to beg. They must be put in a 
position where they have no power.
  There are other moves to change labor law which we will discuss next 
week, but certainly the minimum wage, denial of the minimum wage 
increase, it should be noted, is not a budgetary item. It does not cost 
the taxpayers anything, but that is part of this great blueprint.
  First I want to comment for the tax package. The EITC is one place 
where taxes are being added, and a tax increase is being forced on the 
low-income people by removing $20 billion in funding for the EITC. The 
tax package in this budget, on the other hand, does still provide for 
people who are rich to have a decrease in their taxes, and part of the 
drive to cut Medicare and to cut Medicaid and many other worthwhile 
programs is to generate still the funds to fund the tax increase.
  Probably the most devastating part of this effort to remake America 
is the part that focuses its guns on Medicare and Medicaid. That is a 
life and death matter. You are dealing with people's health and you are 
dealing with lives. We have large expenditures for Medicare, we have 
large expenditures for Medicaid, yes.

                              {time}  1815

  I can think of no more noble expenditure of public funds than to 
expend those funds to promote the health of people or to save lives. In 
New York State, we have large expenditures of funds for Medicare and 
Medicaid. In fact, our State has been criticized for spending more on 
Medicaid than any other State in the Union.
  Yes, we do have those large expenditures. It costs the people of the 
State a great deal because they are matching, New York State matches 
the funds 50 percent, unlike other States that have a better match 
where the Federal Government pays a larger percentage than

[[Page H5272]]

the State. The percentage paid for Medicaid in New York State is 50 
percent. So we are spending large amounts of money like anywhere else 
in the country.
  We probably could trim the budget by eliminating waste, we could 
probably trim the budget by eliminating some corruption. Waste and 
corruption always exist in any program where human beings are involved. 
The minute you invent the program, the hustlers and the swindlers will 
move in and find a way to unjustly squeeze large amounts of money out 
of the program.
  Therefore, you have to have inspectors general and you have to have 
strict law enforcement, you have to have accountability. We just always 
assume that any program, and it does not matter whether it is health 
care or housing, in the private sector they have devices going all the 
time to protect the interests of the employers and the owners from 
their own employees. Stealing is one of the ongoing universal traits 
through the world of human beings.
  So Medicaid can be cut for corruption and for waste. Nobody wants 
Medicaid to operate more effectively and more efficiently than the 
constituents in my district. Since the beginning of Medicare and 
Medicaid, we have watched abuses and complained about abuses and sought 
to have the money directed as much as possible in providing health care 
and less in making doctors rich or in making health care facilities 
rich. It has been an ongoing struggle.
  There was a time when people worked strictly on charitable 
contributions. That was a painful situation where most people who 
needed health care had to go to an emergency room. Then we did move 
into a period where Medicaid was in operation and poor people who 
qualified through the means test for Medicaid could for the first time 
have the luxury of preventive health care. They could have a doctor, 
they could have a situation where they did not have to wait until they 
were half dead to go to the emergency room.
  But we saw the Medicaid mills develop. Medicaid mills were obvious 
facilities that were taking large amounts of money and giving poor 
service, and we complained about those for years, and we saw the waste 
and wondered if the system was not designed to guarantee that certain 
people would get rich. So there have been improvements in that. There 
are still further improvements that can be made.
  Now we have the HMO's, the health maintenance organizations. In many 
ways health maintenance organizations are a big improvement over 
Medicaid mills. Health maintenance organizations when they are 
operating properly and when they respect the patients and the community 
that they operate in are a great improvement over Medicaid mills, but 
if health maintenance organizations are to move in ways which try to 
give less service and make more money, then they become worse than the 
Medicaid mills and must be stopped.
  So we have a situation here where there is still a drive on to remake 
Medicare and to remake Medicaid. This second phase of the Republican 
majority's war to remake America does let up a little on Medicare, but 
it becomes worse for Medicaid than it was before. The Republican 
proposal for Medicare cuts funding $168 billion over the next 6 years. 
It continues to rely on the untested and potentially dangerous medical 
savings account, known as MSA. Medical savings accounts are the 
centerpiece of the Republican proposals for Medicare.

