Thomas Carper

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. I thank the Chair.

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, in listening to the presentation of my friend from Mississippi, I am reminded of the words of Harry Truman when he said something to the effect: The only thing new in the world is the history we forgot or never learned. I want to go back in history. I want to go back about 15 years. We had gone from 1968 to 1997 and never balanced a budget. All those years--almost 30 years. Then President Clinton said to Erskine Bowles, his Chief of Staff, figure out a way to maybe negotiate a balanced budget deal with Republicans in the House and in the Senate and see what kind of deal you can get. So Erskine went out and negotiated and came up with a deal. It was the deficit reduction deal that lead to not one but three balanced budgets by the end of that decade. Interestingly enough, half of the debt reduction was on the spending side and half the debt reduction was on the revenue side. Now fast forward to 2001, a new President, a change in administration, and as far as the eye could see not just balanced budgets but plenty of black ink--surpluses as far as the eye could see. Eight years later, we had another change in administration, and a new President was handed over a $1 trillion deficit, the worst recession since the Great Depression, and we are still trying to dig our way out of that. When we tried to pass legislation here to create a deficit commission a couple of years ago and failed--we were short of votes, and our Republican friends who had cosponsored that measure, as I recall, ended up not voting for it--this President used his own executive powers to say we are going to have a deficit commission and he asked Erskine Bowles to head it up, along with Alan Simpson, a former Senator and deficit hawk from Wyoming. There were 18 good people, including some from this Chamber, who went to work on a real deficit reduction plan--Democrats and Republicans-- and 11 out of the 18 ended up voting for this kind of plan. It was not a 50 50 deal on deficit reduction, but $3 on the spending side for every $1 on the revenue side, with $4 trillion to $5 trillion in deficit reduction over a 10-year period of time. As my friend mentioned, we are seeing a lot of different ideas. We have a bunch here on the floor. The administration submitted their budget as well, and, frankly, none of them come close to being as good as Bowles-Simpson. Alice Rivlin has done good work. Pete Domenici, our former colleague here in the Senate from New Mexico, has done a good one. But in the end, they all come back to pretty much the same place. Bowles-Simpson says we are going to raise $1 in revenue for every $3 on the spending side. The grand compromise was Democrats agreeing to entitlement programs reform--not to get rid of them but make sure they are going to be around for our children and grandchildren. And on the revenue side, we actually raise revenues by reducing the rates on the individual side and the corporate side, and we eliminated by half the so-called ``tax expenditures'' in the Tax Code--tax credits, tax reductions, tax loopholes, tax breaks. We got rid of about half of them. So the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission plan enjoys the support of almost half the Senate--almost half the Senate. Pretty much an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. We have a budget in place right now. We have a budget in place for 2012. We have a budget that is going to be effective for 2013. Right now, we are seeing a deficit reduction of $600 billion in defense spending implemented over a 10-year period of time. Right now, we are seeing a deficit reduction of $600 billion in domestic discretionary spending implemented over a 10-year period of time. And if we don't come up with an agreement, such as Bowles- Simpson, we will see $600 billion more of deficit reduction on the defense side, another $600 billion on the nondefense side, and some entitlement program changes as well. A much better plan than doing that--even though that adds up to about $2 trillion worth of deficit reduction for this year and the coming fiscal year--is the kind of comprehensive balanced plan we have been given by the deficit commission. My hope is, at the end of the day, when we have the opportunity to debate here--later this year, when the elections are behind us--people will actually turn around and say, let's try to figure out the right thing to do, and then do it. This is the right thing to do. In the meantime, let's not waste the next 6, 7, or 8 months. I would suggest to my colleagues to join the bipartisan efforts of people such as Tom Coburn and myself and others, Senator Conrad and Senator Grassley and others, and to join us in going to work on a to-do list provided to us by GAO, the Government Accountability Office. That to-do list is just full of ways to avoid wasting money, and it includes ways to save money by reducing improper payments. We are down from $119 billion last year to $115 billion this year, finally heading in the right direction, reducing fraud in Medicare and Medicaid. Some very good stuff is being done there to help reduce the fraud losses. We have all this surplus property, a lot of which we don't need. The idea is to get rid of that, and we are beginning to do that. We have too many bad information technology projects and too many information processing centers. We are getting rid of a bunch of those we don't need. There is actually some good work that is beginning to be done. We can do more, and we ought to do more. Lastly, I would suggest we ought to consider making the President's rescission powers real. Senator McCain and I and about 40, almost 45, Democrats and Republicans have proposed that we make the President's rescission powers real. The President could sign an appropriations bill under current law, send us proposals to rescind or reduce spending within that appropriations bill that he has just signed into law, and we don't even have to vote on the rescission. We don't even have to take it up or look at it. For the most part, we don't. What John McCain and I and almost half the Senate, Democratic and Republican, have said is, when a President signs an appropriations bill into law and sends it to us, he can send us a rescission message as well that we have to vote on, we actually have to vote on it. And it doesn't affect taxes. It is not a deal that affects entitlement programs but on appropriations, and we would try this for 4 years. With a simple majority, we literally vote on the President's proposal. If it doesn't get a simple majority in the Senate--51 votes-- or a simple majority in the House--218 votes--then it goes away. But at least we have to take responsibility to be held accountable to vote on it. The President would perhaps have some extra responsibility and the opportunity to make meaningful reductions. Mr. President, how am I doing on time?

Mr. CARPER. I will be happy to do so.

