[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 9]
[Senate]
[Pages 12163-12166]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




          MEDICARE IMPROVEMENTS FOR PATIENTS AND PROVIDERS ACT

  Mr. COBURN. We heard some reasons we should support the Baucus doctor 
fix. I happen to have been practicing in 2004 when the Senate did 
exactly what they are doing right now. This bill is going to guarantee 
the doctor fix is not done by July 1. That is what is going to happen 
with this bill.
  Let me tell you, we are eventually going to fix the problem for the 
doctors for 18 months. There is no question. Everybody agrees to that. 
But what we are doing is, we are making sure we are going to add 
hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of cost in every State 
for every private physician that is practicing.
  And the reason is because the bill is not going to get changed by 
July 1, and they are going to be under the 10.9-percent cut. Then they 
are going to come back, whenever we finally get it done. They are going 
to have to refile all of that, and Medicare is going to have to repay 
all of this.
  So this exercise in political gamesmanship, of working only with one 
side of the aisle, not working with Senator Grassley, to truly get this 
done in a way that the President will not veto it and accomplish the 
purposes for which we all say we want, to eliminate the 10.9-percent 
cut for physicians, that is something we are going to lose grasp of, 
and we are going to create a hardship on every physician in this 
country because we are playing a political game with this rather than 
fixing the problem.
  That brings me to my next point. Why is it every 18 months the 
physicians in this country have to come and beg Congress not to cut 
their fees when we are not cutting the fees for the rest of the 
providers throughout the Medicare Program?
  What we have decided is that doctors make too much money. We have 
decided that when they work 80 hours a week, one and a half to two 
times what everybody else works in this country, they spend their time 
away from their families making great sacrifices, that we are going to 
fund increases in the care for our elderly and seniors in this country 
on the backs of physicians.
  Now, I will not dispute the fact that there are some disparities in 
physician pay in this country, with some physicians making too much and 
far too many making too little, especially primary care pediatricians, 
psychiatrists, and the like, those who are on the front lines. But this 
idea that we are going to fix temporarily, again, for 18 months, a 
problem that we have to fix, which is the other problem with the Baucus 
bill, the only thing great about Medicare that will get us out of the 
long-term costs is this idea of creating markets associated with choice 
and responsibility to give greater health care, greater choice, and 
greater benefits to Medicare beneficiaries through competition.
  I am the first to say that the Medicare Advantage Program has lots of 
problems. But to get the Medicare Advantage Program, which is the one 
thing that tries to go toward market-oriented reform in Medicare, to 
pay for this is ludicrous.
  Senator Grassley has a competing bill--we just heard the second 
reading objected to by the Senator from Michigan so we cannot have a 
side-by-side vote on it--does all of the things that the Baucus bill 
does except it does not gut Medicare Advantage.
  Well, why do we want to take the one factor in Medicare that is based 
on markets, that is based on transparency, that is based on some 
personal responsibility, and throw it out and have another program that 
right now every family in this country is on the hook for over $300,000 
in unfunded Medicare obligations, and the Baucus bill guts the only 
thing that helps us solve that?
  So the President is right to veto this bill. Even if it passes, this 
bill will not be overridden. So we are ensuring the fact that doctors 
will experience, on July 1, a 10.9-percent cut. We do not have to do 
that. They know we cannot do this and have it go to the President and 
get it vetoed and come back and get everything else down before July 1.
  So by voting for the Baucus bill, what you are actually doing is 
ensuring that every physician in this country that cares for Medicare 
patients is going to spend thousands and thousands of extra dollars, 
and that CMS is going to spend thousands and thousands and millions, 
perhaps $100 million, to come back and deal with the paperwork once 
this is finally fixed.
  Nobody thinks about that around here. We are playing political games. 
How can you make Republicans look bad as they vote against a Baucus 
Medicare doctor fix? Everybody in this body wants to fix this payment 
system for doctors. There is one real reason we do; we want our seniors 
to be able to have physicians. And we know if an 11-percent cut goes 
through, many doctors will no longer be able to afford to care for 
Medicare patients, they will not be able to afford to. They cannot do 
it.
  So if you cut 11 percent of their fees on Medicare, which are already 
almost as low as Medicaid everywhere, which is about 40 percent less 
than they get paid for anything else, you are asking them to serve 
Medicare at half price. And what they are going to do is they are going 
to make a choice. They are going to say: I cannot take care of Medicare 
patients.
  So what we are going to ensure with the Baucus bill is that doctors 
are going to get a pay cut, maybe for a short period of time, but the 
inconvenience of that, the cost of that for political gamesmanship, we 
ought to be ashamed of what we are doing. And it is exactly the reason 
we have a low rating with the American people.
  We know Senator Grassley and Senator Baucus can work this out. We 
know it can happen. But the fact is, it was chosen to make it an issue, 
not work in a bipartisan fashion, not come up with something that the 
President can sign, but instead to slow down the works. And what they 
will do is markedly decrease availability of Medicare for seniors in 
this country because the doctors, when they first see this, if they see 
a 10.9-percent cut, some of them are going to abandon the Medicare 
Program, and you are ensuring, if you vote for the Baucus bill, that 
doctors will get a 10.9-percent cut for a short period of time.
  You are ensuring that, in fact, what they are going to do is, they 
are going

