Christopher Murphy

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I applaud my colleague Senator Mikulski for her great work, in spite of the result today. Congratulating the UConn Huskies I am here on the floor, however, to congratulate my UConn Huskies for a double national championship. It has only been done once before in the history of college basketball--the men winning a national championship and the women winning a national championship in the same year--and the last time it was us too, in 2004 and now in 2014. So, very briefly, I wish to add my congratulations to those offered by Senator Blumenthal. Our new coach, Kevin Ollie, when he took the job, went on TV and said that despite some of the tough times surrounding the UConn program, his intent was for UConn basketball to take the stairs and not the elevator. He said elevators were for cowards, and they were going to walk one step at a time towards a national championship. Given the fact our long-time Hall of Fame coach had just left, we had sanctions which didn't allow our team to play for a year in the postseason. People thought it just wasn't possible that UConn was ever going to be able to return to the greatness we have seen over the last 20 years. But in Coach Ollie's first tournament, he brought his team to a victory led, of course, by our great point guard Shabazz Napier-- another Connecticut first and second. There are only two players who were national champions in the men's tournament who scored 125 points, had 25 assists and 25 rebounds. Shabazz Napier is the second because Kemba Walker was the first in UConn's last national championship. The women, of course, are even more impressive in what they have done because they managed to win their national championship this year by going undefeated and beating another undefeated team in the national championship game. Of course, that has become kind of old hat for the UConn women. This is the third time they have gone undefeated in the past 6 years, and it is their fourth title in 6 years--Geno Auriemma's ninth title overall, now eclipsing the great Pat Summitt. Watching the game last night, we saw Coach Auriemma in an uncommon display of emotion at the end of the game. He is a very emotional guy, but he very rarely breaks down in tears--which he did, talking about a couple of his seniors, Stefanie Dolson and also Bria Hartley. He has a love for those players. We saw Kevin Ollie's love for his players, especially the guys who stuck it out who could have transferred to other programs but decided to stay with him and stay with the program. What Geno said after the game is he is flattered: ``I'm flattered and grateful, and all the things that have come with this kind of accomplishment . . .'' But he also said: ``I'm more proud of the legacy that exists and what Connecticut basketball is as opposed to the number of championships. When we watch these championship games that now add up for both the men and the women, we see throughout the stands former players by the dozens--maybe even by the hundreds--who come back because of the legacy that has been created in 20 years of nine national championships for the women and four national championships for the men. Even though, as Kevin Ollie said, UConn got there the hard way. We don't have the 100-year legacy of basketball such as Kansas or Kentucky has. We have built this over the past couple of decades. Just as Kevin Ollie has done over the last 2 years, UConn over the course of the last the 2 decades, in registering 13 national championships, has always taken the stairs rather than the elevator. Congratulations, as a diehard Husky fan, to our twin national championship teams. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you, Mr. President, and I thank the Senator from New York for bringing us all together this evening to talk about the really vital economic importance of the Northeast corridor to States such as Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New York. This is a pivotal moment for the Northeast corridor. We have a region that is growing with respect to the number of people who are using the rail but an infrastructure that is dramatically aging. It is important to remember the connection between investment in rail and the emergence of this Nation's economic greatness. The rail line that means the most to us in Connecticut was chartered in 1844. It was the New York and New Haven Railroad, and it was initially built to connect New York to Boston, going through New Haven and going through Connecticut. Later on, it had a spur going through Long Island and then a spur connecting down to Providence. It was built at a time of massive rail expansion all across the country. In the last 25 years of the 1800s, where a lot of this expansion happened after the initial investment in places such as New York and Connecticut and Boston, the expansion of rail led to a tenfold increase in economic output for this Nation. It allowed for enormous social and economic mobility because if you didn't like the circumstances where you were today, tomorrow you could be halfway across the country because of a train. It allowed for the gradual evaporation of a lot of the divisions that were created because of the Civil War. As people got to know other parts of the country and could move more freely back and forth, they began to understand what this Nation was really about. One historian, John Hankey, has noted that the railroads essentially transitioned our lexicology about the United States from referring to ``these United States'' to ``this United States.'' It is a small difference, but it suggests the way in which the rail lines allowed for this country to connect. Nowhere has this expansion of rail mattered more than in the Northeast corridor. We have the highest concentration of population, the highest concentration of commerce, the highest concentration of ports of shipping, and the highest concentration of rail lines. Not only do we have Amtrak running up and down the spine of the Northeast corridor, we have 10 commuter railroads, including Metro North, a line Mr. Blumenthal--the Presiding Officer--and I are very proud of. We have 260 million passengers today who are using the Northeast corridor. That number is expected to grow in 2030 to 412 million. Just think about that. We are talking about a time period of only 16 years. We are going to go from 260 million passengers today to 412 million passengers in 2030. If you ride a train from Bridgeport to Stanford or from Stanford to Grand Central on any given Monday morning or any given Thursday afternoon, you are going to fail to understand how that line is going to be able to absorb an increase from 260 million passengers to 412 million passengers. We simply don't have the capacity today to be able to absorb that increase. We have 1,000 bridges and tunnels along the Northeast corridor that are badly in need of repair. Some of them are 100 years old. The estimates are that over the next 20 years we have to spend $50 billion along the Northeast corridor simply to maintain a state of good repair. I wish this were a cheaper exercise, but it is not. In Connecticut alone, we have to replace a bridge in Cos Cob that is going to cost $830 million. The Norwalk Bridge has to be rehabbed for $250 million. The Saugatuck River Bridge in Westport has to be rehabbed as well for $300 million. The Devon Bridge replacement project is going to be $750 million. We have to upgrade communication and signals all along the New Haven Line; that is $400 million. We have an old aging catenary--the electric lines above the supply power to the trains--that is going to be $600 million as well. In Connecticut it is our lifeblood, meaning we are nothing if not for the economic power that is driven by those trains. About a decade ago an economic report came out on Connecticut that really shook the State to its core. It talked about the great economic potential Connecticut has as we sit right between the enormous job-creating hubs of New York City and Boston. But it warned us that if we don't get serious about unclogging the arteries out of Connecticut into Connecticut, that, in the words of the report, ``Connecticut risks becoming an economic cul- de-sac.'' That is a pretty scary premise, the idea that we could be so close to all of this economic activity, but simply because people cannot get to Connecticut or get out of Connecticut because of these aging rail lines, we are going to ultimately be left behind. So what we are really here to talk about is just a principle of basic fairness. The Northeast corridor makes money. It is the only section of rail in the Nation that does make money simply because of volume and because of efficient management. The profit equals about $300 million a year. We are not asking for the Northeast corridor to get any more than we are owed; we simply want that $300 million, as Amtrak has proposed, to be reinvested in the line. From the Cos Cob Bridge to the Sagatuck River Bridge, we are going to have to make these upgrades at some point. If we don't, ultimately they are going to fall down. We have seen not only in the Northeast corridor but across the country the consequences of allowing our infrastructure to atrophy to the point of crisis and collapse. So why don't we make those investments today? Why don't we make those investments at a moment when people need to go to work, when the repairs are as cost- efficient as they are going to get, and when the line itself in the Northeast is generating $300 million extra a year that right now is going to other parts of the country? I agree with Senator Schumer. We support a national Amtrak. We strongly support a robust inner-city connection linking major cities, major urban areas with rail all across the country. Just in our small region, we have half of the trips of the entire country. So we think it is not too much to ask that to the extent we are profitable, we get to reinvest that money into an infrastructure that is older than any other piece of infrastructure in the entire country. I would say this: It is not just about fairness for the States that make up the Northeast corridor. The economic power of the Northeast spreads itself out all across the country. The corporations that are located in Manhattan and Stanford and Newark employ people in Nebraska and in California, in South Dakota and Texas. So our pitch to our colleagues outside of the Northeast is not just that it seems to be the right and fair thing to do for all of this profit that is being made through the ticket fares passengers in the Northeast are paying to stay in the Northeast, but the benefit that comes from a well-constructed, efficiently run Northeast corridor accrues to the entire country. I am really pleased Senator Schumer brought us down to the floor today to talk about how important reinvesting this $300 million is to the Northeast corridor. In my State, with Metro North generating literally hundreds of millions of dollars in economic benefit to our section of the country, if we don't recapture this income, if we aren't able to make these repairs that I listed, then, as that economic report suggests, we really do risk our State of Connecticut ultimately becoming an economic cul-de-sac. With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you very much, Mr. President. Yesterday, the administration announced that 7.1 million people had signed up for private health care all across the country in exchanges that range from the national exchange down to the State-based exchanges. Many of those who signed up are women who are enjoying new benefits and new protections under the health care law. So I wanted to come down to the floor, as Senator Kaine did earlier today, as Senator Boxer will in a few moments, to talk about why women all across this country have a completely different health care experience today under the Affordable Care Act and why they have no interest in going back to the days before the Affordable Care Act, and to talk also about what it means to have 7 million people all across this country who now have access to private health care insurance who did not have it before. The story for women all across this country, as Senator Boxer will talk about in far more articulate terms than I can, is pretty stunning. Mr. President, 8.7 million women will gain maternity coverage in 2014; 8.7 million women did not have maternity coverage either because they did not have coverage to begin with or because they had a plan that did not provide maternity coverage. The health care law says if you buy insurance, we are going to expect that insurance has just a basic, commonsense level of benefits, and I think every American would agree with the fact that insurance for a woman should probably cover what for many women will be the most expensive intersection with the health care system they have in their life: And that is when they get pregnant. For families across the country, getting pregnant can bankrupt a family if they do not have maternity coverage. That changes with the Affordable Care Act. Twenty seven million women can receive lifesaving preventive care without copays all across this country. A copay for many people is just $5 or $10. But for some cancer screenings, it can be a significant amount of money, running more than $100. For low-income women, who are the primary breadwinner for their family, who are perhaps only making about $25,000 a year, that is a barrier for them in seeking this basic preventive care, seeking care that could catch a cancer when it can be treated before it becomes a killer. Because of the Affordable Care Act, 27 million women now can receive lifesaving preventive care. But maybe the most important statistic for women is this one: zero. Zero women can be charged more just for being a woman. The reality was, as Senator Boxer will talk about, if you were a woman in this country, you were sometimes paying 50 percent more simply because insurance companies believed in many cases that being a woman constituted a preexisting condition. So we have 7.1 million people who are now on these private exchanges. Many of them are women who are already enjoying the benefits of the Affordable Care Act but now are going to be able to get lifesaving treatment because of the ACA. There were a lot of people who said this day was not going to happen. There were a lot of naysayers out there who said there was no way we were ever going to be able to hit the 7 million mark. It is kind of interesting to look back now on all of the folks who predicted catastrophe for the Affordable Care Act who have been proven wrong. Before I yield the floor for Senator Boxer, I want to go through a couple of these statements. A lot of people in the House of Representatives have spent the majority of the last several years trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act. I was a Member of that body, and I probably was down on the floor of the House of Representatives for about 40 different votes to repeal all or part of the Affordable Care Act. I think we are now at about 50 or 51 votes. But when the Web site ran into some troubles in the beginning of the year, they all went down to the floor and went on the cable news networks and said this was an example of how bad this law is and there is no way to fix the law, there is no way to fix the Web site. Representative Bill Johnson of Ohio said this: This may be the most stunning example of overpromising and under delivering in recent U.S. history. Based on my review, the problems with the Healthcare.gov website are catastrophic. That is a bit of hyperbole to suggest that the problems with the Web site were the most stunning example ever in recent U.S. history of overpromising and underdelivering. But, of course, the Web site problems were fixed. They were fixed within a few months such that we have actually gone straight through the CBO's estimate--after the Web site troubles--of 6 million people enrolling and we now have 7 million people enrolling. But as early as this month, Republicans and mass media sources were telling us there was no way we were going to hit 7 million or 6 million. An Associated Press article said: . . . the White House needs something close to a miracle to meet its goal of enrolling 6 million people by the end of this month. With open enrollment ending March 31, that means to meet the goal, another 1.8 million people would have to sign up during the month. . . . That's way above the daily averages for January and February. . . . The math seems to be going against the administration. Well, what the Associated Press did not get is that there is desperation out on the streets. People who have not had insurance for years, if not decades, well, they might have taken their time to price out the right plan for themselves. Some of them might have simply waited until the last minute. But the reality is, the demand there is, frankly, almost insatiable, such that the Web site actually came down for a portion of time on the 31st because so many people were going to it. The number eventually eclipsed even the CBO's rosiest estimate of enrollment. Bill Kristol said this: If the exchanges are permitted to go into effect . . . there will be error, fraud, inefficiency, arbitrariness, and privacy violations aplenty. . . . Just as economic shortages were endemic to Soviet central planning, the coming Obamacare train wreck is endemic to big government liberalism. Well, the exchanges are working pretty well, such that we broke through the 7 million barrier. In my State of Connecticut, which has run a really good exchange, we are coming close to doubling our expected enrollment. Senator Boxer will talk about her numbers in California. But when you actually work to implement the health care law, rather than work to undermine it, as several States are, the exchanges work very well. So then they turned and said: Well, yes, lots of people are signing up, and, yes, the exchanges seem to be working, but the wrong people are signing up. So one conservative scholar said: They have thrown the entire health-care system into unprecedented chaos for a population-- The uninsured-- that is, it seems, staying as far away from it as possible. Little has been fixed. . . . Well, Kentucky, just in the first 6 months of implementation, has reduced its uninsured population by 40 percent. The RAND Corporation said that 9 million Americans who had no health insurance now have health insurance. The reality is that people without insurance are signing up for the new health care law. Why? Because they can afford it and they desperately need it. The fact is Republicans are going to continue to attack this law, and they are going to continue to change their arguments, they are going to continue to be shifting in the messages they send to the American people because every time they tell us that something is wrong, they are wrong. Now they have said--do you know what--that 7 million figure, well, that just cannot be right. They are cooking the books. That cannot be right. There has to be something wrong with the methodology. Well, it is not just the Obama administration that says it is 7 million; it is independent analysts who say it is 7 million. And guess what. By the end of the year it could be 8 million once people who have had life- changing events sign up for care, once we incorporate all the State numbers. Nobody is cooking the books. The uninsured are not staying away. The exchanges are not catastrophic. The Web site is not unfixable. All of these things have been proven untrue. Yet we still have people come down to the floor and tell us why this thing cannot work. I listened to one of my colleagues come down to the floor earlier today and tell a story about a family in Wyoming. I do not know the specifics of the family there. But let's talk about families in a State like Wyoming that is on a Federal exchange--the real story of the options that are out there for families out there. I think my friend from Wyoming was talking about a family of five. Again, I cannot know all of the specifics of that family. But let's say that family of five in Carbon County, WY, was making $100,000 a year-- which would be about twice the average salary in that State and across the country. Well, that family of five making $100,000 a year would qualify for a $677 per month tax credit. A bronze plan would be about $550 to $750 per month. That is about 40 percent cheaper than a lot of private plans that may be available today. Now let's say that family is actually making the median income in Wyoming, which is around $56,000. Well, if you are making $56,000, and you are a family of five in Wyoming, all your kids will qualify for Medicaid, which is virtually free, and the parents would qualify for a tax credit of $528 per month. A bronze plan could be as cheap as $171 per month. That is the reality. That is affordable for a family of five making the median income. That is affordable. I understand people are having stories that do not match up with the 7 million people who have signed up for these plans over the past several months. I get that there is bad news out there. But there is a lot of good news out there as well. There are a lot of people who could not afford to buy a health insurance plan, who now can finally afford health care. That is why Senator Boxer and myself and Senator Stabenow and Senator Whitehouse and so many others have been coming down to the floor to talk about the fact that the Affordable Care Act is working. And for all of the naysayers, for all of the people who have predicted that this law could not work, well, the example has been set: 7 million people and counting signed up for health care exchanges all across this country--never mind all of the people who have gotten access to Medicaid, never mind all the people who have been able to stay on their parents' plan. We do not know what the overall number right now will be of people who have qualified for health care under the exchanges, Medicaid, and the provisions allowing people to stay on their plans. But this number could be 25 million by the time the year is out. So I am thrilled to see the success of the Affordable Care Act and the number from yesterday. I am thrilled to see the life-changing benefits for women all across the country. I am pleased to be joined here on the floor by my colleague, Senator Boxer. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

