Sherrod Brown

Mr. BROWN of Ohio

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Traficant amendment. I commend the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Traficant), with whom I share a county, Trumbull County in eastern Ohio, and thank him for his work on this amendment. I thank the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis) for his good work on this bill and so many other pieces of legislation in our committee. Also Mr. Ford, Mr. Schooler, and the majority staff, and Ellie Dahoney also in my office. This amendment, as the amendments of the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Traficant) typically are on this, on several bills on buy America, makes sense. It will improve the bill. I commend him for his work. I ask for support of the amendment.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the second Thompson amendment. I commend the gentleman from California for bringing attention to the potential of telemedicine and for outlining for us the success already of telemedicine. It is a terrific breakthrough in the last decade or so and in serving underserved remote areas, as the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) said. I think this is a good amendment that will lead to more breakthroughs in telemedicine. I ask support of the House for the Thompson amendment.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the McGovern amendment. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman for his commitment, particularly in light of what Congress looks like it may do on prescription drugs, for his commitment to this issue. I think it is something we need to know more about to see if it is regional, if it is national, how acute the shortage is; and I think this amendment will help us learn to do that and deal with coverage of prescription drugs nationally also. I commend him and ask for support of the amendment.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Johnson amendment. Mr. Chairman, I commend the gentlewoman for her work and also the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lee) and others that have spoken before me. Before I introduced this legislation 2\1/2\ years ago, I visited the Akron Children's Hospital in Akron, Ohio, and saw the outstanding kind of work that medical personnel in that hospital did in pediatric medical advancement. As has been outlined by previous speakers, there is not a very good funding stream for medical education in children's hospitals and especially in freestanding children's hospitals. Ohio is the home, I believe, of more freestanding children's hospitals than any State in the country. With the squeeze of managed care, coupled with the peculiarity of the way that we fund Graduate Medical Education through Medicare, children's hospitals simply cannot produce the pediatric specialists or, for that matter, the pediatric general practitioners that this country needs to produce. This is a very good amendment. This is a very important part of this bill. I commend the sponsor of the bill and ask for support of the Johnson amendment.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. I thank the gentleman from Minnesota for bringing this issue in front of the House. It is extraordinarily important. I think we all need to know more about it. That is something that perhaps our committee can consider. Certainly this Congress should. But specifically now clearly the agency should do that. In section 924 of the bill, it specifically says the information shall be promptly made available to the public, this data developed in such research demonstration projects and evaluations. They will do that. We have a great interest that they do.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Stearns amendment. I believe his amendment will take a major step in saving the lives of people that have heart attacks in public buildings and in other places. I would also use this amendment briefly as an opportunity to talk for just one moment, Mr. Chairman, about cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Last week was National CPR Week. I have a resolution that I have introduced to encourage people around the country to get CPR training. Only 2 percent of Americans are trained in CPR. It would save literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives, both the recommendation that the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Stearns) has and CPR training. I urge my colleagues to think about taking that training and especially to talk about it at home when there are training sessions given by hospitals, by the Heart Association and by other organizations. I commend the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Stearns) for his interest in this issue broadly and specifically and ask for the House support for the Stearns amendment.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the amendment. Mr. Chairman, the amendment underscores how all society benefits from the richness of diversity. I ask for support of the Davis amendment.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Davis amendment. Mr. Chairman, I congratulate him and compliment him on his work on a very important issue. I think that the disparity in health care delivery, especially as it relates to different racial groups, different socioeconomic groups, is one of the most serious problems our health care system faces. It is not something we have done especially well as a Nation or as a society in the past, and I think the Davis amendment is a major step forward in alleviating some of those discrepancies and variations. I thank the gentleman for his good work and ask for support of his amendment.