[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 9 (Wednesday, January 20, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E71-E73]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

[[Page E71]]



   A STARK ASSESSMENT: U.S. REPRESENTATIVE PETE STARK SPEAKS OUT ON 
                     HEALTHCARE AND WELFARE REFORM

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. JOHN LEWIS

                               of georgia

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, January 19, 1999

  Mr. LEWIS of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I insert the following for 
printing in the Record:

                    [From the World, Jan.-Feb. 1999]

                            (By David Reich)

       When President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility 
     and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 more commonly 
     known as the welfare reform bill, US Rep. Fortney Pete Stark 
     didn't make a secret of his displeasure. ``The president sold 
     out children to get reelected. He's no better than the 
     Republicans,'' fumed Stark, a longtime unitarian Universalist 
     whose voting record in Congress regularly wins him 100 
     percent ratings from groups like the AFL-CIO and Americans 
     for Democratic Action.
       One of the Congress's resident experts on health and 
     welfare policy, the northern California Democrat has earned a 
     reputation for outspokenness, often showing a talent for 
     colorful invective, not to say name-calling. First elected to 
     the House as an anti-Vietnam War ``bomb-thrower`` (his term) 
     in 1972, Stark has called Clinton healthcare guru Ira 
     Magaziner ``a latter-day Rasputin'' and House Speaker Newt 
     Gingrich ``a messianic megalomaniac.'' When the American 
     Medical Association lobbied Congress to raise Medicare 
     payments to physicians, Stark, who chaired the Health 
     Subcommittee of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, 
     called them ``greedy troglodytes,'' unleashing a $600,000 AMA 
     donation to Stark's next Republican opponent.
       ``I've gotten in a lot of trouble speaking my mind,'' the 
     congressman admits with a rueful smile. For all his 
     outspokenness on politics, Stark appears to have a droll 
     sense of himself, and he tends to talk softly, his voice 
     often trailing off at the ends of phrases or sentences.
       Back in the 1960s, as a 30-something banker and nominal 
     member of the Berkeley, California, Unitarian Universalist 
     congregation, Stark upped his commitment to the UU movement 
     after his minister asked him to give financial advice to 
     Berkeley's Starr King School for the Ministry. ``I think I 
     was sandbagged,'' he theorizes. After a day of poring over 
     Starr King's books (``The place was going broke,'' he says), 
     he was invited by their board chair to serve as the 
     seminary's treasurer. ``I said, `Okay,' '' Stark recalls. He 
     said, `Then you have to join the board,' I said, `I don't 
     know. I guess I could.' ''
       The UUing of Pete Stark culminated at his first board 
     meeting, when the long-serving board chair announced his 
     resignation and Stark, to his astonishment, found himself 
     elected to take the old chair's place. ``There I was,'' he 
     reminisces, his long, slim body curled up in a wing chair in 
     a corner of his Capitol Hill office. ``And I presided over a 
     change in leadership and then spent a lot of time raising a 
     lot of money for it and actually in the process had a lot of 
     fun and met a lot of terrific people.''
       The World spoke with Stark in early October, as rumors of 
     the possible impeachment of a president swirled around the 
     capital. But aside from a few pro forma remarks about the 
     presidential woes (``His behavior is despicable, but nothing 
     in it rises to the level of impeachment''), our conversation 
     mainly stuck to healthcare and welfare, the areas where Stark 
     has made his mark in government.
       World: You have strong feelings about the welfare reform 
     bill. Do the specifics of the bill imply a particular theory 
     of poverty?
       PS: They imply that if you're poor, it's your fault, and if 
     I'm not poor, it's because I belong to the right religion or 
     have the right genes. That the poor are poor by choice, and 
     we ought not to have to worry about them. It's akin to how 
     people felt about lepers early in this century.
       World: Does the welfare reform law also imply any thinking 
     about women and their role in the world?
       PS: Ronald Reagan for years defined welfare cheat as a 
     black woman in a white ermine cape driving a white El Dorado 
     convertible and commonly seen in food checkout lines using 
     food stamps to buy caviar and filet mignon and champagne and 
     then getting in her car and driving on to the next 
     supermarket to load up again. And I want to tell you she was 
     sighted by no less than 150 of my constituents in various 
     supermarkets back in my district. They were all nuts. They 
     were hallucinating. But they believed this garbage.
       And then you've got the myth that, as one of my Republican 
     neighbors put it, ``these welfare women are nothing but 
