[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 2 (Wednesday, January 28, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S99-S109]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                          THE AGENDA FOR 1998

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, my colleagues and I intend to come here to 
the floor today to discuss the agenda and what we see ahead of us in 
this congressional session, the second session of this Congress.
  My expectation is that we will find ourselves this year, just as we 
have in previous years, debating a range of controversial, interesting, 
and in some cases very provocative issues. We will agree on some of 
these issues on a bipartisan basis. There may well be aggressive 
debates about other issues. That is the way the democratic system 
works. That is the way it should work.
  Where we can reach across the aisle and achieve agreement and do the 
right thing for this country in a harmonious way, good for us. That's 
what the American people expect us to do. However, when there are 
policy issues that are very, very controversial, the people expect us 
to have a vigorous debate, and we will do that.
  Most of us head home on weekends or during time when the Senate is 
not in session. I expect other Senators had the same experience I did 
during this most recent recess. Constituents say to you, ``Well, what 
are you doing down there in Washington? What's going on in Washington? 
What's happening in the Senate?'' It's a question that everyone asks, 
no matter where you meet them.
  What is happening in the U.S. Senate, and what is happening down here 
in Washington with respect to legislative duties, is whatever we decide 
to have happen here on the floor. By virtue of what we schedule for the 
business of the Senate, we decide what parts of the people's business 
we will address this year.
  I want to talk just for a moment about what I think the business of 
the Senate ought to be in the coming months.
  First and foremost, we ought to take up the legislation that 
reauthorizes the highway program. That bill was supposed to have been 
passed last year. It wasn't passed; it was extended for 6 months. And 
the majority leader, quite appropriately, told us that it will be near 
the first order of business when Congress returns.
  We must take that legislation up and pass it so that the folks around 
this country who have to plan to maintain our roads and bridges can 
make those plans. It is our responsibility to pass that bill--not 
later, but sooner, and I urge that the majority leader bring that 
legislation to the floor and do it soon.
  Some in the Chamber counsel, ``Well, let's wait until the budget is 
passed.'' No, this is the legislation that was supposed to be passed 
last year. Let's not wait any longer. Let's bring it to the floor as 
the first order of business and pass a highway bill. It is also a bill 
that deals with jobs and opportunity and economic growth in every State 
in this country. We have a responsibility, in my judgment, to bring it 
to the floor and to move it.
  Second, I hope in the next days we will pass a piece of legislation 
that the House of Representatives approved last year by an overwhelming 
vote. This bill deals with the Internal Revenue Service. It would 
change how the IRS does its business. It would make significant, 
important changes in the relationship between the Internal Revenue 
Service and the American taxpayer. The Senate should pass that bill 
quickly. It ought to be this week or next week. That ought to be at the 
front end of the business of this Senate.
  Last night President Clinton came to Capitol Hill and in his State of 
the Union Address talked about the agenda that he thinks Congress ought 
to consider. At least one of the items of that agenda, which I expect 
will be controversial but really should not be, is the issue of managed 
care. I want to describe why this is so important.

  President Clinton last night talked about the number of Americans who 
are now in managed care plans. Well over 100 million Americans are now 
in these plans. All of us have heard the stories about what managed 
care means to our families.
  Peter Van Etten of Stanford Health Services, in Time magazine, said 
this on April 14: ``In the insanity of economics in health care, the 
patient always loses.''
  President Clinton last night said there ought to be a patient's bill 
of rights. Let me give some real-life examples that will demonstrate 
the importance of this issue.
  In California, an employee who suffered from hemophilia was unable to 
find out whether the new insurance plan offered by his employer would 
cover his blood-clotting concentrates unless he first joined the plan. 
In other words, they said you either decide to join or not to join, and 
we won't tell you whether this covers you as a hemophiliac. What kind 
of health care plan is that?
  A large California HMO denied a referral of an 8-year-old girl 
suffering from a rare cancer called Wilms' tumor. According to the 
National Cancer Institutes' protocol for this type of cancer, the girl 
should have been referred to a Wilms' tumor multi-disciplinary team. 
But the HMO covering this girl demanded the surgery she required be 
performed by a urologist who did not specialize in pediatrics and who 
never before performed this surgery. Even though that HMO had a 
relationship with a local teaching hospital, which, in fact, did have a 
Wilms' tumor team, the family was told they would have to go out of the 
plan and that even the girl's hospital stay would not be covered by the 
HMO. This, by the way, ended up in court. The HMO was fined a half a 
million dollars by the California Department of Corporations.
  A Time magazine cover story titled ``What Your Doctor Can't Tell 
You'' featured a young mother of two, battling with her managed care 
insurer for coverage of expensive treatments for breast cancer that had 
already spread to other parts of her body. She died before the article 
was published, so the fight was over. But she made her point.
  In New Jersey, a young woman took a terrible fall from a horse. 
According to a New York Times newspaper article, she was suffering from 
swelling of the brain, and was being taken by ambulance to the nearest 
hospital. In the ambulance, as her brain was swelling from this injury, 
she said she didn't want to go to the nearest hospital because it was a 
facility concerned with the bottom line. She didn't want to go to an 
emergency room where she felt her health care would be a function of 
profit and loss statements. She told the ambulance crew to take her to 
a hospital that was farther away, where she was not worried about the 
kind of care she would get, and where her health was not going to 
depend on someone's profits and losses.
  A Missouri managed care plan sent all of its customers a letter that 
said a trip to the emergency room with a broken leg, or a baby running 
a high fever, should not generally be assumed to be covered by the 
managed care plan. The letter read like this: ``An emergency room visit 
for medical treatment is not automatically covered under your benefit 
plan.''
  Mr. President, over 100 million Americans are in managed care plans. 
These plans can, in fact, save money. In some cases they can improve 
care. But they can also set up circumstances where decisions about 
health care are made not by a doctor, but by an accountant in an office 
400 miles away, who decides what procedures are covered. I have had 
doctors tell me that this isn't serving patients' interests. And 
patients are very concerned about the quality of their health care in 
this circumstance.
  The President said let's pass a piece of legislation to give the 
patient a right to know about health care options, to ensure the 
fundamental rights of patients under these plans.

  Others will talk about other parts of the agenda. But in conclusion 
let me just talk for a moment about President Clinton's budget proposal 
last night. He said that if our budget no longer has a deficit, we 
should use any additional funds to put Social Security first, to save 
Social Security first.
  I want to describe why that is important. This is a brand new 
document, January 1998, put out by the Congressional Budget Office. I 
will bet if you go to the Congressional Budget Office and you find out 
who wrote this, those people have some fancy degrees, probably three or 
four of them, from the best schools in the country. They probably wear 
tiny little glasses that make you look really smart. They probably work 
hard all day, have several titles. And everybody respects them 
immensely.
  So they write a white book and the white book says that the budget is

[[Page S100]]

going to be balanced in the year 2001. It's right here. These are smart 
people. They published it this month.
  Then the same people, wearing the same glasses and gray suits and 
having the same pride in their work, say on page 43 that in the same 
year, 2001, when they say the budget will be balanced, the Federal debt 
will increase by over $100 billion.
  I didn't take higher math. I probably didn't go to the best school in 
the world. But I ask the question, if you claim the budget is in 
balance, why would the Federal debt be increasing? I know the answer. 
Apparently these folks don't. It's because they are taking Social 
Security trust fund money and using it over in the operating side of 
the budget in order to say that the budget is in balance.
  What the President said last night was ``Save Social Security 
first.'' We need to save the money in those trust funds. This 
accounting system ought to be honest. These people know better than to 
put out reports like this. The Congress ought to know better that to 
think we are running a surplus when the surplus is actually in Social 
Security and it's for future years. And I hope this Congress will 
express itself on that issue.
  Do we decide as a Congress to save Social Security first? Or do we, 
as some suggest, spend more money quickly? Or, as others suggest, give 
money back, quickly, at a time when our Federal debt is still 
increasing? I hope this Congress will heed the advice of the President 
and make the right choices.

