[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 18]
[Senate]
[Page 25547]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                    CUTS IN HOME HEALTH CARE FUNDING

  Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I sat here and listened with great 
interest when the Senator from Maine and the Senator from Kansas were 
talking about the home health care. I realized early that was going to 
be a problem in Alabama. It has had a dramatic and devastating impact 
on the State. Mr. President, 15 percent cuts consistently are really 
devastating the home health care agency.
  Senator Shelby, the senior Senator from Alabama, and I, right after 
this bill passed--without hearings, by the way, as part of a conference 
committee report--along with other people, when it was voted on, did 
not realize its significance. But pretty soon we realized that, so we 
called the top officials of HCFA into our office to discuss with them 
what we could do. We had proposed and offered an amendment to the 
effect we would delay the implementation of these changes until we had 
hearings to analyze their impact. We could tell it was going to be very 
bad. HCFA refused. They would not join us in that effort. That 
amendment we sought to have agreed to over a year ago was not agreed 
to.
  It is, to my way of thinking, a situation that cannot continue. We 
are going to have to fix it. It was seen early. It was a matter that 
came up in an attempt to make some changes they thought would work, and 
Congress ought to pass laws to help effectuate that. But there was not 
an understanding of how bad it was going to be.
  The agency in charge of the management of the home health care, HCFA, 
is responsible and ought to be helping us in a more effective way to 
deal with this. It is true, as the Senator from Maine said, even under 
the containment of costs provided in the legislation that passed at 
that time, HCFA has cut substantially more than that.
  It is expected to produce only about one-third of the savings that 
actually occurred. They squeezed that program for $46 billion over 5 
years. That is about three times what was actually planned to be cut. 
We have a crisis that does require attention. I thank the Senator from 
Maine for leading the effort.

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