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

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, George Holland was a pretty exceptional kid. When he was 14 years old, he went through something that I do not think any of us can even imagine what it is like to go through. His parents got into a heated argument. They were estranged at the time. It became so violent that it culminated in his mother fatally stabbing his father. He was 14 years old, and he lost his dad and then saw his mother get sent away to prison. He then went to live with his aunt. His aunt attests to the fact that even in those dark days, he was full of a positive attitude. He refused to dwell on the murder, to use it as a crutch. He excelled. His friends said his smile was infectious. He was always hugging everybody. He played center on the high school football team in Providence, RI, which is where he is from. His coach says that he was a great team player, he was a leader, and he was always looking to take the younger kids under his wing. His coach said, ``He was just a great kid.'' Well, 3 years after his mother killed his father, George Holland died as well. A gunman targeted his house on February 4 of this year--a house he was visiting. He was with his girlfriend and her family when someone shot into the house around 9 p.m. A bullet went through the kitchen window and struck George, who collapsed and later died at Rhode Island Hospital. He was 17 years old. Steve Finkbeiner and his wife Constance were beloved in their town of LaPlace, LA. They owned a feedstore that was at the end of a quiet road. They had owned it for 28 years. The community all looked upon the Finkbeiners as family. Everybody had some reason to go into that feedstore every now and again. Constance and Steve treated their customers as if they were members of their own immediate family. One friend said exactly that: They were like family. They were just like family. Others remembered Steve as a hard-working man and a community member. It was just after 2:30 p.m. on February 25--just a few weeks ago-- when deputies received a call from the feed and supply store. A woman said she and her husband had just been shot during an armed robbery. Constance survived the attack but was critically injured. Her husband Steve died. What happened was two robbers initially went into the store inquiring about shots for a pet. They left briefly only to return to rob the place and shoot the couple who owned the store. Ruthanne Lodato lived just over the border in Alexandria, VA. She was a music teacher, 59 years old. She was as involved as one can be in the community. She was a loving wife to her husband and the mother of three daughters. She was planning her class's 40th reunion. She was remembered fondly as a music teacher who would hold up her hand to cue the group to sing her school's alma mater. She was the glue that held her family and friends together. That is how she was described. There were 300 mourners at her funeral. On February 6 of this year-- again, just over a month ago--she was shot after she opened the door to her suburban home for what was described as a balding, bearded man in a tan jacket, who shot her dead. Ricky Roberts was a very exceptional guy. He lived out in Sonora, CA. He was a demolition derby driver, and he used his garage to construct demolition derby cars. That is what he loved to do. He loved it so much that when he got married to his wife Teddi, they were married on top of a derby car, probably one that he had made, in July of 1990. They were married on top one of his derby cars at the town's Mother Lode Fairgrounds. What he also loved was volunteering for his community. Ricky was a longtime Sonora police volunteer and a member of the Christian Heights Church. He volunteered hours and hours every week as one of the citizen police officers, and he was very involved with the Police Explorers, helping to train and organize some of the kids who were involved in the Police Explorers Program. He was a very positive person. His mom said that he made people feel good about themselves and that he had a great rapport with people. He had a great sense of humor and he had the ability to laugh at himself. On February 16 of this year, Ricky was found at 11 a.m. bleeding in his garage--the garage where he built demolition derby cars--from an apparent gunshot. He was pronounced dead at the scene. He was the first homicide victim in Sonora, CA, in nearly 13 years. The numbers are pretty stunning: 31,000 people every year die from gun violence; 2,600 people die every month, and 86 people die every day. There is no other country in the industrialized world that has numbers that come anywhere close to approximating these catastrophic totals. What I have tried to do is come down to the floor every week to tell the story of the voices of these victims to let my friends know that these are real people with real families who are getting killed at a rate of 86 per day all across the country. We can talk about these statistics, but apparently the statistics haven't moved Congress and the Senate to action. Maybe the voices of those 86 people a day will-- even after they leave this place. The carnage and the wreckage that is left behind is nearly incalculable. Surveys have been done of what it is like to live in cities with a high incidence of gun violence. They show that the rates of PTSD among the kids who have to live every day with the fear of being shot or with the knowledge that they are pretty sure that in that year a friend, a neighbor or a relative will be killed. They rival the rates of PTSD of our returning soldiers. These cities are like war zones. The tragedy of all of this is that we are not powerless to do something about it. We have the ability to change laws, to modify laws, in order to reduce the rates of gun violence all across this country. I close by drawing attention to the evidence. Johns Hopkins recently did a new study of a Missouri law that for years had required background checks before people bought guns and licenses for all handgun owners. In 2007, Missouri repealed that law. Johns Hopkins, one of the best research universities in the country, did an exhaustive study of rates of gun violence before that law was passed and the rates of gun violence afterwards. They controlled for every factor other than this law that was repealed. They looked at whether rates of gun violence were increasing in only certain counties. They compared it to rates of gun violence in nearby States, and they looked at all of the other factors that could go into an explanation other than the repeal of the law when trying to figure out why rates of gun violence were increasing. What they found was very simple. They found that even when we control for all of the other factors, the repeal of the background checks law in Missouri led to a 23-percent spike in firearm homicide rates. That is an additional 55 to 63 murders every year from 2008 to 2012. There were 60 additional people killed in one State alone because that State had chosen to allow criminals to own guns. When we repeal a background check law, we essentially are allowing criminals to go into places where guns are sold, purchase them, and then either use them themselves or sell them in the black market to people who will do the kind of destruction that leads to 31,000 people dying every year. My colleagues, we have the ability to change this situation. I try to make this point every time I come to the floor to talk about the voices of victims. I understand that we are not going to bring these numbers to zero by passing a commonsense background checks bill or by investing more money into our mental health system or by trying to do something, even if it is in a nonlegislative way, to address the culture of violence in our society. There is always going to be gun violence. We can do something. We can lower these numbers. We can lessen the damage, the trauma, and the carnage all across our country, all across the States that we represent. Think about a kid like George Holland, who had overcome so much, the death of one of his parents and the imprisonment of the other, to become an immensely compassionate 17-year-old. Who knew. Who knows what he was going to accomplish. We will never get to understand the good that George Holland could have done in this world because, at age 17 on February 4 of this year, he was gunned down in his girlfriend's home. Hopefully, whether it is the data or the voices of victims, the Senate will figure out that we can do something to change that reality. I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I thank Senator Whitehouse, who is an extraordinary leader on the issue of trying to control costs and improving quality. Senator Stabenow and Senator Boxer have been down here talking about the importance of the Affordable Care Act long before I got to this body, and I thank them for being with us as well. Our message is pretty simple. Our message is that the Affordable Care Act is working. We know that because just yesterday we had record numbers of people who went onto the Web site to try to sign up for coverage. They placed calls into the call centers. We had 1.2 million people who went on the Web site yesterday looking for coverage. About 390,000 people placed a call. We are seeing extraordinary levels of signups day after day. It looks as though we are on pace to achieve the goal to help those 6 million individuals sign up. That is not surprising because folks have been crying out in desperation for a better way for years and years. People such as one constituent of mine, Sean Hannon, from Weston, CT--I talked about him earlier on the floor today. He had a plan for him and his family that cost about $1,400 a month. Under the Affordable Care Act and the Connecticut Exchange, he is now paying $309. He wrote a really wonderful letter talking about what that means to him and his family, and he ended with this. He said: We are sharing all of this personal information-- His family is sharing this personal information-- because there is an aggressive campaign underway to dismantle this valuable program. The misinformation being put out there is skewing public opinion and this must not happen. Part of the reason why we have decided to come to the floor week after week is because Republicans who are spreading mythology about this law not working for people are chilling interest all across the country in signing up. Part of the reason why we are here on the floor is because there are Governors and State legislatures all around the country that are working to undermine the law rather than to implement the law. But in States such as California and Connecticut, that are actually working to make the law work, we are seeing record numbers of people sign up, and we are seeing story after story such as the Hannons. In Connecticut, we had a goal of signing up about 100,000 to 120,000 people between Medicaid and the health care exchanges. Right now we have 170,000 people signed up. I don't know what our final number will be, but I imagine it will likely be double, if not more, of what our original estimate was. Why? Because we are actually going out and making it easy, simple for people to sign up. When we go out and make it easy for people to get affordable insurance, guess what. They want it. Now that we are celebrating the 4-year mark of this law's being signed by President Obama, it is worthwhile to talk for a second about what the reality was before the law was passed and what the reality of the law is today because that explains why we are seeing this overflow of interest in this final week of signup. Before the passage of this law, there were 3.4 million seniors who were Medicare Part D enrollees--that is the prescription drug benefit-- who were falling into the doughnut hole. There was about 15 percent of those using drugs in that doughnut hole who were skipping or stopping medications when they reached that gap in coverage. The average senior could be paying out as much as $160 in cost-sharing for certain procedures such as colorectal cancer screenings, paying lots and lots of money in preventive health care copays that had effectively stopped a lot of seniors from getting that wellness coverage they so badly needed. So what has happened after the passage of the law? There are 7.9 million seniors who are now in the doughnut hole and saving, on average, about $1,200 in drug costs. That is $9.9 billion being saved by seniors because of the Affordable Care Act. Thirty-seven million seniors all across the country have taken advantage of the free preventive care, getting at least one free preventive service now that the law is in effect. Let's look at the other end of the age spectrum. Before this law was passed, 31.4 percent of young adults between ages 19 and 25 lacked coverage. That was nearly double the national rate. We are seeing young people flock to sign up for these health care exchanges, but even before that, about 3 million young adults all across the country had gained coverage because the health care law allows them to stay on their parents' coverage until age 26. Before the law, women often paid 50 percent more in premiums because of gender rating--the idea that one could be charged more as a woman simply because she is a woman. Put another way, being female was listed by many insurance companies as a preexisting condition. After the law, gender rating was banned, and women are on equity with men in terms of the rates they pay. For middle-class families that have been struggling with health care costs because of a crippling illness, they now never have to worry about losing coverage simply because someone gets sick or not being able to afford coverage in the first place because of a preexisting condition. A world in which 60 percent of all personal bankruptcies were reported to be related to medical costs will be history in this country. Four years after the passage of the law, that is the reality of what life was like before: Seniors paying thousands of dollars more in prescription drug costs, young adults unable to get coverage, women paying more for health care simply because they are women. The new reality is much different. I imagine that is also why a new poll out this week tells us that 60 percent of Americans want to keep the Affordable Care Act in place. They may entertain some minor changes to the law, but less than 20 percent of Americans want to see this law repealed. There is a total incongruity between what people out there believe, what they are experiencing, and what we are hearing as the reality from our Republican colleagues. That is why we are going to come down to the floor week after week and talk about how the Affordable Care Act is working for millions of Americans. Finally, I wish to share one story because Republicans are very good at coming down and telling stories about people who have disagreements with the law. We are beginning to see an overflow of stories and anecdotes from people whose lives are being transformed. Anne Masterson, from Norwich, CT, writes this: Because of a minor preexisting condition, I was unable to get health insurance as an individual. I could get it through my business, my own law practice. I've always opted for good coverage, but I paid dearly for it. My premiums this year increased $965 a month--equivalent to a second mortgage payment. Let's just break that down. What she is saying is she could get coverage through her business, but she couldn't get coverage as an individual, and that was the real story for decades when it came to individuals who had a preexisting condition. For many of them, it wasn't a matter of just having to pay more for health care; they couldn't get insurance at all because of a preexisting condition, and that was the real world for Anne Masterson. She further goes on to say this: Part of my practice is representing children and the elderly in local probate courts. While not very lucrative, it's one of the most professionally satisfying things I do. I feel like I make a difference. However, with the increased premiums, I don't know how I could continue to pay for my health insurance. Let's break that down for a second. Think of all the people all across this country who are stuck in a job simply because they have to get health care for them and their family. Think of all of the innovation that is being stymied because people can't go out and start a business because it would involve taking the risk of going for a period of time without health care. Anne was contemplating giving up work she loved, work she was good at, representing children and the elderly--maybe one of the most important jobs we have in our legal system--because she couldn't afford to pay the premiums on that salary. She finishes by saying: Under the Affordable Care Act silver plan, I'll have the exact same Anthem policy I have now--and pay nearly $600 less per month. Not only will I have the peace of mind of having good health insurance, but I'll also be able to continue representing our most vulnerable citizens. We should step back and try to think about what our job really is here. We get consumed with studies and numbers and data, but really our job is to protect the security of this country and to try to increase the quality of life for the people we represent. It is hard to sometimes measure whether we are doing a good job at increasing the quality of life, but it is really about trying to make sure the people we represent are happy. Happiness comes in all sorts of different ways, but happiness had been stolen from millions of families across the country because every morning they would wake up thinking about how sick they were or how sick their child was or how sick their husband or wife was and their inability to pay for it. We hear those words ``peace of mind'' come up over and over when people talk about the Affordable Care Act. Yes, they are getting better coverage. Yes, they are healthier, but they just feel better about their existence in this world because they no longer have to worry about being part of the 60 percent of bankruptcies caused by medical debt. They no longer have to worry whether their child is going to have to have their life dictated by the terms of their illness. We can talk about the 5 million people who have signed up in exchanges all across the country or the fact that, as Senator Whitehouse says, the Federal Government is slated to save $1.2 trillion as compared to previous estimates on health care costs. We can talk about the $9 billion that seniors are saving because of the Affordable Care Act when it comes to prescription drug costs. But if we really want to talk about the transformation in the Affordable Care Act, if we really want to read into all of these letters we are getting in increasing volumes, it is about the fact that people don't have to wake up every day worrying about health care, worrying about getting sick, worrying about how they are going to pay for an illness. Maybe, in the end, when this law is fully implemented and ultimately Republicans come to this floor and defend it, just as they do Medicare, that will be the true measure of how the Affordable Care Act works. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Yesterday, healthcare.gov saw about 1.2 million visits to the site. The call centers, which are busy enrolling people at a pace that is now exceeding 50,000 to 100,000 people a day, saw 390,000 phone calls. A new poll just came out suggesting that a full 60 percent of Americans want the Affordable Care Act to stay in place, and if they want changes, they only want minor changes. Only 11 percent of people in this poll said they want to repeal and replace the law, and only 18 percent said they wanted to repeal it completely. It is not rocket science to figure out why we have hundreds of thousands of people lining up as we approach the deadline for enrollment seeking to get care. It is not rocket science why there are over 1 million people only yesterday alone going to the Web site trying to find out what their options are. The simple fact is that even today, as we stand on the brink of the enrollment deadline, there are still millions of Americans who remain on the outside of the best health care system in the world. There are still millions of families who are waking up today, as they have week after week, year after year, wondering how they are going to pay the medical bills that are piling up for a sick father and worrying what would happen if their child were diagnosed with a disease, having no way to pay for it. That is a reality still today for millions of families. Many of them, frankly, have stayed away from the Web site because of the misinformation that has been spread by opponents of the health care law. Now as we are coming to the enrollment deadline, we are seeing a surge of interest, much of it from families who are desperate to finally get access to health care insurance that will allow them to avoid the fate of millions of other Americans who have fallen into bankruptcy, have lost their homes, have lost their cars, and who have lost their savings simply because of a mistimed illness. I was pleased today to see the President make a very simple announcement. What he said is that people who are in line trying to apply for health care insurance when the deadline hits on Monday are going to get a shot to complete their application. For very complex cases, for instance, women who are in a situation of extreme domestic violence who don't want to apply jointly and have to apply themselves, they are going to be able to have a little extra time as well. For most of the people I represent, that is just common sense. If someone is desperately in need of health care and if they have gone months, years, and maybe even decades without health care and they have this chance--a chance that will expire Monday this year--then if they are in line trying to fill out an application, they should be able to get through that application even if the midnight clock hits. I heard my friend from Wyoming speak on the floor earlier today and criticize this announcement from the President. I thought it was worthwhile to come to the floor and make it clear that if someone is criticizing a simple decision to allow people a little bit of extra time, they are essentially rooting for people to stay outside of the ranks of those who are insured. They are essentially guaranteeing that people who could get insurance, because they have the ability now over the course of the next few days to sign up, aren't going to be able to get it. Of course, I think people understand this concept because there is plenty of precedent. When folks rush home from work late on election day to go vote, they often see very long lines outside of the polling place. But we don't shut down the polls at 8 o'clock when there is a line outside. We allow people who are in line to vote because they worked hard to get there, to get in line. They deserve a chance to express their choice in an election. That is essentially what the President has announced today, that individuals who are in line on March 31 are going to get a chance to sign up, because why on Earth would we deny people the ability to get insurance? I get it that there are people who oppose this law, who want it repealed, and many people of good faith who want it replaced with something else. But the reality of here and now is that there are millions of people who are going onto the Web site every day. There are hundreds of thousands of people who are calling, and they deserve a chance to get health care insurance, to be able to treat their loved ones for the diseases that they have today or may incur. I would note that there is precedence to this. When President Bush was managing the enrollment process for Medicare Part D, he did, in fact, the same thing. He extended the enrollment deadline for people who were in process and for complex cases. People who were trying to sign up for Medicare Part D at the enrollment deadline received extra time, and there were plenty of Republicans who supported that effort. I come to the floor today to make it clear that for a lot of folks it makes sense that if people are so desperate for health care and they are in the process of filling out these applications, they should get the chance to finish the job. I am continuing to receive letters and emails from people who have gone through the process and whose lives have been transformed. I simply want to make sure that on Monday, if people are in the process of signing up, they don't get foreclosed from the possibility of experiencing a reality such as one of my constituents, Sean Hannon, from Weston, CT. I will finish by reading a letter he sent to our office. Speaking for himself and his wife he said: As working freelancers, my wife and I are not covered by company health plans and we have had to buy private health insurance out of pocket. It has been our largest financial burden. Last year, our monthly premium for Golden Rule was $1,216. That came to $14,592 annually. This plan also came with a huge deductible that needed to be met completely before any payout. This year, Golden Rule increased our premium to $1,476 a month, or $17,712 annually. On February 1, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, we were able to switch from Golden Rule to Connecticare on the CT Exchange. It wasn't easy to go through enrollment, but we had great assistance from a woman at the enrollment center in New Haven, and she stuck with us until we got it right. Let me tell you what the new healthcare plan has done for us . . . First and foremost, we lowered our monthly premium of $1,475 to $309. Let me spell that out so you know it wasn't a typo: three hundred and nine dollars. That is a savings of nearly 80%! So now I am sure you are thinking that we must have made a huge sacrifice in quality of care or services. Just the opposite. We have lost none of the benefits we previously had. We were able to keep all of our doctors, our primary GP and specialists. They all accept the insurance. While we still have a high deductible, unlike the previous plan that didn't pay anything until the deductible was met, we now have co-pays for doctor visits of $30, and procedures such as CAT scans and MRIs are $75 for each visit, and the remainder of the expense is covered COMPLETELY, even before the deductible is met. And we have the peace of mind of not being dropped or penalized for pre-existing conditions. They finish by saying: Despite the messed up rollout and the attendant growing pains of a massive program, ObamaCare has been a Godsend, and we are overwhelmed and ecstatic over the dramatic difference this has made in our family budget. We are sharing all of this personal information here because there is an aggressive campaign underway to dismantle this valuable program. The misinformation being put out there is skewing public opinion and this must not happen. . . . This treasure is ours to lose if we do not speak up now. Yesterday 1.2 million people went to the Web site and 400,000 people called in to seek help. I imagine those numbers will continue to escalate as we move through the weekend. They deserve to be able to get to a reality that Sean Hannon and his family are experiencing now. They deserve to have a chance at paying lower premiums, 80 percent savings, for some individuals, to finally get insured for the diseases, illnesses, and conditions that have plagued these families for years. I applaud the President for allowing these families the ability to complete their applications, and I hope that many of them get to see the same final reality that the Hannons of Weston, CT, have. I yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I rise today to support the Ukraine assistance package, which will be on the floor for a vote later this evening. I want to thank the leadership of Senator Menendez and all the great work Senator Corker has put into this bill. I was proud to help put it together, along with Senators Johnson, McCain, and many others who were part of our debate in the Foreign Relations Committee. I come to the floor, as I am sure others have and will over the course of this afternoon, to talk about the vital importance of a big bipartisan vote in favor of this legislation this evening. Having just come from Ukraine--I was there this last weekend with a number of my colleagues, and it was my second trip to Kiev in the last 3 months--I can tell you they are awaiting a very strong signal of support from the U.S. Congress that will send a message we are going to stand together with our Ukrainian brothers and sisters as they engage in this epic battle for their independence, for their freedom, and for their sovereignty. I won't belabor the underlying details of the bill, but the three components of the legislation are all equally important to Ukraine. We heard support for all three of these pieces while we were there over this last weekend. First and foremost, clearly, we have to deliver on our promise of economic aid. There is $1 billion of loan guarantees in this bill, and it is contingent upon the signing of a new agreement with the IMF, but it will also leverage about $15 billion in funds from Europe. This is important because even before this crisis precipitated by the Russian invasion of Crimea, Ukraine's economy was incredibly fragile, and this international crisis has done nothing but to further weaken the country. Ukrainians have a new government--one they have faith in, one they can believe in--that will finally bring an end to the corruption which has been rife throughout the Ukrainian Government over the past decade. But this new government will be undermined by an economic crisis that will occur, guaranteed, unless the United States steps up and provides this assistance. But we can't do it alone, and so that is why the second component of this bill would allow the United States to agree to a set of IMF reforms that would dramatically increase the amount of funding the IMF has to provide countries in crisis, such as Ukraine. Every other IMF member has signed on to these reforms except for the United States, and it has been largely due to the intransigence of this body that the United States stands on the sidelines. Some people have categorized the IMF reform component of this bill as superfluous, as a political add-on. That couldn't be further from the truth. When we were meeting with Ukrainian officials in this new government last weekend, they specifically asked that we pass the IMF reforms, because they know the only way they get an assistance package that is in the neighborhood of $20 billion or $30 billion is through the IMF. And the IMF will be much more likely able to provide that if the United States steps up and agrees to these reforms. Lastly, we need to send a strong, clear message to Russia there are consequences for their actions in Crimea. By giving the President the authorization to move forward on a broad range of sanctions, we will show that Putin was wrong when he calculated that a march into Crimea would come at little to no cost to Russia. I want to talk for a minute about what this really tells us about the status of Russia in the region and in the world. I am sure my other colleagues will come down to talk about the importance of sanctions and how they may change the calculuses being made in Russia and Moscow today. I have watched the media portray the events of the last couple of weeks as some sign of Russian strength. To me, this isn't a sign of Russian strength, this is a sign of Russian weakness. Putin has designs for reestablishing some sense of the old Soviet empire by reasserting control over what Putin calls the near abroad, which are the former Soviet republics and Soviet satellite states. His dream of reestablishing the Soviet empire fell apart the day President Yanukovych fled Kiev. Ukraine is the crown jewel of the near abroad. As Putin tried to recreate that empire under the guise of something called the customs union, he knew he couldn't do it without the second biggest country in Europe bordering on Russia--Ukraine. His invasion of Crimea was a panicked reaction to this new reality--a Ukraine now oriented toward the European Union. So today, I think it is important to understand the position Putin is in. He has made a mess for the international community to try to clean up through his invasion of Crimea. Crimea represents 2 million people in a country of 45 million, and 90 percent of Ukraine has a government in Kiev which just signed an association agreement with the European Union. Russia's economy is going to hemorrhage if he continues the occupation of Crimea through a broad-based set of international sanctions. He has become a pariah in the world community. I agree with my colleague from Indiana: We shouldn't just be talking about removing Russia from the G8; we should take Russia out of the G8 and make it completely clear to them that they don't have a place at the international table along with countries such as the United States, France, Germany, and England if they behave in this way. The bill we are debating today will give the President and new government in Kiev tools with which to try to address and perhaps end this crisis. But it is important to remember that this is not about reestablishing the Cold War. The world is oriented along paradigms that have nothing to do with who is with the United States and who is with Russia. This panicked invasion of Crimea, while rightly occupying the headlines on a nightly basis, is a display of Russia's weak position in the region and the world after the failure of their puppet government in Kiev to survive. Lastly, I will talk about the broader history, both looking in the past but also looking to the future, we may miss when we concentrate on an hour-by-hour basis on the crisis at hand. Having had the opportunity to visit Kiev a few times in the past several months, I have had the opportunity to learn a little bit about the history of the place and of the people. There is a wonderful cathedral in Kiev called the Church of St. Sophia. It is absolutely stunningly beautiful. It was built by Ukraine's greatest leader, Yaroslav the Wise. He presided over an empire which was at the time called Kievan Rus. Kievan Rus was essentially the hub of trading on the Eurasian continent. It took goods from the east and transported them to the west. It took goods from the Scandinavian countries and transported them down to the Mediterranean. Everything ran through the territory of Kievan Rus. It speaks to Ukraine's past but also to its future. They have been set up with a false choice within the crisis of the last several months: Join the European Union or stay aligned with Russia. But what we know is that Kiev historically has stood at the crossroads--not just east and west but of east and west and north and south. This is Ukraine's past, but it is also going to be Ukraine's future. While we try to deal today with a Russia run by a leader whose foreign policy seems dictated by a desire to poke a stick in the eye of the United States, I ultimately think viewing the forest through the trees also means acknowledging that Russia's future ultimately, in a post-Putin era, is about integration with Europe and integration with the West as well. Frankly, this is the direction Russia was heading until Putin took power. The conversation about how we realize that ultimate paradigm is a conversation for another day. But when Senator McCain and I went to Kiev in December and stood on the stage speaking to a million Ukrainians who had come down to the square to protest the current government, they were there to talk about one concept: dignity. For some it was about Europe, for some it was about corruption, and for some it was about the brutal violence on the square displayed by Yanukovych. For most people, they wanted to restore dignity to their lives, and what dignity really is about in the end is the ability to choose for yourself what your future is. This is why we are here to support Ukraine. No country--the United States, the Russian Federation, Germany-- should dictate to the Ukrainians what their future should be. That is why, in the wake of the invasion, in the wake of years of economic manipulation from Russia, we are going to extend a firm hand to the Ukrainians with an assistance package and a message of economic consequences to Russia. The world we envision ultimately is one not only where Ukraine gets to go back to its historical routes and draw from east and west but one in which Russia realizes that their economic salvation lies not in setting up some new Cold War but in fully integrating themselves, their economy, and their political institutions not only with countries such as Ukraine, not only with the nations of the EU, but beyond to American shores as well. This is the future. But that reality will never exist for the young nation of Ukraine unless it survives this moment. And we can send a strong message this evening that this body stands with that future for this young nation of Ukraine by supporting the package before us. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. I thank the Senator. Senator McCain and I were in Ukraine at the end of last year. We had the privilege to speak on the Maidan in front of about half a million people, maybe even a million people who were there protesting the current government, the corruption that had reined free, their decision to move away from an orientation towards Europe. After Senator McCain's remarks, the crowd rose up with the chant of ``Thank you, USA. Thank you, USA.'' Wherever we went during that trip, as we heard also from the new prime minister yesterday, they were desperate for the help of the United States. They are grateful for the fact that both the House and the Senate are moving forward on the issue of providing loan guarantees--loan guarantees that aren't nearly enough. That is why we need to have the IMF reforms, so they can deliver the bulk of the assistance. But they feel as though they are standing virtually alone as Russia marches across their borders, and desperately want the United States to lead an international consensus to make it clear to the Russians there is a price to be paid. The Russians marched into Crimea in large part because they didn't believe the United States and Europe would enact the crippling sanctions which would have otherwise caused them to make a different decision. What this moment could be about, right now on the floor of the Senate, as we head back over to Ukraine to again express our support, is there is bipartisan consensus in the Senate and the House that we are not only going to stand with them on the question of economic support, but we are going to enact a set of sanctions which will make Russia consider a different decision. My question to Senator McCain is: As important as economic support is, that is not what they are asking for here. They are not asking for passage of the House bill. They are asking for the United States, as we have time and time again, to lead an international consensus to send a strong message to Russia. We are going to go over there and I believe have a good series of meetings this weekend, but we could have had a much stronger message brought to them if we had answered their call ultimately to provide them economic support and stand with our partners in Europe, sending a strong message to the Russians.

