Roy Blunt

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I wish to talk a little bit about health care this morning. The majority leader has suggested in past weeks that all of these contacts and concerns I get from Missourians are just made up--although he didn't target Missourians and say only Missourians were making up these stories; he just said everybody was making up these stories. But that is clearly not true. The law regarding health care--the law that is applied every day with great consistency--continues to be the law of unintended consequences, the law that so often is impacted by what we think we are doing in the Congress, only to find that the consequences of those actions go well beyond the discussion the Congress was having. Certainly if we had that debate again today, the debate we had in 2009 and early 2010, the Congress would be better prepared for that debate, the country would be better prepared for that debate, and people would understand what is at stake. What I see every day are things that people didn't anticipate would happen. Here is a letter we got from Jack in Kansas City, MO. He said: I'm a retired hospital CEO and glad to be retired because of Obamacare. He points out in an absolutely correct way that in most communities in Missouri, particularly our small and midsized communities, the hospital is a real source of pride and place of healing, a major employer. Of course, the potential end result of what is happening now with the changes we made and how hospitals are treated, particularly hospitals in rural areas, hospitals in underserved inner-city areas, is that the programs that were in place are basically going away. And why did they go away? Because the President assumed and the Members of Congress, I am sure, who voted for this piece of legislation assumed, that everybody would be covered, that everybody would have insurance, so we didn't need to have special programs that dealt with people who didn't have insurance and hospitals that dealt with people who didn't have insurance, and we didn't need special programs for underserved areas. Clearly, that is not the case. If we look back at the debate, many people were saying: This will not work out the way the well-intended proponents of this law think it will work out, and we are going to continue to have people without insurance. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office reiterated again just recently that at the end of 10 years, how many people won't have insurance? Thirty million. Thirty million people didn't have insurance when we started, and to disrupt the entire health care tableau of the country to add possibly 10 million, I think we are going to have people who lose insurance at work who previously had insurance through their work. I think that will be one of the major unintended consequences as we approach the end of this year and go into next year. I am talking to too many employers in Missouri who are saying there is a place for people to go now. They can go to the exchange. We struggled with this for a long time. Even though we are not covered by the law, even though we don't have 50 employees, we are no longer going to provide the insurance at work--that many of these employers have provided for decades and others have provided over all the time they have been in business, even if it is less than decades. Norman from Warrensburg, MO, is concerned about what would happen with Medicare and Medicare Advantage. He says: I was struck with Guillain-Barre in 2005 which has left me disabled as well as other resulting health issues. We expend more than $3,000 out of pocket annually just for my prescriptions alone and that was under a Medicare Advantage plan. This plus the Medicare premiums and the physician care takes almost all of our Social Security benefits. We live in a small community. He describes Warrensburg as a small community of around 18,000, and it would probably be one of those communities to lose the Medicare Advantage type of insurance, which is the gap that he thinks allows his family to have the health care they have and would like to continue to have. Paula from O'Fallon, MO, says she believes a lot of people's spouses are going to leave their jobs because they are going to look at who has the better insurance and try to benefit from that better insurance. According to her, her husband's company is paying a large fine because their insurance is better than ObamaCare. I imagine more realistically what that letter might have said is that their insurance isn't exactly what the Department of Health and Human Services believes is the right kind of insurance, when the government makes these decisions instead of the people or the people closest to them, their employers. One of the benefits of the employer-provided system was that people didn't have to worry about this. In fact, almost everybody looked at their insurance and they talked with their employer and they decided they would get more information when they needed it, and when they needed it usually the information they got was pretty good information for them to have. Now we have people trying to figure out, if they have choices, a complexity of choices and alternatives that they never had to deal with before. Frankly, they are not going to like that, and I think one of the other unintended consequences of this law is that people are going to begin to say: I know a government-run program wouldn't be as good as the health care I used to have, but I just don't want to be responsible for it anymore. What we probably are doing is building a groundswell of people who no longer want to be forced into the decisions they never had to make, because 85 percent of everybody who had insurance had insurance at work, and 90 percent of them thought the insurance they had at work met their needs. I think we would be lucky if very far into the Affordable Care Act, 90 percent of the people who have insurance think the insurance they have moving forward meets their needs. Angelyn from Dexter, MO, said her aunt and uncle are searching for a new doctor after their doctor moved out of State. They are having trouble finding a physician in the Dexter area that will take new Medicare patients--another unintended consequence. The people who voted for this bill cut Medicare itself. I wasn't for it, but it is the law. One of the reasons I said I wasn't for it is we are cutting a program we already knew is challenged--Medicare--by $500 billion to form a new program. There is no city council, there is no county government, there is nowhere else in America where people would go to a meeting and say, OK, we have a program that is in real trouble, so what we are going to do is cut that program to start a new program-- and particularly a program such as Medicare that people have been led to believe they can rely on. When we cut Medicare by $500 billion over 10 years something happens. What Angelyn's aunt and uncle are seeing is one of the things that happens is people try to find a doctor who will take Medicare only and find doctor after doctor who says: We are going to continue to serve the Medicare patients we have as long as they are around to serve, but we are not serving new Medicare patients. Joanna in Kansas City said her son goes to college where he is required to have health insurance. His health insurance he gets through the school has increased 40 percent this year. Wayne in Moberly said his premiums and prescription drug costs have increased and he is concerned it is because of all the new requirements that have to be met. He said: ``The future does not look good from where I stand as a small business owner and a farmer.'' Donna in Napoleon, MO, said her insurance had gone from $93 twice a month to $156 twice a month. The interesting point in her letter is she said her insurance would go up even more if she gets a chance to work more. There is a lot to be said for assisting people to get health insurance who cannot otherwise afford to get health insurance, but one of the things I never heard debated in any extensive way is what happens when people are at the edge of moving to a new level of work which then gives them a lower level of benefit. Donna is saying that if she gets to work more hours, she will have less assistance buying her health insurance and her health insurance goes up. The government should not be in the business of looking for ways to encourage people not to work, as in the part-time work we see all over the country now. One of the great workplace impacts of the health care law was that the government for the first time ever said to most employers-- employers of more than 50 people--you have to provide health insurance to anybody who works 30 hours a week. So what did employers for the first time hear the government saying? If someone works less than 30 hours a week, they don't have to have to provide health insurance. So employer after employer made the decision that for new employees we are going to hire three people at 27 or 28 hours a week rather than two people at 40 hours. We are going to meet our workforce needs in a new way. Consequently, those individuals don't have coverage. Many individuals at that level of hourly work who used to have coverage no longer have coverage. An awful lot of companies used to provide coverage at half time--at 20 hours--but if the government says they don't have to provide it until 30 hours, it turns out a lot of people don't work more than 30 hours because they don't have an opportunity or maybe they work almost 60 hours, but they have to work 60 hours at two different jobs, as did a lady I mentioned just last week who contacted our office. David in Kansas City said he is retired from the railroad industry, and on April 1 his former company canceled plans for retirees 65 and older. David had access to a retiree plan from the railroad industry. He doesn't have that anymore. A lot of companies have done that, not just the railroad industry. IBM announced they would no longer provide health care coverage for their retirees. As soon as the retirees are 65 and older they are placed on Medicare, but what kind of supplement do they have? They used to have a supplement that was part of a big IBM plan and now they don't have that anymore. UPS announced the dependents and spouses who are in part of the UPS family wouldn't have insurance anymore. The unintended consequences keep on coming, and we need to continually look at what we need to do to see that people have access to great health care. We are talking now--as we should be--about veterans health care and how veterans could have access to great health care. This is the moment right now where we can look at this issue in a new way. The veterans service organizations are looking at this issue. Alternatives are good. Veterans should have the best health care, in the best location for them, in the best way the taxpayers can provide it. The Veterans' Administration should be the best at some things. They should be better than anybody else at dealing with IED accidents, eye injuries, the loss of limbs, and other issues that are unique to veterans in unfortunate numbers because of the kind of conflicts in which we have been involved. Nobody should be better at that than the VA. The VA may be the absolute best place to go for a particular injury, such as post-traumatic stress. Our veterans have problems because of the conflicts they have been in, but they also have problems because the National Institutes of Health says one out of four adult Americans has a diagnosable mental health problem. In a hearing a couple months ago, I asked the Secretary--the Surgeon General of the Army and the other forces about this: Do you think that is reflected in the military, and the answer was yes. She said: We recruit from the general population. We don't have any reason to believe our population serving in the military doesn't reflect similarly with regard to mental health issues. Some of those mental health issues, such as post-traumatic stress, the VA should be better than anybody else at, but a lot of mental health issues in the VA, there is no reason they should be any better than any of the other facilities. Veterans may have to drive to another State to get to a veterans facility or have to drive 120 miles or 150 miles in the VA's van transportation. If that is what someone wants to do as a veteran, I think we ought to be sure veterans can do that, but if veterans want to get better care closer to home, more choices, we should do that. Let the Veterans' Administration compete to be the best at what they can provide. There is no particular reason to believe the Veterans' Administration is going to be better than everybody in the country at normal internal medicine. There is no reason to believe the Veterans' Administration is going to be the best at dealing with cancer or heart issues or other issues. If there is a veterans hospital that somehow has figured out how to do that, fine, but don't make veterans drive 120 miles by a dozen facilities that can do just as well or better because we have decided to put people in a system that is totally defined by the government. One of the things we are learning is people can make better choices in so many areas than when the government makes those choices for them. So as we think about our veterans, as we think about what we can do to be sure they get the best care, that they are honored, their service is honored in a way they were led to believe it would be honored, this is a great time to have this discussion. So whether it is health care for everybody else or health care for veterans, the Congress of the United States--and the country--has probably never been in a better position to talk about these issues. We see the unintended consequences of taking steps in the wrong direction. Now is a great time for our veterans and health care generally to see what we could do to take steps in the right direction. I note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I want to talk a little bit about the continuing concerns we see in our office and hear from Missourians about what is happening with the implementation of the health care plan. The more people know about the path we are on with health care, the more concerned they appear to become. I know the White House has suggested that somehow the numbers would reflect that people have responded to this program in a positive way. When you take away the health insurance people have and there is only one place they can go to get the insurance they think they need, obviously they are going to go there, but that doesn't mean they like it. In fact, there is a new political poll that suggests nearly half of the American voters say they are for outright repeal of this law, and nearly 90 percent say it will be important to them in determining how they will vote this year. Another point in terms of why we want to start over again is everybody knows what the