Jim McDermott

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentleman from West Virginia.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I come to the floor because I want to tell a tale of two cities. Seattle and Bhuj in Gujarat had earthquakes of about the same strength. Seattle lost one life, and a few buildings had some cracks here and there. There was quite a bit of physical damage but nothing like what happened to the city of Bhuj, the area in which Bhuj exists, that is, Gujarat, had somewhere between 25,000 and 100,000 people die. About 100,000 homes were flattened, and it had to do with the system of preparedness we have in this country for disasters and the absence of such a system in India. As you heard from a previous speaker, USAID presently has one person sitting in Kathmandu to cover all of the subcontinent, and it is clearly not enough when you are looking at situations like this. It used to be, the first years I was in Congress, we were out here every year giving money to some disaster here or there or another place. Hurricane Mitch or the Mozambican floods or a whole bunch of things. But this administration has said there will be no disaster relief for India or for El Salvador, and they are cutting down the use of money from the Surplus Commodities Program. All of those used to be programs that were used to deal with human misery. I originally started with $100 million for earthquake rehabilitation to help them build homes that would survive this kind of an earthquake. I am down to $10 million now, and I cannot get it into that. But at least we can help them establish a system of earthquake preparedness like our own. One of problems when you have buildings fall down like that is, how do you get to the people who are underneath it? What is required is saws that will cut concrete. One of things we know in the United States is if we have a disaster anywhere, we can have cement cutting saws there within a few hours. The ones that went to India came from Switzerland. You can imagine how long it took them to get organized in Switzerland, get them on a plane, and fly them. By that time people have been lying in rubble for 12 to 24 hours. Mr. Chairman, a person can only survive in most of these situations for about 72 hours. Occasionally they find somebody after 4 or 5 days; generally, however, it is a very short window. So the Office of Disaster Preparedness is really to have a list and a cataloging of where are the things that we can use for this. Mr. Chairman, we also need cranes. If workers are going to lift a 20- ton slab of concrete, they have got to have cranes available. All of these things in the United States, we do not have them sitting someplace, but FEMA knows where they are. If there is a problem, the calls go immediately, and the equipment comes in. That is what we are talking about here with this money for India. Mr. Chairman, I hear there is perhaps a compromise in the works for $1 million. I only have this to say about $1 million. We are the richest country in the world. For us to look at a country of a billion people and say hey, we can find $1 million, that is not even a rounding error in this place today. In my view, $10 million is a minimal contribution that we should be able to make to this. I hope the chairman and the ranking member, when they get to conference, will see if they cannot get the number up.

Mr. McDERMOTT. I yield to the gentleman from Nebraska.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, it is always interesting to listen to these discussions about the Export-Import Bank. Every nation in the world, the industrialized world, has an equivalent organization. The United States has the least of that kind of organized support of the business community through the Export-Import Bank. I hear Members come out here on the floor and deplore the trade deficit, that the United States takes everything in and never exports anything. One of the problems with exporting into the Third World or to even other parts of the industrialized world is the question of whether or not they can pay back the debt. Now, if a bank wants to lend money to General Electric to sell some equipment to whatever country, all the Export-Import Bank does is guarantee that if the money is not paid back, they will pay the money. They have not lost any money in this process. But they need the capital as a backup for all the loans that go out into the world. We have changed the Export-Import Bank. When I came to the Congress back in 1988, it used to be called the Boeing Bank. It is not the Boeing Bank anymore. It is a whole lot of other things. In fact, as we heard the list of people in this particular one, Boeing is not in it. It is General Electric and a lot of other things. Last year, fiscal year 2000, there were loans to 2,176 small businesses. If you make one loan for Boeing for $100 million, it only takes one person, but if you are going to take 2,176 small business loans and help small business people get into the international economy, you have got to have people who can help them through that process. That is why the staff has gotten larger and why taking money out of the staff simply makes no sense. I see the reason for the size of this amendment, $18 million. It fits the $18 million that already went out the door for the Chinese loan guarantee. But we are not canceling the loan. It is still going to go ahead. This is not the place to fight the argument that you have here. If you want to make a change, the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Bereuter) has said it more correctly, get in the authorizing bill and decide which industries you are not going to lend to. ``We are not going to lend to any foreign steel industry because they compete with the United States.'' Then General Electric will not bother going out trying to sell anything to them. They will know at the beginning. But this coming in afterward and saying to the bank, ``Well, you lent to the wrong people so we're going to take your money back,'' I do not know what message they get out of that. I guess the message is, we should not loan to anybody who makes steel. Maybe we should not loan to anybody who makes cars. I mean, the Koreans make cars, the Indonesians make cars and other people. Maybe we should never lend any money to a country that has carmaking because it competes with Detroit.