[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 16]
[Senate]
[Pages 21167-21170]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 REMEMBERING SENATOR EDWARD M. KENNEDY

  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, we knew it was coming. Yet the sight of 
Senator Edward Kennedy's desk draped in the black velvet of mourning is 
painfully sad.
  America and the world have lost a great champion of civil rights, 
human rights, and fairness. As President Obama said so well, Senator 
Kennedy was not only historic, he was heroic.
  We will have more time later this week to talk about his 
extraordinary life and the honor those of us who served with him 
enjoyed during his life. Today, I wish to say what a great honor it was 
to have worked alongside Ted Kennedy.
  On his desk today is a copy of one of his favorite poems, ``The Road 
Less Traveled'' by Robert Frost.
  There is another Frost poem that is identified with the Kennedys that 
Ted Kennedy loved as well. It is called ``Stopping by Woods on a Snowy 
Evening.'' It is the story of a man who pauses to admire the simple 
serene beauty of a New England woods filling softly with snow and 
wishes he could stay longer. It reads:

     But I have promises to keep,
     And miles to go before I sleep,
     And miles to go before I sleep.

  Unlike his beloved brothers, Senator Kennedy's life was not one of 
promise cut short but a life of promises kept. He loved America, and 
his life's work made us a better and more just nation.
  If Ted Kennedy were here today, I feel absolutely certain that he 
would be on the floor at this moment talking about health care. It 
really was the hallmark of his public career. From the beginning, he 
understood this was one of the most fundamental things when it came to 
justice and fairness in America.
  The fact that 47 million Americans have no health insurance is at 
least embarrassing, if not shameful, in this great and prosperous 
Nation. Who are these people, these 47 million? Are they lazy or just 
unlucky? Well, they are not the poorest in America because we provide 
for the poorest. We have Medicaid, which provides basic health care for 
those who are out of work and have no source of income or savings. They 
are not the fortunate few or the fortunate majority, because they don't 
enjoy health insurance, as most of us do, where they work. They are 
people who get up and go to work every single day, without the 
assurance that they are going to have protection if they run into 
medical bills.
  This morning, in the State Journal Register, which is published in my 
hometown of Springfield, IL, there is a story of one person, Terry 
Broida. He is a fellow who is down on his luck. He is 62 years old, and 
he says:

       ``I couldn't get a credit card to buy a postage stamp,'' 
     said Broida, 62, who estimated he owes $80,000 to Springfield 
     doctors and hospitals, money he doesn't think he will be able 
     to pay.

  Is he out of work? No. He is a small businessman who operates an air-
filter maintenance company, and he is one of more than 45 million 
Americans who have no health insurance.
  It says:

       He wants to see Congress and the Obama administration cover 
     all Americans through a universal, government-controlled 
     system. And he's not scared of what some would call 
     ``socialized medicine.''

  He said this Tuesday:

       We have socialized medicine already--it's called Medicare, 
     and it works.

  This says:

       America's health-care costs total more than $2.2 trillion a 
     year, accounting for 16.2 percent of the gross domestic 
     product in 2007.

  That is $1 out of every $6 spent in America.

       And yet, the latest statistics indicate that 15 percent of 
     Americans [like Terry Broida] were uninsured in 2007.

  Health care costs are crippling the ability of many companies to 
compete, and many companies are dropping coverage.

       Broida, the father of six, hasn't had health insurance [in 
     40 years] since 1969, when he was 22 and sold life insurance 
     [at a local agency]. When he left that job, he operated 
     furniture stores for more than 30 years.

  He said, ``I was young, stupid and thought I could handle anything.''

       He said he never could afford health insurance but always 
     seemed to scrape together enough money for doctor visits for 
     himself, his kids and his now-ex-wife--until 1980, when he 
     broke his right leg playing softball.
       To pay for the $3,000 surgery to fix his leg, he agreed to 
     reupholster the surgeon's furniture.
       ``It was a pretty good swap,'' Broida said. But that doctor 
     died a few months later, leaving Broida with no one willing 
     to accept a similar swap to remove the metal rod [the doctor 
     put] in his leg.

