Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, first of all, the Senator from Connecticut makes a great point. This is not about regionalization. This is about paying for something. The Senator from Maine is absolutely right. It was in the act we passed this last fall. But it was in there for next year. It was advance funding so we would pay for the money for next year. So if in fact we take this money now and move it out of next year, we are going to have to come up with another $1 billion. You can play the games with the numbers all you want, but the fact is, we are going to have to come up with another $1 billion. The other thing I point out, we are not in great financial shape. We added half a trillion dollars. I was one of the few Republicans who did not vote with the rest of my side in terms of the tax cuts this last time through. I have been straightforward in addressing the financial problems our country had. I ask Members to look at this chart put out by NOAA that says, in fact, for every area seeking today, they are either above normal or much above normal in terms of their temperatures this year. My poor State, Oklahoma, is red hot. It was 92 degrees yesterday in Oklahoma. We set an all-time record. We had 20 or 30 days over 100 this past summer. I am not debating whether we should help people. I am debating can we help people without killing our children. The offer was made several times to the people offering this amendment: We will help you find offsets to pay for this so we do not take it from future generations. That was rejected, straightforward. The fact is, we have to be responsible. We are going to have to come to a point in time where we will have to make a hard choice. If we do not, here is what will happen. The international financial community is going to do it for us. Interest rates are going to go sky high. The value of the dollar will fall through the floor. Talk about leaving a heritage to our children. We will leave a heritage of poverty to our children. It is time for us to make the hard decision. Let's support this point of order because it is right. If we do not support this point of order, the budget does not mean anything, nor do the budget rules mean anything, nor do the appropriations categories mean anything. I yield back the remainder of our time, and I call for a vote.

Mr. COBURN. I yield 2 minutes to the Senator from Mississippi.

Mr. COBURN. I yield 2 minutes to the Senator from Alabama.

Mr. COBURN. How much time remains?

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, how much time do we have remaining?

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, the pending bill, S. 2320, offered by the Senator from Maine, increases direct spending in excess of the allocation to the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Therefore, I raise a point of order against the bill, pursuant to section 302(f) of the Congressional Budget Act.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I want to speak a few minutes after hearing the Senator from Michigan. I thought, first of all, her accusations have to be answered. First of all, she made a fairly serious charge on a friend of mine, the Congressman from Pennsylvania, Bucks County, Jim Greenwood, and implied that not only was his vote and his work in trying to secure prescription drugs for seniors part of a deal with the pharmaceutical industry, which I think there is no foundation for whatever, and I believe it also probably is in very poor taste for this Senate to start hanging out people who have left and demeaning their name on the basis of whom they go to work for. If we counted on both sides, we would find plenty of ammunition to do that. I think that is probably not the decorum of the Senate. I hope we will not hear that again. I have lots of differences with former Congressman Greenwood in terms of social issues, but I have always found him to be an honorable man, above board and straightforward in both his intellect and the way he carried himself. To disadvantage his reputation the way that was done I find unconscionable. No. 2, the Senator from Michigan did run a campaign on lowering prescription drugs. Her campaign was increased competition and reimportation, as well as Government control of every aspect of the pharmaceutical industry to lower the prices. The program this country has I would not have supported. I do not believe it is the Government's role for us to supply to seniors in this country, but this program will supply drugs at half the cost of what most seniors who have been paying for their prescription drugs pay. To scare seniors into thinking they have a prescription drug program and they will not have one in 2 months or 2 weeks or 6 months is the type of tactic that undermines the integrity of this Senate and is one of the reasons people in this country are losing confidence in elected representatives. Quite frankly, the difference is going to be a lot of seniors today are having medicines they would not otherwise have. I don't like it, but it is understandable, and we must recognize any program of this magnitude, when it starts, is going to have trouble. They are having far less problems now. The vast majority of people and the vast majority of pharmacists are not having a problem with the program. It will still have some bugs for the next couple of months. It will get better every month. The goal of the program was to make sure those people who were choosing between food and medicine did not have to make that choice. Even though I'm not a fan of this program, it is accomplishing its goals. To scare seniors with this tactic, to try to scare seniors into thinking something they have now will go away, is unconscionable and is beyond the decorum of the Senate. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate Change, and Nuclear Safety be authorized to hold a hearing February 9, 2006, at 9:30 a.m. on the impact of clean air regulations on natural gas prices.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President. I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be authorized to meet on Thursday, February 9, 2006, at 10 a.m., on TSA and Passenger Screening.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the committee on energy and natural resources be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, February 9 at 9:30 a.m. The purpose of this hearing is to consider the President's proposed budget for FY 2007 for the Department of Energy.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be authorized to meet during the session on Thursday, February 9, 2006, at 10 a.m., in 215 Dirksen Senate Office Building, to hear testimony on ``The President's Fiscal Year 2007 Budget Proposal''.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Select Committee on Intelligence be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 9, 2006, at 10:30 a.m. to hold a closed hearing.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be authorized to meet on Thursday, February 9, 2006, at 10 a.m. for a hearing titled, ``Hurricane Katrina: The Defense Department's Role in the Response.''