[[Page 12164]]

to have a whole lot more overhead because they are going to get a bill 
from the time it starts to the time it ends and finally gets corrected, 
they are going to bill it twice, once for the primary at a 10.9-percent 
cost, then they are going to get a bill again because it is going to be 
retroactively fixed. They are going to have to bill it all again. That 
is pure waste. That is typical government.
  Why would we do that? What are we thinking? What we are thinking is 
short-term partisanship. And we ought to be ashamed of ourselves.


                             Global Warming

  Now I want to spend a few minutes talking about the climate bill. I 
have been listening for 10 days on this issue. And I want to share some 
observations.
  It was said on the Senate floor that nobody has scientifically 
disputed the underlying facts associated with climate change.
  We cannot dispute underlying facts on climate change because climate 
changes. It always changes. We have a history of knowing it changes. We 
know that every 1,500 years we have global warming, whether we like it 
or not. It happens.
  What we do not have is common sense and scientific methods looked at. 
I hear my friends, even on my side of the aisle, talk about anecdotal 
observations that things are different. Sure they are different.
  As a matter of fact, we heard the leading German scientists on 
climate change saying we are going to have a 10-year break on global 
warming. So I guess that means for the next 10 years CO2 
input is not going to have any effect on global warming. So we have 
conveniently changed the terms from global warming to climate change.
  Well, I want Americans to ask themselves, what is climate change? The 
climate changes all the time. Last week, the majority leader, on the 
Senate floor, said the tornados that were in this area were related to 
climate change.
  Like saying anecdotally we can prove there must be climate change 
because we saw tornadoes in the Washington, DC, area last week--do you 
know how many times there have been tornadoes in this month in 
Washington, DC, throughout the years? Hundreds. But now we are 
anecdotally, because we see something new to our experience, 
associating it with some phenomena. That is not science. That is 
ignorance. That is using science in a way that bastardizes it.
  The second point is, if we really want to know how we affect climate, 
it takes a lot of years to find that out. There are retrospective 
studies we can do. As a matter of fact, they have been done. We have 
ice core drilling that goes back about 3,500 years. We know exactly 
what the temperatures were in the north and in the south based on both 
ice core drillings and ocean sediment drillings. We know that because 
we know that isotopes of both oxygen and nitrogen decay at different 
rates. When those are measured, we can have a pattern of what the 
Earth's temperatures were and what the cycles of climate were. Nobody 
wants to embrace that. That is real science. But we ignore that. That 
doesn't fit with the emotion that allows us to relate a policy that we 
want to enact in a way that disproves it.
  There is so much yet to be known about climate. We can't even predict 
what the weather is going to be tomorrow. Yet we have this supposed 
settled science. The science isn't settled. The rhetoric is settled, 
but the science is far from settled.
  What do we know? Here is what we know. The most recent examples of 
1,500-year cycles are these: The Roman warming started in 200 B.C. 
Pared with its other half, the Dark Ages, it ended in 900 A.D. We know 
that historically. We know there was this warming cycle that came and 
went. The medieval warming period, the little ice age period cycle, 
lasted that period of time from A.D. 900 to 1850. The modern warming 
cycle, which started about 1850 to present, is probably the first half 
of the change. What happened during the medieval warming period? The 
Norse populated Greenland. They fished from its coast. They had over 
60,000 cattle. They raised hay on what is now majority covered with 
ice.