consequences are when you make a bad decision about people's health care in a way that I think most Americans would not have anticipated in 2009 and 2010. When you fundamentally get involved in issues that impact people and their families, such as health care, and do things that fundamentally impact the way their money is going to be spent, and that decision is made by the Federal Government instead of by that family whose only decision might be to pay a penalty or not have insurance at all or pay a whole lot more than they were paying, the government has involved itself in an area where the government should have looked for better choices, more options, more ways to seek coverage, and better ways to be sure you can have coverage if you had a preexisting condition. All of those, by the way, were proposed. These are not ideas that weren't out there a few years ago, but they would be taken much more seriously today if we did what nearly half of the American voters say we should be doing, and let's just see what would happen if we start all over. Several States have announced that their Web sites will not work. This includes Oregon and Massachusetts. There is a report that four of the failed State exchanges cost $474 million of taxpayer money, spent in Nevada, Massachusetts, Maryland, Oregon--just those four--for systems that then wouldn't work. Many of these systems around the country that now are being abandoned were put in place partially, if not totally, with grants from the Federal Government. If a State gets a grant from the Federal Government to do something and then it doesn't do it, every other grantee has to give the money back. A State can't say it is going to take millions of dollars from Federal taxpayers to put together an exchange and then announce it didn't work out very well and then have no obligation to give that money back. There was a time when there appeared to be great concern in Washington that States weren't putting an exchange in place. Now we find out that States with this particular plan, ill-conceived as it was, can't put a system in place apparently that works. The State of Oregon, one of the earliest advocates of adopting this system, my belief is and I have read, wasn't able to sign up one single person from October 1 until they abandoned their Web site just a few days ago--not one person. Subsidies appear to be incorrect. The Washington Post reported last weekend that 1 million Americans who have enrolled in the plan may be getting incorrect health care subsidies because the Web site was defective and didn't appropriately calculate what the subsidy would be. If people get too much of a subsidy, they have to pay it back. If they get too little of a subsidy, they may decide they are not going to take the health insurance available because they are not getting the assistance they had hoped for. Potentially hundreds of thousands of Americans are, according to that article, receiving bigger subsidies than they deserve and will be required to return the excess next year. Under Federal rules, consumers are notified if there is a problem with their application and asked to send in or upload pay stubs or other proof of their income. Apparently, only a fraction have done what they are supposed to do. Whose fault is that? If the government allocates the subsidy and if a person hasn't complied with the law, is that the person's fault or the government's fault? It is the government's job to comply with the law and to insist that people comply if they are going to be part of a Federal program. It is not a person's absolute obligation to say, I need to send that final piece of paper in, if the government is saying we are going to give you this subsidy. Don't worry about sending this in, we are going to do this anyway. But there will be a reconciliation moment where people find out their subsidy was more than they deserved and suddenly they have to pay it back. The processing centers. KMOV, a television station in St. Louis, recently broke a story regarding the claims of workers at a Wentzville, MO, facility that was one of a handful of facilities the Federal Government financed around the country to handle paper applications. Not only, on one side, did the applications not appear to work coming in on the Web site--the easiest thing one would have thought possible-- the easier thing, I guess, suddenly we find out, would have been to fill out the paper application and send it to one of these locations that was set up. Contract costs of over $1 billion, 600 people working at the Wentzville site, and the allegations from people working there are that there is just nothing to do. They are told to refresh their computers once every 10 minutes--hit the refresh button--so it appears they are doing something, so 600 people don't process more than one or two applications a month and that way everybody has a chance to process one application. My belief is these are the kinds of applications people would have assumed every individual would have easily processed dozens a day. Yet they are told not to process more than one or two a month because there just aren't that many people making applications at these centers. The television station KMOV did a Freedom of Information Act request to CMS on April 8. They are 2 weeks past the 20 days the government is supposed to have to comply. I wonder what would happen if a taxpayer had an EPA penalty and the taxpayer was a couple of weeks late in complying with whatever that penalty is. Last week I joined Senator Alexander, who is the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions, in a letter to the CMS Administrator expressing my concerns and his concerns and requesting answers to a number of questions no later than the end of this month. Hopefully, they will do better complying with us than they did with the Freedom of Information Act and the St. Louis reporter. The full 5-year contract has a balance of up to $1.25 billion. The Wentzville facility reportedly employs about 600 people. We are now hearing from a couple of the other facilities that they have exactly the same problem. They are going to work, they have a library with books stacked on the table so people can read a book during the day so they can wait for what I guess they think eventually will be this onslaught of applications coming in, but so far it hasn't happened. We have passed October 1, November 1, December 1, January 1, February 1, March 1, April 1, May 1, and soon June 1. One would think these would be coming in because we are paying these people to do this. Frankly, people need jobs, so it is hard to fault them for showing up every day until somebody says: The truth is there is no work here for maybe 590 of the 600 employees; maybe we need to eliminate these particular jobs which were supposedly to help implement this system. Facilities in Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma--there are lots of indications that everybody is having the same experience. The American part of this company, Serco, is based in Reston, VA, but this is a British company. They were already in trouble with the British Government, I have read, for not providing the services they guaranteed to provide. It is amazing to me that to do the work to implement this program, we get a Canadian company to design the Web site, which is already in trouble with the Canadian Government for failure to do what they said they would do, but we hired that company anyway. One would think there would be American companies that aren't in trouble with anybody's government that could design the Web site. Then we got a British company that is in trouble with the British Government to operate these centers for the written applications. No wonder taxpayers are wondering, Who is minding the store? Who is managing the government? Who is doing this work that would make common sense anywhere else? I continue to hear from Missouri families every week about the problems they have. We talk to them and we verify these problems. We then try to find a solution, including going through the Affordable Care Act, trying to find assistance so they can afford to pay for a policy that costs more than they ever thought they would pay, but we are not finding those solutions. I have a few letters, one from a retired substitute teacher who is no longer able to work the substitute hours they were able to work because of the unintended consequences of the Affordable Care Act. Thirty hours, the law says, is when employers have to provide full-time benefits. Different companies had different rules in the past. If we go back to the 40-hour workweek, a lot of people would be working 35, 36, and 38 hours. Now they are working 25 and 26 and 28 hours. Another letter is from a student, Stephanie, in Jackson, MO. The schoolteacher was in Kansas City. Stephanie in Jackson is trying to go to school and trying to do everything she can to pay her own way through school, but her hours have been cut at work. She was working in the past more than 30 hours to try to do what kids used to do. What is one of the solutions to not having a lot of debt when you get out of college? Work your way through school. What is one of the things the Affordable Care Act has made it harder to do? Work your way through school. So Stephanie, the student, says she is looking for a second part-time job now that would give her the hours she used to have in her other part-time job because of the consequences of the Affordable Care Act. Just a couple more examples. Rich from Portageville, MO, his rates have increased from $412 a month to $732 a month. Rick says he is 49 years old. His policy covers him and his son who is 22 years old. They are both healthy, but their insurance went up $320 a month. Roy from Oak Ridge, MO, says his deductible has gone from $250 to $650, and if his wife wasn't a veteran and couldn't get her medications through the Veterans' Administration, they would have real health care problems. Just one last example. Rodney from New Franklin, MO, says his rates have jumped. He says: My health insurance for my wife and myself has jumped from $320 per month to over $700 per month, and now there is a $5,000 deductible, despite the fact that we are both in great health. It doesn't include eye or dental coverage. I am self-employed, Rodney says. So it makes a very big difference to him whether he can continue to pay well over two times what he was paying before, with a higher deductible. Problems with implementing the system appear to not be dealt with in the right way, and then what happens when people do get coverage. It turns out for them not to be coverage they can afford. Of course, whether they had a policy they liked, almost nobody has been able to keep the policy they had, particularly if they had it as an individual. I think we are going to see fewer and fewer people having the policies they have had at work. I will go back to the almost 50 percent of Americans who say: Why don't we start over and do this the commonsense way and solve these problems in a way that benefits families and their health care rather than benefiting more government employees and more government regulations? I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I wish to say a few words about National Police Week. I am pleased to be able to cochair with the Presiding Officer and the Senator from Delaware Mr. Coons the Law Enforcement Caucus which we founded when we came to the Senate together. I am proud to be a cosponsor of the National Blue Alert Act that Senator Cardin talked about, and I would like to see that done. I think we can do things to provide more safety and security for local police officers as we have done for the fire grants, all those things that followed 911. As I was listening, I was thinking about how much we benefit every day from the Capitol Police. We walk by them in their positions securing these buildings and standing in the way of harm, and we often forget they are there for that purpose. When others are able to look for a safer place to be, our police officers run to where the danger is. They stand between us and that danger. In the time I have been here, two of our Capitol police officers have been killed in the building on duty, one just a few feet away from where my office would be in the next Congress. They were there for us. I remember on 9/11 leaving the building with every reason to believe this building could be and perhaps was going to be an immediate target to our enemies attacking us that day. I remember walking out of the building as the Capitol Police were insisting we get out of the building and looking over my shoulder and seeing they were all still in the building. So whether it is the police we see daily here, the police who serve us in our communities, or the families who send their loved ones into harm's way every day, this is an important time to recognize that service, but also it should be an important time to think about what we could do about it. The National Blue Alert bill doesn't mandate that States create a system. It simply provides that States could have access to a system which would create an alert system so that when someone has harmed a police officer, we make a maximum and immediate effort to see that person is apprehended and eventually be called to pay the penalty for what they have done. We benefit from these people who again run to where the danger is, who stand between us and that which creates danger for us as citizens. Whether trying to go to the local grocery store, the local shopping center or the school play, there is somebody in that community whose job it is to make it a safer place than it would otherwise be. I am pleased to have had a chance to work with the Presiding Officer on so many issues. During National Police Week, I rise with and on behalf of all of our colleagues to say thank you for those who stand to defend and protect us here. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, today I wish to honor the work of Concerns of Police Survivors, C.O.P.S., for 30 years of service to the surviving families of America's fallen law enforcement officers. In 1984, Suzie Sawyer started C.O.P.S. as a small grief support organization of 110 law enforcement survivors in the basement of her Prince George's County, MD, home. Following the retirement of her husband from the Prince George's County Police Department, C.O.P.S. relocated its national headquarters to Camdenton, MO, in 1993, where it has since grown, unfortunately every year, to serve over 30,000 surviving law enforcement families across the country at annual seminars and retreats. With 50 national chapters and a yearly budget of $3.4 million collected from private donations and awarded grants, C.O.P.S. assists with rebuilding the lives of surviving families and coworkers of law enforcement officers who have died in the line of duty. I thank Suzie Sawyer for her dedication to this great cause and thank C.O.P.S. for 30 years of incredible service to grieving surviving law enforcement families and coworkers.