Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Fattah].

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Conyers]. (Mr. CONYERS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Georgia [Ms. McKinney].

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon [Mr. DeFazio], from the Progressive Caucus Task Force.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York [Mr. Rangel]. (Mr. RANGEL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, do I have the right to close?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Foglietta]. (Mr. FOGLIETTA asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Payne] and the chairman of the House Progressive Caucus, the gentleman from Vermont [Mr. Sanders], for their support and development of this caring majority budget that we are presenting here today. I also want to thank all the members of the CBC and the Progressive Caucus and their staff for their help in completing this very worthwhile project. Particularly, I want to thank members of my staff, Kenya Reid and Jacqui Ellis, for the Herculean efforts they put forth to produce this budget. I also want to thank the gentleman from Oregon, Congressman Peter DeFazio, and his staff for their valuable assistance. The caring majority budget of the Congressional Black Caucus and the House Progressive Caucus meets the mandate that we produce a balanced budget. But this budget does not produce a murder of Medicaid. It does not reduce EITC or wipe out the summer youth employment programs. The budget is again balanced by eliminating corporate welfare and closing corporate tax loopholes. The Republican budget, on the other hand, continues in its extremism. The Republican budget is really not about money in the overall analysis. The Republican budget is about a destructive plan to destroy the New Deal programs and the great society programs. It wants to destroy safety net programs. Why else would it want to have a $13 billion increase for the defense budget at the same time it proposes to pare down government, streamline government, and to bring an end to Big Government? By continuing to insist that the Medicaid entitlement be eliminated, the Republican budget poses a clear and present threat to the health and life of millions of Americans. By abandoning health care to the States, the Republican budget opens the door to decentralized genocide. Instead of going forward into universal health care, we will be leaving the children and the elderly to die for lack of vital health care. As an alternative to this mean and extreme Republican budget, our caring majority budget of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus is a budget of compassion which would promote the general welfare while ensuring fairness and justice for all.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Illinois [Mrs. Collins]. (Mrs. COLLINS of Illinois asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Wynn]. (Mr. WYNN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Florida [Ms. Brown].

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Conyers].

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Vermont [Mr. Sanders].

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we have just completed phase I of the most important process that takes place here in the Congress, and that is the budget of the United States of America for a 1-year period that deals with the fiscal 1997 budget, which will run from October 1, 1996 to September 30, 1997. It is important that the public understand that the budget that we have discussed today in the budget process is only the beginning. It sets the upper limits in terms of expenditures in broad categories, that the real spending process which gets into great detail is the appropriations process. Now, the Committee on Appropriations oversees the appropriation process, and the way the budget appropriations process was handled in the first half of the 104th Congress, it may be that the Committee on Appropriations could just send the rest of us home and take over and run the rest of the session because the other committees have very little power in the decision making, and this particular Congress, controlled by the Republican majority, we have less power than ever. You know, if Congress really were to be truthful about the way it is organized, about who has real power, then it is the Committee on Appropriations, it is the Committee on Ways and Means, the two or three committees that the way they have stacked the deck and the way they guarantee control from the top have all the power. The Committee on Appropriations has far too much power. You could organize Congress another way. Each one of the committees that has jurisdiction and authorization could also have the power to appropriate because they have the knowledge, they deal with the particular functions in an ongoing fashion, they have the oversight responsibility. They know more about each one of the functions than the Committee on Appropriations knows. For example, in education you have a Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunity, which has existed for years under another name called Education and Labor Committee, and members of that committee know a great deal about education legislation, they know a lot about how the schools operate, they know a great deal about policies and experiments and research and the knowledge that has accumulated on that committee. But when it comes to making the vital decisions about how money is going to be appropriated, it is the Committee on Appropriations which will make the decisions about how money is appropriated for education. Now, most corporations would go out of business if they were organized that way, where the greatest amount of knowledge and know-how is concentrated in one place and the decision making, which is vital, is concentrated another place. But that is the way it operates. So the budget starts the process, education is function 500, and this budget sets the parameters in terms of we cannot go over the figures that are set in the budget process for education. Of course, the figures are set not just by this House of Representatives, but the Senate also will have to deliberate and pass their own budget bill. There will be a reconciliation, and then the Senate and the House together will have the final say on this particular budget process because it does not go to the President. The President started the budget process when he sent a budget to us, and these are reactions and responses to his budget. So when the budget process is finished, he does not get it back; he will not have a chance to veto the budget. Each one of the appropriation bills that then comes out of the budget process will go to the President in each one of these functions: Labor, education, health care, et cetera. I think it is important to take note of this at this critical point. We are often to the process which matters most to the American people. How will the Federal dollars be allocated? How will the dollars that flow into the Federal Government from all over America--they are not Federal dollars; that is the wrong term--all dollars come from neighborhoods, they come from families, they come in individuals. The dollars that make up the Federal Budget are our dollars, and how will they be allocated to meet our needs, to meet the needs of the majority of the people? That is a critical question. There has been a lot of talk about States rights and States rights to do various things, and in many cases States are assuming rights to spend money that comes back to them from the Federal Government, great amounts of money that did not flow out of their particular State. There are a large number of States that get far more money from the Federal Government than they pay into the Federal Government from their population. That is the way the American system is structured. We are one Nation, and the money does not flow to the States on the basis of their contribution, it flows based on many different factors. Some States are more fortunate than others at landing defense contracts. Some States are more fortunate than others in having big power projects. The TVA is not located in New York because we did not have the kind of situation where the water and the necessary conditions to create a Tennessee Valley Authority was there. So Tennessee Valley Authority was a Federal project that poured large amounts of Federal money into Tennessee. For various reasons, NASA is located in Florida, and part of it is located in Texas, and on and on it goes. The Speaker's district has the largest contract to manufacture fighter planes. F-22 fighter planes are manufactured in Marietta, GA, which is part of the Speaker's district. So you have large amounts of money flowing to the States from the Federal Government, and the States now said they want the right to do everything themselves. I would be willing to listen to that argument and say that in this budget-making process let us give States the right to spend money that they generate; the amount that they receive from the Federal Government, which is above the amount that came out of the State in terms of taxpayers, let us cut that off and give it back to the States which are generating the money. I have made this argument many times because I really am very concerned about the fact that traditionally New York State has always been on the giving side and the giving has been very great, you know. It rose as high as $23 billion in 1993, and in 1994 it is $18 billion. We are sending to the Federal Government more than $18 billion more than we are getting back from the Federal Government. Before that, in 1993, we were sending $23 billion, and I am very concerned about this, and I keep speaking about it and bringing it up as often as I can because I think that New Yorkers ought to know this, people in New York ought to know this, and I think the people in the other States on the other end who are receiving the money ought to know this, that if we have States' rights, the people in New York would be far better off if they kept their $18 billion at home, and the States that are receiving the extra money, let them fend for themselves. You know, that is an argument in States' rights that nobody has offered, but we ought to take a close look at that. So as we go into the budget-making process, the appropriations process will follow that. It is important to understand some of these basic contradictions and facts. But understand also that for the 104th Congress under the leadership of the Republican majority, this is now phase II, phase II of the drive to remake America. You know, Speaker Gingrich always says that politics is war without blood and that we are in a war to remake America. Those analogies and the comparisons with war are the Speaker's comparisons, and we have to live with them, I guess, and certainly they have prosecuted the effort so far as it was war. We have had a situation where the Republican majority has moved in a way that you move in war, you know, with a rapid movement. You know, it is revolution, it is extremism, it is not letting up, pushing to try to accomplish a great deal over a short period of time. There is a sense of desperation introduced into legislative process. They want to remake America, and they see themselves as having 2 years to remake America. Automatically you have a process by which mistakes are bound to be made, dislocations in great amounts are going to take place. Maybe a great amount of people