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions be authorized to hold a hearing during the session of the Senate on Thursday, February 9, 2006, at 10 a.m. in SD-106.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, February 9, 2006, at 9:30 a.m. to hold a hearing on New Initiatives in Cooperative Threat Reduction.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I want to spend a few minutes talking about the bill. There is one thing that is an absolute certainty: There are a ton of people in this country who have bad diseases from asbestos who aren't getting treatment and aren't getting cared for. That is what certainty is. You can bet on that, that the problem is made worse because the trial bar is clogging the courts with cases of people who do not have diseases from asbestos, claiming they do. That is one of the reasons the courts want reform. Having been on the Judiciary Committee during the process of this and voting this bill out of committee, even though I have significant reservations about this bill. Let me talk a couple of minutes about that. It doesn't matter to me what the Congressional Budget Office says because their track record in estimating everything from the cost of Medicare to the benefits in capital gains taxes is usually 180 degrees off what actually happens. Having CBO's estimate about what is going to happen with this trust fund I don't think lends any credence or undermines it one way or the other. Because I think they do not know, and I don't think anybody can know. There is a second problem in this bill; that is, the problem we face today is this bill will allow people who do not have injury from asbestos to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars for an asbestos claim when they do not have it. That deals with the medical criteria. It will allow smokers who have some exposure to asbestos who develop lung cancer--smoking is the No. 1 cause of lung cancer--who have no evidence of significant disease caused by asbestos causing their lung cancer to be compensated for a disease that they themselves were responsible for by smoking tobacco products. The intended purpose of the FAIR Act is to compensate those who are truly sick from asbestos exposure, without destroying the companies and jobs and opportunities in the future. My worry with this bill is the defendants and the plaintiffs will end up back in the tort system in a very short period of time. I am rising today to support Senator Cornyn's alternative, the Asbestos and Silica Claims Priorities Act. I am doing that because I think it addresses the real problem. If you look at the abuse in the courts and if you look at what is wrong with this bill, it has to do with putting people in court who do not have disease from asbestos. The Cornyn Amendment has a very defined medical criteria which the courts will have to follow when making judgments about who is eligible to file a claim on this bill. A major reason the FAIR Act won't have enough money--and the major reason people can attack the FAIR Act in terms of the amount of the trust fund--is because the medical criteria is going allow too many people to be in the process who do not have disease related to asbestos. There have not been significant changes in the medical criteria associated with this bill. I tried to amend this in committee. I could not win. I have a significantly different level of knowledge on the committee than the rest of the members in terms of medical knowledge, having continued to be a practicing physician, and I know it is going to be very difficult to explain all those medical issues to Members of this body to try to get them changed. That is why I think Senator Cornyn's approach is a better alternative. We have to create a fair system in the courts for allowing those who are truly sick from asbestos exposure to seek compensation from those who are truly responsible, rather than creating another Federal bureaucracy that is likely to fail. More than 73 companies have already gone bankrupt, and many others have suffered a great deal of financial difficulty, not because many sick people have sought compensation for their injuries but because smart trial lawyers have learned to game the system and file phony claims. These aren't faceless companies with unlimited resources. And the people who are truly injured are not faceless people who didn't contribute something good to the companies they worked for. The businesses, by and large, are ready and willing to right the past wrongs. The question is, Should they be paying when nobody is injured? With the medical criteria in this bill today, a third of the claims, in my estimation, will be paid to people--$50 billion will be paid to people--who will file under the medical criteria, as written, who have no injury whatsoever from asbestos but yet these companies will be paying them for a perceived injury from asbestos. Ninety percent of the claimants out there in the courts today who have filed claims that allege to have impairment from asbestos have no impairment. If you read the press stories about how the game has been played, how the B-Readers have falsely read, for payments from trial lawyer organizations, the chest x-rays, and the pulmonary function tests have been manipulated illegally to claim benefits from some of these companies, you can see we cannot have loose medical criteria and ever expect to have this trust fund survive. The other thing to mention--it is not mentioned much--there is a background caseload in this country of mesothelioma, cancer of the lining of the lung, of about 800 people a year. If there had never been any asbestos, 800 people a year would develop mesothelioma. At my age, and for most people somewhat younger who went to any public school where the ceiling tiles had asbestos components, we can qualify under this bill not