[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 21]
[Senate]
[Pages 30555-30556]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                          LEGISLATIVE LANDFILL

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, as we reflect at the end of this 
legislative session on our accomplishments, it is my belief that there 
are very few things we can go back home to tell the American people we 
achieved.
  100 Senators and 435 Members of the House of Representatives came to 
Washington, DC, at the beginning of the year and listened closely to 
President Clinton's State of the Union Address where he outlined a 
program and some objectives, many stood and cheered. The applause lines 
were frequent during the course of that speech. People of both 
political parties left the State of the Union Address saying they were 
now energized and invigorated to go forward and address the issues 
facing America, and we began the legislative process.
  For me, it is the 17th time I have been through this. It is hard for 
me to remember another session of the Congress as unproductive as this 
session of the Congress. When it came to issues that the people and 
families across America care about, this Congress refused to do 
anything. This wasn't a titanic struggle between the Republican 
conservative agenda and the progressive agenda of the Democrats where 
we brought issues to the floor and fought over amendments from one side 
to the other. That is what we are supposed to see on Capitol Hill. That 
didn't happen because there was no agenda on the other side. The 
Republican leadership had no agenda.
  Recently, a Republican Congressman said we considered this year a 
``legislative timeout.'' When timeouts occur during the course of an 
NFL football game, most people leave the room and go to the 
refrigerator; if America's families had left the room and gone to the 
refrigerator, they would have spent a lot of time there this year if 
they were waiting for Congress to do something. We didn't do it. We 
didn't respond. Now we have to go home, as we should, and explain it.
  Let me state some of the issues we failed to act on this year, issues 
that make a difference to families across America. The Patients' Bill 
of Rights: The relationship of a person, a family, a business, to their 
health insurance company. That is pretty basic. When we asked America's 
families, they said that is the No. 1 concern. We want to make certain, 
when we go in a doctor's office, that the doctor makes the decision, 
not some clerk at an insurance company off in Topeka, KS.
  I know from my experience in Illinois, as most others know from their 
own personal experiences, many times doctors are being overruled. I can 
recall a doctor who said to me a mother came in the office with an 
infant and the baby had been complaining of a headache on the right 
side of his head for several months. The doctor asked if it was always 
complaining about one side of the head, and the mother said yes. The 
doctor thought: I had better take an MRI to see if there might be a 
brain tumor. Before he said that to the mother, he looked at her file 
for the name of her insurance company. He said, excuse me, left the 
room, got on the phone and called the insurance company. He said: The 
mother presents herself with an infant complaining of headaches for 
several weeks and months on one side of the head. It is my medical 
decision and opinion we should have an MRI to determine whether there 
is a possibility of a brain tumor.
  The voice on the other end of the phone said: No; no. The insurance 
company that pays for the bills declines that procedure.
  That doctor had to walk back to that room and not even tell the 
mother what had happened. He was bound by his contract not even to 
disclose that his medical judgment had been overruled by an insurance 
company clerk.
  That is the state of health care in America. Families who go into 
those doctors' offices, confident the patient-doctor relationship is a 
sacred one that can be trusted, are beginning to think twice. They 
appeal to Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans: Do something; 
restore our faith in our medical system. Restore quality health care. 
Pass a Patients' Bill of Rights.
  No, not in this Congress. This Congress and the Senate on July 15 
passed a bill friendly to the insurance companies--as if they needed 
another friend on Capitol Hill--a bill which, frankly, didn't address 
the most basic issues families worry over every single day.
  I won't even get into the question of expanding medical insurance 
coverage. We wouldn't even utter those words on Capitol Hill for fear 
it might bring down charges of radicalism, the idea that the 44 million 
uninsured Americans who grow in number every year might have their 
Government care enough to do something. We are not in that business 
with the Republican-controlled Congress. We don't talk about those 
things--like the aunt who is somewhere off in the distance, never 
referred to by a family.
  We don't talk about medical coverage for all Americans. Families talk 
about it. Families talk about their kids turning 23 years of age, 
coming off the health insurance policies of their moms and dads, and 
whether they have a chance to be covered. Families talk about whether 
or not someone with a preexisting condition can find insurance in this 
country. We don't talk about it in Congress, no. The insurance 
companies don't want Members to talk about it. The special interests 
ruled this session of Congress.
  We see in the Republican legislative landfill of the 106th Congress 
the Patients' Bill of Rights, an issue we failed to address.
  The nuclear test ban treaty: Just a few weeks ago, possible one of 
the worst decisions made by Congress in a decade, a decision to turn 
down a treaty where the United States not only would have the moral 
leadership in the world but enact a treaty that backs it up and says to 
countries around the world: If you are not a nuclear power, don't 
become one. If you have nuclear weapons, don't test them. Let's stop 
this nuclear arms race in place.
  This nuclear test ban treaty failed in the Senate on a largely 
partisan vote. It was a sad day for America. It was a sad day for a 
country which has tried to lead the world and say to countries such as 
India and Pakistan, stop what you are doing, don't keep this arms race 
going and develop nuclear weapons that could mushroom into a war that 
would destroy not only people in those two countries but in many other 
nations. This Congress, this Senate, failed to enact a nuclear test ban 
treaty.
  We failed to enact any legislation to deal with school construction. 
Take a look at the numbers: There will be more kids showing up for 
classes in the next 10 years than we have been serving in the last 10 
or 20 years. Those kids need teachers, they need classrooms, they need 
modern schools, schools where they have the electricity to make certain 
they can sustain the computer technology, schools that are safe, 
schools where kids have a positive learning environment. When the 
President made this proposal for school construction, it was greeted 
with disbelief and disapproval on the other side of the aisle. We have 
done nothing in this session of Congress to deal with school 
construction.
  Campaign finance reform: Is there a more basic issue for the future 
of Congress? Will we ever change the current system which has become a 
bidding war among special interests where Members of the Senate such as 
myself literally have to be on the phone day and night, begging for 
money for a campaign that costs millions of dollars? If you are not 
independently wealthy and cannot write a big check to sustain your own 
campaign in the