Mr. CARPER. I want to close and say to my friend, Senator Conrad, I know the Senator, as much as I, favors Bowles-Simpson, and I want to thank the Senator for the work he is doing in bringing attention to it again and saying this is still the best plan in the room. I think it is still the best plan out there. So the idea is when we get to the day or the week after the election, we will be ready to move and to take it up and, hopefully, to embrace and endorse large parts of it. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President on behalf of Senator Chris Coons, Congressman John Carney, and myself, I wish to offer my congratulations to fire chief Isaac Willis, president S. Christopher Hudson, and the entire Citizens' Hose Company No. 1 as they celebrate the Company's 125th anniversary of service to the town of Smyrna in Delaware. The success of the Citizens' Hose Company is a tribute to the many dedicated men and women who not only have served in this company but have served this community in a number of ways. In 1885, the town of Smyrna installed water mains and fire hydrants throughout the town in preparation of the founding of the Citizens' Hose Company. Since that time the members of this company have protected the property and residents throughout this historic community. The company has reached many milestones throughout the last 125 years--initially fighting fires with a man-drawn hose tender and ladder cart to now answering fire calls using a 100-foot KME Kovatch ladder truck which, in 1999, was the first ladder truck the company purchased new. Additional milestones included the formation of the Ladies Auxiliary in 1950, as well as the expansion of the station in 1985 to accommodate office space and future growth. With over 440 members today, the Citizens' Hose Company No. 1 maintains the highest level of excellence. Over the last several years, the Citizens' Hose Company has answered an average of 475 calls per year and are on pace to keep that record in 2012. The Citizens' Hose Company serves as a great neighbor to all in the Smyrna area. The company participates in numerous community activities throughout the year and has a renowned company band. Since 1947, the Citizens' Hose Company Band has provided music for the marching unit of the company during parades and other community gatherings. An annual participant in the Delaware Volunteer Firefighter's Association Parade, the Citizens' Hose Company has won the prestigious Governor's Cup Award a record 31 times. The company band has had the honor of playing music throughout Delaware as well as in Dublin, Ireland, New York City, and even represented the First State at the inaugural parades of both President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama in Washington, DC. Delaware's firefighters are dedicated and caring professionals who willingly put themselves at risk--day and night, in all kinds of weather. As their congressional delegation, we are all sincerely grateful for the continued service of the men and women of Citizens' Hose Company. The hard work and commitment of these devoted volunteers is an inspiration to us all. Moreover, the Citizens' Hose Company No. 1 has crafted a tradition of superior and selfless service. Today, we send our warmest congratulations to the members, volunteers and families of Citizens' Hose Company No. 1 on this momentous anniversary, and we look forward to hearing of their continued success and exemplary service for another 125 years and beyond.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I came to the floor today to talk about the actions we took here this week in the Senate to make sure the postal service has a good chance to return to solvency and be relevant in the 21st century and continue to provide a valuable role in providing 7 to 8 million jobs in the United States of America. But I think I will put that on hold for a moment and recall the words of a former President, Harry Truman, who left office not very popular, but in retrospect is regarded as one of the best Presidents of the last century. Harry Truman used to say, the only thing new in the world is the history we forgot or never learned. I want to go back to a few years in our history and reflect on the words of the preceding speaker and ask, what can we learn from history? Well, one of the things we can learn from is the last time we actually had a balanced budget in this country, and we had three of them in the last 3 years of the Clinton administration. He became President in the middle of a recession and left our country with the strongest economy of any Nation on Earth, with the most productive workforce, the most revered Nation on Earth. He turned the reins over to a new President, George W. Bush, and gave to him balanced budgets and a strong economy. Eight years later, we had accumulated more debt in those 8 years--from 2001 to 2009--I think than we had in the previous 208 years combined. President Bush then turned over to President-elect Obama a $1 trillion deficit and an economy that was in free fall, with the worst recession since the Great Depression. That is where President Obama and Vice President Biden--a former colleague and Senator from Delaware-- started off in January of 2009. Keep in mind, the last 6 months of 2008, this country lost 2\1/2\ million jobs. The first 6 months of 2009, this country lost 2\1/2\ million jobs. That is sort of like where they took the handoff. I am not trying, and have never attempted, to characterize the comments made by my colleague a few minutes ago, but I think a little history is not a bad thing. Interestingly enough, the balanced budget agreement was negotiated by President Clinton's Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles. That is a name we have heard a lot of in the past year and a half, because he was asked by this President to do a similar kind of thing, to try to negotiate a deficit reduction deal, along with a former Republican Senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson. The two were asked to head up a commission, with 16 other very smart people. And 11 out of the 18, after working at this for a year, came back and said, here is what we think you should do to take a good $4 trillion or $5 trillion out of the deficit over the next 10 years. The deficit commission, headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, simply recommended we do that by working on the spending side and on the revenue side. For every $3 of deficit reduction on the spending side, they said there would be $1 of new revenues--not by raising taxes but actually by lowering somewhat the personal income tax rate, the corporate income tax rate, and broadening the base of the income which can be taxed. That was seen by a lot of people as being a grand compromise. Democrats agreed to compromise on entitlement program reform in an effort to make sure we have Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid 50, 60, 70, or 100 years from now; and Republicans agreed to compromise on tax reform that actually lowers the rate but allows us to generate new revenue--$1 of new revenue for every $3 of spending reductions to achieve deficit reduction. I think that is a smart plan. Other people have come forward with their plans since, but I think that is the smartest deficit reduction plan, and I think it is a good jobs bill. I hope by the end of the year, when the smoke clears and the elections are over, we will come back to that and use that as maybe our north star to get us back to fiscal responsibility in this Nation. That is not why I came here tonight, but I thought maybe it was appropriate, on the heels of my friend and colleague, to set the record straight a little bit. Postal Service Reform Ironically, yesterday 62 Senators voted for postal reform legislation. I appreciate the support of the Presiding Officer and other colleagues, Democrat and Republican. But that legislation was almost immediately attacked by some of our Republican friends over in the House of Representatives. Our Presiding Officer knows I am not a real partisan guy; never have been, not while I was Governor or in the many roles I have been privileged to play in Delaware. But our bill was attacked almost immediately by our Republican friends over in the House because it doesn't do this or doesn't do that or whatever the sin might be. Ironically, we asked, where is your bill? How about let's compare our bill to your bill. They haven't passed a bill. Yet they feel at liberty to take all kinds of shots--and I don't think they are entirely fair shots--at our bill. I had a conversation this afternoon with the chair of the relevant committee in the House and urged him to make sure they actually move a bill and not just criticize what we have done. There are provisions in our bill I am frankly not happy with, and I am sure there will be provisions in whatever bill the House passes he won't be comfortable with. But at the end of the day, they have to move a bill. They have to say this is what we are for, because we have said this is what we want to have as our negotiating point in conference going forward. So we need the House to do the same thing, sooner rather than later. I am encouraged to hear the House is going to take something up by the middle of May. If they can do it before that, God bless them. I want to take 5, 6, or 7 minutes to talk a little about what we are trying to do with respect to postal reform. We are trying to rightsize the enterprise, much as the auto industry rightsized itself 3 or 4 years ago coming out of bankruptcy. We are trying to modernize the postal industry and we are also trying to help the postal service-- encourage the postal service--to find new ways to use their existing business model--where in every community in America there are 33,000 post offices going to every front door and mailbox in America 5 or 6 days a week--to make more money and raise their revenues, some of the ways they can do that. Our legislation focuses on that, rightsizing the enterprise given the reduction in mail, the diversion of mail to the electronic media because of Facebook, Twitter, the Internet, or all of the above. We communicate differently than we used to. We have to help them rightsize their enterprise and modernize and find new ways to generate revenues. That is the heart and soul of what we want to do. How do we do that? As it turns out, by luck, the postal service over the years has overpaid its obligation to the Federal Employees Retirement System by a lot, it turns out by about $11 billion. There is no argument; they have overpaid the money. The postal service is owed that money by the Federal Employees Retirement System. The postal service wishes to take that money and use that money in two ways: one, to incentivize about 100,000 postal employees who are eligible to retire, to retire; not fire them, not lay them off, but say, look, if you will retire, here is another $25,000 or if you are close to retirement, here is some credit, but we want you to retire. Second, the postal service has more mail processing centers than they need. A couple of years ago they had maybe 600 or so. Today they have a few less than 500. They want to get down to about 325 over the next year or two. That would be almost cutting in half the number of mail processing centers around the country. They do not need them, given the volume of mail today. They need mail processing centers, but not as many as they have. When the postal service closes another 150 or so mail processing centers, some people will not be able to work at those mail processing centers, but the postal service is saying, we will find you other jobs. You can be a letter carrier or work in another part of the postal service. You will not get fired. But we want to encourage those eligible to retire to retire. The Service also wants to take most of that Federal Employees Retirement System money to pay down their debt to the Treasury. Right now, they have gone on a $15 billion line of credit. The postal service wants to take most of their Federal Employees Retirement System reimbursement and pay off that debt. Another thing they wish to do, that a lot of folks around here are real concerned about, is to close some post offices. There is the fear that maybe as many as 3,000 or 4,000 post offices. In rural places around the country, maybe the post office is the center of the town. Folks are concerned their post office will be closed and people will be left without postal service. As it turns out, that will not be the case. What the postal service is going to do under our bill is to say to communities across the country, we want to offer you a menu of options. We want to offer you a menu of options for different communities, and among that menu of options we want to offer to those communities are these: No. 1, we are not going to close your post office. We will keep your post office open, but in a place where we are paying the people $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year to run a post office that sells $15,000 worth of stamps, that doesn't make sense. So if the postmaster is eligible to retire, we want to incentivize that postmaster to retire. Let him go off and get his pension, get his benefits, and he could still come back to work on a part-time basis, maybe 2 or 4 or 6 hours a day, and run the post office in that community. If that is what the community wants, that is what they would get. Some communities might prefer to put the post office in the supermarket or the local drugstore or a convenience store, where it is open not just a few hours a day but open 24/7, maybe. That would be an option for the community. Some communities may have a townhall and some other State and local businesses that could collocate those with the post office and put them all under one roof and everybody would save some money. So they could share some space. Another option for some places, maybe Minnesota--we have rural letter carriers in the southern part of Delaware--we could offer people the opportunity for rural mail delivery. They wouldn't have to come in to town to collect their mail in a post office. It would be delivered to wherever they live. The idea is to say to folks in communities that might be adversely affected, you pick from among this menu of options, figure out what works for you. Even vote by mail and pick their favorite choice. So rightsizing the enterprise, reducing the head count, reducing the number of mail processing centers further by another third, and, finally, ways to provide more cost-effective mail service in communities across the country, though not the heart and soul of what we are trying to do, they are very important. Let me mention one or two others, if I could. The postal service pays twice for health care for their retirees. I will say that again. The postal service pays twice for the health care of their retirees. They pay under Medicare and they pay under the Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan. Twice. The employees don't get the full benefit of that money, the postal service certainly doesn't get the full benefit of that money. Most companies in this country--big companies and small ones--when their employees retire, a lot of times will continue to provide health care benefits for them until the age of 65. Then at age 65, the company will say to the retiree, we want you to get your primary Medicare, your primary source of health care, and we will provide a wraparound, your Medigap program, to fill in the gaps for you. That is how a lot of companies do it. My wife retired from DuPont. When she turns 65--in about another 30 years, well, maybe a little sooner than that--Medicare will be her primary source of health care and the company will provide a wraparound for Medigap. What the post office wishes to do is have a similar type of opportunity. In the end, I think the retirees will benefit, the postal service will benefit, and the taxpayers, I think, arguably would benefit. Those are a couple of things that are in our legislation. Did we pass a perfect bill? By no means. By no means. As I said earlier, there are some things in the bill I don't like. And I hope we can make the bill better in conference. In order to get to conference with the House, the House has to pass a bill. It is not enough for the House to criticize what we have done. We say, what have you done? As it turns out, so far, not much--at least in terms of passing a bill and being able to appoint conferees and see what we can work out here. My hope is they will do that. My hope is they will do that sooner rather than later, so we can stop saying, well, the postal service lost $45 million today. They did that yesterday and they are going to do it tomorrow. That is not sustainable. That is not sustainable. They need to be put in a position where they can be successful. We can help them get there. And to the extent the postal service becomes vibrant and solvent, they can support the 7 or 8 million jobs that are tied to and interconnected with the postal service. With that, Mr. President, I bid you adieu, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, some of our colleagues have raised justifiable concerns about the level of compensation that has gone to some of the most senior officials at the U.S. Postal Service. The compensation package for one previous leader of the Postal Service was in excess of $1 million. In a day and age when rank-and-file postal employees are going to be asked to make some sacrifices as labor negotiations go forward, I think it is important for us to remember the concept of leadership by example. This amendment makes sure that, frankly, deferred compensation packages of the kind I just described do not occur. We cut in half--from 12 to 6--the number of postal executives who are able to receive compensation in excess of a Cabinet-level salary, but to give the Board of Governors the ability to pay a fee for good progress toward reducing the budget deficit at the Postal Service through pay above that up to about $270,000. The last thing we say is, the idea that senior executives at the Postal Service do not have to pay anything for health care or do not have to pay anything for their life insurance is wrong and that should end. We do that with this amendment.