     breeders''--a different class of humanity.
       World: You raised the idea of belonging to ``the right 
     religion.'' Do these views of poor people, and poor women in 
     particular, come out of people's religious training?
       PS: No, my sense of what makes a reactionary is that it's a 
     person younger than me, a 40- or 50-year-old man who comes to 
     realize he isn't going to become vice president of his firm. 
     His kids aren't going to get into Stanford or Harvard or make 
     the crew team. His wife is not very attractive-looking. His 
     sex life is gone, and he's run to flab and alcohol.
       World: So it's disappointment.
       PS: Yes. And when the expectations you've been brought up 
     with are not within your grasp, you look around for a 
     scapegoat. ``It's these big-spending congressmen'' or ``It's 
     these women who have children just to get my tax dollar. The 
     reason I'm not rich is that I pay so much in taxes; the 
     reason my children don't respect me is that the moral fabric 
     has been torn apart by schools that fail to teach religion.''
       And then there's a group that I've learned to call the 
     modern-day Pharisees, people from the right wing of the 
     Republican party who have decided the laws of the temple are 
     the laws of the land.
       World: Then religion figures into it, after all.
       PS: Oh, yeah, but to me that's a religion of convenience. 
     In my book those are people with little intellect who listen 
     to the Bible on the radio when they're driving the tractor or 
     whatever. But I do credit them with being seven-day-a-week 
     activists unlike so many other Christians.
       World: Going back to the welfare reform bill itself, how 
     does it comport with the values implied by the UU Principles, 
     especially the principle about equity and compassion in 
     social relations?
       PS: If you assume we have some obligation to help those who 
     can't help themselves, if that's a role of society, then 
     supporters of the welfare reform bill trample on those 
     values. ``I'm not sure that's the government's job,'' they 
     would say. ``It's the church's job or it's your job. Just 
     don't take my money. I give my cleaning lady food scraps for 
     her family and my castaway clothes to dress her children. I 
     put money in the poor box. What more do you want?''
       The bill we reported out, the president's bill, was 
     motivated by the belief that paying money to people on public 
     assistance was, one, squandering public funds and, two, 
     preventing us from lowering the taxes on the overtaxed rich. 
     I used to try and hammer at some of my colleagues, and 
     occasionally, when I could show them they were harming 
     children, they would relent a little, or at least they would 
     blush.
       World: Did you shame anyone into changing his or her vote 
     or making some concessions on the language of the bill?
       PS: We got a few concessions but not many. Allowing a young 
     woman to complete high school before she had to look for a 
     job, because she'd be more productive with a high school 
     education--you could maybe shame them into technicalities 
     like that. But beyond that they were convinced that if you 
     just got off the dole and went to work, you would grow into--
     a Republican, I suppose.
       World: It's been pointed out often that many people who 
     supported the bill believe, as a matter of religious 
     conviction, that women should be at home raising kids, yet 
     the bill doesn't apply this standard to poor women. Can the 
     bill's supporters resolve that apparent contradiction?
       PS: Yes, I hate to lay out for you what you're obviously 
     missing. The bill's supporters would say that if a woman had 
     been married and the family had stayed together as God 
     intended, with a father around to bring home the bacon, then 
     the mother could stay home and do the household chores and 
     raise the children. They miss the fact that they haven't 
     divided the economic pie in such a manner that the father can 
     make enough money to support mother and child.
       Now, I do think young children benefit grandly, beyond 
     belief, by having a mother in full-time attendance for at 
     least the first four years of life. But given the reality 
     that a single mother has to work, you have to move to the 
     idea of reasonable care for that mother's child. And by 
     reasonable care I do not mean a day care worker on minimum 
     wage who's had four hours of instruction and doesn't know 
     enough to wash his or her hands after changing diapers and 
     before feeding the kid. Or who's been hired without a 
     criminal check to screen out pedophiles. Because it's that 
     bad.
       World: Did the welfare system as it existed before the 1996 
     bill need reform?
       PS: Sure. The Stark theory--which I used to peddle a 
     thousand years ago, when I chaired the House Public 
     Assistance Committee--is that people have to be allowed to 
     fail and try again and again--and again. We can't let people 
     starve, but they've got to learn to budget money and not 
     spend it all on frivolous things. So I'd have cashed out many 
     of the benefits. For instance, instead