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I thank my good friend from Oklahoma for ensuring that I have the time to talk for a few minutes about an issue he and I feel very strongly about; that is, the best use of American energy and what American energy means to American families. It seems to me the request our side of the aisle is making is not at all unreasonable. It has been 7 years since the Senate had a real debate on energy. The Shaheen-Portman bill creates that opportunity, but suddenly we were told: This bill is so good already. Why do you want to continue to talk about ways to make it even better? There are very few things beyond energy and health care which I can talk about for a substantial period of time--and I hope to talk about health care sometime between now and the end of the week. Energy has the same kind of impact on families that health care has. The majority leader wants to control every debate every week in the Senate, which means nothing happens. That is not the way the Senate works. Traditionally, any Member of the Senate can introduce any amendment they want on any bill at any time. However, that is not the way the House works. I served in the House. The majority runs the House, and the Rules Committee in the House is nine in the majority and four in the minority. It is pretty hard to lose a vote in a 9-to-4 committee. I think that is why the committee was established that way. The Senate has never been run that way. Now we have a one-man rules committee that wants to decide on every bill and every rule which comes up. This gag rule where Senators can't talk about the topics they want to discuss is something that didn't used to happen in the Senate, but it is now a daily and weekly part of the Senate. We are now at the point where we go to the majority leader and ask: On the energy bill, could we have five amendments that deal with energy? That is so far from how the Senate and the Constitution was designed to be or the Senate practice has been. It is pretty hard to believe that Senators on the minority are reduced to the point that we have to go to the majority leader and ask: Mr. Leader, could we have five amendments that deal with energy? When the Energy bill was on the floor of the Senate 7 years ago--the last time the Senate dealt with energy--every Senator could have every amendment they wanted on anything they wanted to talk about because that was the Senate. One of the prices we paid for that 6-year term was we might have to vote on some things we would rather not vote on. Now we have the 6-year term, but the majority leader doesn't want us to vote on things that the majority may not want to vote on, and there are probably people in the minority who don't want to vote either. Not voting is a pretty safe route apparently politically, but it is not the best route for the country. I would like to see a real debate on energy, and one of the issues I would like to see debated is the amendment I offered to this bill to have a point of order to be sure that at least 60 Senators would have to approve a carbon tax. I offered a similar amendment to the budget last year, in 2013, and 52 of my colleagues agreed with me, and we had a majority vote of 53 who said we don't want to have a carbon tax, but if we do have a carbon tax, it needs to be extraordinary because it affects everybody's utility bill. It affects everybody's ability to pay that bill. It affects whether a person has a job with a paycheck that allows them to pay that bill. Fifty-three of my colleagues, including myself, said we don't want to do that. Several people who voted against that amendment in 2013 have had a hard time explaining why they were against it, so I thought maybe we would vote on it again. I think we would have more than 53 votes this time. If we don't vote this time, we are more likely to have a lot more than 53 votes next time because the American people get it. For the vast majority of the country, half of the utilities come from coal. Rules that create a carbon tax--the simple focus of that is coal, and the focus is fossil fuels generally. The Germans are buying resources from us because they are abandoning their nuclear facilities and converting to coal-fired powerplants. We have a lot of coal and, more importantly, we have a lot of coal- powered plants. If we could say, let's not use coal, but our utility facilities work just like they work without having to take millions of dollars for new investments, that would have a different kind of impact on families than saying, let's not only not use coal, let's build a new powerplant everywhere they have a coal powerplant because otherwise the utility bills will double when we build a new powerplant. When we build a new powerplant, the utility bill is going to double. Also, why would we want to have even the access to a policy that would allow people's utility bills to double? Middle-income families, low-income families are the hardest impacted by that, especially in States such as my State, where 80 percent of the utilities come from coal; but, again, a majority of the utilities come from coal in a majority of the landmass of the country. Our rates would rise 19 percent in the first year with a carbon tax or the kinds of rules the regulators are trying to put in place that would have a carbon tax-like impact, and in the decade after that first year they would double. One doesn't have to be very smart to multiply a utility bill by two. If the boss showed someone the utility bill at work, they wouldn't have to be a genius to multiply that by two, and they wouldn't have to be a genius to figure out that if the utility bill doubles, the job that helps them pay their utility bill at home might go away as well. It would cause significant job loss. It would cause households to pay more for all of the energy they have. They already pay a lot for energy. For the 40 million American households that earn less than $30,000 a year, they already spend more than 20 percent of their income on energy. Do we want those families to continue to see that bill go up and every month wonder what they could have less of so they can pay more for the same utilities, and not because it had to be that way but because the government decided it wanted it to be that way? The households that will be the last households to get the new energy- efficient appliances, the last families to get the new windows and the better doors and more insulation in the ceiling, those are the families impacted in a dramatic way. Those are the families who live in houses where they have to think: Which room can we no longer afford to heat or no longer afford to cool in the heating and cooling months of the year, when we will have to close that door and roll up the throw rug and put it at the base of the door so the heat and cooling no longer impacts that room? Do we want families to do that so we can have a carbon tax, so we can have bad energy policies? We can do a better job by making American energy more affordable and more accessible, not making it less so. What is wrong with having that? I heard my friend from Massachusetts say earlier that we are insisting on a controversial amendment on the Keystone Pipeline. So what. What is controversial about it? A majority of us say we are for it. Controversy would mean people must feel strongly the other way, so they can vote against it. Let's let the American people know where we stand on these issues. Are we going to do smart things about more American energy or not? The energy future of the country is so good that in spite of everything the government has done to slow it down, it still has been a major economic driver. I would like to see us vote on the Keystone Pipeline. I would like to see us vote on the carbon tax, whether that is a good idea or not. I would like to see us vote on what kinds of facilities we need to secure our energy position in the world economy. There shouldn't be anything wrong with these amendments. Senators shouldn't be stopped with a gag rule from the majority leader's office of what we can and cannot talk about. The idea that we can't have energy amendments on an energy bill should embarrass every single Senator here and concern everybody we work for. Hopefully, we will be able to move forward with debate on an energy bill that is actually about energy. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I wish to respond to my good friend from Arkansas. Where he lives and where I live we know way more about tornadoes than we would like to know. Our friend from Louisiana knows about tornadoes and hurricanes both. We had a massive tornado in Joplin, MO, not too far away from these tornadoes in the last week, in fact, in Baxter Springs and Quapaw, along with tornados in Arkansas and Mississippi, but that tornado was 3 years ago, I believe next week, and there was massive destruction. But the first responders were your neighbors. Before anybody else can get there, your neighbors are there, thinking of getting that man out of the garage with his three little girls and your neighbors beginning to help you collect those few things that are left--that may just be stuff, but it is your stuff. It is pictures and things that can't be replaced, but what can't be replaced are the lives which are saved, and what can't be replaced are the lives which are lost--and people will live with that strategy. No matter how resilient, that is a tragedy that lasts forever. For all those families affected this week, the ones Mr. Pryor has talked to and others have talked to--in the hometown of two of our colleagues from Mississippi, Tupelo hit by a tornado--these are tragic moments when communities and families and neighbors come together. That and faith, as Senator Pryor said, are what help people get through this. Caring for America's Heroes Act Madam President, this is National Mental Health Awareness Month. It just started today. Senator Stabenow and I have introduced some legislation this week, Caring for America's Heroes Act, that would look at what we are doing in the military. We are looking carefully at the military as it relates to what we are doing to help our veterans and to help those who serve. I was at Fort Leonard Wood, in Waynessville, MO, just a few days ago, talking to the hospital personnel there about mental health issues as they relate to the many new inductees who come there and as to the full-time force and the retirees who come there. The act Senator Stabenow and I are introducing this week would treat mental health conditions like other health conditions for spouses, dependents, and for retirees who now have a limit on what can be done and how many hospital days they can stay for mental health that is not the same limit for anything else. There is no justifiable reason for it not to be the same limit. I think we are going to have good support from the Defense Department as we work to try to get this done, to just simply ensure that military dependents and retirees who were covered under TRICARE, for instance, are treated in the same manner for inpatient mental health services as they would be for any other injury or any other kind of health issue. Bringing those to par with others is important. The National Institutes of Health estimates that one out of four adults in American has a behavioral health problem and if diagnosed can almost always be treated. I asked the Surgeon General of the Army at a hearing just a few days ago if that one out of four would relate to the military as well. Her view was as follows: Yes, we recruit from the general population. We don't have any reason to believe those numbers aren't reflected in our population as well. So as we move forward, we need to be sure, in Mental Health Awareness Month--and in a month where, as in every month, we should be always mindful of our veterans and retirees--that we are pursuing those solutions for them as we are for the country generally. Hopefully, we will be able to work with the Defense Department and get this one gap closed in the very near future. Health Care I wish to speak about where we are on health care. I know there was an attempt in recent days to take a victory lap, and maybe again today, over the number of people to sign up. I will say one more time, I don't think that is the way you can measure this. I said when the Web site wouldn't work, we can't measure this by whether the Web site works because surely the Web site will eventually work. Frankly, we shouldn't measure this by how many people sign up because the people who sign up don't have any other option. Their option is to not sign up at all or to sign up. That is not much of a choice for most people. I am going to talk in a minute about a couple people who decided they don't have a reasonable choice, so they are not signing up for anything. We need to be sure this government does what is necessary to create access to what has been the best health care system in the world. We all want people to have access to that system. The question truly is, Are we doing that the right way? Polling clearly shows that people don't think we are doing that the right way. The President's numbers reflect that. The Kaiser Family Foundation poll shows that just 38 percent of people think the law is working as intended; 57 percent say it is not working the way the White House had hoped. I would think 100 percent would think it is not working the way the White House had hoped. Surely, the rollout, the signup--we can talk all we want about how many people sign up. There is a debate going on right now over in the House of Representatives this week about they signed up, but did they pay. According to the House Commerce Committee, insurers tell them that only two-thirds of the people who have signed up have paid. If they don't pay, they are not signed up and they don't have coverage. I don't think any insurance works that way. That same committee's report said only 25 percent of paid enrollees are within the crucial age range, which is 18 to 34. For this to work, we have to have people who are young and healthy sign up as well. Why isn't that happening? The original estimate was we need 40 percent. We appear to have 25 percent. What do we need to do? Why is it the fact that insurance costs more relative to everybody else insured for young people than it ever has before by the law? That would maybe explain why young people aren't signing up. Prior to January 1 of this year, if someone were young and healthy, they might pay 20 percent of what the person at the other end of the spectrum was paying. Now they have to pay at least 33 percent. Maybe that is why those people aren't signing up. Of course, the workforce impact of people who have part-time jobs because full-time jobs are covered, jobs of more than 30 hours--the House recently passed the Save America Workers Act to help increase these wages