  The proposal would set up a system whereby the healthiest and the 
wealthiest seniors would leave the Medicare system and many of the 
doctors who treat them would refuse to continue treating other seniors 
who depend on Medicare. The proposal could truly end universal health 
care coverage for the elderly.
  In other words, Medicare is only about 30 years old and Medicare 
could be brought to its knees if you introduce medical savings 
accounts, because medical savings accounts would cover from 85 to 90 
percent of the people who are healthy and who need very little health 
care. The insurance companies would move in and pick off those people, 
and the number of people in the Medicare system would drop so 
drastically and to such a low point until the funding of the Medicare 
system would fall apart.
  So the MSA is a direct threat, it is a gun aimed at the heart of the 
Medicare system. But that is being proposed again with great gusto. As 
you know, it is already in legislation that is moving through the 
House. The Senate and House have agreed and will soon send a bill to 
the President which might contain the MSA proposal. The MSA proposal 
has received few public hearings, very few people know about it. I am 
taking the time to talk about it here now because most people just know 
it as a set of initials. The MSA, as one respected columnist Robert J. 
Samuelson recently said in the Washington Post, quote, ``we should not 
unleash a health care upheaval simply as an afterthought. Clearly this 
proposal would cause serious harm to America's senior citizen 
population and it goes far beyond any change that the electorate 
wants.''
  The people, the voters, the patients do not want MSA's. It will be a 
radical change in their health care and wipe out a system that they 
have come to depend on.
  Of course, finally, the Republican plan for Medicaid is even more 
extreme and it has a potential to cause as much or more harm than the 
Medicare package. Medicare is a basic program whereby the Federal 
Government helps States provide health care for the poorest and most 
vulnerable people in our Nation. This budget proposes to cut Federal 
Medicaid funding by $72 billion.
  To make matters worse, the Republican proposal allows the States to 
drain large amounts of money out of the system by significantly 
reducing the requirement that the States have a maintenance of effort. 
At the same time it allows a return to the State financing gimmicks of 
the past that were banned in 1992 at the urging of the Bush 
administration.
  The majority's plan will send a loosely defined block grant back to 
the States without the current guarantees of care for low-income 
children, pregnant women, disabled people or senior citizens. By 
relying heavily on the Republican Governors for the design of their new 
Medicaid package, the Republican Congress has proposed a program that 
allows States to reduce their financial commitment to the program 
without any guarantee that poor people and seniors will have the 
necessary care.
  The Republican plan abolishes the current entitlement for 
individuals. Entitlement. Remember the word ``entitlement.'' There is 
probably no more noble concept in government than entitlement. 
Sometimes it is abused but when you have entitlements for means-tested 
cases, means-tested entitlements, means-tested entitlements, it means 
that you have to prove and show that you are poor, that you are in need 
in order to be able to qualify for the entitlement.

  We have some entitlements that are not means-tested. The agricultural 
entitlements are not means-tested. You can be a millionaire and still 
get agricultural subsidies. The biggest socialist program in America, 
the most socialist program that continues to exist and over the next 7 
years will still be with us, is the agricultural subsidy program.
  It has many different facets. Agricultural subsidies for various 
reasons, there are Farmers Home Loan Mortgages, there are many, many 
different ways in which socialism and agriculture takes care of people 
who have a great deal of money.
  In fact, in Montana I point out, in Montana, the Freemen out there, 
the siege that is going on now, those people are people who receive 
large amounts of money. They are led by a person who received up to 
$800,000 in Federal loans and subsidies, and he does not want to pay it 
back. They reached the point where they felt they had the right to keep 
it and the right to not be held accountable for paying it back. Their 
property was taken, so they are in a revolutionary mode now. They have 
guns and are ready to fight because the subsidy, the socialism in 
agriculture has thoroughly corrupted them to the point where they have 
lost their perspective completely.
  So the loss of the entitlement, benefits defined by the State, when 
you lose the entitlement, the Federal Government no longer stands 
behind the guarantee of health care to everybody who

[[Page H5273]]

needs it and if you meet the means test, you lose the entitlement, the 
block grant goes to the State, the State has a finite, set amount of 
money in their budget, when they spend that amount of money, then the 
people who are in need after that will not get any help.
  The States will also define the benefits that continue to go to some 
groups that are covered by Medicaid. States will not have to provide 
health care to certain people that are covered right now. Children in 
poverty will not be fully covered because the Republican proposal, the 
scorched earth proposal goes after the health care of children between 
the ages of 13 and 18.
  Children ages 13 to 18 living in poverty would lose their Medicaid 
coverage because they are not on the list of people that the Federal 
legislation would require the States to serve. So a State could cut 
that out if it wants to. Disabled persons, people with disabilities. 
The States would be in a position to define who has a disability and 
who does not have a disability. It is unlikely they would cover all of 
the 6 million disabled persons who now are receiving Medicaid. Six 
million disabled people in this country, people with disabilities, are 
receiving Medicaid now. The likelihood is that if the States are able 
to define who has a disability and who does not have a disability, most 
of these people would lose their coverage. Again there is the low-
income Medicare beneficiary, people who do not qualify for welfare who 
are covered in some States, and they will lose their coverage also if 
you give the Medicaid total over to the States.
  That is the worst feature, the Medicaid assault. The assault on 
Medicaid is probably the single worst feature of the Republican 
majority budget. The assault on Medicaid is a life and death issue. The 
assault on Medicaid is worthy of a long discussion. The assault on 
Medicaid is worthy of a mobilization of people all across the Nation.