Mr. MURPHY. Will the Senator yield for a brief question?

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I got the chance to meet David Weis, a 22- year-old student at Georgetown University, about a week ago. David's story, unfortunately, although it may sound exceptional, is not. He was just about to celebrate his 19th birthday, when 2 days before it, in 2010, he was diagnosed with thyroid and lymphatic cancer--a devastating diagnosis that came just as he was preparing to start college. As most of his classmates were enjoying the first days of their freshman year at Georgetown University, David was dealing with a rigorous course of treatment for his disease that left him tired, left him confused, and left him anxious about his future. David had an ace up his sleeve, and that was the fact he had insurance. But he only has it as long as he is covered as a student. David came to the U.S. Capitol last week to testify in favor and in support of the Affordable Care Act, because he knows that with the passage of this bill his diagnosis will not be a death sentence; that he will be able to get the coverage he needs; and that he will be able to pursue his dreams when he graduates rather than have his life decisions dictated by his illness--having to choose a job simply because it provides health care or having to be locked into a career simply because he can't afford going without insurance to cover his cancer. David's story can be repeated hundreds of thousands of times all across this country by young people in their teens and their twenties and in their thirties who thought they were invincible but who got knocked off their feet by a devastating disease such as cancer and who desperately need health care insurance at the time of that illness in order to get back onto their feet. Some of the best news that has come out over the past several months, as the enrollment has started to ramp up on the Affordable Care Act, has been the number of young people who have signed up. We have seen that 31 percent of all of the people who have signed up for insurance exchanges all across this country are 34 years or under. This is a real signal that young people are recognizing that, although they may feel as if they are going to live forever, they desperately need insurance, just as everyone else does. So that is why I was so glad to see President Obama yesterday go on the show ``Between Two Ferns,'' with Zach Galifianakis, to talk about the importance of young people signing up. We all know about the ``Two Ferns'' effect. Previously unknown stars such as Will Ferrell and Bradley Cooper went on ``Two Ferns'' and were catapulted to stardom. I am glad to see the ``Two Ferns'' effect has had the same impact on health care enrollment. Since President Obama went on ``Two Ferns,'' 19,000 people were referred to the Web site of enrollment from the ``Funny or Die'' Web site. By 6 p.m. that day the video had sent 32,000 people to healthcare.gov. HHS officials said traffic on healthcare.gov had risen by 40 percent on Tuesday to over 890,000 visits in 1 day. It is a signal that when young people, through whatever means is available to them, find out about the benefits of the Affordable Care Act, they are interested and they are signing up. I hope President Obama uses more innovative tools and methods to try to get the word out to young adults in their late teens, twenties, and thirties about the importance of signing up for the Affordable Care Act because it is important. Some 70,000 adolescents and young adults are diagnosed with cancer every single year in this country. There are 151,000 people below the age of 20 living with diabetes right now. So despite the fact that we may think we are going to live forever or think we may not need coverage, young people need it as well. It is affordable. The President said yesterday on this show: You effectively can get coverage for the cost of a cell phone bill. And it is true. Having a cell phone is pretty important, but being able to get treatment when you get a serious disease is pretty important as well. In Connecticut the numbers are pretty reasonable. A 22-year-old in Hartford making a $25,000 salary--which is the salary I made in my first job in Hartford--can get a bronze policy for as low as $66 a month through Anthem. A 25-year-old living in Bridgeport making a little more, $30,000, can get a bronze policy for as low as $108 a month. About two-thirds of all young adults across the country who are currently uninsured are eligible for these subsidies. For all of these young people who were previously going to the marketplace and often having to pay full price, often buying insurance on their own with no ability to negotiate a group discount, this health care law is transformational. Fifty or sixty dollars a month is the price for bronze plans. And this doesn't even count the catastrophic option open to most young people as well. The good news continues to roll in when it comes to the numbers of people signing up. Yesterday the administration announced that 4.2 million people have enrolled in marketplaces through March 1; 943,000 people enrolled in the short month of February; and 31 percent of all those people are 34 or younger. And, of course, we haven't even gotten to crunch time yet. I wish this weren't the case, but I know something about how young people think. Too many leave big decisions until the last minute, whether it be studying for a test, writing a term paper, or signing up for health care. As we have seen in the past on a lot of these enrollment deadlines, like the enrollment deadline for Medicare Part D, the surge comes in the final few weeks of enrollment. So we expect to see the numbers pick up in a significant way through March. Knowing how people in their twenties and thirties think, I expect we will see a major surge in enrollment from young people as well. But they shouldn't wait until the last minute. It does take more than a few hours to look at the choices and decide which is best. In Connecticut we have three insurance plans offering coverage, but each one of them has three or four different plans. So I hope young adults in their twenties and thirties take more than a few hours or a day to sign up because we want to make sure they get the plan available for them. It is easy to do with a phone call to an enrollment center, a visit in Connecticut to the in-person centers in New Britain and New Haven, and very simple to do on healthcare.gov. In Connecticut our exchange is going like gangbusters. We had a goal of signing up 80,000 to 100,000 people, and a full 30 days before the deadline we have signed up 152,000 people. Of those individuals in Connecticut, about 25 percent are 25 years or younger. We are on track to double our original estimates in Connecticut. Connecticut is a State that had a pretty high rate of insured to begin with, so our delta to get to full insurance was relatively small compared to other States. But guess what Connecticut is doing. Connecticut is actually working to implement the law rather than working to undermine the law. We put a lot of time and thought into getting a working Web site, into doing the kind of outreach other States are not doing to get people to sign up. When we have done that, young people and old people across the board have flocked to sign up. I was glad to see the President do his outreach yesterday to young people all across the country. I was glad to see the spike in interest on healthcare.gov. I am glad to see that 4.2 million people have signed up for health care, as more people all across the country--young people especially--are realizing the Affordable Care Act works. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

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

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I would like to offer my grateful thanks to the Presiding Officer and Senator Schatz and Senator Boxer, who I know was down here earlier. All of you are true heroes, as well as some of our other colleagues who have manned the quiet hours of the overnight. I know Senator Heinrich and Senator Booker spent long hours on the floor arguing with great voracity and passion about the cause that brings us here today. I am humbled to pick up where many of my friends have left off and thankful for the bringing of all of us here today. In thinking about this event and thinking about how to frame this debate, I asked some of my friends in Connecticut how they were thinking about this issue of climate change. I received a number of different responses--one that maybe didn't actually stand out but was emblematic about the way my State of Connecticut thinks about climate change--a State that has most of its population right along the shoreline. All of our economic assets essentially buffer the State from the rising coastal levels. Our State has now gone through--as the Presiding Officer's has--four record and once-in-a-lifetime storms in a period of a handful of years. This is a State that has been called to action. A rabbi in the greater New Haven area wrote me a very simple note. He became an activist on the issue of climate change after Superstorm Sandy. Senator Booker was down here, and clearly his State was hit with the worst of it, but Connecticut was hit hard too. We were hit hard in a physical sense and economic sense, but we were also hit hard in a psychological sense. A lot of people who believed in climate change in Connecticut decided to stand up and do something about it when Sandy hit. Rabbi Ratner remembers that night when Sandy hit. He said: The winds were so ferocious that my family feared our house would be torn apart by the trees on our property. My wife and I grabbed our three little children and we brought them into our room for safety. Throughout that long night we huddled together, blocking the windows and praying that we would make it through. The experience and the sense of paralysis and powerlessness reverberated with me and my family for a long time. As a parent, it is not something I am content to let happen again and again. This rabbi has become an activist on the issue of climate. For him, it comes from this experience of that evening in Connecticut. I don't live in the extreme coastal parts of Connecticut, but I remember that after the lights had gone out that night, the only connection I still had to what was happening along the coastline, as the worst of that storm came in--predicted to be at the level of historic tidal high tides along the Connecticut shoreline--was my smartphone. I was trying to keep up via Twitter as to what was happening in places such as Greenwich, Bridgeport, and Norwalk. What I started to see in the moments before I finally lost battery power was what appeared to be a coming apocalypse. Thanks to lucky coincidence, the worst-case scenario did not happen. In fact, in Connecticut the historic high tide and the worst of the surge did not actually hit at the same moment as predicted. Lives were spared, and the economic costs were only in the hundreds of millions of dollars rather than in the tens of billions of dollars. But for Rabbi Ratner and thousands of others in Connecticut, this was the last straw. This was another once-in-a-lifetime storm happening once again and putting their families, their communities, and our economy at risk. What Rabbi Ratner talks about is this sense of paralysis he felt that night. There is a sense of powerlessness as you are huddled and holding your children in your home wondering if the walls will still stand up to yet another historic storm as a consequence of changing climate. And what the rabbi figured out is that he actually was not powerless. That night all he could do was really hunker down and hope they would survive, but the next morning he could go out and do something about it. The problem is that moment is fleeting. There are only so many hours left before the trendlines that have developed--shown so well by Senator Whitehouse in chart after chart--are very hard to turn around. If I have some time later on, I will talk about some of the most insidious trendlines that come not from carbon dioxide emissions but from what we call fast-acting pollutants, such as methane, HFCs, and black carbon. Once they get into the air, it is very hard to turn back around. You are kind of reminded about the parable of the boiling frog. If you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, he will jump right out, but if you put him into a pot of cold water and you just gradually turn up the temperature, he will die because he won't recognize over the course of those minutes that the water is heating up to an intensity that he can't survive. There are only a handful of moments when that frog can choose to jump out before the die is cast because his future is written and his death is guaranteed. That is the moment we are in. We can sort of sit back and say: Well, it does not seem half bad today. Now we have these storms that are bigger, and crops are vanishing, and species seem to be migrating, but, you know, the water around us is not boiling yet. We only have a matter of minutes for the frog to jump out before it is too late. We are in that period of time in which if we do not make some decisions, pollutants will be so locked into the atmosphere, and the trend lines will be heading so clearly in one way, that there is no way to turn around. But this is the moment, as Rabbi Ratner shows, where we have power to do something. I do not want to overstate this analogy because there is no reason to equate anyone with the heroism of people like John Lewis and Eleanor Holmes Norton. But I went with them this past weekend down to Mississippi and Alabama to commemorate what is this year the 49th anniversary of the Selma march that resulted in Bloody Sunday, that eventually inspired LBJ to introduce the 1965 Civil Rights Act, what many people see as a fulcrum point in the civil rights movement. Of course, the idea that had been perpetuated upon African Americans in the South was an idea that, one, it is not that bad. Yes, you have to go to separate facilities, and, yes, your schools are not the same as our schools, but we treat you really nice, and we still allow you to drink from the water fountain, just not our water fountain. We still allow you to go to schools, just not the same schools as we do. And there is the sense of powerlessness, that you really cannot do anything about it. As we recreated this march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with Congressman Lewis, I got the chance to march next to one of the foot soldiers in the civil rights movement. Searese Crawford was not a figure that made any headlines, and Searese is not anybody that you will find if you Google her name in the civil rights movement. But Searese has a story to tell. She was there in Birmingham when the hoses mowed down hundreds of protesters and the dogs were let out to chew up the ankles and knees and legs of those who dared to confront the white power structure. She went to jail at 18 years old for 5 days, which has to be a harrowing affair, and then she marched on Washington at 19 years old, traveling all the way up here to be a part of that moment. I asked her, I said: Searese, why did you do it? She kind of looked at me with a funny look on her face as if it was a silly question. She said: Well, who else was going to do it? I said: So all of your friends did it? She said: No, none of my other friends did it. I said: Did you tell your parents? She said: No, I didn't tell my parents. I just did it because I knew it was the right thing to do. She knew that the situation was not OK. She knew that she was not powerless, that she could do something about it. That is why I feel inspired tonight to be down here with all of the other Senators--not because I am trying to equate this small act of civil disobedience with those of the civil rights movement, but because this is an attempt, as the presiding officer has said over and over in his soliloquies on the Senate floor, to wake up to this issue and to the idea that what is happening today is real, that it is almost irreversible, and that we are not powerless to do something about it. So I want to talk for just a little while this morning about my State of Connecticut, which as I mentioned is particularly impacted by climate change. I want to talk a little bit about that dual discussion, about how we recognize that this is a real problem, not one that can be papered over by the oil companies and by the fossil fuel companies and by the Koch brothers and everyone else who would try to perpetuate this mythology across this country that we do not have to pay attention to the issue of climate change, not unlike the white power structure in the South perpetuated the mythology that African Americans really did not have to worry about the way in which they were being treated. Then I also wish to talk a little bit about the path forward and how hopeful it is. I thought the presiding officer's comments were spot-on--in response to a very apt parable and story from Senator Booker--in which the presiding officer sort of challenged this idea that there is really any danger in lurching into all of the things necessary to fix the problem of climate change. In fact, there is enormous opportunity, not just moral opportunity because we are doing the right thing. That is, of course, probably our first charge as Members of the most powerful legislative body in the world, but also there is enormous economic potential in the ability for this country to capture literally millions of jobs that some nation across the world is going to have as we try to combat climate change. So let me first tell you about what climate change means to us in Connecticut. Here is an example of what it means to the Nation as well through the lens of one company in Connecticut, and that is Electric Boat. Electric Boat is a company that employs a lot of folks in both the presiding officer's State and my State. For those of you who do not know what Electric Boat does, they make submarines. They, along with a company in Virginia, make every single submarine that goes out across this world in order to protect the people of this country. There is maybe no more important defense asset to the United States today than the submarines which provide a multisystemic platform with which to protect this country. We do reconnaissance and surveillance off of them. We use them in times of war to launch attacks to defend our homeland, for charting the maneuvers and operation of other navies across the world. The reality is that you cannot make submarines inland. It probably goes without saying, but you have to make submarines right next to the water because these suckers are big. When you finish making them, you have to deliver them right into the water. So we make them in Groton, CT. Since the inception the submarine building program in Groton, we have lost 100 feet of coastline in Groton at Electric Boat. Now, 100 feet of coastline, that is a lot of coastline anywhere. But maybe you can manage that if you are in a residential area or in an area of marshland; maybe you can figure out ways to adjust. But when you have a multibillion dollar presence sitting right on the water, when you have literally hundreds of millions of dollars of machinery and equipment and training resources right on Long Island Sound, the loss of 100 feet of coastline jeopardizes the ability to make submarines. With sea levels rising at 4 millimeters a year, it is not long before the entirety of our submarine building industry is compromised by rising sea levels. Every day, Electric Boat, a for-profit private company that protects this Nation, is thinking about ways to try to force the water back out of their facility so that they can continue to make boats that protect this country. I know the presiding officer has talked already about the effect on local agriculture. People do not think about Connecticut as an ag State, but we are. We have already seen the impact of these changing climates on Connecticut. I will just give one example. Cranberry Hill Farm is a specialty crop producer in Ashford, CT. They produce heirloom vegetables. They produce heritage breeds of chickens. They produce a lot of firewood for the community, and they produce maple syrup. The owner of Cranberry Hill Farm is adapting to managing a farm in a wildly unpredictable climate. In April of 2012, Connecticut faced a 90- degree heat wave for a week. We are used to heat waves in the Northeast, but we are certainly not used to the number of extended periods of high-level temperatures that we are having today as a result of climate change. So this heat wave caused the strawberry crop at Cranberry Hill to bloom early. Then, when the temperatures dropped back down