  There is plenty more to talk about in the agenda. And my colleagues 
will do so.
  Mr. President, we have an hour and a half. And I understand that the 
Senator from West Virginia wishes to take 15 minutes. So I yield to the 
Senator from West Virginia, Senator Byrd, for 15 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from West Virginia.
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I thank the distinguished Senator from North 
Dakota. And I thank the Chair.
  Mr. President, on several occasions during the last session of 
Congress, I took to the Senate floor to discuss the importance of 
reauthorizing the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, or 
ISTEA. I shared my observation that this effort to renew our Nation's 
highway, highway safety and transit programs would be one of the most 
important, if not the most important, legislative accomplishment of the 
first session of the 105th Congress. As all Senators are aware, the 
provisions of ISTEA expired on September 30 of last year 1997. This 
meant that, absent enactment of new authorization legislation, many 
important highway, bridge, and transit projects would grind to a halt. 
Unfortunately, the Senate did not turn to the critically important 
ISTEA reauthorization bill until October 8 of last year. Between that 
date and October 29, 1997, the Senate was unable to adopt even one 
substantive amendment due to the impasse over Senate consideration of 
campaign finance reform legislation.
  The parliamentary amendment tree was filled. And it was impossible to 
get an amendment in which I and other cosponsors of the amendment 
wanted to have brought before the Senate.
  The Senate failed to invoke cloture four times on the ISTEA bill. In 
the end, notwithstanding the fact that a unanimous consent agreement 
was reached on the campaign finance issue, the 6-year ISTEA bill was 
pulled from the floor. Finally, on November 10, the Senate debated and 
passed a short-term extension of our existing highway and transit 
programs, effectively putting off completion of Senate action on our 
Nation's surface transportation policy for the next 6 years until the 
second session of the 105th Congress.
  Now, despite the stated intentions of the Senate leadership to take 
up the ISTEA reauthorization bill, S. 1173, during the first week of 
the second session of this Congress, I am very concerned that the 
Senate may not return to the ISTEA reauthorization bill until after 
completion of the fiscal year 1999 budget resolution in late spring.
  Mr. President, the onus is now upon us to return to the full 6-year 
transportation authorization bill and complete our work as soon as 
possible. While I supported the enactment of the short-term extension 
bill back in November, I remind my colleagues that it was only a 
stopgap measure providing only about one-half year of funding for our 
existing highway, highway safety, and transit programs. As of this 
date, our State highway departments and our mass transit systems cannot 
establish a budget for the current fiscal year because they do not know 
the final level of Federal resources that they will receive for this 
year. Morever, they cannot develop or implement any long-term financing 
plans because they do not know the level of Federal resources that will 
be available to them over the next 5 years. This is an impossible 
situation for our State highway departments. Given the cost and 
duration of major highway projects and the complexities associated with 
short construction seasons in our cold weather States, planning and 
predictability are essential to the logical functioning of our Federal-
Aid Highway program. But that kind of rational planning is precisely 
what our States cannot do at this time because of our inaction. This is 
not how our State and local transportation agencies should have to do 
business. Certainly, no corporation could long survive doing business 
in this fashion. It is, nonetheless, the circumstances that we have 
placed upon our transportation agencies, due to our failure to enact a 
multi-year ISTEA reauthorization bill in a timely manner.
  Members will recall that, prior to S. 1173, the ISTEA bill's being 
pulled from the floor, I, along with Senator Gramm of Texas, and the 
chairman and ranking member of the Surface Transportation Subcommittee, 
Senators Warner and Baucus, filed an amendment numbered 1397. Our 
amendment embodies the simple premise that the 4.3 cents-per-gallon gas 
tax, which previously went to deficit reduction, but which is now being 
deposited in the Highway Trust Fund, should be authorized to better 
address our Nation's considerable highway needs. The amendment has two 
principal objectives. First, to put an authorization in place that 
allows for a substantial increase in highway spending in order to stem 
the continuing deterioration of our National Highway System. And 
second, to fulfill the trust of the American people, the people out 
there who pay these gas taxes every time they drive up to the gas pump 
believing that these funds will be used to maintain and improve our 
national transportation system. That was the position of Senators 
Gramm, Baucus, Warner, and myself back in October when we brought forth 
our amendment, and that is our position today.
  Our amendment, which now has 49 co-sponsors, provides for the 
authorization of highway spending levels over the next 5 years 
consistent with the revenues derived from this 4.3 cents gas tax--
roughly $31 billion over the 5 years 1999-2003.
  By the way, we have 49 cosponsors on that amendment. But several 
other Senators have assured us that they will vote for the amendment 
even though they were not interested in cosponsoring it for one reason 
or another. They will vote for it. They will be supportive of it if it 
will be brought up for a vote.
  Nothing has changed since October regarding the resolve of Senators 
Gramm, Warner, Baucus, and myself to see this amendment adopted. 
However, other things have changed since the amendment was introduced. 
We are now well into fiscal year 1998 and the 4.3-cents gas tax is 
being deposited--where?--into the highway trust fund. By the end of 
this fiscal year, more than $7 billion--with a big ``B''--$7 billion in 
additional new revenue will be deposited into the Highway Trust Fund, 
not one penny--not one penny--of which is authorized to be spent under 
the committee-reported ISTEA bill. Instead, these funds will be allowed 
to sit in the highway trust fund, earning interest, and being used as 
an offset to the Federal deficit for the next 6 years. In other words, 
if we adopt the levels authorized in the committee-reported bill, as 
Senators Domenici and Chafee--both of whom I have the greatest respect 
for--would have us do, we will have accomplished nothing--nothing at 
all--toward improving our National Highway System. Instead, we will 
have just enacted legislation to actually prevent using this 4.3 cents 
gas tax for highways. What the committee-reported bill does, then, 
without the Byrd-Gramm-Baucus-Warner amendment, is ignore the 
availability of this new trust fund revenue for

