[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 153 (Wednesday, October 21, 2009)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10604-S10608]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                    Medicare Physician Fairness Act

  Ms. STABENOW. Mr. President, I rise today to speak about a motion we 
will be voting on after the nomination that is currently before the 
Senate, and that is the motion to proceed to a very important bill for 
seniors on Medicare coverage, for the disabled, for those who are in 
our military and their families. It relates to the way we reimburse 
physicians under Medicare and under TRICARE. It is called the Medicare 
Physician Fairness Act.
  This is an effort to eliminate what has become a very flawed formula 
for determining the payments for physicians under Medicare.
  We, in fact, know it is flawed because in the last 7 years, the last 
seven times that proposals have come forward from this formula to cut 
physician pay under Medicare and TRICARE, this Congress has chosen to 
reject that recommendation, that cut.
  We want to make sure seniors can have access to their doctors, that 
Medicare is a quality system that allows the kind of reimbursements so 
we can continue to have the quality of providers, physicians, and 
others we have today.
  This bill, S. 1776, would allow us to do away with what has become a 
very flawed process. Every year we postpone the cuts that have been 
proposed because we know they are flawed. We know this time of year, if 
we do not take action, there would be a 21-percent cut in Medicare for 
physicians who serve our seniors and people with disabilities. Because 
Medicare and TRICARE are tied together, that cut would also affect our 
military men and women and their families and retirees from the 
military. So, of course, we do not want that to happen. We are not 
going to allow that to happen. But rather than every year--every year, 
every year--deciding at the last minute we are going to stop these 
devastating cuts, putting physicians in the situation where they are 
not sure how to plan, worrying our seniors, worrying those in our 
military and retired military personnel, now is the time to change the 
formula to stop it.
  By doing that, by passing this legislation, we then set the stage for 
health care reform where, in fact, under health care reform, we have a 
different set of incentives. We focus on strengthening Medicare in a 
way that improves quality access for seniors. We focus on incentivizing 
prevention. We focus on incentivizing primary care doctors with a 
different system that will provide bonuses and payments for our primary 
care doctors.
  So we have a new system. We have a new vision for strengthening 
Medicare, strengthening our health care system. But right at the 
moment, we also have this failed system in place that we are kind of 
stuck with unless we can say: We are done. We are going to start again. 
We are going to start from a different budget baseline, and then move 
forward on health care reform.
  That is exactly what I have been wanting to do with this legislation. 
That is why I am so appreciative of the fact that our majority leader, 
Senator Reid, understands and is committed to making this change. His 
commitment to Medicare, his commitment to our seniors, our military 
personnel, and to our physicians is the reason we are here today. So I 
am so grateful to him for all of his commitment and all of his work. 
But this needs to be changed right now.
  As I indicated, we have a system that supports our Medicare system, 
covers seniors, the disabled. We also tie it to our military health 
care system, members of the U.S. military, surviving spouses, families, 
military retirees, and their families. All of them are extremely 
supportive. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say this is a top 
priority, if not the top priority, of the AARP and those who advocate 
for seniors right now to give seniors the peace of mind to know they 
are going to be

[[Page S10605]]

able to have access to their doctors and that their doctors are going 
to have the resources they need to be able to treat them.
  This bill would make sure that happened by rejecting what has been a 
failed system. We can go right on down the list. We not only have 
strong support from the American Medical Association and other 
physician groups but those who represent our military. Military 
officers and their families and retirees are extremely supportive.
  I am very proud of the work that over 20,000 physicians in Michigan 
do every day providing to more than 1.4 million seniors and people with 
disabilities in Michigan the quality care they need and deserve.
  We have over 90,000 TRICARE beneficiaries, men and women in our 
military, retirees who are receiving high-quality medical services in 
conjunction with the Medicare system. We are very proud of that, and we 
want to make sure we are maintaining that as well.
  Let me go through again what we are trying to make sure we can fix. 
One, this legislation would repeal the current broken system. It would 
stop a 21-percent cut to our physicians under Medicare and TRICARE, 
which would be devastating. It would stop what is a Band-aid approach 
every year. We know we are going to fix it. We fix it every year 
individually for that year, always at the last minute.
  It is time to change that process. I believe this is honest budgeting 
because we know we are not going to allow these cuts to take place. So 
we should do away with this process that even proposes these cuts every 
year and lay the foundation for real physician payment reform, which is 
in the legislation.
  Let me share with you a letter from a medical clinic in southwest 
Michigan where physicians wrote to me.

