[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 52 (Thursday, March 26, 2009)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3821-S3822]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               THE BUDGET

  Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I rise today to speak about the budget that 
is before the Congress, before the Senate, and before the American 
people. Like many others in this Chamber, as well as people from across 
the country, we look forward to working with President Obama to get 
this budget passed.
  When we consider what a budget is, I believe it is a lot of things, 
of course, but it is not just a series of proposals and policies and 
numbers and charts and data. I believe a budget is really a reflection 
of our values. It is a mirror into which we look--at least here in the 
Federal budget--once a year to make an assessment or a reassessment of 
our values and our priorities. I think President Obama understands 
that. His budget reflects that understanding; that a budget is a set of 
values and priorities, and in the end it is also about people. It is 
not just about data and programs, but a budget is about people.
  I was thinking this morning about some people with whom I have had 
contact through correspondence--people who write to our office and talk 
about their lives--such as Trisha Urban, who wrote to our office not 
too long ago. She is from Berks County, the county that has the city of 
Redding in it, on the eastern side of our State.
  Trisha has a story about her life, her family, and about health care. 
Imagine this happening, Mr. President, in the life of one family--in 
this case Trisha Urban's family. Trisha was pregnant and awaiting the 
birth of a child, and at the same time her husband dies, literally 
within the same timeframe. She wrote to me and said:

       We were anxiously awaiting the birth of our first child. A 
     half hour later, two ambulances were in my driveway. As the 
     paramedics were assessing the health of my baby and me, the 
     paramedic from the other ambulance told me that my husband 
     could not be revived.

  This happened all in 1 day, all in 1 hour, literally.
  She goes on to say in her letter:

       My husband's death may have been prevented. Like many other 
     Americans, we have difficulty with our health insurance. My 
     husband had to leave his job for 1 year to complete an 
     internship requirement to complete his doctorate in 
     psychology. The internship was unpaid; we could not afford 
     COBRA.

  COBRA is the extension of health insurance. Continuing to quote her 
letter:

       Because of preexisting conditions, neither my husband's 
     health issues nor my pregnancy would be covered under private 
     insurance.

  And she goes on from there to talk about her own predicament. Mr. 
President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the 
full text of this letter that I received from Trisha Urban.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

       Dear Mr. Casey, Exactly one week and 7 hours ago, I was 
     frantically trying to revive my husband who was doing some 
     last minute errands before taking me to the hospital. My 
     water had broke the night before, we were anxiously awaiting 
     the birth of our first child. A half-hour later, 2 ambulances 
     were in my driveway. As the paramedics were assessing the 
     health of my baby and me, the paramedic from the other 
     ambulance told me that my husband could not be revived.
       My husband's death may have been prevented. Like many 
     Americans, we have difficulty with our health insurance. My 
     husband had to leave his job for one year to complete an 
     internship requirement to complete his doctorate in 
     psychology. The internship was unpaid; we could not afford 
     cobra. Because of pre-existing conditions, neither my 
     husband's health issues nor my pregnancy would be covered 
     under private insurance. I worked 4 part-time jobs and was 
     not eligible for any health benefits. We ended up with a 
     second rate health insurance plan through my husband's 
     university. When medical bills started to add up, the 
     insurance company decided to drop our coverage stating the 
     internship did not qualify us for the benefits. We were left 
     with close to $100,000 worth of medical bills. Concerned with 
     the upcoming financial responsibility of the birth of our 
     daughter and the burden of current medical expenses, my 
     husband missed his last doctor's appointment less than one 
     month ago. I am a working class American and do not have the 
     money or the insight to legally fight the health insurance 
     company. We had no life insurance. I will probably lose my 
     home, my car and everything we worked so hard to accumulate 
     in our life will be gone in an instant.
       If my story is heard, if legislation can be changed to help 
     other uninsured Americans in a similar situation, I am 
     willing to pay the price of losing everything. I am asking 
     you to share my story with others in congress and I am 
     willing to speak on behalf of my husband so that his death 
     will not be in vain.--Trisha Urban

  Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, here is how Trisha Urban concluded her 
letter. She said:

       If my story is heard, if legislation could be changed to 
     help other uninsured Americans in a similar situation, I am 
     willing to pay the price of losing everything. I am asking 
     you to share my story with others in Congress and I am 
     willing to speak on behalf of my husband so that his death 
     will not be in vain.

