[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 58 (Monday, April 23, 2012)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2597-S2598]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        REMEMBERING STACEY SACHS

  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, at its best, the Senate is an extended 
family--we spend an unbelievable amount of time working here, Senator 
to Senator, staff to staff. And in the course of those efforts, we get 
to know each other not as members of a party or as ideological 
caricatures or cutouts but as people. In particular, we get to know and 
appreciate on a personal level not just our staff but the staffs of our 
State delegations. There are staffers from the Massachusetts delegation 
who have been here as long as I have. And certainly on my late 
colleague Ted Kennedy's staff there were professionals I knew as 
friends and turned to as easily as Teddy himself did for so many years.
  That is why I know Ted himself would be here this morning doing what 
I am doing in his place, which is acknowledging with sadness the 
passing on Saturday, April 21 of Stacey Sachs--a longtime health care 
staffer for Ted--whom we lost to complications from a hard-fought 
battle with cancer. Stacey was just 50 years old.
  For many of us, Stacey was a steady and unchanging sight in this 
ever-changing institution. She spent more than a decade on Capitol Hill 
as senior health counsel on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and 
Pensions, HELP, Committee. She came to the Hill to play a role in 
making universal health care reform a reality; her life's work--as it 
was for Ted--is a legacy she leaves behind that should be a gift to 
last.
  But it is not her only legacy. Over the years, I came to know Stacey, 
and I came to know firsthand so much of what impressed and inspired her 
friends and her colleagues: her health care expertise, her honesty, and 
her dedication. She devoted her career to making sure Americans had 
access to health care coverage. It was that simple. For her, that work 
was personal. It was not statistics or spreadsheets or the arcane 
minutiae of legislation. For Stacey, she cared first and foremost about 
the effect public policy has on everyday Americans, and she touched the 
lives of countless people who never met her. But every American, in 
part, can thank her for real changes that made their lives better.
  I am not just talking about legislation, but I could be. Stacey's 
outsized role in the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 and the 
recently enacted Affordable Care Act of 2010 were just two examples of 
the ways she focused and made a real difference on a wide range of 
issues during her time on the HELP Committee. She worked on Medicare 
prescription drugs, Medicare reimbursement, health insurance coverage 
and reimbursement, Medicaid, the Health Insurance Portability and 
Accountability Act, and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. In 
each instance and every effort, Stacey brought to the task at hand not 
just her policy expertise but her compassion and professionalism. The 
same could be said about an effort that came

[[Page S2598]]

to be associated with Ted Kennedy and then-Governor Romney but with 
which Stacey was unbelievably engaged: the development of the 
Massachusetts health reform law in 2006. That law provided the 
Commonwealth with the highest rates of health care coverage in the 
Nation and served as the blueprint for national health reform. While 
the rate of the uninsured grew by millions in our country, today in 
Massachusetts, 98.1 percent of our residents have health insurance, 
including 99.8 percent of our children. And if Ted Kennedy were here 
today, I know he would share with all of us that without Stacey, it 
wouldn't have gotten across the finish line.
  Still, there was more to Stacey than big legislation. She saw 
government and public service not just with a human face but on a human 
scale. Despite the breadth of her legislative portfolio, Stacey became 
most widely known among fellow staffers, constituents, and friends for 
her ability and willingness to help individual patients identify and 
secure the personal health care services they desperately needed in 
times of crisis. She was the person you turned to when someone could 
not find the right doctor, reach the right specialist, or make an 
insurance company do the right thing. And whether that person was from 
Massachusetts or Montana, Stacey fought for them with the same ferocity 
as she would have for Ted Kennedy or for the most landmark piece of 
legislation because for Stacey Sachs, it was pretty fundamental--if you 
were in government to solve big problems for the whole country, why 
wouldn't you work equally hard to solve those problems for the average 
person who came to you looking for help?
  Mr. President, as so many know, after Senator Kennedy passed away, 
Stacey continued her Senate service working for Chairman Harkin on the 
HELP Committee. She was determined to finish the job of health reform--
and finish it she did, even as she went on to, in a tragic irony, fight 
her own battle for life itself against the same disease which took Ted 
Kennedy away from us all.
  Today, we are all fortunate for Stacey's dedication to public service 
and the example of her commitment as we continue in the work of her 
life. Stacey was a member of our extended Senate family, but we should 
remember what she meant not just to us but to her own family. Our 
thoughts and prayers are with Stacey's mother, Sandy Sachs, and her two 
brothers, Bruce and Howard, during this unbelievably difficult time.

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