[[Page 30556]]

Senate, you spend most of your time begging for money. Is that what 
Americans want in the Senate or the House of Representatives? I don't 
think so.
  A bipartisan bill--Senator John McCain, a Republican, of Arizona, and 
Senator Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin--said we can clean up 
this system, but this Congress failed to enact meaningful campaign 
finance reform. Only 55 Senators--45 Democrats and 10 Republicans--came 
forward in support of this most basic change in reform.
  As part of the legislative landfill of the 106th Congress, 
Republicans were successful in not passing campaign finance reform.
  Minimum wage increase? The minimum wage in this country is $5.15 an 
hour. When you calculate that out, it means a little over $10,000 a 
year in income. Can any of us consider a life on $10,000 a year and 
what it would mean? Keep in mind, these are men and women who get up 
and go to work every single day and make $5.15 an hour. Inflation eats 
away at it, at a wage that was already too low to be livable. We tried 
this year to increase the minimum wage by 50 cents an hour each year 
over the next 2 years, saying it is only fair that working men and 
women have that help from their Government. We were resisted on the 
Republican side of the aisle. Ultimately, they came up with their own 
package. They do not do it over 2 years; they do it over 3 years, which 
costs those wage earners $1,200 a year in income to take that approach. 
Mr. President, $1,200? You might say that is not that big a deal. It is 
if you are making $10,000 a year; it is a very big deal.
  The Republican approach representing special interests in stopping 
the minimum wage increase prevailed. They also added in there some tax 
breaks that, frankly, cannot be taken seriously because they did not 
pay for them. There we have it--the minimum wage issue into the 
landfill.
  This is one you will remember, the juvenile crime control bill. You 
will remember it because it came up right after Columbine High School. 
It was an effort by the Senate to pass a sensible gun control law. When 
the final vote was cast, it was 50-50. Vice President Al Gore came to 
the floor, broke the tie, and we enacted the bill which said as 
follows: When people buy guns at gun shows, we want to know if they 
have a history of violent mental illness or a criminal record.
  In an effort to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and kids, we 
passed a sensible gun control measure, sent it across the Rotunda to 
the House of Representatives, where it literally died because the 
National Rifle Association and the gun lobby decided they did not want 
to pass any gun control bills this session. This Nation, which was 
shocked by the occurrences at Columbine and so many other schools, had 
a chance to pass sensible gun control legislation and failed. We will 
go home now to face our constituents, many of whom live in cities where 
gun violence is a commonplace occurrence, and have to tell them this 
Congress failed to pass any sensible gun control legislation.
  Smaller class size--thank goodness the President prevailed in his 
negotiations. The President's goal, and one I share, is to reduce class 
size in the early grades so quality teachers can meet with kids right 
when they are starting their education and help them along. You take 
the kids who are the best and the brightest and you give them the 
biggest challenges. You take those who may be suffering from some 
learning disability, you diagnose their problem and try to deal with it 
at an early age. You take the kids who do not learn as quickly and give 
them special attention. For teachers to achieve that, they need smaller 
class sizes. If you put 30 kids in a classroom, the teacher is lucky to 
maintain discipline, let alone meet the special needs of individual 
students.
  So the President said, and I agree: We need to focus 100,000 teachers 
into reducing class size across America. Until a few days ago, the 
Republicans had opposed this. Finally, the President prevailed. 