are going to suffer. The Speaker says that it is war without blood, but maybe some people are gong to bleed as a result of the rapid movement of our Government to remake itself. So far in phase I, I would say that the Republican majority has been very successful. I apologize to my Democratic colleagues who like to say that we have succeeded, but if you look at the situation in terms of the budget process, the Republican majority, the juggernaut, the great Wehrmacht of the Republican's war machine that has moved forward and established beachheads and gone for the jugular in so many cases laid out a plan where they were going to cut the budget by huge amounts of money and moved in very radical ways, very extreme ways, to accomplish that. As we all know, at one point they even shut down the Government, we shut down the Government more than once, as a result of the extremist agenda that they were trying to accomplish. Well, it was all over, and we finally got all of the appropriations bills passed. Too many Democrats have said that we won a major victory. We did not win a major victor. The Republicans achieved $23 billion in cuts. There were $23 billion in cuts, and you might say, well, we wanted to downsize and streamline the Government, so why not call it a victory for everybody? Problem is that all the cuts are concentrated in nondefense areas. It is the programs that help people most that receive the biggest cuts. Yes, we won some victories in terms of phase I in this war to remake America, we made them back away from $5 billion in education cuts. Thanks to the common sense of the American people and their understanding of what was going on in education, they rallied, they let their Representatives know that they understood the nature of the education cuts, and they put enough people on the spot to make the majority retreat on $5 billion worth of education cuts. But there were $23 billion in other cuts that were made. Some of them might have been legitimate. There is always waste in a government as big as ours, and nobody is going to argue that you cannot cut a lot of waste out. But we wonder if they really zeroed into places where the waste is. Pentagon is not downsizing. The Pentagon military establishment, as we know it, is not streamlining. In fact, in this budget, phase II of the new budget that was passed today, there is $13 billion in increases for military expenditures. So they are not downsized. In this budget there is no mention made of the CIA bringing it under control and guaranteeing that you never have a situation again where the CIA will accumulate $2 billion in a petty cash fund. I talked about that before. Our auditors discovered that $2 billion was accumulated in the CIA petty cash fund. What steps are we taking to see that does not happen again? We have the Federal Reserve, that had $3.7 billion accumulated in what they call the rainy day slush fund, the rainy day fund for the Federal Reserve Bank, and in 79 years they never had a rainy day. The General Accounting Office said they never had losses in 79 years. So that is a place where waste is taking place on a large scale; $3.7 billion in the Federal Reserve. There is nothing in this budget that talks about efforts to collect money that is lying around in various agencies like that. So we have phase II now beginning, and the budget that has been introduced by the Republican majority for phase II in their war to remake America, this budget is as extreme as the first one was. There are a few trimmings here and there, but basically there is no change in direction. So anybody that thinks that we have stopped the juggernaut, that we have contained the war to remake America, the extreme war to remake America, you are dreaming. It is not happening. In this cut there are extreme--in this budget there are extreme cuts. I am glad to see that again we made a breakthrough on education. There are no proposals to totally eliminate the Department of Education anymore, so that is a plus because we were in a situation where we were about to eliminate the Department of Education and become the only industrialized nation in the world not to have a central department of education. Our public education is very weak as it is, and we do not necessarily want the kind of bureaucracy that some of the other nations have, and we do not want to give the kind of power to our Department of Education that they may have in Germany or in Japan, but we definitely need to keep the Department of Education. Mr. Speaker, I applaud the Republican majority for backing away from the threat to eradicate the Department of Education. But it still has many education cuts. The budget eliminates many education programs. What is particularly troublesome is the deep cuts in training programs; for instance, the funding for programs in the careers bill. The careers bill is where they lumped all the training programs together in one bill, and they have cut that by 42 percent, 42 percent. That is going toward one-half. These are job training programs. Mr. Speaker, how do we expect to go forward into the 21st century and to readjust our economy to meet all the challenges of a high-technology economy if we are not going to give people training? How do we expect to have a work force that is being dislocated, downsized, and shuffled around? The legitimate term for it is ``churning''; there is churning going on in the work place, there is churning going on in the big corporations, and the workers in the process are being churned around, spewed out, and they can always find a job somewhere else, although they have lost their regular job that they might have been on 10 or 15 years. So the churning process, if it is going to be humane and going to help people pick up and go on, it needs to have training programs, but the training programs have been cut by 42 percent in this Republican phase II budget. As I said before, the phase II budget is really a continuation of what we had before. It is not very different in every respect. It is still extreme. The retreat on education is only there because of the fact that we have gotten the American people alerted. They are watching to see what happens with education. They are on the job, they are letting their Representatives know, Republicans and Democrats, and they will not tolerate any drastic cuts in Head Start programs, they will not tolerate drastic cuts in title I programs. So we have that much accomplished, but everything else is still moving forward. The contract to remake America and the budget, the budget-balancing effort, is really an assault on the New Deal programs that were developed by Franklin Roosevelt. It is an assault on the programs that were developed in the Great Society, programs by Lyndon Johnson. It is a frontal assault of trying to wipe those programs out. Saving money is only secondary, if it is important at all, because they are proposing to put large amounts of money into star wars, which, of course, has accomplished very little. Billions have been spent there already and it has accomplished very little. There is no great hurry to invest large amounts of money in building a star wars system or a system to intercept missiles, when the technology probably will be far better if we wait a little later to do the building. So the President's proposal that we do research and we prepare is more than adequate. But they are going to waste money in that area, so money is really not the problem. Money is not the greatest concern. Destruction of the New Deal programs, destruction of the Great Society programs: They want to destroy Medicaid, they want to destroy Medicare, they want to wipe out programs that have benefited people for years, and they want to do this in the interest of a small, elite group that will make a great deal of money off the destruction of these programs and the replacement of these programs with other programs. So it is important to see the new budget as phase 2 of the war. The new budget is a blueprint for invasion, for destruction. The new budget is more of the scorched earth policy that started with the majority takeover in 1994. It is extreme, it is revolutionary, it is harmful. People will literally die as a result of what is being done in this area. In education and training, for example, the details can become important, depending on where you sit. Goals 2000, which they proposed to eliminate last time, is again eliminated in this budget. Innovative education programs, strategies, grants, eliminated. Bilingual and immigrant education programs are eliminated. New funding for Perkins loans, student-centered grants are eliminated. Howard University funding is eliminated. Libraries are cut 20 percent; libraries, which have a tiny amount of money, I think $110 million, a very tiny amount of money when you consider all the libraries across the country that exist and that need help as we go toward meeting the educational needs of the 21st century, they are cut 30 percent. Twenty-four other education programs are eliminated. Aid to education, institutional development, is cut $46 million. National and community service programs again are eliminated, AmeriCorps. That is a bargaining chip. They eliminate a program that they know has a high priority at the White House, and they are going to bargain later on to get the White House to accept some of these other cuts as a result of restoring that. The Davis-Bacon Act and the Service Contract Act are eliminated. The Davis-Bacon and Service Contract Act require prevailing wages to be paid on Federal construction jobs and in Federal facilities across the Nation, and that is eliminated; although what has happened is that the prevailing wages are very close, in most cases, to minimum wages in many parts of the country at this point. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting will be eliminated, privatized by the year 2002. The National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, eliminated. So what is new? The battle plan remains the same, the invasion plan remains the same. The scorched earth policy remains the same. There is not very much that is new here. In energy, in a time of skyrocketing increases in energy prices, this budget proposes real cuts in energy funding by 47.05 percent. It wipes out all funding for research on fossil fuels, solar, and renewable energy and energy conservation, at a time when we are recognizing more and more that our environment and the dangers that the environment faces from pollution are not fantasies of environmentalists, they are very real. People have died of certain diseases. Asthma is increasing in our big cities in large amounts. The percentage increases are quite large of people suffering from asthma and other respiratory diseases. The handwriting is on the wall that the environment is not something to be left to a handful of people who have a vision, but the environment ought to concern everybody. Then we are going to wipe out all funding for research in the areas that will deal with the pollution factors that related to that increase. Transportation. It phases out funding that supports mass transit operations. Again, pollution will be increased, because in big cities people will drive cars more and more and use other vehicles above the surface because they cannot get money to keep supporting our subway systems. Even our bus systems above ground that do cause a problem with pollution, it is better to have more buses carrying more people than to have more cars carrying more