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the entire upcoming 6 years. Not one red cent will be authorized for 
expenditure if we accept the committee bill, as reported. This means 
that by the end of 2003, the highway trust fund balances will have 
grown to roughly $72 billion! In other words, some $72 billion will be 
sitting there in the highway trust fund as government IOUs collecting 
interest and being used to lower the Federal deficit instead of for 
highways as we, the Members of Congress, have told the American people 
it would be. I cannot imagine a more perverse scam on the American 
people.
  Well, one may say, we need to balance the Federal budget and we 
cannot do it if we let these highway monies be spent. Not true. Not 
true, Senators.
  The resources were available back in October to finance the levels of 
highway spending embodied in the Byrd-Gramm-Baucus-Warner amendment. 
And today, it appears that there are even more resources available to 
provide for a healthy increase in infrastructure spending, without 
busting the budget. When one reviews the conditions of our Nation's 
highways and bridges and the current inadequate levels of investment--
which would continue for the next 6 years under the committee-reported 
bill--one must come, as I do, to the conclusion that it would be 
irresponsible to do any less.
  Mr. President, our national highway system is America's lifeline, not 
just for rural areas, but for all of our Nation's cities--even those 
that make extensive use of mass transit and rail systems. Our major 
highways carry nearly 80 percent of U.S. interstate commercial traffic, 
and nearly 80 percent of intercity passenger and tourist traffic. Even 
though our Nation has among the most extensive and efficient rail and 
aviation systems in the world, eight out of every ten tons of 
interstate cargo still travel over our highways. And eight out of every 
ten of our constituents travel between States over highways. In regard 
to intrastate traffic, Americans take 91 percent of all work trips and 
87 percent of all trips in a car or truck. Like it or not, we are a 
Nation on wheels.
  Yet, despite the indispensable role our highway system plays in 
modern American life, we have, as a Nation, been negligent--let us 
confess it--we have been negligent in its upkeep. We have allowed the 
system to fall into a woeful state of disrepair while the unspent 
balances of the Highway Trust Fund have continued to climb. According 
to the most recent report by the U.S. Department of Transportation 
regarding the conditions and performance of our National Highway 
System, only 39 percent of our National Highway System is rated in good 
condition. Fully 61 percent of our Nation's highways are rated in 
either fair or poor condition. For our interstate system, which is the 
crown jewel of our National Highway System, fully 50 percent of the 
mileage is rated in fair or poor condition. And these figures only 
worsen when we look at our other major Federal and State highways. In 
our urban areas, fully 65 percent of our non-interstate highway mileage 
is rated as being in fair or poor condition. There are literally over a 
quarter-of-a-billion miles of pavement in the United States that are in 
poor or mediocre condition, and there are almost 95,000 bridges in our 
country that have been deemed to be deficient. Within that total, 
roughly 44,000 bridges have been deemed to be structurally deficient, 
meaning that they need significant maintenance, rehabilitation or 
replacement. Many of these bridges require load posting, requiring 
heavier trucks to take longer, alternate routes. And an additional 
51,000 bridges have been deemed to be functionally deficient, meaning 
that they do not have the lane widths, shoulder widths, or vertical 
clearances sufficient to serve the traffic demand.
  Paradoxically, as our roads continue to deteriorate, our Nation's 
dependence on those roads continues to grow. Highway use is on the 
rise. The number of vehicle miles traveled grew by roughly 40 percent 
over the last decade to an astronomical rate of 2.3 trillion. Within 
that total, the rate of traffic growth on our rural interstates grew by 
an even higher rate. And these levels of growth show no sign of 
abating. Since 1969, the number of trips per person taken over our 
roadways increased by more than 72 percent and the number of miles 
traveled increased by more than 65 percent. This combination of traffic 
growth and deteriorating conditions has led to an unprecedented level 
of congestion, not just in our urban centers but also in our suburbs 
and rural areas. Congestion is literally choking our roadways as our 
constituents seek to travel to work, to the shopping center, to the 
child care center, to their houses of worship.
  Mr. President, the traveling public is waiting for us--for us--to 
take up and pass a comprehensive ISTEA bill that truly addresses the 
needs of our surface transportation system. We should take up that 
legislation at the earliest possible time. And when we do, I hope all 
of my colleagues will join Senator Gramm, Senator Baucus, Senator 
Warner and me, in supporting our amendment to re-invest in America's 
lifeline--our amendment to restore the trust of the American people in 
the Highway Trust Fund--our amendment to authorize the spending of our 
Highway Trust Fund resources where they are so desperately needed: On 
our Nation's highways.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Dakota.
  Mr. DORGAN. Let me thank the Senator from West Virginia, Senator 
Byrd, for a very important statement.
  Mr. BYRD. Let me thank my friend for his courtesy and kindness in 
yielding this time to me, but more than that for his leadership that he 
is demonstrating on this floor. This is quite characteristic of him.
  Let me also say that my colleague, Senator Rockefeller, likewise, is 
ready to speak. I shall wait, I shall sit, and I shall listen.
  Mr. DORGAN. I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from West Virginia, 
Senator Rockefeller.
  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. I thank my colleague from North Dakota. I secondly 
thank my colleague from West Virginia. I wish the Presiding Officer a 
happy new year as we start off on what I think, based upon what we 
heard last night, ought to be a very optimistic and productive year. I 
thought it was really quite an extraordinary speech.
  Even at the time there seemed to be so much in it that we could do 
that I worried, was it too much? And I came to the conclusion, no, it 
was all perfectly sensible--not all of it huge, some of it incremental, 
some of it large and challenging--all of it doable, and I think that is 
our challenge.
  I think our country ought to be very happy about the fact that we 
have a balanced budget. It really was extraordinary, $357 billion down 
to $10 billion. We will present a balanced budget to the President for 
the first time in 30 years. That is an extraordinary accomplishment. We 
all share in that. The Democrats probably get the lion's share of the 
credit for the 1993 part, but the Republicans and Democrats did it 
together last year and, therefore, sealed what is a remarkable 
accomplishment in being fiscally prudent--and I think surprising, in a 
good way, the American people. I think that is probably a good thing 
because the markets rallied by our action. The markets are now troubled 
because of what is happening in Asia, and our President last night held 
out challenges to us on that matter, too, very boldly and I thought 
very correctly.
  The point is we really have to go forward. We have, according to 
whoever you listen to, somewhere between 70 days and 100 days in which 
to enact legislative affairs. I haven't counted it up. I don't know 
exactly how that works, but I will take their word for it. In any 
event, there is really not much time, which means we have to reach 
across the aisle. The Presiding Officer and I often don't agree on 
subjects. On the other hand, we agreed on something of monumental 
importance when it came to the adoption bill at the end of the last 
session, and that is the way things get done around here, and that is 
the way things ought to get done around here. Republicans can't succeed 
without Democrats. Democrats, obviously in the minority, cannot succeed 
without Republicans. Yet we often succeed and do ourselves proud here, 
and I feel very comfortable in saying that.
  I think the President made very clear that parents want their 
children to have the best kind of education. He put a program on the 
line. It is not an extravagant program. It is a sensible program. On 
our side, we have been grumbling about crumbling schools for quite a 
long time, and now I think we have a

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chance to do something about that. The President put forward some money 
for that.
  I think workers have reason to feel--workers of all ages--have good 
reason to feel good about last night because I think the President is 
very concerned particularly about those between 55 and 65 years old who 
don't have health insurance. We have all watched the phenomenon as 
American companies, reacting to principles that I'm not prepared to 
argue with, which I regret I am not prepared to argue with, as they 
decrease coverage, as coverage becomes more expensive or they decrease 
coverage, perhaps, of the dependents of the worker, even if they hold 
on to the coverage for their worker, and often it is the coverage of 
the worker's children that is really the matter most at stake. I think 
he wants that to be solved. He wants people to be able to buy into the 
Medicare Program between 55 and 65.
  Interestingly enough, that is a group which has an enormous amount of 
dependency on health care because right now 15 percent of those older 
Americans are completely uninsured. So that is the time in life when 
things begin to get more difficult in terms of health, and the 
President understands that and reacted to that.
  I really did like, Mr. President, what he talked about in health 
care. I liked the idea of pushing us further than we have been on 
children's health care. We did a very good job last year on a 
bipartisan basis, and that is exactly what it was. I remember the 
Finance Committee meetings. They were an absolute model, Senator Byrd, 
of bipartisan cooperation. All staff, everybody left the room, and then 
there were just the 20 Senators--11 Republicans, 9 Democrats--facing 
each other. And rather rapidly, perhaps because there was no glare, an 
enormous amount of cooperation just exploded in that cooperation, and 
all of a sudden we had the children's health care bill which is being 
put to good use. Fifteen States have already asked Donna Shalala for a 
waiver to be able to proceed. West Virginia has not at this point 
concluded what it will do. Governor Underwood presented a good program 
to the State legislature. The State legislature is going to come back 
with a good program. There will be a compromise reached. The 
legislature is Democratic. The Governor is Republican. They both want 
the same thing. They both want to see children insured. So does the 
President, and he wanted to see more of that.
  I will express a concern to the Presiding Officer that a large number 
of those 5 million children that we included in our bill last year are 
children who are already eligible for Medicaid but simply don't know it 
because their families are detached from the system, because somehow 
through the school lunch program they just have not found out they are 
eligible, they don't want to fill out the paper forms, or they are 
afraid. That is a phenomenon that one finds in the hills and hollows of 
various parts of this country. I worry a great deal about being able to 
get out to those children. In the case of West Virginia there are some 
30,000 children who are already eligible for Medicaid. But the 
President was challenging us to do that and to do more, and well he 
should because there are 10 million uninsured children in this country. 
No other industrial nation on Earth has to go through the pain of 
saying that. He pushes us forward.
  I think he cares very much, as I indicated, about the workers in the 
55- to 65-year-old range. They worry about their future. The baby 
boomers, the younger generation, wonder whether there will be Social 
Security and Medicare for them, and they have reason to worry. I think 
the President, therefore, said, look, let's take the money which is 
going into a surplus, should there be one, and put that into Social 
Security. He said, ``Social Security first.'' That is strong stuff. I 
think the American people really identify with that. That means that, 
no, there cannot be some of the tax cuts which some on both sides of 
the aisle may want to see, some of which may be very useful. But in a 
sense he was saying we can't have it all. We have to make priorities. 
Social Security comes first.