by saying: No, it is not a 30-hour standard. It should be a 40-hour standard. I am a cosponsor of the Senate bill that would do that same thing Senator Collins has been advocating for months now. The unintended consequences in the workplace are not fair to American families. They are not fair to American workers. We could do something about one of those unintended consequences by just saying: Wait a minute. The 40-hour workweek that we have always said was full-time work should still be the 40-hour workweek, not the new 30-hour workweek. The emergency contractor hired to repair the Web site said it is going to cost $121 million to repair the Web site, which is a whole lot more than the $94 million already spent to create the Web site. I wonder what would have happened if we had taken that many millions of dollars and bought insurance for the people we were trying to move from uninsured to insured. I will give about three more examples. My time is limited on the floor today, and I have this down to a handful of examples of people we have heard from in the last few days about families who are dramatically impacted. Surely, there is a good story out there to tell, but there are lots of stories, and no matter what anybody says, these stories over and over turn out to be tragedies for families. Randy and his wife from Mexico, MO, had a plan they liked, but they received a cancellation notice in October of last year. He went on to the exchange but found on the exchange he would have to pay over $600 a month more in premiums and face deductibles that were $3,500 higher than they had been in the past--so a $600 increase in premiums and $3,500 higher deductibles. The cheapest plan available to Randy and his wife would have them paying $14,000 in premiums a year and they would have an $11,000 deductible before the insurance would pay anything--$25,000. Randy and his wife decided: That is not insurance at all, so we are not going to have insurance. They found the best thing he could find, found what was available, and decided it clearly wouldn't work. And that wouldn't work for any us either. If it was going to cost $25,000 annually before a single thing was covered, we wouldn't think that was insurance, and that was the best thing Randy from Mexico, MO, could find. Neal lost his job 2 years ago and decided to go back--Neal is from Raymore, MO. He decided to go back to school full time. He has nerve damage in his back and takes several medications. His doctor prescribed 120 pills a month, but his insurance plan will only pay for 100 pills a month. Neal said not only does he have pain he didn't have before, but he says: There is nothing I can do about it. He says: Nobody wants to help. The doctor says I need 120 pills a month. The insurance says they are not going to let me have more than 100. I think he wishes this was between him and his doctor instead of between him and his insurance company. Myron from Hannibal, MO, and his family have annual premiums that went from $2,200 to $6,500--a $4,300 increase. He found his doctor is no longer in the network. He doesn't want to have a new doctor. He liked his old insurance, but it was canceled, and he can't get to the doctors he used to use with his new insurance. Campus problems: A young healthy son on campus. His insurance was $550 a semester last semester. This year it is $770 a semester so he can have the same insurance that in all likelihood he will not use because he is, after all, young and healthy, but the 40-percent increase is an increase the law almost requires. The law went from five different categories of people to be insured to three, and the top one can't pay more than three times what the bottom pays. One final story. Dennis is from Dexter, MO, near Missouri's bootheel. He is an insurance broker. He says he has lots of stories he could tell, but the one that came to mind that he told us about this week was people who had a nationwide network of doctors in a plan he used to sell now are transitioned to a network that is much smaller and it only works in the State you reside in. Missouri has many States that touch it. As many as eight States touch our State, so almost everybody in our State lives on or near a border. If you live on or near the border in the exchange, you cannot go to the doctor or hospital, in all likelihood, that may be 10 miles from where you are because it is not in your State. When I was first told that, I simply didn't believe it, and the more we checked into it the more we found out that is what people were finding over and over. The policies they could get did not allow them to go a reasonable distance if they had to cross a border. So we have work to do. I hope we can do it. I think there are ways we can work together, but the real thing we have to solve is better health care for families and affordable health care and health insurance for families. It is not happening right now. I hope we move to a better place. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. I thank the Senator from South Carolina for pointing out that bad Economic Policies have the most impact on the most vulnerable among us, including the number he gave of the percentage of income of families who have less than $30,000 of income a year, how much of that already goes to energy. The administration says they are for an all-of-the-above energy policy. That appears to be an all-of-the-above energy policy unless we know it works and unless we know it is available and unless we know we could get it, in this case, from a friendly source. Somehow, they are not for that. They are for ``all of the above'' until we really look at what is there and what we know works and what makes our current energy needs met in the best way. The pipeline is an example of a solution that would decrease our country's dependence on nations we can't rely on quite as heavily. It increases our trading relationship with our very best trading partner. That oil is going to be sold to somebody and a pipeline will be built. The question is, Is the pipeline built to connect to the most logical customer and the best trading partner and come south or does the pipeline go to the west and the oil goes to Asia? This is not about whether the oil comes out of the ground. It is not about whether a pipeline gets built. It is about whether we do that which makes the most sense. On April 18, the State Department, by the direction of the President, once again, said we are going to wait a little while longer. How many deadlines do we have to blow by? I think it is interesting that in the last couple of months when people have left the administration--when the Secretary of the Interior leaves and is asked about the pipeline, he says, Oh, of course we should build the pipeline. When the Secretary of Energy leaves and is asked about the pipeline, he says, Oh, of course we should build the pipeline. Everybody knows that the logical, commonsense thing to do is to build this pipeline and let us benefit from this energy. It has become an example of a commonsense decision versus regulators out of control--regulators who don't want us to use the resources we have or the resources that are right next to us. The national security implications of Canadian oil are pretty great and pretty obvious for everybody to figure out. The economic security implications of doing business with somebody who does business with us--every time we send the Canadians a dollar, for decades, they have sent us back at least 90 cents. Every time we involve ourselves in that trade and strengthen their economy, they turn right back around and strengthen our economy. Why wouldn't we want to do that? Just the cost alone of building the pipeline, talk about a shovel- ready project: 20,000 jobs, not a single taxpayer dollar involved. In fact, the company immediately starts paying taxes to State and local government as that pipeline is extended through communities and almost all of our States. Another 830,000 barrels of oil a day. Roughly 6 percent of all of our daily imports come from this one new source. But, as others have pointed out, that pipeline then becomes available for other objectives as well. A bipartisan determination on this floor has shown that we should obviously build this pipeline. We constantly talk about private sector job creation. Believe me, it is not just building and producing more American energy that are the jobs created, it is the jobs created when we have a utility bill we can rely on and a delivery system we can count on. People will make things in the United States again. The right kind of American energy policy becomes immediately the right kind of American manufacturing policy. The pipeline has almost become the tip of the iceberg that everybody has their eye on, but it is an example of the problem that we refuse to do things that will make our economy stronger, make our families stronger, and create jobs in America that have better take-home pay than the jobs that people have seen in the last 5 years. The take-home pay for American families has gone down and down and down in every one of those years when we look at the surveys. This is a fight worth having. Again, nobody has been more dedicated to that effort than the Senator from North Dakota who understands what a difference energy can make in the State. He saw that happen as Governor. We have seen that happen in the State he lives in. The right kind of American energy policy can provide so many of those exact same benefits for the United States of America. This is one of the easy examples to talk about, out of a volume of examples of the administration clearly headed on a path that makes no sense when we really look at the national security impact, the economic impact, or, most importantly, the impact on American families. I again thank the Senator for leading this fight.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I thank my friend for leading this colloquy. I think the Senator from South Carolina, Mr. Scott, is going to speak for a few minutes before I do, and then I will be glad to enter into this discussion. It is an important topic. Nobody has been a greater leader on this than my friend from North Dakota, and I thank him for organizing this colloquy, as many of us wish to come to the floor today to speak on this critical issue.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I wish to speak a little bit about the letters I have received and the emails and the calls over the last few days about the health care plan. The numbers signed up or whether the Web site worked--and I have said repeatedly--aren't the test here. The test is, is this a better plan? Does it allow more people to have better coverage or does it allow more people to have lesser coverage? I am becoming more and more convinced that the latter might be the case: the high deductibles, the increase in premiums, the benefit of a couple of years, actually, where the trajectory of health care costs were still going up but were beginning to flatten out, and now they are projected to go up pretty dramatically over the next few years based on the recent projections. So the real test is, is this plan a better plan, not does the Web site work. The fact that the Web site doesn't work sort of shows the ineptitude of government. The easiest thing in the world to do today-- or should have been in 4 years--would be to figure out how to develop a Web site. So I would say the Web site shouldn't be the test of whether the health care plan works because the Web site will work. Apparently a number of States are having a problem, the Federal Government had a very obvious problem, but the Web site will eventually work. Surely that can't be a long-term problem. Given no other alternatives, people are going to eventually sign up in some numbers. I am not interested even in finding out whether the numbers are real. I did notice that the President, as with most of the people I work for, in his announcing the numbers the other day, referred to the plan as ObamaCare again. I noticed he quit doing that since the election. He said he kind of liked ``ObamaCare''--in one of the Presidential debates in 2012 he said he liked the term--and then he pretty well quit using it. But with the signup numbers, he said some people call it ObamaCare, in his announcement the other day. So I guess if he can call it that, the people I work for can call it that as well. So we have premiums rising, deductibles going up, and hospitals seeing, in many cases, their fastest growing column of unpaid debt is people with insurance. Not too long ago, we said: That doesn't make any sense. How did people with insurance wind up in the fastest growing column of unpaid debt? It is because people's deductibles are, for many families now, well beyond a deductible they can pay. If a person had a $500 deductible a few years ago and they have a $3,000 deductible today--if they had a hospital bill, they might be able to put $500 together and think that gets this bill paid. Nobody is going to call me anymore. I am not going to get this repeated notice. But if a person has a $3,000 deductible, they might decide: I can never pay that, so I am going to let them do whatever they are going to have to do, and hopefully my insurance company pays enough of the bill that the hospital decides they are not going to bother me. But that is the fastest growing debt in many hospital accounting offices right now-- people who have insurance, who aren't paying their part of the bill. But whether it is increases in premiums or increases in deductibles or they can't see their doctor, the people I work for in Missouri tell me every week a series of stories that I absolutely believe are true. I basically verify with people before I come to the floor, before pulling a few of these stories out: Do you mind, Timothy from Kirksville, if I mention that you have contacted us? I am not going to give your last name or put that on the record, but I would like to show that there is some dispersing around our State of this problem. They say, yes, this is absolutely true, and I told you because I want people to know about this. Timothy from Kirksville, MO, said his premiums went up drastically in 2013. If premiums continue to rise, he says his family will have to make sacrifices elsewhere in their budget. Kim from Frankford, MO, said she and her husband's deductible recently increased dramatically to $6,000. So far, she says, it feels like we don't have insurance because we have such a high deductible. We couldn't pay it if we ever had to use it, so do you really have insurance? Kim's parents recently tried to find a plan on the exchange and were shocked to learn that the cheapest plan they could find offered premiums of $1,200 a month with a $12,000 deductible. Yearly premiums were equal to 20 percent of their income. Mike from Columbia, MO, said his health insurance premiums shot up by $1,000 this year--and $1,000 matters to families. Based on the letters