  So we have been there before. We don't like to look at the historical 
fact because it doesn't fit either our populace viewpoint or give us a 
reason to enact a bill which, in my estimation, is the greatest--will 
be, if we pass it--loss of freedom this country has ever experienced.
  Freedom is directly related to the level and the amount of government 
we have. Under the climate bill Senator Boxer has put out, you can 
guarantee a loss of your liberty. Anybody with any common sense knows 
that. We are going to put all sorts of decisionmaking in the hands of 
bureaucrats. They are going to be deciding for you. So when bureaucrats 
start deciding for you, that means you don't. If you don't like the 
results, you have to prove your innocence. The onus becomes on you.
  The unique thing about the American experience is that freedom is our 
basic model. Liberty is ours. When we grow the Government, through $6.4 
to $6.9, all the way up to supposedly $10 trillion in a tax structure 
that is implemented through a great number of Government programs, 
Government boards, Government regulations, you can bet your freedom is 
going to be markedly limited.
  The last thing I want to talk about is the very fact that we are 
talking about not using resources we have. Even if you buy everything 
that the alarmists with climate change and global warming would have 
you, and let's assume they are all right, everybody agrees it is going 
to take us 20 to 30 years to get off of hydrocarbons as a method of 
energy production, as a source of energy. We know that. If we were to 
start building nuclear plants today, we would have every alternative 
energy that we had, and it would still take us 15 to 20 years to start 
to begin to do that. So what is it that we fear about utilizing our own 
energy resources?
  My senior Senator sitting on the floor--and I can tell you that both 
of us, coming from Oklahoma, love our land. We love our streams. We 
love our lakes. We love the wildlife that is everywhere you turn in 
Oklahoma. We drill all over the place. We don't contaminate our 
environment at all. But we have a level of ignorance about what 
exploration is for energy in this country. It is done in a fabulous, 
sophisticated way. We now drill 1 hole and create 8 to 20 wells out of 
1 hole because the technology allows you to drill any direction you 
want at almost any depth you want. So what happens is, we allow people 
who are not aware of the technology of exploration to create a picture 
that says exploration can't be done in an environmentally friendly way. 
That is not true. We do it all the time in Oklahoma. Come visit.
  Behind my home is a gas well. It was drilled 25 years ago. When they 
plugged it, everything about that was remediated. Do you know what is 
growing there right now is the most fabulous wild blackberries you ever 
tasted in your life. That is exactly the opposite picture that the 
alarmists want you to have about energy exploration.
  The point I am making is, we have a hundred years, at a minimum, of 
hydrocarbons available to us that we could utilize in the next 5 to 10 
years and not utilize foreign imported oil from people who have vowed 
to take away our freedoms. The fact is, that gets blocked all the time 
on the Senate floor on the basis of an irrationality that says you 
can't do it.
  We have two of the largest domestic natural gas producers in the 
world in Oklahoma. In the Gulf of Mexico, you can't even see the rigs. 
In 8,500 feet of water, 20,000 feet below the surface of the ocean, 
they are drilling oil in a platform that is floating that moves less 
than 8 inches based on gyroscopes. They have not once in all the years 
had an environmental spill when they were doing that. That is how great 
the technology is. Yet we have this fear that you can't do something.
  At the same time that we have this fear, what we are doing is 
embracing $4.35 gasoline. We are embracing the funding of terrorists by 
our purchase of oil moneys that then go to fund terrorists. We have 
become schizophrenic. We have lost it. When we would deny the ability 
to use resources in this country