  The rod is still there today, 29 years later.

       A 17-foot fall through a roof while working in early 1990s 
     left him with another $3,000 hospital bill he couldn't pay, 
     and a heart attack in 1995 generated a $25,000 bill to St. 
     John's Hospital [in Springfield, IL].

  He thinks the hospital forgave most of the bill.

       Fearing another big bill, [Terry] decided not to seek 
     medical care in 1996, when he fell off another roof. ``I just 
     laid in bed until the pain went away, and I went back to 
     work,'' Broida said.
       Spinal stenosis almost crippled him until his primary care 
     doctor at [a local community health center] referred him for 
     emergency surgery in 2007.

  The surgery worked, but the surgeon was from a local clinic which did 
not offer discounted rates to patients, such as they offer to major 
health insurance companies. The doctor bill alone for his emergency 
surgery was $40,000. Broida said, ``There's no way in hell I can pay 
$40,000.''

       At one time, he said, he earned $50,000 a year. He said he 
     now makes about $18,000 while recovering from surgery.

  He went on to talk about the fact that he had heart problems that may 
have been complicated by dental problems. He cannot afford regular 
dental care, obviously. He basically said he is for a universal system 
of health care. He would like the Federal Government to establish a 
public option to compete against private insurance companies so people 
like him could afford insurance.
  He said in this article:

       ``Businesses exist to make a profit,'' he said. 
     ``Government exists to provide a service.''
       Asked whether the debate about reform makes him hopeful, he 
     said powerful lobbying interests will be a barrier to major 
     decisions by congressional lawmakers.
       ``I'm not holding my breath,'' he said. ``It's all about 
     the Benjamins. If they listen to the money we're screwed.''

  Terry Broida, Springfield, IL, one of 47 million uninsured Americans 
who are all over our country. They got up and went to work this morning 
at their small businesses and working for other people. They made the 
bed in your motel room last night. They are going to take the dishes 
off the table when you finish with your breakfast. They are the folks 
who are watching your kids at daycare. They are the ones who are 
watching your mom in the nursing home. And they are the ones who do not 
have health insurance.
  What kind of a country are we if we can ignore the obvious--47 
million uninsured Americans. When people come to the floor and rail 
about health care reform and talk about socialism, they are talking 
about whether we as a nation can reach out and provide for those who go 
to work and do not have the protection and security of health 
insurance. I do not call that socialism. It is fundamental Americanism 
and fairness. It is what has defined us as a country for so long.

