Jimmy Duncan

Mr. DUNCAN

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, Judge Mayo Mashburn, a great Tennessee judge, recently passed away. Judge Mashburn presided as a Criminal Court judge in McMinn County and the rest of the 10 Judicial District over the past decade. While Judge Mashburn was described as a ``no nonsense'' judge who was to the point, he was also a man who went out of his way to help people. Judge Mashburn was one of the most respected citizens in east Tennessee and was loved by many people. A close friend, Dr. Bill Trotter was quoted in the Daily Post-Athenian saying, ``Our community will miss him both as a judge and a man who served the community in many ways.'' I request that a copy of the article which appeared in the Daily Post-Athenian be placed in the Record at this point. I would like to call it to the attention of my colleagues and other readers of the Record.

Mr. DUNCAN

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, last night, each Member had the August 12 issue of the New Republic delivered to our offices. As everyone knows, the New Republic is a very liberal magazine. Yet this magazine had a lead editorial entitled ``Sign It,'' urging the President to sign the welfare reform bill. The President earlier vetoed a welfare reform bill that passed the Senate 87 to 12. The current bill passed the Senate 74 to 24 and passed by a very large margin in this House. The New Republic says this bill ``will, finally, start the process by which America's underclass problem can be solved.'' The editors said the block grant structure of this bill ``is likely to point the way to ending the `culture of poverty.''' This is a really significant endorsement, Mr. Speaker. The New Republic ended its editorial with these words: The continuing agony of the underclass is destroying our cities, our race relations, our sense of civility, our faith in the possibilities of government. It's worth taking some risks to end it. I urge the President to sign the welfare reform bill.