  We have a great deal to lose. Medicaid is as close as we have gotten 
to universal health care. Medicaid, which provides health care to 
everybody who needs it, who is poor and can pass the means test, 
Medicaid is as close to universal health care as we have gotten in this 
country. We are the only industrialized country other than South Africa 
that does not have universal health care in one form or another.
  So we are about to lose that. I am particularly concerned about it 
because in New York City, it seems that the extremist forces are out 
ahead of the Republican majority here in Congress. The Republican 
majority here in Congress have been thwarted in their efforts to end 
the Medicaid entitlement. They have been thwarted in their efforts to 
take steps that would reverse the quality of care in nursing homes. But 
we have a Republican Governor who has moved on nursing homes and tried 
to suspend the regulations, a Republican Governor who is threatening to 
change the way hospitals are funded for indigent persons, to take away 
that funding altogether if they do not agree to some new proposals that 
he had made. We have a Republican Governor who has proposed to close 
down one of the hospitals in my district, Kings Borough Psychiatric 
Center. Kings Borough Psychiatric Center is the only psychiatric center 
in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is a borough which has 2.5 million people; 2.5 
million people is enough to need a psychiatric center with 500 beds. It 
has been there for 100 years. But now they are proposing to close down 
Kings Borough Center.
  The juggernaut in New York, the Wehrmacht in New York, the scorched 
earth policy in New York is moving faster than the policies here at the 
Federal level. The mayor is proposing to sell certain hospitals. The 
mayor is proposing to lease certain hospitals. A notice was just issued 
day before yesterday that 1,600 hospital workers will be laid off 
immediately between now and the middle of June and between now and 
January 1, 8,000 hospital workers will be laid off in New York City.
  This is radical, this is extreme, this is a life and death matter. 
Not only will patients die as a result of the extreme changes within 
the hospitals, but there some people employed in these hospitals who 
are earning basic pay as janitors, as cleaners, as maids, some people 
who are technicians. There are large numbers of people who will be out 
of work as a result of this reduction in the service for health care. 
Health care is a service, first of all, and that is its most important 
function. But health care is also an industry. It is one of the most 
noble industries mankind has ever created, and it does provide jobs.
  So we have a situation where we are moving in an extreme manner and 
in a year's period 8,000 people will be thrown out of work and the work 
that they do in the hospitals will be dislocated and confused, and 
people will literally die as a result.

                              {time}  1830

  War has been declared on the health care system of the people of New 
York city. War has been declared by the Governor. War has been declared 
by the mayor. The war in New York State and the war in New York City is 
very much interrelated with the war that has been declared here in 
Washington.
  In fact, the war began here. The move is here, once the proposals by 
the Clinton administration in the 103d Congress went down the drain. 
Those proposals were good proposals, idealistic proposals, and 
proposals which were complicated because of the fact that they reached 
out toward the goal of universal health care.
  We can come with legislation that is much simpler an we can, in 
incremental steps, probably improve the health care system. But if we 
want to reach the goal of universal care, universal health care for 
everybody, it requires a complicated system. It requires something 
which is very unusual and calls on our present system to be 
restructured.
  That is what the Clinton administration program required. It was the 
proper approach in terms of setting the goal and seeking the goal of 
universal health care. The fact that the complications led to a 
political problem does not diminish the validity of the Clinton health 
care proposals.
  Now we are without that national goal and without that national 
guidance, and we are in a situation now where we have a stampede on to 
restructure and to reengineer the health care system. In a place like 
New York, we are talking about nearly 8 million people, health care for 
nearly 8 million people, so it is a very tempting target.
  The stampede on now is a stampede toward privatization. It is a 
stampede that begins with the ideas that there is a lot of money to be 
made if they create a health care-industrial complex. A government 
health care-industrial complex means that the private sector will own 
it, the private sector will run it, but the funding for it will still 
come out of the taxpayers' pockets.
  Just as the funding for the military-industrial complex comes out of 
the taxpayers' pockets but is run by private enterprise, and great 
amounts of money are made out of it, now we have a foolproof system 
that will go on forever. The health care-industrial complex is not like 
the military-industrial complex. It will be here forever, and we then 
do not have to worry about never having a justification for it.
  The military-industrial complex has done well long after it is needed 
at the level it is needed. it is still here. We needed a military-
industrial complex to win World War II, and we needed a military-
industrial complex at a certain level to fight the cold war and to 
maintain the security of the free world. All that was necessary, but we 
have not needed the extremes in spending that we have, and we certainly 
do not need to justify adding $13 billion more to the existing defense 
budget.
  That is a victory of the military-industrial complex. Its power 
exceeds its usefulness, but that is one of those complexes and we are 
governed by many different complexes in this country. Complexes have a 
great impact on our policies.
  We have a banking-industrial complex that really is the biggest 
swindle of all. The banking-industrial complex pulled off the savings 
and loan swindle and that may cost the American people, before it is 
over, about a half trillion dollars to bail out the savings and loans 
and the other banks. There were other banks also, not savings and 
loans, but banks that went bankrupt. We are going to be out a half a 
trillion dollars by the time the Resolution Trust Corporation and all 
the mechanisms that were set up and designed to do this are finished.

