Tom Harkin

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Nevada for asking for this consent. Certainly I will yield to the Senator from Arizona when he arrives. I know he had time reserved. I listened with great interest to the President's State of the Union speech, hoping to hear what kind of plans he had to help America's working families in the struggling economy. Unfortunately, I didn't hear anything to help the millions of people who are out of work and have given up looking for work because there are so few jobs. I think this administration needs to wake up and come up with a real jobs plan to help America's families. We need to extend emergency unemployment insurance for the hundreds of thousands of people who paid into unemployment when they were working but months after losing their job still can't find work. We need to raise the minimum wage, which has not been increased in over 6 years. And the administration needs to immediately withdraw its proposal that would deny millions of workers their overtime pay. The President's proposal will deny overtime pay to 8 million workers. Five months ago the Senate voted 54 to 45 on my amendment to block the administration's effort to take away overtime pay to 8 million Americans. The House soon followed, 223 to 201. The Senate spoke again yesterday in its vote against cloture. This should not even be an issue on the Omnibus appropriations bill that is before us today. The Congress of the United States spoke up, clear as a bell, and said: No, the administration must not strip overtime rights from 8 million American workers. But, as we all know, the administration refused to accept the will of Congress. The administration ordered its foot soldiers in the House to strip this provision from the omnibus. Senator Specter and I fought to keep it in, but the administration refused any cooperation or compromise. In the end, just like that, without any vote in the conference, the administration nullified the clear will of both Houses of Congress and the American people by sticking to his position to deny overtime pay rights to 8 million Americans. This is a clear abuse of power by the administration and part of a pattern we have seen from this President, time and time again. The administration seems to believe in government by one branch, the executive branch. When there are no checks and balances, the result is bad public policy, and that is exactly what we see here today. Mr. President, I see the Senator from Arizona has arrived. I will yield the floor and resume my talk on the overtime provisions later on sometime today.

Mr. HARKIN. I thank the Chair. Mr. President, picking up where I started earlier today, I listened to the President's State of the Union Message hoping he would come up with a real jobs plan to help America's families. But quite frankly, there was nothing in the State of the Union Address that talked about that. We need to extend emergency unemployment for the hundreds of thousands of people who paid in when they were working, but months after losing their jobs, they still can't find work. We need to raise the minimum wage, which has not been increased in 6 years. And right now, most important of all, the administration needs to withdraw its proposal that would deny millions of American workers their overtime pay protections. Five months ago, the Senate voted on my amendment 54 to 45 to block the administration's effort to take away overtime pay protection for up to 8 million workers. That's right, the Bush proposal that came out of the Department of Labor would deny overtime pay protection to 8 million American workers. The House followed soon after us and voted 223 to 201, and the Senate spoke again yesterday in its vote against cloture. Now, again, this should not even be an issue in the Omnibus appropriations bill before us. Congress spoke up clear as a bell. They said: No, the administration should not strip overtime pay protection for these 8 million workers. As we all know, the administration refused to accept the will of Congress. The administration ordered its foot soldiers in the House to strip the provision from this omnibus bill. Senator Specter and I fought to keep it in, but the administration refused any cooperation or any compromise. In the end, just like that, the administration nullified the clear will of both Houses of Congress and of the American people. This is a clear abuse of power by the administration and it is part of a pattern we have seen from this President time and again. The administration seems to believe in government by one branch, the executive branch. Time and again, we see this administration running roughshod over the will of Congress. When there are no checks and balances, the result is bad public policy, and that is exactly what we see today. The administration's new rule is a stealth attack on the 40-hour workweek, pushed by the White House without one single public hearing. As I have said time and again over the last several months, it will effectively end overtime pay for dozens of occupations, including police officers, firefighters, clerical workers, air traffic controllers, social workers, journalists, nurses. In the amendment that I offered and that we voted on and that the House supported, there was one part of the President's proposal our amendment did not touch. The President's proposal does increase the income threshold that guarantees overtime pay protection from $8,060 a year to $22,100 a year. In other words, if someone makes under $22,100 a year, under the President's proposal they are guaranteed overtime pay if they work more than 40 hours a week, regardless of their occupation. Well, my amendment did not touch that, but now we understand that the Labor Department is providing tips within the proposal to employers on how to get around it. It included helpful tips for employers, advice on how to avoid paying overtime to the lowest paid workers who are supposedly helped by the new rule. For example, here is a list of what they have put out to employers--I might say probably to unscrupulous employers because honest employers are not going to do this anyway. If employers want to get around the rules, the administration is telling them how to do it. They are suggesting how employers can avoid paying overtime. First, they lower existing wages so when workers accrue overtime, their net pay will not grow. In other words, reduce their pay, work them longer hours so that the net effect is the same. So the workers will be working more than 40 hours a week but their pay will be exactly the same. Now, that is what has come from the Department of Labor. That is what they are telling employers to do to get around that provision in their proposal. Secondly, they are saying change workers' duties so they are exempt from the overtime rules. Well, okay. So let's say someone makes slightly over $22,100 a year. Therefore, they might be eligible for overtime. Just change their designation. Say they are something else. Put them under the category of exempt from overtime, and guess what; they are exempt from overtime. If an employee is close to the $22,100, what they are saying is, raise their wages to the level required to be exempt. So if someone is making $22,000 a year, or $21,700, just raise their pay to $22,100, work them over 40 hours a workweek, and do not pay them any more overtime. That is the way to get around it. This is from the Bush administration. That is what they are telling employers to do. Lastly, do not let them work more than 40 hours a week. Well, this sweeping proposal is in direct contrast to the intent of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that established the 40-hour workweek for America's workers. It is a slap in the face to the millions of American workers who depend on overtime pay to support their families and make ends meet. We are not talking about spare change. We are talking about taking away some 25 percent of the income of American workers. It is essential family income that helps pay the mortgage, feed the children, pay for college, save for a rainy day, save for retirement. Now, again, one can say do not let them work more than 40 hours a week, family time is premium time. For an American worker to spend time with their children at baseball games, basketball games, football games, or at school meetings, or just to be home with their families late in the evening or on a weekend is premium time. If an employer is going to ask an American worker, a man or a woman, to give up their premium time with their families, they had better pay them premium wages, which is what overtime is. No. The Bush administration is saying, hey, this family-friendly administration--how many times have we heard that, ``family-friendly administration''?--is now saying: Forget about it; if an employee wants to work overtime away from their family, we are going to make sure they do not get overtime. Or if they need the overtime to pay for retirement and stuff, we are suggesting they do not work an employee over 40 hours a week. Again, we already know that American workers are working more than what they have in the past and more than what they have done in other nations. If we look at this chart, we can see that American workers work more hours than workers in other industrialized nations. Here is the United States over here. Hours worked per employed person in 2001 is slightly over 1,800. Look at where it is in Denmark, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany. American workers are already working longer than any other workers in any other industrialized country. What the administration is saying is we are going to work employees longer and not pay them any more. It will not create one new job. It will give employers a disincentive to hire new workers if they can force their current employees to work more hours with no increase in pay. That is exactly what it is. It is anti-worker. It is anti-family. It is bad economic policy. Congress did the right thing in voting to block this new rule. Now that Congress's vote and voice have been nullified, we are hearing from the Department of Labor that the new rule will go in in March. I am here to serve notice that just as I offered this amendment last summer, I will offer it again and again on any legislation that comes to the floor of the Senate. We will not give up, nor will others who have fought this fight with us. The American people will not allow us to drop this issue. They have been watching this issue closely because it hits so close to home. Lastly, I was home over the break period and there was this cartoon that appeared in the Des Moines Register which I thought kind of summed it all up. Here is a police officer standing over a poor guy who looks as if he has been run over by a truck. The police officer is taking it down and he is saying: ``You say the guy who took your overtime pay bore a striking resemblance to the one who gave it to you in the first place?'' So on the one hand, President Bush is saying we are going to raise the threshold so that employees are covered by overtime pay provisions. On the other hand, they are saying to employers: This is how to get around it. Here is how employers can get around this proposed rule so that they can take overtime pay away. The President wants to have it both ways. He wants to tell the American workers that he is going to increase their overtime pay. On the other hand, he is whispering to employers: Do not worry, I have ways you can get around it. There is only one way, and that is the right way, which is to pay workers what they earn and what they deserve and to pay them the overtime they need and for which they have worked. The administration can take care of this right now. They could take care of it, but they have nullified what they have tried to do in Congress. So I urge the administration to do what is fair and just for America's workers and withdraw this harmful proposal. It is the right thing to do, to withdraw it. I say to this administration if you think this is just an issue with labor unions, you are sadly mistaken. Everywhere I went in Iowa and some other States during the long break period that we had, I heard about this issue. Not just from union workers; white collar workers, nurses, firefighters, and others in our society. Maybe they don't belong to a labor union, but they are going to be drastically affected. This cuts very deep. I don't know who gave you the advice, Mr. Bush, but it was bad advice. You ought to get a grip on this, President Bush. Get a grip on this and tell your Secretary of Labor to rescind this proposal. Work with Congress. We can, as we have many times in the past, come up with something. The Fair Labor Standards Act has been amended many times but always through an open process with open hearings, the best information, and Congress worked with the administration. We have never had any contention. Certainly we could agree on that level, that $8,060 level, that ought to be raised to $22,000. It ought to be raised. But then don't put out information saying OK, here is how you get around it. Let's raise it. Let's make it stick. Let's not exempt all these workers from overtime pay protection. That is the right thing to do. This Congress, this Senate, and this Senator will continue to fight to make sure this rule does not go into effect and that we protect the legitimate overtime pay protections of the American workers. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. But Congress voice and vote were nullified. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a New York Times article dated January 20, 2004, and a letter to the President signed by several Senators dated January 16, 2004, be printed in the Record.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, 5 months ago the Senate voted in support of my amendment to block the administration's effort to kill overtime pay for millions of American workers. The bipartisan vote of the Senate was 54 to 45. The House followed suit with a 221-to-203 vote. The Congress spoke up clear as a bell and said: No, the administration must not strip overtime rights from 8 million American workers. But as we all know, the administration refused to accept the clear will of Congress. The administration ordered the conferees to strip this provision from the omnibus bill. Senator Specter and I fought to keep it in, but the administration refused any cooperation or compromise. In the end, with a snap of its fingers, the administration nullified the clear will of both Houses of Congress and the American people. This is just another example of the brazen abuse of power by the administration. The administration seems to believe in Government by one branch: the executive branch. Time and again, we see this administration running roughshod over the will of Congress. The administration's new overtime rule is a stealth attack on the 40- hour workweek, pushed by the White House without a single public hearing. There was one positive part of the proposal that would raise the basic income that guarantees overtime pay for low-income workers from $8,000 to $22,100. My amendment did not touch that part of the proposal. But now we find that the Labor Department is advising employers on how to get around it. The Labor Department example suggests cutting workers' hourly wages and making them work longer. That means there will be no net gain by the worker. This is disgraceful. Here is what they have done: ``How to Avoid Paying Your Employees Overtime,'' courtesy of the Department of Labor. Lower existing wages so when workers accrue overtime, their net pay will not grow. In other words, pay them less; work them longer. Change workers' duties so they are exempt from the overtime rules. Raise workers' wages to levels required to be exempt, $22,100. Don't let them work more than 40 hours a week. This is what is in the Bush proposal. This is like the IRS giving advice to tax cheats on how to avoid paying their taxes. This is a direct violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that established the 40-hour workweek for American workers. Right now, Americans work longer hours than workers in other industrialized nations. This is a slap in the face to workers who give up their premium time with their families to work overtime, and we are not talking about spare change here. We are talking about taking away some 25 percent of the income of many American workers. Congress did the right thing in voting to block this new rule.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President how much time do I have?

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I wish to engage in a colloquy with the distinguished majority leader, the Senator from Tennessee, Mr. Frist. From time to time, Congress is confronted with a public health crisis of such magnitude that we have no choice but to act. For a number of reasons, including the changing physical environment, eating and physical activity habits, obesity has now emerged as a serious new public health threat. More than 65 percent of American adults and 15 percent of children are obese or overweight. These figures double the levels during the 1980s for adults and triple the levels for children. Obesity now contributes to an estimated 300,000 deaths annually. We also know that obesity contributes to diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, cancers and heart disease. The economic impact also is alarming. The Surgeon General reports that obesity costs the Nation over $117 billion directly and indirectly. These tends will continue if we do not develop a comprehensive strategy to prevent and treat this condition. I commend Senator Frist and others for introducing the Improved Nutrition and Physical Activity Act to begin to tackle this challenge. Senator Frist as a physician certainly understands the impact of rising obesity rates. I commend his leadership on this issue. I believe that he and I agree that this IMPACT bill is an important step forward, but that more may need to be done to prevent and treat obesity. In view of the continuing and growing public health threat, I wonder if my friend and colleague would agree with me now that the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, as the committee of jurisdiction in this policy area, should devote further attention to this problem next year. I wonder whether he, as a fellow member of that HELP Committee, would agree with me now to urge chairman and ranking member of that committee to hold a hearing early in the next session of this Congress for that purpose.

