Michael Enzi

Mr. ENZI

Mr. ENZI. The Senator from Wyoming is absolutely correct. We are getting a lot of calls and mail, letters about that. Another thing the President promised, of course, is that everybody would have catastrophic coverage. It fascinates me that the Wyoming people and the people across America have figured out that Medicare doesn't have catastrophic coverage. But Medicare Advantage provides catastrophic coverage as well as a number of other things that Medicare does not cover. I think they realize, too, that if Medicare Advantage goes away, yes, they can get Medigap but Medigap is more expensive. It is also interesting that the AARP sells Medigap.

Mr. ENZI. I am seeing what you are seeing. I am noticing some people do not know what an entitlement actually is. That is a bill that goes on forever, that the Secretary of Health and Human Services has to make sure that it is paid in perpetuity unless there is some other major Congressional action that happens. We keep paying that bill over and over again. I think the Senator from Wyoming recognizes entitlements and some of the difficulties involved with that.

Mr. ENZI. We are being notified our time is up. We will continue. I have several letters from Wyoming organizations that I want to have printed in the Record, and I will do that at a later time. I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. ENZI

Mr. ENZI. I appreciate the comments, some of which need correction, from yesterday and those that have just been made. On a partisan bill, I sat through all of those days in the HELP Committee. That bill was rushed and put together. Senator Kennedy was not able to be involved in that part of it. His staff did it. They did it in a hurry. We turned in 159 amendments that were accepted. Most of those were for typos and minor corrections. There were a few that actually had some substance to them. That bill was passed on July 15 out of committee without a single Republican vote. It wasn't published. We didn't see the final version until September 17. The ones that were really something that could have made a difference were taken out without the permission of any Republican Senator. That is not bipartisan. We talked about how many hours we spent together. If you don't accept things from the minority party, it is not bipartisan. It is still partisan. Just spending hours doesn't make any difference. To move on to a different topic, yesterday we were talking about costs. I hope the people take a look at a Wall Street Journal article from yesterday that says: A bill that raises prices but lowers costs, and other miracles. We heard all day yesterday that this bill is going to save people a lot of money. This article reads: We have now reached the stage of the health-care debate when all that matters is getting a bill passed, so all news is good news, more subsidies mean lower deficits, and more expensive insurance is really cheaper insurance. The nonpolitical mind reels. Consider how Washington received the Congressional Budget Office's study Monday of how Harry Reid's Senate bill will affect insurance costs, which by any rational measure ought to have been a disaster for the bill. CBO found that premiums in the individual market will rise by 10% to 13% more than if Congress did nothing. Family policies under the status quo are projected to cost $13,100 on average, but under ObamaCare will jump to $15,200. Fabulous news! ``No Big Cost Rise in U.S. Premiums Is Seen in Study,'' said the New York Times, while the Washington Post declared, ``Senate Health Bill Gets a Boost.'' The White House crowed that the CBO report was ``more good news about what reform will mean for families struggling to keep up with skyrocketing premiums under the broken status quo.'' Finance Chairman Max Baucus chimed in from the Senate floor that ``Health-care reform is fundamentally about lower health-care costs. Lowering costs is what health-care reform is designed to do, lowering costs; and it will achieve this objective.'' Except it won't. CBO says it expects employer-sponsored insurance costs to remain roughly in line with the status quo, yet even this is a failure by Mr. Baucus's and the White House's own standards. Meanwhile, fixing the individual market--which is expensive and unstable largely because it does not enjoy the favorable tax treatment given to job-based coverage--was supposed to be the whole purpose of ``reform.'' Instead, CBO is confirming that new coverage mandates will drive premiums higher. But Democrats are declaring victory, claiming that these higher insurance prices don't count because they will be offset by new government subsidies. About 57% of the people who buy insurance through the bill's new ``exchanges'' that will supplant today's individual market will qualify for subsidies that cover about two-thirds of the total premium. So the bill will increase costs but it will then disguise those costs by transferring them to taxpayers from individuals. Higher costs can be conjured away because they're suddenly on the government balance sheet. The Reid bill's $371.9 billion in new health taxes are also apparently not a new cost because they can be passed along to consumers, or perhaps will be hidden in lost wages. This is the paleo- liberal school of brute-force wealth redistribution, and a very long way from the repeated White House claims that reform is all about ``bending the cost curve.'' The only thing being bent here is the budget truth. Moreover, CBO is almost certainly underestimating the cost increases. Based on its county-by-county actuarial data, the insurer WellPoint has calculated that Mr. Baucus's bill would cause some premiums to triple in the individual market. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association came to similar conclusions. One reason is community rating, which forces insurers to charge nearly uniform rates regardless of customer health status or habits. CBO doesn't think this will have much of an effect, but costs inevitably rise when insurers aren't allowed to price based on risk. This is why today some 35 states impose no limits on premium variation and six allow wide differences among consumers. The White House decided to shoot messengers like WellPoint to avoid rebutting their message. But Amanda Kowalski of MIT, William Congdon of the Brookings Institution and Mark Showalter of Brigham Young have found similar results. In a 2008 paper in the peer-reviewed Forum for Health Economics and Policy, these economists found that state community rating laws raise premiums in the individual market by 20.9% to 33.1% for families and 10.2% to 17.1% for singles. In New Jersey, which also requires insurers to accept all comers (so-called guaranteed issue), premiums increased by as much as 227%. The political tragedy is that there are plenty of reform alternatives that really would reduce the cost of insurance. According to CBO, the relatively modest House GOP bill would actually reduce premiums by 5% to 8% in the individual market in 2016, and by 7% to 10% for small businesses. The GOP reforms would also do so without imposing huge new taxes. But Democrats don't care because their bill isn't really about ``lowering costs.'' It's about putting Washington in charge of health insurance, at any cost.