because asbestos truly caused it. There is no causal effect in that low an exposure. There is no particle load count at all in terms of measuring exposure, which is what we know is important. A small amount of asbestos exposure is harmless, a large amount of asbestos exposure is terribly disease causing. When we don't look at load factors, we are going to have medical criteria that make people eligible who are truly not diseased from asbestos. For example, there are 174,000 new cases each year in this country of lung cancer. This is kind of a wordy chart. I don't think it is going to project well. But the important thing about that is they may have no true, actual asbestos exposure but could claim under this system asbestos exposure from environmental background exposure. Most of these people have lung cancer because they are smokers, and they are going to have lung impairment, and they are going to meet some of the requirements under the medical criteria but have no true asbestos exposure. If you look at that, and take 10 percent of the cases based on lung cancers alone, you are talking $5 billion a year. Just lung cancer alone times 30 years, at $5 billion a year, is more than the trust fund has in it. I will guarantee we will see an approach for compensation by anybody who has ever had any exposure or been around asbestos, and they will qualify to a certain extent more or less under this bill. What if it is 5 percent? You are still talking $78 billion. The numbers are massive. If you are going to have a trust fund, you are going to have to have adequate medical criteria that truly reward those people and compensate those people who are truly injured. If you have good medical criteria, the trust fund system will work. If you do not have good medical criteria, if you have very loose medical criteria, the trust fund will fail. We will not have solved the problem. Either we have to get away from a trust fund program and design medical criteria the courts will use, or we have to keep a trust fund program and tighten up the medical criteria in this bill. The bill as written today, I believe, will fail. It will fail because it will be overwhelmed with claims against this trust fund by people who do not have asbestos-related true disease. I will give a couple of examples. Nonmalignant level 2 under the fund allows individuals who have obstructive pulmonary disease--people with emphysema, people with chronic bronchitis--to receive compensation by the fund even when they do not have restrictive pulmonary diseases. That is what asbestos causes, a restrictive disease, not an obstructive disease. Under the criteria written in this bill, smokers who have had exposure to asbestos, who do not have a disease related to asbestos, will be compensated under this bill. Consequently this fund allows a smoker--the No. 1 cause of obstructive airway disease, not asbestos, but smoking--asbestos causes restrictive lung disease--to receive compensation. That cannot work with the fund as we see it today. This fund also will compensate people for cancers where there is no scientific evidence whatever that their cancers are caused by asbestos. For example, for colorectal cancer, there are 130,000 cases of colon cancer a year. There are tons of scientific studies that show there is no connection between that and asbestos, but we have this in the bill. It is dependent on an IOM study, but it should not be in the bill. If new science sometime later shows some connection between colorectal cancer, stomach cancer, or esophageal, laryngeal, and pharyngeal cancer, we can put it back. We are putting it in, when there is no science whatsoever--and the small studies on laryngeal and pharyngeal cancer that show some connection were not modified for smoking and alcohol use, the No. 1 and No. 2 causes. So it is not good science. Therefore, we have a large group. If you take lung cancers combined with all the other cancers and put them together and you say 10 percent of those who are coming through will try to go to the trust fund, you have $267 billion that will blow this thing wide open. This trust fund, with the medical criteria it has today, will not work. That is why having a bill that has specific medical criteria in it will work. Let me be clear why I support the Cornyn substitute. The Cornyn substitute does not shut anyone out of the courts. If you think you have asbestos exposure, and you want to sue, you can. But you will have to meet the medical criteria for it to be related to asbestos or silicosis. There is no unreasonable requirement; there is just upfront medical criteria that must be met to have application and that requirement must apply. It does not mean you cannot have your day in court. You can. You have to demonstrate your disease matches the medical criteria which are recognized medical criteria associated with asbestos disease. The other thing that is good about this bill is if you have had asbestos exposure and have no disease now, this does not cut you off from the future. If you develop disease that is truly related to asbestos, you will be able to have your day in court years--30, 40 years--down the road if, in fact, you develop impairment related to asbestos within this medical criteria that the medical community and the scientific community recognize is accurate. Under this substitute, as compared to the present bill, physicians will have to comply with strict scientifically sound requirements. There is no room for doctors and x-ray B readers to fudge the data under the Cornyn substitute. The substitute makes sense. The trust fund concept will work if we have good medical criteria. We do not, so it is not going to work. The answer is to keep people in the court system but define the medical criteria where they can win when they truly have a disease that is caused by asbestos, and they lose