I get, there would be some temptation to contact Mike and say, if you want to look at a whole stack of letters here, $1,000 is not the worst story people have to tell, but for a working family it is almost $100 a month. It is whatever you were going to do with that $100 a month that you are not able to do because your insurance just went up $100 a month. Mike doesn't say anything about his deductible or what his premiums are, but he just says it is $1,000 more than it was last year. Lisa from Jefferson City, MO, the State capital, said she and her husband own a small business, and even though they don't have to provide health insurance for their employees, they have done so and they have chosen to pay 100 percent of the cost up until now. Actually, until January of this year, no employer had to provide insurance for their employees but most employers did. Eighty-five percent of everybody who had insurance got insurance at work. Ninety percent of them thought what they had at work was great for what they needed to have for themselves and their family. We had a system that was working pretty good, where almost everybody had it. Instead of figuring out how to expand that system so other people could get in, I am afraid we have made it more difficult for everybody involved. Lisa, the business owner, says her premiums went up 35 percent last year, and they have been told already that they will go up even higher next year. She says if the premiums continue to increase, they will soon not be able to cover their employees. Carol from Cameron, MO, said her coverage has gone down and her out- of-pocket costs have increased significantly. Her deductible is now $3,500 and she has to pay $65 every time she goes to see a doctor. She worries she will never be able to use the coverage she is paying for because the out-of-pocket costs are too high, and if she ever actually got sick or had to go to the hospital or had a significant condition, she is worried she can't pay the deductible, even though she is paying every month to have this coverage and feels as though the coverage is not truly insurance for her at all. Merl and his wife in Cape Girardeau, MO, are in their late sixties. They have Medicare and a supplemental policy, but their copays have increased. One of their primary doctors has stopped taking Medicare. He and his wife are concerned they can't see the doctor they would like to see, that their copays have increased, and their doctor left the program. By the way, the administration, I guess the day before yesterday, announced we weren't going to have the reductions in Medicare Advantage next year as we had this year. We will still have this year's increase, but we will not have next year's increase. Whoever thought that paying for a new health care program out of Medicare was a good idea anyway? So $500 billion out of Medicare, which has bigger and bigger problems all the time as more and more people enter Medicare--$500 billion out of Medicare to pay for yet another new system. Apparently, even the administration, at least between now and the election, doesn't think that is a good idea because they just suspended one of the pay-fors. They said: We did that once, and that was kind of painful because people could see what was going to happen to their Medicare Advantage, so we don't want to do that between now and election day--although I think in fairness they didn't mention election day in the rule, they just mentioned it wasn't going to happen in this even-numbered year. Mike from Kansas City, MO, says his premiums went from $600 a month to $700 for him and his wife. The deductible went from $5,000 to $7,500--he says all because of the new requirements and what has to be covered. Mark from Columbia, MO, says the doctor he has had for 18 years joined a network of concierge doctors because he is afraid of the President's health care plan limiting his ability to provide quality care to his patients. Unfortunately, now that his doctor is part of a private network, Mark is no longer able to afford him--or to afford to see him, and the doctor does not accept the insurance Mark is covered by. All kinds of unintended consequences appear to be happening when the government decides not only can it begin to involve itself in 17 percent of the economy of the country but in virtually everybody's health care decisionmaking process. This would be a big job for a very efficient government in a very small country. In a federalist system where we have 50 States and territories to deal with, in a big country, this is very hard to do. It is unfortunate that all of the warnings about the unintended consequences about people in the workplace will begin to have part-time jobs instead of full-time jobs or people who had less than 50 employees wouldn't want to go to 51 because they would then be covered by a law they were not initially covered by--all of those warnings have turned out to be at least as bad as those people saying this could happen were saying they could be. John in Overly, MO, went to healthcare.Gov to find a plan. The cheapest quote he could find for his family of four was $750 a month, and in John's case that is almost 30 percent of his income. He has looked at the numbers and has decided it would be more affordable to go uninsured. He said: I am self-employed, married, and have two children, and though I am self-employed, I never had any trouble affording health insurance for me and my family [until now]. Richard is from Stoutsville, MO. His wife's premium last year was $359 a month, with a $5,000 deductible. This year it is $800 a month, and since they are on a fixed income, they have just decided they can no longer afford to pay for her individual insurance because they had to buy it as individuals. I would just say that we need to look at these cases. Surely somebody out there has benefited from the system. There are people who were able to stay on their family policies longer. A piece of legislation I wrote when I was a Member of the House--it was 3\1/4\ pages long--apparently it would have added about as many people as any other single thing did, and it would have added those people whether you had the rest of this health care bill or not, at no cost to any taxpayer anywhere and no disruption of anybody else's insurance coverage. Those are the kinds of things we should have looked at. But we need to look at what it takes now to be sure we have a system that is not measured by whether the Web site works and not measured by an argument about whether people who signed up paid but is measured by whether this really does provide better health care. Health care is critical to families. Somebody told me one time: When everybody in your family is well, you have lots of problems; when somebody in your family is sick, you have one problem. That is how important health care is. We need to be sure this is a system that does not meet some numerical or technical ``check the box'' but really does provide access to what was the greatest health care system in the world. There are ways to encourage more access to that system and more choices, not fewer choices and less access and more people who feel as though they are paying a premium every month but if they ever really get sick, they really will not have insurance. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I wish to honor Dr. Robert H. Spence, who is retiring as president of Evangel University after 40 years of dedicated service in that role--making him the longest tenured college president in the State of Missouri and one of the longest tenured college presidents in the United States. Under his vision and leadership over the last 40 years, Evangel has been transformed from what was once a World War II-era Army hospital campus--complete with metal huts--into a modern institution with a dozen new facilities. Today, Evangel boasts an impressive campus with two residence halls, a 2,200 seat chapel, a state-of-the-art fitness center, dining hall, student union, fine arts center, two major classroom buildings and a 66,000-square-foot administration building. The expansion of facilities reflects the fact that Evangel's enrollment has doubled, and the school has added nine masters programs. With Dr. Spence at the helm, Evangel University has flourished. Evangel is located in my hometown of Springfield, MO, so I have personally witnessed the growth and development of the university and can attest to Dr. Spence's dynamic leadership and commitment. He is active in the community, serving on numerous boards and institutions, dedicating his time and energy to Springfield's citizens on- and off- campus. In recognition of his community work, the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce, where Dr. Spence once served as chairman of the board, honored him for a ``Career of Character,'' naming him Springfieldian of the Year in 2004. In 2012 he received the Springfield Business Journal's Lifetime Achievement in Business Award. These recognitions are well deserved. I join many other community leaders in Springfield in thanking Dr. Spence for his lifetime of work as an inspirational minister, messenger, and educator. As a former university president, I applaud him for his commitment to Evangel University over the last four decades. I have always relied on Dr. Spence's sound counsel and judgment and wish him and his wife Ann a long and enjoyable retirement. They have certainly earned this time to relax.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, it is a pleasure to honor CW5 John Alan Fisher as he retires from a 30-year career with the Missouri Army National Guard. Chief Fisher has had an extraordinary career with the Guard and has made incredible contributions little-known outside his field. I am glad to be able to recognize him for his accomplishments today. Chief Fisher began his career as a young Marine, earning the Vietnam Service Medal, the Navy Unit Commendation Medal and the Humanitarian Service Medal over the course of his 8 years of service. In 1980, after fulfilling his commitment to the Marines, Chief Fisher enlisted in the Army National Guard. In the three decades since, he and his team of professionals have helped supply and maintain mission-ready aircraft without a single aircraft accident or incident reported. Chief Fisher's career has been in aviation maintenance, leading efforts to identify problems with the helicopter fleet that is serviced in my hometown of Springfield, MO. Early in his career, Chief Fisher recognized problems with wiring that compromised the Guard's ability to maintain combat-readiness in its helicopter fleet. While others thought the modules for the fleet were wearing out, it was Chief Fisher who recognized that the problem was in fact a failure of the wiring. Since that time, he and his team have developed the first protocol to rewire literally miles of wiring in helicopters. His efforts ensure the reliability of the fleet for 14 States. Under Chief Fisher's leadership, these programs have grown into a world-class operation at the Missouri Theater Aviation Sustainment Maintenance Group, MO-TASMG, in Springfield. Today, Springfield remains the only National Guard site in the Nation that specializes in rewiring air frames for America's military helicopters. Officer Fisher has been an incredible asset to this mission, as has the team of highly-skilled professionals he helped train. The crew at MO-TASMG are able to build and repair some of the most complex parts of virtually any aircraft in the Army inventory. Many of these components have been integral to the success of missions in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. In fact, in 2004 you could open nearly any avionics compartment in an aircraft in theater to find a repaired component label identifying Chief Fisher's team as the source of its repair. With multiple deployments to both Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, these accomplishments only scratch the surface of Chief Fisher's many contributions throughout his nearly four decades of service. I am also pleased to note that Chief Fisher's legacy extends beyond his own service, as his son Shane Fisher also serves in the Missouri National Guard. I am thankful to both of them for their service. Congratulations again to Chief Fisher on his well-deserved retirement. He has certainly earned this time to relax with his family.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, let me talk about why I think we should have this and other amendments on this bill. My friend from Colorado just talked about an amendment that he said he supported last week. Of course, none of us got to support it on the Ukrainian bill because it wasn't allowed to come up, just like on this issue of talking about unemployment extension or the other things that our friends on the other side have announced in a pretty aggressive way that they intend to bring up because they just hope to have a political issue rather than a process that will actually work. I believe we should have these energy amendments such as the one I am proposing on this bill because getting people back to work and being concerned about people's take-home pay, being concerned about what people get to keep of what they earn is an important part of this whole process. So the amendment my friend objected to would be an amendment that would make it very difficult--it would establish another hurdle before anyone could have a carbon tax. This amendment is similar to the one I offered during the budget debate this year, and 53 of my colleagues supported it, so a majority of the Members of the Senate are for this but just not the majority it would take in the Senate to get it done. A carbon tax would force families to pay more at the pump. What is a carbon tax? It is a tax on fuels that have some carbon component, and that means fuels such as gasoline, coal-based electricity, and other fossil fuels. For this component, you would have to pay more at the gas pump, you would have to pay more for your heating, more for your cooling, more for virtually every product we make in America. The energy bill, the utility bill is a big component of what we make in the country today, and it could be one of our huge advantages in manufacturing and job creation, but we are headed in a direction with our view of energy that is not the most focused on more American energy and that doesn't take advantage of the moment we could be in. Areas where I live in Missouri, people in the South and Midwest-- frankly, from about the middle of Pennsylvania to the western edge of Wyoming--are heavily dependent on coal for electricity. About 50 percent of all the electricity in that vast majority of the land mass of America is from coal. Eighty-two percent of the electricity produced in Missouri is from coal. There are at least five States that have a higher dependency on coal than we do. If we had a cap-and-trade bill, the estimates are that our bill would