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw amendment No. 2065.

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 2066.

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, just briefly, I support this amendment. I am happy Senator Coburn has offered this amendment and it was debated. I hope it is accepted on a voice vote. Let me say, we brought a bill to the floor that has been brought together by two Republicans and two Democrats. We just had a vote on whether to waive a budget point of order. Give us a chance to air the bill, offer amendments, and look to see what we can agree on in a bipartisan vote. We have an early opportunity to go back and forth on amendments not just for the Democratic amendments but Republican amendments as well. My hope is at the end of the day we will approve both. Hopefully, we will be able to say we passed a bill with bipartisan support.

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I hope my colleagues listened to what Senator Collins said with respect to the way this has been scored. It is a very important point. As much as anybody in this Chamber, I am interested in reducing the budget deficit. I want Senators to keep in mind these three points: One, for a number of years, the Postal Service has overpaid its obligation into the Federal Employees Retirement System--$12 billion to $13 billion in overpayment. They are owed that money. They should be given that money. They are going to use it to help 100,000 postal employees who are eligible to retire to retire. They will use that money to pay down their debt--$13 billion--and almost wipe it out. They will use it for that purpose. CBO scores that as something that makes the budget deficit bigger. If they overpaid the money into the Federal Employees Retirement System, they ought to get it back. They should get people who are eligible to retire and want to retire to retire. They should use it to pay down a $12 billion line of credit to the Federal Government. The second point I wish to make is the one offered by Senator Lieberman. If we do nothing and we get to May 15, the Postal Service is free to close post offices across the country--3,700 of them. They are free to close as many as 200 to 300 mail processing centers. There is a smarter way to do this, which is in this legislation. Lastly, we are going to have the opportunity today and tomorrow for all of us to better understand the amendments that have been agreed to and offered by both sides, what has been agreed to and put into the managers' amendment, which we will, frankly, have a lot more confidence in. The Postal Service tells us today they are going to lose $23 million. They lost that much yesterday. They are going to lose that much again tomorrow, the next day, and the next day. They owe $13 billion to the Treasury. What I think is more important to keep in mind is when we finish our work today and tomorrow, and we look to see what that means for the Postal Service, in terms of their operation on a daily basis and where will they be in terms of paying their obligation by 2016, we need to keep our eye on the ball. I urge Senators not to vote for this. Give us a day for the body to work its will and then make your decision. If we have not made any more progress, vote against it. Lastly, several of our colleagues have well-intentioned amendments that will literally drive up the cost and make it harder for the Postal Service to move toward a balanced situation, to a sovereign situation. I urge Senators--and some of these amendments are offered by people we love and it is hard to say no to them. But in this case, maybe the greater devotion should be to the taxpayers of our country, to the people who work for the Postal Service, and to their customers.