[[Page 12165]]

that would stop the upward trend on the price of oil, that would 
utilize oil shale to conversion for jet aviation fuel, that would 
utilize oil shale for heating oil, that we would not allow that, we 
will not allow the utilization of our own resources at our own negative 
benefit, what is the purpose of that?
  I get written to all the time by constituents from Oklahoma about gas 
prices. Do you know what I tell them? I say: You should blame us. You 
should blame the Congress. It is absolutely our fault we are in the 
position we are in. We didn't act. From 1995 up through this year, 
every time we have had a chance to increase exploration in a safe, 
environmentally friendly way in this country, it has been blocked. So 
now we sit with the hardest of the hardest hit, the poor and less 
fortunate, trying to make a choice of whether they can even get to 
work, let alone buy their groceries, because gas now and their energy 
needs are such a large component of their family budget.
  It is our fault, and we are going to sit around. We are going to 
dither, and gasoline is going to be $5.50 a gallon. The American public 
is going to react to that, and they are going to say: Maybe we ought to 
take another look at these good energy companies that do it 
environmentally well and supply us power and energy and do not fund the 
very people who want to take away our freedoms.
  It is coming. This is part of the same rumble from the American 
public that says we do not get it on spending. I was enlightened today 
on a new bill that is getting ready to be introduced that I am going to 
try to keep from coming to the floor that is a yearly authorization for 
the Coast Guard. There is a 25-percent increase in it, but of that 25 
percent, 80 percent is earmarks. We almost doubled the Coast Guard when 
we created the Department of Homeland Security. Yet this year we are 
going to come close to a trillion-dollar deficit--$3,000 for every man, 
woman, and child--and we still do not get it.
  So the idea that Congress will not act to raise the level of 
supplies, that Congress will not take off the tariff on imported 
ethanol, refuses to take off the tariff on imported ethanol to protect 
a false economy associated with corn ethanol--when, in fact, we have a 
shortage, as manifested by the price of the fuels that drive our energy 
and yet we will not act--the American people have a right to be 
disgusted.
  We are the reason gasoline is over $4. It is not the oil companies. 
It is not the Middle East. It is us. Because we could have done 
something. We still can do something. But we heard political speeches 
all today because what we want to do is sue OPEC and create an excess 
profits tax, and eventually a Btu tax, rather than increase the supply. 
What we should do is increase supplies. The American people get it. 
Somehow we do not.
  My hope is that America will let us know. I think they are going to. 
My hope is we will listen.
  With that, Madam President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.
  Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, I came down to the floor for a totally 
different purpose. But my junior Senator was talking, and I am so 
impressed with some of the things he has shared with us today. He is 
being too kind in one area, though.
  Sooner or later we have to say who is at fault in terms of the 
increase. While he is right, it is us, I have and I would invite anyone 
to go to my Web site or go to the Environment and Public Works 
Committee Web site--it is epw.senate.gov--in there I have listed all 
the bills, I say to my good junior Senator from Oklahoma, that have 
come up since 1995 where we have tried to expand the supply of oil and 
gas in America, even the bills when we were a majority, when the 
Republicans were a majority.
  In October of 1995, we voted to implement a competitive leasing 
program for oil and gas exploration. That was within the coastal plain 
of ANWR, as well as offshore. It passed 52 to 47. Of that vote, 52 were 
Republicans, 46 were Democrats--right down party lines. Then, the very 