       Every year we have to wait to the last minute to see if the 
     rates will get cut or fixed. This makes it impossible to 
     budget and project for the next year. Especially for 
     practices like ours, with nearly 50 percent of our patients 
     are Medicare patients. With the uncertainty and the increases 
     that we do get not keeping up with the cost of living, we 
     have to err on the side of caution, which leads us to job 
     cuts. Though we need the staff to provide the best patient 
     care between Medicare and Medicaid we can't afford to keep 
     them and stay in business. If the uncertainty continues we 
     will be forced to re-evaluate our patient population as well, 
     leaving the Medicare patients with no choices for the care 
     that they need.

  This is really the bottom line. We want to make sure physicians are 
fully participating in caring for our senior citizens, for people with 
disabilities in this country. We want to make sure Medicare is strong. 
We want to make sure we are protecting it going forward. In order to do 
that, we have to start from the premise that we will not be allowing 
these cuts or the possibility of these cuts to go forward year after 
year after year.
  The vote we are going to have in front of us is a vote to proceed to 
the bill. I know there are those with amendments they would like to 
offer. I would hope that we would see a strong bipartisan vote to 
simply go to this bill. I think the seniors of this country deserve 
that.
  I think all of those who care about health care for our senior 
citizens and the disabled, our families, our military personnel deserve 
that; to have the opportunity to go to this bill, to be able to work on 
it together, and to be able to pass this bill and permanently solve 
this problem.
  I am very grateful for the fact that the President of the United 
States not only supports this effort, his administration's budget, the 
budget he gave us at the beginning of this year, his very first budget, 
he put forward a budget that did not include going forward with the 
cuts in this flawed formula.
  His budget baseline started from a premise that we would not be 
making these cuts going forward. I believe that is where we should be. 
We should be making sure we stop the Band-aid approach. Stop this 
effort that has gone on year after year and create an honest budgeting 
process so that we can make sure our seniors have confidence in the 
future; that they are going to be able to see their doctor under 
Medicare, and that physicians have the confidence of knowing they are 
supported by a strengthened Medicare system.
  So I am very hopeful we will see a strong bipartisan vote to allow us 
to move to this very important measure to strengthen and protect 
Medicare of the future.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Connecticut.
  Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise to declare to my colleagues that 
I intend to vote against cloture to proceed on the motion to proceed to 
this measure regarding the sustainable growth rate.
  I want to explain why. I thank Senator Stabenow for her leadership, 
and to say this is one of those moments where substantially I agree 
with just about everything she had to say about the inadequacies of the 
sustainable growth rate formula which was put in in the late 1970s as 
part of what turned out to be a very effective attempt to bring fiscal 
responsibility, budget balancing, even a surplus.
  Believe it or not, at the end of the Clinton administration, 
historians may note, perhaps people will forget, we actually had a 
Federal Government surplus. But it turned out that this sustainable 
growth rate formula for the reimbursement of doctors was not workable 
and unfair and has resulted in the refusal of a lot of doctors to treat 
patients under Medicare.
  So why would I not vote for cloture to proceed to take up this 
matter, and then vote for it? It is because there are larger questions 
involved. In some sense, I think this is a precautionary tale, the vote 
on this matter. It is a precautionary tale of what we will face in 
succeeding votes in the Senate and most immediately in the health care 
reform debate we will soon take up on the Senate floor.
  We did not get into this terrible situation with our Federal deficit 
and debt because there were people in the House or in the White House 
over the last several years who had bad motives or bad values. In fact, 
in most of the cases, such as this, when money has been allocated, 
appropriated for programs, it has been done with the best of 
intentions. But the ultimate effect has been bad for our country and 
our future because it has put us into a position of national debt that 
is unsustainable, that threatens to cripple our economic recovery and 
burden our children and grandchildren and beyond so that they do not 
live in a country with the kind of economic dynamism and opportunity in 
which we were blessed to be raised.
  In some sense, if I would be allowed to paraphrase, I would say the 
road to an unsustainable, damaging, American national debt is paved 
with good intentions, with votes for good programs. It just is time for 
us together, across party lines, to sound the alarm, blow the whistle, 
and make choices regarding priorities.
  We cannot have, no matter how good or worthwhile, programs for which 
we are not prepared to pay. The numbers are stunning. I am privileged 
to be serving my 21st year in the Senate. The numbers of our Federal 
indebtedness today are so shockingly high that if you told me that 21 
years ago or 10 years ago or even 5 years ago, I simply would not have 
believed it.
  The fiscal year that ended on September 30, fiscal year 2009, we now 
know, learned about a week ago, America ran a deficit of $1.4-plus 
trillion. We know America now has an accumulated long-term debt of $12 
trillion.
  We know the Congressional Budget Office has projected that over the 
next 10 years, we will run deficits that will add $9 trillion to the 
long-term debt. So $12 trillion now, add $9 trillion, and that is $21 
trillion of debt. It is unbelievable. We say it is unsustainable. That 
is a big word. What does ``unsustainable'' mean? It means that at some 
point this size debt is going to cripple the economic recovery that is 
just beginning. It is going to create hyperinflation because at some 
point people are going to stop buying our debt and we will have to 
raise interest to get more people to do so. At some point, if we don't 
fix this, the government is going to be left with no alternative but to 
print more money. That is the road to inflation, to lost jobs, and to a 
lower quality of life.
  All these things we have done, which seemed necessary at the time, 
which are good, we have to pay for them or else this will not be the 
country we want it to be for succeeding generations. We are going to 
reach a point where we will not have the money to