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I say to my colleagues that this is another good amendment offered by the Senator from Oklahoma. What the Postmaster General has in mind for our communities across America, where there are 33,000 post offices, is to give a number of them an option--a menu, if you will--to see whether it makes sense in those communities to shorten somewhat the length of time the post office is open in a day--maybe to 6 or 4 hours a day--whether to use a colocator in a supermarket maybe or in a convenience store or to in some cases, say, to State and local government operations in those communities: Why don't we put them under the same roof? Why doesn't that make sense? Frankly, all those ideas may make sense. The idea is not to tell a community which of those options they have to choose but to say: This is the menu. And this is one of the great options that should be on the menu. I commend the Senator for offering the amendment. I urge a ``yes'' vote on the amendment.

Mr. CARPER

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

Mr. CARPER. Madam President, we are debating this bill today because the Postal Service is facing, as many of us know, a dire financial crisis that literally threatens its very survival. This is a crisis that has been building for some time. It is one that only Congress can fix at this point, and one that we absolutely must fix now, literally in a matter of weeks. Since the Postal Service was first established in 1971 in its current form, we have taken it for granted that our mail would arrive and that important business and personal correspondence would reach its destination. In addition, businesses, large and small, have come to rely on the mail to reach new customers and to communicate effectively with existing customers. The Postal Service has a presence in virtually every community of any size in our country, large and small. It supports a trillion-dollar mailing industry that creates and sustains millions of private sector jobs--I am told as many as 8 million private sector jobs today. Unfortunately, a number of those jobs are at great risk today. They are at risk because those of us in Congress have, to date, proven unwilling or unable to come to consensus around a package of reforms that can update the Postal Service's network and business model to reflect the reality it faces today--if you will, to right-size the enterprise, much as the auto industry has right-sized its enterprise in the last 3 or 4 years. That lack of action on our part comes despite ample warnings about the severity of the problem and about the consequences of not appropriately and effectively solving that problem. Nearly 2 years ago, former Postmaster General Potter announced--I think with the help of three major consulting companies--that the Postal Service would run up cumulative losses of more than 230 billion extra dollars by 2020 if we did nothing. There are several reasons for these losses, including the diversion of first class mail to electronic forms of communication and legislative hurdles Congress has imposed on reform efforts. Mr. Potter and his successor Pat Donahoe have done a tremendous job, I believe, in trying to chip away at these losses, with the help of their employees, with the help of several of their unions, with the help of a number of their customers, and I think from time to time with help from those of us who serve in the Congress and in the last administration and the current administration. Over the past decade, the Postal Service has reduced the size of its postal workforce by roughly a third--not by firing people, not by laying people off, but through attrition. They have closed scores of mail processing facilities across America with no noticeable impact on service. People still drop letters and packages in the mail, and they might be delivered the next day or the next day or within at least 3 days--pretty amazing when you think about it. The approval rating for Congress is not very high, but the customer satisfaction of the American people with respect to the Postal Service is still at about 85 percent--pretty good compared to how we are doing here in our Nation's Capital. The Postal Service has introduced some new products such as the flat rate boxes: If it fits, it ships. They have formed productive partnerships with companies such as UPS and FedEx. UPS and FedEx do not want to deliver every package, every parcel to every mailbox or address across America. The Postal Service does that 6 days a week. The Postal Service has a nice partnership with FedEx and UPS in order to make money for the Postal Service and to provide good customer service in that partnership. But despite that, losses at the Postal Service continue to mount. Last year, the Postal Service suffered an operating loss of more than $5 billion. It will see a similar loss this year, even if it finds some way to avoid making the retiree health prefunding payments due in the coming months. Then the losses accelerate to $6.5 billion in 2013; to $10 billion in 2014; to more than $12 billion in 2015; and to more than $15 billion alone in 2016. But these losses are only theoretical. I say that because the Postal Service is close to exhausting its $15 billion line of credit with the Treasury and by this time next year will be well on its way to running completely out of cash. If that were to occur, the Postal Service's ability to continue operating will be in jeopardy. Postmaster General Donahoe has said repeatedly that he and his team will do everything they can do to keep the mail moving even as the Postal Service's finances deteriorate. I believe him. But make no mistake: If the Postal Service is not permitted in the very near future to begin making the adjustments needed in response to the likely permanent declines in mail volume--especially first class mail--we have witnessed in recent years, the Postal Service will drown in red ink. The ripple effect of losing the Postal Service and the still very valuable services it provides would deliver a body blow to our economy at the very time our economy is recovering. We are on the brink of this impending disaster in part because we are expecting the Postal Service of 2012 to try and be successful with a business model created in the 1970s. Let's remember, in 1970, when I was a naval flight officer on my first tour in Southeast Asia, there was no e-mail. There was the mail. The happiest day of the week was when the mail came--letters, cards, packages, magazines, newspapers, you name it. That was the day of the week to live for. The last time I was over in Afghanistan--and Senator Lieberman and Senator Collins have been there any number of times--the last time I was there, they still get mail, our guys and gals still get mail, but do you know what they have? They have Skype, they have telephones, they have these little phones like we carry around. They have the Internet; they have Facebook; they have Twitter. They have all that stuff. As a result, they do not use the mail as we did in our generation. Today, Americans live and work online. We shop and transact more and more business online. These trends are likely to accelerate. If any of our colleagues doubt that, then they should ask our pages--these pages who are sitting right down here--how often they sit down and write a letter or send a greeting card. Our colleagues should ask members of their own staff how often they pay their bills through the mail. We should look at our own mail. In fact, when I asked my staff to do this, I said: Go back and look at 2001--my first year as a Senator--go back and see, if you look at the number of e-mails we got then and the number of letters we got then, what was the ratio? For roughly every 15 letters we got in 2001, we got 1 e-mail. I said: Go back and look at 2011. They did. As it turned out, for every 1 letter we received last year, we received about a dozen e-mails. Think of that. The Federal Government itself is even contributing to this trend, and I think in a pretty big way. It was announced within the last week or so that the Social Security Administration, starting next year, will send virtually all of its 73 million payments--I think that is each month--to Social Security recipients processed online through direct deposit, not mailed out. That is us. So even as the American people adjust to new communications technologies, many of us here in Congress expect the Postal Service to continue as if nothing has changed. But in these changing times, these challenging times, we need to recognize that difficult choices need to be made. It is not efficient or affordable to maintain a mail processing and delivery network built for the peak mail volumes of years ago. That said, many of my colleagues have legitimate concerns about the severity and speed of the Postal Service's streamlining efforts. To address those concerns, the managers' amendment that Senators Lieberman, Collins, Brown, and I have put forward includes a number of safeguards crafted to ensure that the changes that will occur in the coming months and years are implemented in responsible ways--ways that are consistent with what I can describe as the Golden Rule: that we would treat others the way we would want to be treated. That includes customers of the Postal Service, employees of the Postal Service, and taxpayers of this country. We also seek to provide assurances in our managers' amendment that those who still rely largely on the Postal Service, including rural customers without access to broadband, will continue to have access