  There is also, as the Presiding Officer knows, a commission on 
Medicare which I am very proud to serve on. That is a huge problem that 
we will have to solve. Last year we bought ourselves about 10 years, 
but let's face it, in the buying of those 10 years we took some of the 
pressure off, the decision that we will have to make in the next 2 
years, and we cannot allow that to happen.
  The Social Security Commission of 1983 succeeded because Social 
Security was in the act of collapsing and the commission knew it and 
therefore they acted. The commission on Medicare, which affects so many 
in our country, is not going to be faced with that kind of immediate 
pressure so we will have to bring it on through our own energies, our 
own intellectual and moral commitments, and I believe we will be able 
to do that.
  The other thing that the President said among many that I liked very 
much was the whole concept of people dealing for the first time with 
managed care. He pointed out the enormous number of Americans that are 
in managed care now and he wants to see basic rights for people that 
have that available to them. I think he is quite right. We will see, as 
we have before, insurance companies and their lobbyists talking about 
mandates and big Government and all kind of things like that, but I 
don't sign on to that. I think the President is right, that 
confidentiality ought to be a right, and managed care patients ought to 
be able to see a specialist. Just because it is the cheapest doesn't 
mean it is the best. Patients should not be herded into something 
because it is cheap. It ought to be as cheap as possible, but it has to 
be very, very good.
  All in all, I thought the President had a lot to say. I thought he 
said it with eloquence. I thought he said it with strength. I thought 
he said it with a very, very strong vision. Health care is hard. No. 1, 
it is hard just as a subject, but it tends to automatically send people 
scurrying one direction or another direction. People either say too big 
Government or people say that is not enough. Somehow we have to find in 
this Chamber a way of understanding that the world's greatest economy 
can afford, even if it is on an incremental basis, that all of our 
citizens be insured. We really can do that and we can work together to 
do that.
  There has been marvelous cooperation--Senator Chafee and myself, 
Senator Kennedy, Senator Hatch--on children's health last year. There 
have been so many examples of that over the recent years. I think part 
of the lesson that he preached last night was, ``Let's do this 
together.'' It wasn't just ``I, a Democratic President of the United 
States.'' It is ``we,'' representing all of us, representing 
Republicans and Democrats all across this country.
  I am ready to fight for a good solution for Medicare. I want to see 
parents satisfied that their children are getting the best education. I 
want to see baby boomers have a sense of security about Social Security 
in the future because we dedicate surpluses to that area, and I also 
want to see retired workers who are either kicked out of jobs or 
retired from jobs during the vulnerable period of their older lives, 55 
to 65, to have a basic sense of being able to buy into Medicare. I 
think that is sound health care policy and I congratulate the President 
on doing that.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I thank Senator Rockefeller for a 
wonderful presentation.
  I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from New Mexico, Senator Bingaman, 
following which I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from Connecticut, 
Senator Dodd.
  Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from North Dakota. I 
may not take a full 10 minutes, I advise the Senator from Connecticut.
  Let me start and make the points that I came here to make because I 
do believe that some important issues were raised by the President last 
night in the State of the Union Address, and they are points that are 
worthwhile to go back and look at for just a minute.
  One change that has occurred here in Washington in the time I have 
been here--and it was very clear last night when I listened to the 
President--is that we now have a consensus; at least a majority agree 
that education is a national responsibility as well as a State and 
local responsibility. I can remember very recently--and you still hear 
people say this, but not many anymore--but I can remember when a

[[Page S103]]

substantial number of people used to say education is not an 
appropriate issue for the Federal Government to concern itself with.
  Clearly, it is a great concern for the people I represent in New 
Mexico, and it is a great concern for working families all over this 
country; but ``it should not be a concern for people who come to 
Washington to make the laws or to appropriate funds or to allocate tax 
dollars because this is not a national responsibility.'' That was the 
argument that we always heard. I think one of the great legacies that 
this President will leave and this Congress will leave is that there is 
a change in that attitude. There is a recognition here in Washington, 
finally, that just as every other industrial nation in the world 
considers education a national concern as well as a State and local 
concern, here in America we need to consider it a national concern as 
well as a State and local concern as well. So I think that is a major 
change and a change for the better.
  Last year, Congress and the President agreed on some very significant 
initiatives in the area of education--a new HOPE scholarship for 2 
years of college, a $3 billion overall increase in education funding 
was included last year, and funding for a new $210 million reading 
initiative. There were various other initiatives in the education area 
that were agreed upon by Democrats and Republicans alike. So we have 
made progress so far in the 105th Congress, and in the second session 
we can make more progress. I have heard some speeches today and some 
comments today by my colleagues, particularly on the other side of the 
aisle, and they go along two lines. Number one is the old argument that 
this is not a national concern, education is not a national concern, we 
should not be doing more in this area. We ought to leave it up to local 
school districts if they want to do it. Second, there is no money. We 
may have the largest economy in the world, and we may be in a period 
where the Union is strong and where the economy is strong and where we 
are finally getting to a balanced budget, or very near to it, but there 
is no money. ``We now spend less than 2 percent of our Federal budget 
on education and that is too much. We can't afford to spend any more.'' 
That is the argument I hear.
  I don't think the American people agree with that. When I go to my 
State and have town hall meetings and visits with people around New 
Mexico, I hear them say they are shocked to find that the Federal 
Government commits so little in resources relative to what the Federal 
Government spends in other areas. So I think we are expected by the 
people who sent us here to do better by education. The President is 
showing us the way to do that.
  There are three areas in particular I want to highlight today where I 
think he is showing some leadership, and we need to follow that 
leadership and try to make a difference. One is in the very important 
area of lowering the dropout rate in our schools, reaching those at-
risk students who historically have left high school before they 
graduate. We have oversized schools in this country. We have low 
expectations of many of our students. We have inadequate involvement of 
parents in the education of their children. As a result of all of these 
factors, over 500,000 students each year in this country drop out of 
school before they complete high school. Thirty percent of the young 
Hispanic adults in this country lack a high school degree because of 
that very problem. This is a national tragedy, in my opinion, and we at 
the Federal level can do some things to try to assist with this 
problem.
  I hope very much we will take the lead of the President in doing 
that. He has proposed key programs such as title I, the TRIO program, 
bilingual education, and several new initiatives to make schools more 
conducive to learning, to raise expectations and lower dropout rates. 
He has proposed $12 billion for class size reduction and teacher 
training and a mentoring program for at-risk middle school students. He 
has proposed $150 million for comprehensive reform. Now, that funding 
would go to schools with a serious dropout problem that want to focus 
on restructuring those schools and coming up with ways to give 
attention to the at-risk student, to keep them in that school, prevent 
them from dropping out. That is an initiative that is worth our effort 
and support.

  A second area, in addition to the dropout problem that the President 
is providing leadership on and that we here in Congress have done a 
substantial amount on in recent years, is providing computers and 
access to the Internet for the students in our schools today. 
Technological literacy is an essential part of being educated today. We 
need to ensure that the schools throughout this Nation are equipped so 
that students who come through those schools have access to that 
technology. The President is proposing significant fiscal year 1999 
increases for key technology programs. For the formula grants to States 
there is $425 million in fiscal 1997. For competitive grants, $76 
million for technology training for teachers. And all of us understand 
that you have to train the teachers to use the technology in order that 
it can be used effectively by the students as well in the classroom. 
The President is proposing increases in each of these areas. I believe 
it is in the best interest of this country for us to follow his lead in 
that area.
  The President's $10 billion school construction initiative will also 
help to provide access to fully-wired, technology-ready facilities for 
computers, and the Internet can be readily integrated into classrooms. 
Schools are the last area of our society where technology is really 
having an impact. It is more prevalent in our homes and in our offices 
than it is in our schools, and it is time that we fix that problem.
  The final area I want to mention is where I believe the President has 
made some progress and this Congress has made some progress and we need 
to keep moving forward in, which is the area of world-class academic 
standards. Too many schools still offer watered-down academic programs, 
general education tracks, and low expectations that will not meet the 
demands of local competition. The President has proposed $200 million 
in incentives to help districts to set high academic standards, to 
eliminate the problem of social promotion which he spoke about very 
eloquently last night, and to take other measures to upgrade the 
quality of education in our schools. He requested roughly $13 million 
to pilot and field test a new voluntary national test in reading at the 
fourth grade level and math at the eighth grade level. This test would 
be developed by the National Assessment Governing Board, which is not 
part of the Department of Education.
  Mr. President, these three initiatives--the effort to reduce dropout 
rates, the effort to provide technology for our schools, and the effort 
to assist our local schools to achieve world-class academic standards--
are all worthy goals for us in this second session of the 105th 
Congress. I hope very much that we will follow the lead of the 
President and support these efforts with real resources. We will 
recognize that our constituents do not want to have us debate and 
debate and debate about whose responsibility it is to improve the 
schools. They want to see progress, they want to see improvement, they 
want to see their children receive a better education. We have the 
power to do that by continuing what we started in the last session of 
this Congress--that is, putting more resources into education, giving 
the priority to education that the President talked about last night. I 
hope very much we will do that. I believe the President has shown a 
direction that the American people want to see us follow. And I hope 
very much we will have the good sense to follow that direction.
  Mr. President, I know there are others who intend to speak. So at 
this point I yield the floor.
  Mr. DODD addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Hagel). The Senator from Connecticut is 
recognized.
  Mr. DODD. Mr. President, let me, first of all, commend my colleague 
from New Mexico for the very thoughtful statement on education, on the 
importance of it. I did not hear all of the statements made earlier. I 
know my colleague from West Virginia, the senior Senator from West 
Virginia, Senator Byrd, discussed the issue of transportation and the 
importance of the ISTEA bill, the intermodal transportation system 
bill, which has to be brought up very quickly here. I heard our junior 
Senator from West Virginia