Mr. DUNCAN

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate Woods Memorial Hospital in Etowah, TN, for being nationally recognized for its success in advanced technology as well as its overall business success. In addition to its national recognition, the hospital was honored with the Tennessee Quality Commitment Award and received accreditation with commendation from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations earlier this year. These are fine honors which the hospital should be very proud to receive. Despite the growing shortage of quality medical care in our rural communities, Woods Memorial Hospital remains dedicated to providing its patients with the best technology and high quality care from its professional staff. I am proud to have Woods Memorial Hospital in the 2d district of Tennessee. I request that a copy of the article ``Critical Care'' which appeared in Inc. Technology be placed in the Record at this point. I would like to call it to the attention of my colleagues and other readers of the Record. Critical Care--Case Study (By Joshua Macht) The gurney crashes through the emergency room doors. On it lies a woman, lips pale, fading in and out of consciousness. In the glare of harsh lights, a quickly gathering knot of doctors and nurses steps into crisis mode. Needles, probes, and paddles move in and out of hands; a blood-sample is raced to the hospital laboratory. Moments later the lab sends the test results electronically to the emergency room: the woman's blood pressure is low; she must be losing blood. Images from a pelvic ultrasound are quickly delivered to a radiologist. Around the corner, in the operating room, the surgeon prepares for the unscheduled morning performance. Before he scrubs, he dials a voice-mail box and retrieves a radiologist's interpretation of the ultrasound. The diagnosis: a ruptured fallopian tube and massive internal bleeding. The doctors suspect an ectopic pregnancy (an inseminated egg attaches to the wall of a fallopian tube instead of the uterus); the embryo has to be removed. Barely an hour and a half after the woman is rushed to the hospital, she's on the operating table; soon she's recovering in her hospital bed. A routine crisis for one of the nation's big-city, high- tech hospitals. Except for one thing. This scene is taking place in tiny Woods Memorial Hospital, a 72-bed non profit hospital in Etowah, Tenn., a rural community halfway between Chattanooga and Knoxville. Big changes are going on in health care, leaving hospitals across the country reeling from skyrocketing costs, a glut of beds, and all-out efforts by the government and the insurance industry to reduce treatment and reimbursement. Large urban hospitals, though they've felt the squeeze, are often able to weather the crisis because they've invested in sophisticated medical technologies that attract patients and in high- powered information systems that improve efficiency and manage costs. But smaller hospitals typically don't have the money or the expertise to practice high-tech medicine or to buy computers. Those are some of the reasons small hospitals are collapsing or being swallowed up by larger competitors at an unprecedented rate. The crisis is all the greater for small hospitals like Woods that are located in rural areas, away from large pools of potential patients and technological know-how. Woods, however, is thriving. Outpatient care is at its highest level ever, while patient revenues swelled from $16 million in 1991 to $28 million last year. Net income, even allowing for money that will never be recovered from federal, state, and private health-care subsidies, rose to $1.6 million in 1995 from $953,327 in 1991. What makes Woods different? Three and a half years ago, the hospital began to transform itself. The focus: cost containment. The method: automation. Led by an administrator who has applied a near-military zeal to the task of automating every aspect of the institution's operations. Woods has proved that even organizations caught in the vortex of an industry's downward spiral can buck the trend. Etowah is a sleepy town of 4,500 people, most of them paper-mill and textile workers, on the edge of the Cherokee National Forest. Etowah didn't get a hospital until 1965. Not surprisingly, when it was built. Woods was a spartan facility: the emergency room was open only during certain hours, and there was no intensive care unit. In fact, there wasn't an internist within 50 miles. Instead, family practitioners and general surgeons mended everything from sprained ankles to burst appendixes while cases of any complexity were referred to larger Bradley Memorial in the next county, the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville, or Erlanger Medical Center, in Chattanooga. Still, Woods was healthy. In most hospitals back then in the fee-for-services days, just about anyone with a medical degree and a stethoscope could make money by patching up a patient and billing the patient's insurance company, few questions asked. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the hospital, run by a retired air force colonel, added 40 beds to its original 30 and built an intensive care unit. Then came the crunch. In 1983 the federal government stopped paying Medicare reimbursements based on a hospital's tally of the actual cost of the care given; instead, it began doling out flat fees based on its estimate of what the treatment of a given illness should cost. The payments were especially meager to rural hospitals, on the theory that a hospital's costs should be much lower outside a city. Woods's Medicare reimbursements plunged to less than 75% of the cost of treating its Medicare patients, who made up two-thirds of the hospital's patient population. With its Medicare operations running deeply in the red, the hospital's cash reserves were soon depleted, leaving no money for improvements or even upkeep. Tile walls and floors began to crack. Patients waiting to be admitted sat in the lobby on folding chairs. More important, the hospital couldn't afford to keep up with the latest medical technology. That, in turn, made it all but impossible to recruit young talent to the staff. One of the few doctors to join the staff in the late 1980s was Charles Cox, who had started at Woods as an orderly in 1976 before going to medical school and whose family owned a dairy farm in the area. ``There really wasn't much incentive for young doctors to come here,'' calls Cox, who would sometimes save patients during the day and do farm chores at night. To make up for the reimbursement shortfall, the hospital tried raising its prices to non-Medicare patients. But that led to a leveling off of patients. It was clear that the only way to bridge the gap between Woods's costs and reimbursements was to reduce costs by improving efficiency. Not an easy task. Inefficiency was ingrained in almost everything that went on at the hospital. Consider patient intake. Patients would wait 30 minutes or more in the dreary lobby while nurses filled in hospital admission forms and then typed hospital bracelets. If a patient needed blood work or X rays, a nurse had to fill in a three-page carbon-copy requisition form and hand-deliver copies to the lab and to billing. Ah, billing: two women in a cramped office entering the charges for each patient into a bare-bones minicomputer-based system. and that was the high-tech part. They had to prepare the special forms for billing third parties, like Medicare and Blue Cross of Tennessee, by hand and then mail them. Four to six weeks later, when a batch of reimbursement checks came in, the switchboard operator would use the time between calls to record the payments in a 30-column ledger. ``Things moved slowly back then,'' says Carol Ethridge, chief financial officer and information officer. ``And because everything was done manually, there was plenty of room for error.'' When Phil Campbell arrived at Woods in 1990 to take over as CEO, the hospital was $200,000 shy of making its payroll and was struggling to survive. Campbell had been working as associate administrator of a health-care facility in Rome, Ga., when Woods's board hired him. ``I had wanted to go to a ``rural hospital,'' says Campbell. ``But I underestimated how difficult it would be.'' For the first few months, Campbell tried to persuade large suppliers to extend the small hospital's payment schedule. But then, suddenly, he took the offensive. Most hospitals charge for small items--a Band-Aid (as much as $10 in some hospitals) or a single aspirin (as much as $4 or more a pop). Campbell, who seemed determined to become the Crazy Eddie of health care, decided to give them away. Next he slashed prices on lab work, the hospital's biggest profit center. Then, as though the county board of trustees weren't already apoplectic, Campbell presented the group with an expanded budget that called for automating every last department of the small hospital. ``Oh, sure, some employees and citizens thought we were crazy,'' says Campbell. ``But I knew we had no choice.'' Campbell, a tall imposing figure with the middle-aged-boy looks of a high school football coach, knows he can come off as a little overbearing. ``My wife tells me I'm more conservative than Rush Limbaugh,'' he says, meaning it as a boast. If his administrative style seems somewhat military, it probably is. Campbell spent two years at the U.S. Army's Fort Stewart in Hinesville, Ga. But Campbell wasn't a soldier there; he was a student in a master's of health-services- administration program run by Central Michigan University. Alongside army colonels and majors, Campbell was drilled in the mantras of hard-core health-care management: Improve quality. Lower costs. Increase volume. Although he had studied health-care institutes in crisis, he faced the real thing for the first time when he took over at Woods. He was on the front line. And he admits to feeling green: ``There was nothing I could have done to prepare for this job.'' The single-level brick building looks more like a suburban elementary school than a hospital. In that respect Woods hasn't changed much from the day it was founded. Inside, though, it's a different story. To start, almost every inch of every surface has been redone--with carpet, paint, or wallpaper--in mellow lavender and mauve. A ``new'' Woods had to look the part. An interior designer chose the color scheme. Otherwise, each department was free to redecorate as it saw fit. But the hospital's makeover was more than skin deep. Campbell knew that the heart of the transformation would be automation. The only problem was figuring out a way to afford it. The hospital had already solicited a bid from a computer vendor for an automation package; the bid came in at close to $1 million, about four times what the hospital could conceivably spend. Campbell got on the phone to see if he could do better. Exhorting vendors to cut corners and margins wherever possible, explaining that the old health-care gravy train had been derailed, Campbell finally got the proposal he was looking for; an extensive new system for $250,000. That proposal came from Health Systems Resources Inc., in Atlanta. HSR agreed to install an IBM RS6000 and a UNIX-based work- station, along with 60 terminals and 12 PCs--enough to put every department in the hospital on-line. Now all Campbell had to do was come up with a way to get the system to pay back. The key would be using the system to cut costs. Campbell divided the entire medical staff into small teams, each one with access to a PC and a mission--to examine a different element of the hospital's service with an eye toward reducing waste. Take the pharmacy and therapeutics committee, headed by Brandon Watters, an internist. One of the committee's tasks: to assess the hospital's use of cephalosporins, a type of antibiotic. Harry Porter, a member of the committee and director of the pharmacy, called up records of what the hospital had been spending on antibiotics. It turned out that in the previous year, Woods's use of all cephalosporins had gone up 204%, mainly because its use of Rocephin, the most expensive antibiotic, had gone up. So Porter, who documents the use of all drugs in the hospital, had the computer graph the applications of Rocephin. The chart revealed that 70% of the time the powerful antibiotic was dispensed to treat infection but that 30% of the time it was administered to prevent infection in patients undergoing surgery. After a bit of research the committee determined that far less expensive (but equally effective) antibiotics could be substituted for the surgical use of Rocephin. The result; an estimated $40,000 savings on Rocephin in 1995. To keep the medical staff up to date with his committee's findings, Watters imports all of his results from Quattro Pro into Microsoft Publisher, which he then uses to publish inPHARMation, the hospital's pharmacy and therapeutics newsletter. Food waste was another target. Thanks to the dietary and food-services committee headed by Michele Fleming, director of food and nutrition services, Woods now uses a PC spreadsheet to track virtually every aspect of food service, from patient's satisfaction with portion size to seasoning preferences. As a result, patients are less likely to end up with food they don't like and won't eat. Fleming knew, for example, that in the second quarter of 1995, only 92% of patients said they received the correct seasoning packets with their food. By the fourth quarter the number was up to 100%. To save nurses and administrative employees time, the new system streamlined the laborious admissions process. Today patients zip from the lobby to their hospital bed in minutes. With just a few keystrokes, an admissions clerk enters a new patient's record into the system and instantly creates an electronic billing form on the main server. The clerk then hits another button to print out an embossed plastic identification card on a special printer. Using an imprint of the card, the clerk can also quickly manufacture a plastic hospital ID bracelet. Because billing and accounting have been integrated into the system, patient charges and insurance bills are tallied electronically during the patient's stay. Gone, too, are the days of carbon-copy requisition forms. Now nurses simply order lab work and diagnostic images through the computer system. In addition, lab equipment has been electronically connected to the mainframe. Now Cindy Glaze, supervisor of the laboratory, can transfer blood-test results from her lab instruments to her computer terminal and then, with a keystroke, on to the emergency room, the operating room, or a nursing station. Automation has all but eliminated some of the worst administrative chores. When a nurse electronically orders 500 ccs of erythromycin from the pharmacy for a patient, the system automatically charges the patient's billing record. It used to take weeks for the hospital to finalize patients' bills; today bills are ready whenever patients are ready to leave the hospital. And no one fills in forms by hand or licks envelopes and mails them off to Blue Cross or Medicare; instead, charges are automatically transferred to the proper electronic form, and then, using a dial-up account, a bill is transmitted to the third-party payer. Ethridge says that reimbursement takes about 14 days. As for the new switchboard operator, Virginia Huff, she rests easier knowing that the computer takes care of the Medicare logs. When a doctor orders an MRI for an elderly patient, the charge automatically transfers to an electronic log. Running the log for the entire year takes just a couple of hours of computer processing time. Campbell's plan has worked. Not only have Wood's outpatient utilization rates increased by 25%, but the hospital's net income has nearly doubled in the past five years. Last year outpatient utilization rates actually surpassed inpatient rates--which means higher revenues because insurance companies typically reimburse outpatient procedures at a higher rate. After Campbell dropped the prices of lab work, the volume of work in the small lab increases dramatically-- 300,000 tests in 1995, up from 115,000 in 1991. Remarkably the hospital has not raised the prices of care in five years, nor has Campbell added any clerical positions to the staff, even with all the increased billing. ``If we were still keying in bills, we would need at least twice as many people in the billing department alone,'' says Ethridge. Fewer nonmedical positions means more dollars to recruit doctors--a critical goal. The average can general $1 million in revenues for the hospital annually. Woods uses some of the freed-up money to pay for new recruits' medical education in exchange for a commitment to practice there. The difference in the opportunities for young doctors today and in 1988, when he joined the hospital, is huge, says Cox. ``Today we have all the technology that big urban medical centers have. So doctors can come here and not feel at a disadvantage.'' Active recruitment efforts along with a healthy cash surplus have allowed Woods to expand services. For example, Campbell hired Dan Early to direct the new Resource Counseling Center. In addition, to reach African Americans in the county (a population that traditionally has had trouble accessing health care), Campbell founded the Minority Health Alliance for education and care. Recently the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville chose Woods as one of its first partners in its telemedicine program, which allows doctors to work via videoconferencing hookups. Woods's telemedicine facility is located in what used to be the gift shop. So far the state- of-the-art satellite link has been used primarily for dermatology. But doctors can also keep up to date with the medical advances at U.T. without leaving Etowah. Craig Riley, for example, an internist, attends live conferences at U.T. via satellite and can even use the live link to complete the continuing medical education credits he needs to meet Woods's credit requirements. As Woods moves into a new era of health care, Campbell continues to position the small hospital for aggressive growth. Last year Woods joined Galaxy Health Alliance, in Chattanooga, a managed-care network of 13 rural and suburban hospitals in four states. (Woods is also part of another managed-care network that includes U.T.) Although managed care may represent a controversial new road for medicine, few hospitals want to be left out of the loop. An Zuvekas, senior research staff scientist at the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., predicts that rural hospitals increasingly are going to depend on advanced electronic networks for their survival. She reasons that it's more effective for managed- care plans to interact just once with a group of hospitals than to deal with them individually; consequently, says Zuvekas, rural hospitals that are able to share both data and expertise over a wire are going to distinguish themselves as worthy partners in the managed-care relationship. The road ahead is filled with uncertainty. Potential Medicare cuts could make it even more difficult for rural hospitals to make ends meet, and managed care might force many more hospital mergers and acquisitions. Still, Campbell has a grand outlook for Woods. On a tour of the hospital, he points out the window to a mound of dirt. ``That will be a state-of-the-art women's center,'' he says. ``We are finally going to start delivering babies again.'' A nearby parking lot will soon be transformed into an expanded intensive care unit and emergency room, he adds. Ethridge, meanwhile, is just trying to enjoy the fact that for once Woods isn't struggling. ``We've been waiting six years to slow down,'' she says. Given Campbell's ambitions, Ethridge probably shouldn't plan on too long of a lull.