people, because you get less of a pollution factor when you have buses instead of cars. But we are cutting the capital assistance to mass transit. We are eliminating any new starts, support for any new starts in the mass transit system. At a time when we are trying to get people off of welfare and get them to work, we are going to make it more difficult for them to get to work, because it is going to cost more to get to work. We also at the same time are going to continue polluting the air. In the area of crime and law enforcement, this budget defunds, wipes out the COPS Program, and abandons efforts to put 100,000 new police officers on the street by the year 2000. We thought we had settled that one, it is such a popular program across the country. We thought that the extremists would certainly yield to common sense and yield to the fact that the American people had made it clear that they want the COPS Program, they want the cops on the streets. But in this budget, no, we continue the same practice that was started in the first budget of this session. The extremist blueprint calls for an elimination totally of the COPS Program. The earned income tax credit, which is a way to give tax relief for low-income working people, we got a $20 billion cut in this budget for the earned income tax credit, which really provides great relief to people at the lowest levels. They say they want a tax cut, but the one tax cut that is already in effect, they take it away, in effect, for people at the lowest levels, they take it away. They still want a tax cut, however. It is being proposed for the rich in large amounts. Twenty billion dollars has been taken away from the earned income tax credit. This cut reduces the after-tax increase of almost 8 million households in America; 6.8 million children will be hurt by this cut. This change is particularly offensive in light of the Republican rhetoric about moving people from welfare to work. We ought to make work pay. We ought to reward people when they go to work, but the earned income tax credit, which was doing that, is being drastically cut. There is nothing in this budget about minimum wage. Minimum wage is not a function of government. The taxpayers do not have to pay for minimum wage, so it is not in the budget. It will not be in the appropriations bill. A minimum wage increase is a situation where employees pay additional wages. The proposal that was put forth by the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Gephardt], the Democratic minority leader, and the proposal that was endorsed, sanctioned by President Clinton, is a proposal for a 45 cent increase over the present minimum wage; 45 cents one year and 45 in another year, 90 cents that will not be in the budget, 90 cents that the taxpayers do not have to shell out. So the minimum wage increase is not going to cost us anything. Seventy-four percent of the people in America say that a minimum wage increase is a fair approach to guaranteeing that people have the opportunity to earn a decent living. Nevertheless, the extremist blueprint, the invasion plan, refuses to entertain any increase in the minimum wage. I said before that this is about more than saving money, and the fact that the Republican majority has dug in and is adamantly opposed to a minimum wage increase is just one more indication that saving money and balancing the budget are not the only agenda. The agenda is designed to wipe out the New Deal programs, to wipe out the Great Society programs, and the agenda is designed secretly to wipe out the gains made by working people, to destroy the effectiveness of unions. A tax on working people, a tax on unions, are not part of the Contract With America. You will not find anything in there that says they want to destroy Davis-Bacon, that they want to change the Fair Labor Standards Act so that people cannot get their overtime. Nowhere in the Contract With America does the Republican majority say we want your overtime. But they do want your overtime. Not only are they moving in ways which deny a minimum wage increase to all workers, but the workers who have been working for years, the workers who have enjoyed overtime when they had the necessity to be employed overtime, they would get overtime pay, we are not being told that they should not get overtime pay, that they should get comp time. So the blueprint for the second half of the Republican war to remake America, it wants your overtime. One of the targets, one of the objectives is to take your overtime; nor to give you a minimum wage increase, but also to take your overtime. It is not in the budget. I am digressing from discussion of the budget, but it is part of the design to remake America. It is part of a situation where, to please contributors, to please certain elite groups, the workers must be sacrificed, the workers must be given the status of serfs, peons, or sharecroppers. The workers must be put in a position where they have to beg. They must be put in a position where they have no power. There are other moves to change labor law which we will discuss next week, but certainly the minimum wage, denial of the minimum wage increase, it should be noted, is not a budgetary item. It does not cost the taxpayers anything, but that is part of this great blueprint. First I want to comment for the tax package. The EITC is one place where taxes are being added, and a tax increase is being forced on the low-income people by removing $20 billion in funding for the EITC. The tax package in this budget, on the other hand, does still provide for people who are rich to have a decrease in their taxes, and part of the drive to cut Medicare and to cut Medicaid and many other worthwhile programs is to generate still the funds to fund the tax increase. Probably the most devastating part of this effort to remake America is the part that focuses its guns on Medicare and Medicaid. That is a life and death matter. You are dealing with people's health and you are dealing with lives. We have large expenditures for Medicare, we have large expenditures for Medicaid, yes. I can think of no more noble expenditure of public funds than to expend those funds to promote the health of people or to save lives. In New York State, we have large expenditures of funds for Medicare and Medicaid. In fact, our State has been criticized for spending more on Medicaid than any other State in the Union. Yes, we do have those large expenditures. It costs the people of the State a great deal because they are matching, New York State matches the funds 50 percent, unlike other States that have a better match where the Federal Government pays a larger percentage than the State. The percentage paid for Medicaid in New York State is 50 percent. So we are spending large amounts of money like anywhere else in the country. We probably could trim the budget by eliminating waste, we could probably trim the budget by eliminating some corruption. Waste and corruption always exist in any program where human beings are involved. The minute you invent the program, the hustlers and the swindlers will move in and find a way to unjustly squeeze large amounts of money out of the program. Therefore, you have to have inspectors general and you have to have strict law enforcement, you have to have accountability. We just always assume that any program, and it does not matter whether it is health care or housing, in the private sector they have devices going all the time to protect the interests of the employers and the owners from their own employees. Stealing is one of the ongoing universal traits through the world of human beings. So Medicaid can be cut for corruption and for waste. Nobody wants Medicaid to operate more effectively and more efficiently than the constituents in my district. Since the beginning of Medicare and Medicaid, we have watched abuses and complained about abuses and sought to have the money directed as much as possible in providing health care and less in making doctors rich or in making health care facilities rich. It has been an ongoing struggle. There was a time when people worked strictly on charitable contributions. That was a painful situation where most people who needed health care had to go to an emergency room. Then we did move into a period where Medicaid was in operation and poor people who qualified through the means test for Medicaid could for the first time have the luxury of preventive health care. They could have a doctor, they could have a situation where they did not have to wait until they were half dead to go to the emergency room. But we saw the Medicaid mills develop. Medicaid mills were obvious facilities that were taking large amounts of money and giving poor service, and we complained about those for years, and we saw the waste and wondered if the system was not designed to guarantee that certain people would get rich. So there have been improvements in that. There are still further improvements that can be made. Now we have the HMO's, the health maintenance organizations. In many ways health maintenance organizations are a big improvement over Medicaid mills. Health maintenance organizations when they are operating properly and when they respect the patients and the community that they operate in are a great improvement over Medicaid mills, but if health maintenance organizations are to move in ways which try to give less service and make more money, then they become worse than the Medicaid mills and must be stopped. So we have a situation here where there is still a drive on to remake Medicare and to remake Medicaid. This second phase of the Republican majority's war to remake America does let up a little on Medicare, but it becomes worse for Medicaid than it was before. The Republican proposal for Medicare cuts funding $168 billion over the next 6 years. It continues to rely on the untested and potentially dangerous medical savings account, known as MSA. Medical savings accounts are the centerpiece of the Republican proposals for Medicare. The proposal would set up a system whereby the healthiest and the wealthiest seniors would leave the Medicare system and many of the doctors who treat them would refuse to continue treating other seniors who depend on Medicare. The proposal could truly end universal health care coverage for the elderly. In other words, Medicare is only about 30 years old and Medicare could be brought to its knees if you introduce medical savings accounts, because medical savings accounts would cover from 85 to 90 percent of the people who are healthy and who need very little health care. The insurance companies would move in and pick off those people, and the number of people in the Medicare system would drop so drastically and to such a low point until the funding of the Medicare system would fall apart. So the MSA is a direct threat, it is a gun aimed at the heart of the Medicare system. But that is being proposed again with great gusto. As you know, it is already in legislation that is moving through the House. The Senate and House have agreed and will soon send a bill to the President which might contain the MSA proposal. The MSA proposal has received few public hearings, very few people know about it. I am taking the time to talk about it here now because most people just know it as a set of initials. The MSA, as one respected columnist Robert J. Samuelson recently said in the Washington Post, quote, ``we should not unleash a health care upheaval simply as an afterthought. Clearly this proposal would