[[Page S104]]

discuss the issue of Medicare and health care. So a number of these 
items the President discussed last evening in his State of the Union 
Message have been the subject of some discussion here today.
  I think all of us were very impressed with the agenda the President 
has laid out for this session of this Congress, the remaining 70 to 120 
days. The distinguished majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Senator 
Lott, has indicated this will not be a long session. So we have a 
relatively short amount of time for an agenda that I think is important 
for the country. I hope many of these items will be considered in a 
strong bipartisan sense. Some will obviously provoke some 
disagreements. Minimum wage and family and medical leave are two items 
that come to mind immediately. But I hope on things like Medicare and 
Social Security and building our public schools and campaign finance 
reform, we can find some common ground here and get the business of the 
country done.
  Mr. President, I would like to focus some remarks, if I could, on a 
subject that is I think critically important. The President spent some 
time discussing it last evening. It is one that I had worked on for 
about a month and a half here, during the month of December and a good 
part of the month of January, with a bipartisan group of Republicans 
and Democrats, and that subject is child care.
  Unfortunately, in the last week, I received some correspondence from 
our colleagues on the Republican side who decided to pull out of the 
effort basically to come up with another bill. I understand Senator 
Chafee of Rhode Island has introduced a bill that, in many ways, 
reflects the work product of those 6 weeks, where I had tried to see in 
that quiet time if we could come out with a proposal that we could 
rally around here. Unfortunately--and this happens--these things break 
apart. I hope at some point we will come back together again. This is 
important. We have introduced a bill on our side, so there are two 
bills out there. The President laid out some thoughts and ideas on it. 
Let me say to you, Mr. President, how important this issue is. We are 
talking about millions of families in this country that are either 
single parents raising children, or two-income parents that need both 
incomes. They may have children and have to pay the tremendous cost of 
child care because, obviously, you can't leave them home alone. Maybe 
they don't necessarily have grandparents or aunts and uncles around to 
take care of them on a daily basis. It poses a serious problem for 
parents. When schools close down for snow days during the winter. What 
do you do with your children when you have to go off to work? You have 
the job you need and the children you love. How do you reconcile these 
issues?
  In the past, many of us grew up in a situation where you had 
neighbors and friends and you would accommodate an occasion when a 
crisis like that emerged. Today, it is a daily effort, if a family is 
to make ends meet and fulfill these obligations. The average cost of a 
child care setting is between $4,000 and $9,000 per child per year. If 
you are making, as the average family does, $30,000, $35,000, $40,000 a 
year, with two children that need some care because they are minors or 
infants, you immediately get a sense of how difficult a situation 
people can be placed in financially.
  What we have proposed is to expand the block grants, to come up with 
some tax credits--by the way, tax credits not just to families who have 
children they want to place in care, but to families who decide they 
are going to try and get along with one income. Some parents are going 
to stay home. We provide the credits for them as well. We make it 
refundable, too, Mr. President, because people who make that $30,000 
and below don't pay taxes. Yet, many of them are out there just barely 
getting along. If they don't have a refundable tax credit, they don't 
get any benefit at all. So we refund the tax credits for those families 
that either want to stay home with their child or place that child in a 
child care setting, because they need that extra help to get along. On 
the stay-at-home parent idea--and I am delighted to see more and more 
coming to this issue--I authored something called the Family and 
Medical Leave Act, which was a source of some controversy back in the 
1980's. It took me 7 years. It went through 2 vetoes, and as the 
President said, it was the first bill he signed into law in 1993. That 
was basically a stay-at-home parent idea. The idea was that if your 
child is facing a medical crisis or serious problem that could be 
documented, that a parent could make the choice to take 12 weeks away 
from their job, up to 12 weeks, without pay, without losing their job. 
We were the only country that I could find among industrialized nations 
that didn't permit a family and medical leave policy, giving parents 
the ability to stay at home and care for their children without losing 
the job that they need.

  So the idea of providing some assistance for parents who want to stay 
at home and care for their children, I think, is a very sound idea. I 
hope we don't get into the situation where we cause stay-at-home 
parents and those who must work to be pitted against each other, to 
cause a quarrel, if you will, between parents who don't have that 
choice. If you are raising 2 or 3 kids on your own, the idea that you 
have a choice to stay home and watch them is nonexistent. You don't 
have that choice. Or if you are a two-income family barely getting by 
or you want to invest money that you are earning for their education, 
or to buy a better home, or to plan a vacation, you should not be 
branded somehow as an uncaring parent because you made that choice. I 
don't want to see us get into a debate here and suggest somehow that 
parents who need that second income are less caring about their 
children because they make that choice, any more than I want to see us 
deprive parents who make that choice to be at home by not providing 
them with help so that they can do that.
  So I am hopeful that we can come to some common ground here. We have 
begun Welfare to Work. We have a lot more people in the work force. We 
don't have the child care vacancies, and we don't have the high-paying 
child care workers, as the average income is $12,000 a year. I don't 
know anyone who can now get along on that income. How do you attract 
good people to care for our children in this society?
  There have been studies done recently about the quality of child care 
programs around the country. Some 17 States now have certification 
processes. Yet the Ziegler Child Study Center at Yale University would 
tell you that even in the States that have certification and 
accreditation processes the quality of child care is embarrassing. It 
is mortifying.
  So for States that do not have that certification process you can 
imagine what it is like. In fact, if you pick up almost any daily 
newspaper in any city or any State in the country, you will find a case 
almost on a daily basis of parents who placed their child in what they 
thought was a safe, quality child care setting only to discover, of 
course, that child is not safe, and lost its life as we have seen in 
numerous cases. So we need to be far more conscientious.
  We don't deal with quality here in Washington. We don't set 
standards. I realize that is too high a hurdle to probably overcome. So 
we let the States set the standards. There is nothing in our Federal 
bill that mandates what standards are. But we do think there ought to 
be at least health and safety standards. We require that for our pets. 
If you leave them at a vet or in one of these weekend kennels, you get 
a State requirement of safety and health standards for your puppies. It 
seems to me, if we are going to require that minimum standard for 
animals that we might try it for our own children in this country.
  So our bill provides assistance to employers and providers of child 
care, and to parents who want to have the security of knowing their 
children are in safe places.
  To give you an idea of how serious this problem is, in the State of 
Florida today, there is a need of 40,000 spaces for child care that are 
nonexistent in the State. We are told with Welfare to Work that number 
will increase by 440,000 in the coming year. So you are going to have 
an explosion, I guess, of child care providers. What will be the 
quality? How much will the cost be? Is it accessible to people? The 
State of Florida may be an example where the vacancy rate is 
particularly high. But it is not unique. Other States across

[[Page S105]]

the country are facing similar problems.
  I was disappointed when I saw the list of the 19 priority items that 
the majority leader has placed before us in this brief session that 
child care is not on that list of 19. Child care is not on that list. 
We went through the debate on welfare reform a year or so ago. One of 
the promises made in this Chamber was that as we moved people from 
welfare to work, we would do something about caring for the children of 
these people who have been on welfare. What we are being told now, with 
this priority list of 19, is that child care is not on that list; that 
working families who are trying to make ends meet in caring for their 
children are not going to be a part of this agenda in the next 70 or 
120 days of a legislative process. I am hopeful that agenda can change, 
that it is not written in concrete, that there will be an opportunity 
to make the case that we ought to be able to come up with a compromise 
bill if need be between Republicans and Democrats that takes out the 
partisanship on this issue and says that we ought to be able to come up 
with some idea here that can assist these working families.
  I know my colleague from Utah, Senator Hatch, with whom I wrote the 
child care block grant program 13 years ago, and my colleague from 
Kansas, Senator Pat Roberts, care very much about this issue. Senator 
Jeffords cares about this issue, and had his own bill up earlier. 
Obviously, Senator Chafee does. He has a bill in. I know my colleagues 
from Maine, Senator Collins and Senator Snowe, and Senator Specter have 
an interest in this. I am just disappointed. I can't hide it--that 
having invested 6 weeks of staff time and effort to try to come up with 
a compromise bill that it all falls apart literally in the last few 
days after we pretty much had a work product.