Mr. DUNCAN

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I recently had the privilege of hosting a luncheon in honor of the Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team, the 1996 national champions. The team was later honored along with the Kentucky men's team in a special ceremony and reception at the White House. Coach Pat Head Summitt, who has coached the Lady Vols for more than 20 years now, is unquestionably one of the finest coaches in this Nation. She has achieved her great success through much hard work, determination, and perseverance. The Knoxville News Sentinel recently ran a very fine article about Coach Summitt which I would like to call to the attention of my colleagues and other readers of the Record. I was particularly impressed by the great influence that this article shows that Coach Summitt's family had in helping her become the great leader she has become. Tennessee's Pat Summitt Credits Family for Her Zeal for Hard Work (By Amy McRary) Minutes after winning her fourth national basketball crown, Tennessee Lady Vols Coach Pat Summitt went looking for the people who taught her about the game. Tennessee had just trounced Georgia 83-65 in the March 31 NCAA finals at the Charlotte Coliseum in North Carolina. When Summitt got to the seats where her parents, Richard and Hazel Head, sat, the 43-year-old coach got a reward she'd waited for all her life. Tall, stern Richard Head wrapped his daughter in a bear hug and gave her a kiss. ``I'm glad you finally got to see one,'' Summitt said to the quiet Middle Tennessee farmer with a gruff voice and sometimes gruffer manner. It was only the second hug and first kiss the 73-year-old Head had ever given this child he raised as a hardworking fourth son, the young woman he cheered for to play harder, the demanding coach he'd once worried would be fired. Patricia Sue ``Trish'' Head's first basketball court was one end of a 100-foot hayloft. Her daddy hung a goal at one end and strung some lights. Her first teammate was her oldest brother, Tommy, seven years older than his little sister and now a state legislator. Her first opponents were older brothers Kenneth and Charles. Trish gave as good as she got when they played two-on-two after raking hay, milking cows, working tobacco. Summitt praises her parents, saying they protected her from her brothers. Her only sister, Linda, is six years younger than Summitt. To hear the family tell it, Trish didn't need any protecting. ``I reckon she was just one of the boys,'' says Charles Head, a farmer and greenhouse operator. ``In that hayloft, she was right in the middle of us. That's what made her tough.'' As tough and as good as she was, she had no team to play for in 1966. The high school in Clarksville didn't have a girls' team. So Richard Head moved his family of seven some six miles down the road, to tiny unincorporated Henrietta in neighboring Cheatham County. Then, Trish could play ball over at Cheatham County High School in Ashland City. Her first year, she caught a Trailways bus home every day. ``Everybody thought I had lost my mind,'' Hazel Head says. The family moved from a new home to an old, drafty house near their community grocery. ``That old house was cold as kraut.'' Richard Head says simply: ``I just knew she wanted to play ball.'' Pat Summitt coaches basketball the way she played basketball--intensely. ``The amount of work it takes to be successful does not detour Pat,'' says former UCLA coach Billie Moore, who coached Summitt on the 1976 silver medal U.S. Olympic team. ``In the coaching game, she is not going to leave anything for granted. She was that way when I first met her.'' Growing up on the family's Middle Tennessee dairy farm meant working--and working hard. ``Daddy said he wanted Mama to have a girl, but he treated me like one of the guys,'' Summitt says. Summitt wasn't any older than 10 or 11 when she was driving a tractor. She set and harvested tobacco, raked and baled hay, plowed fields and raised 4-H calves. When the doors were open at Mount Carmel United Methodist Church near Ashland City, the Heads were there. Summitt couldn't date until she was 16. Living 15 miles from town, she didn't go out for pizza until her senior year in high school. ``We worked, and we played basketball in the hayloft,'' she says. Richard Head ran the farm and the store, built houses, served as water commissioner and on the county court. ``Miss Hazel'' worked as hard as her husband, mowing the yard and cooking huge, country meals. The first to bring food to families after the death of a loved one, Hazel Head is ``the hardest working person I know,'' Summitt says. ``I've often said I wish I had more of my mom in me. I think I learned a lot from my mom about being a good mother. You can always count on Miss Hazel.'' Today, the Heads are likely the hardest-working retired people in Tennessee. Richard Head still works the family farmlands and does some work in Springfield, over at the tobacco warehouse. Hazel Head helps over at the family laundry in Ashland City almost every afternoon. The friendly and down-to-earth 70-year-old still fills three freezers of her own and keeps friends and family supplied with vegetables from the Heads' 10-acre garden. They still live in Henrietta, but in a newer and warmer house Richard Head built. Except for Summitt, all their now-grown and married children live within a five-mile radius. In the Head family, good work was expected and didn't need praising. Excuses weren't accepted; laziness wasn't tolerated. Not that the Head kids questioned. ``Rebel? Are you kidding?'' laughs Summitt. ``A lot of discipline came as a result of fear. We had to get our own switch out of the yard. And if you got a little one, Mama would get her own. I hated that.'' Trish's 16th birthday was spent on a tractor. Friends were feting her and a friend at a country club. But rain was coming and bales of hay were still in the field. Richard Head refused to let his daughter leave. She had work to finish. ``I think I wound up getting in trouble with my dad that day,'' Summitt remembers. ``I was so mad I wasn't paying attention (to her work). I think I got a switch that day and it wasn't birthday licks.'' ``Richard was far more the patriarch than Hazel was the matriarch,'' says R.B. Summitt, Summitt's husband of nearly 16 years. ``Pat didn't hear anything if things were OK. If something went wrong, boom. Pat responds to that. Most women, I think, do not.'' Affectionate expressions simply weren't Richard Head's way. ``I never did like that stuff,'' Head says matter-of-factly. ``Some families hug and kiss all the time, but we just never really did,'' defends Hazel Head. ``It's just the difference in people. But that didn't mean you didn't love them. He'd work his toenails off for either of our five kids.'' Attempting to win her father's approval helped drive Summitt early in her career as she took a program only slightly above intramurals and made it the best in women's basketball. Her teams have won four championships in 13 trips to the Final Four. For 20 consecutive years, the Lady vols have won at least 20 games. For eight seasons, including the last three, Summitt's teams have won 30 or more games. Summitt played on the 1976 Olympic team and coached the 1984 women's team to a gold medal. She has repeatedly been named Coach of the Year by athletic organizations. ``It was obvious when he (Head) was in the stands, Pat played at a different level,'' Billie Moore says. ``I like to kid him and say it's all a front, that he's really a softie on the inside. They are a very close, supportive family and having that is part of (having) your confidence.'' The Heads and Moore tell of Richard Head yelling ``Trish, Trish'' at his player-daughter through one pre-Olympic game. Teammate Trish Roberts thought that man in the stands was yelling at her. Summitt knew exactly who her daddy was hollering at. ``The coach said afterward she'd never seen two girls play so hard,'' Richard Head says. You'd likely zip right through Henrietta up Highway 12 from Ashland City to Clarksville except for that big green-and- white highway sign proclaiming. ``Home of Pat Head Summitt.'' Under the green sign is a smaller, handmade one shaped something like the state of Tennessee. Fashioned and fastened by the Heads' mail carrier, that sign reads ``Lady Vols #1 and Always #1 Here'' in bright orange letters. Two satellite dishes stand in the Heads' back yard, gifts from Summitt so her parents won't miss a game. She phones after contests. ``If they lose, she doesn't call right straight; she's too down,'' Hazel Head says. ``But she likes to know what we think.'' Today, her assistant coaches and husband insist Summit is self-motivated. ``I think she is pretty well content with her folks, her family, her career, her life. I think it took a while,'' says R.B. Summitt, who's executive vice president of Sevier County Bank. ``I think she always worried what her dad would say or think.'' The first hug Summitt got from her daddy was last year, a conciliatory hug after a bitter loss to Connecticut in the NCAA championship game. The second came with a kiss after this year's championship. ``To hug me and give me a big old kiss, that was a first,'' Summitt says. And she says, her father has now told her he is proud--in his own matter-of-fact, understated manner. The Heads spent a day at the Summitts' Blount County home after this year's NCAA tournament. As Richard Head was leaving, he told his daughter: `Now I don't want to hear any more about how I've never hugged you or kissed you or told you I was proud of you.'' ``That was Daddy's way of telling me he was proud,'' Summitt grins. Consider how far she has come. Pat Head began coaching the year Title IX, which required equal athletic opportunities for women, became law. She was a 22-year-old graduate assistant who also taught four courses. Four of her players were 21; 50 people came to see them lose their first game by one point to Mercer University. Between coaching, Summitt worked on her master's in physical education and rehabilitated an injured knee so she could try out for the '76 Olympics. She was her own assistant, own trainer and sometimes team driver. R.B. Summitt remembers hauling team equipment to games in his Ford van after he met his future wife in 1977. Twenty years later, it's still a family event, but the coach doesn't drive the team bus and her husband doesn't have to load equipment. Richard and Hazel Head drive 3\1/2\ hours to some contests. R.B. Summitt has seats near the court where he can yell--loudly--at officials and opposing coaches. The Summitts' only son, 5-year-old Tyler, has been Summit's traveling companion since he was just months old. This spring, he stood on a ladder to help his mother cut the nets in Charlotte. During this season's 18-point thrashing by Stanford, Summitt walked to the end of the bench near her son. ``Mama,'' he said solemnly, ``I'm doing all I can.'' ``Son, she replied, ``I don't think that will be enough.'' Today, Pat Summitt has coached half her life, compiling a 22-season record of 596-133. some 8,000 fans regularly cheer the Lady Vols during home games. After