[[Page S10606]]

do the first thing the Federal Government is supposed to do, which is 
to defend the security of the country, to provide for the common 
defense in what is, obviously, a dangerous world.
  This is a precautionary tale, a precautionary vote. We are coming to 
a big debate on health care reform. I am for health care reform, but it 
is not the only thing I am for. In fact, at this moment in our history, 
it seems there are two things that matter more to our country than 
health care reform, although I wish we could do them all. One is to 
sustain the recovery from the deepest recession this country has had 
since the Great Depression of the 1930s. We are just beginning to crawl 
our way out of it. Gains in gross domestic product look as though they 
are coming, but it is fragile. It is not robust. Of course, almost 10 
percent of the American people are out of work. In fact, it is higher 
than 10 percent. To me, the top priority we all should have--and I 
speak for myself--is to sustain the economic recovery to get people 
back to work, to keep our economy strong.
  The second--and it is related to the first--is to begin to deal with 
the terrible imbalances in our Federal books that will compromise the 
economic recovery and cripple our economic future and the opportunity 
our children and grandchildren will have in the future. It means we 
have to make choices. In the coming health care debate, we have to make 
sure, as the President said, that there is not one dime added to the 
deficit as a result. We have to make sure that what we do within the 
context of health care reform not only doesn't increase the deficit and 
the long-term debt but doesn't add cost and increase premiums, for 
instance, on working people, middle-class families to pay for their 
health insurance and on businesses for which we need to provide every 
incentive to add workers, to grow, to sustain the recovery as it exists 
now.
  Those are the standards I will apply to my own action on the health 
care reform proposal. I want to be for health care reform. I am for 
health care reform. I know the system needs to be changed. But this is 
a precautionary vote coming up because while the Medicare Physicians 
Fairness Act, which would repeal the sustainable growth rate formula, 
is substantively just, it is not paid for. It adds almost $250 billion 
to the debt for the coming years. I don't think we can do that anymore.
  I am relieved to know, in terms of the immediate impact of my vote 
against cloture on this matter, that if cloture is not obtained, the 
health care reform bill that came out of the Senate Finance Committee 
does take care of the problem with the sustainable growth rate for 
another year. That gives everybody--doctors and, most important, 
Medicare recipients--breathing room. We can't go on spending without 
paying for what we are spending, no matter how good or right it is, 
because there is a greater harm being done to our country.
  The speed with which this Medicare Physician Fairness Act has come to 
the floor and taking it out of health care reform where it certainly 
belongs is also a precautionary tale.
  I have said I am against the public option for health care insurance, 
essentially a government-owned health insurance plan, one, because we 
believe in a market economy and a regulatory government. We believe a 
market economy is the best way to create economic growth and wealth. It 
serves the American people very well. We also know that a market 
economy of itself doesn't, as somebody long ago said, have a 
conscience. So the government sets rules. We have oversight. We have 
regulatory rules. We have antitrust laws, for instance. That is the way 
we maintain fairness in the economy, in the marketplace. I don't 
remember another case where our answer to a concern about fairness in 
the marketplace--in this case, whether there is real competition in the 
health insurance business, whether the health insurance companies are 
being fair in their rates, et cetera, which are all reasonable 
questions--I don't remember another case where the answer was to create 
a government-owned corporation to compete with the private sector.
  I spent 6 great years serving as attorney general of Connecticut. We 
sued a lot of businesses for unfair trade practices, for bid rigging, 
for price fixing. We appeared before regulatory commissions on behalf 
of the people of the United States, all sorts of businesses. But nobody 
ever had the idea that instead of us doing that, we should create a 
government oil company, a government car company, a government company 
to sell automobiles, a government company to take care of roof 
contracting. I could go on and on. One of the reasons is, particularly 
now, I don't have confidence that we can discipline ourselves from 
making it into another cause of the skyrocketing Federal deficit.
  This bill is evidence of that. Here is a good cause, a group we all 
respect, the doctors, saying: We need this 10-year fix to the problem. 
And we just did it. This really ought to be done as part of overall 
Medicare reform. We have to have a commission. We have to have some 
system to deal with the great threats to our economic future. Medicare 
is going to run out of money in 2017, 8 years from now. Social Security 
is already dipping into the trust funds, taking more out than we are 
getting in. It may change in a year or two, but that is the way it is.
  With respect to the sponsors of this proposal, the Medicare Physician 
Fairness Act, the doctors' associations that I know would like us to 
vote for it, I think 1 year is enough; 1 year paid for is enough. To do 
more than that now is wrong and irresponsible, and therefore I will 
vote against the cloture motion on the motion to proceed to the 
Medicare Physician Fairness Act.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from South Carolina.
  Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I will vote against the motion to proceed. 
Before Senator Lieberman leaves the floor, I want to say again, of all 
the people I have met in the Senate, he constantly amazes me, because 
there is no doubt he is doing this because he believes passionately 
that America is at a crossroads and this is making the problem worse, 
not better. I am on a bill with him--there are seven Republicans and 
seven Democrats--that is a comprehensive solution to our health care 
needs. It is the Wyden-Bennett bill. It mandates coverage, but we do it 
through the private sector.
  I want colleagues to know that Senator Lieberman has been 
constructive in trying to find a bipartisan compromise that will allow 
us to deal with health care inflation, which is a problem in the 
private sector. He practices what he preaches, trying to solve 
problems. As he explained it, the Senator from Mississippi and I were 
sitting here talking. There is not much of that around here in politics 
now, where one would come out and take on an issue that is being pushed 
by leaders of the Democratic Party. He is an independent Democrat, but 
he articulated the reason in a way most Americans really appreciate.
  Doctors have a problem. In 1997, we tried to balance the budget with 
President Clinton, the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. When we looked at 
how we could sustain a balanced budget, we had to go to where the 
growth was in the budget. The big programs were Medicaid and Medicare, 
the entitlements. Eventually, those two programs will cost the 
equivalent of the entire Federal budget today in 20 or 30 years. If we 
want to balance the budget, we have to slow down entitlement growth.