  So I am going to continue to raise this issue. I am glad the 
President did last night. I am glad he highlighted it. I think a lot of 
people in this country understand in very graphic ways how important 
this issue is to them for their neighbors and their coworkers. They 
understand it. They see every day what goes on, how difficult this is, 
how costly it is, and how worried people are. After-school care is a 
big issue in this context. We put over $3 billion over 5 years in after 
school care. 5 million children every day are home alone between 3 
o'clock and 6 o'clock and 7 o'clock. Any police chief in any town will 
tell you the problems that kids get into is not after 11 p.m. at night 
when people want to put in curfews. Where kids get in trouble is in the 
afternoon between 3 o'clock and 8 o'clock. That is when trouble occurs. 
Seventy percent of our schools in this country have no after-school 
care programs at all. It seems to me that we ought to do something 
about that. I am not just talking about infants but young children in 
elementary schools. Try and dial a phone in a relatively small 
community between 3 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. in the afternoon. There is a 
delay between the last digit you dial and when the phone actually 
clicks in. That is because the phone system is overloaded with parents 
calling their homes to make sure their kids have gotten home safely.
  So after-school care is a part of our effort and a part of this 
proposal that we will put before this body.
  So with those thoughts I am urging our colleagues to see if we can't 
find some common ground. Hopefully the majority leader will change that 
agenda to include child care on it with the recommendation of the 
administration. We are not arguing now with an executive branch over 
whether or not we ought to do this.
  There are two bills here that it seems to me we should move on. I am 
going to raise this issue at every opportunity I can in the coming 
weeks to see to it that before this session of this Congress adjourns 
that this U.S. Senate will address child care, after-school care, and 
care for parents who want to stay at home, and that these parents are 
going to get some relief before we call it quits. I think it is a 
critical issue and one that ought to be one of our top priorities 
rather than not a priority at all.
  With that I yield the remainder of my time, if any of my colleagues 
want to take a few minutes before the time expires. I see my colleague 
from New Jersey.
  Mr. TORRICELLI. I thank the Senator from Connecticut for the time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.
  Mr. TORRICELLI. Mr. President, the State of the Union Address last 
evening reminds me of the words of President Kennedy who in 1962 came 
before the Nation and he said, ``It is my responsibility to report on 
the state of the Nation but it is all of our responsibility to improve 
it.''
  Increasingly that is a responsibility that is being met. It is 
incredible now to remember that when President Clinton assumed office 5 
years ago there was projected to be in 1998 a Federal budget deficit of 
$357 billion. Indeed, in the budget that the President is about to 
submit there is a $10 billion deficit. And the reality is within a year 
the U.S. Government for the first time in 30 years will be conducting 
its affairs in a fiscal surplus.
  For 3 decades, six Presidents of both political parties in their 
State of the Union Addresses have had it incumbent upon them to 
distribute pain--not to challenge the Nation to meet problems but to 
distribute sacrifice because of mounting deficits that left the U.S. 
Government with no choice.
  There have indeed been many victims of the deficit. It is common to 
talk about them in terms of taxpayers having to pay an ever larger 
share of their income in Federal tax with an ever-larger share of their 
taxes going to interest on the national deficit. The taxpayers were not 
the only victims. The Federal deficit made victims out of children who 
never got the education they required. Students were never able to 
continue with assistance into higher education because of programs we 
could not pass; young families that could not get day care, and people, 
mothers and fathers, who could not follow opportunities because of it. 
There were many victims of the Federal deficit, and we each now need to 
be reminded that the country's budget evolved into a surplus.

  Alan Greenspan may have said it best when he said we cannot just 
balance the Federal budget and think that our work is complete for if 
there is no investment in the Nation's future then we have still 
failed. That, Mr. President, is where we find ourselves tonight. Part 
of our national mission is accomplished. There will be a Federal budget 
surplus. Now the question is are we wise enough to recognize where the 
sacrifices have been? Are we smart enough to plan for the future to 
assure that the economic growth that we are now experiencing can 
continue?
  Last night in the State of the Union Address the President outlined 
several specific investments that go to the core of this question, each 
in a way addressing an aspect of the national infrastructure. The first 
was Social Security.
  There are in our Nation 80 million members of my generation born in 
the years after the last world war. They have worked hard. They are 
saving diligently. They have participated in building this high-growth 
economy. Soon they begin to face retirement. The Social Security trust 
fund through their savings and participation will continue to run a 
surplus through the year 2014. The current projections are that the 
same trust fund will expire by the year 2031.
  Last night the President left us with a simple challenge. In facing 
the Federal budget surplus let's deal with Social Security first. Let 
this generation of Americans now retire. My generation who will be 
facing it in all too few years know the trust funds will be secure, 
permanent. Let's begin that planning now.
  Second, the President recognized that in the 21st century the 
foundation of our Nation's economy and perhaps its principal national 
infrastructure will be our educational institutions. As certainly as in 
the 17th century it may have been the construction of canals, as 
certainly as in the 18th and 19th century it may have evolved into 
railroads to most certainly what now are institutions of higher 
learning in our schools.
  As part of the program to deal with this reality, the President 
challenged us to create a Federal program to hire 100,000 new teachers 
to enable the Nation to reduce the class size for first, second, and 
third graders to 18 students, an extraordinary challenge with 
everything that it could mean for expanding the quality of American 
schools. But it did more.

[[Page S106]]

  Recognizing that smaller school classes is going to mean the need for 
more classrooms and facing the reality that fully two-thirds of all 
American schools are now substandard, two-thirds have at least one 
serious construction problem that must be addressed, potentially $100 
billion worth of necessary construction to bring America's schools up 
to standards, the President recommended a program whereby the Federal 
Government would not build the schools; that responsibility would 
remain local. But we could reduce the cost of the construction by the 
Federal Government paying the interest on the loans of local 
governments and State governments to build those schools.
  Third, the President challenged this Congress to continue progress on 
access to quality health care in America. Two years ago, this Congress 
assured that Americans could change their jobs without losing their 
health care. This Congress assured that if a member of a family was 
taken ill, they would not lose their health care because they made use 
of it. Two years ago, we did right by the American people in expanding 
our health care opportunities. And a year ago we did so again, adding 5 
million American children, previously uninsured, without access to the 
system. We brought them into health care insurance through the 
Government.
  Now the question is even larger. The President challenged us in the 
State of the Union Address to deal with the reality of 160 million 
Americans who now have their health care delivered through managed care 
systems. I know something of this issue because only a week ago in New 
Jersey, meeting with 100 individuals, many of whom had had difficulties 
with their managed care systems, I heard the stories that Americans are 
experiencing every day--members of managed care systems who could not 
get the truth of their own files, people who needed to see specialists 
but were denied, people whose privacy had been violated, people who 
traveled needing access to emergency rooms and could not get it because 
care would not be received through their managed care program.
  The President's challenge last evening was we can make managed care 
work, and, indeed, in reducing costs it has worked. We have gone from 
12 and 13 and 14 percent annual increases in the cost of health care to 
2.5 percent last year. But saving money is only half the equation. The 
remainder is assuring that what has been the finest quality care system 
in the world in the United States is maintained and that managed care 
complements that system and does not frustrate it.
  Fourth, the President recognized the reality that fully 60 percent of 
American women today with children, with homes to maintain, are also in 
the work force--not always by choice, certainly not usually by luxury. 
But with the cost of raising children and maintaining a home today, two 
family incomes are often a necessity, and yet in modern America the 
ambitions of these women, the needs of these families are frustrated 
because they cannot get affordable child care. It is hard to imagine 
any higher priority today for young working families in America than 
assuring quality, safe, affordable child care. Indeed, America remains 
almost alone in the world in not helping our families meet this urgent 
need and responsibility.
  Through tax credits for businesses, through a larger child care tax 
credit for working families, the challenge has been laid before the 
Congress. More directly, the President said, ``Not a single American 
family should ever have to choose between the job they need and the 
child they love.'' Exactly, Mr. President, and that is the challenge 
before this Congress.
  And yet, finally, I recognize that having fought all of these years 
to balance the Federal budget, to reach the point where an American 
President could honestly predict a surplus in our finances, we achieve 
nothing if we meet these responsibilities but require higher taxes on 
American families that cannot afford the increased burden. It is 
notable that this balanced budget has been achieved and some of these 
social objectives already met while the country has the lowest tax 
burden on middle-income families in 20 years. But it is important still 
to recognize that that burden can still be eased more through targeted, 
responsible tax cuts that do not add to the deficit but help meet some 
of these social objectives-- tax cuts to encourage and expand child 
care, targeted tax cuts to help with the cost of financing education, 
tax cuts that encourage savings and investment to maintain this rapid 
economic growth that is producing these extraordinary revenues.
  Mr. President, this is an extraordinary time in the life of our 
country. We can do good and great things but not by resting on what we 
have achieved. This economy has not grown, our people are not 
productive, our industries are not competitive, we are not leading the 
world in finance and industry, no less in diplomacy, statesmanship and 
military power because we have learned to rest but, rather, because we 
have learned to challenge --not because we live off the growth of 
previous years, the investments of other generations but because we 
invest and save ourselves. That challenge remains with us tonight, not 
to accept things as they are but to invest, to educate, to build,
  There is a quote that I have through the years always admired from an 
architect in Chicago, Daniel Burnham, who said in 1909 to his 
colleagues, ``Make no little plans, for they have no magic to stir 
men's blood and will probably never be realized. Make big plans.'' Last 
night, in his State of the Union Address, President Clinton made before 
the Nation an ambitious agenda. It is a big plan worthy of a big and a 
great nation.