have gone up about 40 percent since 2013. A carbon tax is disproportionately impactful on people who are struggling to get by. If you want to really do things that impact the vulnerable in our society, make the utility bill higher. If you want to really do things that impact the vulnerable in our society who are looking for work, make it harder to put those jobs in the United States of America. About 40 million U.S. households that currently earn less than $30,000 per year spend almost 20 percent of their income already on energy. Why would we want that percentage to be higher. What you make is not nearly as important as what you are able to use to advance your family. If the utility bill is 30 percent of what you make or 40 percent of what you make instead of 20 percent, obviously the other things you would have done with that money could not have been, done. These are the households that can least afford to have the new energy-efficient refrigerators. These are the last households to get the better windows, the last houses to get more insulation in the ceiling and the walls, the first houses where people have to think about, What room do we shut off this winter because we cannot use all the rooms in the house in the way we would like to? It would be nice to be able to fill up your tank rather than stand at the gas pump and wonder, Can I possibly afford to put more gas in than that pump has already shown on prices that are already too high. There are lots of amendments on this bill about energy, none of which, I am told, will be allowed, and I think that is a tragedy. A 2013 study by the National Association of Manufacturers found that the overall effect of a carbon tax on American jobs would be staggering, with a loss of worker income equivalent to about $13 million and 1.5 million jobs. Why would we want to take that out of our economy when we can not only keep it there, but by enhancing more American energy, we could expand it? The utility bill is an increasingly important part of job creation. Energy-sensitive industries such as chemicals, auto manufacturing, iron and steel manufacturing, cement, mining, and refining sectors are the hardest hit by a carbon tax, and these sectors would see a big drop in their manufacturing output. So if we had the kind of debate we ought to have, it would be a debate about how we get people back to work rather than how we continue to extend benefits in a policy that was never intended to have never- ending benefits. This system doesn't work. It doesn't work for people who pay into the system or draw out of the system if we abuse it. I think we all know this is not the debate we should be having this week, and I would like to see us have a debate on how we could improve the economy while we deal with this so-called immediate need that we are talking about on the floor instead of the things we ought to be talking about. I wish to talk for a few minutes about the announcements yesterday about how many people have signed up for the President's health care plan. As I said when the Web site wouldn't work, it is not about whether the Web site works. Frankly, it is not even about how many people sign up. This is about whether this is the right direction for us to go as a country. Is this health care more affordable, and will more people be insured, and will the people who are insured be insured with policies they can afford and coverage they want? The President, of course, and everybody understands the Web site had its problems. I think we would be really remiss if we decided--if making the Web site work was the test of the program or, frankly, making people sign up was the test of the program. This debate is not over. It shouldn't be over. We need to continue to look for ways to try to make this work better because I certainly continue to hear from Missourians who tell me that the course they are on is hurting their families, hurting their job opportunities. The law of unintended consequences appears to be the law here that is most likely to be applied, the unintended consequences of people who are going to work part time, the unintended consequences of people who are looking at a job that used to be a full-time job but now the government said: You don't have to provide benefits unless somebody works 30 hours a week. I guess what the government really said was that you have to provide benefits when they do work 30 hours a week. But people immediately look at that and the society adjusts to that government determination. So suddenly people are working 28 and 29 and 20 hours without benefits where they might have been working those same hours before with some level of benefits or might have--more importantly for their families--been working full time before. We are going to continue to talk about this law and how it serves people. Let me give a couple of quick examples as I conclude this morning. I had a person in the office this morning who was here for another purpose. He is a radiologist from Cape Girardeau, MO, and he said he received notice that his insurance was going to go up $500 a month for the same coverage until the President made the decision to suspend the law, which is a totally different debate topic, whether the President can do that. But when the President suspended the application of this law, which everybody is supposed to be so excited about, they were able to keep the policy they had for another year, and it was $500 a month less--$6,000 a year less for that family. Here is some information I got today from Sherry in Shelbyville, MO, who said that her 18-year-old son has had cerebral palsy his whole life. They had a medicine that works that allows him to deal with this. Last year a 3-month supply of this particular medicine went from $125 to $1,086--almost a $1,000 increase. But that may or may not be impacted by what is happening with overall health care policies. What was impacted this year was her family's deductible. Their deductible went from $500 to $5,000. They were paying $500 on a 3-month supply of medicine. A 1-year supply of that medicine cost a little over $4,000. They were paying $500 of that, and now they are paying all of that. Her view--which would be the view of most working families--is: We had insurance we could afford, we had insurance that met our needs, and now we are paying $3,500 more than we were paying. For almost any family, $300 a month makes a big difference. It particularly makes a difference for families who are struggling and already dealing with a health problem. Pete from Jackson, MO, receives health care benefits through his employer, but his wife and two children had health insurance through an independent carrier. His wife and children's plan will be dropped November 30 of this year. Their new plan will cost $1,200 per month instead of $530 for similar coverage they have right now. By the way, these are just a few of the letters from the top of the list. If I had more time, I could certainly read more letters. I have a letter from Greg who is from St. Joseph. His out-of-pocket expenses went from $2,500 per year to $10,000 per year. He is paying that by going into his 401(k) retirement plan. If anybody thinks Greg and his family are better off from this new change in the law by paying $10,000 out of pocket instead of the $2,500 out of pocket--and he is having to dip into his retirement plan to help pay for his health insurance--I would like to hear from them. There are people who had insurance before this new law, and although they have insurance now through the exchange, they just happen to be paying in many cases a lot more and have a deductible that is a lot higher. I think that would be a great debate for us to have on the floor now that we know, as a country, what is at stake. What do we do to be sure the best health care system in the world works better for everybody? How do we make changes so that those who are outside of the system have a better chance to be a part of that system rather than penalizing everybody who had insurance they thought was working for them? I yield the floor to my friend from Rhode Island.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I am pleased to be here with my colleagues talking about ways we can get people back to work, regulations that don't make sense, and energy policies that clearly every economist we talk to understands are a key to the future. I know the Republican leader has joined us on the floor, and I think I will ask him if he has some comments he would like to make, and then we can come back to me at the end of his comments.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, Senator Thune, my friend from South Dakota, and I have worked for a long time on the kinds of economic and troublesome regulations he talked about earlier. Nobody appears to be answerable to the people--those who come forward with these regulations. I think he has an amendment on that, and I would afford him the chance to talk about that amendment.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, let's talk about this topic a little longer--regulation. Again, in my view--and my friend from South Dakota and I have shared this view for a long time--when the Congress passes laws--and I think it is appropriate that we are not always in the best place to come up with the regulations that put those laws in place--I believe the country has clearly come to a place where nobody is then answerable for regulations that have a significant impact on our economy. The Senator from Kentucky Mr. Paul and I have cosponsored the REINS Act, which addresses these laws that meet this kind of threshold, and it is a bill that was before the Congress, but we can't get that bill to the floor. Senator Thune and I have worked for a long time on this kind of proposal that would simply create opportunity. The emergency nature of the opportunity is really a 5-year emergency now where we have seen job opportunity after job opportunity go away. Part of that is surely because of what were the unintended but clear consequences of the Affordable Care Act, and part of it is rules and regulations that don't make sense to people who are about to take enough of a chance with their creation of opportunity for themselves and somebody else without having any idea that someone answerable to them is eventually going to have to answer for what the Federal Government does. And that is what bringing these regulations to the floor would do. Nobody is saying Congress should be responsible for implementing every law and the goal of law, but we should be responsible for the impact of that law and should have the final say on rules and regulations that we have essentially started in motion. They should come back here. If we don't do this on this bill today, we should do this. We should have done this years ago. Many of us in this body, in the Congress, have believed for a long time that this is one of the major impediments to job creation. Another impediment is bad energy policy. That is why there are so many energy amendments. The amendment I offered where the Congress couldn't have a carbon tax unless it passed a threshold of 60 votes was offered in the budget debate last year, and 53 of my colleagues-- Democrats and Republicans here on the floor--agreed that, yes, we should have a special threshold. When we talk about a tax that makes gas at the gasoline pump more expensive; that makes diesel fuel that delivers products more expensive; that raises the utility bill of everybody who has some element of fossil fuel in their utilities, and that is virtually everybody; that makes it less likely that people will create manufacturing jobs and those kinds of opportunities here, of course we ought to be talking about those kinds of policies, whether or not it is the carbon tax. In Ohio, in Missouri, in Wyoming, in the vast middle of the country, our energy comes from fossil fuels. Those are the resources we have. Our focus should be on using those more effectively, not figuring out ways we shouldn't use them at all or figuring out ways to double the utility bill. That is the EPA's own estimate of their own rule, that the utility bill, they say, will go up 80 percent if the rule is in place. I think that is probably a little optimistic on their part. Eighty percent is almost doubling your current utility bill. Think about where you work or your daughter-in-law works or your son-in-law works or somebody in your family works, doubling the utility bill there and wondering if there will still be a utility there or if that company will decide to go somewhere else. The incredibly capable and competitive American workforce is being held back by utility policies that stop people from making the investments they want to make. The energy cost of manufacturing, according to the National Association of Manufacturers and others, is a key element now in that final decision to decide where you are going to build something, where you are going to make something, and, most importantly for families, where you are going to create a job that has the kind of take-home pay families need. When we talk about the Keystone Pipeline, the ability to maximize our use of natural gas, of fracking for oil, we are talking about the great resources we have, and we should use those resources to our benefit. Every other country in the world, when they look at their tableaux of natural resources, the first two words that come to mind in every other country in the world are ``economic opportunity'' or ``economic advantage.'' What does this allow us to do that we couldn't do otherwise? What advantage does this give us over our competitors? We shouldn't let the first two words that come to mind when we look at our natural resources be ``environmental hazard.'' What is the worst thing that would happen and what would happen if that happened every day? No. 1, the worst thing to happen is something we should think about but not be overwhelmed by. We should see that that doesn't happen, and if it does happen, what are we immediately prepared to do about it so it does not become an ongoing problem? That is the whole formula it takes on the energy side, on the natural resources side to create opportunity. The one thing government policies can do, although they can't create jobs, is they can create an environment where people want to create private sector jobs. That is and continues to be the No. 1 priority domestically this Congress should be focused on--what we do to create more private sector jobs. I think energy is a big part of that. Certainly, my friend from Wyoming Senator Barrasso who has brought us together to talk about this, understands that so well. Energy and regulation policies that make sense are the kinds of policies that help us create the opportunities that hard-working families need and that families who would like to see somebody in their family have that job with great take-home pay are focused on. I yield for my friend Senator Barrasso.