  So we have a health care complex now, health care-industrial complex.

[[Page H5274]]

Large insurance companies, large pharmaceutical companies buy HMO's. 
HMO's are health maintenance organizations. They are not evil 
automatically. They are not inherently evil. In fact, the Health 
Insurance Program of New York, called HIP, has been in existence for 
half a century. It was a great step forward in health care.
  HIP still exists, but HIP was a non-profit-making enterprise. It is 
not designed to make a profit. Although they make surpluses and they 
have probably been taken care of very well, it was not designed to make 
profits, and it has worked very well.
  We can have profitmaking HMO's also, and that has been proven in some 
places. They make profits and they also give good service. There are 
communities which insist that they are going to get good service or 
else they are going to get rid of the HMO's, so they have good service.
  But in big cities and communities like the majority of the 
communities that my district covers, there is an attempt being made to 
come in and stampede the situation and restructure, reengineer the 
health care system for the benefit of the big HMO's, and the insurance 
companies and pharmaceutical companies are going to stand behind them.
  They are not listening to doctors. They are not listening to hospital 
administrations. They are definitely not listening to community 
leaders. They are very seldom listening to elected officials. We need 
to reestablish the dialog, and the only way we can get that dialog is 
by confronting them with a situation which brings to a halt the grand 
design to redesign our health care system.
  So we have the mayor proposing to sell one of the hospitals in my 
district; the Governor proposing to close down another one; the layoffs 
of thousands of people taking place; and all this is happening very 
rapidly, and in the meantime the shadow of the Medicaid entitlement 
being taken away looms over our head.
  The Medicaid entitlement will be converted to a block grant 
automatically. Right away there is a reduction in the amount of funds 
available for Medicaid because the proposal is not just to give the 
State what it now gets but to cut the amount of money. The State will 
have the power then to cut the benefits. So we will have several rapid 
shocks to the health care system all at once.