working 20 years without a contract, Summitt now earns an annual $135,000. That's the highest base pay of any UT coach, male or female. But for those first couple of years, the Lady Vols won only 16 games a season. The third season, they hit 28 wins and never looked back. And over in Henrietta, Richard Head was trying to get his daughter to quit the coaching game. ``I felt like she might have a bad season, and they'd get rid of her. They won't now for awhile, but at one time I figured they might.'' A sometimes blind, always demanding passion drives the woman who is arguably the best coach in women's basketball. ``I've always said, `Teams may beat us, but they better not outwork us. Coaches may beat me, but they better not outwork me,''' Summitt says. ``I guess you have to be a little crazy to be this driven, but I enjoy working.'' Says Mickie DeMoss, Summitt's assistant coach for 11 years: ``She coaches with a lot of passion; she does everything with a lot of passion. ``If she owned Weigel's up the road, it'd be the best Weigel's in the city of Knoxville. Because she'd work from sun-up to sun-down. ``Holly (Warwick, also an assistant coach for 11 years) and I often say we do things the hard way around here,'' DeMoss laughs. ``If the competition is doing it one way, we're going to find a way to do it a little better.'' Says Shelley Sexton, point guard on Summitt's first 1987 championship team and now women's basketball coach at Karns High School, ``Nobody questions themselves harder, nobody puts themselves through more, than Pat Head Summitt. She is a perfectionist.'' The slender 5-foot, 11-inch Summitt walks faster, drives much, much faster. ``If Pat's not driving, putting on her makeup and talking all at the same time, she's wasting her time,'' DeMoss says. Warwick and DeMoss half-joke Summitt only slows down when Tyler is riding. When she jogs, Summitt has to run two steps ahead of everyone else and has to finish at least a step ahead. ``And the whole time she's running--she's talking basketball,'' says Warwick, a three-time All-American when she played for Summitt from 1976 to 1980. Summitt readily admits she's not the world's most observant woman. Her narrow focus tapers to tunnel vision during basketball season. Her assistants swear Summitt comes to work not knowing if she's walked in through rain or 20-degree cold. Last spring, she jogged the same route for three weeks before realizing a building she passed daily had burned. Current events don't get any more attention. Summitt was once to go to Las Vegas to pick up an award. ``Today'' show host Bryant Gumbel and Dallas Cowboys running back Emmitt Smith were to attend. Summitt didn't want to go--she didn't recall who those other people were. ``I have asked her before, if she will just read one story on the front page of the paper before turning to the sports section,'' DeMoss says. ``And it's not necessarily sports-- it's basketball. It's women's basketball. It's Lady Vols basketball.'' One of the best stories about Summitt's single-minded determination can be told in a true story that sounds more like a tale. Consider the birth of sandy-haired, blue-eyed Ross Tyler Summitt. Tyler, who can't talk defense and rebounding with the best of them, was nearly born while his mother was recruiting UT point guard Michelle Marciniak. The story goes like this: Summitt was about two weeks away from her due date when she and DeMoss flew to Pennsylvania in September 1990 to recruit Maricinak. While there, Summitt went into labor. But she wasn't going to have her son anywhere but in Knoxville. And it didn't matter she was states away. `You know, Pat can be pretty stubborn,'' DeMoss says. DeMoss raced her boss to the UT plane. On the way, Summitt's pains increased. The pilot offered to land in Virginia. That sounded like a great idea to DeMoss. Forget that archrival Virginia had defeated Tennessee in overtime in the NCAA East Regional that March. ``Pat told me, `Mickie, you let them land in Virginia, you're going to have a mad woman on your hands.' That was all I needed to know,'' DeMoss recalls. The plane landed at McGhee Tyson Airport in a fast two hours, black exhaust fumes streaking its sides. Tyler was born a few hours later at St. Mary's Medical Center. The doctors said if the baby's head had been turned differently, DeMoss would have had an assist in his birth. ``It was the longest two hours of my life,'' DeMoss says. Down the sidelines she strides, pointing, yelling, snarling. Her blue eyes glare ``the look'' that makes an All- American cower. In the comfort of your den, in the safety of your Thompson- Boling seat, you're very, very glad you're not wearing Tennessee orange. Even Richard Head thinks Trish is sometimes too hard on those girls. ``I think Daddy's gotten more relaxed since his children have married . . . since he's got nine grandkids and two great-grandkids,'' Summitt says. Watching Summitt, it's hard to imagine this woman was once so reserved she dreaded taking college speech classes. The nickname ``Pat'' stuck when she was too shy to tell college classmates everybody called her ``Trish.'' Gracious one-on-one, Summitt keeps in touch with and often advises former players. Involved in community causes, she's chairing the 1996 local United Way campaign with men's basketball coach Kevin O'Neill. So maybe, just maybe, those flashes of sideline temper aren't as bad as they seem. Or maybe the end justifies the means. Summitt makes no excuses. ``I'm not really concerned about what people say about the way I coach or my style,'' Summitt says. ``Because unless you are really on the inside, I don't think you can totally understand and appreciate communication. ``My volume can be on 10, but my message can be very positive. My volume may be a two and it can be one of constructive criticism. I can't spend my career trying to please everybody. When I concern myself with people, it's the people right here.'' Through the years, 13 players have transferred out. ``I'm sure my personality, my expectations for us, had something to do with it,'' she says. Those around her say Summitt today yells more selectively, having adapted to changes in players and differences in teams' chemistries. She's still tough. ``Now she still gets in their faces and she expects a lot out of them, but I think she has really made an effort to compliment them when they do well, tell them how proud she is of them,'' DeMoss says. ``There's never been a question that she cares about her players.'' Says former Lady Vol center and current University of Richmond assistant coach Sheila Frost: ``Pat will drive you to the brink, but she won't break you. I was just a little farm girl when I got to Tennessee. She took me under her wing and she kicked me in the rear too.'' The idea of playing for a demanding basketball icon with a temper can be intimidating not just to 18-year-olds. DeMoss works to ``humanize'' Summitt to recruits and parents. ``I tell them up front, `Yes, she's tough, she's demanding. . . . She expects nothing but your best. And if you come here, basketball needs to be important to you because it's very important to Pat.' '' Call it maturity. Call it security. Don't call it mellow. ``Pat hates it when people use that word,'' DeMoss says. Summitt agrees she's more apt to ask for input from DeMoss, Warwick and assistant Al Brown and from her players. ``I'm more flexible today than I was at 27, more tolerant. Starting out I guess I was kind of a dictator type. I thought I had all the answers.'' There's no question who's in charge, but Summitt is more comfortable letting players make some decisions. ``I've heard her ask the players during a time-out, `You want to play zone or man-to-man?' '' DeMoss says. ``I think she knows now you can laugh and have fund and still win. Used to, she didn't think the two ever could go together.'' She gets help laughing from practical jokers DeMoss and Warwick. Once, Summitt was ragging the players about her playing days. The coach swore she always rebounded and never tossed fancy passes. DeMoss and Warwick showed the team a grainy, black-and-white video of Summitt's playing days. ``She threw hook passes; she didn't rebound. The whole team had to wait for her to get down the court,'' Warwick laughs. ``But she took it very well.'' Summitt can slip in a joke herself. Tennessee was to play Louisiana Tech in April in the 1988 Final Four semifinal. Summitt called Warwick and DeMoss with the worst of news--UT star Bridgette Gordon had severe food poisoning. ``She really had us going. And then she said, `April Fool.' Ninety percent of the time she is so serious, she can really get you,'' DeMoss says. Mellow or mature, Summitt remains one very poor loser. ``She's more like her daddy. I want them to win, but he really is disappointed if they don't,'' Hazel Head says. ``I try to tell her, `When you go out there, you know one's going to lose, and one can't do it all. You can't always be on top.' '' Says R.B. Summitt, ``If we should have lost, Pat's not a good loser and it's not any fun. But if we should not have lost, if the team didn't give effort, if we sort of gave the game away with mistakes, then it's worse.'' ``I get really sick inside,'' Summitt says, putting one hand to her chest. ``I just have a terrible feeling. I cannot get it off my mind. I replay every play. I always feel there's something I could have said or done to make the difference.'' She is hard on herself and on her players. Game mistakes are replayed in hard practices. ``I'm sure the players get sick of hearing it. But that's OK. Then they'll remember how they felt when they lost,'' she says. If you really want to feel the Summitt wrath, be lazy or dishonest. Team policy is sacred. Going to class and being on time are not mere suggestions. You don't go to class, you don't step on the court. All players who remained at Tennessee four years have graduated, a fact that coaches are as proud of as those national championships. Players who break team rules get suspended. Most recently, Lady Vols center Tiffani Johnson was not allowed to make last Monday's team trip to the White House because of an undisclosed rules violation. Word is that Summitt knows everything. ``She just looks at you and says, `I know what you've been doing and you just confess,'' Warwick says. Summitt suspended point guard Tiffany Woosley for three games her senior year after Woosley made comments reportedly criticizing some teammates. ``It doesn't matter who you are, if you do one thing wrong, you get punished. It's Pat's way or no way,'' says Woosley, now coach at Fayetteville's Lincoln County High School. ``That's the way it should be. She's tough. But I learned from it, the good and the bad.'' Says Sexton: ``There's a price to be paid to be a part of that program. You have got to be above reproach. It's a responsibility, a commitment on and off the floor. Recruits ask DeMoss ``Can I play for Pat? Can I handle Pat?'' I tell them, ``Two things will keep you out of the doghouse. Work hard and be honest,'' DeMoss says. Says Summitt, ``I think I have very little patience with people that are not motivated to work hard. It's hard for me to understand.''