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that it be in order for me to offer my amendment on this bill, No. 2885.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. I thank the Senator for this important question. And I can answer it quickly. Yes. After hearing from countless people in our home States, we know that the time to act is now. We have a model that works and this demonstration project allows States the opportunity to try it in their communities. The dates and timeframes you mentioned for getting this program started should be viewed as absolute deadlines. I would like to see things move even quicker, if possible. We firmly believe--and expect--that the administration will work quickly to get this program off the ground. There are people around the country who will benefit from these services. The sooner we enact these pilot programs, the sooner we can test the effectiveness of this model. As I mentioned, I believe this model will work and am eager to see it put into place not only in eight States, but all 50.

Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately one in four adults suffers from a diagnosable mental health disorder that could be treated if diagnosed and treated properly. The bill the chairman brings to the floor today-- the bill that establishes the so-called doc fix, the repair and reimbursement issue--has an important provision in it that allows us to look at those individuals who have these mental health behavioral illnesses and begin to treat them, in eight pilot States, like any other illness. When Senator Stabenow and I introduced the Excellence in Mental Health Act in February 2013, our goal was to be sure that federally qualified centers, such as behavioral and mental health clinics, which met the proper standards could offer mental health treatment like any other kind of health treatment. This bill, which we will vote on later today, includes a provision which allows the country to have a 2-year pilot in eight States. Those eight States aren't designated in the legislation. The States themselves would step forward and say if they want to be a part of this. Certainly when we introduced this legislation in February 2013-- supported from the very start by Chairman Wyden, who has just become chairman of this critically important Finance Committee--we did it looking at the reality that people's lives have changed and the people they impact have changed. One of the things that moved the Senate toward talking about mental health was some of the violent tragedies we have had in the country in recent years. In fact, after the Sandy Hook tragedy in December--a year ago--the committee that deals with these issues had a hearing on mental health in January 2013. It was the first hearing on mental health since 2007. For whatever reason, these are issues that, as a society, we have not wanted to deal with in a way we could. As I mention these violent tragedies, I want to be sure to say that people who have a behavioral illness are much more likely to be the victim of the crime than the perpetrator of the crime. Even when saying that, we know that the one consistent issue in these tragedies over and over in this country and other countries is that somebody has a behavioral illness that has not been dealt with, somebody has a clear need, and no one has reached out to meet that need. In pursuing the Excellence in Mental Health Act and now pursuing this pilot project for eight States, the law enforcement community has been widely supportive of dealing with these challenges when we can deal with these challenges at locations that people want to go to create maximum accessibility and fully qualified locations. The veterans community--unbelievably responsive. The Iraq and Afghanistan veterans community was in Washington last week dealing with mental health challenges. This was their No. 1 priority. We just had a news conference here in the building and somebody from that group was once again with us, as they have been since February of 2013. The community that supports mental health and looking for mental health solutions has been widely supportive of what we are trying to do. The House passed this legislation. It is legislation we worked on-- House Members, Senate Members, bipartisan. One of the House Members, Dr. Tim Murphy, a psychiatrist who understands these issues, not only was supportive of what we were doing but we became supportive of what he was doing when he was advocating for people who have a behavioral illness--people having mental illness who are involved in a nonviolent crime--that dealing with their illness rather than incarcerating the individual is the better approach that should be available to law enforcement, to judges. That is an important part of what we are doing. The Excellence in Mental Health Act was originally cosponsored by a bipartisan group of 25 Senators. It has been supported by 50 mental health organizations, veterans organizations, law enforcement organizations. It creates a place where people's needs are met. The demonstration project would allow community mental health centers an opportunity to increase the types of services they provide within and to their local communities by providing a similar rate under Medicaid that federally qualified centers receive for primary care services. This is something we have been talking about for a long time. It allows government to begin to treat these behavioral challenges exactly as we treat other challenges--to have a healthy body, a healthy mind, all in one person, all in one spirit, all treatable. This provision in this bill that comes before us today I think is the beginning of a significant change in how we look at helping people change their lives. It is the beginning of a significant change in looking at mental illness as though it is any other illness. I believe we are going to see a good response to this on the floor today as we vote. More importantly, I think we are going to see a number of States that are incredibly interested in being one of these eight pilot States that will allow that to happen. I certainly hope Missouri turns out to be one of those States. Clearly, our State has been a leader in so much, including mental health, first aid. Many of our federally qualified clinics have added behavioral help. Many of our community clinics have added a level of service that this law would anticipate we need to have to meet community needs. I certainly have worked closely with the Missouri Coalition of Community Health Centers. They just celebrated their 35th anniversary and they are very excited about this legislation. Senator Stabenow and I were on the floor the last day of October, the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy signing the Community Mental Health Act. Many of the goals of that act have not been achieved in the way I believe the country 50 years ago had hoped to see them achieved. But this legislation today includes a significant step toward that goal set half a century ago--still unrealized--that allows us to do things as a country we wouldn't otherwise be able to do. Senator Stabenow has been a great partner in this legislative effort, a great advocate for this effort. Our bipartisan friends in the House have as well. I look forward to a successful vote today so we can see this important step move forward. I yield the floor.

Mr. BLUNT. I thank the Senator for her work on behalf of her constituents in Michigan and all people struggling with mental illness. She is a strong advocate and I am very pleased we were able to work together on this important issue. As she mentioned, this demonstration program will allow communities to improve the amount and quality of mental health services available to those suffering from mental illness. As Senator Stabenow and I have constructed this program, it is our strong and clear intent to ensure this demonstration project is driven by the community. Our local community mental centers are the best source for learning what the needs are in communities across our States and the country. It is critical States work not only with these centers, but with groups that advocate on behalf of those struggling with mental illness, and the patients themselves--and their families-- who can explain the difference that access to quality mental health services makes in the lives of people struggling with mental disease. For example, in Missouri, many current community mental health centers have partnered with community health centers in their area. This has worked well for Missouri providers and allows patients an excellent opportunity to receive coordinated care. If these pilot projects prove successful, which I believe they will, it is my hope we would see these programs continue and expand to other States, so other patients can benefit from higher quality services in their communities. I would like to yield back to Senator Stabenow to ask her to talk about the role she envisions States should play in the application process.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I would ask for an additional 5 minutes for the Senator from New Hampshire.