  Medicare is one of those programs that have grown dramatically. When 
it first came about, it was a $4 billion safety net. They projected 
that Medicare would cost $37 billion in 1990. It was like $90-something 
billion. It is $400 billion today. Those who designed the Medicare 
Program as a safety net for senior citizens without health care did a 
good thing, but from then until now, it has become a $400 billion item 
that is eating up the entire budget.
  In 1997, we recalculated the growth rates to be paid to doctors and 
hospitals. Since then, doctors and hospitals have been saying that we 
cut reimbursements to the point that they can't take Medicare and 
Medicaid patients and it is hurting their ability to stay in business. 
About 60 percent of their income comes from the Federal Government. I 
don't doubt that is true. What we did is just nickel and dime doctors 
and hospitals and never reform Medicare.
  So Senator Lieberman is right. To help doctors and hospitals and the

[[Page S10607]]

country achieve a balanced budget, we will have to fundamentally reform 
Medicare, and the doctor fix should be part of that effort.
  What we are doing here is making a promise we can't afford to pay. We 
are going to tell the doctors: Don't worry ever again about Medicare 
reimbursements being cut because for a 10-year period, we are going to 
hold you harmless.
  That is beyond cynical. We need to look at the doctor fix in terms of 
comprehensive Medicare reform. It is a $245 billion item designed to 
get the medical community to support the leadership version of health 
care. It is transparent. It is wrong. It is bad politics. It is bad 
policy. I hope my colleagues will reject it.
  The bill coming out of the Finance Committee--and I congratulate 
Senators who are trying to fix health care because it needs to be 
fixed--is about an $800 billion expenditure, a little bit more. It is 
revenue neutral over a 10-year period because it is going to be paid 
for. Four hundred billion in Medicare cuts are part of the payoff, the 
pay-fors.
  How do we take $800 billion of expense and make it revenue neutral? 
We offset it. One of the offsets is a $400 billion-plus reduction in 
Medicare spending over a 10-year window. I argue that not only is that 
not going to happen because the Congress hasn't reduced Medicare 
spending anywhere near that, it is just politically not going to 
happen. Two years ago, we tried to slow down the growth of Medicare to 
$33.8 billion over a 4- or 5-year period and got 24 votes. If 
colleagues think this Congress is going to have the political will and 
courage to reduce Medicare by $400 billion over 10 years, show me in 
the past where we have had any desire to do that.
  The doctors fix is the best evidence yet of what will come in the 
future. We are contemplating doing away with the reduction in physician 
payments that was part of the balanced budget agreement because our 
medical community has been hit hard and is complaining. Look at the 
$400 billion. Do we think if people are going to be on the receiving 
and of a $400 billion cut over a period of time, they are going to 
accept it happily? Do you think they are not going to complain? What do 
you think we are going to do when one group of the medical community or 
the insurance community says, ``You are putting me out of business.''