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, good morning. I am pleased to be here today to introduce legislation that will facilitate dialog on a key issue facing the Northwest. I want to begin today with a quote from Chief Joseph, a man who lived in Northeastern Oregon and traveled the lands of the Columbia and Snake River Basin: The Earth was created by the assistance of the sun, and it should be left as it was . . . I never said the land was mine to do with it as I chose. The one who has the right to dispose of it is the one who has created it. I claim a right to live on my land, and accord you the privilege to live on yours. This legislation is called the Salmon Planning Act. It provides for the planning that will be necessary to save the endangered salmon and steelhead populations in the Snake River if the Bush administration continues to deny funding to recovery efforts. For centuries, salmon has been recognized as a symbol of the Northwest lifestyle and a mainstay of the economy. Both commercial fishermen and the sport fishing industry rely on consistent runs of salmon and steelhead. Generations of northwesterners have grown up with fishing as a part of their lives. Beginning in the early 1960s, a series of 4 dams were constructed on the Lower Snake River. The dams provided energy, water for irrigation, and a barge system for transporting goods between the inland and ocean ports. Since then, the 12 genetically distinct populations of salmon and steelhead, native to the Snake River, have dropped to such an extent that every one of those populations is either functionally extinct or listed under the endangered Species Act. Scientific studies have shown that declining salmon runs represent the declining health of the overall ecosystem in the Columbia and Snake River basin. Independent studies by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Fish and Wildlife Service have shown an ecosystem in peril. Additionally, numerous treaties with Native Tribes in Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and the Canadian Government have committed our government to ensuring the continued viability Last year the National Marine Fisheries Service released a biological opinion regarding the Columbia and Snake River Basin and developed the Salmon Recovery Plan, which would avoid breaching the dams. I support this plan and hope that we can continue to make every effort to develop a workable solution without breaching the dams. However, the current administration has so far failed to allocate any funds to implement this plan. Full funding of the restoration measures called for in the Salmon Recovery Plan will cost an estimated $1.2 billion per year for the region as a whole. The administration has chosen to sacrifice the salmon and the economy of the Northwest in favor of large tax refunds. The Salmon Planning Act will provide for a thorough peer review of the Salmon Recovery Plan of 2000 by the National Academy of Sciences to ensure the scientific credibility of its findings. In addition, the Salmon Planning Act calls for a study by the General Accounting Office of the effects of potential dam beaching if recovery efforts fail. The GAO study would detail the effects of dam removal on every sector of society that is impacted. In addition to the fishing and scientific community, dam removal would affect energy, transportation, agriculture and the local communities. The GAO study will also address the potential liability of the American taxpayer that may result from our failure to fulfill our treaty obligations should our salmon and steelhead populations become extinct. Passage of the Salmon Planning Act by itself will not result in the breaching of the dams. Let me repeat that, this act will not result in breaching the dams. Congress will need to address this issue again in the future. This bill does, however, provide the planning that will be necessary for Congress to make an informed decision. The window of opportunity to save our valuable salmon and steelhead resources is quickly closing.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California (Mr. Schiff).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. This amendment was put out here for a very simple purpose. The Republicans have been acting like they had a $500 bank account and they were going to write ten $100 checks; and that is what the Committee on Ways and Means Chairman led by the Committee on Ways and Means Republicans has done, over and over again. We received a letter from the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle) on July 11 that said that the surplus remaining was $12 billion. Now, the President has yet to submit a defense request to us. The lowest estimate anybody has heard is that he wants $10 billion. So if we just imagine taking 12 and subtracting 10, we now have $2 billion left in surplus, and so then we are almost into Social Security and Medicare. Okay? Now, we also have stuff coming out of the CBO and the Committee on Joint Taxation telling us that the economy has slowed down and the revenue estimates are going down. A very conservative estimate of how far down they have gone is $20 billion. Now, remember, we have that $2 billion left, we subtract another 20, we are $18 billion into the surplus in Medicare. Mr. Speaker, I do not know how many times I have heard people