Mr. ENZI. That is our understanding as well.

Mr. ENZI. That was an editorial by the Wall Street Journal, the staff of the Wall Street Journal, confirmed by MIT, Brigham Young, and others.

Mr. ENZI. Madam President, I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from Florida.

Mr. ENZI. Madam President, I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from South Dakota.

Mr. ENZI. Madam President, I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Oklahoma.

Mr. ENZI. Madam President, I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Texas.

Mr. ENZI. Madam President, I yield 2 minutes to the Senator from Kansas.

Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from Alaska so she can actually propose her amendment that we have been debating and take up to 10 minutes.

Mr. ENZI. That would still leave us with 2 minutes. If it does leave us with 2 minutes, then I would have the Senator from Wyoming use that 2 minutes.

Mr. ENZI. I will yield our final minute to the Senator from Wyoming.

Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I wish to raise a point as the accountant around here. You have mentioned some ways to cut Medicare to pay for this. Actually there are only two ways you can pay for a government program. You have to do it through cuts or through taxes. I don't think there is anybody in America who believes you can do $1 trillion worth of new programs and have them all paid for, unless you steal somewhere. That is what we are doing from Medicare. We say that is not going to affect Medicare. If you eliminate the DSH payments which are part of this, it is going to put some Wyoming hospitals out of business. I can assure you that if those seniors can't go to a hospital in their town, they are going to consider that a benefit cut. They are going to be upset, and they ought to be. The same with nursing homes. If you cut back on nursing homes, the people who have to move to another town for a nursing home--because all of our towns don't have more than one nursing home--puts quite a burden not only on the patient who isn't going to get to see their family as much, but also on the family who has to travel a long way to see the patient. So I don't think we ought to be paying for the new programs by doing this when Medicare needs an extended life. I am always fascinated when they explain that this will extend the life of Medicare because, yes, if you cut payments to everybody, that maybe saves money and extends the life of it, if we did that. Is there anybody who thinks we are going to cut the doctors over the next 10 years by $250 billion? No, we are not going to do that. We never have.

Mr. ENZI. Yes.

Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I wish to ask the Senator from Idaho what he thinks will happen with these Medicare cuts as they affect jobs and the economy. That is one of the biggest things on people's minds right now, jobs and the economy. We are concentrating on something here where we are going to maybe make a difference, even though CBO says it won't be much of a difference.