[[Page E72]]

     of giving you food stamps worth 50 bucks, why don't I give 
     you the 50 bucks? The theory behind food stamps was that 
     you'd be so irresponsible you'd buy caviar and wine and beer 
     and cigarettes and not have any money left for tuna fish and 
     rice. And that kind of voucher doesn't give you the chance to 
     learn.
       We did a study, good Lord, in the 1960s in Contra Costa 
     County, California. Our church was involved, along with the 
     United Crusade charity, and some federal money went into it, 
     too. We identified in the community some people who had never 
     held a regular job--either women who had done day work or men 
     who were nominally, say, real estate brokers but hadn't sold 
     a house in years. And in this study we took maybe 20 of them 
     and made them community organizers--without much to do but 
     with an office and a job title. All this was to study what 
     happened to those people when they had regular hours and a 
     regular paycheck, having come from a neighborhood where 
     people didn't necessarily leave for the office at every 
     morning at 7:30.
       And we found that these people suddenly became leaders, 
     that people in the neighborhood came to them for advice. They 
     even talked about going into politics, just because of the 
     fact that they fit into the structure and what that did for 
     their self-image and their neighbors' image of them.
       Another part of that program: in the poorest parts of our 
     community people were given loans to start new stores--wig 
     shops and fingernail parlors and liquor stores and sub shops 
     and soul food places and barbecue pits. The stores had little 
     economic value but lots of social value. They were places 
     where children of the families who owned them went after 
     school, and people didn't sleep or piss in the doorways or 
     leave their bottles there because the street with these shops 
     became a community that had some cohesion--though when the 
     funds were cut back, it reverted to boarded-up shops.
       World: Are you suggesting that this kind of program might 
     work for current welfare recipients?
       PS: Absolutely. I don't believe for a minute that 99 
     percent of people, given the opportunity, wouldn't work. They 
     see you and me and whoever--the cop on the beat, the school 
     teacher, the factory worker, the sales clerk--going to work. 
     People want to be part of that. It's just like kids won't 
     stay home from school for very long. That's where the other 
     kids are, that's where they talk about their social lives. 
     That's where the athletics are. And so it is with adults: 
     they want to be part of the fun, of the action.
       Inefficient as some people's labor may be, as a last 
     resort, bring them to work in the government. It would be so 
     much more efficient than having to pay caseworkers and making 
     sure they're spending their welfare checks the right way. 
     Give them a living wage, damn it. They'll learn. And given 
     time, their efficiency as economic engines will improve.
       World: Do you have a clear sense of how the changes in the 
     system are affecting welfare clients so far?
       PS: No, and I'm having a major fight with our own 
     administration over it. Olivia Golden, who until recently 
     headed up the family, youth, and children office in the 
     Health and Human Services Department, sat there blithely and 
     told me ``Welfare reform is working!'' I said. ``Olivia, 
     what do you mean it's working?'' ``Well, people all over 
     the country have told me--'' ``How many?'' ``Maybe 12.'' I 
     said, ``Are you kidding? You've talked to maybe 12 
     people?''
       They won't give us the statistics. They say, ``The states 
     don't want to give them to us.'' All we know--the only 
     figures we have--is how many people are being ticked off the 
     rolls. What's happened to the people who leave the rolls? 
     What's happened to the kids? The number of children in 
     poverty is starting to go up--substantially, even when their 
     family has gotten off welfare and is working.
       World: One of the arguments in favor of the welfare bill 
     involved ``devolution.'' Do you accept the general 
     proposition that states can provide welfare better than the 
     federal government?
       PS: Well, the states were always doing it, under federal 
     guidelines. Now we've taken away the guidelines and given the 
     states money with some broad limitations.
       I have no problem with local communities running public 
     assistance programs. They're much closer to the people and 
     much more concerned, and somebody from Brooklyn doesn't know 
     squat about what's needed in Monroe County, Wyoming, where an 
     Indian reservation may be the sole source of your poverty 
     population. But I want some standards--minimum standards for 
     day care, minimum standards for job training. I'm talking 
     about support standards, not punishment standards.
       World: And the current bill has only punishment standards?
       PS: Basically. It's a threat, it's a time limit, it's a 
     plank to walk.
       World: What about the idea that welfare reform would save 
     the government money? How much money has been saved?
       PS: I can get the budget figures for you, but I suspect we 
     haven't saved one cent. I mean, do homeless people cost us? 
     What is the cost in increased crime? We're building jails 
     like they're going out of style. Does the welfare bill have 
     anything to do with that? I don't know, but I wouldn't make 
     the case that they're unrelated.
       So if you take the societal costs--are we saving? And it's 
     such a minuscule part of the budget anyway. It's like foreign 
     aid. I could get standing applause in my district by saying, 