cause serious harm to America's senior citizen population and it goes far beyond any change that the electorate wants.'' The people, the voters, the patients do not want MSA's. It will be a radical change in their health care and wipe out a system that they have come to depend on. Of course, finally, the Republican plan for Medicaid is even more extreme and it has a potential to cause as much or more harm than the Medicare package. Medicare is a basic program whereby the Federal Government helps States provide health care for the poorest and most vulnerable people in our Nation. This budget proposes to cut Federal Medicaid funding by $72 billion. To make matters worse, the Republican proposal allows the States to drain large amounts of money out of the system by significantly reducing the requirement that the States have a maintenance of effort. At the same time it allows a return to the State financing gimmicks of the past that were banned in 1992 at the urging of the Bush administration. The majority's plan will send a loosely defined block grant back to the States without the current guarantees of care for low-income children, pregnant women, disabled people or senior citizens. By relying heavily on the Republican Governors for the design of their new Medicaid package, the Republican Congress has proposed a program that allows States to reduce their financial commitment to the program without any guarantee that poor people and seniors will have the necessary care. The Republican plan abolishes the current entitlement for individuals. Entitlement. Remember the word ``entitlement.'' There is probably no more noble concept in government than entitlement. Sometimes it is abused but when you have entitlements for means-tested cases, means-tested entitlements, means-tested entitlements, it means that you have to prove and show that you are poor, that you are in need in order to be able to qualify for the entitlement. We have some entitlements that are not means-tested. The agricultural entitlements are not means-tested. You can be a millionaire and still get agricultural subsidies. The biggest socialist program in America, the most socialist program that continues to exist and over the next 7 years will still be with us, is the agricultural subsidy program. It has many different facets. Agricultural subsidies for various reasons, there are Farmers Home Loan Mortgages, there are many, many different ways in which socialism and agriculture takes care of people who have a great deal of money. In fact, in Montana I point out, in Montana, the Freemen out there, the siege that is going on now, those people are people who receive large amounts of money. They are led by a person who received up to $800,000 in Federal loans and subsidies, and he does not want to pay it back. They reached the point where they felt they had the right to keep it and the right to not be held accountable for paying it back. Their property was taken, so they are in a revolutionary mode now. They have guns and are ready to fight because the subsidy, the socialism in agriculture has thoroughly corrupted them to the point where they have lost their perspective completely. So the loss of the entitlement, benefits defined by the State, when you lose the entitlement, the Federal Government no longer stands behind the guarantee of health care to everybody who needs it and if you meet the means test, you lose the entitlement, the block grant goes to the State, the State has a finite, set amount of money in their budget, when they spend that amount of money, then the people who are in need after that will not get any help. The States will also define the benefits that continue to go to some groups that are covered by Medicaid. States will not have to provide health care to certain people that are covered right now. Children in poverty will not be fully covered because the Republican proposal, the scorched earth proposal goes after the health care of children between the ages of 13 and 18. Children ages 13 to 18 living in poverty would lose their Medicaid coverage because they are not on the list of people that the Federal legislation would require the States to serve. So a State could cut that out if it wants to. Disabled persons, people with disabilities. The States would be in a position to define who has a disability and who does not have a disability. It is unlikely they would cover all of the 6 million disabled persons who now are receiving Medicaid. Six million disabled people in this country, people with disabilities, are receiving Medicaid now. The likelihood is that if the States are able to define who has a disability and who does not have a disability, most of these people would lose their coverage. Again there is the low- income Medicare beneficiary, people who do not qualify for welfare who are covered in some States, and they will lose their coverage also if you give the Medicaid total over to the States. That is the worst feature, the Medicaid assault. The assault on Medicaid is probably the single worst feature of the Republican majority budget. The assault on Medicaid is a life and death issue. The assault on Medicaid is worthy of a long discussion. The assault on Medicaid is worthy of a mobilization of people all across the Nation. We have a great deal to lose. Medicaid is as close as we have gotten to universal health care. Medicaid, which provides health care to everybody who needs it, who is poor and can pass the means test, Medicaid is as close to universal health care as we have gotten in this country. We are the only industrialized country other than South Africa that does not have universal health care in one form or another. So we are about to lose that. I am particularly concerned about it because in New York City, it seems that the extremist forces are out ahead of the Republican majority here in Congress. The Republican majority here in Congress have been thwarted in their efforts to end the Medicaid entitlement. They have been thwarted in their efforts to take steps that would reverse the quality of care in nursing homes. But we have a Republican Governor who has moved on nursing homes and tried to suspend the regulations, a Republican Governor who is threatening to change the way hospitals are funded for indigent persons, to take away that funding altogether if they do not agree to some new proposals that he had made. We have a Republican Governor who has proposed to close down one of the hospitals in my district, Kings Borough Psychiatric Center. Kings Borough Psychiatric Center is the only psychiatric center in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is a borough which has 2.5 million people; 2.5 million people is enough to need a psychiatric center with 500 beds. It has been there for 100 years. But now they are proposing to close down Kings Borough Center. The juggernaut in New York, the Wehrmacht in New York, the scorched earth policy in New York is moving faster than the policies here at the Federal level. The mayor is proposing to sell certain hospitals. The mayor is proposing to lease certain hospitals. A notice was just issued day before yesterday that 1,600 hospital workers will be laid off immediately between now and the middle of June and between now and January 1, 8,000 hospital workers will be laid off in New York City. This is radical, this is extreme, this is a life and death matter. Not only will patients die as a result of the extreme changes within the hospitals, but there some people employed in these hospitals who are earning basic pay as janitors, as cleaners, as maids, some people who are technicians. There are large numbers of people who will be out of work as a result of this reduction in the service for health care. Health care is a service, first of all, and that is its most important function. But health care is also an industry. It is one of the most noble industries mankind has ever created, and it does provide jobs. So we have a situation where we are moving in an extreme manner and in a year's period 8,000 people will be thrown out of work and the work that they do in the hospitals will be dislocated and confused, and people will literally die as a result. War has been declared on the health care system of the people of New York city. War has been declared by the Governor. War has been declared by the mayor. The war in New York State and the war in New York City is very much interrelated with the war that has been declared here in Washington. In fact, the war began here. The move is here, once the proposals by the Clinton administration in the 103d Congress went down the drain. Those proposals were good proposals, idealistic proposals, and proposals which were complicated because of the fact that they reached out toward the goal of universal health care. We can come with legislation that is much simpler an we can, in incremental steps, probably improve the health care system. But if we want to reach the goal of universal care, universal health care for everybody, it requires a complicated system. It requires something which is very unusual and calls on our present system to be restructured. That is what the Clinton administration program required. It was the proper approach in terms of setting the goal and seeking the goal of universal health care. The fact that the complications led to a political problem does not diminish the validity of the Clinton health care proposals. Now we are without that national goal and without that national guidance, and we are in a situation now where we have a stampede on to restructure and to reengineer the health care system. In a place like New York, we are talking about nearly 8 million people, health care for nearly 8 million people, so it is a very tempting target. The stampede on now is a stampede toward privatization. It is a stampede that begins with the ideas that there is a lot of money to be made if they create a health care-industrial complex. A government health care-industrial complex means that the private sector will own it, the private sector will run it, but the funding for it will still come out of the taxpayers' pockets. Just as the funding for the military-industrial complex comes out of the taxpayers' pockets but is run by private enterprise, and great amounts of money are made out of it, now we have a foolproof system that will go on forever. The health care-industrial complex is not like the military-industrial complex. It will be here forever, and we then do not have to worry about never having a justification for it. The military-industrial complex has done well long after it is needed at the level it is needed. it is still here. We needed a military- industrial complex to win World War II, and we needed a military- industrial complex at a certain level to fight the cold war and to maintain the security of the free world. All that was necessary, but we have not needed the extremes in spending that we have, and we certainly do not need to justify adding $13 billion more to the existing defense budget. That is a victory of the military-industrial complex. Its power exceeds its usefulness, but that is one of those complexes and we are governed by many different complexes in this country. Complexes have a great impact on our policies. We have a banking-industrial complex that really is the biggest swindle of all. The banking-industrial complex pulled off the savings and loan swindle and that may cost the American people, before it is over, about a half trillion dollars to bail out