when they do not have a disease caused by asbestos. The science is not that hard. But we cannot take care of the trial lawyers and take care of all the executives who want this problem solved the way they want it. They want an answer now. The answer is, use what this country has used in the past: the judgment of courts based on sound criteria that cannot be manipulated. Then we will get this problem solved and the people who are suffering today, who cannot get into court because of false claims--hundreds of thousands of them by people who do not have asbestos-related illness--the people who are injured will get compensated. I thank Senator Cornyn for, first, his courage to offer a substitute. He is on the Judiciary Committee. We have a great chairman. He has done a lot of hard work on this. He has brought a bipartisan bill to the Senate. The bill will fail. It takes a great deal of courage on Senator Cornyn's part to offer a commonsense alternative to this. It is my hope that the many Members in this Senate will look at the trust fund with the medical criteria as set out today, and reject it as it is written. Either modify this bill or take the Cornyn substitute and put it in its stead. This is an issue we will spend a lot of time on. I know people are considering points of order against the legislation. In fairness to the Senate and also the public, if that is going to happen, they ought to do it so we do not continue to spend time. Part of the process around here is to make things not happen so you can have a political advantage. If people are going to offer a point of order, they ought to offer it. Let's go on to the next thing on the agenda for the American people. If they are not going to offer it, let's have a real debate, file cloture, get a vote on this bill and move on. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, as a member of the majority and sitting as the President of the Senate yesterday, I was able to hear several hours of debate on the nomination of Judge Sam Alito, Jr. I heard time and again dire predictions that Judge Alito is going to give the executive branch complete authority over our Government, including himself on the Supreme Court. Those who oppose him never mentioned one single case where Judge Alito ruled in favor of the President or expanded Executive power--not once. They think if they just keep repeating the same far-left smear--one dreamt up by far-left groups such as Ralph Neas' People for the American Way and Nan Aron's Alliance for Justice--the American people will fall for it. It is disturbing to me that those who oppose Sam Alito are taking their cues from people such as Nan Aron and the Alliance for Justice who, even before the hearings began, before we had any hearings whatsoever, bragged, ``You name it, we'll do it,'' to sink Judge Alito. I think the American people and their elected representatives would rather base their views on the lawyers and judges from across the political spectrum who had actually known Judge Alito. Former Third Circuit Judge Gibbons explained his faith in Judge Alito's ability to fairly judge cases in which the government is asserting its executive power. He said: ``The committee members should not think for a moment that I support Judge Alito's nomination because I am a dedicated defender of that administration. On the contrary, I and my firm have been litigating with that administration for a number of years over its treatment of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere, and we are certainly chagrined at the position that is being taken by the administration with respect to those detainees. I am confident, however, that as an able legal scholar and a fair-minded justice, he will give the arguments, legal and factual, that may be presented on behalf of our clients careful and thoughtful consideration without any predisposition in favor of the position of the executive branch.'' Defense lawyers who litigated against Judge Alito confirm that when Judge Alito was part of the executive branch, he had a modest view of its power. The New York Times reported that one defense attorney, Dan Ruhnke, said that Judge Alito lacked the ``cop mentality'' of many career prosecutors and was ``never a cheerleader for law enforcement.'' Another defense attorney, Drew Barry, said that Judge Alito was ``not a bloodthirsty United States attorney,'' and that he was ``a vigorous prosecutor who went after a wide variety of bad guys, but his reputation was not someone who would ask for the heaviest sentences.'' As a member of the Judiciary Committee and in my time in the Senate, this is a sorrowful time for me. The politics of personal destruction were all too evident in the Senate hearing and continue on the floor of this body. The ``guilt by association'' standard of those who oppose Sam Alito would disqualify anybody who would be nominated no matter who the President is. The idea that politics guides the Supreme Court nominations process in the Senate is new. The idea of the ``results only in my eyes qualification'' proves that those who challenge the integrity of Sam Alito require standards that they themselves could never live up to. To be critical is fair to the process of confirmation, but destruction and absolute mischaracterization of one's record the way we have seen reaffirms the lack of fairness and conscience of those who carry out such tactics. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, I spent 4 days listening, questioning, and watching--not only Sam Alito but all those who came to testify for him and those who came to testify against him. Here is what I observed--not as a lawyer, not as a Senator, but as a physician trained in the art of observation and the art of listening. Sam Alito is a man of high moral character. You do not hear the direct words challenging that, but you hear everything indirectly. He is also a man of intellectual brilliance, impressing everyone who comes in contact with him. He is a man of dedication to the law, to equal justice under the law. He is a man who has shown dedicated commitment to the things that are important in our country. He is a man who is completely sold out to one thing, and one thing only: His record and his life has demonstrated equal justice under the law. What I also observed was a great diversity of political background of those who support him, those who know him, those who have worked with him for the last 15 years, regardless of their political views, either liberal or conservative, regardless of their gender or their color, regardless of their view on abortion. Those who know him uniformly support him as a great jurist, a man of integrity and conscience, and one who is completely sold out to the idea that everyone in this country has equality under the law. Those who know him, those who testified, of all stripes, of all political persuasions, would and are challenging what we have been hearing on the floor by those who oppose him--the mischaracterization of his rulings, the mischaracterization of his beliefs, the mischaracterization of his actions. What I also observed, which concerns me even more, was that those who don't know him but have a political agenda to keep the Court activist and beyond its constitutional bounds oppose him. They do not know him. But what they do know is judicial activism, making law where none exits, which they put before a judiciary committed to equal justice under the law. That is why he is being opposed. Their greatest fear is the Court will return to a place where the Constitution, the statutes, and treaties are interpreted, but personal political agendas are left at the door. They fear the battles lost in the legislatures will no longer be carried out by judicial fiat. The former Soviet Union is the great example. They had a constitution but there was not equal justice under that constitution. During Chief Justice Roberts' opening statement to the Judiciary Committee, he referenced the fact that the most powerful entity in the world, the U.S. Government, deferred to the rule of law when the Court was convinced that a private client was right on the law and the Government was not. He referenced President Reagan's speeches about the Soviet Constitution and how it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people, but those rights were empty promises because that system did not have an independent judiciary to uphold the rule of law and enforce those rights. Roberts concluded: We do, because of the wisdom of our founders and the sacrifices of our heroes over the generations to make their vision a reality. Under our law, the mighty can be defeated by the meager. We heard yesterday the philosophy of those who oppose this great jurist. Let me quote it exactly because it is very dangerous. This quote is from the Senator from Rhode Island: . . . in truth the Supreme Court is the Constitution. If that is so, we are no longer a nation of laws but rather a nation of judges. That is not America. That is not freedom. That creates nine kings, the exact opposite of what our Founders intended. That is the very thing the American people rejected in the election of 2004. It was about judges. Finally, let's talk about the real issue that will cause most people to oppose him. They fear he may truly believe in liberty for all. That is their fear. Let me explain. Senator Kennedy had a very eloquent quote during the hearing. I would like to repeat it: America is noblest when it is just to all of its citizens in equal measure. America is freest when the rights and liberties of all are respected. America is strongest when we can all share fairly in its prosperity. And we need a court that will hold us true to these guiding principles today and into the future. But he did not mean ``all,'' he meant all those except the truly innocent and truly weak, the preborn child. Behind me are two pictures, one of a 26-week-old preterm infant in a neonatal IC unit, smaller than your hand; and the other picture is of a 26-week preborn child's face seen by ultrasound. The Declaration of Independence states: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness . . . So, America, ask yourself, how did we get to the point that the accidental killing of a 26-week unborn infant is a felony but taking of that same life by abortionists is legal? It is schizophrenic. Why should your liberty be based on your location inside the womb or out? The Court's jurisprudence on liberty and privacy interests is fundamentally flawed. They fear a correction in that flaw. To quote Robbie George of Princeton University: On what constitutional basis can we say that abortion is protected by ``due process'' but a right to assisted suicide . . . is not? Why is sodomy protected and prostitution unprotected? Why does the right to privacy not extend to polygamy or the use of recreational drugs? That is the kind of justice you have when you are a nation of judges and not law. Hopefully, someone of Sam Alito's character can steer the ship back to liberty for all, including the weakest and most innocent of all. Sam Alito was sold out to this document, the U.S. Constitution. He sold out to equal justice under the law. We need to speak truthfully about the opposition to him. We need to speak truthfully about the problems that have been created by an activist Court, and about the opposition to bring back and steer the ship to where the judges make judgment based on the Constitution, laws, and the treaties of this country, not their political philosophies. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. It is my understanding I am allotted 30 minutes. I would appreciate it if the Chair will let me know when I have 10 minutes left.