come out and say, we are going to put a lockbox on these funds. By God, we are going to put a lockbox on this, on Social Security, and lock up all that Medicare. Right here, before we pass this foolish bill, we are already $18 billion into the Medicare money. Now we have another $13 billion here. So now we are up to $31 billion, and next week we are all going to get a chance to come out here and pass a bill about energy cuts. I have forgotten what that one is. I think it is $33 billion. And we know that $500 checking account that we wrote $1,000 worth of checks on, we are going to write about $5,000 worth of checks by the time we are done. We are bankrupt, unless we go into Social Security and Medicare. Now, we can do all the dancing we want out here and talk all about the issue of the first amendment. I mean, people are acting like somehow we cannot fund social services done by faith-based groups. As I said earlier, that is nonsense. Catholic charities, Jewish Charities, Lutheran World Service, on the list goes, the Salvation Army, the whole works, they all have tremendous amounts of Federal money, and they follow rules. And that section of this bill that wants to take away the rules or start bending the rules is going to wind up with people facing indictments. We are going to have ministers who think they can come down here to the government, get a bag full of money and go home and do whatever they want with it, and they are going to wind up being indicted. Now, we had one of our colleagues, some of my colleagues may remember, runs a great, large church, and he spent a lot of money defending himself against the charge that he was spending Federal money in a religious way. He ultimately won, but we are going to see that this is not a free bag of money to just go and take for church leaders to take home and do whatever they want with. The Supreme Court, the district courts, the courts of appeal have been clear on this issue. The gentleman from Texas acts like the country started when the Democrats were picking up the pieces after the Republican debacle of the 1920s. This country spent 200 years with a separation of church and State. It does not need this bill, and it is fiscally absolutely irresponsible.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler) be allowed to manage the 15 minutes allocated to the Committee on the Judiciary.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself a couple of minutes here. The distinguished chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means certainly is an erudite speaker and I appreciate his great erudition on these matters. However, the gentleman knows that since he runs the House, he sets the rules. You would not let us have a clean amendment. You said, you have to do a substitute; and you have got to make it germane. You made it so tight, we did not have any way to do it but to use your stupid vehicle. But we wanted to pay for it. If we could have added an amendment and simply paid for it, we would have done it, because we would have proven the hypocrisy of what has gone on on the other side. You are offering this amendment, and you have broken the budget; and you are into Social Security, and you will not pay for this. That is what the people need to understand. We are willing to pay for what we do. It will turn out in this vote that you are not. You are simply doing a PR exercise. Everybody on the other side already has their press release ready: ``Today we gave a charitable choice to every American. They can participate.'' It is an empty sack. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/4\ minutes to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Roemer). (Mr. ROEMER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, whenever we pass this legislation, we have to ask ourselves, what is broke? What are we trying to fix? The gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott) has very clearly said any religious organization can accept money. In the present situation, this bill is not needed. Catholic Charities gets 62 percent. That equates to $1.4 billion a year from the Federal Government. The Salvation Army gets $400 million a year. United Jewish Communities, their nursing homes get 76 percent of their money from the Federal Government. Lutheran Services gets 30 percent of their $6.9 billion from the Federal Government. That is $2.6 billion. Mr. Speaker, my colleagues tell me that faith-based organizations need this bill to get this money. That is clearly not what we are doing here. We are skirting around the court case we heard about. We want to give the ability of religious organizations to break laws that are here today and mix church and State. The other thing that we are doing, and everybody forgets the past, the other side of the aisle took money from the Community Development Block Grant for social services 2 years ago and put it into the transportation budget. Now these agencies are coming and saying, we do not have enough money. So the other side of the aisle's answer is, well, we will just ask people to contribute more. We will put this really good incentive out there. Mr. Speaker, everybody who has filed the short form in this country now has the opportunity to give $25. If they keep records, and they have to keep records where they gave that $25, they then will get $3.75 back. Now, I do not know how stupid the other side of the aisle thinks 75 percent of the American people are. If they care, they are already giving $25. They will give $25 or $50, or whatever they have, but they are not going to do it for $3.75 that they have to wait a year to get. This is simply a nonsense bill.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pascrell). (Mr. PASCRELL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 10 seconds to the articulate gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank).