Mr. ENZI

Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ENZI

Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, first, I wish to thank the Senator from Alaska for the tremendous work she has done on this issue and for the dozens of people she has talked to over the last couple days to try to come up with an amendment that would actually solve the problem everybody has been talking about. I appreciate the Senator from Maryland recognizing this major flaw in the bill, and it is in the bill. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is in the bill. That is exactly the group that specified this new policy on mammograms that has upset people all across the country. It upset everybody so much that we have an amendment on the floor by the Senator from Maryland reacting to that and reacting to the fact that it is in the bill at the current time. So I appreciate the Senator from Alaska coming up with a plan that actually is more comprehensive than the amendment from the Senator from Maryland because the Senator has had a little bit longer to work on it. I appreciate the words the Senator has in there that ``you cannot deny.'' The Senator is on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee with me, and I know we have worked on this issue in committee. I hoped this kind of a realization would have been made at that time. We had some amendments where you could not deny based on this or the comparative effectiveness or could not prohibit based on it. We know all those amendments failed, meaning there was probably some intention to deny or to prohibit based on these groups. So I appreciate the Senator bringing up the fact that it is the caregivers who will have some say in this so Washington cannot come between you and your doctor. I wish the Senator would go into a little bit of some of her background from Alaska because the Senator and Alaska have been very involved in breast cancer for a long time, and people ought to be aware of the kind of services that are available out there and what the costs of those services are.

Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I know there is not any word that probably turns a family upside down as much as the word ``cancer,'' and it does not matter which form of cancer it is. It is just drastic because we do not know all the implications of it. Maybe someday we will. Maybe someday we will know how people get it, and we will be able to cure it with a vaccine. But, so far, what we have are some mechanisms for putting it into remission. One of the reasons I know how upsetting that is and how it turns the world upside down is, 3\1/2\, 3\3/4\ years ago my wife was diagnosed with colon cancer. She had screenings, but she listened to her body. She said: Something is the matter here. She kept going to doctors. So even if they do not recommend the screenings, if your body is saying something is the matter, pursue it until you are either convinced nothing is the matter or a doctor finds what is the matter. That is the advice she gives to everybody. These are things that need to be between the patient and the doctor. Now that she is in remission, one of the things the doctor recommended was that she take Celebrex. That is something normally for arthritic pain, but what they found was in some patients that will keep polyps from growing that will turn into cancer in the colon, and we definitely do not want that to recur again. So she is taking that. But it is a constant fight with making sure that is an approved medication and that it can be done and that it will be paid for. If that were just a task force recommendation--first of all, since she had the screening, they would say she does not have a problem and, later, she would die from it. But she was able to listen to her body, get the treatment she needed, and now is continuing to get the treatment without a task force saying: No, 99 percent of the people do not need that. Her doctor and she are able to determine what she needs. On other screenings, once you have cancer, there are other times you need to have MRIs, other kinds of tests run. That, again, has to be up to the doctor and the patient to determine how often those are needed. Again, I know from talking to a number of people whom I know--not just ladies either--who have had cancer, once you have had cancer and you are in remission, you would actually prefer to have your screening a little bit earlier for the mental reassurance you get with it. Again, from talking to people--and we have talked to more now because we are trying to give some reassurances to them when this terrible word comes up--when they go to the doctor, one of the first things that happens is they weigh in, they take your blood pressure. When you are waiting for a decision on how the blood test you got turned out or the MRI you got turned out or whatever it was, that blood pressure goes through the roof. Quite frequently, you cannot leave the doctor's office until you have--you went there for the information, so, of course, you stay for the information, but they will not let you leave until they do the blood pressure test again, to make sure it goes down below the critical stage. That is how much impact this has on people. So I am glad the Senator did something that goes a little bit further, covers a few more things, and makes sure people have access to their doctor, to the tests they need, and not to be relying on some government bureaucracy to say: Well, in 99 percent of the cases or 85 percent of the cases--who knows how far down they will take it, depending on what the costs are. We do not want that to happen. I think the Senator's amendment allows patients to get these preventive benefits and stops government bureaucrats and outside experts from ever blocking patients' access to those types of services. I appreciate the Senator from Maryland who put up an amendment. I do not think it meets that standard. They still rely on government experts called the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force to decide what preventive benefits should be covered under private health insurance. This is the same Preventive Services Task Force that made this decision that women under the age of 50 should not receive annual mammograms. In fact, I think I even remember in there that they were not necessarily recommending self-examination. Most people I know who are very young discovered it with self-examination. I certainly would not want them to quit doing that because there is a recommendation from somebody who does not understand them or their body. Patients do want to receive preventive screenings. Sometimes they are a little reluctant to do it because nobody wants the possibility of hearing that word given to them. Americans should be able to get screened for high blood pressure and diabetes when a doctor recommends they get these tests. I think the Senator and I agree they should be able to get colonoscopies, prostate exams, and mammograms, so they can prevent deadly cancers from progressing to the point where they are no longer curable. Many of these diseases are preventable or curable or can be put into remission if they are discovered early enough. I think we agree with Senator Mikulski's goal that all Americans should be able to get preventive benefits, but we disagree that her amendment achieves that stated goal. Her amendment does not ensure access to mammograms for women who are under the age of 50. Part of that I am taking from an Associated Press article. As most Americans know, last month the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force revised the recommendations for screening for breast cancer, advising women between the ages of 40 and 49 against receiving routine mammograms and women ages 50 and over to receive a mammogram just once every 2 years. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force lowered its grade for these screenings to a C. That sparked the political firestorm, as many women became confused about what services they could get and when they could get them. The health care bills before Congress further confused the issue because they rely heavily on the recommendations of the task force. That is what is in the bill. The underlying Reid bill says--and the Mikulski amendment restates--that all health plans must cover preventive services that receive an A or B grade from the task force. Let's see, we just said that was a C grade. Because breast cancer screenings for women under the age of 50 are no longer classified by the task force as an A or B, plans would not have to cover those services. So Senator Mikulski drafted an amendment to try to fix this problem, but I think it confuses the matter some more. I say to the Senator, I appreciate the effort you have gone to, to try to clarify that and expand it to some other areas--and to not add another layer of bureaucracy--by saying that all services and screenings must be covered by health plans. However, the previous amendment does not have any guidelines that are specifically for women or prevention.

Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I congratulate the Senator from Alaska also. Isn't it true that the Senator's amendment ensures that the Secretary of Health and Human Services won't be able to deny any of these services based on any recommendation? That is one of the things we have been concerned about. Again, that is an unelected bureaucrat who could come between you and your doctor and your health care. I know the Senator has covered that in her amendment, too, and I do appreciate it.

Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I also appreciate that the Senator from Alaska makes sure they can't deny care based on comparative effectiveness research, which actually was part of the stimulus bill that was run through at that point in time, and finally that the Senator's amendment includes a commonsense provision that would prohibit the Secretary from ever determining that abortion is a preventive service. So I hope all of my colleagues, whether they are pro-life or pro- choice, would support this change to ensure that the controversial issues don't sidetrack the debate on the preventive issues because what we are talking about is the preventive issues, and I appreciate the Senator covering that.

Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, as I said before, my wife says that she had probably never mentioned the word ``colon'' twice in her whole life, and since then she has become an encyclopedia for people who have a very similar problem. She had a colonoscopy a short time before. She was still having problems, and they had said there is no problem, but she kept getting it checked until she found that there was a problem. So people need to listen to their bodies, and they need to listen to their doctors, and they shouldn't have a bureaucrat coming in between that. So I thank the Senator.

Mr. ENZI

Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I yield to the Senator from Nebraska.