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  It has been almost 80 or 90 years now since we decided that if you 
make more money in America, you will pay more in taxes than someone who 
makes less. Socialism? I don't think so. I think it is fairness, and 
that is what we are getting down to in this debate.
  Tonight the President of the United States will speak to us, not far 
from here, across the Rotunda. I am not sure exactly what he is going 
to say, but I know one thing for sure, he is not giving up on his 
promise to America to make a difference when it comes to health care. 
This President understands it is once in a political lifetime that you 
can change this country for the better.
  He also understands there are powerful forces against him, people who 
are making a fortune off the current system who do not want anyone to 
rock the boat. Oh, they are not going to say that. They are going to 
come up with some of the things Senator Reid referred to earlier--the 
great lies about death panels and cutting off people when they need 
chemotherapy late in their life. They are going to peddle those lies 
and try to mislead and distort the debate. But I don't think they will 
succeed because I believe the American people understand that the best 
thing for us to do is not go through shoving and shouting at town 
meetings but sit down and have an honest debate and answer questions 
honestly, not the kind of distortion and lies we have seen.
  For Terry Broida, $80,000 in debt to the hospitals and doctors in my 
hometown, he will go to work tomorrow in his little business and try to 
keep it going. He will see his own medical condition deteriorate. I 
wonder if, on the floor of the Senate and the House of Representatives, 
there will be anybody listening to his story and deciding that America 
can do better.
  We are the fortunate few on the floor of the Senate. We have the best 
health insurance in America. Every American deserves that kind of 
health insurance. We have an opportunity once every year to pick from 
private health insurance plans, the ones that are right for our family. 
If we pick a big plan, we pay more out of our payroll deduction. If we 
pick a smaller plan, we pay less. But we have that right, that choice, 
that security, and peace of mind to know our families are going to be 
protected.
  Many of the same Senators who come to the floor and to their town 
meetings to rail about public options and public-administered health 
care plans happen to belong to one right here in the Senate. 
Interesting, isn't it? Terrible for everybody else but perfect for them 
and their families.
  I think the American people can see through that. They understand 
that, at the end of the day, we can improve this system and make it 
better and fair. They understand if they have health insurance they 
want to keep, it is going to be their right under any change of the 
law. If they have a doctor they trust, they can stay with that doctor. 
That is going to be protected.
  But if they are similar to Terry and have no health insurance or they 
have health insurance which is terrible, we want to give them the same 
choice Members of Congress have: to pick the health insurance that is 
right for them, and for those in lower income categories, to give them 
a helping hand to pay for that health insurance premium. That is only 
right, and it is only fair.
  We want to make sure these health insurance companies do not continue 
to rip off people. Two out of three people who file for bankruptcy in 
America today do so because of medical bills they cannot pay, just like 
Terry. Two out of three file for bankruptcy because of medical bills. 
You know what, 78 percent of them, more than three-fourths of those 
filing for bankruptcy because of medical bills have health insurance. 
It is no good. It wasn't there when they needed it. The company denied 
their benefits. The company refused to pay, and they were stuck, losing 
everything--their life savings, things they had saved for the future, 
gone.
  We cannot allow this to continue. We cannot allow the radical voice 
we have heard over the last several weeks distorting the facts about 
this debate to prevail. This is a time for us to stand and do the right 
thing for this country and bring coverage to those today in America who 
do not have the most basic security we all need--the security of 
knowing that when you wake up in the morning, you are not one accident 
or one diagnosis away from being wiped out financially.
  For 47 million people, that is the reality of life in America. The 
President tonight will challenge us to change it. We have to have the 
political courage to do it.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Ohio.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I applaud the remarks of my friend from 
Illinois and his leadership on health care issues. He is one of the 
people in this institution--and I wish there were more--who went home 
and listened to people and came to the floor of the Senate to talk 
about the stories of people because that is why we are here. He 
represents them very well. That is why he supports this health care 
plan by the President. That is why he supports the public option and 
coverage for all--prevention and wellness and all that is in this 
legislation--insurance company reform that matters.
  I thank my friend from Illinois.
  Mr. President, tonight President Obama addresses the Nation, just 
down the hall, in a joint session of Congress, an historic night. A 
President has not addressed a joint session of Congress, other than a 
State of the Union Address which comes at the beginning of every year, 
since President Bush did it right after September 11. We know how 
important this is.
  President Obama is stepping up and going to be more specific and more 
forceful and help to set aside and answer all the distortions the 
Senator from Oregon, the Presiding Officer, and I and others heard at 
our meetings in our States in August, when we were home talking to 
people about this health care legislation.
  I went to the most conservative part of my State, Cincinnati, and did 
my first large townhall meeting. Mr. President, 1,500 people showed up; 
1,000 of them generally were supportive of this health care bill with a 
public option. About 500 were opposed.
  Several people stood and some argued that they did not like it. They 
called it socialism. They talked about death panels, and they talked 
about illegal immigrants, none of which are in the bill, of course. 
They have been misled, in large part, by insurance company interests in 
this city that have done all they could to propagate this 
misinformation all over the country.
  The CEO of Aetna was paid $24 million last year. The CEO of CIGNA and 
so many of these other companies makes tens of millions of dollars a 
year. That is just their top executives. Obviously, other executives 
make millions of dollars a year, while too often they deny a person 
coverage because of a preexisting condition or they put an annual or 
lifetime cap on an insurance policy that makes you understand that if 
you get really sick, your policy was not nearly as good as you thought 
it was because they canceled your insurance or plans tend to 
discriminate on gender, geography, disability, and age, in many cases.
  This legislation we will bring to the floor that was passed out of 
the committee on which the Presiding Officer sits, the Health, 
Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and passed three committees 
in the House of Representatives, will say you can keep the insurance 
you have, but we will build consumer protections around that insurance 
so insurance companies cannot cut you off, cannot deny you care, cannot 
cancel your insurance policy, cannot do--the technical term they use is 
``rescission''--when they find all kinds of reasons to cancel you.
  I wish to talk a little bit about this townhall meeting in Cincinnati 
in the most conservative part of the State where people said: Are you 
sure you want to go there? Because there is all kinds of 
misinformation, all kinds of anger and disagreement with the bill. I 
found that was true only in a minority of people who showed up.
  It was a huge crowd we had at the University of Cincinnati. One woman