next month, on November 17--I remember that because that was my 
birthday--the Senate voted on a motion to adopt a conference report on 
the same thing--for a competitive leasing program for oil and gas 
exploration--and again it passed by almost the same margin. All the 
Republicans voted for it. All the Democrats voted against it.
  Now, those two bills were up there. And, of course, what happened? 
The President at that time, Bill Clinton, vetoed those bills.
  I could go from there all the way up to the present day.
  In March of 2005, the Senate voted on an amendment to allow us to 
vote on ANWR--right down party lines: every Democrat opposed it; every 
Republican supported it. On November 3, 2005, the same thing happened.
  In June of 2007, the same thing happened. That was a better one, 
actually. That was the Gas Price Act. The Gas Price Act I am 
particularly fond of because that was mine. We could have all the oil 
and gas production in the world that we need to bring down the price of 
gas, but if we cannot refine it, we are not going to be able to use it. 
So as to refineries, right down party lines, the Democrats opposed any 
new refineries in America.
  This one was more difficult to oppose because I think most people who 
are understanding of what happens during a BRAC process--that means 
Base Realignment and Closing Commission--when that happens, the 
communities close by a major military installation that is closed 
suffer economically, greatly.
  What this would do is take those closed, BRACed out, military bases 
and turn them into refineries. That saves millions of dollars of 
Government money because otherwise they have to be cleaned up to 
playground standards. You do not have to do that if there is going to 
be a refinery on it. So it is something everybody wanted.
  We arranged for EDA grants for communities to apply for to attract 
refineries. We could have had a refinery in every area of America where 
we closed military bases. But it was killed. On June 13, 2007, it was 
killed--right down party lines. It was 43 to 52. Of that, 43 
Republicans voted for it; 48 Democrats voted against it.
  In 2008, we had a similar vote on ANWR. The same thing happened; then 
again on May 15 of this year.
  I am saying this only to correct that one thing my junior Senator 
said, in that he was right, it is our fault, but this is strictly 
partisan. I think people are going to have to realize that. Until 
people realize that, the same thing is going to happen. Until people 
write in, and the imagination is captured of the American people, and 
they understand what is causing the high price at the pumps--it is a 
very simple concept. As many have said, you should learn this concept 
in econ 101; that is, supply and demand--if you decrease the supply, 
the price does not go down; it goes up. What they are trying to do with 
the Energy bill to decrease the supply would cause the same thing.
  That is not why I came to the floor. I am glad to join with my junior 
Senator and talk a few minutes about what he said about the science 
behind this thing. This whole thing started back when they were trying 
to pass Kyoto. Like a lot of the cruddy things that happen in this 
country, it started with the United Nations.
  The IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences--these people are 
policymakers, not scientists--came out and said the science is here, 
the science is settled, the science is settled, the science is settled; 
and they kept saying it louder and louder, and they were backed up by a 
very liberal media. So the people actually believed the science was 
settled. But the fact is, the science was not settled.
  My junior Senator, Mr. Coburn, is right because time and time again, 
we talked about the medieval warm period. We talked about the cooling 
periods. Let's keep in mind that the climate has always changed in this 
country. God is still up there, and we are going to have these changes. 
They have taken place.
  The interesting thing right now is, as scientists will tell you, it 
has been