Mr. HARKIN. I appreciate the attention of the majority leader to this subject. I commend his work and congratulate him on passage of this bill. I look forward to sending a joint letter to the HELP Committee, requesting a hearing, and I look forward to working with the Senator from Tennessee and others to build on this important start in combating harmful obesity.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, today I extend my appreciation to my fall 2003 class of interns: Dennis O'Connor, Melissa Hall, Jason Eaton, Theresa Fruher, and Natalie Dupcher. Each of them has been a tremendous help to me and to the people of Iowa over the past several months. Their efforts have not gone unnoticed. Since I was first elected into the Senate in 1984, my office has offered internships each fall to young Iowans and other interested students. Through their work in the Senate, our interns have not only seen the legislative process at work, but they also have personally contributed to our Nation's democracy. It is with much appreciation that I recognize Dennis, Melissa, Jason, Theresa, and Natalie for their hard work this fall. It has been a delight to watch them take on their assignments with enthusiasm and hard work. I am very proud to have worked with each of them. I hope they take from their fall a sense of pride in what they have been able to accomplish and an increased interest in public service and our democratic system and process.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, we are sent here to do the people's business, but one critical piece of the people's business is missing in this omnibus bill that was filed today. There is one shameful omission. Both Houses of Congress, on a bipartisan basis, voted for my amendment to block the administration's proposed new rule on overtime. Both Houses voted to block the administration's radical rewrite of the Nation's overtime laws. That amendment passed 54 to 45 in the Senate, and 221 to 203 over in the House. The Congress of the United States spoke up--clear as a bell--and said, ``No, the administration must not strip overtime rights from 8 million American workers.'' The administration refused to accept this act of defiance by Congress. The administration ordered its foot soldiers in the House of Representatives to strip this provision from the omnibus. Senator Specter and I fought to keep it in, but the administration refused any cooperation or compromise. In the end, just like that, the administration nullified the clear will of both Houses of Congress and the American public. I believe this is an abuse of power, and there is a clear pattern to this abuse of power. Time and again, we see this administration dictating to Congress, nullifying the work of Congress, running roughshod over the will of Congress. This administration seems to believe in Government by one branch--the executive branch. When the executive branch speaks, the administration's allies in Congress must obediently fall in line. And, time and again, they do. They act as a rubber stamp. They give the President a blank check. This is dangerous to our constitutional system. The Founding Fathers did not talk about blank checks. They talked about checks and balances. In the Federalist Papers they specifically talked about the danger of allowing any one branch to reign supreme. Instead of independent, coequal branches of Government, today the executive branch does, indeed, reign supreme. Time and again, this administration dictates to Congress, and Congress submits--even when both Houses of Congress have previously voted to the contrary. The problem with having the executive branch dictating to the legislative branch--the problem with discarding checks and balances--is that it results in bad public policy, and that is exactly what we see here, today. Both Houses of Congress, with bipartisan majorities, voted to block the administration's proposed overtime rule. This was the right thing to do. It was the correct public policy choice because this new rule is a stealth attack on the 40-hour workweek, pushed by the White House without a single public hearing. It will effectively end overtime pay for dozens of occupations, including nurses, police officers, firefighters, clerical workers, airtraffic controllers, social workers, and journalists. This proposal is a slap in the face to the millions of American workers who depend on overtime pay to support their families and make ends meet. We're not talking about spare change, here. We are talking about taking away some 25 percent of the income of many American workers. Now that Congress's vote and voice have been nullified, we are hearing that the Department of Labor could issue this new rule in the coming weeks. But I am here to serve notice that I will not give up, nor will others who have fought this. The American people will not allow us to drop this issue. They have been watching this issue closely, because it hits so close to home. I pledge that I will offer the overtime amendment to every piece of legislation until we succeed. Let's be clear. This is not just about reversing a destructive, misguided measure. It is also about this Congress asserting its independence and refusing to have its votes nullified at the whim of this administration.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. The article goes on to describe how the drug industry got everything they wanted. I think seniors in this country deserve more. They deserve to be put first in the process. Instead they have been put last. Corporate interests, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, they come first. It speaks volumes that on Wall Street the health industry and drug stocks have surged with the emergence of this bill. Corporate executives may be popping their champagne corks in celebration of what happened here today, but seniors are left scratching their heads and wondering why their interests were forgotten. Maybe they assumed that the AARP would stand up for their interests. But AARP has brazenly betrayed the wishes of its members. Seniors need to know what direction Medicare is taking and whose side the AARP is on. It says everything about this bill that Newt Gingrich is urging Republicans to vote in favor of it. Remember, this is the same Newt Gingrich who was Speaker of the House and expressed his desire to let Medicare wither on the vine. Mr. Gingrich is one of those ideologues who insists that the private marketplace will solve all of our problems. It would make his day to see Medicare dismantled. If he is for this bill, that ought to give us pause for concern. Mr. Gingrich and his rightwing friends love this bill, like the head of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, who once said: My goal is to cut government in half . . . to get it down to the size where we can [drag it into the bathroom] and drown it in the bathtub. Today, with this vote on this bill, Newt Gingrich's dream is coming true. The bill is a first step toward privatizing Medicare. You can bet that once the ink is dry, they will be starting on Social Security and going after that, too. Mr. Gingrich even went so far as to say he believed the pharmaceutical companies are getting unfair treatment; that they are punished by the success. Wrong. The bill doesn't ask for a penny from the pharmaceutical companies. I disagree. On page 53 of the bill, it protects drug companies from Government efforts to negotiate lower prices. That is on page 53, line 18. It says that Medicare cannot negotiate for lower prices for drug companies. A recent Peter Hart poll found that almost two-thirds of seniors view this bill unfavorably. Most of them identified themselves as members of AARP, American Association of Retired Persons. Among those AARP members, only 18 percent said Congress should pass this bill, while 65 percent said Congress should get back to work. Last week, AARP members from Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania tore up their membership cards in front of their organization's headquarters here in Washington. Members are accusing William Novelli, CEO of AARP, of ``selling out'' to insurers and selling out to Newt Gingrich. Where did they ever get that idea? Well, in fact, the relationship between Newt Gingrich and the bigwigs at AARP goes way back. William Novelli, the head of the AARP, wrote the preface to Gingrich's book, ``Saving Lives, Saving Money.'' In that preface, he states: Newt's ideas are influencing how we at AARP are thinking about our national role in health promotion and disease prevention and in our advocating for system change. That is Mr. Novelli in Newt Gingrich's book. I would have to ask Mr. Novelli which of Newt's ideas are ``influencing how we at AARP are thinking''? Is it Newt's wish that Medicare wither on the vine? Is that influencing Mr. Novelli's thinking? AARP's endorsement is disturbing for another reason. They have a flagrant conflict of interest in this matter. They receive vast revenues from the sale of insurance to seniors. Royalties from such arrangements include deals with UnitedHealthcare Insurance Company, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and Advance PCS pharmacy benefit manager. All that accounted for more than one-third of AARP's $630 million in revenues last year, according to AARP's 2002 annual report. If you open up any newspaper in the last 3 days, you have seen full- page ads by AARP telling you why this is such a good bill--full-page ads in USA Today, the New York Times, Washington Post, and on and on. First of all, I want every elderly person who belongs to AARP to think about this and the dues they pay. Think of all that money being siphoned off to ad agencies. Think about all that money being spent on these full-page ads to get Congress to rush this through and pass it. Well, Americans deserve better from AARP. They deserve better from Congress. This bill reflects the priorities of Newt Gingrich, who has been hostile to Medicare since its inception. Seniors know this bill is a betrayal. They know who the winners and losers are with this bill. HMOs, PPOs, pharmaceutical companies, on premium support, they win, and seniors and disabled lose. On cost containment, they win because Medicare is prohibited from bargaining for better prices, and seniors and disabled lose. On drug coverage, pharmaceutical companies win and seniors lose. On health savings accounts--my, my, my, now we have them--HMOs win, seniors lose; stabilization fund--a slush fund is what it ought to be called--again HMOs and PPOs win, and seniors lose; on competition, pharmaceutical companies win big time on that and seniors lose. It may seem in what I am saying tonight that somehow I am opposed to insurance companies. Nothing could be further from the truth. In my State of Iowa, I think we are, if I am not mistaken, the second largest domiciliary for insurance companies in America, second only to Connecticut. Insurance has a prominent role in Iowa. It employs a lot of people. Insurance can provide meaningful protection for a lot of people. I happen to have a lot of insurance--homes, cars, life insurance; I have all kinds of insurance. It is a good deal. I have benefited from insurance. Insurance is good. It shares the risk. You put people in a large pool and it shares the risk. That is the basic essence of insurance, and there is one principle of insurance that everyone understands, or should understand: The bigger the pool, the less the risk for everyone in the pool. But what is Medicare doing? What are we doing in this bill with Medicare? We are dividing up the pool: a little bit here, a little bit there, and a little bit there. Under the health savings accounts, the healthiest will opt out. Under premium support, the healthiest will be cherry-picked by the HMOs.

Mr. HARKIN. Will the Senator yield because I was mentioned? I just want 30 seconds. I was opposed to it at that time, too. I was opposed to the noninterference at that time. I have always been opposed to it.