to average-April levels, the strawberry crop did not survive. Strawberry crops cannot survive a 90-degree heat wave in April. They are not built for that. So Cranberry Hill Farm lost the entirety of their strawberry crop for that season. I wish that was the exception to the rule. But that story can be repeated over and over across Connecticut. Farmers, especially small farmers in Connecticut, that is what we have. We have a lot of farmers. We have a growing number of farms, frankly. We have more and more people going into farming. But they farm pretty small plots of land, and they cannot be, with small acreage, terribly diversified. So when a farm like Cranberry Hill loses a strawberry crop, that jeopardizes their whole operation. There just is not the resiliency in New England farming because of the small size and limited scope that you may not have in other places. But at least when it comes to something like strawberries or other specialty crops, they can hope that they are going to be able to do better next year. But for their maple syrup operations, which is a big deal in Connecticut and across the Northeast, the prospects are pretty seriously dire. As Connecticut summers get hotter and they got longer, what we are seeing is a receding sugar bush tree line. The sugar bush is a temperate tree and the hot summers are driving those trees farther northward. So with record-breaking heat waves hitting my State every single summer, Connecticut's maple syrup industry may not survive at all. In Connecticut, that is a big deal. That is an industry that employs a lot of people. I just personally would panic if I did not have my Connecticut maple syrup. But what we have seen is that the hotter temperatures are moving industries further north. Senator King maybe told this story earlier tonight if he was on the floor. I have heard him tell it before. He talks about the temporary benefit that Maine has received because our Nation's lobsters are moving. As the temperature of the water on the Atlantic coastline grows hotter and hotter, the lobsters are pretty quickly figuring that out. They are not as dumb as you may think. They are retreating north. So for the time being, Maine is having a bounty because they have all of Connecticut's lobsters. That, however, has been disastrous for States like ours. In places like Connecticut and Rhode Island, we have seen the wholesale evisceration of the fishing industry, especially those lobstermen in Connecticut who were once a defining feature of our landscape and of our economy. They had to move or just shut down operations because the temperature of the water, in part, is forcing the lobsters to move to a different place. So whether it is maple syrup or strawberries or lobsters, Connecticut's maritime industry and our agricultural sector have already been fundamentally transformed. Let's talk about two other things that really matter to us in Connecticut. I heard the presiding officer reference one of these subjects a little bit earlier. We have a pretty big tourist industry in Connecticut. One of the reasons for that is that over the course of the fall, we get hundreds of thousands of people, certainly at least tens of thousands of people, who drive through the beautiful stretches of northwestern Connecticut and eastern Connecticut in which the fall foliage just lights up New England like a Christmas tree. Those tourists bring with them to Connecticut their wallets, their pocketbooks, and they deposit a little bit of money with us in what we colloquially will call leaf-peeping season. It is a big deal to our State. Climate change is having today and will continue to have an effect on fall foliage. For a lot of people that sounds like maybe a small, minor consequence, that leaves in Connecticut will look a different color, but in Connecticut it is a big part of our fall industry. Climate change is making our summers much hotter, making there be more 90-degree days and this, in turn, will affect these brilliant fall colors on the trees. Many of those trees will migrate north or die out, and the timing of that transition from summer to fall fundamentally changes in a lot of ways. Many of these tree species which present the most vibrant colors may completely be gone. Skiing is another industry that matters to us in Connecticut. We don't have the big mountains Vermont and New Hampshire and Maine have, and I know our friends out in the Midwest don't even accept what we have to offer in the northeast qualifies as big mountains, but in New England, of course, skiing is a very big deal and it is a major industry. We are having trouble, as we speak, keeping Connecticut slopes open. We have had one, I guess it is a hill--not a mountain--that brings in millions of dollars to Connecticut's economy called Powder Ridge not far from my home in Cheshire, CT. It has been an off-and-on prospect with families and operators starting it up, stopping it, starting it up and stopping it, because they are on a year-to-year lifeline due to the fact that there is less snow and less people coming onto the slopes. Estimates suggest that over the course of the next half a century, the skiing industry is likely to vanish in Connecticut. This is a multimillion dollar industry in places such as Ski Sundown, Mohawk Mountain, and others that are in small towns in places such as northwestern Connecticut. Those small-town economies will essentially collapse if they don't have the central organizing principle of their winters, which are the ski mountain, the ski lodge, and the thousands of families who come from all over Connecticut and all over New England to ski there. Our ski industry in Connecticut already is in jeopardy, but it is going to get worse if we don't do something about it. Maybe what is scariest, though, is what is happening with these storms along the coastline. I mentioned this a little bit in the story of the rabbi who sheltered his family, but we are not unlike most other States across the Atlantic in that we were initially, as a State, a maritime community, so we built up our State along our waterways. To us, that was essentially Long Island Sound and the Connecticut River. Today, if you track development, it has migrated outside of those corridors. It is still basically centralized along the Connecticut River, which now is not coincidental to Interstate 95 and the Long Island Sound which is not coincidental to both Interstate 95 and the Amtrak line. What is most troubling is the fact that these storms attacking us with increasing ferocity and severity are no longer a nuisance. They present a catastrophic potential for Connecticut's entire economy. I will give us one example of how close we came during Superstorm Sandy to an absolutely economy-ravaging disruption of our rail lines. The Amtrak line runs down Connecticut's coastline. If we take a little kayak down across the Long Island Sound--which I will do virtually every summer--there are long stretches of that kayak ride in which we can see the Amtrak line lying literally on top of the wetlands that shelter the land from the sea or within just a handful of yards. Now whether that was a smart decision, in retrospect, I can't tell you. But we built up our main rail line, which provides billions of dollars of economic benefit to the entirety of the Northeast corridor in Connecticut right on the shoreline. This is a line that obviously millions of Connecticut consumers use but connects Boston to New York and to Washington, DC. It is the vital life link between some of the biggest economic centers in the entire world. When Superstorm Sandy hit, it completely obliterated a sand dune near Rocky Neck State Park that essentially took the bullet for a rail bridge that was just feet behind it. We were fortunate at this sort of point of exposure to have an enormous sand dune that was standing right next to the rail bridge. All of our ecologists and all of our disaster experts tell us that if that sand dune wasn't there, then that bridge would have been obliterated. If you lose just a stretch of track, you can probably rebuild that in a handful of days or weeks. But if you lose a bridge along the Amtrak line, that is a disruption that will likely take you months to recover from. That is a disruption that will be, as I said, catastrophic to the entire northeastern corridor. If you lose the ability to move people by rail from New York to Boston, that kills thousands, tens of thousands, of jobs. If you can no longer take a train from Rhode Island to Washington, DC, that eliminates commerce. That kills jobs. That sand dune is gone. So if there is another storm, then all that is left to protect the rest of Connecticut from that storm surge is that rail bridge, and it is likely to come down. We are going to do the hard work of rebuilding that sand dune, but that is not the only place along the Connecticut shoreline in which the Amtrak line is in harm's way. As we talk on the floor about the rising sea level tides we have, it is just a matter of time before there is no sand dune that is big enough to withstand the storm surge that will hit the Amtrak line and knock it out of service potentially for weeks and for months. Our beaches are part of our economy as well. The estimate with respect to Hammonasset Beach State Park--which is a beautiful beach that tens of thousands of Connecticut residents go to--but people from all across the country and all across the world flock to every year-- frankly, I am lucky enough to spend a good part of my summer down on the Connecticut shoreline. My family has had a little beach house in Old Lyme that I get to go to, which is essentially right next to the Hammonasset Beach State Park. I can't tell the number of license plates we see from Canada, Quebec, and Ontario, that are coming down to spend their summers on the Connecticut beaches. They rent a little house or they park their RV or they camp out on the campground surrounding both Rocky Neck State Park and Hammonasset Beach State Park. They spend thousands of dollars, each family, over the course of August or the several weeks that they come down in the local part of the economy. So much of that part of the State is built up over beach tourism that comes into Hammonasset Beach State Park and to Rocky Neck State Park. The Department of Energy & Environmental Protection tells us that by the end of this century--and it could come faster if the worst-case scenarios come true--Hammonasset Beach State Park will be gone. It just won't exist any longer. The scope of the tides and the water will be such that our economy-driving, dollar-generating State park--which is a beautiful place to go and which brings joy to thousands of families-- will not exist any longer. While I don't have the estimate for Rocky Neck, I know the geography and it would suggest to me that if Hammonasset is going to be gone by the end of this century, then Rocky Neck is probably not far behind. The insurance industry is not located along our shorelines, but it employs thousands of people. We are the insurance State, Hartford, CT. We are the insurance capital of the world. If our friends on the Republican side of the aisle don't believe the scientists, then hopefully they may believe the market. Our Republican friends tell us that they take their cues from the private market. The private market is very quickly having to adjust to the reality of climate change because, as storm after storm hits the northeast and as storms ravage the gulf coast and more severe weather--often in the form of tornados-- hits the Midwest, it is the insurance companies that in most cases ride to the rescue. They ride to the rescue with billions of dollars that they have to pay out. The only way they adjust is by raising premiums on all the rest of us. Companies such as Travelers and The Hartford, some of the biggest property casualty insurers in the world, which are headquartered in Hartford, CT, will tell us their models are fundamentally changing because they know climate change to be a reality. They aren't budgeting premiums in the future on the belief that these are just freak temporary occurrences. The biggest insurance companies in the country--indeed, in the world--are making economic decisions based upon their rock-solid belief that the 99 percent of climate scientists that are referred to on the floor are telling the truth. So rates are increasing. The exposure for Connecticut's insurance industry is expanding. I think about the expansion of flood plain zones. Today, about 11 percent of New York City is in a flood-risk zone. Within the next several decades, the estimates from the insurance industry are that 34 percent of New York City is going to be in flood-risk zones. If you are in one of these zones, you obviously pay a severe premium when it comes to your insurance cost. Now while maybe in some way, shape, or form I am glad that part of that money will migrate to Connecticut's insurance companies, it gets sucked out of millions of businesses all across this country. They are having to pay the insurance premiums because the insurance companies are planning on climate change. The insurance companies are planning on this body doing absolutely nothing about it, resulting in billions of dollars more in premiums from small companies, big companies, mom-and-pop stores, and homeowners all across this country. We are going to become a sicker State as well, and that comes with costs too. Lyme disease--named after a particularly beautiful part of the world, Lyme, CT, and Old Lyme, CT--absolutely ravages tens of thousands of people in Connecticut. If someone knows anyone with Lyme disease, they know how insidious a disease it is because it initially presents with systems that are a little hard to detect that are masked by other illnesses. It is still sometimes very troublesome and tricky to treat. Often antibiotic treatments will zap Lyme disease within the first couple of days or months, but there are people across the State of Connecticut with what we refer to as chronic Lyme disease and who don't respond to antibiotic treatment. It is life changing. It really is life changing and it forces many people to be bedridden, out of the workforce, and living fundamentally different lives than they had planned. With warmer and wetter conditions in Connecticut, our epidemiologists and our disease scientists tell us we are going to see an increase in the deer tick. We are going to see, as we have already, an increase in the diagnosis of Lyme disease. And the mosquito-borne diseases, such as eastern equine encephalitis virus, along with Nile virus, which impacts people but also livestock--horses--and wild birds, are going to become more prevalent as well. As you sort of figure out what the consequence of this is, the story just gets worse and worse. So as you have wetter and warmer conditions, as we have today, and the mosquitoes and the deer ticks start to infest, especially in our coastal areas, then you have to engage in mosquito-control measures, and that historically has involved draining or ditching wetlands, which has enormous environmental consequences for those areas. That further erodes a lot of our maritime industries that depend in part on those wetlands staying healthy and happy. The other way you deal with mosquitoes is you spray aerially. After decades of bad history with pesticides and aerial spraying, we know how careful you have to be about that. The reality is that you are going to see a mist floating down on tens of thousands of homes and neighborhoods and kids as we try to stamp out the increasing numbers of mosquitoes that come to places such as Connecticut as climate change guarantees warmer and wetter climates. So we lose jobs, we increase costs, we see entire industries evaporate from Connecticut, and we become a more expensive and a sicker place. But the folks I got to spend some time with this last weekend in places such as Selma and Jackson, and tiny little towns in the Mississippi Delta, such as Money and Ruleville, saw a better day. They saw the ability to change their circumstances. On the other side of that fight an epic battle that, not unlike the fight we have here today, combined individual decisions people had to make to change their lives and the way they treated people, small testaments of courage by people such as Sarah C. Crawford, but it also involved a fight here in the Senate that eventually culminated in the Civil Rights Act. They recognized that the path to justice for African Americans didn't actually come with much pain at all, that the path to economic and racial justice for Blacks across this country lifted up everybody. And if you talk to a lot of White Mississippians or White citizens of Alabama, they will tell you that they felt as if there was a psychological and mental weight lifted from them, and they saw the economies of their States improve. I don't know all of the history, but many people suggest that in the years following World War II, Birmingham, AL, was poised to become the economic crossroads of the South, that it could have become an economic powerhouse rivaling cities of today such as Atlanta in the South, but it didn't because of the fact that racial injustice held it back. Once they figured out that was both a moral stain on that State and an economic stain, they changed their ways. Again, not to overstate the comparison--it is just in my brain because I was there this last weekend--so goes the story for the fight against climate change in the sense that the pathway to addressing this issue runs through the creation of millions of jobs in this country as well as cleaner air to breathe and cleaner water to drink for all of our citizens and kids across the country. So if I could, I would like to run through a handful of examples of how this could matter to my State as well. Connecticut has built a pretty serious and I think pretty impressive fuel cell industry. Fuel cells aren't renewable resources in the sense that they use a small amount of gas that mixes together with elements inside the fuel cell to produce what is essentially an ultra-clean source of energy. There is virtually no pollutant coming out of fuel cells, so there is almost no contribution to global warming from these fuel cells. They are changing the climate, but they are also creating a lot of jobs in Connecticut. On December 20, 2013, Connecticut opened its first utility-scale fuel cell farm in Bridgeport, CT. It was manufactured and built by a company in Connecticut that employs hundreds of people--the world's biggest fuel cell company, Fuel Cell Energy. It is located on a former brownfield. It is the first powerplant like this of fuel cells in North America, and at 15 megawatts it is producing enough power to supply power to 15,000 homes. It is a serious facility, and it is creating hundreds of jobs in places such as Danbury and Torrington, CT. The problem, though, is this fuel cell farm in Bridgeport, CT, is the exception rather than the rule. Fuel Cell Energy is selling most of its products in Asia. It is selling most of its products in Korea. Over the years the Korean Government has kind of figured out what the gig is, that its main seller of fuel cells is creating jobs in the United States while they are selling product into Korea. So Korea has essentially said to Fuel Cell Energy: Your time is up. We will continue to buy a handful of these fuel cells from you over the coming years, but by the end of this decade we want to produce all of those fuel cells in Korea, and we want you to transfer the technology and transfer the jobs to us. Fuel Cell Energy doesn't have any choice in this matter because if Korea decides they do not want to buy from them, they will buy from somebody else. So they have to essentially do an agreement in which they transfer that technology and transfer those jobs. Those are hundreds of jobs today in Connecticut but potentially thousands of jobs in the future as we power up fuel cells all across the country. The reason they are not selling fuel cells in this country is because we don't have a renewable energy strategy to really advantage those sources, which, admittedly, today costs a little bit more than purchasing energy from a grid powered by things such as coal and by oil. But when you weigh the jobs that can be created in the fuel cell industry against the slightly marginally higher cost of getting that energy from a fuel cell rather than getting that energy from a coal- fired powerplant or an oil-fired powerplant, there is a pretty darn good argument that you should invest in fuel cells. So, to Connecticut, this is a matter of jobs, especially in the fuel cell industry. Greenskies Renewable Energy is a company in Middletown, CT, and they design and install big solar arrays. They do not manufacture the equipment, but they