the savings and loans and the other banks. There were other banks also, not savings and loans, but banks that went bankrupt. We are going to be out a half a trillion dollars by the time the Resolution Trust Corporation and all the mechanisms that were set up and designed to do this are finished. So we have a health care complex now, health care-industrial complex. Large insurance companies, large pharmaceutical companies buy HMO's. HMO's are health maintenance organizations. They are not evil automatically. They are not inherently evil. In fact, the Health Insurance Program of New York, called HIP, has been in existence for half a century. It was a great step forward in health care. HIP still exists, but HIP was a non-profit-making enterprise. It is not designed to make a profit. Although they make surpluses and they have probably been taken care of very well, it was not designed to make profits, and it has worked very well. We can have profitmaking HMO's also, and that has been proven in some places. They make profits and they also give good service. There are communities which insist that they are going to get good service or else they are going to get rid of the HMO's, so they have good service. But in big cities and communities like the majority of the communities that my district covers, there is an attempt being made to come in and stampede the situation and restructure, reengineer the health care system for the benefit of the big HMO's, and the insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies are going to stand behind them. They are not listening to doctors. They are not listening to hospital administrations. They are definitely not listening to community leaders. They are very seldom listening to elected officials. We need to reestablish the dialog, and the only way we can get that dialog is by confronting them with a situation which brings to a halt the grand design to redesign our health care system. So we have the mayor proposing to sell one of the hospitals in my district; the Governor proposing to close down another one; the layoffs of thousands of people taking place; and all this is happening very rapidly, and in the meantime the shadow of the Medicaid entitlement being taken away looms over our head. The Medicaid entitlement will be converted to a block grant automatically. Right away there is a reduction in the amount of funds available for Medicaid because the proposal is not just to give the State what it now gets but to cut the amount of money. The State will have the power then to cut the benefits. So we will have several rapid shocks to the health care system all at once. For this reason, this Sunday, we are mobilizing all over the city. Not just in my district but all over the city there are demonstrations at hospitals called Hospital Support Sunday. Churches are leading their congregations to hospitals that are threatened and they are having rallies to send a message to the mayor and to the Governor that we are the people, the health care system is for us, those of us who are patients and those of us who are alive and will someday probably become patients. We want a voice in the restructuring. We do not want the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies and the HMO's to restructure our health care for their benefit. We could like to have a voice in the restructuring of the system for the benefit of all the people. We have three demands. One is that they freeze the situation as it is now. Do not have any more sales of hospitals. Do not try to lease hospitals. Stop downsizing and streamlining, cutting the budget so that the hospitals are not able to function properly. If they cannot function properly, people stop coming, and then they use the fact that their number of patients is declining as a justification for cutting the staff. It is a vicious game that is being played with our health care system and we want it to come to an end. We want the assault on our health care system as part of the war we make in America to come to a halt. Maybe we can make a deal. In every war, no matter how vicious the war may be or how ambitious the maniacs are who drive the war, they do make some arrangements. As bad as the Third Reich was under Hitler, they did not attack Switzerland. For various reasons they never attacked Switzerland. As bad as they were, they did not go on to attack Sweden. They did grab little Norway because it was in the way in terms of their own strategies. They did terrible things but there were some places where even the vicious Nazis did not cross the line. Maybe we can have a deal with the people who are trying to remake America and a Speaker who declares that politics is war without blood. Perhaps we can have a safe haven out there in health care, put it off the invasion map, take it away as a target and let us not do terrible things that our grandchildren might spit on our graves as a result of hearing about. Let us not destroy the health care system for the elderly, which may throw people out on the streets. Because in Medicaid two-thirds of the money from Medicaid goes to nursing homes. One-third goes to poor families, and they are important, too, but two-thirds goes to nursing homes. Many people in those nursing homes are people who were middle-class people, who had some means before they got ill and lost their jobs and lost their faculties and for various reasons became impoverished. Once they become impoverished then Medicaid is all there is left to take care of them. Take away Medicaid and they are literally in the streets. So we do not want to hastily, in the process of remaking America, do things that would end up being counted as atrocities sometime in the future as people look back. We do not want to do thing that in the process of trying to justify them we would take ourselves into some kind of immoral era similar to the Nazi era. People with disabilities in Nazi Germany became people who ought to be destroyed, and it is to the credit of the German people that they would not consent to euthanasia as long as they knew about it. But when they singled out a particular ethnic group, they did go on and try to destroy a whole ethnic group. The seeds were sewn. Human beings or nations should never begin to think in certain directions. Human beings and nations ought to automatically want to structure systems that provide for the preservation of life. To be pro- life in the most profound sense is to try to preserve the health care system; to try to see to it that at least every person has an opportunity to maintain good health and to benefit from the modern life-saving devices, and to in some way know that we care about them that far. We cannot guarantee them an income, we cannot guarantee them a lot of things, but let us put the health care system into a safe haven status and say we are going to try to guarantee that decent health care is provided for everybody. We are going to try to guarantee that systems are maintained. We want to streamline them, make them more efficient, eliminate the waste and corruption, but we are going to maintain systems that are adequate. We cannot maintain adequate systems if overnight we are going to make a decision to close hospitals in a big city like New York. The closing of the hospitals has not been discussed by the doctors and the administrators, it has only been discussed behind closed doors by politicians who want to make a score and save money over a short period of time. So that kind of restructuring is going to be a scorched earth kind of restructuring where people's lives will not matter. We will not stand by idly and watch this kind of restructuring of our health care system in New York City. I hope that the rest of Americans understand that we are at a critical point and they too must get out take a look at what is happening, who is making what plans about their health care system, who is making what plans about how many hospitals we are going to have in a given area, and about the nature of those hospitals. A burn unit cannot be maintained by an HMO. A burn unit needs a large population to support. A burn unit needs to exist within the structure of a hospital. MRI's are very expensive and cannot be maintained in some doctor's office or some clinic cannot maintain an MRI. If the hospital goes, then we have a situation where the justification and the rationale for a number of other services that are based on a density of population will no longer be there. So we must fight to keep hospitals, or at least to have people sit down at the table and give us the blueprint; show us how they will maintain the quality of services, if they are going to restructure and eliminate certain hospitals or certain aspects of the current health care. Now, we have the analogy of politics as war without blood. In every war monumental mistakes are made. The nature of war is such that it is going to grind down and eat up, chew up, and abuse large numbers of people because it is an emergency and we cannot set our own scenarios. We have to react to the enemy. There are a number of things in the nature of war. That is why the analogy that politics is war without blood is a bad analogy. We should not have to move in an atmosphere of war. We should not have to rally to meet a crisis that does not need to be created. Health care could be kept at some kind of rationale level. Health care should be kept off the table. Yes, eventually, HMO's, profit making HMO's, may make money in health care. Eventually Wall Street may have stocks in the health care industry do very well. But let us try to do that and make capitalism and the profit motive work for the benefit of the people. Let us not allow the situation to get totally out of hand and a scorched earth policy to leave us with ruins in our health care system. Once we close a hospital, reopening it is almost impossible. Once we close down certain kinds of facilities, we cannot bring them back. And we must force those who are in place of decision-making and power to stop, listen, and negotiate. Our demands in New York City are three basic demands. Freeze the situation. Do not go any further. Disclose your plans. Let us see what is happening. And they negotiate. And this is a pattern that I offer to the rest of the country. It is your health care. This invasion plan will roll right over you unless you rally and guarantee that you are respecting and that your health care does not become cannon fodder in this so-called war to remake America.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, this fiscal year 1997 budget of the Republican majority continues the same extremism of the fiscal year 1996 budget. American people have rejected that extremism, but it goes on and on. It is an assault on the majority of the American people, starting with the poorest people who need Government most. The children, the elderly and the people with disabilities are attacked first. The Medicaid entitlement, the removal of the Medicaid entitlement, is the thrust of that attack, which is most dangerous. Are we going to take away the possibility of life itself from many people? The Medicaid entitlement, means-tested Medicaid entitlement, is probably one of the most noble actions of our Government. As my colleagues know, it is a prolife action in the most profound sense of the concept of prolife. It is for all life. But by taking away the Medicaid entitlement, we are going to condemn people to a situation where the funds will not be there to preserve life when it is needed. We are taking a step backward from the possibility of ever realizing universal health care. This is a step forward toward decentralized genocide. By giving it out to the States, by having the States with less money try to meet these needs, we are going to ratchet down the benefits and make more and more people suffer and more and more people will die, and eventually we are going to get into a situation where there is a whole class of people which we are throwing overboard, a whole class of people for which life itself has no meaning, the Government will not help to preserve it, and that kind of step is what this extremist budget takes us into. Medicaid entitlement must be preserved.