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I agree with the second part of the amendment too and support the en bloc amendment and commend the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee) for her good work on this.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman from Houston and rise in support of the amendment. It makes good sense with the HCPR's work in the past in rural areas that inner cities should be included, and ask for support of the amendment.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Davis amendment and commend the gentleman on his work in promoting equal access for medical researchers and medical training. I think it is certainly an issue whose time has come. I thank the gentleman from Illinois for his work and ask the support of the House for the Davis amendment.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. I rise in support of the Andrews amendment and compliment him on his forward thinking on this issue. Transparency in the health care system is particularly important. I think this will contribute to that, and I ask Members on this side of the aisle and both sides of the aisle to support the Andrews amendment.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Tierney amendment and thank him for his efforts in a major step in dealing with the high price of prescription drugs that the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Allen) has worked on and the gentleman from California (Mr. Waxman) and the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis) and the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) and the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Turner) and many in this institution, the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Berry), and others. Some brief facts that I think that this agency will look at and need to look at about the price of prescription drugs: forty-three percent of the cost of research for new prescription drug products in this country are paid for by the National Institutes of Health; forty-three percent of the research dollars spent are spent by taxpayers through the National Institutes of Health. Drug companies themselves pay only about 50 percent of all their research costs in this country in developing new prescription drugs. In addition, this Congress has bestowed tax cuts on those drug companies for the dollars that they do spend on research and development. In turn, U.S. consumers are given the privilege of paying the highest drug prices in the world, two times, three times, four times the price that prescription drugs cost in countries like Britain and France and Germany and Japan and Israel and other countries that have a different pricing mechanism for their prescription drugs. Some allow something called parallel importing which brings sort of an international competition in the price of prescription drugs. Others allow something called product licensing which allows generics in the marketplace to compete so that prices are not monopoly priced and are not set so high unilaterally by the drug companies. The third point I would add, Mr. Chairman, is that one-half the drugs that are developed, the new prescription drugs developed in this country, are developed for the world market or developed outside the United States. That says when the drug companies threaten this institution, as they have repeatedly, by saying if we do anything to lower drug prices, the bill by the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Allen) or the bill by the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Berry) or my legislation or any other, if we do anything like that, they are going to cut back on research and development dollars. The fact is half the drugs developed around the world are developed in countries where governments have actually acted to lower prescription drug prices. I thank the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis) for his hearing today. We are going to have another hearing next Monday, which will bring forward Members of this body who are supporting and sponsors of other prescription drug legislation. We all know the problem of high price of prescription drugs. I think the Tierney amendment will go a long way towards exploring solutions so we can in our committee move forward in dealing with the high cost of prescription drugs. I ask for support of the Tierney amendment.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pascrell), my friend, on his leadership on this issue and ask the House for support on the Pascrell amendment. Two weeks ago, I sponsored a women's health fair in Brunswick, Ohio, in my district. Among other speakers was Dr. John Schaeffer, a prominent cardiologist from Elyria, Ohio, who talked about many of the things and emphasized many of the statements that the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pascrell) mentioned, among them that the incidence of heart attacks in men is higher, but the mortality rates are higher for women. In other words, men are much more likely to recognize the symptoms of heart disease because we, too often, in this society have said that heart disease is a male disease more and not a female disease. But the fact is it is the largest killer among women. More women die of heart attacks than men. Women need to be aware of the symptoms that are present in heart attacks. As we have instructed men in this society to be aware of the symptoms, we need to do the same with women. I think including the Pascrell amendment in this legislation will be a major step towards that. I ask the House support of the Pascrell amendment.