to the services they know and need in the years to come. We also take steps in this bill with this managers' amendment to ensure that this effort to save the Postal Service is not all about closing facilities and cutting services. Recognizing that questionable policy decisions made over the years regarding the Postal Service's pension and health care obligations are part of the Postal Service's financial problems, we call for, in this managers' amendment, refunding the more than $10 billion the Postal Service has overpaid into the Federal Employees Retirement System. A portion of that refund--that $10 billion to $12 billion, whatever it turns out to be--would be used to encourage at least some of the 125,000 postal employees at or near retirement age today to retire now or within the next year or 2, saving the Postal Service billions of dollars annually. Let me back up for a moment. If you go back a decade or so ago, there were roughly 900,000 men and women who worked for the Postal Service, for us in the Postal Service. Today, there are 550,000 people who are employees of the Postal Service. Out of that roughly 550,000 people, 125,000 are eligible to retire. They are eligible to retire, and they have not chosen to do so, despite the fact they are eligible. One of the things the Postmaster General wants to do--and I believe our managers, those of us who are cosponsors, coauthors of this bill and the managers' amendment, want to do--is to encourage those folks to retire. Eighty percent of the Postal Service's costs are personnel costs. To the extent we can continue to right-size this enterprise, enable it to right-size itself, given the market share from 550,000, 500,000 down to maybe 450,000 in the next year or two--an enterprise where 80 percent of the cost is personnel--that helps get this enterprise back to a place where it is not bleeding money every day of every week of every month of this year. Today the Postal Service will lose--get this--$23 million. Today. And today, if you look at the amount of money the Postal Service owes to the Treasury on its line of credit, it is roughly $13 billion--maybe more than that for the line of credit that only goes up to $15 billion. There is some controversy that flowed out of the 2006 legislation signed by former President Bush. He insisted at the time that in order to sign that legislation, we in the Congress would have to agree to I think maybe the most conservative approach to prefunding retiree health benefits of any government agency or any business with which I have ever been associated. I used to be treasurer of my State government, and we began prefunding health benefits for retirees several years ago--actually, right at the end of my second term as Governor--but nothing like this. We instituted that requirement in order to get President Bush to sign on to the bill at a time when the Postal Service was in good shape. That was a very popular year, if you will, for the Postal Service, before the roof fell in and the economy went to heck in a hand basket. But the Postal Service was in pretty good shape, very good shape, so the taxpayers would not be saddled with those obligations in the event the Postal Service could not meet them in the years to come. President Bush's people said: Look, we will sign this bill. The Postal Service will not always be making money--as they were in 2006-- and 10 or 15 years down the line when they are not doing so well, we want to make sure that a large part of the health care benefits for retirees have been satisfied or paid for. That is not an entirely bad idea. We did not know that we were going to enter the worst recession since the Great Depression in 2008. We did not know we were going to lose 2.5 million jobs in the second half of 2008 and we did not know were going to lose 2.5 million jobs in the first half of 2009, but we did. It put us in the tank and it put the Postal Service in the tank far quicker than anybody had a reasonable right to imagine. But, in retrospect, the payment schedule put into place back then proved to be too aggressive once the bottom fell out of our economy in 2008. Our managers' amendment scraps the schedule adopted in 2006 and replaces it with a more realistic one that is based on what the Postal Service actually owes. And that change, coupled with some others, including one that would better coordinate postal retirees' Medicare and Federal employee health benefits, would cut the Postal Service retiree health costs by more than half--not ignore them but cut them in half and put them on a more realistic time schedule. Finally, our managers' amendment pushes the Postal Service to redouble its efforts to innovate, to redouble its efforts to develop new products that can grow revenue going forward. There are some who would argue that--let me dwell on that for just a moment. Frankly, somewhere down the line--I don't if it will be a year from now or 5 years from now or 10 years from now--a light will go on in somebody's head, and they will say: You know, the Postal Service goes to every door in America five or six times a week. They are in every community in America. Why did we not think of a particular idea to enable them to create a new source of revenue or new sources of revenue? I would like to mention some that are actually working. Flat rate boxes--if it fits, it ships. That is a great product. There is the partnership the Postal Service has with FedEx and UPS, delivered by the Postal Service the last mile or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 miles where Fed-Ex or UPS does not want go in many cases. That is a good way to make money, especially if more people buy things, order things for themselves, for their families, for their loved ones over the Internet and have them shipped. The Postal Service can have a big piece of that business. There are other ideas as well. Fed-Ex and UPS get to deliver wine and beer. The Postal Service does not. We changed that in this legislation. There are ideas dealing with electronic mail boxes. We will hear more about those in the days to come. Other countries with postal services actually have used that as a way to provide a good service for their people and for their businesses, and I think there is maybe an argument that we should allow the Postal Service here to do that too. Even further down the road and kind of out there in ideas, as the Presiding Officer knows in neighboring Pennsylvania--they do not have a coastline, but they are close to ours and to New Jersey--5, 6 years from now, we are going to have windmill farms off the coast of the United States, the east coast from North Carolina, Virginia, all the way up to Maine. They are going to be harvesting the wind, turning that wind into electricity. Do you know what. The wind does not always blow, but there are times that it blows a lot more, and we are going to generate more electricity than we can actually use on a particular day at a particular hour. What are we going do with that electricity? Well, we are going to store it. And where are we going to store it? One of the places to store it is in the batteries of fleets of vehicles. Who has one of the biggest fleets in America? The Postal Service. A lot of the vehicles in their fleet are like 25, even 30 years old. We have all of these new vehicles coming to the market that are far more energy efficient to replace those old and in some cases dilapidated fleet vehicles in the Postal Service. The new vehicles, with their batteries, can literally be a place to receive the electricity generated on a windy day in the Atlantic, out in the Outer Continental Shelf, to store that electricity and, when needed, put it back out on the grid, the electric grid, to provide energy as needed across the Northeast and mid-Atlantic part of our Nation. That is an idea that is sort of out there, but we need to be thinking boldly, and the Postal Service needs to be doing that. I think one of the better pieces of our amendment--and this came from some of the more progressive members of the Democratic Party here in the Senate and kind of joined up with some of the more conservative folks on the Republican side--but the idea is that the Postal Service needs to be more entrepreneurial. They need to be more innovative. When they come up with good ideas for making money, including the idea we talked about at lunch in the caucus we had today--how about vote by mail? In two States today--Oregon and Washington--they vote by mail. And what does that do to voter turnout? I think we were told by Senator Cantwell that in her State last year--2 years ago in the election, they had 72-percent voter turnout. This year they are expecting 84 percent voter turnout. I mean, this is a country in which we are lucky to have 50 percent of the people who are eligible actually turn out to vote. And we can see what vote by mail can do in those two States. They could be laboratories of democracy for our Nation, encourage voter turnout, maybe do it in a more cost-effective way and-- get this--provide new sources of revenue, a great source of revenue for the Postal Service. That is the sort of thing we need to kind in mind. I don't think there is any one silver bullet, but I like to say there are a lot of silver BBs, and some of them are pretty big, and those might be among them. There are ideas we have not even thought of yet that we ought to do. Let me just say--and I am getting fairly close to the end--that I don't mean to suggest that what the managers' amendment--the underlying bill was reported out of committee by about a 9-to-1 vote. The