  In this one single letter from a woman in Pennsylvania, a mother and 
now a widow, is contained all the challenges that we face in this 
budget, specifically with regard to health care. But I think it speaks 
to so many other challenges we face as well. So every budget we do, and 
especially at this time of economic crisis, is about people, and we all 
have to remember that.
  I think President Obama understands this budget is about people--it 
is about people who are leading lives of struggle and sacrifice and 
setback. But at the same time he understands the American people, even 
at this difficult time in our Nation's history, understand we will 
overcome this. We will pass a budget, and we will get to work on these 
important priorities--priorities such as health care, the priority of 
education, and also of making progress on a whole range of energy 
issues.
  As we are passing this budget, we should remind the American people 
that even as we work on health care, energy, and education, this budget 
contains plenty of middle-class tax relief, and it is important to talk 
about that.
  Now, I don't want to look in the rear-view mirror and talk about the 
past too much, but I think it is important to provide a brief 
assessment of where we are. We can't make progress ahead of us if we 
don't know where we are and where we have been. Here is where we have 
been the last couple of years.
  The prior administration inherited a $236 billion surplus. When the 
prior administration ended, it was the exact opposite--record deficits 
at that time. The Congressional Budget Office projected the surplus--
this is back in the early part of this decade--the projection was the 
surplus would grow at $710 billion--a surplus of $710 billion--by 2009. 
We know that is not the case today.
  President Obama and the American people have inherited a deficit of 
almost $1.3 trillion. If you look at it in terms of gross debt, it is 
like looking at the side of a mountain. We went from $5.8 trillion up 
to over $12 trillion in debt. That is what we face. And I think it is 
important to understand that is where we start.
  But President Obama didn't spend a lot of time talking about the 
problem he inherited, he focused on solutions. So he put before the 
Congress an open, honest, and accountable budget. This is a budget that 
will come about because of his work and his leadership as President but 
also the work that Chairman Kent Conrad and others in Congress do. I 
want to commend Chairman Conrad for the work he has done on this 
budget. He has a great array of charts we are going to be using in the 
next couple of days to highlight some of these issues.
  But this is an honest budget. It is not perfect, but it is honest, 
and it focuses on those priorities I mentioned before--health care, 
energy, education, deficit reduction, and tax relief.
  Let me take a couple of moments to talk about health care. The story 
I told before, encompassing the letter from Trisha Urban, is an unusual 
story, a graphic and difficult story to tell about tragic events in the 
life of one family. But the problems that families are having with 
health care are not all that unusual. For the first time in a decade, 
we have a budget that tackles one of the biggest problems in the 
country--the health care crisis. We can't put it off to 2010, 2011, or 
2012. We have to deal with this now, this year, with a new President 
and a new Congress committed to doing that.

[[Page S3822]]

  Across Pennsylvania this issue comes up all the time when I talk to 
people in our State. If you look at it in terms of the Nation, there 
are nearly seven times the number of Americans without health insurance 
today as there were in 2000. Families USA is an organization that 
analyzes health care in the country, and then they focus specifically 
on a particular State. The most recent report of Families USA finds 
that nearly 3 million Pennsylvanians under the age of 65 were uninsured 
for some period of time in 2007 and 2008. The overall number of 
Pennsylvanians without health insurance is growing faster than the 
nationwide average.
  So we have a major challenge on our hands with regard to health care, 
and the President has been very focused on making sure health care is a 
major component of this budget. We are going to be talking about the 
specifics of that in the days ahead.