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Thompson amendment. Mr. Chairman, I congratulate my friend from California (Mr. Thompson) for his leadership on issues of child abuse and abuse of the elderly. This amendment will lead to better training of health professionals to deal with those problems of sexual abuse and child abuse and abuse of the elderly, and I ask the House for support of the Thompson amendment.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, we often hear the acronym for cardiopulmonary resuscitation, CPR, and know what it means. But do we know what to do if, say, someone walking next to us goes into sudden cardiac arrest? Sadly, most people would answer no. Cardiac arrest is one of the leading causes of death in the U.S., with a survival rate of only 5 percent. CPR can link an arrest victim with professional emergency care. But its success is dependent on the knowledge of our general population, And only 2 to 3 percent of Americans are trained to perform CPR. I have introduced a resolution supporting National CPR Weekend, an effort by the American Heart Association and Red Cross to train 15,000 people in CPR. Free training sessions will be held this weekend in Medina, Ohio, and Cleveland, Ohio, and nine other cities across the country. Medina General Hospital will train over 300 volunteers in five training sessions throughout the day. We do not have to be a doctor. We do not have to be in top physical condition. We just have to be willing to join in an important cause, saving lives. Please call the local Heart Association for CPR trainings in the area.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, last week the Office of Personnel Management announced that premiums for the Federal Employees Health Plan would increase by 9 percent next year, the third straight year of large increases. On January 1, Medicare managed care plans in this country planned to drop 395,000 senior citizens from their plans. Last year 400,000 were dropped. Most of the remaining plans are curtailing or terminating prescription drug benefits. Those are the numbers. Here are the stories. Last month I received a letter from a 71-year-old widow in Sheffield Lake, Ohio, who had taken a part-time job to help pay for her prescription drugs. Until United Health Care pulled out of her county and left her without a health plan, she had some drug coverage. But just one of her medications, lipitor, absorbed most of her entire benefit. I recently spoke with a woman in Elyria, Ohio, who spends $350 out of her $808 a month Social Security check on prescription drugs. What is the common thread here? The high cost of prescription drugs. Prescription drug spending in the U.S. increased 84 percent in the last 5 years. We have spent $51 billion in 1993. Last year we spent $93 billion. According to the Office of Personnel Management, two factors caused the steep FEHB premium increases. One of those factors is technology. The other is the mushrooming cost of prescription drugs. According to GAO, HCFA, and market analysts, one of the key reasons Medicare HMOs fail to turn a profit and drop so many seniors is they underestimated how much it would cost to cover the cost of prescription drugs. I receive letters every day from seniors who cannot stretch their Social Security check far enough to cover prescribed medications. Some of the increased spending derives from expanding use of prescription medicines. But according to most analyses, two-thirds of the increases are attributable to price inflation. The American public is right to wonder why is Congress not doing something about that. The simple reason is our threats from the drug companies. The drug companies say, if you do not leave drug prices alone, we will not produce any new drugs anymore. I believe it is time that we use market forces, by that I mean good old-fashioned American competition, to challenge that threat. We can introduce more competition in the prescription drug market and still foster medical innovation. We need information from the drug companies to go explore industries' claim that U.S. prices are where they need to be. The bill I introduced today, the Affordable Prescription Drug Act, lays out the groundwork we need to do both. Drawing from intellectual property laws already in place in the United States for other products in which access is an issue, pollution control devices under the Clean Air Act are one example, this legislation would establish product licensing for essential prescription drugs. If a drug price is so outrageously high that it bears no resemblance to pricing norms for other industries, the Federal Government could require drug companies to license their patent to generic drug companies. The generic companies could then sell competing products before the brand name patent expires, paying the patent holder significant royalties for that right. The patent holder would still be amply rewarded for being the first in the market, but Americans would benefit from competitively driven prices when there would be two or three or four sellers in the marketplace. Alternatively, a prescription drug company could in fact lower their prices, which would preclude the Federal Government from finding cause for product licensing. Either way, high drug prices come down. The bill requires drug companies to provide audited