Finally, we are moving forward on this initiative which we started last 
year that serves school districts all across America, not just in the 
cities but in the towns and suburbs alike.
  Look at the efforts to help family farmers. We finally came through 
with that on a bipartisan basis. It is one of the things we achieved 
this year. But it begs the question, to leave it at that, because next 
year if we do not change the basic Federal farm policy, the so-called 
Freedom to Farm Act, we are going to see a rerun, unfortunately, of 
what we saw this year--farmers literally struggling to survive. As 
prices across the world have plummeted, they cannot make a decent 
income.
  In my home State of Illinois, a State that has a very strong farm 
sector, just a few years ago the average net farm income for a farmer 
was about $48,000 a year. This year it will be about $25,000. That is 
about half. But $13,000 of the $25,000 will come from Federal payments. 
The other about $12,000 will come in farm operations. We cannot sustain 
a farm economy where half the income of farmers in Illinois and 
Minnesota or Nebraska comes from the Federal Treasury. The law has to 
be changed, and this year we did not take up a change in the law as we 
should have.
  The last point I would like to make before I yield to my colleague 
from Minnesota is this. The Patients' Bill of Rights is an issue we 
have to return to as the highest priority in the next Congress. When 
you consider the lives of people who are dependent on this action, you 
understand the severity of it. I will tell one quick story.
  Take a look at this little girl here. She is Theresa. She lives in 
Yorkville, IL. Her dad is a police officer and her mom stays at home to 
look after her. She suffers from a rare disease known as spinal 
muscular atrophy. It is a very debilitating disease. As you can see, 
she is on a ventilator, and I met a couple of kids just like this. This 
is what her mother says:

       She was hospitalized from September 2nd last year until 
     February 15 of this year due to fighting the insurance 
     company for certain provisions we could not do without in our 
     home.
       We had to fight and fight with the insurance company for 
     things the doctors had said were needed [for Theresa.] So we 
     fought for 2\1/2\ months. We eventually did get everything 
     that we needed, except it was a very long battle.

  Can you imagine having your family separated that long because the 
insurance company did not want to help?

       Theresa caught RSV in the hospital while we were waiting 
     for the appeal to go through. That is why she now has [a 
     ventilator and tracheotomy.]

  That is a real life family. Theresa's dad is a policeman. Theresa and 
her family would not be protected by the Republican version of the 
Patients' Bill of Rights. They would not have the benefit of an appeals 
process in a timely fashion so they could get a good answer, a sensible 
medical answer for this little girl. Instead, they are embroiled in 
month after month of weary debate with the insurance company. That is 
health care in America for too many American families. This Congress 
has failed, utterly failed to address this critical issue.
  I yield the floor.
  Several Senators addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kentucky is recognized. We 
are going from side to side.
  Mr. WELLSTONE. I thank the Chair. I wonder if I can ask unanimous 
consent to follow the Senator from Kentucky?
  Mr. INHOFE. Reserving the right to object, I inquire of the Chair, it 
is my understanding we had until the hour of 1 o'clock equally divided. 
I ask how much time is remaining on each side?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. On the Republican side, there are 22 minutes 
37 seconds. On the Democratic side, there are 9 minutes 33 seconds.
  Mr. INHOFE. I thank the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, the Senator from Minnesota 
will be recognized following the Senator from Kentucky.

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