Mr. HARKIN. What we have before us today is a bill drafted behind closed doors in the dark of night that amounts to a bonanza for special interests. Don't take my word for it. Look at what others are saying regarding this bill. This is from the Des Moines Register editorial board, my home paper: This legislation is a big, sloppy kiss to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. The Albany Times Union: This is not only an imperfect bill, it may also be a disastrous one. This is the New York Times of the 19th: This is a gift to pharmaceutical companies and insurers and a threat to elderly Americans. Deal would alter Medicare's core. If a compromise bill on prescription drugs passes, the Government program will become a massive subsidized insurance market. That is the LA Times. They have it right. It is not just the media and some of us on this side. From the American Conservative Union, listen to what they say: The Medicare prescription drug benefit bill that passed the House and the Senate would drive up costs for millions of senior citizens. Millions more will lose their current coverage under private Medigap insurance and employer provided plans. The House-Senate conference committee should reject the bill and start over with a bill that includes real Medicare reform. This bill would provide billions of dollars in subsidies--bribes--to private plans and HMOs. In fact, this morning's Washington Post had an article which said the Medicare bill would enrich companies $125 million more for employers and health firms. It would ensure billions of dollars in profits and projected $139 billion to pharmaceuticals. I think it speaks volumes that when this bill came out last week, the drug and health industry stocks surged on Wall Street. I ask unanimous consent that the article from today's Washington Post be printed in the Record.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, the legislation before us seeks to privatize Medicare, plain and simple. It seeks to privatize it, despite the fact that 89 percent of seniors say they want to stay in traditional Medicare--and they have done so when they had a choice-- despite the fact that traditional Medicare is less expensive to administer--2 to 3 percent compared to 15 percent in private plans. Again, there is something the average person doesn't understand. They don't realize. You would think a Government plan such as Medicare would cost more than a private plan. Private plans are supposed to be cheaper because of competition. We have had Medicare for almost 40 years. We have had private plans that length of time. So we have a lot of data. We know. This is not conjecture. We have the data. We know. What does the data say? Administrative costs for Medicare, 2 to 3 percent. In other words, out of every dollar that goes to a beneficiary, it takes 2 to 3 cents to administer Medicare. For a private health care plan, for every dollar that goes out, 15 cents goes for administration. You might ask, Why is that? Just think about it this way. With traditional Medicare, we don't have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on corporate CEO salaries. We don't have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars at least for fancy full-page ads in the New York Times and USA Today and Newsweek magazine. We don't have to spend all of that money to advertising agencies. That is where you get chewed up with these private plans. Despite the fact that Medicare expenditures are growing at a slower rate than private plans, they say government costs are going up. The fact is--again, we have data for 40 years--Medicare has increased by 9.6 percent compared to private plans at 11.1 percent. Despite that, this Senate, this Congress, and this administration want to move us into private plans. Despite the clear wishes of senior citizens in this country, they want to move us into private plans. I guess for those who came up with Medicare+Choice, somehow their ideology said these seniors would move into HMOs, and 89 percent said no. By gosh, I guess the thinking is here, if they didn't want to voluntarily move into HMOs, we will force them into HMOs. That is what this bill does. The conferees chose to ignore all of the facts and all of data we have from the past. Instead, they concocted a grand experiment that encompasses all their right-wing ideological fantasies and seniors are the guinea pigs. What we have in this bill that no one here has read is nothing less than a witch's brew of seemingly appealing benefits. But it is a witch's brew, one that is going to come back to haunt us in the future. This experiment is a result of what I call private sector worship. It is a faith-based notion among some of our colleagues that the private sector will take care of everything. It is a blind faith that free markets solve every problem. But this private sector worship flies in the face of past experience. The entire reason we have Medicare today is that there is no private sector market for health insurance for sick seniors--none. Why? Because there is no money to be made in insuring sick, older people. The free market works fine when you are talking about automobiles, airplanes, TVs, widgets, clothes, and that type of thing. But the free market is not stupid. The free market cares about profits--not people. By its very nature, the free market shuts out people with disabilities, shuts out people with mental illnesses, and shuts out people who are in the last years of their lives. In short, the free market shuts out people who are not profitable. I have news for my colleagues who believe the free market is the answer to everything. The free market did not break down barriers to people with disabilities in our country. It was the Government--we here in the Congress--that had to step in to ensure opportunity and openness in our country for people with disabilities. In the survival of the fittest free market, these folks were left behind. Another example: We have been fighting this Congress for years to pass a bill ensuring mental health parity. But people with mental illnesses are not a profitable group. So the free market, left to its own devices, will have nothing to do with mental health parity. Think about it. We don't have mental health parity. Why wouldn't we? Why wouldn't the free market jump in there and get it? Because there is no profit. That is why, as soon as we get back into session next year, I hope we pass the Paul Wellstone mental health parity bill. Again, if we leave it up to the free market, people with mental illness are simply left behind. Another prime example of those left behind is the elderly. The elderly are not a profitable group of people to include in an insurance risk pool. They are sick. They have chronic illnesses. They are expensive to treat. The proof is all around us. It is impossible to imagine private insurers fighting and competing with one another for the privilege of covering the elderly. That is why we have to bribe the companies with billions of dollars of taxpayer money to get them to participate in this witch's brew scheme we have come up with here. I have seen this proof firsthand. The other day, I talked about my own situation. I want to repeat it again. In 1958, I was a senior in high school. My father was 74 years old. My mother had passed away 8 years prior to that. My father had worked most of his life in the coal mines in Iowa. My father had an eighth grade education. My mother was by then deceased. She was an immigrant with no formal education--little formal education. We lived at that time in a little house in a rural town of Cummings, IA, of 150 people. Because of my father's years in the mines--we called it miner's lung at that time; they call it black lung today--he would get sick every year. We would never see doctors. We didn't have any money. My father's total income was less than $1,500 a year. It was about $1,200 a year. That included bonuses for having kids under the age of 18. Thank goodness he worked a while during World War II to pay into Social Security and he had some Social Security. That is all he had. My father had no stocks, no bonds, no property, no trusts, nothing. He had the small house we lived in and he had a Model A Ford, the only car he ever owned. That was 1958. And every year during those 1950s, I remember, like clockwork, my father would get sick. He would get sicker; he would get pneumonia. We would rush him to the hospital in Des Moines. They would put him in an oxygen tent, give him antibiotics, fix him up, and send him back home again. If we did not have any money, and our total family income was less than $1,200 a year, how did we afford that? I tell you how: It is called charity. The Sisters of Mercy at Mercy Hospital would take care of my father, and knowing that we were poor and could not afford it, they would not bill us. That was charity. I was in the Navy some years later, in 1966. I came home on leave, I think for Christmas, and my father was quite beside himself because he showed me this new card he had, a Medicare card. Now he could go see a doctor. If he had to go to the hospital, he did not have to rely on charity any longer. I often think of how much better my father's later years would have been had he had Medicare. If he had seen a doctor and had preventive health care, his later years would have been much healthier and much better. But he only had Medicare for 2 years before he passed away. I tell that story because I wonder, as I stand here and as I listen to all this debate about choice, as I listen to the debate about how insurance companies out there will come in and do all this, I wonder, why didn't insurance companies rush to help my father? Why weren't they knocking on his door, competing with one another, to cover my father? We had insurance companies at that time. Why weren't they knocking his door down to cover him? Why? Because my father was not profitable. Elderly people in health care are not profitable. So do not tell me the private sector will solve every problem, because I lived through its failures firsthand. I know many Iowans and many Americans have the same situation. They do not want to be left to the volatility and the whims of private HMOs. I understand many of my colleagues prefer the free market over Government intervention. I do, too, in most cases. But to say that we are going to do it regardless is a misplaced faith. There is a time and a place for the Government to step in, where the private sector fears to tread or fails to tread. No question, this is the case when it comes to helping people with disabilities, people with mental illnesses, and seniors with serious health problems. We hear the claim that private sector competition will drive down costs and save Medicare. Nonsense. The only competition will be competition for healthy seniors. If you are sick, you will be shunned. I saw this headline in the Washington Post: ``Medicare Deal Likely to Spark More Health Care Competition.'' I thought, my goodness, and I got to reading it. On Wall Street last week, drug stocks jumped as investors anticipated a congressional deal finally announced in principle last night that would add a prescription drug benefit to the Medicare Program. Pfizer was up on Friday. So was Eli Lily. And so was Johnson and Johnson. But this is what it is all about, as Robert Hayes, president of the Medicare Rights Center, states: This could be like the wild West out there. If suddenly there are five or six or seven plans out there, the insurance companies will be pricing their product to make a profit, as they are obligated to do. If the consumer is kind of shooting in the dark because of the complexity of this--and the darkness is deepened by age or disability-- you'll have a customer primed for exploitation. We're real concerned that people could get ripped off. It is not competition for the elderly out there. It is competition among the drug companies as to who will make the most money. That is the only competition that will be out there. They do not want an even playing field competition. This bill will give billions to private plans so they can compete and make profits. This is what people have to understand. They should know this before we vote on this bill. That is why we should get it out there and come back in February and vote on it and let the people see what is in there. This bill before the Senate will pay a private insurance company 26 percent more than traditional Medicare; $1,900 more per senior. Get this straight: We are going to take your hard-earned tax dollars and we are going to give those tax dollars to a private insurance plan to compete with Medicare, and in order to be able to compete, we are going to give them 26 percent more than what we provide in Medicare. I guess I would kind of like that competition. Man, I would like to get a piece of that action. I would like to have the Government give me 26 percent more than what Medicare is making. That is not competition; it is a corporate giveaway. It is corporate welfare. That is what it is. It is a waste of taxpayers dollars when Medicare, over 40 years, shows it can do the job cheaper, more effectively, and more efficiently. Seniors know it, trust it, and want to keep traditional Medicare. We are saying: No; we are taking your tax dollars and we are going to give it to private companies, 26 percent more, $1,900 more per beneficiary to bribe them to get into a private plan. On top of that, the conferees have come up with what they call a stabilization fund. How about that for a nice fancy word-- ``stabilization'' fund? What are we stabilizing? It sounds as if there is an earthquake out there. There may be when seniors find out what is in the bill. It is a $12 billion slush fund for private plans. Privatization, when it comes to medical care for the elderly, costs more money and it will reduce choice. We have heard the claim time and time again that seniors should have a choice as Members of Congress do. Seniors will be gravely disappointed when they find out what they are getting is nothing like what we have. I hear about choice all the time. No senior will be forced out of Medicare. How many times have we heard that? They will be able to stay with Medicare. Listen to the words carefully because what we are not hearing is that if you want drug coverage, you have to get out of Medicare. If you do not care about not having drug coverage, you can stay in Medicare. That is what they are saying. They are saying no one will be forced out of Medicare. No. But if you want drug coverage, you are out of Medicare; you have to go to a private plan. Isn't that what we are all about, trying to get drug coverage for seniors? And seniors say they want it under Medicare; they do not want it under private plans. Seniors will actually end up with reduced choices under this legislation. If there are two private plans, say, an HMO and a PDP--maybe you have never heard of a PDP. If you say you have never heard of it, I understand that because they do not exist. But it has been conjured up in this bill. We have conjured up something called PDPs. So if there are two private plans, an HMO, and a PDP, and if a senior who is in Medicare wants drug coverage, that senior is forced to take the PDP or the HMO. You cannot stay in Medicare. You have to move over and take one of the private plans. That is a choice? That is a choice? That is like you have a choice between getting shot and getting hung. Either way, you are dead. Not a very good choice. They will not be allowed to get their drugs through traditional Medicare. Again, let's say they go and join one of these private plans, this PDP, or whatever it is, or an HMO. Well, then the HMO can tell them: You can't see your doctor. You have to see another doctor. Oh, you can't take that drug. It is not on our formulary. You have to take this other drug. Why do you have to take this other drug? Well, they will not tell you why, but they are probably getting a bigger kickback from the pharmaceutical companies for that certain drug. So seniors are forced to change drugs. That is not choice. It seems to me around here sometimes it is almost to the point that if you hear someone say it is daytime, you might just think it is probably night. If someone says something is black, you probably think it is white. Around here we have gotten to the point where we use these words to confuse people, to make people think something is not what it is. This idea of choice, that somehow we are giving seniors more choice-- just false. The rhetoric around this bill does not match reality. The President and this administration has said many times that seniors deserve choice, that the seniors deserve what Members of Congress have. I am all for that. But that is not what they are getting. Right now, I pay about 25 percent of my drug costs. That is it, flat. But the prescription drug plan put before seniors in this bill will not even come close to that. Instead, it is a confusing, convoluted maze that--mark my words--will leave the seniors feeling betrayed and bewildered. All I can say to some of my colleagues who may have been here in the 1980s is, do you remember when we passed the catastrophic health insurance plan? Well, if you like the seniors' reaction to that plan in the 1980s, you are going to love their reaction to this grossly inadequate prescription drug plan. Now, look at what they are going to be faced with right here. Every year we, in our plan, the FEHBP, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan, have an open season, and we get to choose what plan we want to go in. So we get all these books. Here is one from Aetna. Here is another one from a different Aetna. Here is one from, of course, Blue Cross, and then a different Blue Cross. Here is Kaiser. Here is APWU. Here is PBP. Here is Mail Handlers. Here is NALC. Here is GEHA. Here is MB, Individual Practices Association. We are supposed to read this and go through them all and decide which plan we want to be in. I wonder how many Senators actually go through these. I can count them on less than one hand. I can