detailed information on drug company expenses. This is not some brand new, untried proposal. Product licensing is done in France. It has been done in Canada. It is done in Germany. It is done in Israel. It is done in England. Let me leave my colleagues with this: Through the National Institutes of Health, American taxpayers finance 42 percent of the research and development that generates new drugs, 42 percent. The private foundation and State and local governments and other non-industry sources kick in another 11 percent. That means prescription drug companies account for half the money in research and development of new drugs. The Congress has given drug companies generous tax breaks on the R&D dollars that they do shell out. And yet, we pay the highest prices in the world in this country, sometimes two or three or four times the price for prescription drugs that people pay in any other country in the world. Drug companies, and luck for them, drug companies score a triple- double. Congress gives the drug companies huge tax breaks. Taxpayers pay most of the cost for research and development. And yet, the drug companies charge Americans the highest price in drug world. Go figure. Drug company profits outpace those of every other industry by at least five percentage points. Mr. Speaker, I ask the Congress to pass the Prescription Drug Affordability Act.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, this November, representatives from 135 Nations are meeting in Seattle to decide the all-important global trading agenda for the World Trade Organization. Unfortunately, these trade bureaucrats and their army of attorneys are not going to discuss the overwhelming need to reform the World Trade Organization before expanding it. They are not going to talk about fighting the spread of AIDS in Africa or stamping out slavery in Thailand. They are not going to talk about Mexican workers who are paid pennies an hour to work in shiny American factories or Indonesian children who work 18-hour days for less than a dollar a day to make a pair of shoes that sell in this country for $120. Rather than address the fact that so many of the world's people continue to live in grinding poverty and continue to barely survive, most of them on less than $1 a day, the trade bureaucrats in Seattle are going to discuss how to sell them compact discs and cellular phones. My colleagues can count on this, our own United States Trade Representative is not going to mention that millions of American children are growing up in poverty while their parents continue to struggle to find jobs that pay a livable wage. Our own U.S. Trade Rep. is not going to mention that, even though Wall Street is booming, 90 percent of its benefits go to the richest 5 percent of Americans, and our own United States Trade Rep. will not mention that the living wage for most Americans has not increased appreciably in nearly 30 years. The WTO has weakened the standards we erected to ensure our children are not exposed to imported foods soaked with the same pesticides we banned in the United States. The WTO has undermined the laws and regulations we created in Congress that were intended to protect our privacy, our health, and our environment. The WTO has made improving the lives of workers less important than improving the rights of property holders and intellectual property rights. Instead of creating a global supermarket for America's goods and Services, we have created a system of rules that puts more emphasis on property rights than on human rights. So it is vital that we in Congress, that the American people, realize just what is at stake when the world's largest assembly of millionaires meets in Seattle this year. We have got to keep fighting to make labor, standards, and environmental rights and human rights as important to our trade bureaucrats as intellectual property rights.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, as incredible as it sounds, the bureaucrats from the United States Trade Representative's Office are once again preparing to give their comrades in the People's Republic of China membership in the World Trade Organization. We saw the same thing happen last April when the Chinese autocrat Zhu Rongji was here in Washington. The USTR was feverishly working to further open our wallets to the world's largest nonmarket country; a nation that is ruled by corrupt tyrants with absolutely no respect for the rule of law or the basic human and political freedoms of its people; a nation that buys less of our goods than Belgium, one that steals our nuclear secrets, a country that proliferates weapons of mass destruction, and has the audacity to threaten the people of Taiwan for wanting the very same political freedom that lets us debate these issues in this chamber. I have said it before, and I will say it again. Wei Jingshang, a man who spent nearly decades in Chinese prisons for having the nerve to fight for democracy, told me that it is American business executives and their political connections that serve as the vanguard of the communist revolution of the Chinese in the United States. As I speak, our Trade ambassador is being advised at the APEC summit in New Zealand by an individual who just 2 weeks ago was a lobbyist for Boeing, while his predecessor is now a lobbyist for a satellite manufacturer with extensive dealings in the People's Republic of China. Think about that the next time you read or hear about a textile worker in Georgia or an assembly line worker in Detroit or Cleveland who loses her job to