Mr. DUNCAN

Mr. DUNCAN. That was the very point of this colloquy. I thank the gentleman form Indiana. I believe he and his colleagues on the subcommittee have done an excellent job on this legislation. amendment offered by mr. obey

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Chairman, I would like to engage in a colloquy with the distinguished gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Myers], chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development. I have a brief colloquy that has already been approved by the chairman. Earlier in this Congress, I introduced legislation, H.R. 28, the Freedom From Government Competition Act. It has been brought to my attention by some of my constituents that at least one Federal agency under this bill is considering some competition with private industry. As the chairman knows, when the last White House conference on small business met here in Washington, the problem of unfair government competition and the failure of government to adequately utilize the private sector was ranked as one of the very top issues for small business. Additionally, since the Eisenhower administration, it has been official U.S. government policy that ``the Federal Government will not start or carry on any commercial activity to provide a service or a product for its own use if such product or service can be procured from private enterprise through ordinary business channels.'' I would like to ask the chairman of the subcommittee if, as a general proposition, the subcommittee intended that money appropriated in this legislation be used by Federal agencies or quasi-governmental agencies for the purpose of competing with private business.

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to strike the last word.

Mr. DUNCAN. I yield to the gentleman from Indiana.

Mr. DUNCAN

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 3536) to amend title 49, United States Code, to require an air carrier to request and receive certain records before allowing an individual to begin service as a pilot, and for other purposes, as amended.

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume to simply echo the remarks of the ranking member, the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Lipinski]. In fact, a few minutes ago I whispered to Dave Schaffer, our very fine staff director for the subcommittee, that I thought many people watching the discussion on the Child Pilot Safety Act and the Airline Pilot Hiring and Safety Act, these 2 bills, would not fully realize that if we had gone too far in either direction on either one of these bills, we could have turned either or both of these bills into something very, very controversial, and instead everyone has worked together in a very bipartisan and a very cordial fashion to fashion legislation that I think merits the support of all of our colleagues. And I, too, like Mr. Lipinski, want to thank the staff for some outstanding work on these two bills, and also thank once again the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Lipinski] and the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Oberstar], and I urge passage of this bill.

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I have no additional speakers at this time, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Heineman], one of the main people in this Congress who is the biggest mover and shaker on this particular piece of legislation. He has been in on this from the very beginning and deserves a great deal of credit for this legislation. (Mr. HEINEMAN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, on Thursday, June 6, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee reported the Airline Pilot Hiring and Safety Act, H.R. 3536, by voice vote. H.R. 3536 will go a long way in helping the airline industry weed out poor pilots--and it will make sure that these pilots are kept out of the system. The legislation requires airlines to share the records of pilot job applicants before they are hired. These records include physical exams, drug tests, alcohol tests, training records, proficiency and route checks, and others. It also requires airlines to request the motor vehicle driving records of the pilot from the National Register. None of this information can be released without the pilot's prior written approval. Over the last 7 years, as a result of airplane accidents involving fatalities, the National Transportation Safety Board has recommended to the FAA, on at least three different occasions, that pilot performance records should be shared. Since 1987, substandard airline pilots have contributed to several fatal plane crashes, killing hundreds of people. Among these pilots, one failed three flight tests in 6 years, one had been fired five times for poor performance, two had substance abuse problems, and the list goes on. The Aviation Subcommittee, of which I chair held 2 days of hearings on this issue just this past December. From those hearings there was general consensus that the sharing of pilot records should be done. H.R. 3536 provides airlines near total immunity from defamation lawsuits. The only exception would be if the airline knowingly places false information about a pilot in his or her record. As I have said on several occasions, I believe that 99.9 percent of the pilots who fly today are very good pilots. But, unfortunately, some poor pilots have fallen through the cracks. Again, on a bipartisan basis, we worked to craft a bill that I feel confident every Member of the House can support. H.R. 3536 has several cosponsors from both sides of the aisle. It is also supported by the chairman of the full committee, Mr. Shuster, as well as the ranking members of both the full committee and the Aviation Subcommittee, Mr. Oberstar and Mr. Lipinski. It is a good bill, a bipartisan bill, and it will help our make our safe aviation system even safer. I urge Members to support its passage. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DUNCAN

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on all three of the bills just considered, H.R. 3267, H.R. 3536, and H.R. 3159.

Mr. DUNCAN

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, let me say that I rise to once again thank our two outstanding ranking members, the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Oberstar], and the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Lipinski]. All three of these bills that we have had on the floor today pertain to aviation safety. We just, of course, have been through two terrible tragedies with the ValuJet crash and the TWA crash. The sympathy of every Member of this body goes out to the family members of the victims of those tragedies. In fact I think on our subcommittee we see that tragedy closer up than almost any other Member of this body because we have heard in just recent weeks from the family members of some of these victims. I think that we are going to produce legislation in the next few weeks or months that will help improve the treatment of family members of victims of these tragedies and hopefully will produce legislation to make our airports even more secure. These bills today, along with the legislation that we approved in March to reform the FAA, are the first major overhaul of our civil aviation law since 1958, a major step that we took if passed by the Senate. I think the members of the public should know that we are not sitting idly by, that the Members of this body are doing everything possible to make sure that our aviation system becomes even safer. I think we should note that we have by far the safest aviation system in the world. We have had a little over 12,900 deaths in all U.S. aviation accidents combined since the Wright brothers' flight of 1903. Even one death is too many. We need to work constantly to improve and make it better, especially with air passenger traffic going up as much as it is, and it is going to shoot way up in these next 10 years, possibly to as many as 1 billion passengers a year. So we have got a lot of work to do. We should note that unfortunately as many people are killed on the highways in this Nation every 4 months as have been killed in all of these U.S. aviation accidents combined since the Wright brothers' flight. We have an aviation system that the world looks up to and that we should be proud of. We should reassure the flying public that our aviation system in this country is very, very safe, and we are going to do everything we can to make it safer. That is why we can all be so proud not only of our FAA reform legislation but of these bills today. Mr. Speaker, I urge passage of this final bill, H.R. 3159. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DUNCAN