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particularly got my attention, a young woman named Rachel, 17 years 
old. There were three high schools--Wyoming High School, which is in a 
suburb of Cincinnati, and another couple schools that were also there. 
This 17-year-old girl said--her name is Rachel--she said: My father's 
side of the family has the breast cancer gene, the gene that often 
indicates a high likelihood of breast cancer in the next generation of 
women. She said: My mother has had some autoimmune diseases in her 
family.
  She said: I go to the doctor every year. I am very healthy. She 
looked great. She was outspoken and friendly. She said: I go in once a 
year. I have a physical. I am fine. I have never had any illness of any 
consequence. My parents' insurance company told me because of my 
parents' illnesses or just my parents' condition--not even illness at 
this point--I was told by my parents' insurance company that I would 
not be able to get insurance because I have a preexisting condition. 
She has never been sick, but she has been told by the insurance company 
that she would not get any insurance.
  What kind of behavior is this? Insurance companies are going to do 
what they are going to do. Their bottom line is to try to figure out 
how they can bring in the most revenue possible and how to pay out the 
fewest dollars as possible. The way you do that is to deny care. I 
understand that is their business model. I don't blame them for that. I 
don't hate the insurance companies. I understand we need rules that 
insurance companies cannot do that. There is no reason the law should 
allow this insurance company to deny Rachel, from Wyoming High School 
in a suburb of Cincinnati, her care.
  Then I did other meetings around Ohio in Cambridge, in eastern Ohio, 
a small town. Mark, from Cambridge, discussed how businesses are 
struggling with crushing premiums and copays that take money away from 
company earnings and employee salaries. He learned, as a small business 
owner, health insurance reform--our bill--will provide tax credits to 
buy coverage for employees and, as we talked earlier, will prevent 
insurers from dramatically increasing premiums if an employee gets 
sick.
  Imagine you have a business in Eugene, OR, or there is a business in 
my State in Akron or Zanesville or Lima. It is a small company that has 
25 employees, and two of these employees get a serious form of cancer 
which costs them--they all have insurance through their employer--tens 
of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars. The insurance 
company will do one of two things. They will either jack up premiums so 
high that the small business may not be able to afford the premiums and 
will have to lay off people or cancel the insurance or the insurance 
company will cancel their insurance. Either way, that will not work for 
their employees who did nothing wrong.
  One of the things this legislation does is give those small 
businesses a tax credit so they, in fact, can insure their employees 
and make a financial go of it. It allows the small businessperson to 
take his whole business and all his employees into this exchange where 
they will get a choice of insurance companies. They could go with 
Aetna, CIGNA or United Health. They could go with a not-for-profit 
mutual company called Ohio Mutual. They could go with a public option. 
They have a choice. That is the point of a public option--to give a 
whole array of choices and at the same time have insurance reform so 
those companies can no longer cut off people because of a preexisting 
condition or deny care for a whole host of reasons. And the public 
option will help us enforce that by giving people that option where 
they simply would not cheat and would not deny coverage like that.
  Another young man at one of our meetings in Columbus--Brenton, a 
recent college graduate--talked about how the excitement of graduating 
turned into anxiety knowing that he is one illness away from towering 
medical bills and even unemployment. Brenton, like millions of other 