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett).

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I rise to oppose this resolution. I brought this glass of water out here because, when we look at it, it is not quite clear whether it is half full or it is half empty. This debate is really a half-full, half-empty debate. I went to China first in 1977 with the first legislative delegation that got into China after Mao died in 1976. There were about 25 of us State legislators who traveled all over China. The Chinese people at this point dressed in either gray, if they were in the government; or blue, if they were a peasant; or green, if they were in the army. You could look around the whole place and there was not anything but gray and blue and green. In 1982, I went back to China with a group from Seattle to establish a sister city relationship with Chungking. I was one of the five official delegates who did that. We went to the largest city in China, Chungking in the west. At that point, immediately one noticed two things. One was people's clothing had begun to change. People were allowed to have a little free expression here and there. The second thing that happened was that people were not afraid to come up and talk in English. When we had been there in 1977, people who had been trained in Bible schools and all sorts of places in the United States and spoke good English were afraid to speak to you in the street in English. In 1982, that had changed. They were talking about development of free trade zones in Tianjin and other places in China. I went back to China in 1992, and the changes were even more dramatic in terms of the change in people's dress, the change in people's behavior. They were having dancing classes, doing western ballroom dancing out in the street in front of the Shanghai hotels. Now, we say that is all superficial, but it is very indicative of the changes that are occurring in China. Now, if I were to tell my colleagues that there were labor leaders in one of the states of China that had formed a union and they worked on the docks and they did not like the way things were going so they called a strike, and the governor of the State, the State Attorney General, actually, were to put those labor leaders in house arrest for an entire year for having a strike, I am sure somebody would be out here jumping up and down and telling me all about these terrible human rights violations going on in China. The description I just gave my colleagues is going on in South Carolina today. A black longshore union down in South Carolina has three or four labor leaders under house arrest for a year while the Attorney General runs for governor and uses them as his bait. Now, the Bible says that before you talk about the mote in our brother's eye, look at the plank in your own eye. We are not clean on all of these issues of human rights, and giving everybody opportunity. The Chinese have changed dramatically since 1977 when I first went there. Have they a long way to go? Of course. I have been to India and seen the Dalai Lama, seen the people who have fled from Tibet who live in Katmandu. I have seen all of the aspects of this. Many of them live in Seattle. And those are not right situations. And none of us who think we ought to keep the pressure on the Chinese to change, none of us who are supportive, at least none that I know who are supportive of continuing a trade relationship with China, for 1 minute condone what is happening in Tibet or what is happening in a variety of slave situations in forced labor camps, none of that. But to walk away and say to one-fifth of the world's population, we have no interest in you, go your own way, do whatever you want; until you do it our way, we are not going to talk to you. We tried that. My Senator, Warren Magnuson, who was here for 44 years, said, the biggest mistake we ever made was in 1947 when Mao put his hand out to the United States and said he wanted to work with us, and we said, no, you are a Communist. We will not deal with a Communist. We closed the door on China from 1946 until a Republican President showed up. I mean, I do not have many good things to say about Richard Nixon, but I will say he had the courage to go and reopen the door and say, closing the door does not work. We have lots of proof of that. And to go back to the pre-1972 era is simply not in either in our best interests or in the world's best interests. If the gentleman from Ohio is correct, that the Chinese are this great, fearful dragon, I think they are mythical animals, but, anyway, if they are really a fear to us, it is much better that we know them, that we are talking with them, that we are involved with them, and that we are using trade as a way to get them to adopt the rules of a civil world society, that is, the World Trade Organization. Everybody plays by the same rules. They have to make changes for that to work in the WTO. They cannot continue the way they have been, and they have not. They have been going gradually, not as fast as we would like, but the next time somebody tells us something has not changed in China in 10 years, remember, they have been there 6,000 years. They do not do things in a minute.