  The President also made a strong commitment to energy independence. 
We all know it is important. We know it is an urgent priority, and we 
have talked a lot about it--year after year of talking and not acting, 
year after year of explaining the problem instead of putting the 
solutions into law, into the budget, into the programs we know can 
work.
  Energy independence is not just a nice thing to do, it is not just 
another way to go about heating our homes and powering our economy. 
Energy independence is essential for our national security. The more we 
ignore it, the less safe we are. The more we ignore energy 
independence, the more the terrorists have an increasing advantage over 
us. We have to deal with this this year as well. We are dependent for 
oil on some of the most politically unstable areas of the world. We 
know that, but we can't just acknowledge that, we have to act on it.
  This budget addresses the need for investments in clean energy that 
will help us combat global warming and create the new green jobs of the 
future--not just any jobs, the green jobs that will pay wages on which 
you can sustain a family.
  This budget, with regard to energy, builds on the investment we made 
through the recovery and reinvestment bill we passed not too long ago, 
for renewable energy, energy efficiency and conservation, electric grid 
modernization, and low-carbon coal technology, which is so important 
for our transition to this new energy economy.
  I wish to conclude today by addressing the issue of education. We 
know that the challenge we have with regard to education is a lifetime 
of challenges, and we have to think about education as a continuum, a 
continuing series of challenges we have to face as Americans.
  We cannot say we want a growing economy or higher GNP growth or a 
skilled workforce to compete in the world economy--we cannot really say 
that with any degree of truth or integrity unless we are willing to 
make investment in children in the dawn of their lives. As Hubert 
Humphrey said a long time ago--he talked about how the test of 
government is how we treat those in the dawn of life, the shadows of 
life, and those in the twilight of life. When he spoke of the dawn of 
life, of course he was speaking of our children.
  The United States of America today has no prekindergarten education 
policy beyond the important program of Head Start. But we have to not 
just make the funding commitment to Head Start, which has been so 
important to our economy and to our children and our families, we have 
to do more than Head Start. We need a full commitment to 
prekindergarten education--early learning. President Obama understands 
that. He campaigned on it. He promised the American people he was going 
to work on it, and he put it in his budget. It is so critically 
important to make this a priority in our budget. But he knows that 
making sure a child has access to early education and health care and 
the promise of a bright future will not reach fulfillment unless we 
invest in higher education as well. Access to higher education and the 
opportunities it affords is one of the fundamentals of what makes this 
country strong. I really believe his commitment on higher education is 
a seminal part of his budget.
  But I really believe also that when President Obama talks about 
education, he is not just talking about it in some abstract form. When 
he focuses on the needs of our children, it is not an abstraction--not 
only because he is a husband and a father but because President Obama 
believes, as I believe, that every child in America, no matter where 
they live, no matter who they are, no matter who their parents are, 
every child in America is born with a bright, scintillating light 
inside them. It is up to us, those of us who are elected officials, who 
are given power to help people, who are given power to get things right 
in this country as best we can, it is up to us to make sure that 
whatever that light is inside a child, it burns ever brighter, that 
that child's full potential--if it is unlimited or if it is much more 
limited--whatever that potential is, whatever the brightness of that 
light is, we have an obligation here to make sure that potential, that 
light burns brightly. I really believe what President Obama has tried 
to do on education speaks directly to that obligation we have as 
Members of the Senate or Members of Congress.
  We have a lot more to talk about in the days ahead. We have a lot 
more challenges to face as we face the challenge not only of passing a 
budget but of making sure these programs work for people. But in the 
end, this is about people. It is about Trisha Urban and families who 
face the impossible challenge of having health care for their family. 
It is also about a lot of families in Pennsylvania and across the 
country who lost their homes, may have lost their jobs, and have lost 
their hopes and their dreams.
  I believe with all my heart that this budget is one of the ways we 
speak to their concerns, one of the ways we do our best to speak to the 
worries they have about their own future, one of the ways we give 
integrity to the promise we have when we say we are working here to 
make sure the families of America can reach their potential: that 
children's lives will be better than their parents' lives. There are 
many people worried about that basic feature of American life.
  This budget is not perfect. We will continue to work on it. I and 
others will have amendments, but President Obama has put us on a path 
to make the investments in health care, education, and energy; to cut 
the deficit in half; to provide tax relief; and also by making those 
investments to put us on a path not just to getting our economy out of 
the ditch and back on the road but making sure we are making the 
investments to grow our economy in the future--to create jobs, to 
create opportunity, and to create a future for our families and 
especially for our children.
  We have a long way to go, but I really believe President Obama--
working with leaders such as Chairman Conrad here in the Senate and 
others in the House as well to make sure we are on that path to fiscal 
responsibility--is on the path to investing in priorities such as 
health care, education, and energy. If we work together, we can 
reestablish the kind of economy we used to have and reestablish and 
reenergize the priorities the American people elected us to work on. I 
know we can do that together, but it is not going to be easy. We look 
forward to the challenge. We look forward to working with President 
Obama.
  I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call roll.
  Mr. ENZI. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call 
be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Gillibrand). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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