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Let me simply in closing echo the words of the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Lipinski]. If there is any other subcommittee in this Congress where there is a better relationship between the ranking member and the chairman, I would like to know about it. The Subcommittee on Aviation has a history of working together in a very bipartisan way. Sometimes all the publicity is given to our divisions up here, and people do not realize that on many important pieces of legislation the Members on both sides of the aisle work well together. I think this is in part due to a close relationship that I have with my ranking member, Mr. Lipinski, but also it is a tribute to the ranking member of the full committee, the gentleman from Minnesota, Mr. Oberstar, who served for many years as the chairman of this subcommittee and who is recognized in this Congress and is often referred to as Mr. Aviation. I appreciate the work that they have done on this bill and the comments they have made. I think we have a good bill. It is a bill that will correct the abuses without overreaching. I urge passage of this bill. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, chaired by the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Shuster], reported H.R. 3267 by voice vote on June 6. The bill was introduced on April 18 by myself, along with the chairman of the full committee, Bud Shuster, Aviation Subcommittee Ranking Member Bill Lipinski, Aviation Subcommittee Vice Chairman Jerry Weller, the chairman of the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, Bill Clinger, as well as Jim Ross Lightfoot, Bill Paxon, and Bill Martini. Since the introduction of this legislation several other Members of the House have added their names as cosponsors. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, since 1964 there have been 178 accidents and incidents involving pilots 16 years of age and younger. And, as we all know, last April, 7-year-old Jessica Dubroff attempted to become the youngest pilot to fly across the United States. Unfortunately, Jessica, her father, and a flight instructor were killed while attempting to set this record. Specifically, H.R. 3267 requires a private pilot license for any person attempting to break an aviation record. The bill also requires a study to be conducted by the FAA to determine if any additional rules or guidelines should be put in place for children flying aircraft. So, I think we have a balanced approach that focuses on the media- driven publicity stunts without imposing any additional regulations or undue restrictions on the entire aviation community. H.R. 3267 has strong support from the general aviation community, including the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, and the National Air Transport Association. The bill is also supported by the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Transportation, and several Members from both sides of the aisle. It is a good bill, a balanced bill, and I think it is one that will merit the support of all Members. I might just say, Mr. Speaker, that because of the terrible tragedy of flight 800 by TWA, the attention being given to aviation safety right at this time is understandably extremely high, and the public is demanding that we take every step possible to make sure that our aviation system is as safe and secure as possible. This bill, along with two companion bills that we will act on shortly, are judicial steps that this Congress can take and can be proud of in working to make sure that our aviation system is as safe as possible, and we will be doing additional things and holding additional hearings as we move on through the coming weeks and months. Mr. Speaker, I urge the support of all my colleagues for H.R. 3267, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 3267) to amend title 49, United States Code, to prohibit individuals who do not hold a valid private pilots certificate from manipulating the controls of aircraft in an attempt to set a record or engage in an aeronautical competition or aeronautical feat, and for other purposes.

Mr. DUNCAN

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I recently received a copy of an article that was written by Ross Booher and Kevin W. Jones entitled, ``Ending Student Subsidies''. One young man is currently attending the University of Tennessee Law School, and the other is just entering. Both Ross and Kevin are not only excellent students, but they are citizens who I am certain will contribute greatly to our society and its future. I request that a copy of this article, ``Ending Student Subsidies'' be placed in the Record at this point, so I can call it to the attention of my colleagues and other readers of the Record. [From the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 24, 1995] Ending Student Subsidies (By Ross I. Booher and Kevin W. Jones) Although college lobbyists apparently have persuaded Congress to abandon plans to eliminate the federal interest subsidy on guaranteed student loans this year, lawmakers are likely to scrutinize the program again in the future as they search for ways to cut wasteful government spending. We urge them to do so. Even though we are students who currently enjoy the benefits of this taxpayer largess, we believe that the interest subsidy should be dropped, American taxpayers spend almost $2.5-billion a year for interest on guaranteed loans while the borrowers are students and for six months after they graduate. The borrowers never repay any of this interest. We believe that this subsidy amounts to a taxpayer-financed gift to people who neither need it nor deserve it. Eliminating the subsidy would not make student loans or a college education less available, because the loans themselves still could be obtained. Further, the maximum amount that could be borrowed would remain the same; students would not pay any interest while they were in school; and they would continue to have a six-month grace period after graduation before the began repayment. The only change we suggest is that once students begin repayment, they pay all the interest that has accrued. The interest should be added to the student's debt, not to the national debt. We believe that students, and everyone else, would be better served by a stronger economy. We are willing to ``sacrifice,'' not out of altruism, but because we and everyone else will benefit from a national economy not bogged down by federal debt. According to the U.S. Treasury Department's latest estimates, the federal government is nearly $5-trillion in debt. Unless we cut all but the most- essential spending the interest on the national debt alone will soon consume almost all federal tax revenue. This scenario augurs ill for the schooled and unschooled alike? All federally financed programs would be endangered. Many who oppose ending the subsidy fear that, without it, students from lower-and even middle-income backgrounds will be unable to afford higher education. This fear is unfounded. Students who are willing to borrow money to pay for college still would be able to do so, but, as the people who benefit from the loan (and the education), they simply would have more to repay after graduation. Isn't it reasonable for the recipient of education to have to pay for it, particularly when the financial rewards of college continue to far outweigh the costs? The U.S. Department of Education calculates that eliminating the federal interest subsidy would increase the loan repayment of an undergraduate student who chooses to borrow the maximum amount available during his or her undergraduate year by about $69 per month during the standard 10-year repayment period. Even this, the highest possible increase, would easily fit into the budget of most college graduates--who, according to the most recent census data available, earn $1,039 per month more than the average high- school graduate. The vast majority of undergraduates, however, borrow far less than the maximum loan amount, and thus the increases in their payments would be smaller. What about more-expensive graduate and professional degrees, such as those in medicine and law? Will students be able to afford them without the interest subsidy? Again, the answer is yes, The Department of Education calculates that eliminating the interest subsidy would increase the payments of the average student who receives Ph.D., and who chooses to borrow the maximum amount available, by about $382 per month during the standard 10-year repayment period. This is a great deal of money, but, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average Ph.D. recipient earns $3,853 per month and the average recipient of a professional degree earns $4,961 per month. The comparable figures for people with a bachelor's degree and people with a high-school diploma are $2,116 and $1,077, respectively. Looking at the big picture, those who borrow the maximum among of $138,500 to obtain a doctoral degree enable themselves to earn an average of $1.4-million more during their lifetime than the average high-school graduate. Recipients of a professional degree in fields such as law and medicine earn, on average, a staggering $2.2-million more than the average high-school graduate. Organizations lobbying to preserve the interest subsidy, such as the American Medical Student Association and the Student Osteopathic Medical Association, point out that, in the years immediately following graduation, many people who earn a graduate or professional degree earn very little relative to the amount of debt they have incurred. According to the A.M.S.A., medical doctors can earn an average of about $2,500 per month during residency training. The A.M.S.A. currently argues that it is difficult to make payments on a $100,000-plus student loan with such a salary. For this very reason, the government provides the option of temporarily or permanently making payments on a 30-year repayment schedule. This method dramatically lowers monthly payments, by spreading them out over a longer period. When borrowers complete their postgraduate training and begin to realize the financial rewards of their education investment, they may choose to return to the standard 10-year repayment schedule, thus lowering the total interest they will pay. We believe that this option makes eliminating the subsidy relatively painless, even for those whose earnings are not very high immediately after they receive their advanced degree. Some supporters of the interest subsidy point out that not all jobs requiring a college education pay the Census Bureau's ``average salary.' Wouldn't losing the interest subsidy hurt students who choose to incur student-loan debts and then enter occupations that pay very little? Again, provisions already are in place to address that concern. First, most students now begin repaying their loans six months after they graduate, but longer deferments are granted for a variety of reasons--including unemployment, a return to full- or half-time student status, acceptance of an academic fellowship, and economic hardship. Further, if graduate serve in a public-service position (for instance, as a nurse, public-school teacher, member of the armed forces, or peace Corps or Vista volunteer), their loans may be partially or completely paid by taxpayers--who receive obvious benefits from the graduates' service. What about students who borrow because they want to attend an expensive private college or university, but then decide to enter a low-paying field not included in the public- service category above? Such students may find that, in a world of limited resources, they cannot always have everything they want: They may have to choose between pursuing a low-paying career and attending an expensive college. Of course, they may decide that they want to do both badly enough to be willing to take out student loans and accept a 30-year repayment schedule and a lower standard of living. If that is their choice, it should be their responsibility to cope with the consequences, not that of the American taxpayer.