Mr. COBURN. I am happy to respond. As the Senator knows, on the conference report I am unable to offer amendments to eliminate those things. As the Senator well knows, also, I have started down a track where I am going to confront earmarks in the Senate or we are going to change that. With that, I offered on almost every appropriations bill what was called a sunshine amendment. That will be offered again in the House next year, and when we come to conferences, the ability to put in extraneous earmarks has got to be limited. I would, however, answer the Senator. Having had an oversight hearing on food stamps, we spend $1.6 billion in giving food stamps to people who do not qualify, who have more than the capability to take care of themselves. That is at a rate of 6.9 percent of every person who comes to attest for food stamps. So I believe the same thing can be said for the Food Stamp Program that we can say about Medicare and Medicaid, that we need to run a bill. We need to have better oversight. We need to check it so the fraud and abuse is out of it. As the Senator knows, I do not like earmarks because I believe they compromise the operation of good government. I think they buy votes when votes would not be there. I think the Government has grown because of the force of earmarks. So I am not aware of those specific things. I have not looked at it, to answer the Senator's question. But I am not happy they are there.

Mr. COBURN. I will.

Mr. COBURN. As the Senator knows, I believe we do a disservice to our country in the way we manipulate appropriations. I have been very vocal on that. But I also know it requires courage to stand up. And the American people are expecting that. They are going to see that this next year on the floor of the Senate. They are going to see a process by which every earmark is challenged in the bills that come before us and in the bills that come out of conference. What I do know--and I will finish my statement with this--is every economist and every elected official in this country, in this body, knows we are on an unsustainable course. Everybody knows that. Everybody is aware of that. Slowing the rate of growth of programs is compassionate. It is not lacking in compassion. If you do not slow the rate of growth, the very people you want to help will not be helped in the future. It is compassionate to keep your obligations. The way to keep your obligations is to change the programs so we pay for them out of the waste, fraud, and abuse that is involved. Most people who oppose this bill do not have a good alternative. They do not have a good alternative. The plan of never-ending expansion, unsustainable commitments, is the surest way to deny benefits and coverage to the very people we want to help in the long run. It is the only way we are going to be able to do it. We cannot continue to avoid the tough choices, and we cannot continue to avoid prioritizing and to grow government as we like. We cannot do what we have done in the past. The economic conditions will not allow it. The American people are not going to allow it. It is time, and it starts January first--it starts here with this bill, but it starts in the next session of Congress. It is going to be different. It is going to be difficult. But we are going to make the tough choices. With that, I yield my time.