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I wish to speak about the same topic as my good friend from Oklahoma. I was at the Supreme Court listening to the arguments on this case, Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby, and another case involving a Pennsylvania company which I wish to speak about as well. Of course, this case, as the Senator from Oklahoma has pointed out, starts with the Affordable Care Act and what many people and I believe the Supreme Court will decide is a blatant violation in religious freedom in the way that act would be applied. There is nothing in the act that deals with the rule which sets those big fines up or establishes how those fines would be collected--or, in fact, nothing in the act which specifies specific things that have to be in the so-called model plan. That all is up to the administration, all up to the Department of HHS--unless the Court or the Congress does what needs to be done here, which is to say there are certain boundaries you can't cross. The so-called Affordable Health Care Act--which seems to be providing neither better health care nor better affordability--was signed into law 4 years ago this week. In that 4 years we have seen disastrous effects of the health care act. One of those is the workplace effect where more and more people work less and less. Why do they work less and less? Because for the first time ever the government has said businesses and people had an obligation to provide insurance for somebody who worked more than 30 hours. Prior to that law, many people with insurance worked less than 30 hours. It may not have been insurance which the President of the United States would have specified they had, but it was insurance which appeared to be working for them. But once the government says: Here is what you have to do, the government ironically also appears to be saying: Here is what you don't have to do. So we know the workplace effects are bad. We know this is one of the principal reasons given for people working part time without benefits instead of working either full time or part time with benefits. We see the cut in Medicare and the impact it has on seniors. We see the increasing amount of money you have to spend before your insurance kicks in for so many people. We know this law is not working for American families or American individuals. Now we see a case where the law doesn't work for the Constitution. Specifically, the law forces businesses such as Hobby Lobby-- mentioned by the Senator from Oklahoma, Senator Inhofe--to offer health insurance for employees which covers services that violate their religious belief. This is a company which has always prided itself in its ability to offer health care coverage better than its employees might be able to get other places. This is a company which starts its nonseasonal employees at a rate about twice minimum wage, its lowest paid employee. This is not a company which is in any way trying to take advantage of its employees. This is a company which in every indication through the existence of the company is they want to act in a certain way which is comfortable with its faith. The penalties? If you don't do what the government says, the penalties are $36,500 per employee per year. In the case of this company, which has locations all over the country and a significant number of employees, that is more than $450 million a year. If you don't provide insurance at all, one of the points made by the government lawyers today, your option would be you would only pay a $2,000 penalty. So $2,000 a year if you don't offer insurance at all; $36,500 a year per employee if you don't offer exactly the insurance the all-knowing government has decided you need to have. What a foolish position for the Federal Government to be in: Your penalty, if you are this big company but privately held, closely held by a family--this happens to be a big and successful company but not a publicly-traded company. It happens to be a company that chose to incorporate but incorporated within the ability of the family to do so in a closely-held way. If you don't pay--if you don't do what the government says, your penalty would be less than the insurance you are providing by quite a bit--if you don't provide insurance at all. If you don't do exactly what the government says, it is probably the amount of money that puts your company out of business. Hobby Lobby, with more than 500 arts and crafts stores around the country, is being joined in the case today. The cases were joined together by Conestoga Wood Specialties, a company that manufactures kitchen cabinets. Their case was presented at the same time. This company was founded by the Hahns family, a Mennonite family from Pennsylvania. It is a smaller company than Hobby Lobby, but a company that still upholds their own religious beliefs and has a tradition of upholding those religious beliefs in everything they do. These two companies of very different size do not object to all of the things in the list of things the government says you have to offer. In fact, in the area of contraception, they object to only 4 of the things that happen after conception, the things that would create an abortion in their view after conception. They both traditionally offered other kinds of contraception, but this crosses their religious boundary. So for these 4 things only the government would say you have to pay $36,500 per employee per year. There are at least 46 cases filed concerning for-profit companies that have the same kinds of religious objections. More than 10 of those lawsuits are in my State of Missouri. It is not just about one set of religious beliefs, but it is about protecting all Americans' First Amendment rights to pursue their faith-based principles and what they believe. These happen to be a Mennonite family and an evangelical Christian family. The largest Christian group in America, the Catholic Church, has a broader sense of what they think would violate their religious beliefs. But the point here is not what the government is specifically trying to force you to do; it is that the government under the laws that we have passed should not be able to force you to do things that violate your faith principles. There are many faith-based groups that have different views of how you deliver health services. I met with many of those groups over the course of the last 2 years since this rule came out. There are 84 different briefs that have been filed with the Court on behalf of these two cases, suggesting as friends of the Court that here is something you should think about and look at. On those 84 amicus briefs they are at least 3 to 1 in favor of the families that own these companies that want to be able to run their companies based on their faith-based principles. The numbers of people that are concerned about this are large, and they include a very diverse set of coalitions of people who care. One brief from a bipartisan group of 107 Members of Congress said you should uphold the law that Congress passed that protects people's freedom of religion--not to mention the Constitution itself--where freedom of religion is the first freedom mentioned and the first sentence in the First Amendment to the Constitution. It is important in our history of who we are. Twenty-one states have joined this case on behalf of these companies. Doctors' and women's organizations have filed briefs advocating that the Court respect the religious rights of companies. Protestant and Catholic theologians have filed briefs, as have the Rabbinical Council of America, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, Crescent Foods, a halal food company, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities. All have a broad diversity of religious views, but they agree on one thing: This is a principal tenet of who we are. President Jefferson said in a letter he wrote to the New London Methodists in 1809 that of all the rights we hold, we should hold the right of conscience most dear. Once the government can start telling you what to believe and how you apply what you believe, we have given up the most fundamental of all freedoms. Congress has a long tradition of protecting religious liberty. The Congress enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to ensure broad protection of religious liberty. The HHS regulations do not satisfy the high bar set by that act. That is a position that I hope the Court upholds. The mandate is an enormous government overreach, and it violates Americans' constitutional rights. While this mandate severely fines religious individuals, it exempts plenty of other nonreligious institutions. The administration has already exempted 100 million employees from the mandate for commercial or political reasons. People should also not be forced to give up their business to hold on to their faith or to give up their faith to hold on to their business. These family businesses are not publicly traded corporations. I am not a lawyer, but I am told on the best authority there is not one court case that diminishes the rights of these kinds of corporations. In fact, numerous Federal courts have upheld the ability of for-profit corporations to bring racial discrimination cases. So you could have a racial profile as a corporation, but you couldn't have a religious profile as a corporation. This is an untenable position for the government to take. The Supreme Court has heard this case today. I join my colleagues on both sides of the aisle and in both Chambers to urge the Court to preserve the fundamental religious freedoms that Americans have enjoyed, the Constitution demands, that laws passed overwhelmingly by the Congress and signed by the President in 1993 continue to be the standard that is applied to our right of conscience, our right of belief, of what we want to believe, must believe, and do believe. I am pleased to be joined by my colleagues to talk about this very same topic.

Mr. BLUNT

Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, as we talk today about passing new laws, I would like to take a few minutes to talk about enforcing the laws the Congress has already passed. I want to talk today about something that I believe has been pushed to the wayside too many times by the current administration, and that would be the Constitution of the United States. Article II, section 3 of the U.S. Constitution declares that the President-- coming right out of the Constitution--that the President ``shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.'' Simply put, constitutional requirements are just that--they are constitutional requirements. They are not constitutional suggestions. This is not something the Constitution does not clearly define. The branches of government in the Constitution are the judicial, the legislative, and the executive. And the job of the executive is, again, to do what? To ``take care that the laws be faithfully executed.'' Yet time and again President Obama has refused to enforce the law and shown a willingness, frankly, to misuse regulations, in my view, to sidestep the Congress, to sidestep what the law intended to do and, more importantly, to step around the Constitution. Whether it is issuing waivers to States from the work requirements contained in the bipartisan Welfare Reform Act of 1996 or announcing yet another change--and we are now at over two dozen changes and delays--in the President's own health care law, the current administration has sought ways, over and over again, to circumvent the Congress by picking and choosing which laws it wants to enforce--clearly not a power given the President in the Constitution. In fact, there is a reason the legislative branch is article I of the Constitution. Because the Founders clearly saw the legislative branch as the branch that would determine the direction of the country, and the President's job was not to write the law, the President's job was to execute the law, to enforce the law. People all over America are rightly concerned about government overreach. They are rightly concerned about government dysfunction. They are rightly concerned about a Senate that has not brought the appropriations bills to the floor the way they should come to the floor for over 7 years now, so we are not debating our priorities. But it is the overreach, the dysfunction, the lack of compliance with the law and the seeming belief that somehow that is the President's job, to decide which laws we comply with as a country and which ones we do not, which laws the government enforces and which ones it does not enforce. That is not the President's job. I introduced a bill this week to stop this overreach and to force President Obama to uphold the Constitution. The ENFORCE the Law Act, which is cosponsored by more than half of my Republican Senate colleagues, and which passed the House yesterday, permits Congress to authorize a lawsuit against the President if he fails to uphold the constitutional obligation to uphold the law. Whenever we are asked, all of us as Members of the Senate, by people that we work for: How can the President decide he is not going to enforce the law, one of the responses we all have thoughtfully given to the other question of: What are you going to do about it, is at this point there is no standing of individual Members of Congress or even the entire body of the Senate or the body of the House to go to court and say: We have standing in court to have this law enforced. This bill would become law, and a law that would give the Congress that standing. It effectively permits the Congress, either House of the Congress, to authorize a lawsuit against the President if he fails to uphold his constitutional obligation to faithfully execute the law. If the President has a defense, this is a lawsuit. His side can go to court and defend that. But if he does not have a defense, he has sworn, as we have, to uphold the Constitution. This is not a partisan matter. This bill is important because it gives Congress the ability to combat executive disregard for the Congress no matter what party controls the White House or no matter what party controls the Congress. The courts have ruled that individual Members of Congress lack standing to take the administration to court. We are not considered individually so-called ``aggrieved parties.'' That is why Members, whether it was the National Labor Relations Board case where the President thought he could decide whether the Senate was in session, instead of the Senate deciding whether the Senate was in session--I joined many of my colleagues to file an amicus brief. I am not a lawyer, but I am able to do that as a citizen, to file an amicus brief, a friend-of-the-court brief, saying why we thought the President was wrong and why we thought the people who were challenging the rules that this group created, that were put in power in an unconstitutional way-- we could file that but we could not initiate that. We could not go to court and say: We believe the law is not being enforced. The ENFORCE Act removes that procedural barrier, so that a Member of the House, a Member of the Senate, can be empowered to bring a lawsuit in Federal court challenging the administration's refusal to enforce the law, challenging the administration's belief that on their own they can suspend the law, they can postpone the law, they can delay the law. If the law gives the President the ability to do that, it is going to be in the clear black-and-white letters of the law. It is not there now. The ENFORCE Act provides an expedited process so that if this lawsuit is initiated this way, by one or both Houses of the Congress against the administration for not faithfully executing the law, it goes immediately to a three-judge panel in the U.S. district court and then goes directly to the Supreme Court if there is an appeal. This is an a easy way to solve this problem. It is a way that creates standing to define who is constitutionally obligated to do a job that they are not doing. It is time we reestablished the proper limits on the executive branch. The Founders believed in separation of powers. It is the responsibility of the Congress to protect the idea they came up with in a document for the first time that was a governing document, the idea of checks and balances. If you eliminate that idea of checks and balances, you eliminate the miracle of the Constitution. I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join me and others in supporting this effort to stop executive overreach and encourage the President to enforce the law. The Constitution still matters. The Constitution deserves to be defended. This is a way the Members of the Congress of the United States can give themselves the ability to launch that defense. Again, I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this bill that the House passed yesterday. All we have to do to do our part is step forward and pass this legislation. I suggest the absence of a quorum.