  For this reason, this Sunday, we are mobilizing all over the city. 
Not just in my district but all over the city there are demonstrations 
at hospitals called Hospital Support Sunday. Churches are leading their 
congregations to hospitals that are threatened and they are having 
rallies to send a message to the mayor and to the Governor that we are 
the people, the health care system is for us, those of us who are 
patients and those of us who are alive and will someday probably become 
patients. We want a voice in the restructuring. We do not want the 
insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies and the HMO's to 
restructure our health care for their benefit. We could like to have a 
voice in the restructuring of the system for the benefit of all the 
people.
  We have three demands. One is that they freeze the situation as it is 
now. Do not have any more sales of hospitals. Do not try to lease 
hospitals. Stop downsizing and streamlining, cutting the budget so that 
the hospitals are not able to function properly. If they cannot 
function properly, people stop coming, and then they use the fact that 
their number of patients is declining as a justification for cutting 
the staff.
  It is a vicious game that is being played with our health care system 
and we want it to come to an end. We want the assault on our health 
care system as part of the war we make in America to come to a halt.
  Maybe we can make a deal. In every war, no matter how vicious the war 
may be or how ambitious the maniacs are who drive the war, they do make 
some arrangements. As bad as the Third Reich was under Hitler, they did 
not attack Switzerland. For various reasons they never attacked 
Switzerland. As bad as they were, they did not go on to attack Sweden. 
They did grab little Norway because it was in the way in terms of their 
own strategies. They did terrible things but there were some places 
where even the vicious Nazis did not cross the line.
  Maybe we can have a deal with the people who are trying to remake 
America and a Speaker who declares that politics is war without blood. 
Perhaps we can have a safe haven out there in health care, put it off 
the invasion map, take it away as a target and let us not do terrible 
things that our grandchildren might spit on our graves as a result of 
hearing about.
  Let us not destroy the health care system for the elderly, which may 
throw people out on the streets. Because in Medicaid two-thirds of the 
money from Medicaid goes to nursing homes. One-third goes to poor 
families, and they are important, too, but two-thirds goes to nursing 
homes.
  Many people in those nursing homes are people who were middle-class 
people, who had some means before they got ill and lost their jobs and 
lost their faculties and for various reasons became impoverished. Once 
they become impoverished then Medicaid is all there is left to take 
care of them. Take away Medicaid and they are literally in the streets.
  So we do not want to hastily, in the process of remaking America, do 
things that would end up being counted as atrocities sometime in the 
future as people look back. We do not want to do thing that in the 
process of trying to justify them we would take ourselves into some 
kind of immoral era similar to the Nazi era.
  People with disabilities in Nazi Germany became people who ought to 
be destroyed, and it is to the credit of the German people that they 
would not consent to euthanasia as long as they knew about it. But when 
they singled out a particular ethnic group, they did go on and try to 
destroy a whole ethnic group. The seeds were sewn.
  Human beings or nations should never begin to think in certain 
directions. Human beings and nations ought to automatically want to 
structure systems that provide for the preservation of life. To be pro-
life in the most profound sense is to try to preserve the health care 
system; to try to see to it that at least every person has an 
opportunity to maintain good health and to benefit from the modern 
life-saving devices, and to in some way know that we care about them 
that far.
  We cannot guarantee them an income, we cannot guarantee them a lot of 
things, but let us put the health care system into a safe haven status 
and say we are going to try to guarantee that decent health care is 
provided for everybody. We are going to try to guarantee that systems 
are maintained. We want to streamline them, make them more efficient, 
eliminate the waste and corruption, but we are going to maintain 
systems that are adequate.
  We cannot maintain adequate systems if overnight we are going to make 
a decision to close hospitals in a big city like New York. The closing 
of the hospitals has not been discussed by the doctors and the 
administrators, it has only been discussed behind closed doors by 
politicians who want to make a score and save money over a short period 
of time. So that kind of restructuring is going to be a scorched earth 
kind of restructuring where people's lives will not matter.
  We will not stand by idly and watch this kind of restructuring of our 
health care system in New York City. I hope that the rest of Americans 
understand that we are at a critical point and they too must get out 
take a look at what is happening, who is making what plans about their 
health care system, who is making what plans about how many hospitals 
we are going to have in a given area, and about the nature of those 
hospitals.
  A burn unit cannot be maintained by an HMO. A burn unit needs a large 
population to support. A burn unit needs to exist within the structure 
of a hospital. MRI's are very expensive and cannot be maintained in 
some doctor's office or some clinic cannot maintain an MRI. If the 
hospital goes, then we have a situation where the justification and the 
rationale for a number of other services that are based on a density of 
population will no longer be there.

  So we must fight to keep hospitals, or at least to have people sit 
down at the table and give us the blueprint; show us how they will 
maintain the quality of services, if they are going to restructure and 
eliminate certain hospitals or certain aspects of the current health 
care.

[[Page H5275]]

  Now, we have the analogy of politics as war without blood. In every 
war monumental mistakes are made. The nature of war is such that it is 
going to grind down and eat up, chew up, and abuse large numbers of 
people because it is an emergency and we cannot set our own scenarios. 
We have to react to the enemy. There are a number of things in the 
nature of war. That is why the analogy that politics is war without 
blood is a bad analogy.
  We should not have to move in an atmosphere of war. We should not 
have to rally to meet a crisis that does not need to be created. Health 
care could be kept at some kind of rationale level. Health care should 
be kept off the table.
  Yes, eventually, HMO's, profit making HMO's, may make money in health 
care. Eventually Wall Street may have stocks in the health care 
industry do very well. But let us try to do that and make capitalism 
and the profit motive work for the benefit of the people. Let us not 
allow the situation to get totally out of hand and a scorched earth 
policy to leave us with ruins in our health care system.
  Once we close a hospital, reopening it is almost impossible. Once we 
close down certain kinds of facilities, we cannot bring them back. And 
we must force those who are in place of decision-making and power to 
stop, listen, and negotiate.
  Our demands in New York City are three basic demands. Freeze the 
situation. Do not go any further. Disclose your plans. Let us see what 
is happening. And they negotiate. And this is a pattern that I offer to 
the rest of the country.

                              {time}  1845

  It is your health care. This invasion plan will roll right over you 
unless you rally and guarantee that you are respecting and that your 
health care does not become cannon fodder in this so-called war to 
remake America.

                          ____________________