design these big solar arrays and they install them. It was started in 2008 by a former Peace Corps volunteer in Mali. The company doesn't charge customers any upfront costs for solar power. Instead, they typically sign customers to long-term contracts, and Greenskies purchases the solar energy they are producing on their buildings. Greenskies has installed over 70,000 solar panels across the country, and they have offset 15 million pounds of CO2. That is the equivalent of 763,000 gallons of gasoline being burned. In 2012 they got their biggest contract yet. They won a contract to build solar arrays on 27 Walmart stores in Massachusetts. That is a $30 million contract. In 2013 they announced plans to build a 43-acre solar farm in East Lyme that is going to be 16,000 solar panels. That solar farm alone in East Lyme will be able to power 6,300 homes. That is pretty significant in terms of the amount of power it is going to be able to put on the grid, but it is also significant in terms of the number of jobs that will be created. Today Greenskies may be employing dozens of people, but they are going to be hiring hundreds and thousands of people as they install all of these solar arrays in Connecticut and Massachusetts and for clients all across the Northeast. Another company playing in the solar space is a company called Apollo Solar. It is based in Bethel, CT. It is a small company. Today it only employs about 10 people. But they manufacture the electronic equipment that filters power from a solar cell and allows it to be stored in a battery. That is really the future, the idea that every individual home is going to be a small powerplant where you can put solar panels on your roof, then take the power that is being produced by the solar panel, store it in a battery, and then use it at the moment at which prices on the grid are the highest or, if you want, sell it back to the grid at the moment at which you can get the most return for this little stored amount of energy you have created by the solar panels on your roof. Today, Apollo Solar has become a significant supplier for cell phone towers in the developing world, especially in Africa. Countries in Africa just don't have the electric grids we have, so if they want cell towers to be able to provide lifesaving cell coverage to their residents, then they have to essentially power these cell towers on an individual tower-by-tower basis. And if you don't do it with solar arrays, then you have to do it with diesel generators, which produce enormous amounts of black carbon. That makes the air very difficult to breathe, and it is also much more expensive. Apollo Solar has produced this technology for cell towers. Right now it is being used in places such as Africa, but eventually this technology can be used in millions of homes all across Connecticut and all across the country, and that is going to fundamentally change the way in which we engage with the electric grid. We think Apollo Solar is poised to become an industry leader on this issue. Today it is only a handful of people, but this is one example of thousands of companies all across Connecticut and all across this country that are poised to explode in growth if we do the smart thing and decide we are going to create a renewable energy market here in the United States. It is important to say that neither Greenskies nor Apollo Solar is making those solar panels because much of that work is being done in other countries--countries that do have domestic markets for renewable energy, countries such as Germany and China. So despite the successes of companies that install these big solar arrays and successes of companies such as Apollo Solar that create the attendant technology attached to the solar panels, there is so much more we could do if we had that domestic market here. The point is that we have an enormous opportunity to create millions of jobs in this country based on this technology. The imperative should be one surrounding the public health effects of climate, the imperative should be around the life-changing catastrophic consequences of rising sea levels, the added cost to our economy that comes with entire industries such as those in Connecticut--the maple syrup industry, the fall tourism industry, the skiing industry, and the lobster industry-- evaporating and disappearing before our eyes. That should be the imperative. Being a country that has only 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of the world's pollution in carbon emissions, we more than any other nation in the world have to play a role in this global economic and environmental imperative. But beyond that, there are enormous job gains to come if we make the right decision. Lastly, before I turn it back over to the Senator from Hawaii for some remarks--and I will stay on the floor because I would like to maybe talk a little about short-lived climate pollutants, if I have the time--New England is an example of a place that has figured out how to do this the right way. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative--we call it RGGI--is the first market-based regulatory program in the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is a cooperative effort amongst Northeastern States to cap and reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector. It is essentially just a miniversion of legislation which we have debated here in Congress. We essentially set a cap for how much carbon we are going to produce in the northeast. We allow emitters of pollution to trade credits and decide for themselves what cost point-source polluters are willing to pay for the ability to send carbon dioxide into the air. We have heard over and over the horror stories coming from our friends on the Republican side. As a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House of Representatives, when we debated the Waxman- Markey bill, we heard over and over that electricity prices were going to dramatically spike; and, yes, you are going to have the benefit to the environment from reducing carbon dioxide, but you are going to have catastrophic consequences for the economy because everybody is going to have to pay for it. I guess I can understand how people would believe that if there wasn't any empirical evidence to test their theory. Luckily, New England has just that evidence. New England has tested this idea. Frankly, the whole world has tested this idea because we have reduced ozone-depleting pollutants based on a similar protocol. But in New England we have taken on this issue. RGGI has been an unqualified success. Our carbon-reducing plan in New England has prevented the release of 2.3 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the equivalent of taking 435,000 cars off the road for a year. The program will offset 8.5 million megawatt hours of electricity generation and avoid the release of 8 million tons of CO2. The program is going to generate $1.6 billion in net economic benefit regionwide, and it is putting $1.1 billion in electricity bill savings into the pockets of consumers in the region over the next decade. That is maybe the most important number. In addition to preventing the release of 2.3 million tons of CO2 pollution, it is reducing the energy bills for New England consumers by over $1 billion. Wow. How does that happen? How do you restrict emissions and then reduce pollution? We take all the money we glean in people buying the credits necessary to pollute and we put it right back into energy efficiency. We put it right back into programs which actually allow consumers to use less electricity, to make their homes more efficient, to transfer over to furnaces which will use less energy. All of these energy efficiency investments cancel out and override the price to the energy producers of having to comply with the new requirements. It is pretty simple calculus, but it works for us in New England. We have taken the equivalent of two coal-fired powerplants offline, and we have returned $1 billion in savings to rate payers. We have done something about the scourge of climate change that people have been talking about overnight and we have saved people a whole boat load of money. I guess this is why the Presiding Officer and Senator Schatz decided to engage in this exceptional exercise, to come down to the floor of the Senate tonight because we just don't understand how people don't see this. If this were really a fight as some people make it, between the quality of our air and the quality of our economy, then let's have at it. Let's come down and have that debate. But it is not, and we have proved that in Connecticut. This isn't just guesswork. This isn't estimation. This isn't conjecture. In Connecticut we have proved we can make significant gains to reduce climate pollutants, create jobs, and save people money. This is a triple whammy. We get a cleaner environment, become a global leader, create a whole bunch of jobs and save a whole bunch of people money. Why on earth wouldn't you do that? Unless this debate has been hijacked by the very small number of people today who make money off the status quo. I don't have the exact quote. I should have brought it down here. We probably shouldn't look to Machiavelli for political advice. He, before anybody else, painted for us a picture of the challenge presented to the reformer. The reformer's job, he said, is the toughest job in the world, because those who will benefit from the new order have trouble seeing it today, but those who will be harmed by the new order, those who exist in the status quo, see the peril in the most acute sense and fight the hardest to preserve it. So, yes, there are people who face a perilous future, but they are a very small number of people, and they are people who run the old-line energy businesses which are clinging to the status quo today, who are flooding this debate with millions of dollars to try to affect it. But as even they will find, there are even bigger, brighter opportunities on the other side. I imagine even the Koch brothers are industrious enough and innovative enough to figure out how to make a whole mess of money off of the renewable energy economy. I argue they will make even more money. So I thank Senator Schatz, Senator Boxer, and the Presiding Officer for leading this effort. I will stick around on the floor to engage in discussion, but this is a triple win: Combat climate change, create jobs, and save people money. It is time for the Senate and time for the Congress to wake up. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be recognized for such time as I may consume.

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to a period of morning business with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. MURPHY

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

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, we now are in about the sixth month of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. We have over 11 million people who have received health care--who previously had not been able to receive it--either through the private exchanges, which have signed up 4 million people all across the country; through the expansion of Medicaid, which has reached millions more; or through all of the young people who are able to stay on their parents' plans until they are 26 years old. Taxpayers are saving money. In fact, CBO has redone their estimates for the 10-year period after the passage of the Affordable Care Act to suggest that we are now going to save $1.2 trillion on Federal health care spending, in large part because of the reforms in the Affordable Care Act. Across this country millions of Americans who had been kept out of the ranks of the insured because of a preexisting condition now have access to health care, and tens of millions of seniors are paying less for their health care because they get checkups for free and they are able to access prescription drugs for 50 percent or less than the original cost when they reach that doughnut hole. So the Affordable Care Act is changing lives. When you reorder one-sixth of the American economy, there are going to be bumps along the road. No one should come to the floor--even those of us who are the most vocal proponents of the law--and suggest there are not going to be some people who are not going to have the perfect experience. Of course there is no excuse for the way in which the Web site operated for the first several months. But it is time for proponents of this law to tell the real story, and the real story is that the Affordable Care Act is working. It is working for millions of Americans who now have access to health care. It is working for taxpayers who are spending less than ever before as you look at annual rates of growth in Federal health care spending. Today and this week my colleagues and I are focusing on the benefits for one specific group of patients, one specific set of families all across this country, and those are patients and families dealing with cancer diagnoses. So I will start this off--I will be joined later by Senator Stabenow and some of my other colleagues--and I want to talk first about a family in Indiana. I will talk about some families in Connecticut as well, but the Treinens have a story that is, frankly, not unique. They had insurance and they thought they had really good insurance. They didn't pay too much attention to the lifetime cap of $1 million that was in their insurance policy because they just figured, as a relatively healthy family, there was no way they were ever going to spend $1 million on health care over the course of their time on that insurance plan. But as millions of families across this country know, cancer can interrupt your plans, and that is what happened to the Treinens. Their doctors diagnosed their teenage son Michael in 2007 with an aggressive form of leukemia. The treatment called for ten doses of chemotherapy that cost $10,000 per dose. A 56-day stay in an Intensive Care Unit alone cost about $400,000. So Michael and his family reached that $1 million lifetime maximum in less than 1 year, and it was then left to this brave family to go out and raise money in solicitations in their neighborhood, in their community and all across the country, which miraculously allowed them to bring in $865,000 in 6 days to keep their son's treatment going. Needless to say, that avenue is not available to every family. But due to their ingenuity and their passion, the Treinens were able to raise almost $1 million from private donors in order to keep their son's treatment going. But the story doesn't end well, however, for the Treinens. Even though money came in from all over the United States, and as far away as places such as Germany, Michael's cancer eventually stopped responding to chemotherapy and he died May 25, before he could receive the transplant they all hoped would save his life. The reality is that insurance companies have been getting away with this practice for years--lifetime or annual limits that for 105 million Americans were preventing them from receiving care when they really got sick. That is what insurance really is supposed to be for. For those of us who buy insurance, we get it in the hopes that should we get very sick, that insurance plan will be there to help us. But with annual and lifetime limits, when people got really sick, especially with cancer diagnoses, that help wasn't there. Tom Bocaccio, who is a retired police officer in Newington, CT, is still dealing with the consequences of lifetime caps. His wife past away after an 8-year struggle with adrenal cancer. After her death, the husband she left behind was saddled with a $1.5 million bill because the Bocaccios, over that 8-year period of fighting cancer, had exceeded their lifetime cap. That changes Tom's life in a myriad of ways. He has lost his wife, and there is no way to describe the pain that comes with that, especially after that brave, courageous battle of almost a decade, but now his entire life is upended by the fact that he has a $1.5 million bill he has to pay, and he doesn't have the resources to do that. So first and foremost, for cancer patients all across this country, 105 million Americans no longer face lifetime limits on health care benefits. For cancer patients, not only does that deliver financial security, but it delivers mental and psychological security as well--to know in the midst of dealing with this diagnosis and all the pain that comes with confronting this disease head on, they do not also have to worry about skimping on treatments, about cutting back on hospital stays that might harm the recovery or treatment of the patient simply because they are trying not to get above that annual or lifetime limit. The benefits to cancer patients extend beyond just that protection on lifetime and annual limits. In addition, cancer patients are going to be able to keep their health care because of the ban on discrimination against families and individuals with preexisting conditions. I have spoken about the Berger family many times on this floor. They are a family that explains exactly why we need this protection. The Bergers, from Meriden, CT, had a son who was diagnosed with cancer during the 2-week period in which the husband, through which the family had insurance, didn't have a job. He switched jobs, and during that 2- week period in which he was waiting to get insurance through his new job, their son was diagnosed with cancer. The new insurance policy decided it was a preexisting condition. The Bergers had to pay every dime of that treatment and they lost everything. They lost their savings, their home. Their lives were transformed because of the misfortune of having a cancer diagnosis at the wrong time. No family anywhere in the country dealing with a cancer diagnosis will ever have to go through what the Bergers went through because here ever after the law of this land says that if you have a preexisting condition, you cannot be discriminated against. There are all sorts of other benefits that matter, whether it be the fact you don't have to pay for preventive health care any longer so you can get a checkup without cost or clinical trials are now covered which many cancer patients enjoy the benefit of. Life changed for cancer patients and families dealing with cancer when the Affordable Care Act passed. Senator Stabenow, myself, and others had a press conference earlier this week in which we heard the story of David Weis, a senior at Georgetown University who was diagnosed days before his 19th birthday with thyroid lymphatic cancer. David talks about the difference the Affordable Care Act makes for him, not only in financial terms but in terms of how he thinks about his future. David now can go out and get a job, search for and pursue a career based on what he wants to do with his life rather than based on what job will provide him with adequate benefits to treat his cancer should it reoccur. I have a constituent who talks about it the same way. He was 14 when he was diagnosed with a form of leukemia. He went through treatment for over 3 years. His family now knows that with the Affordable Care Act-- because he is only covered on his mom's policy until he is 26--after he ages out of his mom's plan, he will be able to pursue his dreams no matter what kind of insurance plan his prospective employer has. What we have learned over the years is there is a connection between the mind and the body. If you are stressed out about things such as how you are going to pay for treatment of your disease, it does have an effect on your body's ability to fight that disease. Unfortunately, for millions of families dealing with cancer, their treatment has been restrained, their body's recovery has been curtailed because they are obsessively--and appropriately--always worried about what will happen if their insurance runs out. The ACA says never again. No family will have to worry because that will be guaranteed, and discriminatory policies of annual and lifetime limits disappear. I will end with the notion that it is important to remember every time our Republican friends come down to the floor and talk about how awful they believe the Affordable Care Act is, their proposal is to return cancer patients and families dealing with cancer back to the reality in which they had lifetime limits which ended their coverage-- for this family I talked about from Indiana, after only several months--and they want to go back to the days in which families such as the Bergers lose everything, their savings, their home, because of a mistimed cancer diagnosis. This week the House of Representatives voted for the 50th time to repeal all or part of the Affordable Care Act. I was a Member of that body for 6 years, and I probably participated in about 40 of those votes. Despite the fact I heard lots of my Republican friends come down to the floor and say: We are voting to repeal and replace, they never voted once to replace the Affordable Care Act because their agenda is not to replace it. Their agenda is simply to repeal it and go back to the days in which cancer patients were treated with this kind of carelessness. Our colleagues on the Democratic side who voted for the Affordable Care Act understand there are places where it can be better. We understand there is a process of perfecting it. But we understand-- because of families such as the Barrows, because of families such as the Weises, the Treinens, and the Bergers--for cancer patients and the families who love them, they know the ACA is working, and they know they never want to go back to the days in which their lives were put in jeopardy by a health care system which didn't work for them. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. First, I associate myself with the remarks of the majority leader. I certainly understand the concerns of those on the Republican side about the individual who has proposed to spend a certain amount of money supporting the global warming cause, but it pales in comparison to the money that has already been spent by the Koch brothers, who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars and will continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into these races, completely dwarfing any amount of money that is spent on the other side.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I am on the floor to talk about the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. I am pleased to have Senator McCain on the floor because it is very hard to describe the sensation both he and I felt at the end of the last year when we got the chance to travel to the Maidan--Independence Square--in Kiev and speak to about 1 million people. It is even harder to describe the sensation of hearing that group of people yelling back to us in unison: Thank you, U.S.A. Thank you, U.S.A. But that was the reality we were able to experience. It is important to note that Senator McCain and I didn't go to the Maidan that day to advocate for President Yanukovych's removal even though the end of that process resulted in that fact. In actuality we spent 2 hours that night meeting with Yanukovych, pleading with him to reverse course on his decision to abandon plans to join the EU so that he could win back the support of the hundreds of thousands of people who had gathered on that square to support our European integration and domestic political reforms. But President Yanukovych didn't listen, and instead he lost his legitimacy as a ruler when he turned his security service on his own people, resulting in the murder of over 100 Ukrainians who simply wanted to compel their leader to follow the wishes of the Ukrainian people. I was proud to author a resolution that passed unanimously in this body that declared our support for the ability of Ukrainians to peacefully air their grievances against their government and to oppose the use of force against them. Then, I was equally proud to join Senator McCain and some others in a bipartisan call for sanctions against Yanukovych when he began his murderous crusade against the protesters. I was even prouder of President Obama, who through the State Department sent a clear, unwavering message to the Ukrainian people that the United States stood with them in their desire to see a better future for Ukraine, aligned with Europe and the West. This strong bipartisan approach here in America to the Maidan movement helped the people of Ukraine as they charted their own path toward a new government. We didn't dictate the terms of Ukraine's future; we simply supported the right of the people to determine it for themselves. But now, despite the success of the Maidan, the crisis in Ukraine has changed its face. It hasn't dissipated. And today Secretary Kerry was greeted in Kiev by Ukrainians pleading for the continued support of the United States. Having been so clear-voiced in our support of the Ukrainian people thus far since the protests began last November, now is the moment when Democrats and Republicans should stand united in this Congress so that years from now, when a group assembles in Kiev marking the anniversary of this grave crisis, they will celebrate Ukraine's political sovereignty and economic rebirth with more chants of thanks to the United States. In what shape should this support come? First, we need to stand together in the next week to deliver serious financial assistance to a Ukrainian economy that is weak and is growing weaker as this crisis persists. A $1 billion aid package is a good start, but our real work must happen within the structures of the IMF, which can provide potentially tens of billions of dollars necessary to fully right the Ukrainian economic ship. While Ukraine does need to undergo economic and budget reforms from within, I would caution the IMF to be gentle in the timing of the conditions applied to this aid. Difficult steps need to be undertaken to right-size gas prices and trim budget deficits, but Ukraine should be given a long enough lease so that these necessary reforms don't strangle a nation today dealing with threats to its very existence. Second, Crimea. Russia has invaded Ukraine, make no mistake. They have done so in violation of the United Nations charter and the very accord they signed in 1994 guaranteeing Crimea's territorial security. No doubt Vladimir Putin was sore at losing his erstwhile ally in the Ukrainian President's office. No doubt he didn't like the fact that the United States voiced its strong support for the right of a sovereign Ukraine to make independent decisions about its future partnerships. No doubt he is infuriated that the Ukrainian people are now on their way to getting their way. But this is not a schoolyard. You don't get to push weaker kids around just because you don't like them. This is the 21st century. The reason we belong to organizations such as the United Nations or the reason we negotiate treaties such as the Budapest memorandum is because now we understand, after centuries of European war, how destabilizing this kind of behavior is. The irony for Russia, of course, is that this invasion demonstrably weakens, not strengthens, their nation's position in the world. Let's say for argument's sake that the end result of this crisis is a Crimea that is more closely aligned with Russia than with Ukraine. What does that accomplish for Russia? Well, it will have won the occupation of 2 million Ukrainians while the majority of the other 43 million continue to orient themselves permanently toward the European Union. If the United States and Europe make good on sanctions threats, which I hope we will, it will devastate the Russian economy, leaving millions of Russians out of work and adding political instability to Putin's own land at a time when he really can't afford much more instability, and it will make Russia an international pariah, shunned by the industrialized nations that help form the future path of global, political, and economic values. Given this reality, why did Putin do it? He didn't do it to protect Russians in Ukraine because the only threat to their safety is due to the military crisis of Russia's own making. He did it because, like the schoolyard bully, he doesn't see past his own nose. He believes that he wins by temporarily flexing his muscles and by capturing the world's attention. He doesn't look to the long-term, potentially dire consequences to his own political standing and to his own people. He pulls punches because it feels good today no matter how bad it will hurt tomorrow. But that being said, no matter the irrationality of Moscow's behavior, we need to make sure in the case that Russia does not correct its mistake, and correct it soon, the consequences do hurt. I believe Congress should authorize broad authority for President Obama to enact strong sanctions on Russia through penalties to its banks, its oil companies, and its political and economic elite. I believe the President should only be allowed to use this authority in the case that this illegal incursion into Ukraine continues and that we should give Moscow the opportunity to reverse course or join with the international community to address their concerns about the safety of Russian citizens in Ukraine. Let's give Russia a chance to make this better and deliver a clear message of the consequences if they don't. This, of course, can't happen without the support of our European allies. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on European Affairs, I will be on the phone this week with European Parliamentarians urging them to join us in proposing new sanctions on the Russian economy. I know there is hesitance in Europe due to the integration of Russia into the European economies, but this crisis should, frankly, matter more to Europe than it matters to us. Five years ago it was a laughable proposition that Russia would invade Ukraine, but it is happening now. It may be unthinkable today that Russia, in 5 years, is going to move on a NATO ally, but if this aggression goes unchecked, then the future can be very perilous, even for our friends in Europe. Finally, a word on the politics of this crisis. I have listened to some of my good friends on the Republican side try to score political points in connection with the Russian move on Crimea, trying to paint this somehow as Obama's fault. This is a ridiculous contention. Putin marched into Georgia in 2008 under a Republican President, who many of my Republican colleagues considered to be strong on foreign policy, and now he is doing it with a Democrat in office. President Obama is considering steps in response that seemingly weren't even considered in 2008. What has me feeling even more suspect of the criticisms of President Obama is there doesn't seem to be any real difference between what the Republicans want the President to do and what he is actually doing. It is easy to say it is Obama's fault, but history tells us otherwise, and these political attacks mask the fortunate fact that there is pretty solid bipartisan agreement on what to do next. Ukraine can remain whole and free and it can stay on a path to join Europe. When that day emerges from the smoke and the fire of the crisis, if we play our cards right, then they will have America and our European allies to thank, in part, for that new day. I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my legal fellow, Don Bell, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the calendar year.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I appreciate my colleagues--Senator Warren, Senator Schumer, and Senator Murray--joining us on the floor today. I think we will be joined by Senator Stabenow in a few moments. I also appreciate that they were at an event we did yesterday in which we were kicking off the Affordable Care Works Campaign. The campaign is designed to tell what has been untold for much of the last 6 months, which is the increasing good news about the millions of Americans for which the Affordable Care Act is working and, indeed for many of them, changing their lives. An announcement was made this week that 4 million Americans have now signed up for the private health care exchanges. There are now over 10 million Americans all across the country who now have insurance today that didn't have it prior to the passage of the law either because of these private exchanges or increased eligibility of Medicaid or the law's provision that young men and women under the age of 26 can stay on their parents' insurance. Over 10 million people all across the country now have access to insurance that they didn't have before we passed this law. As Senator Schumer said, there is even more good news because we now know that the second promise of the act, that it was going to reduce the deficit, is true as well. CBO tells us that from the 10-year period covering the enactment of the law to a decade later, we are going to save about $1.2 trillion beyond what we initially estimated. At current trajectories, we are going to be $250 billion under CBO's initial estimate for Federal health care expenditures on an annual basis. That is a big savings to the American taxpayers. When you combine that with the millions of Americans who have coverage, you can see how the Affordable Care Act is working. There is still work to do. There will be debates on the floor of the Senate about ways in which we can change and fix the Affordable Care Act. Because we are reordering one-sixth of the American economy, there is no doubt there will be bumps along the road, and no doubt there will be places where we can find bipartisan agreements on how we can fix the act to make it work even better. The answer from our Republican colleagues has been pretty simple so far. It has been to simply repeal the law. They say they want to repeal and replace it, but we have yet to see any evidence of that replacement. I think when the Presiding Officer and I served together in the House of Representatives, we probably witnessed about 30 or 40 different votes to repeal all or part of the Affordable Care Act, and never once was there a vote to replace that act. The American people don't want this bill repealed so we can go back to the days when the insurance companies ran our health care. They don't want to go back to the days when the 10 million Americans who have insurance are uninsured. They want this act to be implemented. They want it to be perfected. They want us to work to make it better. But they are understanding day by day that the Affordable Care Act is working. Specifically for seniors there are some pretty unique benefits, many of which have been glossed over. At the outset of the implementation of this act, some pretty important things happened--sometimes while people weren't even looking. First, the doughnut hole was cut in half almost overnight. The first year anybody who was in the doughnut hole got a $250 rebate check. The second year, their drugs--when they were in the doughnut hole--got cut by 50 percent. By the end of this decade, the doughnut hole will be completely eliminated. The average savings for a senior, as Senator Stabenow will talk about, has been $1,200. People often don't know that is because of the Affordable Care Act. When you go in and your drugs all of a sudden cost 50 percent less than they did, there is no stamp on that bill that says courtesy of the Affordable Care Act. The fact is that without the Affordable Care Act, seniors--over the course of the last 3 years--would have spent $9 billion more on drugs than they have. The number is so big that it is kind of hard to fathom. The Affordable Care Act has saved seniors $9 billion, an average of $1,200 per senior. On top of that, when seniors go in to get their annual checkup or for a cancer screening or tobacco cessation program, those preventive health care visits are now free. Twenty-five million seniors have access to those programs all across the country. In my State of Connecticut, 76,000 people with Medicare have taken advantage of free annual wellness visits under the health care law. So we are seeing tremendous benefits for seniors all across the country. This is not just about the doughnut hole or preventive health care. In 2012, the Medicare Part B deductible dropped by $22 to $140. That is the first time in the history of Medicare that the Medicare Part B deductible has actually been reduced thanks to the efficiencies that are being garnered in the Medicare Part B program by the health care law. Second, Medicare Advantage plans now can't charge more than Medicaid for things like chemotherapy, skilled nursing, and other specialized services, which results in saving thousands of dollars for seniors. In the first 3 years of the Affordable Care Act, Medicare recovered $15 billion in fraudulent payments under Medicare because of new tools designed to root out fraud and waste and abuse in the Affordable Care Act. Older Americans who have not yet reached Medicare age are saving money because the act reduced the amount of discrimination in premiums against older Americans by saying that insurance companies can't charge older workers more than three times what they charged younger workers. For seniors, in particular, we are trying to make it clear that some of the unnoticed benefits, such as the fact that nobody is asking you for a copay when you go in for a Medicare checkup and that you are saving money every time you go into the pharmacy--that didn't happen magically. That didn't happen because of Republican health care policies. It happened because of the Affordable Care Act. Finally, before I turn it over to my colleague Senator Stabenow, I want to address some of the mythology we have been hearing on the floor of the Senate in the past few days about Medicare Advantage. There is no doubt that there were reductions in the payment from the Federal Government to the Medicare Advantage plans in the Affordable Care Act. Why? Because we were overcompensating private health care companies for running the Medicare Advantage plan. We were giving them 13 percent more than it cost Medicare itself to run the Medicare program. That just doesn't make a lot of sense. Private companies were telling us they could do things for the same price or less than the Federal Government. In this case we were paying Medicare private insurers a lot more than it costs Medicare to run the program. So we decided to eliminate that subsidy. Guess what. The news has been pretty remarkable. In fact, 30 percent more seniors are on Medicare Advantage plans today than when we passed the law, and premiums under Medicare Advantage have come down by 10 percent during that time. More people are on Medicare Advantage plans, there are less costs in premiums, and the average Medicare participant has 18 different plans to choose from. All of this apocalyptic talk about what was going to happen when we passed the Affordable Care Act with respect to Medicare Advantage and all this new apocalyptic talk about what will happen when the subsidies get further reduced has not come true. We now have cheaper Medicare Advantage plans, more seniors on them, and plenty of across-the-board availability. I am really pleased to have been joined here by about a half dozen of our colleagues to tell the story about what the ACA has meant for seniors. We are going to come to the floor every week. We are going to stand with patients and consumers every week to talk about the benefits for seniors, cancer patients, women, and taxpayers all in an effort to try to prove to the American people what millions of Americans are finding out, and that is that the Affordable Care Act works. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, earlier this month, a Hartford icon, Walter ``Doc'' Hurley, passed away at the age of 91. For some, Doc was a teacher, for others a coach, and for many more he was a dedicated philanthropist and friend. No matter what role he played at any given time, Doc Hurley worked his entire life to positively impact the Hartford community, and he will be sorely missed. Doc led an eclectic and inspiring life. After attending Weaver High School in the North End of Hartford, he served in World War II as a marine. Upon coming home from the war, he finished college, worked as a teacher in Virginia, and spent a brief stint as a professional football player in the All-American Football Conference before finally returning to Hartford in 1959. It was when he became vice principal at Weaver High School in Hartford that he began in earnest his lifelong goal of inspiring students to pursue a college degree. The most visible piece of Hurley's lasting legacy in the community is the Doc Hurley Scholarship Foundation and the renowned Doc Hurley Scholarship Basketball Classic. Over the years, Doc's foundation was responsible for awarding more than $570,000 in scholarships to 550 high school seniors. Many of these students who went on to successful careers owe their start to Doc Hurley and his scholarship foundation. Doc was a once-in-a-generation mentor, coach, teacher, and positive inspiration for Hartford's youth. Last October, I held an antiviolence basketball tournament for nearly 1,000 kids with the University of Connecticut men's basketball team in the field house that bears Doc Hurley's name at Weaver High School. I was proud to have had the chance to work with him on that basketball tournament and, more importantly I will work to continue his legacy of encouraging Hartford's students to achieve their highest potential. I join everyone in Hartford and around Connecticut in celebrating the life of Walter ``Doc'' Hurley and mourning the loss of this great man.