Mr. DUNCAN

Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, I think that anyone who is truly interested in education should read the following article from the July 17, 1996, issue of the Wall Street Journal. I would like to call it to the attention of my colleagues and other readers of the Record. Why the Catholic School Model Is Taboo (By Sol Stern) New York City's Cardinal John J. O'Connor has repeatedly made the city an extraordinary offer: Send me the lowest- performing 5% of children presently in the public schools, and I will put them in Catholic schools--where they will succeed. The city's response: silence. In a more rational world, city officials would have jumped at the cardinal's invitation. It would have been a huge financial plus for the city. The annual per-pupil cost of Catholic elementary schools is $2,500 per year, about a third of what taxpayers now spend for the city's public schools. no idle boast More important, thousands more disadvantaged children would finish school and become productive citizens. For Cardinal O'Connor's claim that Catholic schools would do a better job than public schools is no idle boast. In 1990 the RAND Corporation compared the performance of children from New York City's public and Catholic high schools. Only 25% of the public-school students graduated at all, and only 16% took the Scholastic Aptitude Test, vs. 95% and 75% of Catholic- school students, respectively. Catholic-school students scored an average of 815 on the SAT. By shameful contrast, the small ``elite'' of public-school students who graduated and took the SAT averaged only 642 for those in neighborhood schools and 715 for those in magnet schools. In 1993 the New York State Department of Education compared city schools with the highest levels of minority enrollment. Conclusion: ``Catholic schools with 81% to 100% minority composition outscored New York City public schools with the same percentage of minority enrollment in Grade 3 reading (+17%), Grade 3 mathematics (+10%), Grade 5 writing (+6%), Grade 6 reading (+10%) and Grade 6 mathematics (+11%).'' Yet most of the elite, in New York and elsewhere, is resolutely uninterested in the Catholic schools' success. In part this reflects the enormous power of teachers' unions, fierce opponents of anything that threatens their monopoly on education. In part it reflects a secular discomfort with religious institutions. I myself have felt this discomfort over the years, walking past Catholic schools like St. Gregory the Great, near my Manhattan home. Every morning, as I took my sons to public school, I couldn't help noticing the well-behaved black and Hispanic children in their neat uniforms entering the drab parish building. But my curiousty never led me past the imposing crucifix looking down from the roof, which evoked childhood images of Catholic anti-Semitism and clerical obscurantism. Finally, earlier this year, I ventured in, and I was impressed. I sat in, for example, as fourth-grade teacher Susan Viti conducted a review lesson on the geography of the Western United States. All the children were completely engaged and had obviously done their homework. They were able to answer each of her questions about the principal cities and capitals of the Western states--some of which I couldn't name--and the topography and natural resources of the region. ``Which minerals would be found in the Rocky Mountains?'' Miss Viti asked. Eager hands shot up. Miss Viti used the lesson to expand the students' vocabulary; when the children wrote things down, she insisted on proper grammar and spelling. I found myself wishing that my own son's fourth-grade teachers at nearby Public School 87, reputedly one of the best public schools in the city, were anywhere near as productive and as focused on basic skills as Miss Viti. Both my boys' teachers have wasted an enormous amount of time with empty verbiage about the evils of racism and sexism. By contrast, in Miss Viti's class and in all the other Catholic- school classes I visited, it was taken for granted that a real education is the best antidote to prejudice. Miss Viti earns $21,000 a year, $8,000 less than a first- year public-school teacher. ``I've taught in an all-white, affluent suburban school, where I made over $40,000,'' she says. ``This time I wanted to do something good for society, and I am lucky enough to be able to afford to do it. I am trying to instill in my students that whatever their life situation is now, they can succeed if they work hard and study.'' You might expect liberals, self-styled champions of disadvantaged children, to applaud the commitment and sacrifice of educators like Susan Viti. You might even expect them to look for ways of getting government money to these underfunded schools. Instead, they've done their best to make sure the wall of separation between church and state remains impenetrable. Liberal child-advocacy groups tout an endless array of ``prevention'' programs that are supposed to stave off delinquency, dropping out of school and teen pregnancy-- yet they consistently ignore Catholic schools, which nearly always succeed in preventing these pathologies. Read the chapter on education in Hillary Clinton's ``It Takes a Village.'' Mrs. Clinton advocates an alphabet soup of education programs for poor kids, but says not a word about Catholic schools. Similarly, in his books on education and inner-city ghettos, Jonathan Kozol offers vivid tours of decrepit public schools in places like the South Bronx, but he never stops at the many Catholic schools that are succeeding a few blocks away. Why are Catholic schools taboo among those who talk loudest about compassion for the downtrodden? It's hard to escape the conclusion that one of the most powerful reasons is liberals' alliance with the teachers' unions, which have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the campaign coffers of liberal candidates around the country. Two weeks ago I attended the National Education Association convention in Washington, a week-long pep rally for Bill Clinton punctuated by ritual denunciations of privatization. Before the teachers' unions rise to political power, it was not unusual to see urban Democrats like former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo support government aid to Catholic schools. Mr. Cuomo's flip-flop on this issue is especially revealing. In 1974, when he first ran for public office, Mr. Cuomo wrote a letter to potential supporters: ``I've spent more than 15 years . . . arguing for aid to private schools,'' he wrote. ``If you believe aid is a good thing, then you are the good people. If you believe it, then it's your moral obligation, as it is my own, to do something about it. . . . Let's try tax-credit plans and anything else that offers any help.'' Mr. Cuomo soon learned his lesson. In his published diaries he wrote: ``Teachers are perhaps the most effective of all the state's unions. If they go all-out, it will mean telephones and vigorous statewide support. It will also mean some money.'' In his 1982 campaign for governor, Mr. Cuomo gave a speech trumpeting the primacy of public education and the rights of teachers. He won the union's enthusiastic endorsement against Ed Koch in the Democratic primary. Over the next 12 years, in private meetings with Catholic leaders, Gov. Cuomo would declare that he still supported tax relief for parochial school parents. Then he would take a completely different position in public. For example, in 1984 he acknowledged that giving tax credits for parochial-school tuition was ``clearly constitutional'' under a recent Supreme Court decision-but he refused to support such a plan. Politically controlled schools are unlikely to improve much without strong pressure from outside. Thus, the case for government aid to Catholic schools is now more compelling than ever, if only to provide the competitive pressure to force state schools to change. And the conventional wisdom that government is constitutionally prohibited from aiding Catholic schools has been undermined by several recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions. sucker's trap Since the powerful teachers' unions vehemently oppose any form of government aid to Catholic schools, reformers are often skittish about advocating vouchers or tuition tax credits, fearing that will end the public-school reform conversation before it begins. But to abandon aid to Catholic schools in the name of public-school reform is a sucker's trap. We have ended up with no aid to Catholic schools and no real public-school reform either. Catholic schools are a valuable public resource not just because they profoundly benefit the children who enroll in them. They also challenge the public school monopoly, constantly reminding us that the neediest kids are educable and that spending extravagant sums of money isn't the answer. No one who cares about reviving our failing public schools can afford to ignore this inspiring laboratory of reform.