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is absolutely right. In every profession, every specialty in medicine, whether it is pulmonary surgery or pediatrics or obstetrics or whatever, there is a board that gives people the right to say, I am an obstetrician, I am a psychiatrist, I am a pediatrician; and those boards look at all of these particular conditions related to that specialty and make decisions about what is an appropriate standard of care. Now, if an insurance company wants to just arbitrarily make their own standards of care in contradistinction to what the doctor has been taught, what he has agreed to as being an obstetrician, this is the way you handle these kinds of cases, and suddenly he is told by somebody who is not in the profession that they should do otherwise, you can see the conflict. I mean, it is terrible for doctors. That is why doctors hate this so much. Here you have been trained, gone to college, medical school, an internship and a residency, all this training, and here is somebody coming out of nowhere telling you you cannot do that; what you have to do is what we tell you to do. Mr. Speaker, I think that the essence of this whole thing is bringing it back to a place where doctors and patients make the decision. Now, the other part, and this is about deciding, what does the ordinary citizen know? The ordinary citizen is not a physician or a nurse or anybody in the health care profession. When they feel sick, when they feel pain in their chest or pain in their stomach or whatever, they go to see a physician or they go to see the emergency room in a hospital, because they are worried. Now, it may turn out that what they thought was a heart attack is really related to eating spicy food or something else. It may turn out that it was not a heart attack. But to say that the average citizen is supposed to make that decision in their own home and diagnose themselves, put a stethoscope on their chest and say, well, it sounds all right to me, I mean, it is crazy. Everybody knows that. None of us wants to go to the emergency room in a hospital, but people go, and because it turns out it was not anything really big, why, they say we are not going to pay for it. But people go, and then because it turns out it was not anything big, then they say, well, we are not going to pay for it. Those kinds of issues, sort of a reasonable person standard, what would a reasonable person do in this case, those kinds of issues, should not be turned back on the patients. I had a hearing in Seattle with my constituents. I opened my door and said, come on in. People told me all kinds of things. For instance, thy were told by an insurance company they could not have this kind of treatment, but somebody a thousand miles away in Kansas City or Los Angeles was having that kind of treatment for exactly the same kind of circumstances. So one place is doing one thing and another place is doing another thing, and all of these differences are based simply on insurance companies' decisions about how tightly they can squeeze this issue down. There is a story or a case that came up from Florida where a man, an elderly man about 75 years old who had prostate cancer, after he had the prostate cancer removed, then they talked about, how do you suppress the male hormones. Now, obviously there are a couple of ways to do that. One is to castrate him. That is a one-time $1500 operation. Or they can put him on medication that costs about a thousand dollars a year. So it will cost more if he lives 5 or 10 years. So they made the decision to do the castration. The man said, I do not want that. Again, we have these kind of things. These are tough decisions. But they ought to be made between the doctor and the patient about what is best for the patient, not by an insurance company saying, ``do it the cheapest way.'' Lots of physicians are leaving medicine today. Many of my colleagues in my class have said, ``I am through with this. I cannot fight with insurance companies any more, because it has just taken all the joy, all the pleasure out of being a physician because I am always caught.'' So there was a time, and the insurance companies have changed this, but there was a point where they would say, ``You cannot even tell the patient that there is another treatment. If we only cover x, you cannot tell the patient there is y, or that there is another way to be treated. If you go over to see Dr. Johnson, he'll give you another treatment.''