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, this week we will end it with the celebration of Mother's Day on Sunday. I think it has been a bad week for mothers and a bad week for families and a bad week for children. We had a Republican housing bill which passed, which greatly reduced the participation of the Federal Government in the provision of housing for the poorest people in America; bad for families, bad for children, bad for mothers. One of the highlights of the debate on this bill was the offering of an amendment which would have just kept the present provision in the bill which says that no family should be made to pay more than 30 percent of their income for rent in public housing. No family should be made to pay more than 30 percent. That was removed by the Republican majority, and the amendment which was attempting to put that back into the legislation was voted down by the Republican majority. It means it was telling poor families in America that you should pay more than 30 percent, be prepared. But no Member of Congress pays more than 30 percent of their income for housing, I assure you. Very few people in America pay 30 percent or more of their income for housing. That is not the way budgets for families are constructed. Yet we are saying that poor people should pay more than 30 percent. So it was not a good action to benefit families and mothers. Next week we are looking at a situation we are going to be voting on the defense authorization. We are told that $13 billion is being added to the defense budget; $13 billion being added. How is that going to benefit families and children and mothers in America? Beyond that, we have no hope next week of voting for the increase in the minimum wage. The increase in the minimum wage calls for a mere 45- cent increase in 1 year and a 45-cent increase the next year, a total over a 2-year period of an increase of 90 cents, which would bring the minimum wage up to $5.15 per hour. Mr. Speaker, that would be good for families, families that are at the very bottom who are working, who find that, although they are working, they cannot make ends meet, cannot live on $4.25 an hour, which is the present minimum wage. So we would do a great deal for families, for mothers and children, if we were to move next week to pass an increase in the minimum wage. But that is not on the horizon. What we are going to do instead is pass a bill to increase the defense budget by $13 billion. The authorization to increase the defense budget is for $13 billion additional. Next week we will probably have the Republican budget on the floor, and of course the Republican budget will be passed because the Republican majority has the numbers to pass it. The Republican majority this year, this fiscal year, has already cut $23 billion out of the budget. That $23 billion, a large part of those cuts were in housing, and many of the cuts were in job training. Activities and programs that are very needed, very much needed by the American people in general and certainly by families, by mothers and children, and yet they were cut. In this coming Republican budget we can expect more of the same kinds of cuts. In fact, the cuts in Medicaid and Medicare are back on the table. It was a retreat from those, but they are back on the table. So there will be an even larger cut in this year's budget than we had last year; $23 billion was just a beginning. More important for families and for children is the fact that we are going to have in the next 10 or 15 days the Medicaid entitlement on the chopping block. Medicaid entitlement means that Medicaid, which had only existed for a little more than 30 years, it was part of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program, created a little more than 30 years ago. The Medicaid entitlement says that, if you are poor, if you can pass a means test which shows your family is poor, then you are entitled to Medicaid, which is federally funded. The Federal Government will make certain that you get the aid you need in order to take care of your health needs. Now, that is an entitlement. It means that no matter how many people are in need in a given year, the Federal Government stands behind the process by which they shall be taken care of. They have a right to the care, and the Government will provide the Federal share of the dollars. That entitlement now is being threatened. The Governors, both Democratic and Republican, have voted that they would like to have the Medicaid entitlement removed, not have the Federal Government stand behind the provision of health care for poor people. The States will instead take care of it on a finite basis. No entitlement. That means that there will be a certain amount of money available, and all of the people who get sick after the money is spent will not be taken care of. The entitlement is gone. Mr. Speaker, the entitlement for nursing home care will be gone because two-thirds of Medicaid money goes to finance care for people in nursing homes. Two-thirds. Only one-third goes to poor families. Two- thirds goes to people in nursing homes. So that is threatened. That will be removed. That is not good for families, not good for mothers, not good for children. In fact, the movement of the Medicaid entitlement will mean a first step toward genocide, in my opinion. We are going to give it to the States. That means it will be decentralized genocide, a first step toward decentralized genocide. I will talk more about that later. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about all of those items, but let me just talk about a few things that are nice that happened this week. National Library Week was this week, and it was an occasion where the libraries celebrated 50 years of the Washington office of the American Library Association. They were quite happy that the Federal Government has given anything to libraries. We had a banquet where they were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the American Library Association, Washington office, and they honored some Members of Congress who had helped with libraries over the years. As I sat there and listened to the celebration, it occurred to me that never have so many applauded so lustily for so little. Never have so many applauded so lustily for so little. The Federal Government has done very little for libraries over the years. Over the 50-year history of the national ALA Washington office, they have received very little help from the Federal Government relatively speaking. In fact we have a bill which is pending now in the Senate which will authorize $150 million in aid to libraries; $50 million is what the Senate has, and I think the House of Representatives has $110 million. There is some kind of talk there will be agreement whereby the higher figure may be accepted, and we will have $150 million in aid to libraries. Well, that is down from where it was just 5 years ago. At one point we got as high as $217 million. Aid to libraries has gone down instead of up. This has happened at a time when we are talking about the need to increase our level of education for families and for children. So it is good that National Library Week took place. It is good the librarians are happy and celebrating the fact that we have gotten an agreement almost to maintain the level of Federal funding for libraries at $150 million a year. The authorization now will go down. The authorization was open-ended, but now the authorization will set a ceiling that no more than $150 million will be available to all of the thousands of libraries across America who need some kind of assistance. Of course, State and local governments provide most of the money for libraries, but that is the way it is. Why should it be that way if education is a national concern and our national security is dependent on education? Then you would think libraries would be getting far more than they get now in terms of aid from the Federal Government. Libraries are the biggest bargain the Government has for the millions of people served. The dollars, which are pennies per person, are quite great indeed. So the value of what we spend for libraries is unexcelled in any other area of expenditures in education. But that was a mixed blessing. I am not happy with what the Federal Government has done in this critical area, but we celebrated. We also had a mixed victory in terms of people with disabilities. I spoke last week about the fact that the bill which provides aid to children with disabilities, it is called IDEA, Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, that act is what is in existence right now, they are trying to replace it with another act, which would be a new authorization, and they are chipping away, I said, at the Federal Government's commitment to children with disabilities. There are many ways in which the Federal Government in that legislation would reduce its level of commitment. I am happy to report that the committee I serve on, the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, postponed the markup. The markup was to take place on Wednesday, the 8th, and now it has been postponed. And one of the reasons it was postponed is because the numerous groups that are concerned and involved with trying to help improve this legislation have all indicated that I was correct; that when they looked at the bill closely there was a withdrawal of the Federal commitment in a very basic way. For years, the Federal Government has committed itself to picking up the cost of the excess, part of the cost of the excess. It costs a certain amount to educate a child in a school system. And whatever the additional cost was to educate a child because they had disabilities, that cost went up. The authorization language was that it would pick up 40 percent of the excess cost; 40 percent. Now, we have never actually appropriated enough money to reach the goal of 40 percent of the excess cost, but we did get up to 7 percent; 7 percent. In the new legislation that was being proposed we were backing away from that commitment and zero percent was committed. We thought that was a big step backward, and I am glad to hear that we have postponed the markup. That is good news for mothers, it is good news for children. There was also good news occurring today. We have in the Capitol a rally of thousands of nurses. Nurses have come because they feel they are shut out of the whole process by which health care is being reengineered. Health care in America, the system, is undergoing some revolutionary changes. The biggest change relates to the health maintenance organizations, health maintenance organizations which will be providing service to people on a per capita basis. They will have each individual family pay a certain amount of money and they will provide service for that individual, for