Mr. ENZI

Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, after the speech by the Senator from Illinois, I feel compelled to make a few comments. One, he challenged us a little bit to do a bill in 2,000 pages or less. I am one of those people who do not think it can be done in less. I do not think there are nearly enough pages there to solve the biggest problem in the United States for every American. People are not comprehending how big health care is. The bill we are doing will affect 100 percent of the people in America. I do not know if we have ever had a bill before that affected 100 percent of the people--100 percent of the people, 100 percent of the professions, 100 percent of the businesses. This is big. Everybody has a role in health care, and we are trying to condense it into 2,000 pages and make it seem a lot simpler than it is. The reason our side has been saying you need to take this a step at a time and get it right is because that gives up some of the right. There are over 200 references in the 2,000 pages that say the Secretary of Health and Human Services will solve that particular problem; in other words, put in the details. We do not have nearly the details in there to actually run health care for America. Without the details, we do not know what the devil is, and that is the difficulty. So we really ought to break it down a step at a time. One step I really think would calm America down is if we did Medicare as a separate step. That way we could assure seniors that Medicare was going to be for Medicare. Yes, there are savings in Medicare. Yes, Medicare is going broke. Use the savings for Medicare. It seems pretty simple to me. One of the things they are complaining about is the doc fix we have. We are not paying doctors adequately to be willing to take Medicare patients. Of course, we are not paying them adequately to take Medicaid patients either. But we are not paying them right. It would cost about $250 billion to fix that. Well, if we are talking about $464 billion worth of savings in Medicare, why not use that $250 billion to fix that problem so we have doctors. I do not care what kind of insurance you have, I do not care how much you pay for the insurance, if you cannot see a doctor, you really do not have insurance. That is what seniors are being faced with. That is what Medicaid people are being faced with. Medicaid--well, that is another piece that ought to be maybe a step because 40 percent of the doctors will not take a Medicaid patient because they are not being paid adequately for it. If you are not paid adequately, you go broke. They are small businesses. They are affected by this bill in more than one way. They have to provide what we are saying is a government requirement for the minimum insurance they have, and they also have to live with whatever rules we put in there and whatever pay fixes we put in there. On the government option, one of the things CBO said was, the only way that would ever bring down costs is if the government fixes prices for the doctors, for the hospitals. Well, we are kind of doing that in this bill for Medicare because we are telling nursing homes they are going to take a big cut. Nursing homes do not have a lot of margin, and if nursing homes go broke, people have to go a long ways, sometimes--in Wyoming, anyway, and Colorado, wherever we have rural populations--they may have to go a long way to see their loved one. They may not even be able to do it. So we have to keep those small nursing homes in business as well. So we ought to do this in steps and get it right. That is one of the problems that the Group of 6 ran into. We were not given the time. We allocated about 13 different areas to go through. I think we made it through 5 completely and probably 3 fairly completely, and the rest we were just asking basic questions. With any business, it looks pretty easy until you scratch the surface a little bit, and when you scratch the surface, you find out that every job out there is fairly complicated. If you have never done it before, and you are trying to come up with 2,000 pages worth of laws to govern that, you are probably going to get it wrong. That is what the doctors are telling us. That is what the other providers are telling us. This bill has it wrong, in a lot of places, enough places that it is going to cause a crisis in America if this bill passes the way it is. We have never passed a major bill in this body with just one side voting for it. If that were to happen, the other side would take potshots at anything that turned out to be something that had not been comprehended when the bill was written. And there will be plenty of that in here. But just as important, the American people will not have confidence in it. They do not have confidence in us now--either side. I think that is what the elections in Virginia and New Jersey said. That is what the tea parties are saying. They are saying: We don't trust any of you. Throw the whole bunch out. Start over. Well, we need to stop and get their confidence. Just steamrolling from one side, even if they have the 60 votes, is not going to do that. I have been saying that since we started. It is something so important that we have to get it right, and we do not have it right in this bill because there are a whole bunch of things, over 200, where we said to the Secretary of Health and Human Services: You figure that one out. Well, that is going to be thousands of pages, and it is going to be done by an unelected bureaucrat. It is not going to be approved by this body. We ought to take the responsibility for getting those things right. And we can. Yes, it takes time. Yes, we have a lot of things to do. But I am in agreement that health care is the most important thing we have to do. But we ought to take the time to get it right. There are a lot of ideas out there that would--in fact, one of the things that always upsets me when they say: So where is the Republican version? Well, I have been working on this thing for about 4 years. I have been working on it, actually--health care--ever since I got on the committee over 13 years ago, but for the last 4 years pretty intensively. Senator Kennedy and I sat down and worked out principles we wanted to have. The principles are still the principles we are talking about around here. We want to make sure people are covered in catastrophic situations. We want to make sure preexisting conditions are taken care of. We want to make sure they have portability when they go from one job to another. The list goes on and on. We reached agreement. He was busy working on the Higher Education Act because it was way past due for being reauthorized, so I was kind of released to go talk to everybody on health care. I worked that. I worked both sides of the aisle, finding out ideas they had, and boiled it down to a 