Mr. McDERMOTT. I was flying home to Seattle. Sitting next to me was a middle-aged woman. We got to talking as we were eating dinner. I said, What do you do? She said, I run a neurologist's office in Vienna, Virginia. I said, Really? You are the one who handles the billing and all that kind of stuff? She said, Yes. I said, Has he joined any HMOs? She laughed and said, He has signed 60 agreements with HMOs. We would have no practice if we did not sign with all these operations. I said, Have you read all the contracts? She said, Are you kidding? How could I possibly read 60 contracts and still do business? I do not know what we have signed, because we had no choice, because all of our patients came in with insurance cards from those plans. If we were not in the plan, we would not get paid. That is a big part of what is going on out there, why it costs more money, because you have people who are having to bill all these companies with different rules. There is no single set of rules. If the doctor makes a decision, if he has made a decision because of the way he thought one plan worked and it is not the way the other plan worked, then he is wrong, and they send it back to him and do not pay him. Of course, the patient keeps getting the bills, because they say, your doctor has not sent these in, or whatever. So there is this endless paper mill that gets caught up. Patients really should not have to worry about that. I had some surgery and I wound up at home receiving all the bills that came from the hospital. At one point they had not paid a bill. I said, Well, this consultant came in and saw me. Why have you not paid him? They said, We have not received any confirmation that you were in the hospital. I said, where did you think I had the surgery, out in the parking lot? Because until the bills came in in the right order, they kept coming back to me. That happens to people all over this country. Doctors spend a lot of time and money filling out forms for their patients. There is no need for that. There is no need for the insurance company to do that. The reason they do that is the longer they hold on to the money, the more they have to give to the stockholders. If they paid their bills right away when they came in the money would be gone, but this way they can invest it and hold on to it and give the profits to their stockholders. This patient bill of rights, in my view, in a democratic society there should not be any question about this passing. It has taken us 5 years to get it to this point, and we have passed it again, again, and again. The insurance companies have killed it either in the Senate or in the House. It is absolutely a crime. The American people ought to demand of thier Members of Congress that they vote for the Dingell-Ganske-Norwood bill. I have to give great credit to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Ganske) and the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Norwood). They are Republicans. But when one is sick, one is not a Republican or a Democrat, just a sick person. They have taken this very professionally. The gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Ganske) is a very good surgeon, and the gentleman from Georgia also has a medical background. They have taken this and said, We do not care what our caucus said, we are going to do what is right. In my view, that is what Members of Congress really should do, and I think all of them ought to do it. If the leadership does not bring it out here pretty quick, we are going to have to make them bring it.

Mr. McDERMOTT. I think what people really need to understand, too, is that in a democracy there should be open debate. Both sides can make their case, and then we put it to a vote and the majority should rule. We have the majority of votes. The leadership is just using all the maneuvers of the parliamentary system to keep it locked up. But the ones they are hurting, not themselves perhaps, maybe they have not had the experience yet, but who they are hurting are the American people; and that is unconscionable, should not happen. We have been too long on the road on this, and I congratulate the gentleman again for putting his time and effort into making this happen.

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, first of all, my hat is off to the gentleman. I was sitting over in my office doing my mail, and I saw these gentlemen out on the floor talking about this issue. I thought, I have to go over and help them and also say some things that I think might be useful I think for people trying to understand this whole issue. The first one is, why do we need a national bill? Why do we not just pass it at the State level? The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Green) sort of alluded to the need for Federal protection because of a law called ERISA. ERISA was a law passed many years ago to protect pensions, and it is now used by many corporations to protect their involvement in health care so that it cannot be touched by insurance commissioners in States. They say the insurance commissioner has to go away. We are covered by the Federal law called ERISA, and you cannot monkey with how we do our health care. So the managed care companies are hiding behind ERISA all over this country, and that is why we need a national law. It is not sufficient to do it just in Texas or in my own State of Washington, where we just passed a law. We have done the best we can, but we are in the same place Texas is: Only about 50 percent of the people are covered by our Patients' Bill of Rights. The second thing that is worrisome about these other bills that we see out here, the Fletcher bill and others, is the possibility that we will have a Federal law that overrides what is done at the State level. Now, if we set a high standard in the State and in comes a Federal law with a low standard, we lose; and that is why we need to have a provision in the bill that does not allow the Federal law that we pass here to override a higher standard that we might have in a State. The State of Washington, the State of New Jersey may decide to do something more than is done by the Federal law, and they should have that right. They should be able to do that. Now, the history of this bill is