count them on less than one finger. Yet seniors every year are going to get this. They are going to be asked: Make a choice. It is confusing. It is going to be bewildering to them every year--every single year. That is what I mean, a senior could get out of Medicare and go into an HMO or one of these PDPs. They could jack up their prices--I will say more about that in a minute--because the premium is not set in law. It can go up. It can go up. They can get bounced around. So they may be in one plan 1 year, and that plan may not exist the next year. Then what do they do? What do they choose? Well, that is why I say, you wait. This is going to be a confusing, bewildering mess for our senior citizens. The only ones making the money are pharmaceutical companies. I think it is instructive that in this bill--if I can find it here, I think on page 53 of this bill, if I am not mistaken. I wonder how many people read this. Page 53, line 18: ``Noninterference--In order to promote competition''--I love this, I love the way they play with words--``In order to promote competition under this part and in carrying out this part, the Secretary''--the Secretary of Health and Human Services-- ``(1) may not interfere with the negotiations between drug manufacturers and pharmacies and PDP sponsors; and (2) may not require a particular formulary or institute a price structure for the reimbursement of covered part D drugs.'' Now, what do you suppose that is all about? Well, what it says is that Medicare cannot negotiate with drug companies to get a better price on drugs for our seniors. That is what was written in the bill. We have said for a long time that we ought to use the power of Medicare to negotiate with the drug companies to get a better price. The VA, the Veterans' Administration, going back to a law that we passed here, I think, in the 1980s, the VA sits down and negotiates with drug companies for the price of drugs for veterans hospitals and veterans throughout the country. That is why veterans' drug prices are 50 percent or more less than what you might normally pay or what an elderly person would pay because they use the purchasing power of the VA to bring it down. But in this bill, we have said, no, you cannot do it any further than that. Medicare cannot negotiate. Think about it. It is written in here. Medicare is prohibited from negotiating with drug companies to get a better price on drugs. People always ask: Why are drugs so much cheaper in Canada? I have been to Canada a lot. I am sure the occupant of the Chair has been to Canada. If you go to Edmonton, Calgary, places like that, there are drugstores all over, private drugstores owned by private citizens--free enterprise. You go in there, and the pharmacist is there, and you can get your drugs 50, 60, sometimes as much as 80-percent cheaper than what you get here. It is the same drug, made by the same manufacturer, that is that much cheaper in Canada. Why? Well, guess what. The Canadian Government buys the drugs. They negotiate with the drug companies to get a lower price because they buy in such huge volumes. Then the private pharmacist makes money on filling the prescriptions, watching your prescriptions. But in this bill we are forbidding Medicare from negotiating with drug companies for a better price. What a sweetheart deal that is. Let's see what seniors are going to pay for this and why this is kind of confusing. Here is what seniors are going to find out. Right now, here is what seniors pay under Medicare: Part A premium, hospital, nothing; Part A deductible, $876 for benefit period set for everybody; Part B premium $66.60 a month; Part B deductible for their doctor, $100 per year, and a 20-percent cost share on each visit to the doctor's office. Very simple, very straightforward; every person in Medicare understands that. Now what? Well, let's see. Seniors who have an annual income above $13,470 per year will have to pay a yearly deductible of $250. They will then pay a $35-a-month premium, which can go up, by the way. That is not fixed in law. So that is $420 a year. That figure can change every year because if the private plan is not making the profit that they want, they can boost that figure up, and they will. After seniors have put in at least $670 up front, they can start receiving some benefits. You might say, well, 670 bucks, that isn't much. Remember what I said: This is someone who is above $13,470 a year. Six hundred seventy dollars is a lot of money to someone making $14,000 a year and worrying about heating bills, buying food, taking care of themselves. So after they pony up $670, the Government will then pay 75 percent of the drug costs up to $2,250. What happens then? What happens then is that person making more than $13,470 a year will have to pay 100 percent of their drug costs up to about $5,000. That is the so-called donut hole. That is going to be outrageous. One day you are going in, you are getting your drugs, and you are paying 25 percent. You are going to go in one day and your drugs are $2,200, and then all of a sudden your pharmacist says: You have to pay full price. Why? Well, I am sorry. You reached the donut hole of $2,250. Think of it this way. If your drug costs are $5,000 a year, you will have to pay $4,000 out of pocket. And for that, we bribe HMOs, we give billions of dollars in subsidies to the pharmaceutical companies and to HMOs and to PDPs and whatever else. Another thing, a senior who has an annual drug cost of only $500 will pay more into the program than they receive. You will put in $500. If you have $500 in drug costs, you will pay $751.25 into this program every year. What a deal. To make things even messier, the program would create several tiers of classes under the Medicare Program. Again, there are different low- income benefits available to those under 135 percent of the poverty level. That is $12,123 for a single person. There is another set of benefits for those under 150 percent of poverty level. That is $13,470 a person. On top of that, to receive the low-income benefits, a senior must undergo an asset test. We threw the asset test out of here in the Senate. Now it is back in this bill. But now let's look at this asset test. For one group, those who are at 135 percent of the poverty level or below--that is below 12,000 bucks a year--if you are below that, the asset test is $6,000 for a single person. You can't have more than $6,000 in assets. It is $9,000 for a couple. For the group at 150 percent of the poverty level--let's see, that is $13,470--the asset test there is $10,000 in assets, $20,000 for a couple. So mind you, for a difference of a little over $1,000 a year, maybe about $1,300 a year, your asset goes from $9,000 to $20,000 for a couple; $6,000 to $10,000 for a single person. If this sounds confusing, believe me, it is. How are you going to decide where you fall? Let's take a group of senior citizens down at McDonald's having their morning coffee. They are all talking about the drug benefit when it goes into effect. Bob is over there, and he gets good benefits under the low-income benefit. But his friend Sue just took a job at the local supermarket at minimum wage to try to make ends meet, pay her heating bills. But because she has a little extra income, even though she barely makes any money, she is in a different class. So, therefore, she is going to get a different drug benefit. Margaret thought she was going to get some low-income benefits but she filled out her forms and she had too much life insurance, over $10,000 in life insurance. So she is out. How in the world is the average elderly citizen supposed to know where they fit into this mess? You are going to have several different people who make nearly the same amount of money each year and they are going to receive drastically different benefits. This is a formula for confusion and confrontation. You are going to be pitting elderly against one another. You are going to have friends wondering: Why is it that Bob over there gets all those benefits and I don't? We know that Bob owns something else. He is cheating maybe. And why did he get that and we didn't? Why is it that George over there gets all these low-income benefits? And you know George. All his life he frittered his money away, gambled it, boozed it up. Sure he doesn't have much now, but the Government is coming in and giving him everything. How about Bob? Bob over here worked hard all his life, raised a family, educated his kids. He is a man of meager means, but he has Social Security. He was frugal. He saved a little bit. He has a little life insurance policy. No, Bob, you don't get this. Your income may be just about the same as George's, a little bit more, but because you have a little bit of assets--you saved for a rainy day--you are out. Tell me what this is going to be like when the seniors get ahold of this and talk about it. Then there are those citizens who are going to lose retiree prescription drug benefits. Two to three million are going to lose prescription drug benefits. It is outrageous. This bill would spend roughly $88 billion to try to bribe employers not to drop retiree health coverage yet, even with that, 2 to 3 million seniors will lose their retiree benefits. Yes, the drug and health industries are spending millions to ram this bill through immediately, even though seniors across the Nation don't know what it contains. The authors of this bill did not let the senior citizens of this country see what was in the bill because they knew once they found out they would have trouble passing it here. Apparently a seat at the Medicare table was quite expensive. The Washington Post article from Saturday morning was entitled ``Two Bills Would Benefit Top Bush Fundraisers.'' It explains that the Medicare bill will benefit at least 24 Rangers and Pioneers as executives of companies or lobbyists working for them. A Pioneer in the Bush campaign is one who raises at least $100,000, while a Ranger is someone who has raised at least $200,000. I ask unanimous consent that this article be printed in the Record.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, today by a 2-vote margin, I guess it was, the Senate, this greatest deliberative body in the world, decided to begin the process of ending Medicare in America. After nearly 40 years in which the elderly in our country have been raised out of poverty, in which the elderly in our country have been given the assurances that they will not have to go to the poor farm to pay for medical care, after nearly 40 years of children being freed from the burden of caring for ailing parents and grandparents, after providing an envy of the world in what we do to care for our elderly in terms of health care, the Senate today began the process of turning our back on all the progress we have made. Medicare was created, as I said, almost 40 years ago, with the purpose of providing our Nation's aged and disabled with that safety net, to protect them from death and destitution. For years, seniors have counted on health security in their golden years thanks to Medicare. For nearly 40 years, this program has stood as a social contract between the American Government and the American people. After a lifetime of labor, when a person turns 65 they are promised health insurance covering doctors' visits, hospitals, and many other health costs. There was one exception for all of those 40 years; that is, there was no coverage for prescription drugs. It is almost impossible to overstate what Medicare means to a family, a citizen of modest means who has worked hard for a lifetime, a person who does not want to be a burden on the rest of his or her family. Medicare has been a rock solid, reliable, guaranteed lifeline for America's senior citizens. Today, with a two-vote margin, we are watching that social contract erode. We are taking huge risks with the health and security of seniors, all to satisfy ideological agendas, to satisfy big political donor's wishes and certain political strategies. With this Medicare bill, we have seen grave abuses of power--such as the recent vote in the House of Representatives in which this bill before us today lost in the House of Representatives, lost under the normal rules, lost under the democratic means over there. But as you know, they kept the vote open for almost 3 hours, from about 3 a.m. to 6 a.m., to twist arms until they finally got the votes. I was driving to work Saturday morning. I was listening to public radio. A caller had called in and she said President Bush says he wants to bring democracy to Iraq. After what happened last night in the House of Representatives, I hope Iraq wasn't watching. That is not the kind of democracy they need in Iraq. I am disappointed in the process that we have had here. This has been a sham process. We have this bill here; I have held it up many times. I can barely hold it up right now--1,200 pages. It is dated November 20. It was delivered on our desks when we arrived here Saturday morning, that big. Saturday morning and here it is, Monday, and we are expected to vote on it. How many seniors in this country have seen this bill? How many here in this room have actually gone through it or looked at it--or staffs? We know basically what is in it, but who knows what fine print is included and how some things may work? It is a terrible process. That is why I argued against it repeatedly and that is why I voted against cloture today on the filibuster. It is not that I want to keep filibustering, but I believe we should have gone home and let this bill get out to the public, let the American people see it, talk about it, digest it. Then we can come back here in late January, as we are going to do, and February, and see what our constituents think about it. To me that seems to be the American way, the democratic process. That is not the process we followed here. That is not the process. We are debating a proposal that was originally supposed to accomplish one simple goal: to right the wrong in Medicare, that gap that was in there, by providing coverage for prescription drugs and to make medicine more affordable for seniors. I regret that in writing this bill Congress has strayed from that objective. We have forgotten who we are supposed to be helping--our Nation's seniors. Instead of a straightforward drug benefit, we now have a Medicare privatization proposal that threatens to undo the entire Medicare Program on which seniors and the disabled rely each and every day. Seniors who rely on the stability and affordability of this program, seniors like many in my home State of Iowa, simply want and need affordable medicine. I have seen no big clamour to change the basic Medicare Program. We had a proposal here in the 1990s to get more competition in Medicare. The Congress came up with this Medicare+Choice Program, where seniors could stay in traditional Medicare or they could join an HMO. So we have had several years of experience with this. What is the result? Eighty-nine percent of the seniors in this country have chosen to stay with Medicare. About 11 percent in various parts of the country went with HMOs. That is fine. That was purely voluntary. But seniors have spoken. They want to keep traditional Medicare. They simply need an affordable drug benefit. I want to say more about this as I talk, but under this bill seniors do not really have a choice. You hear my friends on the Republican side say time and time again, choice, choice, choice, we are giving seniors choice, choice, choice. That simply is not true. I hear all the time they say if a senior wants to stay with Medicare, they can stay with Medicare. That is true. But at what expense? What they don't tell you is, if a senior wants to stay with Medicare, they don't get drug coverage. They get no prescription drug coverage. Yes, you can stay with Medicare but you have to give up prescription drug coverage. If you want prescription drug coverage, you have to go to some private plan. That is what they are not telling. I will have more to say about that choice. This bill totally violates the spirit and substance of the original Medicare Program. Again, to make it worse, we are rushing it through the Senate. This bill doesn't start until 2006. What is the rush? Why are we here 3 days before Thanksgiving, 7 o'clock in the evening, having a vote on a filibuster today, trying to ram this bill through? Why is it that the House of Representatives, in an all-night session, rammed this bill through? I will tell you why they rammed it through. Because the pharmaceutical companies and the big insurance companies want to get it through before Americans broadly know what is in it. That is why. Get it through in a hurry. Only a few fortunate people know what is in this: a roomful of Republicans, two Democrats, and big money industries. Seniors didn't have a seat at the table. If they would have, I am sure they would have created a very different bill. I have this cartoon here. I will show it again. Here is a pharmacy. There is a pharmacist who represents Congress. This elderly woman has come in, has given her drug benefit to Congress, and Congress is saying: Have a seat. It will be ready in 2\1/2\ years--your prescription; 2\1/2\ years. Yet we have to rush this through right now. As I said, I called this the big Medicare gamble. It is like a roulette wheel. That is what we are doing. Before, under Medicare, it wasn't a gamble. You knew what you had. You had good, rock solid coverage, no matter what part of the country you lived in, whether you lived in rural Iowa or New York City; it didn't make any difference. Now we are rolling the dice, spinning the roulette wheel. It is going to unravel Medicare. The special interests, the drug companies, the HMOs are now more important than seniors. Seniors are being told there is not enough money for a really good drug benefit. Why isn't there enough money? It is because we already squandered our surplus in tax cuts worth trillions for the wealthy. Once again, the well-heeled on Wall Street are more important to this administration than the elderly and disabled on Main Street.