Mr. COBURN. No, I do not.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, it is estimated that the fraud in New York State is $14 billion a year in Medicaid alone, of which the Federal Government pays two-thirds. In 5 years, solving the Medicaid fraud in New York would pay for every savings we have claimed in this whole bill for the next 5 years. Examples: St. Barnabas Health Care System agreed to settle $3.9 million in claims it overcharged Medicare; the Premium Health Care Group, $1.6 million for fraudulent wound-care claims; Michael Clemens, FBI special agent--$1 billion in Medicare fraud in south Florida alone. If you add up what is going on in Medicare and Medicaid, $37.5 billion a year at a minimum is fraud and yet we are trying to save a measly two-tenths of 1 percent in terms of slowing the growth. We haven't gone far enough. For somebody to reject this bill on the fact that we might not meet our obligations on Medicare and Medicaid-- the obligation isn't being met in terms of the oversight of these programs. I wish to spend a few moments talking about Medicaid fraud because it is important for people to know what a poor job we are doing in terms of oversight. Investigators estimate that as much as $18 billion worth of fraud occurs every year in New York alone on Medicaid. That is 5 percent of the total national spending on Medicaid in one State. One New York dentist, Dr. Dolly Rosen, claimed to have performed 991 procedures a day in 2003--991 procedures a day. The New York Medicaid Program consumes $44.5 billion. It is the most costly and generous in the Nation. In the article that I mentioned, James Mehmet, the retired chief investigator of Medicaid fraud in New York City, says that at least 10 percent of that was spent on fraudulent claims. We can, if we will do the oversight, accomplish what we need to in terms of doing the hard work, and the reductions in the expenditures won't have any impact on those who are truly needy for Medicare and Medicaid. What they will have an impact on is the criminals who are defrauding the American taxpayers by billing for services they have not performed. Other examples: Schering-Plough agreed to pay $335.5 million back to Medicaid this last year on the basis of fraud and an elevated billing process. The other thing estimated in New York, to build the case a little further, this same James Mehmet estimates as much as 30 percent of the budget--10 percent of it is fraud; 30 percent of it is abuse. If only half of that is inappropriate payments, we are up to 25 percent or up to $12 billion a year. Again, that is in one State. If we did the oversight, changed the rules, increased the punishment, held people accountable, every bit of savings in this bill could be paid for by Medicaid fraud in New York State alone. The question is, are we going to do what we need to do as a Senate, in the future? This bill is a first good step. It does a lot of things in terms of Medicaid, of creating a new Medicaid task force to go after fraud. We can do much more. To do less says we do not have the Christmas spirit, the spirit of giving, the spirit of sacrifice. I close on this one note. Most everyone listening out there has children and grandchildren. When you think about your grandchildren, what do you think? What is it you desire for them? What is it you want for them? When we hear the rhetoric--whether it is from the AARP or other groups--discounting the fact that we are going to slow down the growth in Medicare and Medicaid, and doing it not by taking away benefits for those who are truly needy but by doing the job we should be doing, when we do that, we give a gift to our children and to our grandchildren. I want opportunity for my grandchildren. I don't want them to be given anything. I want them to be given the gift of having an opportunity to attain it. I want to create an economic environment in the future that is sustainable. We are not sustainable today. I want every grandparent out there to think, do they want something for themselves today that is going to be paid for by their grandchildren 20 years from now? That is the real issue. That is the whole center of the entire debate in Congress today as we debate these contentious issues on how we spend or do not spend money. It is a simple question. Take now and charge it to your grandchildren. Take now and take away their opportunity for homeownership. Don't do anything now because it might not be politically popular, but undermine any future your children and grandchildren have. That is described as selfishness. That is the exact opposite of the spirit of giving. America is better than that. America's heritage is better than that. The American people are better than that. The problem is, we do not understand what is before the Senate, the obligations and the great responsibilities before us. We were sent here to make the hard choices. If you are listening today, listen to the rumble, the rumble that is out there in the American public. They want us to do the hard work of trimming the waste, of trimming the fraud, of trimming the abuse. They want us to eliminate our political earmarks to pay for the things that are necessary for this country--not pay for the things that get us reelected. There is a rumble. The rumble is real. The American people are paying attention that we should be doing the hard and heavy lifting of making the tough choices. This bill is a start. It should go much further. It should be $100 to $200 billion of reduced spending through fraud. If there is truly $35 billion a year in wasteful, fraudulent, improper payments for Medicare and Medicaid, that is $18 billion for Medicaid, $19 billion for Medicare. That is $37 billion a year. In 10 years we can save $370 billion. This chart I had up will show a better future for our children and our grandchildren. I ask the Members of the Senate to make sure we pass this bill. This is a start. It does not have anything to do with the tax cut. There is not going to be any tax cut unless we get spending under control. To not want to get spending under control means Members do not want to give an opportunity for advancement in the future for our children and grandchildren. Grandparents, this is about our grandkids. I have four grandchildren. I wish I had 20. But more than that, I wish for them the same opportunities that have been there for us, the same opportunities that the great generation fought for and gave us such wonderful blessings. The same opportunities for every veteran we have had who has fought and died and been injured and the sacrifices they have made--are they in vain if we do not have the same type of courage, the same type of commitment that those who serve our country in our armed services have? We can do no less than to start down the hard road of making difficult choices. This is the first one. They are going to get harder as we face the economic perils in front of us and the commitments we have made that right now we cannot keep. We either change them or the American people are going to change us.

Mr. COBURN. I am happy to yield.