managers' amendment, crafted by Senators Lieberman, Collins, Brown, and myself, is not perfect. Very few things associated with my name have ever been perfect. But I will say this. One of my core values--some of you have heard me say this maybe too many times--if it is not perfect, make it better. If it is not perfect, make it better. And we have the opportunity to take what we believe is a managers' amendment which is an improvement over the original bill--we have the opportunity to make it better. I do not think in this case, they are not just Republican ideas, they are not just Democratic ideas, they are not liberal ideas, they are not conservative ideas, they are just better ideas. And my hope is that Members will have the opportunity in the days this week, in the days to come, to come to this floor and to offer their better ideas. I would plead with our colleagues, don't just come to the floor and offer amendments that have absolutely nothing to do with the Postal Service. Please come to the floor to offer amendments that can help make this bill better with respect to ensuring that we have a Postal Service that is viable and solvent in the 21st century, that can meet our communications needs for individuals, for families, and for businesses. We are not going through a fire drill here; this is an emergency. This is an emergency. It is a huge challenge, but it is also an opportunity to get it right this time and hopefully, with a growing economy, to maybe have a little bit of the wind to our backs. We have to pass a bill. My hope is we can pass a bill with bipartisan support that is good underlying public policy so that when we end up in 2016, the Postal Service won't be running daily losses of $22 million a day as they are today, that the Postal Service will have had an opportunity to use this refund they are owed by the Federal Employees Retirement System--$12 billion--to pay down much of their debt, maybe use a little bit of that money to help incentivize some of the 125,000 Postal Service employees who are eligible to retire to go ahead and retire. We can do this in a way--I know a bunch of our colleagues are concerned. We hear it--Senator Lieberman and I, Senators Collins and Brown--from our colleagues already. They are concerned about rural post offices. Believe it or not, we have some of those in Delaware. We have some of those in Connecticut and certainly in Maine, even some in Massachusetts. I think we have actually come up with a pretty good approach. And we appreciate very much the input of people such as Jon Tester from Montana and Jerry Moran from Kansas, those Senators--one a Democrat, one a Republican--to try to give us a better idea on how to move forward on the post offices. Let me just close with this. There are 33,000 post offices in America, in communities across the country. A year or so ago, the Postal Service--the Postmaster General met with us and our committee, and he said: We have 3,700 of those post offices under review that we think maybe should be closed--3,700. There were at the time about 500 mail-processing centers across the country that the post office had for processing mail, and he said: We would like to close about 300 of them. We would like to change the standards for delivery for mail from 1 to 3 days to maybe 2 to 3 days. Some were afraid it was going to slip from 2 to 3, to 2 to 4, even worse. Where we have ended in this managers' amendment--I would say to folks, my colleagues who are concerned about the impact that will have on their rural post offices or their mail-processing centers, here is where we have ended. The Postal Service has pretty much backed off and said: We are not that much interested in closing 3,700 post offices or 2,700 or 1,700 post offices. What they really would like to do is this, and I think it is a smarter, actually more cost-effective approach, more humane approach, and that is to say to communities across America: We have a post office--or maybe the postmaster is making $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year and the post office is selling like $15,000 or $20,000 worth of stamps. Rather than close that post office, provide that community with a menu of options. The menu of options would be to maybe keep the post office open; say to the postmaster there who is eligible to retire: We would like to incentivize you to retire. Here is a $25,000 bonus if you will go ahead and retire. You can retire, receive your pension, be eligible for benefits as a postal retiree, and come back and work on a part-time basis and run that post office for 2 hours a day, 4 hours a day, 6 hours a day, whatever the community feels meets their needs, morning or afternoon, midafternoon, evening. And that retired postmaster can--that money they collect, they keep. They do not have to reduce their pension. That is just extra money they can make for continuing to provide the service. We still have the post office there. The flag still flies in front of it. That is one option. Another option might be, if the folks in the community want it, to put that post office in a supermarket. One of the supermarkets that are close to my house in Delaware--they have a supermarket, they have a pharmacy, and they have a bank. It turns out that one of our major national chains of pharmacies, Walgreens--I was up visiting their headquarters, their offices up in Chicago--I do not know if Chairman Lieberman has been there, but the pharmacy of the future--they took me to a couple of them--has a beautiful pharmacy. Part of it is a post office. So you can see in places across the country whether it might make sense to consolidate the post office in like a Walgreens or some other kind of pharmacy or convenience store. It might make sense to-- say you have a small town and they have like a townhall, that kind of thing. How about consolidating those buildings together with the post office? We have even heard of an idea like creating kind of an Internet cafe in places where they do not have broadband and see if we can't have in rural post offices--where folks who live in that community, in that area, do not have broadband access, maybe have it at the post office. There are all kinds of ideas out there. You know, on the mail-processing side, instead of closing 500 mail- processing centers across the country, the Postmaster General has come to us. We worked to maintain--not to go from 1- to 3-day service--from that to a 2- to 3-day service or 2- to 4-day service, but to maintain kind of like a 1- to 3-day service--1 with an asterisk: The 1-day service would be overnight service, next-day service in communities like if they are in the same metropolitan area. They were still getting next-day service. Outside of that metropolitan area, they might. But in most cases it would be 2-day service, and in no case would it be worse than 3-day service. By going to the modified service standard delivery, the Postal Service would have to close 500 mail processing centers. It probably would be able to close 150 and be able to offer incentives to employees to retire and they could migrate to other jobs within the Postal Service. But I think it maybe would be a smarter way to move this large, old, but still germane, relevant Postal Service into the 21st century. I will close with this: This is not the time to kick the can down the road. I have no interest in doing that. I know Senator Lieberman and Senator Brown and Senator Collins have no interest in doing that. This is the time to fix the problem. I would like to think we are smart enough in the Senate to fix this; that we are smart enough to work with the House, with our staffs, a lot of good people--the folks at the Postal Service who work there, the unions, the customers, and a lot of people in businesses all over the country together working on this. I think we are smart enough to figure out how to solve this. We need to do that. Last thought: During the recess I mentioned to my colleagues and the Presiding Officer and Senator Lieberman during our caucus lunch, I said: I don't know what you guys did over the Easter recess, but I covered Delaware. I love to do it. I go back there every night, but it is a great joy to reconnect with everybody. I also spent some time on the phone and meeting with folks in businesses in Delaware and outside of Delaware who usually rely on the Postal Service. Nationwide there are 7 million to 8 million people whose jobs are integrated or part of or facilitated by our Postal Service--7 to 8 million jobs. We are coming out of the worst recession since before I was born--before we were born. We need to get out of it. One of the best ways to do that is to provide certainty and predictability for a lot of businesses. One way to do that is to pass postal reform legislation that finishes the job we started 5, 6 years ago. We can do that. We need to do that. I am encouraged that we will do that. I thank the chairman of the committee, whom I love working with--I think we all do--for giving me a chance to work with him on this issue and for providing the great leadership he always does. Also, I say to Susan Collins who has just left the floor, it is a real privilege to work with her. Finally, we are blessed with wonderful staffs, wonderful people, as Senator Lieberman knows, John Kilvington and others who are part of my staff, and Michael and the team who are part of Senator Lieberman's staff, and Kate who works with Senator Collins. They have done great, hard work. We are privileged to be able to work with them. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Eight million.