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

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I apologize to my fellow Senators. I have taken a long time. I have taken over 1 hour and 15 minutes, I believe. But I believe we ought to take a lot longer than that. I think we ought to get this bill out of here, send it into the countryside, let people see it, and come back in February rather than taking Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Let us, as I said, take a week or two to get into this bill, debate it, discuss it, and yes; and amend it if we need to, rather than being ramroded through as they are doing. If the seniors reject it, then we can reject it and go back to the drawing board. We should not at the eleventh hour when people want to go home for Thanksgiving be stampeded to support a bad bill, a bill that will destroy Medicare as we know it. I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I do have quite a lengthy statement. I had estimated it might take me upwards of about 45 minutes. I know others want to speak. I am going to try to collapse it as much as I can, but I had a number of things I wanted to say. Hopefully, I can get them said within a certain amount of time. I don't mean to drag it out, but I did have a number of things I wanted to point out about this bill. We are debating an issue of utmost importance--the health and security of this Nation's elderly and disabled. To repeat what has been said, Medicare was created 40 years ago with the purpose of providing this Nation's aged and disabled with a safety net to protect them from debt and destitution. For years, seniors have counted on health security in their golden years thanks to Medicare. This program stands as a social contract between the American Government and the American people, a social contract between one generation and the next. The contract is simply this: After a lifetime of work, when you turn 65 you are promised health insurance covering doctors visits, hospitals, and many other health costs. But there has been one exemption from this social contract--no coverage for prescription drugs. It is not possible to overstate what Medicare means to a citizen of modest means who has worked hard for a lifetime, who doesn't want to be a burden on the rest of his or her family. It is really kind of hard to overstate what it means. Medicare has been a rock-solid, reliable, guaranteed lifeline for a great number of America's senior citizens. I think back to my father's own experience, my own family's experience in the days before Medicare. In 1958--I just pick that year because I was a senior in high school at that time--my father at that time was 74 years old. He had worked most of his life in coal mines, in Iowa. A lot of people don't know it, but we had a lot of coal mines in Iowa. He had a number of accidents in those mines and elsewhere. He suffered from what was then called miner's lung. That is what they called it at that time, miner's lung. Today we call it black lung disease. As I said, he had several chronic injuries as well and he was in pretty tough shape. Keep in mind, my father only had an eighth grade education, and all of his work life basically had been prior to Social Security coming into existence. My father's total income in retirement was less than $1,500. Again, thank goodness during World War II, even though he had been old then, he had worked for a while and was covered under Social Security. Other than that, he had no assets, he had no money, no stocks, no bonds. He did own a small house in Cumming, IA. Oh, yes, he had a model A Ford that was 30 years old. That was the only car he ever owned. Of course, in 1958 he had no Medicare because the program didn't exist. This meant that my father couldn't afford the luxury of seeing a doctor. But every year, like clockwork, my father would get sick in the middle of wintertime. He had this terrible chronic lung problem, black lung, miner's lung. My mother had passed away 8 years prior to 1958. He was on his own and basically taking care of us. As I said, I was a senior in high school at the time. Every year he would catch a cold, he couldn't get over it, he would come down with pneumonia, and a neighbor of ours who had a car would rush him to the hospital in Des Moines. He would arrive at the hospital in Des Moines. They would take care of my father. They would put him in an oxygen tent. They would give him his antibiotics and send him home in a week or two. How could he afford to do that if we were so poor and had no income? My father was 74 years old. Did we have a rich uncle? No. So what happened? I will tell you how we afforded it. We thanked Sisters of Mercy at the Mercy Hospital in Des Moines who gave us charity care because our family didn't have any money. That is the only way that my father got health care. We forget. Those of us who are young perhaps forget that 45 years ago that was the status of elderly health care in America. My father was not unique. Our family was not unique. In my little town of 150 people, it was all the same. All my father's brothers, his sisters, our family--of all who were that age, none of them had any health care. None of them had any money. If it wasn't for the charity of the Catholic Church and the Sisters of Mercy, my father would have had no health care whatsoever. Had my father had any money or health insurance, he could have seen a doctor. He could have had annual checkups. He could have prevented long stays in the hospital. But in the absence of anything like Medicare, he ended up in a dire situation, in effect, in the emergency room. For many uninsured in this Nation, things are still that way. But fortunately, Medicare has offered a better alternative for our Nation's elderly and disabled. I can remember as though it were yesterday. After I left high school, I went to Iowa State University. I had a Navy ROTC scholarship. I was in the Navy. I was flying planes. And I can remember coming home on leave once. It was Christmas of 1966. I came home, and my father, who was nearing his 81st birthday, still with his bad lung problems--I remember coming home and I remember when he proudly showed me his Medicare card. He said: Now I can go to see a doctor. I can go to the hospital, if I have to. But I can see a doctor. We don't have to take charity anymore. I think of the impact that Medicare card had on my father, and the impact it had on my family and what it meant to my father to be able to get health care without accepting charity. What a tremendous difference. I often think about what my father's later life would have been like had he had Medicare. I think about how much healthier he could have been with good preventive care, and how much more he could have enjoyed his later years if he had had decent health care. Today, seniors rely on Medicare. It means everything to them. If you do not have your health in your older years, you just do not have much of anything. Unfortunately, back in 1966, we weren't nearly as sophisticated about medicine and health care as we are now. Surely, if we were creating the Medicare Program today we would include coverage of prescription drugs. We know that drug breakthroughs and innovations have made it possible to prevent illness, control illness, and keep people out of the hospital. For many in this society, modern prescription drugs have been a lifesaver and a life sustainer. Here we are today debating a proposal that was originally supposed to accomplish one simple goal: To fill in the gap that was left in Medicare--to right the wrong in Medicare by providing coverage of prescription drugs and simply to make medicine more affordable to seniors. That is what we started out to do. I deeply regret that in writing this bill Congress has strayed from that straightforward objective. This bill got hijacked, and it got hijacked by the corporate special interests, insurance and HMOs, and it got hijacked by the pharmaceutical industry. We have forgotten who we are supposed to be helping--our Nation's seniors. Instead of a straightforward drug benefit, we now have a Medicare privatization proposal that threatens to undo the entire Medicare Program that seniors and the disabled rely on each and every day--seniors like my father who relied upon the stability and the affordability of Medicare in his later years, and seniors like him back in my home State of Iowa who simply want and need affordable medical care. That is all they want. But what they are offered in this bill is something else entirely. This bill totally violates the spirit and substance of the original Medicare Program. I call it the ``Big Medicare Gamble.'' It is a roulette wheel. If you know anything about odds in roulette--I don't. I just learned this: The odds are tremendous against you. Roulette--that is what they are playing with Medicare. This bill threatens to unravel Medicare as we know it. Seniors are being told to head to the back of the line because the special interest drug companies and HMOs are more important than they are. Seniors are being told there isn't enough money for a full drug benefit. That is because we have already squandered our surpluses in tax cuts worth trillions of dollars for the wealthy. I heard someone the other day say: Look, we can't do any more in Medicare than we are doing now because we are limited by the $400 billion that was put in the budget. So all of you people want all of this stuff, but we can't do that, you see. We can't do it. We simply don't have the money. The very same person saying that voted for the tax cuts in 2001 and in 2003. I am saying: Well, fine. If you vote for the tax cut, fine. But then don't say we don't have enough money to have a good meaningful prescription drug benefit under Medicare. What you are saying is you had different priorities. Your priority was to give tax breaks to the wealthy. That is your priority, and the seniors and elderly who need prescription drugs, they can go to the back of the line someplace else. We had the amount of money--I will continue to say this because it is true--that we gave up in the tax breaks. If you spread that out over 75 years, that money is three times more than what we need to make Social Security and Medicare whole for 75 years--three times. So don't tell me we don't have the money. People just have different priorities on how to spend the money. Once again, the well heeled on Wall Street are more important to this administration and to the supporters of this bill than the elderly and the disabled on Main Street. What we have before us today is a bill drafted behind closed doors in the dark of night that amounts to a bonanza for special interests. Don't take my word for it. Look at what others are saying. Here is the Los Angeles Times: ``Deal Would Alter the Essence of Medicare.'' As Congress prepares to vote on the final $400 billion Medicare prescription drug bill, there is one thing on which most lawmakers agree. The legislation would over time change the essence of the 38-year-old health insurance program for the elderly and disabled. We are doing that and we are told that we have 2 days to debate it--2 days, Saturday, today, and tomorrow--and we are going to vote on Monday. My prescription for this bill is to put it out in the countryside, send it out across America, let us get out of here, go back home for Christmas, go back to our constituents, get it out among the elderly, let us see what they say about it, and come back here as we are going to do on January 20 and take it up in February. Let's hear what the American public has to say about it before we pass it. It does not go into effect until 2006, so what is the rush? If it does not go into effect until 2006, why not take a couple, 3 months to put it out there and let people think about it? No, no, we have to debate this Saturday, Sunday, and vote on it Monday. Here is my own Des Moines Register editorial: This legislation is a big, sloppy kiss to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. From the Albany Times Union: This is not only an imperfect bill. It may also be a disastrous one. That is what others are saying about it. Another one, from the New York Times, on the 19th: . . . gift to pharmaceutical companies and insurers and a threat to elderly Americans. From the Los Angeles Times: Deal would alter Medicare's core. Continuing: If a comprehensive bill on prescription drugs passes, the government program will become a massive subsidized insurance market. That is what we are doing. It is not just the media. Here is what conservative organizations are saying. Here is the Cato Institute, a more libertarian institute, perhaps, than conservative. I am not certain if it is conservative or libertarian: The Medicare prescription drug bill to be voted on by Congress is a terrible mistake that will dearly cost our children and grandchildren. This is not a Medicare reform bill. This is barely a Medicare prescription drug bill. This is a bill for politicians and special interests. Sometimes the better part of valor is recognizing when you have made a mistake. Congress should recognize this bill as a mistake and go back to the drawing board. That is Cato director of health and welfare studies Michael Tanner. From the Heritage Foundation: The agreement contains an unworkable and potentially unpopular drug benefit with millions of Americans losing part of their existing coverage. That is not just me, a Democrat, saying that. It is the Heritage Foundation. They go on to say: More than four million seniors with existing private coverage are bound to lose it or have it scaled back. Meanwhile, the politically engineered premiums and deductibles coupled with their odd combination of ``doughnut holes'' or gaps in coverage are likely to be unpopular with seniors. That was November 17, 2003, Heritage Foundation. From the American Conservative Union: The Medicare prescription drug benefit bills that have passed the House and Senate would drive up costs for millions of senior citizens. They go on: Millions more would lose their current coverage under private medigap insurance and employer-provided plans. The House-Senate conference committee should reject the current bill and start over with a bill that includes real Medicare reform. That was the American Conservative Union, August 21, 2003. It probably seems odd for this progressive Democrat to be agreeing with conservatives, but sometimes they get it right, and they are right on this. This bill would provide billions of dollars in subsidies--make that bribes; they say subsidies, it is bribes; call it to what it is, bribes--to private plans and HMOs. It would ensure billions of dollars in profits, a projected $139 billion in profits to pharmaceutical companies. It speaks volumes that on Wall Street this week, drug and health industry stocks have surged up on the news of this big money, special interest bonanza. I often pointed out that during the deliberations on this so-called prescription drug bill, you never saw any pharmaceutical companies around here. I can tell you one thing. I have been here 29 years, and I have seen times in the past whenever we had bills dealing with drugs or pharmaceutical companies, if it is something that is going to cost the pharmaceutical companies one penny, they are here. They are in the halls. Their private jets are parked out at the airport. They are calling; they are phoning; they are in our offices. If there is any legislation that is going to take a nick out of the pharmaceutical companies, believe me, you see them up here. I never saw a one, not one during this entire debate and development of this bill, which indicates to me they love it. Why wouldn't they, with a projected $139 billion in profits? Now, I don't mind pharmaceutical companies making profits. They have a right to it. They provide good drugs. They do good research. But what I mind is that the $139 billion in profits they are getting are coming out of taxpayers' pockets--not to buy drugs, just as a subsidy, a blatant subsidy. It is not something they are making in the marketplace; it is a funnel from taxpayers to the taxing power of the Government and giving it right back out to the pharmaceutical companies. One of the oldest statements in medicine goes back to Hippocrates: The first thing in medicine is ``do no harm.'' That is the oath that each doctor takes in this country: First do no harm. We have to look at this bill. It does tremendous harm. Most egregiously, this legislation seeks to privatize Medicare, despite the fact that 89 percent of seniors are in traditional Medicare, and that is what they have chosen. I listened to the Senator from Michigan, Ms. Stabenow. She pointed out we offered seniors a choice in this country in 1997. It is called Medicare+Choice. They could stay with traditional Medicare or they could join an HMO. Guess what, 89 percent of the seniors in this country stuck with Medicare and 11 percent went with HMOs. It seems to me they have already stated what they want. Despite the fact that traditional Medicare is less expensive to administer--this is something else that a lot of people do not understand--they say private industry can do it cheaper than Medicare. The fact is, since we have had Medicare for over 40 years, we have good data. We know. We can look at the figures. This is not something on which you have