10-step plan. I did a tour with my 10-step plan to see what kind of problems there were with it and was really pleased with the reception. Yes, I learned some things that needed to be done differently than what I thought. But if you will check my Web site, there is a 10-step plan that is a bill that covers the things we have been promising people they would have. I would not suggest doing it in one package. I would suggest doing it in several steps, not necessarily 10 steps, which are what are in there. But it would bring down the cost of health care insurance. That is the biggest thing I hear from people out there: Bring down my cost. Now, everybody has been real pleased with this CBO clarification that came out that said the costs were not going to rise. They did not say: Don't let them rise. They said: Bring them down. Bring them down. They said: We don't mind covering a whole bunch of other people, but don't increase my costs as a result. This bill increases their costs as a result. There is a way to do it. There are four different bills on the Republican side. And then there is a really bipartisan bill that Senator Wyden and Senator Bennett worked out, and I think there are about 15 cosponsors on both sides of the aisle. Those are all ways that this could be solved. But they are not in the bill. Since Senator Wyden was left out of that part of the process, I am not even sure it could be considered partisan because you have to include all from one party. But, at any rate, there are alternates out there. When we did the health care bill, which took weeks of doing the amendments, because it is very hard to do something in an amendment process and get it right-- it is easier in the committee than it is here on the floor--but in the committee, we put up one of those as an alternative. We only took one vote to vote the whole thing down. They only had to criticize about 3 parts of 20 to get enough enthusiasm against it to be able to win. All the votes were 13 to 10, pretty much. So we said: Wait a minute. That is not a good idea for us. They should have to take a look at these germs of ideas that are in all these different sections. So we started putting them up one at a time. We still lost most of them 13 to 10. There were a couple of them that did finally pass. But we need to get into a mode of working across the aisle, like Senator Kennedy and I did on so many bills. In fact, I think we set some records, probably, not just when I was chairman of the committee but when he was chairman of the committee. We were on our way to getting a bunch done. Anyway, deficit reduction. I heard Senator Durbin talk about deficit reduction, and if this bill reduces the deficit. You have to be honest. If you use phony accounting, you can show huge deficits being reduced. That means leaving out some things that aren't in the bill, but they are going to be costs we have to cover. For instance, the doc fix, $250 billion. It is not in there. They say we will fix it for 1 year and then we will hold them hostage again for another year so we can get them to join us on something else. That is not the right way to do business. We ought to fix the thing and if we have all of this extra money in Medicare, that would solve some problems for Medicare. On Medicaid, we are about to dump a whole bunch more people onto the Medicaid system. It is nice we are going to be able to do that, but there are some other ways we can take care of those same people and make sure they have insurance, and they would have insurance that didn't have the same stigma as Medicaid. One of the stigmas I am talking about is the doctors not willing to take them. If you can't see a doctor, you don't have insurance. If we dump all of these people on a system that already won't take the patients, how many of them are going to be able to see a doctor? So we could eliminate that stigma. In fact, that is what we did in the SCHIP in Wyoming. We made a provision so that it could go through the private market. When they go through the private market--or when they don't go through the private market, a problem a kid has if their dad is working, they have insurance; if he is not working, they don't have insurance, or if it is mom. Under the Wyoming one, when they go through the private market they know they have it for a year. That is the way it ought to be. That is the way Medicaid should be. Of course, you have to sign up for it. Right now you don't have to sign up. You go to the hospital, you get your fix, and we pay for it, or the State pays their share. We are dumping a huge liability on the States, so it is a real problem. The States are very concerned. Right now they are having budget problems almost across the entire United States. They are saying, so what are you going to dump on us? Well, our Gang of 6 asked that question and we got this overall CBO score on how much it was going to cost the States as a whole, but we didn't want to know how much it was going to cost as a whole. Every one of us has to answer to our State, so we asked for it to be broken down and they broke it down. It was kind of interesting. I had to call my Governor and explain to him how much he was going to have to come up with, even under the extra protection we were trying to build in for States. But the next day we got another breakdown. I said, so did CBO change their score? No, they didn't, but we manipulated the numbers a little bit differently. Well, they manipulated the numbers for Nevada and New York, and I think that is in the bill too. Their excuse for it was that Nevada and New York are particularly hard hit by the recession. Well, one of our complaints--and part of the phony accounting--is that this doesn't even go into effect for 4 more years, so how would we know that in 4 more years Nevada and New York would be the hardest hit? How do we know it won't be Wyoming and Colorado? So the formulas ought to be formulas that are going to work for everybody all of the time, not just for some of the leadership. There are some flaws in here we need to take a look at and we need to clear up. I am not going to keep everybody much longer because I want to go hear the President speak too and I apologize for the time I have taken. But once in a while a speech gets me kind of concerned and I have to expound a little bit on it and I think the people of America need to know. Actually, I think the people of America have figured this out. I think that is why there were problems in August and I think that is why we are not going home on the weekends, because we don't want people to hear what the people at home are saying. I was home over the Thanksgiving weekend and I got an earful, and I like what I am doing. I don't think I like what is happening in the bill. So with that, I yield the floor and thank the President, so the Senator from Oklahoma can speak.