Mr. CARPER. Madam President, I want to switch gears and talk a little about gas prices. Madam President, I don't know what kind of vehicle you drive most of your miles in while in New Hampshire. The vehicle I drive most of my miles in, and have been driving in Delaware for 11 years now, is a Town and Country Chrysler minivan. When I stepped down as Governor in 2001, my old Chevrolet Corsica was about 12 or 13 years old, and my wife said: Don't you think it is about time to get something new? So I took my oldest son Christopher, who was about 12 at the time, and I said: Let's go out and shop for a new car. I thought it would be a man thing, a dad and son thing. So we went out and drove Porsches, we drove Ferraris, and we bought a 2001 Chrysler Town and Country minivan, which he laments to this day. Anyway, fast-forward 11 years, and we had a meeting yesterday morning, as you know, with the CEO of Chrysler-Fiat, and I mentioned at the meeting that we bought this vehicle when I stepped down as Governor, and 11 years later--later this week--the odometer will reflect the numbers 300,000 and counting. It will have over 300,000 miles. We are going to go over 300,000 miles. So it was built to last. What a great car, built in this country, a terrific vehicle. But when I stopped and got gas last weekend, we paid about $3.81, and the prices continue to go up--mostly up, sometimes down, and then back up again. What I would like to do is talk a little about high gas prices and how it puts pressure on all budgets, including the budget of my own family. We drive that vehicle a whole lot and, hopefully, will drive it a few more miles before it is ready do sit more in the driveway and take a rest. I want to begin by acknowledging that I go home just about every night and talk to people literally almost every day, morning or evening, in Delaware. I will cover the State this weekend and for the next week or two during our recess, so I hear a lot directly from the folks I am privileged to represent about their concerns about gas prices at the pump and the kind of pressure it puts on the budgets within their own families. I understand gas prices are at their peak. Actually, they have been higher than this. I think they were a little over 4 bucks during part of the Bush administration, but this is as high as they have been for some time. It puts a strain on American families and American businesses, and it threatens to impede or slow down our economic recovery, which is actually moving at a pretty good pace. Unfortunately, the solution is not as simple as some would suggest. If it were, we would not be having this discussion every year or two around the same time. I am asked sometimes: Why don't we just drill more in this country? Some assume high gas prices at the pump must mean we have slowed down or stopped drilling at home. Many are surprised by the answer, and the answer is we are drilling more in America. In fact, I believe--correct me if I am wrong--but we are drilling more in this country than we have for at least the last 8 years. Because we are drilling more, the United States is now a net oil exporter, not a net oil importer. This country, which for years we said we are the Saudi Arabia of coal, is now on its way to becoming the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. As we have opened for drilling additional acres onshore, offshore, off Alaska, and the gulf, we are in a position to become a net oil exporter. The Obama administration has made available millions of acres for oil and gas exploration in the last year or two, approving more than 400 drilling permits since the new safety standards were put in place. These safety standards, we may recall, were implemented to make sure we didn't have a repeat oilspill disaster such as the BP oilspill that occurred almost 2 years ago today. We have been joined on the floor by Senator Nelson of Florida, who remembers all too well the oil that washed up in places such as Pensacola, where I did basic training on my way to becoming a naval flight officer. But since we got that straightened out and put in place tighter restrictions for drilling safeguards, 400 or so new drilling permits just since then have been put in place with stronger safety standards. As a result, we have a record number of oil rigs operating right now, more working oil and gas rigs than the rest of the world combined. Let me say that again. With the changes that have been made, the increases in permitting in a year or two, we now have a record number of oil rigs operating right now, more working oil and gas rigs than the rest of the world combined--combined. Yet of the millions of acres our government has allowed for oil and gas development, only 25 percent of those acres are being used for production. We have a chart that demonstrates that rather graphically. If you will, think of all this as the millions of acres that are available for oil and gas development in this country. Of all these in the orange, we have the percentage that are producing acres, that actually have permits and the oil and gas companies could be drilling; 25 percent of these are producing acres and 75 percent of these are nonproducing acres. It is not because people are drilling and coming up with dry holes; it is because, in many cases, they are not drilling. Keep that picture in mind. You know the old saying, a picture is worth a thousand words. This is worth at least 500, maybe even more than that.