  I hope and trust in this final year of the 105th Congress our vision 
will be as big, our action will be as bold as the State of the Union 
Address this Congress heard last night from President Clinton.
  Madam President, with that, if I could, I should like to yield to the 
Senator from Oregon.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Collins). The Senator from Oregon is 
recognized.
  Mr. WYDEN. I thank the Chair.
  Madam President, by focusing on Social Security reform, educational 
quality, and strengthening the rights of health care patients, last 
night's speech zeroed in on the issues that I have been hearing 
Oregonians talk about during the course of 12 town meetings this month. 
Certainly a budget surplus, no matter how you count to create that 
surplus, is not going to bring us into some sort of budget nirvana if 
it is followed by more years of deficits. And I thought what was 
especially constructive about last night's speech was it zeroed in on 
the critical questions of retirement and health care that clearly drive 
the budget and the deficit for the long-term. The fact is you cannot 
have long-term budget discipline unless you deal with Social Security 
and health care, and I think last night we heard a call to arms, to dig 
in on a bipartisan basis on those key issues.
  Now, with respect to Social Security--and I am sure it is the case 
for all of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle--I can report that 
in my State more young people think that they are going to have a date 
with an extraterrestrial than think they are going to get a Social 
Security check. They look at these whopper payroll taxes that they are 
paying today, more than 6 percent for the worker, more than 6 percent 
for the employer, millions of Americans paying more in payroll taxes 
than they pay in income taxes, and they see that essentially their 
retirement contribution in the past has gone to a great extent to 
operate the budget.
  I think it is fair to say--and there has been a considerable amount 
of discussion of this in the last few weeks --that the budget surplus 
in America is to a great extent the Social Security surplus in America. 
I think last night we learned that the real challenge ahead--the 
President essentially called for what amounts to a year-long national 
teach-in on retirement finance in America--is to be straight with 
people. We are going to have to talk about the tough choices and in 
particular how we protect the millions of Americans for whom Social 
Security is a lifeline, vulnerable folks who every month are balancing 
their food costs against their medical bills and medical bills against 
their pharmaceutical bills, and the question is, how do we take care of 
those vulnerable folks and still get

[[Page S107]]

ready for this demographic tsunami--75, 80 million baby boomers that 
are going to retire early in the next century.
  But it seems to me that if we spend the next year working on a 
bipartisan basis to dig into these issues, look at a variety of 
different approaches--I am particularly attracted to the idea of trying 
to stimulate more private saving; I think there are a variety of ways 
in which that can be done--we will have said on our watch, on our 
watch, Madam President--and I have enjoyed serving with you on the 
Senate Committee on Aging--we will be able to say that on our watch we 
did not duck the tough and difficult questions. And certainly they are 
just as difficult with respect to health care as they are to retirement 
finance.
  I come from a part of the United States where we have perhaps the 
highest concentration of managed care in the country. In fact, in my 
hometown of Portland, more than half of the older people are in HMOs, 
are in managed care, and the challenge always is, even in a hometown 
like mine where we have a lot of good managed care, how do you hold the 
cost down while still protecting the rights of patients in those health 
plans.
  I am of the view that a lot of those folks feel powerless today. 
Frankly, they feel powerless throughout the health system, whether they 
are in an HMO or a fee-for-service plan or one of these hybrids that is 
a little bit of each. And I think that we as a body differ on lots of 
aspects about health care. Certainly you can differ on the role of the 
Federal Government, State government, tax policy, and a variety of 
issues, but I, for the life of me, cannot understand why any of us 
would not support what we heard last night with respect to patients 
being told about all their options in the health care system. Disagree 
all you want about the kind of services that ought to be part of a 
health plan but let us not disagree on the fundamental right to know 
what treatment might be available to you and what your options are. The 
same with the right of appeal, the right to make sure that if you felt 
you did not get a fair shake from the health care system you would have 
an opportunity to be heard and you could have another chance to make 
sure that your claim for services was addressed in a fair way. This 
issue, the question of protecting the rights of patients in health 
plans while holding costs down, is the essence of our challenge in 
health care. Of course you can hold costs down if you don't give people 
any care. That is a walk in the park. Anybody can do that. That is not 
the kind of health care system we want. We want one that both holds 
costs down and protects the quality of health care in our country. We 
have been able to achieve some of that success in my home State. I am 
convinced we can do it in every community in Oregon and across the 
country, but it is going to mean, as we heard last night, stepping 
forward, stepping up to the key issues.

  Madam President, what I was especially pleased about with respect to 
last night's speech was the call for bipartisanship. I think that is 
critical to taking on these key issues such as retirement and health 
care. Again, in our home State, that's the kind of government that we 
are trying to practice. I can tell you that my colleague in the U.S. 
Senate, Senator Gordon Smith and I, after we ran against each other for 
the seat to replace Bob Packwood--of all people, we could probably have 
come here and quarreled about all kinds of issues. We have not wanted 
to make that part of our service. We wanted to make part of our service 
tackling these issues on a bipartisan basis, in a way that makes sense 
for Oregon and our country. That is why, as new members of the Budget 
Committee, we joined in the last session in terms of Medicare 
reimbursement reform.
  As the Presiding Officer of this body knows, regarding much of the 
Medicare reimbursement system, since its inception the program has 
actually rewarded folks for being inefficient and penalized States for 
holding costs down. Senator Smith and I thought that was particularly 
unfair to our constituents, who have done so much heavy lifting to get 
the health care system back on track. We worked with other Senators, 
leaders on both sides, and were able to make some very dramatic changes 
in that reimbursement system. It has an eye-glazing name called the 
AAPCC, the Average Adjusted Per Capita Costs, but it's the guts of 
reimbursement. And I am convinced that when, on a bipartisan basis, 
colleagues can work for those kinds of changes, and we were successful 
last session, we can certainly rise to the challenge that we were given 
last night and move ahead with respect to reform as it relates to 
health maintenance organizations--consumer rights, like the right to 
full information and the right to appeal.
  So I am optimistic, as we go forward in the days ahead to tackle 
these issues, Madam President. I think we have an opportunity on our 
watch to say that we did not duck, that we understand that these 
issues, with respect to retirement and health care financing, are the 
biggest issues that in the past folks in politics ducked. We cannot 
afford to do that any longer. I look forward to working on a bipartisan 
basis with my colleagues on those questions in the days ahead.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota is recognized.
  Mr. WELLSTONE. Madam President, I do want to say to my colleague from 
Wyoming that I shall stay within 10 minutes. He is here on the floor. 
We have had a chance to speak as Democrats for a while. So I will try 
and stay relatively brief. When I say 10 minutes I mean by clock time, 
not by Senate time. So I really will try to do this.
  I thank my colleague from Oregon for his fine statement.
  Mr. WYDEN. I thank my colleague.
  Mr. WELLSTONE. Madam President, I want to talk about the President's 
speech last night. Let me start out with where I disagree with some of 
what he had to say, and then let me talk about what I think were some 
of the sharp differences between Democrats and Republicans. That is not 
to say I am not interested in bipartisanship, but I think, frankly, if 
there are differences between the parties that make a difference, and 
people see a real debate and it is important to their lives, that will 
be all to the good.
  I think the President is dead wrong in what he had to say about 
welfare reform. I never called it reform because I think that takes for 
granted the very question in doubt, as to whether or not it is really 
reform. That there are a million or 2 million or 3 million fewer women 
and children--those are the welfare recipients on welfare today--than 
several years ago does not necessarily represent reform. A reduction of 
the caseload, reduction of people who are receiving assistance, has 
nothing to do with whether or not you have reduced poverty. It is 
reform when we have reduced poverty.
  I will just say for the record that, as I have had a chance to travel 
around the community, and a lot of poor communities in our country, 
there are several things which I found which are very troubling. I do 
not believe I do any damage to the truth when I say this, and think all 
Senators need to take note of it. First of all, it is simply true that 
there are 3- and 4-year-olds at home alone. It is simply true that 
there were long waiting lists for affordable child care, long before 
welfare reform, and many of these children are not receiving nurturing, 
important developmental care at the most critical years of their lives.
  This is wrong.
  It is also true, as I said the other day, that there are first and 
second and third graders who, when they go home, there is no parent 
there. I think it is poignant. I think it is wrong that there are fewer 
children playing outdoors now because when many of these kids go home 
they go into a housing project and they are told to go inside, not take 
any phone calls, not answer the door. That is happening in the United 
States of America. We need to take note of that.
  I think the President is also wrong because we don't know where these 
mothers are. We don't know what kind of jobs they have. And what is 
really astounding to me, Madam President, is at the State level we are 
not collecting the data. I think, as responsible policymakers, since 4 
years, 3 years, 2 years from now, depending upon the State, all of 
these women and children are going to essentially be receiving no 
assistance, they are going to be cut off from all assistance, don't we 
need to know whether or not they have reached