that family, for a year on the basis of that per capita amount. They are changing the way health care is provided because with the dollar figure placed on each family, the incentive for the HMO is to try to keep the cost of the health care down. That is a laudable goal. We do not want to spend any more for health care than we have to spend. But we find excesses have started to develop where HMO's, given no kind of regulatory controls, have been pushing the quality of health care steadily downward because they want to keep the costs down. That has resulted in legislative action in many States. Some States have said we cannot push a mother with a baby out of a hospital after 24 hours. HMO's have started to do that. The HMO's have been saying 24 hours is enough if a woman has a baby in a hospital; she has to go. So some States have said, no, it is 48 hours. It used to be the doctors and the nurses and the people taking care of the mother who had the child that made the judgment as to when that mother could go safely home with the child. So here is something that gets to the heart of what Mother's Day is all about. The nurses are here to say that that kind of activity, either by hospitals or by health maintenance organizations, endangers the quality of life of the child and the mother. They are here to say that as nurses they want the opportunity to be able, as professionals, to say when wrong decisions are being made about the care of patients. Nurses are our experts on the front line in health care. They see more of patients than doctors. Nurses are closer to the situation. They read the vital signals on a day-to-day basis. When we are in the hospital we see more of nurses than we see of doctors. When young children come into the world, most children are born in hospitals in this country, nurses are one of the first experiences they will encounter, even if they do not realize it. And often, of course, if we are fortunate to live a long life, as we live longer and life becomes more complicated in terms of physical maintenance, we are going to spend more time in hospitals. And nurses, at the end of our lives, are probably going to be one of the last set of people that we have experiences with. So I want to congratulate and thank the nurses who have come today to Washington by the thousands and say that they are very much a part of what Mother's Day is all about. Many of them may be individual mothers, of course, and we certainly applaud that, but certainly in terms of keeping mothers together at a very critical time in their lives, taking care of infants at a very critical time of their lives, nurses are very much on the front line. It is Mother's Day, and I hope that on Sunday, as we reflect on Mother's Day, we will stop and think about what the Nation is doing for mothers and what the Nation is doing for children, what the Nation is doing for families. Among Members of Congress there is a lot of rhetoric this year about family values. Everybody talks about family values. And when one hears the dialog, we think that family values are all about whether or not children will be allowed to see pornography on the Internet or whether we will take a stronger step about getting pornography off the TV sets or getting violence off the TV sets. I think that is important. We should get rid of pornography and violence. Certainly violence is pervasive on our TV sets. Our children see hundreds and hundreds of murders. By the time a child reaches high school, they have seen thousands of murders on TV. So we should deal with that, and that is part of what family values are all about. I am certainly not criticizing that. But it is just a tiny part of what support for family values has to be all about. Support for family values and support for families ought to be about so much more. It ought to be about food, clothing, shelter, providing educational opportunity. It ought to be about providing jobs that have wages that are large enough, wages that are high enough to guarantee that when people work they earn enough money to make a living. But in celebration of Mother's Day, I just want to digress for a moment and say that in March 1990, when we had a day care bill before us and the talk about mothers and children and what the Federal role should be in trying to guarantee that poor mothers who go to work have an opportunity to have their children get day care coverage, it was a long debate. During that debate I got very angry about the way the Members of the House were dragging their feet. Indeed, Members of both Houses were dragging their feet on a concrete answer to the problem of day care for working mothers, poor working mothers. I wrote a rap poem because I was very impressed at that time by the fact that rap poems had become, rap music had become very popular. I was not happy with the kind of content that the rap music had, what they were saying, the substance of rap music was not impressive. But I was impressed with the possibility of rap as an art form. I was impressed with the possibility of rap as a poetry form, a literary form. I still am an exponent of rap as a literary form that ought to be developed. I think that like the sonnet, it has a lot of potential for expressing strong feelings. The first rap that I wrote and put into the Congressional Record was called ``Let the Mothers Lead the Fight.'' It is all about the fight for mothers to get public policies which are conducive to the improvement of the quality of life for families. At that particular time it was day care. There are many others that, many other public policies that do relate to families. I dedicated this rap poem to Marian Wright Edelman, because Marian Wright Edelman at that time was very much in the middle of a fight to get better day care for families, for poor families. Marian Wright Edelman, as you know, is the head of the Children's Defense Fund. The Children's Defense Fund is going to have a stand for children here in Washington on June 1. And the same issues that we were discussing, in March 1990, are very much on the agenda today in May of 1996. In fact, the situation is more serious now because we did not have a threat of Medicaid being taken away in 1990. Now Medicaid may be taken away from families in 1996. So I think the rap poem is appropriate. I will read it again here. I will read it for the first time on the floor because the first time I just submitted it into the Record. It is called ``Let the Mothers Lead the Fight.'' I dedicate this to all the mothers on Mother's Day. It is very significant that when I first put this in the Record, a local newspaper in my district ran the poem on the front page of the newspaper that weekend just before Mother's Day. So I want to note that it is not the first time that it has been pulled from the pages of the Congressional Record. We did have it run in one of our local weekly newspapers back in 1990: Let the mothers lead the fight- Sisters snatch the future from the night Dangerous dumb males have made a mess on the right Macho mad egos on the left swollen out of sight Let the mothers lead the fight! Drop the linen-throw away the lace Stop the murder-sweep out the arms race Let the mothers lead the fight: Use your broom Sweep out the doom Don't fear the mouse Break out of the house- Rats are ruining the world! Let the mothers lead the fight! Fat cats want to buy your soul Saving the children is the mothers role: Cook up some cool calculations Look up some new recipes Lock the generals tight down in the deep freeze. Let the mothers lead the fight! Human history is a long ugly tale Tragedy guided by the frail monster male: Babies bashed with blind bayonets Daughters trapped in slimy lust nets, Across time hear our loud terrified wail- Holocaust happens when the silly males fail. Let the mothers lead the fight! Snatch the future back from the night Storm the conference rooms with our rage Focus X-rays on the Washington stage. The world is being ruined by rats! Rescue is in the hands of the cats: Scratch out their lies Put pins in smug rat eyes Hate the fakes Burn rhetoric at the stakes Enough of this endless selfish night Let the mothers lead the fight! Holocaust happens when the silly males fail! March now to end this long ugly tale Let the mothers lead the fight! Stand up now to the frail monster male! Let the mothers lead the fight: Snatch the future back from the night! Let the mothers lead the fight? I was told later on that that is a little too angry. It is a little too anti-male. It is a little too hostile, but that was in March of 1990. That was before the attack on Aid to Families with Dependent Children. We are almost certain to end Aid to Families with Dependent Children as a Federal program as an entitlement. That is almost certain. I am not even going to bring up, get up anybody's hopes that we can hold on to that. What we are fighting now is to hold on to the entitlement for Medicare, something which mothers and families, children cannot survive without. Poor families need Medicaid. If the mothers do not lead the fight, it appears that the silly males who are in control of policies and power are going to move to take away the Medicaid entitlement. That is going to be a first step toward what I call decentralized genocide. The nurses were here today, the nurses were here to talk about health care. The nurses were here to talk about the fact that there is a health care industrial complex that is being developed. What do I mean by that when I say a health care industrial complex? I mean that health care instead of being primarily a service is going to be primarily an industry, a vehicle for making profits. Health care has always been an industry, a service and an industry, a very vital service, but it is an industry. It employs people. Income is earned. Capital is made, is required to build hospitals. All kind of auxiliary companies feed in, the laboratories and the companies that build health care machinery, the drug companies that do the research and earn tremendous amounts of money on the drugs that they develop. It is an industry. It has always been an industry. There is nothing wrong with it being an industry. It is an industry that large amounts of public funds are put into. Taxpayers money goes into the health care industry. I have said many times, I can think of no more noble way to spend taxpayer money on than to spend it on helping people to stay healthy and helping people who are already ill, helping people who are elderly, who need nursing home care. There is no more noble way to expend Federal dollars than in the health care industry. The problem now is that the health care is becoming too much of an industry, more industry than service, whereas service was a primary goal before. And the patient and the people and the health care was first. Now the industry goal of profits, how much money can we make, has become the most important goal. Large insurance companies are buying health maintenance organizations. Pharmaceutical companies are buying health maintenance organizations. The stock market has health maintenance organizations on the stock market. There is a great deal of pressure on every stock market company to produce profits. You have to produce more and more and higher and higher profits. Where are the profits going to come from? The profits have to come out of giving less care to patients because in many cases these health care maintenance, these health maintenance organizations are being funded by government, the Federal, State and