[[Page 12166]]

cooling ever since 2001. Also, another interesting thing is, they talk 
about global warming, when, in fact, all during the 1990s, supposedly 
it was getting warmer, the southern hemisphere was getting cooler. The 
Antarctic was getting cooler. The last time I checked, the southern 
hemisphere was part of the globe. So we did not have global warming.
  Now all these people who were saying that was true--and I think 
probably the best example I used to use--it has been a while since I 
have used it--is when Al Gore was the Vice President of the United 
States and he decided to try to build a case whereby we would be 
ratifying the Kyoto treaty. So he hired a guy named Tom Wigley, a top 
scientist in America, to put together a study. This is the charge he 
gave him. He said: Let's assume that every developed nation--not 
developing; not China, not Mexico, not India--every developed nation 
signed on to and ratified the Kyoto treaty and lived by its emission 
standards, which they would not. Look at western Europe; 15 countries 
signed on to it, and only 2 of the 15 have met the emission 
requirements. But let's assume that is true, that they all do. How 
much, then, I say to you, Dr. Wigley, would this reduce the temperature 
after 50 years? His result was this: If all developed nations joined in 
and ratified the Kyoto Treaty and lived by the emission requirements, 
it would lower the temperatures by seven one-hundredths of 1 degree--
not even measurable. So we go through all this economic pain.
  I have never been as proud, I don't believe, of the Senate as I was 
last week because when I compare what happened in 2005 when they had 
the McCain-Lieberman bill, a very similar bill--not nearly as bad as 
this bill but a similar bill; it was cap and trade, the concept was the 
same--I was down here on this floor standing at this podium for 5 
consecutive days. I was the only one willing to voice the opposition. 
We had a total of two Senators to come down in 5 days to give me 
support. However, last week, in only 3 days, 25 Senators came down.
  It shows that this huge financial power base that is over there in 
the far left environmentalist community--I am talking about the George 
Soreses and the Michael Moores and the various other groups that are 
out there in California; I call them the Hollywood elitists--those 
individuals have all the money that they dump into all of these 
campaigns. We were willing to take them on, and we won. The most votes 
Senator Boxer had with this change that took place in 2006--it is 
supposed to be a much more liberal Senate, and it is--she could only 
get 44 votes, not a majority of 51, certainly not the 60 votes that 
were necessary but only 44. I was just really pleased at that, in the 
fact that people are waking up. People recognize science is mixed. Some 
people say the science is real, some say it is not, but one thing that 
is not confused is the amount of money it would cost.
  We talked about this bill that we defeated--hopefully we didn't 
defeat it. I hope it comes up so we can debate it longer. Let me make 
this message right now to the Senate majority leader, Senator Reid: I 
want you to bring this back to the floor so that we can talk about it 
more and more and more and talk about the fact that this is a $6.7 
trillion tax increase. Senator Boxer would argue that, no, this has a 
built-in system whereby poor people are getting some money back. When 
you analyze the bill, that amount comes to $800 billion. In other 
words, if we raise the taxes on the American people, for every $8 we 
raise the taxes, we are going to give them back $1. That is not a very 
good deal, but that is in this bill; to make us less competitive and 
less able to be reliant upon our own reserves--huge reserves that we 
have out there, that we could become energy independent overnight, that 
we were going exactly the wrong way.
  I saw a couple of editorials such as the Wall Street Journal which 
said that with gasoline selling at $4 a gallon, the Democrats picked 
the worst possible time to bring up cap and trade. The issue is 
starting to feel like the Hillary health care plan.
  Anyway, I would even argue with some of the people who put in an 
analysis as to how much that bill we defeated last week would have 
increased the price of gas at the pump. They say 53 cents a gallon. 
However, that 53 cents a gallon is predicated--
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has used 10 minutes.
  Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, it is my understanding that we are in a 
period of morning business; is that correct?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. That is correct.
  Mr. INHOFE. All right. I would like to continue my statements, then.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. INHOFE. The fact that it would increase by 53 cents a gallon I 
think is conservative because that is assuming we would have 268 new 
nuclear plants. Now, the very people who are promoting this bill and 
want to stop us from drilling, from exploring for oil and for gas, are 
the same ones who are opposed to nuclear energy. So they say in that 
period of time, by 2030, the most nuclear plants we could have would be 
64. I think everyone agrees with that, so instead of 268 new plants, 
there will be 64. So you could say that--if you use the same 
percentages--it would raise the price of gas by $2, not just 53 cents.
  Well, we defeated the largest tax increase ever this last Friday. As 
I saw the majority leader coming through, he was smiling, and I hope 
that means he is going to bring it up so we can debate it more. I just 
get very excited about the fact that there has been a wake-up call in 
America. After all of those lonely years over the last 7 years, now 
people realize this is something that is not good for America. It took 
$4-a-gallon gas to make that wake-up call become a reality. So I am 
very thankful it happened. I congratulate the Senate on its wisdom.
  With that, I yield the floor.

                          ____________________