to guess. So we look at the figures, and what do we find? We find that the average administrative expense in Medicare is 2 to 3 percent. In other words, for every $1 that goes to a Medicare recipient, 2 to 3 pennies are used in administration. In private plans, it is 15 percent. For every $1 that goes through a private plan in health care, 15 cents is used in administration; only 2 to 3 pennies in Medicare. Why is that? With traditional Medicare, we do not have to spend millions on corporate CEO salaries or give them the private jets in which they fly all over the country. How about all the big page ads they take out in USA Today, New York Times, and Newsweek magazine? Those cost a lot of money. Medicare does not do that. So we have very cheap administrative expenses. Despite the fact that administrative costs are 2 to 3 percent in Medicare and 15 percent in the private sector, they want to privatize Medicare. Despite the fact that under Medicare+Choice, which I just mentioned--they came in a few years ago in the late 1990s. HMOs have a history of dumping seniors. They get signed up, they are not making enough money, they leave town, and they dump them. But, still, we want to privatize it. They want to privatize it despite the fact that Medicare expenditures are growing at a slower rate than private plans. This is fact. This is not something we are guessing at. We have the data, how much Medicare has grown expenditures percentage-wise compared to private plans. We have the data. No one on that side will ever dispute it because it is factual. Medicare expenditures are growing at about 9.6 percent a year; private plans, 11.1 percent. Their expenditures are growing faster than Medicare. They want to privatize Medicare despite the fact that private plans are concerned first with what? Profits. I do not say that as a bad word. That is their business. They are in business to make money for themselves and their shareholders. So their first concern is profit. Senior citizens and the sickest are not profitable. The elderly are not profitable. The sickest and the disabled are not profitable for insurance companies. Despite the clear wishes of senior citizens in this country, they want to privatize Medicare. The conferees have chosen to ignore all of these facts. Instead, they have concocted a witch's brew--a witch's brew--of seemingly appealing schemes which are designed to let Medicare wither on the vine, and to set the stage, next year and beyond, for attacking Social Security. Make no mistake about it; that is what this is designed to do. And I will have more to say about that in a minute because of what Newt Gingrich stood for. The ideological experiment that we have confronting us is the result of what I call private sector worship. It is sort of a faith-based notion among some of our colleagues and administration officials that the private sector will take care of everything. It is a blind faith that free markets solve every problem. But this private sector worship flies in the face of past experience. The entire reason we have Medicare today is because there is no private sector market for health insurance for sick seniors--none, zero, zip, nada--no private sector market because there is no money to be made in insuring the sick, the elderly. The free market works just fine when you are talking about automobiles and airplanes and TVs, and widgets, et cetera. But the free market is not stupid. It cares about profit, not people. So by its very nature the free market shuts out people with disabilities, people with mental illnesses, people in the last years of their lives--in short, people who are not profitable. So I have news for my colleagues who believe the free market is the answer to everything. The free market did not break down barriers to people with disabilities in our country. When the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990 and signed into law, it was not the free market that did that. It was Government. It was us, the elected officials here in the Congress, working with the President, who did that. It was our free Government that had to step in to ensure that opportunities and openness in our country was there for people with disabilities. In the survival-of-the- fittest free market, these folks are just simply left behind. Another example: We have been fighting in this Congress for years now to pass a bill ensuring mental health parity. But people with mental illnesses are not a profitable group. So the free market, left to its own devices, will have nothing to do with mental health parity in insurance. That is why I hope, as soon as we get back in our session next year, we can get to work passing the Paul Wellstone mental health parity bill because when we leave it up to the free market, folks with mental illness simply get left behind. Another prime example of those left behind is simply the elderly. The elderly are not a profitable group of people to include in an insurance risk pool. They are sick. They are older. They have chronic illnesses. They are expensive to treat. On this score, the proof is all around us. It is impossible to imagine private insurers fighting and competing with one another for the privilege of covering the elderly. That is why this bill has to bribe these companies with billions of dollars in subsidies to participate in this wrong-headed scheme we have before us. As I said in my opening comments today, I have seen this proof firsthand. Now, back in 1958, when my father, as I said, was then 74, getting sick every year, going to the hospital, relying upon the charity of the Sisters of Mercy, we had insurance companies. There were a lot of insurance companies in those days. Why weren't those insurance companies rushing out to Cumming, IA, with a population of 150 people, knocking on our door and competing with one another to cover my father with health insurance? Because they would never make any money off my dad. He got sick all the time. And he did not have any money. Where was the free market? Where was the free market to cover my father in his time of need when he was elderly? The only market that was there was the charity market. Somehow I get the uneasy feeling that those promoting this bill see that as, once again, sort of the last kind of stopgap to helping our elderly, relying on charity once again, relying upon your kids, relying upon your families. So do not tell me the private sector will solve every problem. I have lived through its failures firsthand. And I know that many elderly in my State of Iowa and around the country are in the same situation. They do not want to be let to not-so-tender mercies and whims of HMOs. Now, it may sound like I have a real case against insurance companies. I do not. In fact, in my State of Iowa I think we are proud that we are the second largest domiciliary of insurance companies in the Nation, next to Connecticut, I believe. We are proud of our insurance companies in Iowa. They employ a lot of people. They are good corporate citizens. And they provide a very valuable commodity: insurance. What the heck, I have a lot of insurance. I have life insurance, health insurance, car insurance. I probably have more insurance than I know what to do with, but it is a good tool, and I can afford it. Insurance has been good for us ever since the first insurance scheme started about, I think it was, 3,000 years ago, in China, when Chinese farmers were sending their barges down the Yangtze River, down to the ports, down to the cities. They found the storms would come up, and they would lose some of the barges, so a few of them got together and they decided to pool--to pool--their risks so that if one barge went down, that one person would not be totally wiped out. They found out by doing that, they could cover one another. Thus began the whole idea of insurance-- risk pool, sharing the risk, spreading the risk around. So, no, I have a great deal of respect for insurance. I think it provides a very valuable, meaningful commodity for all of us. But it is not adaptable here in health care for the elderly. It is just not adaptable. Many of my colleagues prefer the free market over Government intervention. In many cases this is a wise preference. But in other instances it is a misplaced faith that the free market can do anything. There is a time and a place for the Government to step in where the private sector either fears to tread or fails to tread because it is not profitable. No question, this is the case when it comes to helping people with disabilities, people with mental illnesses, and seniors with serious health problems. We hear the claim that private sector competition will drive down costs and save Medicare. Come on, let's get real about this. The only competition in this bill will be the competition for healthy seniors. That is where the competition will come. It says right here in the Washington Post: ``Medicare Deal Likely To Spark More Health Care Competition.'' When you read that, you say that is good, that is what you want. Except when you read in here, it says: "This could be like the wild west out there,'' Hayes said. ``If suddenly there are five or six or seven plans out there, the insurance companies will be pricing their product to make a profit, as they are obligated to do. If the consumer is kind of shooting in the dark because of the complexity of this--and the darkness is deepened by age or disability-- you'll have a customer primed for exploitation. We're real concerned that people could get ripped off.'' If you are sick and you are a senior, you are going to be shunned. If you are a senior and you are healthy, you are going to have people fighting for you. Why? Not on a free-market basis, but that is where the subsidies go. We are going to give them subsidies to do this. We hear the claim that Medicare should compete with the private sector, but they don't want an even playing field. This bill will give billions of extra dollars to the private plans so they can compete and make profits. That is not competition, that is simply another excuse to shovel taxpayers' dollars to the special interests. In fact, this bill will pay private plans 9 percent more than traditional fee-for-service Medicare. But that is not the end of it. On top of that, the conferees have come up with what they call a stabilization fund, which amounts to a $12 billion slush fund for private plans. Once again, the writing is on the wall. Privatization costs everyone more money. So understand this: They say they will pay the private plans 9 percent more, but when you add the $12 billion in this stabilization fund, it is more like 26 percent more. In other words, taxpayers of this country are going to pay, out of our tax dollars, 26 percent more to the private plans so they can compete with Medicare. What a sweetheart deal that is; what a sweetheart deal. And then they say that is competition, that is fair competition. It is nothing more than a scheme to give money to special interests. We hear the claim that seniors should have a choice. Many people have said seniors should have a choice as we Members of Congress have. I can tell you this: When they find out what is in this bill, they are going to be disappointed to find out their options are nothing like our options. Yes, I believe the seniors of this country ought to have what we Members of the Senate and Congress have. But they aren't going to get it under this bill. Many seniors could actually end up with reduced choice with this legislation. Under this plan, if there are two private health plans, say an HMO and a PDP--I know, aside from a few people probably around here, no one has ever heard of a PDP. And why not? Because they don't exist. They have just been conjured up out of this witch's brew. It is called a prescription drug plan. There is no such animal out there now. In a particular area, if a senior wants drug coverage, that senior will be forced to get their drug coverage through one of those private plans, not Medicare. That senior will not be allowed to get their drugs through traditional Medicare. So they can go to the PDP or the HMO. Well, they don't want to go to an HMO. Eighty-nine percent of seniors have already said they don't want to join an HMO. They want their choice of doctor. They want fee-for-service. So they can join a PDP, but we don't know what they are like because no one has ever built one. But once the senior goes in this private plan, they could face restrictions on what doctors they can see. The plan can change the drugs that are available to them. You could be on one drug and they could say: Well, we aren't going to cover that drug; we are going to cover another drug. Now, why would they switch from one drug to another? Well, maybe they are getting a kickback from the pharmaceutical manufacturer that is making the drug. Maybe they get a bigger kickback on one drug than they do another. So they tell you: We are not going to cover that drug. So seniors could be forced to change drugs in midstream. This is not competition. This is another excuse to shovel money to the special interests. I don't call that choice. That is not choice at all. There is a lot of rhetoric surrounding this bill that doesn't match reality. This administration has said many times that seniors deserve choice, that seniors deserve what Members of Congress have. I am all for that. But let's put our money where our mouths are. Right now, as a Senator, I pay about 25 percent of my drug costs, period--a heck of a deal. But the prescription drug plan put before seniors today won't even come close to this. Instead, it is a confusing, convoluted maze that--mark my words--will leave our seniors feeling betrayed and bewildered once they find out about it. I say to my colleagues, if you like our seniors' reaction to the catastrophic health insurance plan of 1987, you are going to love their reaction to this grossly inadequate prescription drug plan. In 1987, I was here. We all voted for a catastrophic health plan for the elderly. The AARP supported it and said it was wonderful. Guess what. We came back a year later and had our heads handed to us by seniors in our States. I know I had mine handed to me. We came back a year later and undid it. I can barely lift the bill that we have before us. It got delivered to us sometime this morning or last night. I didn't see it last night when I went home so it must have been sometime during the night or this morning this was handed to us. I am not going to kid anybody. I haven't read this. I have been here all day. I haven't read this. I am not about to. I will have my staff look it over, and we will try to get through it. But no one is going to read this prior to the vote on Monday. How many seniors in the country will go through this before Monday and be able to tell us what they think about it? Yet we are given 2 days--today and tomorrow--and we vote on Monday. A bill such as this, that is this big, that could have disastrous effects, is a bill that ought to be out there, around the countryside. Let's go home for Christmas and Thanksgiving. Let's let it out there. Let's get people looking at it, talking about it. See what the effect is going to be in your State and mine, urban and rural, wealthy, poor. Come back in February and let's take it up and see how we feel about it then. To me, that is the way democracy works. This President wants to bring democracy to Iraq. I sure hope they are not watching this. I sure hope they are not watching this exercise. They might think democracy may be something they may not want if they watch this. Look at what our seniors are going to be faced with. Once a year, we in our plan, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, get an open season in which we can leave the plan we are in and pick another one. Here are all the books I get once a year to look through to decide which plan I want. I get 30 days, or something like that, to look through them and decide which one. Here is MD Individual Practice Association; here is GEHA; here is NALC; here is the Mail Handlers Benefit Plan; here is BPP and PPP-- never heard of that; here is Kaiser Foundation; here is APWU--on and on and on. You get my point. So we are now going to say to the seniors that every year you get a change and you will get all these wonderful books, like we do, to read, and you go through them and decide which plan you now want to be in. Give me a break. Maybe a person out there is sick and just hanging on, and they are supposed to decide by looking at these books. I suppose maybe they will have to go out and hire somebody to look at them. They will have to give a subsidy to somebody else. Maybe we will give a subsidy to the trial lawyers to help them decide which one to choose. Every single year. Who knows what drugs will be covered or what doctors? It is convoluted, bewildering. Every year they can bounce them around; you can be in a different plan. At the end of the year, the plan can say: I am not making enough money, so I am out of town. Nothing in this bill stops them. Nothing in the bill says: We don't care if you don't make any money, you have to stay. If you are not making money, you can get out of there, and the senior is dropped, period. Let's talk about what Senators are going to pay with this. They are going to find out, to their dismay, what they are going to have to pay. Aside