a flood of Chinese goods, products that are made by workers that can be arrested, tortured, even executed for trying to organize a trade union. Think about their lives and the lives of their families and the well-being of their communities because the USTR is not going to hire these workers, Microsoft is not going to employ them as computer engineers, Wall Street is not going to take care of these laid off workers by allowing them to share the wealth either. And while we are left wondering how to help our workers and their families recover from the latest flood of prison labor imports or how we get the People's Liberation Army to back down from its threats against Taiwan, maybe we should take a closer look at how exactly our proposed World Trade Organization deal with China will affect American business and American workers. Just last week, the International Trade Commission released a report detailing the benefits a China WTO deal would have on our economy, a report based on the false promises that Zhu made during his Washington visit last April. False promises because time and time again the communist Chinese Government has not lived up in China to a single pledge to open its market to foreign competition. Every memorandum of understanding, every bilateral trade pact that our USTR, our Trade representative, has negotiated with the Chinese and touted as proof that China is changing has been completely ignored by the central planners in Beijing. Yet the American people, including those of us here in Congress, are not even allowed to read the Trade Commission report which was paid for by our tax dollars. These are not nuclear weapons codes. These are not blueprints for a new generation of microprocessors. These are not top secret materials. This is merely a government report on how a World Trade Organization deal for China will affect the U.S. economy. Yet the bureaucrats at USTR are deliberately withholding information from the American people and from this Congress. The only thing we have been able to read is a tiny summary that ominously warns that even under the best circumstances, meaning for the first time ever China actually lives up to its promises to reform, if in fact that would happen, even then, under the best circumstances, a WTO deal would barely increase our exports and would continue to swell the record setting trade deficits that we seem to find each month in dealing with China. Think about that because the ugly truth in this report which we are not allowed to read because it is damaging to the agenda of the Republican leadership in Congress, to the President and the administration, and to leaders in corporate America because it is damaging to them, it is admitting that the People's Republic of China into the WTO is the ultimate remedy for our burgeoning trade deficit with the world's worst abuser of human rights. Mr. Speaker, this is absurd. The American people should demand that the report be released and we should once and for all be allowed to finally democratize our trade policies. For too long our voters, the men and women who send us here, have been shut out of this arena and they deserve to know exactly what our trade bureaucrats and their corporate allies have in store. Mr. Speaker, say no to WTO accession for the communist government and the People's Republic of China.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Madam Speaker, I rise today to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the community development block grant program. This program has put local development decision in the hands of those who know best, those who live and work in the community. This long-term commitment to responsible flexibility has paid off leveraging $2.31 for every Federal dollar spent. Unfortunately, Republicans have chosen to commemorate 25 years of job creation and increased affordable housing by stripping the block grant program of $250 million in the Fiscal Year 2000 VA HUD appropriations bill. In Lorain, Ohio, a community struggling with loss of industry and experiencing rents as much as 50 percent of income these cuts instantly translate into a loss of jobs, jobs that would have been created next year through mutually beneficial community improvement and construction projects. It defies common sense to deny people in Lorain, Ohio and across the country the chance to support their families and improve their communities just so Republicans can afford to give more tax breaks to the rich. I encourage my colleagues to vote against this legislation.

Mr. BROWN of Ohio

Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of this amendment. International trade pacts like NAFTA must not be used as an excuse to put profits over public health and the environment. But that's what NAFTA's Chapter 11 does. It gives corporations the right to challenge our public health laws, environmental laws, even civil jury verdicts as ``barriers to trade.'' Just ask the residents of California, who don't want the gasoline additive MTBE in their wells, groundwater, and lakes. MTBE smells and tastes like turpentine and may cause cancer, yet the Canadian corporation Methenex is suing U.S. taxpayers for nearly a billion dollars because under NAFTA California's ban of MTBE is classified as a barrier to trade. Mr. Speaker, we were elected to protect the health and well-being of our constituents, not corporations. We need to give our communities the right to enact legislation that protects their well-being, not Wall Street's profits. I urge my colleagues to support the amendment.