sort of interesting. The Clintons worked very hard at getting a health care bill to cover all people that could never be taken away. They failed for lots of reasons, but, certainly, in the election of 1994, the Republicans took great pleasure in saying, we saved you from government medicine, which was how they defeated the President's attempt to give everybody universal coverage. Everybody remembers the Harry and Louise ads where this couple is sitting around the dining room table saying, well, can you believe it? The government is going to come in and take over our health care. Well, the people who said they did not want government medicine essentially said at that same point, we are going to give health care coverage to the insurance industry. Anything they want to do is fine, because that is the free enterprise system. Let them squeeze the people and let them squeeze down health care as much as possible so that they can make more money. There is nothing wrong with a managed care company, but it is very simple what they do. They take in premiums and then they pay out as few benefits as possible so they can give all the rest in dividends to their stockholders. Now, there is nothing wrong with that, except that it means that the patients are always being squeezed. The first obvious one that came to the Congress back in 1994 was the fact that women would come to the hospital at 8 o'clock in the morning, deliver a baby, and by 5 o'clock they were in the car on the way home before the baby had ever had a feeding or there was time to observe whether the child had jaundice, or anything. And we called it drive-by babies. We passed a bill through both Houses that said we cannot have a drive-by baby system. We have to let the doctor and the patient decide how this is going to happen. Well, the next thing that happened was women went into the hospital to have a breast removed for cancer and, lo and behold, they go in in the morning at 8 o'clock and out at 5' clock, and they were on their way home. So we were having drive-by mastectomies in this country because, again, the insurance company was trying to squeeze down the number of days they spent in the hospital so that they could save money to give to their stockholders. The patients and the doctors were frustrated by that, so they came up here, and we passed another bill preventing that, saying that the doctor and the patient should decide it. Well, we were going one disease at a time, the disease of the day, the disease du jour. We said, that is not going to work. We have to have a bill that gives patients and doctors the right to make medical decisions for people. It seems so obvious that the person that is receiving the treatment and the person that is giving the treatment should be the ones to decide what is appropriate. But the insurance companies took the view that they could look over your shoulder and decide, that is too much, or they do not need this. I had the experience, because I am a physician; I am a psychiatrist. I had a patient on a ward in Seattle; and they came along and said, this patient has to be discharged. Well, this patient was suicidal. I have to make the decision about whether I am going to put a patient that is suicidal out of the hospital and send them home, risking that they may kill themselves, or fight with an insurance company. So I got on the phone. Here I am talking to some very nice woman in Omaha, Nebraska, from Seattle, and she is telling me that I have to justify to her why that patient can stay in the hospital another day. Now, it is ridiculous. I am a psychiatrist. Surgeons go through that, pediatricians go through that, obstetricians, gynecologists, all kinds of physicians go through this all the time, fighting with insurance companies, managed care companies that are making decisions for patients that they have never seen. When the physician is standing there looking at the patient and they have to get on the phone and explain why to somebody who has never seen them, it shows us how ridiculous it is. It seems like this bill ought to go through immediately.

Mr. McDERMOTT. The whole financial incentive business of saying to the doctors that each month they get to make 80 referrals for consultation with outside consultants, and if they make more than 80 they will reduce the salary, and if they make less they will get more, well, that puts that initial early primary care physician in a very difficult position, because if we have a patient who has diabetes, for instance, we will say, well, I could handle diabetes. I learned about it in medical school. I am not going to refer them to a specialist in diabetes until they get into trouble. So they are taken care of, and then when they get in trouble at that point they are sent in a mess to a specialist. That is not patient care, but that is the kind of thing that physicians are put in if they are trying to stay within these kind of limits, these financial incentives that have been put there. They are under tremendous tension about how many people they refer to specialists when they think, this is something that ultimately could be a real problem. I want to have somebody with more experience in this area to see them now. The same is true in gynecological things or in cardiac things or in psychiatric things. Why would he refer a patient to a psychiatrist if he could just give them some pills and see how they do. They might do that once and see if it works, but at a certain point it is better to send them to somebody better trained who has more experience. For physicians who are caught in that economic vice, that is a terrible way to run the medical system, to say, I am going to hit you in your pocket if you do what you think is best for your patient. If the patient knew what was in the doctor's mind, they would be afraid to go to him.