from being confused and bewildered, being able to be dropped every year, let's see what they have to pay. Seniors who have an annual income above $13,470 per year--that is right, $13,470 a year--that is not a lot of money. If they have an income above that, they pay a yearly deductible of $250 before their coverage kicks in. They will pay $35 a month in premiums. Can I tell you also that this $35 is not fixed in law; it is estimated. It could go up every year. It could be $40, $42, $45, or who knows? There is no guarantee it is going to be $35. So now you have about $420 a year. As I said, the number could change every year. When a private plan is not making enough profits, they can increase the premiums every year. So seniors end up paying more. So after seniors put at least $670 upfront into the program, they can start receiving some benefits. You might say, well, $670 is not a lot of money. If you are making $14,000 a year, or $13,470 a year, that is a lot of money. That is asking a lot. Then, after they pony up the $670, they pay 25 percent of their drug costs up to $2,250. At $2,250, the senior hits the gap--what we call the donut hole--at which point they pay 100 percent of their drug costs until they hit the catastrophic amount, even though they are still paying monthly premiums into the program. So during the course of the year, a senior could have coverage one day, and the next day they could go to the pharmacy and be charged the full sticker price for the prescription drugs. That is the donut hole. It is not fair. It is outrageous. Look at what they are paying now: Part A premium, zero. Part A deductible, for hospitalization, $876 per benefit period; Part B premium for doctors, $66.60 a month. The deductible is $100 a year with doctor visits. The cost share for doctor visits is 20 percent. That is straightforward, simple, and easy to understand. There are not income limits, asset tests, or anything else. It is just very straightforward. Seniors who have annual drug costs of $500 actually pay more into the program than what they receive. They would pay $500 for drugs, but they would pay $751.25 into the program. Tell me how fair that is. A senior with $1,000 in drug costs would pay $876.25. At the higher end, a senior with $5,000 in drug costs would pay nearly $4,000 for his or her drugs. What a deal. And for that, they get to read all these books every year. They get all these, I say to my friend from California, every year. And they have to try to decide. They can get bounced every year from one plan to another. For that, they pay $5,000, or they pay 4,000. It should not come as a surprise. It is estimated that seniors, over the next 10 years, will have $1.8 trillion for prescription drugs costs, but we are allocating $400 billion to pay for it. Where did that money go? Well, it went to tax cuts. Hopefully, the people who voted for the tax cuts now will not bemoan the fact that we don't have the money. They voted to blow the money on tax breaks for the wealthy. Now, let's look at one other thing. To make things even messier, this program would create several tiers of class under Medicare. Right now, you have one class. Everybody knows what he or she has to pay. Under the new program, we are going to classify you and have a lot of different strata here. There are different low-income benefits for those under 135 percent of the poverty level--$12,123, single--and another set of benefits for those under 150 percent of poverty-- $13,470. On top of that, to receive the low-income benefits, a senior has to undergo an asset test. Again, hang on here, folks. We will see if we can understand this. We will have a little test afterward. For those at 135 percent of the poverty level and below, the asset test is $6,000 for a single person, $9,000 for a couple. For the group at 150 percent of poverty and below, the asset test is different. In this group, a person cannot have more than $10,000 in assets, or $20,000 for a couple. Follow me? So what you are going to have is this. I predict this is exactly what is going to happen. You are going to have seniors at the senior citizen center, or at the local McDonald's having a cup of coffee; and old Bob is going to say: You know, this thing they passed is a pretty good deal. I am getting all my free drugs and stuff like that. His friend, Sue, is sitting there and she might say: What are you talking about? I just took a job at the local supermarket bagging groceries or stocking shelves; I am retired and have Social Security, but I need to make ends meet and pay for my drugs. Because I took that extra job to help make ends meet, to pay for heating bills, to meet my drug costs--I took this job that doesn't pay a heck of a lot--minimum wage--but because I got bumped up a little, I don't get the same benefits you get, Bob. And Margaret, who is sitting there, thought she was going to get the low- income benefits, but she filled out her forms and found out she had too much life insurance, over $10,000 in life insurance. She cannot afford her medicine, but her life insurance is considered an asset. If you are going to go to McDonald's in the morning and you are sitting and having coffee, they are going to talk about this. But for the spread of $25 a year--maybe $50 a year--one person will get great benefits and the other person won't. You tell me if this is not a formula for an uprising among the elderly. It is not rich and poor. I am talking about people who make $13,470 a year, or they make a little less than that. Or $12,123 versus $12,150. That is the kind of difference you are going to have, and that is going to decide what you get. Then they are going to say: You know, old John over there is getting those low-income benefits, but, by gosh, he is cheating because I know he owns something else. He owns a better car than what he said or he has a little something stashed away someplace. How do we get those low-income benefits? We know he has more than that. It is going to arouse suspicion among the elderly: Why do you get a better benefit than I get? We are both in the same boat, and you make 50 bucks more a year than I do and you get all these benefits and I don't. Hang on to your hats. It is going to happen. How are they going to know where they fit in? You will have several people who make nearly the same amount of money each year and they receive drastically different benefits. This is a formula for confusion and confrontation among the elderly. Right now, there is only one group. When you have Part A deductible, you all pay. When you have a Part B premium of $66.60, everybody pays it. When you have deductible of $100, everybody pays it. When you have a Part B cost share of 20 percent, everybody pays it. When they sit around McDonald's having their coffee in the morning, Bob isn't suspecting that Joe is getting away with something or that Sue maybe has a little something extra, and Margaret who took that job at the supermarket to have a little extra money doesn't feel as if she is discriminated against because she has a little extra pocket change. They all pay the same. Wait until this program heads south. You just wait. You just wait and see what happens. I don't know, did the authors of this bill deliberately design a system that is going to fail, that does more harm than good? There were a thousand pages delivered to us on Thursday. The drug and health industries are spending millions to ram this bill through immediately, even though seniors across the Nation don't know what is in it. What is the rush, I ask again? It doesn't go into effect until 2006. What is the rush? Why must we pass this bill before seniors have had a chance to examine the provisions and voice their views? I saw this cartoon in a newspaper from Newark, NJ. This is the cartoon. Here is the pharmacy and the pharmacist. This, obviously, is a senior citizen who has come in. She has a prescription to fill out. The pharmacist represents Congress. He is saying to her: Have a seat. It'll be ready in 2\1/2\ years. That is what we are saying: Have a seat; in 2\1/2\ years, this will be ready. Why do we have to rush it through right now? Why do we have to fill the prescription now if she doesn't get it for 2\1/2\ years? Maybe we ought to write the prescription later on, next year after we have had a chance to really look at it. I think seniors in this country deserve more. They deserve to be put first in the process. They have been given short shrift in this process by the corporate special interests who have a very different view about the direction of Medicare. As I said earlier this week, the stocks of pharmaceutical companies and health insurance stocks have gone up. Maybe a lot of seniors assume that AARP would stand up for their interests; that AARP would come in here and stick up for them. But AARP, the American Association for Retired Persons, has brazenly betrayed the wishes of its members on this issue. Seniors with whom I have spoken from all across Iowa do not like this bill. AARP came to Iowa late this summer and had three big town meetings on this drug bill. Several hundred people showed up. I was told when AARP presented it, they presented the House version and the Senate version, as we passed them, in a straightforward manner without editorializing whether one was better or worse or good or bad. After presenting this to several hundred Iowans in three different locations, at every meeting, they asked the 200 to 250 people who showed up, all senior citizens: How many of you would sign up for this plan? Do you know how many hands were raised? Zero. Not one hand went up. Not one hand. Now AARP is saying this is a great bill. I don't know with whom they talked. When they talked to the elderly in Iowa, they didn't get any takers. My constituents want an affordable, reliable benefit under the traditional Medicare Program. Seniors across the country agree. A poll released this week found that almost two-thirds of seniors view this bill unfavorably. Most of them identify themselves as AARP members. Among those, only 18 percent said Congress should pass the bill; 65 percent said Congress should go back to work on this bill. They need to know the direction Medicare is taking and whose side AARP is on. It says everything about this bill that Newt Gingrich is urging Republicans to vote in favor of it. For those of you who have forgotten who Newt Gingrich is, he was Speaker of the House and was the one who uttered the famous phrase: It was his desire to let Medicare ``wither on the vine.'' Mr. Gingrich is one of those ideologs who insists the private marketplace will solve all the problems. It would make his day to see Medicare dismantled through privatization, and that is exactly why he is pulling out the stops in lobbying for this bill--because under this bill, Medicare not only withers on the vine, it is cut away from the vine. This bill is a realization of Newt Gingrich's fondest dream: to end Medicare as we know it. I might also say that Newt Gingrich made no bones about it. He wanted to privatize Social Security--privatize it, put it out on the stock market. That is next. But he sees this as the first step to that privatization. The newspapers have been full of accounts of Mr. Gingrich's ``pull out the stops'' lobbying for this bill. He says: Every conservative Member of Congress should vote for this Medicare bill. I submit, if Newt Gingrich is for this bill, that is a serious red flag. That ought to raise a lot of questions because, as I said, Mr. Gingrich has made no bones about it--I give him marks for honesty--he has said time and time again that Medicare ought to wither on the vine; we ought to privatize Social Security. Not only does it privatize Medicare, it is a bonanza for Mr. Gingrich's corporate friends, the big money corporate interests. This bill is like Christmas in November for Mr. Gingrich's corporate friends. It allows people to sock away thousands of dollars a year in tax-free medical savings accounts. Of course, the people from where I come don't have money for tax-tree accounts. It will be used mostly by the wealthy, not low-income seniors. Newt Gingrich is ecstatic. This Medicare bill is yet another tax cut bill with the benefits flowing overwhelmingly to the wealthy. Here is more of what Mr. Gingrich has to say about this Medicare bill: I think this is one of the great historic moments in moving the Nation in a conservative direction. He said--get this--this is Newt Gingrich: If you are a fiscal conservative who cares about balancing the Federal budget, there may be no more important vote in your career than one in support of this bill. I guess as a supply-side zealot, he believes that the tax-cut provisions in this bill will help us balance the budget. That is bizarre. That is just bizarre. They just want to privatize Medicare. That is all they want to do. They want to privatize Social Security. Mr. Gingrich claims that the shift towards medical savings accounts would be ``the largest change in health policy in 60 years.'' He made this claim to a gathering of his right-wing anti-tax enthusiasts at the Americans for Tax Reform headquarters in Washington. Of course, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, Mr. Grover Norquist, is famous for saying, ``My goal is to cut government in half, to get it down to the size where we can drag it in the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.'' That includes Medicare and Social Security. That is part of his government. That is what he wants to drown in the bathtub. So it is no wonder that Mr. Gingrich and his right-wing friends love this bill. Not only does it undermine a Government program that they despise; even better, it serves up another fat tax cut for the rich. Only the wealthy and healthy will benefit from this bill. Mr. Gingrich is outspoken in his belief that pharmaceutical companies are getting unfair treatment and they are punished by their success. Well, Mr. Gingrich, that is wrong. This bill does not ask one penny from the pharmaceutical companies. In fact, it protects drug companies from Government efforts to negotiate lower costs. I am the first to support drug research and development, but the Medicare burden should not be taken solely out of the pockets of seniors and taxpayers. In closing, I would have to ask: Exactly why are Newt Gingrich and AARP in the same bed? That seems odd. What are they up to? AARP's slogan is ``the power to make it better.'' They claim to represent American seniors. However, millions of seniors are furious that AARP has endorsed this lousy bill. As I said earlier, a Peter Hart poll found almost two-thirds of seniors viewed the bill unfavorably, and most of those were AARP members. Among AARP members, only 18 percent said we should pass this bill, while 65 percent said we had to go back to work on it. Yesterday, AARP members from Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania tore up their membership cards in front of their organization's Washington headquarters. AARP's Web site community message board is filled with outraged comments. Members are accusing William Novelli, CEO of AARP, of selling out to conservatives and Newt Gingrich. Now, where, I wonder did they get that idea? In fact, the relationship between Newt Gingrich and the bigwigs at AARP goes way back. William Novelli, executive director of AARP, wrote the preface to Newt Gingrich's book, ``Saving Lives, Saving Money.'' In that preface, Mr. Novelli states that: Newt's ideas are influencing how we at AARP are thinking about our national role in health promotion and disease prevention and in our advocating for systems change. That is Mr. Novelli's preface in Newt Gingrich's book. Well, I have to ask: Which of Newt's ideas are ``influencing how we at AARP are thinking''? Is it Newt's fond wish that Medicare ``wither on the vine''? No wonder members of AARP feel so betrayed. I too feel betrayed that AARP's leaders have chosen to endorse the right-wing principles of this Medicare bill and endorse Newt Gingrich's ideas of how to undermine and privatize our Nation's health care system. AARP's endorsement is disturbing for another reason. They have a flagrant conflict of interest in this matter. Bear in mind AARP receives vast revenues from the sale of insurance to seniors. Royalties from such arrangements include deals with United Health Care Insurance Company, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and Advanced PSC Pharmacy Benefit Management, accounted for more than one-third of AARP's $636 million in revenues last year, according to AARP's 2002 annual report. There we have it. AARP is looking at the insurance end of it, of course. American seniors deserve better from the AARP and from Congress. They deserve a bill that includes an affordable prescription drug plan, that strengthens Medicare, that does not penalize the sickest and the poorest in our Nation. This bill reflects the priorities of this Republican administration and of Newt Gingrich who have been hostile to Medicare since its inception. This bill needs to be written by individuals and groups that believe in Medicare, not those who want to undermine it. Seniors know that this bill is a betrayal. They know who the winners and losers are with this bill. Under premium support, HMOs, PPOs, and pharmaceutical companies, they win; seniors and the disabled lose. Under cost