recent college graduates and young adults, will benefit from low-cost 
plans and longer periods to stay on their parents' plans. I can't count 
the number of young people--21, 22, and 23 years old--who don't have 
insurance because when they graduated college, left home, or whatever, 
in their early twenties, their coverage was canceled. They could no 
longer be part of their parents' insurance plan. Under this 
legislation, every person is allowed to stay--if the parents want them 
and the children want to--on their parents' plan until the age of 26, 
an age when young people begin to get better employment that can also 
lead to coverage.
  Jane from Cambridge--eastern Ohio--discussed how her retirement 
security is being shattered by ballooning out-of-pocket costs and 
outrageous premium hikes. She will benefit from health insurance reform 
that roots out waste, fraud, and abuse to preserve the long-term 
sustainability of Medicare. She will also get assistance under our core 
medical bill, closing the doughnut hole, if she had the Medicaid 
prescription drug coverage. This doughnut hole has swallowed up so many 
people who have been buried in huge costs for their prescription drugs 
because of the way the Medicare bill was written 5 years ago.
  You may remember back in those days--and we don't operate that way 
anymore--the drug and insurance companies sat down with President Bush 
and wrote the Medicare privatization bill. It was written for the drug 
companies; written for the insurance companies. They benefitted most 
from it. It created this huge doughnut hole where senior citizens have 
huge out-of-pocket costs they have to bear. This legislation begins to 
close that doughnut hole so that would not be the case.
  Mr. President, it is clear that as many of us--the Senator from 
Illinois and the Presiding Officer from Colorado--went around our 
States in the last month and listened to people--such as the young 
college student who lost insurance; or Rachel, the young woman in 
Cincinnati who might have a preexisting condition, even though she had 
not been sick a day in her life or been diagnosed with any preexisting 
condition; or the small businessperson and fellow named Mr. Fisher in 
Cincinnati who told us how he has covered his employees for 26 years 
and how every year it gets harder and harder, to the point now where he 
has had some serious illnesses in his company of 40 or 50 or 60 people, 
if I can recall, and he simply can't continue to cover all of them--
every one of these individuals has a specific problem. Many of them are 
happy with the insurance they have, if they have it, but many of them 
know the anxiety of what might happen with a preexisting condition or 
what might happen to them or their employees. Insurance is good only 
when it always works. That is what this bill does.
  Insurance companies will have to do what they promise, not in the 
fine print but what they promise. This legislation goes in that 
direction.
  We look forward to hearing the President tonight as he leads us on 
this very important issue. This will be perhaps the most important vote 
in the next couple of months that any of us cast, at least on a 
domestic issue--or maybe the most important vote in our lives outside 
of voting on the Iraq war 6 or 7 years ago. But this is probably the 
most important vote we will cast in our careers.
  We have moved intelligently. I think we have moved cautiously. We are 
ready to move this bill forward, get it to the President's desk by the 
end of the year. It is going to make a difference in the lives of tens 
of millions of people in the country.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bennet). The Senator from Illinois.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I see the Senator from Florida is on the 
Senate floor, so at this point I ask unanimous consent to reserve the 
remainder of the time on the majority side and yield to the Senator 
from Florida who will be recognized in morning business on the other 
side.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from Florida.

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