     ``I don't like foreign aid.'' And if I ask people what we're 
     spending on it, they say, ``Billions, billions!'' We spend 
     diddly on foreign aid. The same is true for welfare. Any one 
     of the Defense Department's bomber programs far exceeds the 
     total cost of welfare.
       World: Is there any hope of improving the country's welfare 
     system in the short of medium term, given that the 1996 bill 
     did have bipartisan support?
       PS: It had precious little bipartisan support, but it had 
     the president. No, I don't think we're apt to make changes. 
     And what's fascinating is that with the turn in global events 
     our economy may have peaked out. We may be heading down. And 
     while this welfare reform may have worked in a booming 
     economy, when the economy turns down, those grants to the 
     states won't begin to cover what we'll need.
       World: If Congress isn't likely to do anything, what can 
     people in religious communities do to make sure the system is 
     humane?
       PS: They can get active at the state and local level. 
     Various states may do better things or have better programs 
     or more humane programs. And the lower the level of 
     jurisdiction, the easier it is to make the change, whether 
     it's in local schools or local social service delivery 
     programs.
       The other thing is to take the lead in going to court. It's 
     the courts that have saved us time after time--in education, 
     women's rights, abortion rights. We need to look for those 
     occasions where a welfare agency does something illegal--and 
     there will be some--and take up the cause of children whose 
     civil rights are being violated.
       World: Let's shift over to healthcare. In the 1992 
     presidential campaign, the idea of a universal healthcare 
     plan was seen as very popular with the voters. Why did the 
     Clinton health plan fail?
       PS: I'd like to blame it on Ira Magaziner and all the 
     monkey business that went on at the White House--the secret 
     meetings and this hundred-person panel that ignored the 
     legislative process. Their proposal became discredited before 
     it ever got to Congress. We paid no attention to it. My 
     subcommittee wrote our own bill which accomplished what the 
     president said he wanted. It provided universal coverage, it 
     was budget-neutral, and it was paid for on a progressive 
     basis.
       World: And it did that by expanding Medicare?
       PS: Basically it required every employer to pay, in effect, 
     an increase in the minimum wage, to provide either a payment 
     of so much an hour or add insurance. And if they couldn't buy 
     private-insurance at a price equivalent to the minimum wage 
     increase, they could buy into Medicare--at no cost to the 
     government, on a budget-neutral basis. But the bill allowed 
     private insurance to continue, with the government as insurer 
     of last resort.
       We got it out of committee by a vote or two, but then on 
     the House floor, we couldn't get any Republican votes. They 
     unified against it, so we never had the votes to bring it up.
       The Harry and Louise ads beat us badly. People were 
     convinced that government regulation was bad, per se. It was 
     just the beginning of the free market in medical care, 
     which we're seeing the culmination of now in the for-
     profit HMOs and the Medicare choice plans that are 
     collapsing like houses of cards all over the country. But 
     back in 1993 the idea was ``Let the free market decide. 
     HMOs will be created. They'll make a profit, they'll give 
     people what they want. People will vote with their feet 
     and the free market will apply its wonderful choice.''
       World: Did that bill's defeat doom universal healthcare for 
     a long time to come?
       PS: It certainly doomed it for this decade and things are 
     only getting worse. We now have a couple of million more 
     people uninsured. We're up to about 43.5 million uninsured, 
     and we were talking about 41 million back in 1993. And people 
     on employer-paid health plans are either paying higher copays 
     or getting more and more restricted benefits. Plus early 
     retirement benefits are disappearing so that if people retire 
     before 65, they often can't get affordable insurance. It will 
     have to get just a little worse before we'll have a popular 
     rebellion. We're seeing in the managed care bill of rights 
     issue where people are today. To me, that's the most potent 
     force out there in the public.
       World: In both areas we've been discussing assistance to 
     the poor and health insurance, the US government is taking 
     less responsibility than virtually all the other industrial 
     democracies.
       PS: Why take just democracies? Even in the fascist 
     countries, everybody's got healthcare. We are the only nation 
     extant that doesn't offer healthcare to everybody.
       Take our neighbor Canada. There is no more conservative 
     government on this continent, north or south. I've heard the 
     wealthiest right-wing Canadian government minister say: ``I 
     went to private prep schools, but it never would occur to us 
     Canadians to jump the queue, go to the head of the line in 
     healthcare. We believe healthcare is universal. Now, we fight 
     about spending levels, we fight about the bureaucracy, and we 
     fight about how we're working the payment system.'' But they 
     don't question it.
       World: In the US we do question it--the right to 
     healthcare, that is, Why?
       PS: It's connected with this idea of independence. Where do 
     we get the militias from, and those yahoos who run around in 
     soldier suits and shoot paint guns at each other?
       World: The frontier ethos?