  These $400 billion cuts are never going to happen because, you see, 
with the doctors fix, where every year we relieve the doctors from the 
imposition of that agreement in 1997--and in many ways we should 
because the 1997 agreement was not comprehensive--but to those who 
believe we are going to cut $400 billion in Medicare, have the courage 
to tell the doctors we are going to do to them what we said we would do 
back in 1997. Nobody wants to do that, and I am sympathetic as to why 
we do not want to do that because we are asking too much of doctors and 
hospitals and we did not reform the system as a whole.
  Mr. President, $245 billion added to the debt is no small thing. What 
I hope will happen is we can find a bipartisan pathway forward on 
health care reform that deals with inflation, deals with better access 
to preventive medicine, has some medical liability reform, is truly 
comprehensive, with give-and-take, and mandates coverage. I am willing 
to do that as a Republican. But if we go down the road our leadership 
has set for us here and basically tell the doctors ``Don't worry 
anymore, you are going to be held harmless for the next 10 years,'' 
then what group will follow who will want the same deal and to whom 
will we begin to say no? I do not know. I do not know to whom we will 
have the ability to say no if we do this. And if you say no to them, 
what the heck do you tell them--``You are not a doctor, so it does not 
matter what we do to your business.''
  If we do this, we have lost the ability, in my view, to provide the 
necessary solutions to the hard problems facing the country. We will 
have given in to the most cynical nature of politics. We will have 
destroyed our ability to engage with the public at large in a credible 
way to fix hard problems. And when it comes time to ask people to 
sacrifice, they are going to look at us and say: What do you mean 
``sacrifice?'' Aren't you the people who just basically wiped out what 
the doctors had to do because you were afraid of them?
  I am not afraid of doctors. God bless them. I am glad we have them. 
What we have done in the name of reform has been unfair because we 
picked on them and not the system as a whole. So to the doctors out 
there, Lindsey Graham gets it, that your reimbursement rates as they 
exist today under Medicare make it very difficult for you to do 
business. But I hope you will understand that my obligation is beyond 
just to the doctors in South Carolina; it is to what Senator Lieberman 
said: the next generation as well as to the here and now.
  Every politician has a problem: How do you affect the here and now, 
people who can vote for you, and how can you secure the future? Well, 
you just have to ask the people who are here and now to be willing to 
make some changes for the benefit of the country long term. I am 
confident that if we ask and we do it in a smart way, people will join 
with us. I want to give the doctors better reimbursement rates, and the 
only way we can achieve that is to reform Medicare from top to bottom 
and make it more efficient.
  One of the things I am willing to do is ask a person like myself to 
pay more. As a Senator, I make about $170,000 a year. I am not saying 
we are worth it, but that is what we pay ourselves. I would like to 
think we earn our money because it is not an easy job, but there are a 
lot of jobs harder than being a Senator, I can assure you. But right 
now, the system we have to fund Medicare, the trust fund, will run out 
of money in about 4 years. But basically I am paying the same amount 
for Part B premiums that cover doctors and hospital payments out of 
Medicare as my aunt and uncle who worked in the textile mill and made 
$25,000 a year. I am willing for people like myself to have to pay more 