containment, the private companies win; the seniors and disabled lose. Under drug coverage, pharmaceutical companies win; seniors lose. Under health savings accounts, the wealthy HMOs win; seniors and disabled lose. Under the so-called stabilization fund, this slush fund, HMOs, PPOs, and pharmaceutical companies win; seniors and the disabled lose. Under so- called competition--boy, there is a misnomer if I have ever heard it-- HMOs, PPOs, and pharmaceutical companies win; seniors and disabled lose. The seniors know this. Again, it is a question of priorities. This administration rammed through this Congress $1.6 trillion in tax cuts. Now they say they cannot take care of the elderly who have worked their entire lives, contributed to their communities and served this country. Once again, the administration has made a clear choice. They have chosen the folks on Wall Street over the folks on Main Street. It is a big deal. I got to thinking the other day. I talked about how my father, during the Depression--I was born November 19, 1939. I just had my birthday this week. In 1939, my father was out of work. He had a wife, five kids, and one on the way. I was the sixth one. He had no money. He had an eighth grade education. My mother was an immigrant who had no formal education. They lived in a small house in a small town in rural Iowa, and my father had no hope. He was already 54 years old, had worked in the coal mines most of his life, and the only thing they had was this tiny little house in this small town. As I walk out of my door every day, I have on my wall a little framed orange piece of paper. It is dated July 19, 1939, 4 months to the day before I was born. On that orange piece of paper, it is printed and it says: You, Patrick F. Harkin--that is my father--are to report to work at once as a laborer on a project, $48.30 a month. It was signed by somebody, and then my father signed it--4 months to the day before I was born. It was his WPA form when my father went to work on a WPA project. Now, I look at that because I remember once George Bush, when he was a candidate for President, said: Government cannot give hope to people. Every day when I walk out of my office and I look at that piece of paper, I say: Mr. Bush, you are wrong. If it had not been for Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, I do not know what would have happened to my family and my father. They gave him a job. They gave him hope. Years later, when I was in high school, my father took me to some of those projects he built. One of them was at Lake Okoboji. It is still in use as a recreational facility in Iowa; a high school in Indianola is still being used today built by WPA. Why do I say that? Because I got to thinking about the new deal and I got to thinking, it was a Government program, Roosevelt's New Deal. Who was the benefactor? The unemployed. To my father, who had no hope, it gave him hope and it gave him a job. Then we had Truman's Fair Deal, and who benefited from that? The uninsured and low-wage workers. Today we have a new Government program that they are trying to push on us, Bush's Big Deal. Not the New Deal, not the Fair Deal, but the Big Deal. Who wins? The HMOs, big pharmaceutical companies and private health plans. I call it the Big Deal because the bigger you are, the better the deal. Compare that to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal, that reached down and helped bring people up. No, today we have the Big Deal: the bigger you are the better the deal. This is a radical departure for Medicare. It changes the nature of this program as an entitlement. The conferees set an arbitrary cap on how much Medicare money can be spent. Instead of a cap, we ought to just be spending the money more wisely. We ought to be spending less on HMO subsidies, less on subsidies to the pharmaceutical companies, and more on preventive health care, keeping our seniors more healthy, getting them better diets and better exercise--more preventive health care to keep them healthy. This is an article called ``Entitlement Change Is Inevitable, Key Administration Officials Say.'' They went on to say: ``In the long run, Social Security cannot meet its commitments.'' That seems to be the constant refrain we hear from this administration. Social Security cannot meet its commitments. Of course not; we just took the huge surplus that had been built up under the Clinton administration and we squandered it on tax breaks for the wealthy. I say again, the amount of money going out in tax breaks to the wealthy in our country that was passed in 2001 and 2003, over the next 75 years, is three times more than what is necessary to ``save Social Security and Medicare.'' Don't tell me that the money is not there and that Social Security can't meet its commitments. It can't meet its commitments now because we squandered all the money on tax breaks for the wealthy. Sure, Medicare is headed for a train wreck, but it is a train wreck planned and plotted by this administration. You can be sure as soon as this bill is out of the road they are going to start on Social Security. Headline: ``Bush Pushes For Expanded Private Role in Medicare.'' That is what it is all about. ``The foundation of this . . . compromise--is a level playing field between Medicare and private plans,'' said Senator Edward Kennedy. ``What conservative Republicans are now trying to do is rig the system in a way that would coerce senior citizens away from Medicare and into private plans.'' Senator Kennedy said it right. To be fair it is not just Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Bush who are hostile to the Medicare Program. Many others share their views. The junior Senator from Pennsylvania and third ranking Republican, Mr. Santorum, said--I believe this is a direct quote: I believe the standard benefit through the traditional Medicare program has to be phased out. That is the third ranking Republican on that side of the aisle. The junior Senator from Utah, Mr. Bennett, has said: Medicare is a disaster. Medicare will have to be overhauled. Let's create a whole new system. Tom Scully, head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid, the top Medicare official in the Bush administration, said this about Medicare; he called it ``an unbelievable disaster'' and a ``dumb system.'' Medicare is not a disaster or a dumb system in the eyes of millions of seniors who rely on it every single day. As I said, this is too big an issue to address in a day or 2 days. We have to act now, we are told. Nonsense. The provisions in this bill don't kick in until 2006. We received the bill on Thursday, this right here. We received it this morning on our desks. We didn't have time to look at it. We ought to withdraw the bill, get it out to the public, and bring it back for consideration in February. That will allow time for seniors back home to analyze it, discuss it, and share their views with Members of Congress. Then we can take an informed vote on this bill, taking into consideration the views of seniors in our respective States. This is the Senate, supposedly the world's greatest deliberative body. We can take more time, as we did last week, in going all day and all night and all day and all night, talking about four judges who were held up--we can take more time to do that than we can to debate and discuss this profound change in Medicare in the United States. What does that say about the state of affairs in the Senate today? Oh, yes, we can deliberate over four judges--168 that got approved and 4 that didn't. We can talk about that for days or weeks on end. But, no, to discuss this profound change in Medicare we take Saturday and Sunday and vote on Monday. The Senate has ceased being the world's most deliberative body. It is now the world's most rushed body: Rush it through, stampede it, and get it done. This is a complex, confusing, bureaucratic nightmare of a bill. It is a bad bill procedurally. This bill contains untested experimental privatization plans that especially threaten seniors in rural areas. To top it off, it offers yet another big tax break for wealthy Americans. There is supposedly a fix in this bill for the disparities. There is supposed to be fairness, in terms of addressing the disparity between the States, in reimbursement for Medicare on a per beneficiary basis. I have taken the floor many times to talk about how Iowa is No. 50 in the Nation in the per beneficiary reimbursement for Medicare. So Iowa has been 50th out of 50 States. This bill was supposed to have a fix in it to make it more fair. So they put, I think, $25 billion into this bill to make it more fair over the next 10 years. Right now, the per beneficiary reimbursement in Louisiana is $7,336. In Iowa it is $3,053. In Virginia it is $4,611. I say to the occupant of the chair, the citizens of Virginia pay the same Medicare taxes as anybody else in this country. Yet the seniors in Virginia get back $4,611 per beneficiary, the seniors in New York get $6,924; the seniors in Texas get $6,539; the seniors in Maryland, right next-door, get $6,301, but in Virginia they only get $4,611 per beneficiary. In Iowa it is $3,053. Yet we pay the same Medicare taxes. So we have been fighting for a long time to try to straighten this system out and make it a little bit more fair. They put some money in the bill. But guess what they did--they made it worse because what they basically did is they kind of gave a percentage increase. You know how that works. If you get $100 and I get $10 and we get a 10-percent increase, you get a lot more money than I get. Right now, Iowa, we are 50th. Louisiana is first in terms of how much money they get per beneficiary. Now we are 50th. The disparity in payments for seniors between Iowa and Louisiana is $4,685. In other words, a beneficiary in Iowa gets $4,685 less. We get less in reimbursement per beneficiary than it cost Louisiana. Under this bill, supposedly meant to fix this, Iowa is still last. We are number 50th. The disparity has gone from $4,685 per beneficiary to $5,017 per beneficiary. It is worse. This was supposed to be fairness? There are some who will say that Iowa, in terms of the beneficiary and the amount of money they got, is 13th. That is all right. It may be 13th. But other States are more. As you can see, it increases the disparity rather than lessening it. That is what we want to do--lessen the disparity in the States. Lastly, the Washington Post this morning said it all. ``2 Bills Would Benefit Top Bush Fundraisers.'' At least 24 Rangers and Pioneers could benefit from the Medicare bills as executives of companies or lobbyists working for them, including 8 clients affected by both bills. Meaning the Energy bill. ``Pioneer'' is someone, I guess, who raises $100,000 for the President, and ``Ranger'' is someone who raises $200,000 for the President. I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the Record.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Jenelle Krishramoorthy be granted the privilege of the floor for the remainder of the debate today, and the remainder of the debate on this Medicare conference report.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote on this vote and the previous vote.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, this has been a good debate. I wish we could go for another hour. Just a couple points. First, on job growth, that I have heard my friends on the other side talk about here this evening and the last month. The fact is, manufacturing jobs are going down. The service sector has increased. Manufacturing jobs continue to lose. One in seven manufacturing jobs were lost during the Bush administration. We are now at the lowest level of manufacturing jobs in our country since 1958, and it continues to go down. So when they talk about job growth, they are talking about the lowest kinds of jobs and the lowest paid kinds of jobs in the service sector. Again, what we ought to be talking about are jobs. Again, as my colleague from North Dakota said, just look at the facts, the three major budget bills and job creation bills. In 1981, 1.4 million jobs were lost in 2 years after the Republican budget bill past. Under the Democratic budget bill passed in 1993, under our economic plan, 6.4 million jobs were created in 2 years. Of course, we know what is happening under this President Bush: after his budget bill passed in 2001, 2.1 million jobs were lost in the next two years. It is the same old thing--Republican trickle-down economics was tried in 1981 and 2001. Put it in at the top, hope that it trickles down. That is the fundamental difference between Democratic and Republican economic policies. We have long believed--and the proof is what we did in the 1990s-- that if you put it in at the bottom, give it more to working families, invest in education and health care, educational opportunities, make the economy more efficient, it percolates up. It is percolate-up economics that works versus trickle down. The problem with trickle down is when you give it to those at the top, they take too big a cut and it never quite trickles down. But when you put it at the bottom, you put people to work and you get the economy humming. We need to do it by expanding educational opportunities. Under this President, we have had the lowest request for educational funding in the last 30 years. That policy is going to mean a less well trained work force in the long-term, an economy that will not compete as well and larger deficits for our country.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I am somewhat taken. I cannot believe it. The Republicans are in charge of the White House, the Senate, and the House, and they are blaming the Democrats for this economic downturn and for the fact that we have these huge budget deficits. They are the ones who are in charge. They are the ones that produced an 8 percent increase in domestic discretionary spending last year, far more than the average increase in the Clinton years. And, that excludes Iraq and Defense. I would respond to my friend from Virginia, no, we do not believe in higher taxes, but we do believe in fairer taxes--fairer taxes--for the American people. Right now, the corporate income tax rate is the lowest it has been since the 1930s except for 1983--1.2 percent--yet payroll taxes, paid by every hard-working American, is at the highest level ever. That is what has been happening; not that the people ought to pay more taxes, we ought to have fairer taxes. Why is it fair that in the 2003 tax bill those making over a million dollars a year are getting, on average, $93,000 while half the taxpayers got $100 or less. That is what we are opposed to.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, in less than 3 years time President Bush has turned a projected surplus of $5.7 trillion into a projected deficit of $4.2 trillion over the next 10 years. Now not even Congress is powerful enough to reverse the law of supply and demand. This vast new debt will raise interest rates and damage the economy in the long run. It is going to hurt the Federal Government's ability to cover the Social Security and Medicare costs of baby boomers and the education of our kids. The tax bill gave a $93,000 tax cut, on average, to those earning more than $1 million a year. The majority of Americans, however, get less than $100. Also, right now, more and more foreign countries are owning our debt and more and more will be owning that debt over the next 10 years. My question is, are these tax cuts for wealthy Americans worth the long-term damage they will cause our economy?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, the Bush administration wants to eliminate overtime pay for some 8 million Americans, including many policemen, firefighters, and nurses. One big reason overtime pay was created in 1938 was to create jobs by Franklin Roosevelt to give employers the incentive to hire new workers rather than paying time and a half to current workers. By killing overtime for millions of workers, the administration will also kill the incentive to create new jobs and hire new workers. At a time when we are struggling to create new jobs, why in the world do so many Republicans want to give employers a new disincentive to begin hiring again by taking away what we have had since 1938--overtime pay protection for almost 8 million American workers? Why would we want to take that away and give employers more of an incentive to continue to hire people--or to work people longer in the day or the week without paying them any more money?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I had some calls like that, too, from labor groups and building trades on the overtime issue. I thought, well, it doesn't affect you. With a union contract they get their overtime pay. But check with their spouses. They will be told to stay another 2 or 4 hours. Right now, sometimes in America almost 25 percent of a family's income comes from overtime pay. That is taking away family income. It is taking away time from ones family. And, it is reducing the need to hire additional workers. That is why we oppose the administration's regulation to take away overtime pay protection.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, first I ask unanimous consent that Theresa Frueh of my office be given privileges of the floor tonight and tomorrow.