Mr. CARPER. I would be happy to yield.

Mr. CARPER. Amen.

Mr. CARPER. If my friend would yield to me for one more minute, a lot of people go out this time of year and they buy new cars, trucks, and vans. Traditionally the spring is when people shop for vehicles. Go back a couple of years, to 2007. In 2007 we sold 16 million cars, trucks, and vans in this country. In 2009, as we had fallen into the great recession, car sales and truck sales fell to 9 million units; from 16 million to 9 million in less than 24 months. That has changed now. We are on our way. The CEO of Chrysler was here yesterday and said they are on their way to record profits. They paid back the rest of the money we invested in them as taxpayers. But people are starting to buy vehicles again. The average life of vehicles people own in this country is 11 years, like my Chrysler Town and Country minivan. But this is the time people will start to trade in vehicles or buy something more energy efficient. Unlike 5 years ago, people can go into a Ford, Chrysler, GM dealership, and foreign labels as well, and buy vehicles that get 30, 35, 40 miles per gallon and more. And finally, the availability of credit has come back. I say to people who have that ability, thinking about trading and trading up, this is a great time to do it--great vehicles, great quality and much better efficiency, and that is part of the solution as well.

Mr. CARPER. Or simple.

Mr. CARPER. Just in the gulf?

Mr. CARPER. Really.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Madam President, I appreciate the opportunity to speak. I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. CARPER. Madam President, I feel compelled to say a word on the heels of our colleague from Alabama, whom I salute as he heads off into the setting Sun. I wish him well and to have a good break. When I was in the Navy during the Vietnam war, when we weren't flying a lot of missions off the coast of Cambodia and Vietnam, we flew into a lot of other countries, including Japan. I have always had an interest in Japan in terms of the way they provide health care. One thing that intrigues me about that is that they spend half as much money for health care as we do. They spend 8 percent of gross domestic product. We spend 16 percent of gross domestic product. They get better outcomes--everything from longer life expectancy to lower rates of infant mortality--and they cover everybody. They cover everybody. It is not socialized medicine. They have a private health care delivery system and private health insurance companies as well as we do, but they get a better result for about half the money we do, and we have to compete with them. It is not a fair competition. We have our businesses that are competing directly with the Japanese and, frankly, with other countries as well. But when they are spending half as much money for health care, and we are trying to compete our businesses against theirs, it is not a fair fight. It is like having one arm tied behind our back. For years, Presidents, Members of Congress--Democrat and Republican-- have talked about this challenge--the fact we spend so much more money for health care than the rest of the world, and we don't get better results and, in a lot of cases, we get worse results and we don't cover everybody. We have a lot of people uncovered. That is not smart. For years, for decades, nobody took it on. They tried during the Clinton administration but gave up during that course. They didn't have the kind of bipartisan support that is needed. Frankly, we didn't have the bipartisan support I would like to have had on health care reform when we took it up during the earlier part of this current administration. A lot of people have focused on the individual mandate as being constitutional or unconstitutional. I am not a lawyer. I don't pretend to be an expert on that stuff. I studied a little economics when I was a Navy ROTC midshipman at Ohio State. When I got out of the Navy and moved to Delaware to get an MBA under the GI bill, I studied some more economics and all, but I don't pretend to be a lawyer. But I do know this: Health insurance companies have said to all of us--Democrats, Republicans, Presidents, now and in the past--look, if you expect us to provide health insurance for folks with preexisting conditions, you have to make sure the pool of people we have to cover includes not just people who have preexisting conditions--not just people who are sick or have illnesses or conditions that are expensive to treat--you have to make sure we have a pool of people to insure that includes some healthy people. The way some countries deal with this is they mandate for everybody to have coverage. We didn't want to do that. We didn't want to mandate that everybody have coverage, but we wanted to incentivize people, including healthier people--including healthier young people the ages of my sons who are in their early twenties--to make sure at least some of those young men and women end up in that pool, so healthy people end up in that pool. So part of the request from the health insurance industry, in return for doing away with preexisting conditions and basically screening out sick people, saying they are not going to provide coverage for them, was to make sure a lot of healthier people ended up being in that health insurance pool. The way we decided to do it in the health care bill, in the law rather than just mandate people get coverage, was to incentivize them. If they choose not to, that is their business. If they happen to be poor, we will help them pay down their cost for health care. But if they are not poor, and they have the financial means, we would like for them to get coverage. We are not going to mandate it, but the first year we have the means to be able to have coverage and they choose not to, there will be a fine or a penalty of some kind--maybe a couple hundred bucks, and that will increase not to $1,000 or $2,000, but it will go up several hundred dollars in order to encourage people to get the coverage. At the end of the day, some people will say: I am paying $600-- whatever it ends up being. Maybe instead of paying this fee I should just go ahead and get some health insurance coverage. The idea is to provide some plans that are reasonably affordable so folks can take advantage of them. So that is the issue of the mandate. The Supreme Court will decide whether under the commerce clause of the Constitution that just as we compel people to pay into Social Security, it can be a similar kind of compunction to say we would like people to get covered for health care, but in this case not to mandate it, as we do with Social Security. So we will see how it works out in the Supreme Court. They heard arguments this week, and I am sure the arguments will continue on the air waves, at townhall meetings, and on television for months to come and maybe beyond that. Who knows. But the heart and soul of the health care reform legislation has less to do with mandates for me than it does with how to get better health care outcomes for less money. For me, that is it--better health care outcomes for less money. We don't have to look at Japan and other countries to figure that out. All we have to do is look at places such as Minnesota's Mayo Clinic, in Ohio the Cleveland Clinic, Pennsylvania's health care delivery system, which is called Geisinger, Utah's Intermountain Healthcare, and California's Kaiser Permanente. What do they have in common? They get better health care outcomes for tens of millions of people for less money than most other health care delivery systems in this country. Better results for less money. How do they do it? Well, they have figured out what works, and they do more of that. They figured out what doesn't work to get better health care outcomes for less money, and they do less of that. They have moved away from what we call a fee-for-service approach to health care. People get sick, they go see a doctor, they go see a nurse. They have visits and get shots or they get lab tests done or get x-rays or MRIs. We treat people when they get sick. For years, that is the way we have done health care in this country, including Medicare and Medicaid. Much smarter ideas have come out of Cleveland's clinic, and they have a huge health care clinic in northern Ohio, the Mayo Clinic, Geisinger in Pennsylvania, Intermountain in Utah, and Kaiser Permanente mostly in California. Here is what they do. They do not just incentivize health care providers--doctors, nurses, and hospitals--to work on people when they are sick. Their incentive works entirely different. What they do in those places is focus on how to keep people healthy, not just how to incentivize the doctors, hospitals, and nurses to keep people healthy, but how do we incentivize the patient, the person whose health is at stake, how do we incentivize them to take personal responsibility for their own health care. In my mind that is the heart and soul of the health care reform right there. Among the smart things that work are large purchasing pools. We have an 8-million-person pool for us that we are part of. Members of Congress, our staffs, all Federal employees, Federal retirees, and our dependents are part of a huge purchasing pool called the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan. It is approximately 8 million people. We don't have 8 million Federal employees, but we have 8 million people when we add in retirees and dependents and so forth. We are part of this big health care purchasing pool. We get lower prices. It is not free. We pay about 28 percent of the cost of our premiums as Federal employees and servants, if you will, to people in our respective States, and our employers, the taxpayers, pay the other 72 percent or so. But what we are going to do is provide the opportunity for individuals, for families, for businesses--small and midsize businesses--all over the country, in less than 24 months, to be able to join a similar kind of purchasing pool. We are going to start them, and every State--New Hampshire, Delaware, Alabama, and every other State-- will have the opportunity to have their own large purchasing pool to be able to take advantage of lower administrative costs. The administrative costs for our Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan is $3 out of every $100 of the cost of the premium. So $3 out of every $100 of premium costs goes for administration. In most plans for individuals, for families and small businesses, it is more like 20 or 30 percent. So 3 percent for our large purchasing pool, and we will have those available, in fact, in every State. The other thing we have going for us in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan is we use private health insurance plans. We are not using socialized medicine or stuff like that. The private health insurance plans in the country can sign up and say they want to be able to offer their plans to the folks who are Federal employees with dependents, to Federal retirees, and so we can choose among them. So there is a lot of competition between those health insurance companies, and we get the benefit from that competition. It drives down cost. Competition helps drive down cost and improves the range of opportunities. The other thing I like about the law is that, for the most part, insurance can't be sold across State lines. But we make an exception. I will use Delaware as an example. We are boundaried on the west by Maryland, to the north by Pennsylvania, and to the east by New Jersey. When we establish our own health insurance pool in 2014, we will have about 900,000 people. So we will have a huge health insurance pool, but we are sure not going to have 8 million people. But what we will have under the law is the opportunity to create an interstate compact between Maryland or Delaware or Delaware and Pennsylvania or Delaware and New Jersey or maybe all of the above and have a multistate purchasing pool or exchange. The great thing about this approach is we, No. 1, will have a bigger pool, which will drive down administrative costs and increase the competition. The health care that would be available in Delaware plans could be offered in Maryland, could be offered in Pennsylvania or offered in New Jersey. So we would have a larger purchasing pool, more competition, and a better deal for the consumer. I think that is another part of the heart and soul. So two things, and I will close on this and then turn to what I came to the floor to talk about. But I was inspired by my friend from Alabama. In terms of the key reforms in the health care legislation, No. 1, move away from fee-for-service--just paying for treating people when they are sick. Migrate away from that. We still need to treat people when they are sick, but migrate to a system like we have at Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, Geisinger, Intermountain Health, and Kaiser Permanente where they focus on how we keep people well. Focus on prevention and wellness and focus on treating people in a coordinated fashion as a team, not as individual providers. Very smart. The other key element is this idea of creating these large purchasing pools and trying to incentivize people to be part of the health care delivery system by taking better care of themselves. So those are the two keys.