to keep Medicare solvent.
  We are making some changes but not nearly enough. Mr. President, $3 
out of $4 of Medicare spending comes from the General Treasury, the 
taxpayers. One-fourth of the money to cover Medicare expenses comes 
from the patient population being served. There are plenty of Americans 
who are paying about $100 a month once they get into retirement who can 
afford to pay $450 a month for the Medicare services they receive. 
Nobody is asking them to do it. I am willing to ask, and I am willing 
to do it myself. It is those types of changes that will lead this 
country to a brighter future and will correct the imbalance we have.
  Finally, Medicare is $34 trillion underfunded. If you had $34 
trillion sitting in an account today, it would earn interest over 75 
years. You would need all the money--the $34 trillion plus the 
interest--to make the payments we have promised people in the future.
  When I was born in 1955, there were 16 workers for every retiree. 
Today there are three, and in 20 years there will be two. There will be 
two workers paying into the Social Security and Medicare trust funds 
where there used to be 16 when I was born. There are more baby boomers 
retiring every day than anyone ever anticipated. We are living far 
beyond 65.
  The question for the country is, Will people in my business go to 
you, the public, and say change is required? We cannot run the system 
assuming things that do not exist. We have to come to grips with the 
fact that we have an aging population, we live longer, there are more 
retirees than ever, and there are fewer workers. Once we come to grips 
with that dynamic and ask those who can afford to give, to give--hold 
those harmless who cannot afford to give--America's best days are 
ahead.
  If we do not reform these systems and we continue to do what is being 
proposed today--try to buy a constituency off: Doctors, we will fix 
your problem if you will support our bill; the $254 billion it will 
cost to get you onboard, do not worry about it.
  To the doctors who may be listening, you better worry about it. You 
need to worry about not only the viability of your medical practice but 
the ability of your government to make payments it has promised to the 
next generation, the ability of your government to be able to continue 
to operate, the ability of our country to pass on to the next 
generation a sound and secure America.

[[Page S10608]]

  We are about to borrow ourselves into oblivion. There is a theory out 
there, long held, that democracies are doomed to fail because 
democracies over time will lose the ability to say no to themselves; 
that we in the government will continue to grow the government based on 
the needs of the next election cycle and make promises that make sense 
for our political future but really over time are unsustainable. We 
have reached that point, and we are about to go over the edge.
  The only way America can self-correct is to make sure our political 
leadership is rewarded when we ask for change we can believe in. This 
is not change we can believe in. This is the old way of doing business. 
This is buying off a constituency that is important for the here-and-
now debate of health care and not giving a damn about the consequences 
to the country down the road. This is how we got in this mess.
  If we pass this bill, not only have we destroyed this new hope from a 
new President of ``change we can believe in,'' we will have reinforced 
the worst instincts of politics, sold the country short, and made it 
impossible to say no to the next group we want to sacrifice who needs 
to help us solve this problem.
  With that, I yield back.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Iowa is 
recognized.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.