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, it is about time we did what this amendment or this instruction does. I was in the State legislature in 1972 when we passed the Education for All Act in the State of Washington. Along came the Feds about four years later and said we are going to have education for all in this whole country, and we will give you 100 percent of the rules and regulation, and we will give you 5 percent of the money. They have been doing that to States like Washington since 1972. This is 28 years of an unfunded mandate. It is about time for the guys who want to talk about unfunded mandates to get up here and put the money on the bar. I know, I was there. I saw what was done in the State legislature, and then I come up here. Now my colleagues are saying we want to wait until next year. We are going to be waiting until next year to the year 2050. Mr. Speaker, this ought to pass.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from South Carolina for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, apparently I am the only person who is going to come out here and raise a question. Everybody who has watched the military industrial complex develop weapons systems must be amazed that the day after something happens in the Pacific, we run out on the floor in this virtual reality Congress to make a PR event, which will be in the newspapers, as though we have succeeded. Now we must put out $60 billion or $100 billion. If you listen carefully to the words of the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt), this thing has failed over and over again. This is only the second time out of four, in a system where you put the problem out there and you have the answer, and you shoot at it, and two out of four times you have missed. Now, how can anybody be excited about a system like that? If I know what the pitcher is going to throw and I stand here, I am going to hit it. Everybody knows that. That is why they hide the pitcher's signals between the catcher's legs. They do not want people to know at bat what the pitcher is going to throw. But here we have this system, right here and right here, and twice we missed it; and we are out here congratulating. I do not say anything about the employees. Boeing has worked on all kinds of these programs, but we never came out and congratulated them the first time they succeeded. This is simply to build up a momentum in this society for a system which, as the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Traficant) says, is driving the Chinese and the Russians together. To put this system up, we have to tear up the ABM treaty. The Russians have said do not do it; it has kept peace for 50 years. The Chinese have said do not do it. Why are we out here whipping up the public to believe this is a good idea? I am going to vote against the resolution; not against the people, but against the purpose of it.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, throughout time people have resisted scientific advancement. History is replete with the examples of fundamentalist religious leaders issuing scientific decisions based on absolutely no evidence. It is deja vu all over again today with this current administration as they inject politics into the single most promising medical research of the century. The Bush administration is unfortunately not committed to research that would hasten medical discoveries, but rather, to hold science hostage to the Catholic vote. Carl Rove, the President's chief political adviser, is concerned about the views of the Catholic Church because the Catholic voters are seen as a swing vote in the elections. This administration has degraded medical research and the tremendous potential of embryonic stem cell research into an anti-abortion vote. The White House is currently reviewing the matter. In other words, they are looking at the polls. ``A responsible leader,'' and this is a quote, ``is someone who makes decisions based upon principles, not based upon polls or focus groups.'' The New York Times reminds us that President Bush said those words a few days before Election Day. Perhaps he needs to be reminded. Without a microscope, one cannot even see what this debate is all about. The center of the controversy is a microscopic cluster of cells stored in test tubes like this one. It is smaller than the period at the end of a sentence. When Orrin Hatch says he can tell the difference between cells in the test tube and those in a woman's body, then we know that this is a nonsense argument. We should continue this research.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the last speaker certainly makes a good case for wind power. There is an opportunity today for Members to sign the discharge petition to return this country to cost-based power, not power determined by gougers in the energy industry. We have seen on the west coast 400 percent profit for Texas companies selling energy. Now, 400 percent profit is a little bit over the top. Most of us who believe in the free enterprise system think that maybe 10 or 20 percent is not too bad. But they want unlimited ability. Mr. Speaker, the oil dynasty of Cheney and Bush and Evans have selected the people to run the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Whenever you hear anybody say FERC, they are talking about people appointed by the Bush people to control and allow the industry to actually not control the energy industry. Now, you would say it is a west coast problem, that it is always Democrats. New York is doing it now, and they are fearful of what it is going to be without cost-based power. It is time to sign the discharge petition.

Mr. McDERMOTT

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Chairman, this is not just a California problem. I repeat, it is not just a California problem. We had the Deputy Secretary of Energy before the Committee on the Budget today, and he said in answer to a direct question, this is not only California, it affects the State of Washington. Mr. Chairman, we are facing 150 percent increases under BPA. We face the loss of 102,000 jobs in Washington State. Electricity that cost $23 a megawatt last year is between $200 and $300 this year. Some of you are feeling fat and sassy in the Midwest or East and saying it is just the Californians arguing about a big problem. The rest of the Nation is also going to get it because there is a grid that connects the whole energy system in the United States. What is happening to us in Washington State, we are only a thousand miles from California, if my colleagues are within a thousand miles, my colleagues ought to be voting for this amendment.