[[Page S108]]

economic self-sufficiency? These parents, mainly women--do they have 
jobs that pay a decent wage? Do they have health care coverage? Can 
they afford child care? Where are their children? We need to know that. 
That is where I disagree with the President's analysis. And I will have 
some amendments almost on the first piece of legislation that comes to 
the floor of the Senate where I will try to get the Senate to address 
these problems.
  Second, I think we have to do much better in higher education. I was 
a college teacher for 20 years and I believe that we didn't expand 
assistance gaining the best bang for the buck. The way of targeting the 
assistance to those students in most need would have been to 
dramatically expand the Pell grant program. And if you are going to 
have tax credits, they have to be refundable. If you don't have tax 
credits that are refundable and you have a student from a family 
earning less than $27,000, $28,000 a year--which, by the way, is the 
income profile of many, many community college students--it doesn't do 
you any good. You have no tax liability. You can't cash flow paying 
your tuition because you get it too late to pay your tuition, and you 
are not eligible anyway. So if we are going to talk about making higher 
education more affordable let's, for gosh sakes, talk about these 
working families.

  That is disagree.
  Agreement: I think the President's focus on education, on early 
childhood development, affordable child care, on health care, was 
extremely important. Let me make but a couple of points for my 
Republican colleagues. As I listened to some of my Republican 
colleagues talk about the President's speech last night, I felt like 
what they were saying is: Oh, this is just Government all over again. 
Americans, when it comes to these pressing issues of your lives, there 
is nothing the Government can or should do.
  Madam President, if you own your own large corporation and you are 
wealthy, then that's fine. But for most of the working families in this 
country, affordable child care is a huge issue. For most of the working 
families in this country, making sure that your children get a good 
education and a commitment to public education and lowering class sizes 
and having more teachers and having more teaching assistance is hugely 
important to you. If you are from a working family in our country, you 
want to make sure, vis-a-vis an increasingly corporatized and 
bureaucratized health care system--listen, managed care can be good or 
bad. It depends upon who manages the managed care. But the fact of the 
matter is, the nine largest insurance companies own and control well 
over 60 percent of the managed care plans, and for them the bottom line 
has become the only line.
  So of course we want to make sure that people have access to the care 
they need. Of course we want to make sure that nurses and doctors can 
provide that care. Of course we want to make sure there are some 
independent appeals processes for ordinary people in our country. Of 
course we want to make sure that there are some basic consumer 
protections. And I think the President is right on the mark. What I am 
worried about, it is a challenge to colleagues on both sides of the 
aisle, is that the Congress will sure enough pass a bill. It will have 
a great acronym. It will sound great and it will have that made-for-
Congress look, because there will not be any teeth in it, enforcement 
teeth.
  By the way, one way in which I would love to amend some of what the 
President was talking about last night, and I think we could get 
bipartisan support for this, is we ought to think about --Families USA 
has talked about ombudsmen, you know, through nongovernment 
organizations, through nonprofits, where people would have somewhere to 
go so they can have basic information about what their rights are as 
consumers. We absolutely ought to do that. We absolutely ought to do 
that. It's a simple proposition. Either we are here to represent big 
insurance companies or we are here to represent doctors, nurses, 
nurse's assistants, other caregivers, and consumers.
  The third point I want to make has to do with jobs. I said it the 
other day on the floor of the Senate. I will summarize. I will say it 
again. No matter where I go, whether it be low-income communities, poor 
communities, middle-income communities, it doesn't matter--and for that 
matter upper-income communities. People are focused on how to earn a 
decent living and how to give their children the care they know they 
need and deserve. I am going, for a moment, to talk about low-income, 
since we don't talk that much about low-income, poor people. I will 
tell you that there are two challenges here. One, the President talked 
about raising the minimum wage. Senator Kennedy and I have been out on 
the floor. We talked about the legislation we have introduced, 50 cents 
a year for 3 years and then indexing it. I will tell you that is 
extremely important. Because it is wrong when people work full-time, 
all year round, and they are still poor in America. That should not be 
the case. When people work, play by the rules of the game, they ought 
not to be poor.

  My second point, however, is different. It doesn't do any good to 
raise the minimum wage if people live in communities where there is no 
work at all. We have communities in our country, ghettos and barrios in 
rural areas, where there is no work. And we really do need to figure 
out ways of combining our initiatives while at the same time providing 
some job opportunities for people to build up some skills and then be 
able to transition to private sector employers. If we are going to 
rebuild crumbling schools--and we should, God knows, when students go 
into schools that are so uninviting, with ceilings falling in. Imagine, 
could we do our work if the heating didn't work? If the plumbing didn't 
work? If the air conditioning didn't work during the summer? If we 
didn't have access to Internet? If we didn't have access to the best 
books? Could we do our work? A lot of students are going to school in 
decrepit buildings, unsafe, that tell those students we don't value 
them.
  If we are going to rebuild crumbling schools, invest some money in 
that infrastructure, I think we ought to also make sure that a certain 
percentage of the jobs go to the adults, the fathers and mothers of 
those children who live in these communities. Because these are 
communities that are ravaged by high levels of unemployment. Let's 
combine rebuilding the schools with some job training and jobs for some 
of the parents in the community.
  If we are going to reduce class size we can talk about 100,000 more 
teachers, but there is also a role for teaching assistants that can 
help a teacher in a classroom. That could provide employment for people 
who live in these communities without any jobs at all. So I would like 
to see us have more of a focus in this area. To a certain extent I am 
talking about people who all too often are faceless and voiceless here, 
but I think it is extremely important, as a matter elementary justice, 
that we focus in this area.
  Finally, Madam President--I hope I have stayed within 10 minutes--an 
issue that you care a great deal about, an issue that I wish all of us 
would care a great deal about, even if we disagree on the specifics. I 
do not know what other people find, but I tell you I think an awful lot 
of people in our country, I am sorry, I think it is well over 50 
percent, are just disillusioned and disaffected with politics. It is 
terrible. I think people think that both parties are owned and 
controlled by the same investors.
  I think that people think that when it comes to their concerns and 
their hopes about themselves, their families, their communities, their 
loved ones, these concerns are of little concern to those of us in the 
Congress. I hate that.
  I have two Republican colleagues on the floor with me from Wyoming 
and from Colorado, both of whom I respect. It does not matter if we 
disagree on issues, this is one thing we do not want to have happen. I 
mean, we do not want people to just kind of become so disillusioned 
that participation becomes less and less. We lose our democracy.
  So, Madam President, the final issue the President talked about--I 
hope we can move some campaign finance reform. We cannot get all the 
big money out of politics. I wish we could. But if we could at least 
pass some reforms that would give people some confidence we are serious 
about trying to get some of the money out of politics and make politics 
more responsive to the concerns and circumstances of their lives, we 
would be taking a big step forward.

[[Page S109]]

  I look forward to the debate. I hope we have a lot of debate. I do 
not want it to be acrimonious. But I think differences between the 
political parties are healthy. I think if the differences make a 
difference to the people we represent, it is even better. The sooner we 
get substantive, the sooner we have bills out here on the floor, the 
sooner we have the debate, and the sooner we get on with the work of 
governance, the better I will like it as a Senator from Minnesota.
  Madam President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The time under the control of the Democratic 
leader has expired.
  Mr. ENZI addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming is recognized.
  Mr. ENZI. Thank you, Madam President.
  I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed 5 minutes in morning 
business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. ENZI. Thank you.

                          ____________________