[[Page E73]]

       PS: Maybe, maybe. And the American Medical Association is 
     not exactly exempt from blame. The physicians are the most 
     antigovernment group of all. They're the highest paid 
     profession in America by far, and so they are protecting 
     their economic interests. Though the government now looks a 
     little better to them than the insurance industry because 
     they have more control over government than over the 
     insurance companies.
       Look, the country was barely ready for Medicare when that 
     went through. It just made it through Congress by a few 
     votes. There are some of us who would have liked to see it 
     include nursing home or long-term convalescent care. That can 
     only be done through social insurance, but people won't admit 
     it. They say, ``There's got to be a better way.'' It's a 
     mantra. On healthcare: ``There's got to be a better way.'' 
     Education: ``There's got to be a better way.''
       They've yet to say it for defense though. I'm waiting for 
     them to privatize the Defense Department and turn it over to 
     Pinkerton. Although in a way they have. There's a bunch of 
     retired generals right outside the Beltway making millions of 
     dollars of government money training the armed forces in 
     Bosnia. I was there and what a bunch of crackpots! They've 
     got these former drill sergeants over there, including people 
     out to try to start wars on our ticket.
       World: A few more short questions. Have the culture and 
     atmosphere of the House changed in the years since you 
     arrived here?
       PS: Yes, though I spent 22 years in the majority and now 
     four in the minority, so I may just be remembering good old 
     days that weren't so good. Back when I was trying to end the 
     Vietnam War. I was in just as much of a minority as I am now, 
     and I didn't have a subcommittee chair to give me any power 
     or leverage.
       On the other hand, look at the country now. Look at TV talk 
     shows--they argue and shout and scream, and then they call it 
     journalism. Maybe we're just following in their footsteps.
       World: Is it a spiritual challenge for you to have to work 
     with, or at least alongside, people with whom you disagree, 
     sometimes violently?
       PS: Yes, and I don't a very good job. My wife says, ``When 
     you retire, why don't you become an ambassador?'' And I say, 
     ``Diplomacy doesn't run deep in these genes.'' But it's tough 
     if you internalize your politics and believe in them.
       Still, I like legislating--to make it all work, to take all 
     the pieces that are pushing on you, to make the legislation 
     fit, to accommodate and accomplish a goal. It really makes 
     the job kind of fascinating. I once reformed the part of the 
     income tax bill that applies to life insurance, and that's 
     one of the most arcane and complex parts of the tax bill. It 
     was fun--bringing people together and getting something like 
     that. And actually writing that health bill was fun.
       But not now. We don't have any committee hearings or 
     meetings anymore. It's all done in back rooms. Under the 
     Democratic leadership we used to go into the back room, but 
     there were a lot of us in the room. Now they write bills in 
     the speaker's office and avoid the committee system. I mean, 
     it's done deals. We're not doing any legislating, or not very 
     much.
       World: Do you think about quitting?
       PS: No, I don't think about quitting. I'd consider doing 
     something else, but I don't know what that is. Secretary of 
     health and human services? Sure, but don't hold your breath 
     until I'm offered the job. Even in the minority, being in the 
     Congress is fascinating, and as long as my health and 
     faculties hold out. * * * I mean, I'm not much interested in 
     shuffleboard or model airplanes.

     

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