Mr. MURPHY

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

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, yesterday we received news that 4 million people have now signed up in private health care exchanges all across the country. In addition, it was released that about 12 million people have called the call centers in January alone, and 1.1 million people signed up to receive health care through the Affordable Care Act during that time. Young enrollment--the group of individuals for which there has always been a question as to whether they are going to sign up for these exchanges--grew by 65 percent. It is time for this body to recognize the Affordable Care Act is working. It is working for people who have been desperate to get insurance. It is working for people who have been getting the short end of the stick from insurance companies, and it is working for millions of seniors all across this country who have been paying far too much for prescription drug costs and for preventive health care. We have known this from the very beginning in Connecticut. Despite the hiccups over enrollment in the fall period, States such as Connecticut that had made a commitment to making this law work, rather than undermining it, have seen the success from day one. Connecticut, at the outset, said that we were going to try to enroll between October 1 and March 31 about 80,000 people. That was our goal. We just announced in Connecticut--a State that is working to implement the law, not undermine the law--that we didn't just hit 80,000, we didn't just hit 100,000, but we have enrolled 126,000 Connecticut residents in our health care exchanges and in Medicaid. Our projection is that we are going to enroll 150,000 people by March 31. That is nearly double our initial estimate. Last week, traffic on Connecticut's Web site rose 31 percent, and the daily enrollments rose by 67 percent. The stories just keep on coming into our office about the lives that are being changed as people, for the first time in their lives, get access to affordable health care. People such as Susie Clayton, who has been dealing with a cancer diagnosis for over a decade--a crippling, preexisting condition that for most of her adult life has kept her out of the ranks of the insured. I have known Susie for probably two decades. Almost every single conversation I have had with Susie over those 20 years has been about her daily struggle to try to deal with her illness and her preexisting condition. Every single day, every single week, she has thought about whether she is going to be able to pay for her health care if she has a reoccurrence of her cancer and whether during that time she is going to have a job that provides her with insurance. Susie had been paying about $1,700 a month at last count for an insurance plan she could afford. Her life changed on January 1. She now is paying a couple hundred dollars a month in premiums. She finally gets to wake up every day not having to worry about whether she is going to be able to afford coverage, whether she is going to be able to see a doctor to deal with her very difficult diagnosis. With 4 million people now enrolled in these exchanges across the country, that story can be replicated over and over. A bunch of our Republican colleagues have come to the floor over the last couple of days--I was in the presiding chair yesterday listening to some speeches--regarding some new information about Medicare Advantage. Everybody knows by now that included in the health care bill was an end to the subsidies given to Medicare Advantage plans. The private sector in health care and in other industries always tells us they can do things more cheaply than the Federal Government--and a lot of times they are right about that--but it was exactly the opposite when it came to Medicare Advantage. We were paying private insurance companies 13 percent more than it costs the Federal Government to run Medicare. This was a source of enormous profit for the insurance companies. It didn't make sense to oversubsidize insurance companies to run a program the Federal Government itself was running for 13 percent less money. So we ended those subsidies, and part of the elimination of those subsidies has gone into effect. But the story that is being told on the floor today isn't true. The fact is that since the Affordable Care Act was passed, even as we have been implementing these cuts to these overly generous, unjustifiable subsidies to insurance companies, Medicare Advantage enrollment has gone up by 30 percent. Thirty percent more seniors are now enrolled in Medicare Advantage, even as these cuts have been imposed. Premiums are down. Medicare Advantage premiums have been reduced by 10 percent. Over the course of the debate on the Medicare Advantage cuts, I heard Republican after Republican, when I was in the House of Representatives, come to the floor and tell us that the sky was going to fall when we ended these subsidies to insurance companies. I will be honest. A lot of them are in my State of Connecticut. Not only has the sky not fallen, it has risen, with 30 percent more seniors in Medicare Advantage with 10 percent less in premiums. To the argument I have heard on this floor that there will be less choices available to seniors because of these cuts going into effect, let's just be honest: The average Medicare beneficiary has 18 different Medicare Advantage plans to choose from--18 different plans. That is a pretty robust market. Let me just add that Republicans have voted for these cuts themselves. The Ryan budget, which has essentially been the budget standard for Republicans in both the House and in the Senate--endorsed by hundreds of Republican legislators--the Paul Ryan budget included the cuts to Medicare Advantage subsidies because Republicans have agreed with Democrats that there is no reason to subsidize insurance companies instead of subsidizing beneficiaries. So what happened when we decided to stop subsidizing Medicare Advantage? Enrollment went up 30 percent. Premiums went down 10 percent. The average beneficiary still had the choice of 18 different plans. But we took that money we saved in padding the pockets of health care insurance companies, and we told seniors that when they show up to get a preventive health care visit, they are not going to have to pay anything out-of-pocket. So since the ACA has been passed, here is how much a senior has to pay for their annual checkup: Nothing. So 25 million people have gotten free preventive care since the Affordable Care Act has been passed. What else did we do? We decided that this doughnut hole in the prescription drug bill, whereby people got coverage up front and then they had to pay for a certain amount of drugs themselves and then they got catastrophic coverage, didn't make sense. So we eliminated the prescription drug doughnut hole. It will be gone by 2020. It has been cut by more than half already. Since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the average senior has saved $1,200 in prescription drug costs thanks to the Affordable Care Act. So as I listen to my Republican colleagues come to the floor and complain about the cuts to Medicare Advantage--cuts, in fact, that many of them have supported--I think we have to ask ourselves: If we had a choice to provide a 13-percent subsidy to for-profit insurance companies or pass along $1,200 in savings to American seniors and eliminate the costs that many of these fixed-income seniors pay when they go in to get preventive care, what would we choose? This is really all about choices in this body. It is about choices in terms of where we put the money we spend on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries. To me, it is a no-brainer. To the American public, it is a no-brainer. Instead of subsidizing insurance companies, let's subsidize hard-working seniors, who have built this country, with $1,200 in drug savings and 25 million people who have gotten free preventive health care. For Republicans who have come down to the floor and said they want to repeal the Affordable Care Act or that they want to repeal the cuts to Medicare Advantage plans, essentially they are saying they want to return billions of dollars to the insurance companies and take away that money from seniors in this country. I do not think that is a choice the American people are going to accept. This week a group of us in the Senate are launching the ACAworks campaign. Later today I will be joined by a number of my colleagues around the corner as we launch a new effort to make clear to the American people that now, with 4 million people enrolled, and millions of people saving money--notwithstanding the legitimate difficulties that were encountered in the first days of the Web site--the Affordable Care Act is working. It is working for millions and millions of people across this country who are finally getting care. We will be joined today, as well, by a couple of Medicare recipients who are glad they now have the protection when they get into the doughnut hole. They are glad they now get free preventive care. And they will take the choice any day of this Congress and this government investing in them instead of investing in big for-profit insurance companies. None of us deny there are bumps in the road as you rework one-sixth of the American economy, which represents our health care economy. None of us will deny there is no excuse for the fact that for the first few months there were a lot of people who were not able to enroll who wanted to. But now that the enrollment site is working, now that outreach efforts are up and running, record numbers of people are signing up for health care because there is an almost insatiable demand for quality, affordable health care that is now being met as the Affordable Care Act is working. I yield back the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MURPHY

Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I join my colleagues in support of the nomination of Jeffrey Meyer of Connecticut to be a U.S. judge for the District of Connecticut. I thank the chairman of the Judiciary Committee for his hard work in shepherding Mr. Meyer's nomination through the process and thank my colleagues and leadership for bringing it to the floor today. Before I make brief remarks in support specifically of Meyer's nomination, I want to associate myself with the remarks of Senator Leahy and Senator Blumenthal. There are essentially two ways to try to shut down the government from within. You can try to defund it--and we have seen that effort play out in real terms at great cost to the American people over the last year and a half--and you can also try to depopulate it. You can try to very slowly and methodically take people out of positions by either denying them confirmation into the administration--as we have seen, as a long list of nominees to agencies throughout the Federal Government are being delayed by Republicans--or you can try to keep the judiciary understaffed so it cannot do its work as well. So I, unfortunately, believe this is part of a pretty methodical policy and strategy on behalf of those who feel as though they have been elected to destroy government from within, to both try to defund the organs of government and then also to depopulate its ranks. That is part of the reason I think we are laboring under delay tactic after delay tactic when it comes to our Federal judiciary. Today, though, hopefully we can unite around a nominee who is singularly qualified to serve on the district court. I am proud to support Jeff Meyer's nomination--someone who comes from a family with deep roots in public service. Mr. Meyer has worked in the legal system but also has a history of helping the poor and the voiceless in Connecticut throughout his career. Both Senator Blumenthal and I know his father well, Ed Meyer, who served with me in the Connecticut State Senate. Jeff Meyer comes from a world-class educational background, in part because he got a lot of it in Connecticut. He is a graduate of both the college and the law school at Yale. He has an extensive academic and teaching background. After he graduated law school, Mr. Meyer clerked at the Supreme Court for Justice Blackmun, and then for Judge James Oakes, the former chief judge of the Second Circuit. Currently, he teaches the Supreme Court Advocacy Clinic at Yale Law School, where he provides pro bono legal services. Before that, he taught at Quinnipiac Law School, where he was honored with their Excellence in Teaching Award. But even more impressive than his academic background and training is Jeff Meyer's long history of working for a fair and just legal system in Connecticut and, frankly, throughout the Northeast. Even as a law student Jeff Meyer showed a commitment to helping disadvantaged groups by giving legal assistance to homeless clients through the Yale Law School clinic. He actually received an award for his work there from the City of New Haven. Later, he worked as a staff attorney in Senator Leahy's home State of Vermont at Vermont Legal Aid. In Connecticut, he helped keep our State safe by serving as an assistant U.S. attorney for 9 years. Since 2008 he has served on the Connecticut Judicial Ethics Committee--a fairly thankless task, I might add--and he has served on a range of other important State and local committees, including the Advisory Committee for the Selection of the Connecticut Federal Public Defender, the Independent Accountability Panel for New Haven's police department, and the U.S. Attorney's Police and Urban Youth Task Force. Aside from his academic and community work, Jeff Meyer has also managed to find time in between to litigate complex commercial issues and investigate foreign aid issues. He served as an editor and counselor of the Independent Panel Review of the World Bank Department of Institutional Integrity. And he did an incredibly important tour of duty as the senior counsel of the Independent Inquiry Committee into the United Nations Oil for Food Program. He also wrote a book on the U.N. oil for food scandal. Along with his book, Mr. Meyer has an impressive body of legal scholarship that includes a wide range of law review articles and opinion pieces on topics ranging from criminal justice issues, to foreign aid, to workplace safety. I will point out that Jeff Meyer is exceptional in the sense that he has sought work that others in the legal community might avoid. The work he has done on Connecticut's Judicial Ethics Committee or in the independent review process of the New Haven Police Department or even in his work investigating the Oil for Food Program was tough stuff-- issues that were controversial that some other lawyers may have avoided. But Jeff Meyer sought places in which his talents were needed and in areas in which others may have looked the other way. The District of Connecticut is currently about 13 percent understaffed, and this confirmation would fill a vacancy that has existed now for almost 2 years. Because Jeff Meyer has such stellar qualifications, I cannot think of any reason why people in this body would oppose his nomination. I urge all my colleagues to support him. I yield the floor.