local governments, or they are being funded by industry that wants a lower cost. The industry wants to spend less money on health care. The government wants to spend less money on health care, and you cannot get profits by raising the price that you charge industry or government. The only way you can make money and increase your profits in health care is to decrease the kind of service you provide to the patient. Well, that is not exactly true. You might get rid of some waste. There may be waste in the way service is provided. Too many people may be doing the same kinds of things. There may be waste in the amount of money you pay for equipment or waste in the amount of money you pay for drugs. It is possible that you can legitimately save money and increase profits. But we see too many examples where the easiest course of action by the health maintenance organizations has been to decrease service. That is the easiest way to make the greatest amount of profit. I am not here to lead a charge against health maintenance organizations. I am not here to try to cover up the fact that in my community, many of my communities, poor communities, Brownsville, East New York, Bedford Stuyvesant, parts of Crown Heights and Brooklyn, New York, people have suffered for years without HMOs being there. The Medicaid mills and the abuses of doctors who were taking exorbitant fees and giving little service, health care has always been a problem. So health care may be improved through health maintenance organizations. It is possible. I am not going to be dogmatic enough that health maintenance organizations represent some kind of evil that ought to be stopped. No. The argument here is that as you reengineer the health care system, as you restructure it, then do not just restructure it to maximize profits. Restructure it to give better health care. And in the process of restructuring it, include the nurses in the dialogue. Let the nurses give us advice as to how we can restructure health care to make it more effective and at the same time less costly. When you restructure health care, let the patients be involved. When you restructure health care, by all means, do not push the doctors out on the fringes. There are doctors organizations, medical organizations of doctors complaining about the fact that their decisionmaking powers have been taken away, that they are second-guessed by people who are accountants, that accountants are now running the show who never went to medical school, many of them who did not take a biology course in high school. But they are looking at the costs, and they want to know how badly were people bleeding when they went to the emergency room. If they are not bleeding so many liters, then do not give them emergency care. Send them home. Reductio ad absurdum, absurd situations like that are almost occurring where people are being told in the emergency room, you have to call your HMO, check with them. And if they say we cannot give you emergency care, then you have to go home. We cannot deal with it. A doctor on the scene in the emergency room to be able to make the judgment, does this person need emergency care or not, and a health maintenance organization should be required, mandated to follow through on the doctor's decision that a person needs the health care. So we are into a situation now where the most intimate kind of thing that affects families, that affects children, that affects mothers, their health care, the most intimate kind of care is now a matter of public policy. Public policy has to defend the patients and defend the mothers and defend the children from the possibility that they will be abused by people who are trying to maximize profits. That is the kind of situation we find ourselves in. Mother's Day, this Sunday, has to be a day of reflection on what is happening in health care, about health care in America. Mother's Day has to be a day where you deal with some of the issues that I have raised in a piece of legislation that I am drafting which got called the Patient and Health Care Professional Protection Act. Mother's Day has to be a concern of some of the activities that are taking place around the country other than here in Washington. In New York, on next Sunday, May 19, there is going to be rallies at 5 different hospitals to deal with health care. It is called Hospital Support Sunday. On May 19, in New York, there will be in each one of the 5 boroughs people of all walks of life getting together to come out to show their support for maintaining proper care at the hospitals. New York, we have threatened hospitals that may be closed. Hospitals may be sold. Hospitals may be leased. A number of problems are being generated by the fact that they are trying to make maximum profits off of hospitals and set up a situation where they can maximize the amount of money being paid off the patients. So in unison with nurses and doctors, people will be coming out on May 19 at 5 different hospital sites to let it be known that the people care about health care. In this bill that I have, we have 2 major sections. One is to protect the rights of the health care consumer, the patient. It establishes a Federal mechanism for the emergency investigation of the most egregious cases involving death or life-threatening situations. We have situations now where the Federal Government does investigate and survey hospitals. They have come up with reports on the death rate at hospitals that are receiving Medicare and Medicaid funds. But that is after the fact. It is a survey, a study undertaken, sometimes years after the deaths have occurred because they are looking at statistics and how many people in a given area, people in the health care, the heart care surgery section or people who are suffering from asthma, how many deaths in those categories are recorded on the records of the hospital. They have come up with a pattern. That has been very useful in determining that some hospitals have patterns of improper care. But it has not been useful in dealing with emergency situations that might save some lives by stopping immediately practices which are dangerous. So a mechanism would be built in here to do that. We also outlaw what is called the gag order. There are contracts being forced on nurses now where the nurses have to sign a gag order which says you cannot discuss the care being given in this hospital with anybody outside the hospital, you cannot discuss it even with the patient's family. So that is a process that is ongoing that nurses have to deal with. They are taking care of people, they see things happening not good for the patient, they see things happening that may endanger the patient, but they cannot talk to the family about it. They cannot complain to anybody else about it. It mandates that the gag order of this kind will no longer be there; the Federal Government will make that illegal. My legislation mandates that there must be a compilation of uniform national patient outcome data collection and analysis to make sure that patients are taken care of, are systematically receiving quality care based on sound evidence. That is a systematic analysis of what happens when patients go to hospitals: Do they have to come back for the same treatment? Do they get infected while they were in the hospital? What pattern is there in this hospital which relates to the patient outcome, directly related to the patient? Hospitals often evaluate it now based on what kind of machinery do they have or what kind of procedures do they undertake, or what are the qualifications of the medical staff; but not on a basic activity like what is happening with the patients. So there are other mechanisms also which deal with patients. Most important of all, I insist in this legislation that we create an office of consumer advocacy for health at the State level, and then we insist that there be independent patient advisory committees created at the level of the HMO. That is, every health maintenance organization would have a percentage of its funds paid into a statewide fund that is used to fund health advisory organizations, patient advisory organizations, that would be run by patient groups, a certain percentage. I put in 1 percent; 1 percent of the gross spent on health care should be set aside so that patient advocacy, patient advisory organizations can be funded on a regular basis. Yes, there will be relief and appeal mechanisms built in. But unless you have the opportunity for patients to organize and have their own group process, they will have no chance against the establishment, medical care establishment, when they have a grievance. So we want patients to have the same kind of activities, mechanism to defend themselves. And then, of course, we are protecting the health care professionals against any further harassments by having a mechanism for developing nationwide guidelines established. We want to prohibit the discharge and the demotion or harassment of any nurse, doctor, or any other health care professional who assists in an investigation of the hospital or of his or her employer. We want to guarantee compensation for victims of whistleblower retaliations. We have a whistleblower program for people to inform about abuses in Medicare, waste and corruption in Medicare, but we do not have whistleblower mechanisms which inform about abuses of patients. Nurses need to be protected and compensated if there are retaliations when they report these kinds of abuses. This is just a brief summary. I do not want to go into details here because I think it is very important to note there is a political process that is beginning. The patients and the nurses, the doctors, all the people who really care about health care more than they care about profits, they outnumber the people who want to make money. So they have a political advantage in our democracy. And what they need to understand is that this is going to be an ongoing political debate for years to come. It will take us 10 or 15 years to straighten out this new reengineered health care system. In the process of straightening it out, we must have the people who are the experts on the front line there. We first must open up the situation so that they are respected and they are allowed to come to the table and they are allowed to help decide how we are going to reengineer and restructure the system. In New York State we just had yesterday an announcement made by Governor Pataki. And Governor Pataki is a Republican. I seldom have praise for Republicans. But Republicans, too, can do some good, and I want to praise the Governor for having taken a definitive step in solving some problems related to HMO's in New York State. A lot of different people have been complaining. The State assembly has a bill which is trying to regulate and improve the care of health maintenance organizations. The State Senate has a bill, the Governor brought them altogether, he brought in the health maintenance organizations, he brought in representatives of the health plans, the Blue Cross/Blue Shield. He brought in certain groups that say they represent patients: New Yorkers for accessible Care, Coalition of Health Care Consumer Organizations. But a lot of different people. I do not see nurses there. I do not see nurses particularly represented in the groups that are specified here, and that is unfortunate. And I am not sure that the health care consumer organizations really represent consumers, because there is no grassroots consumer organization. Nobody in my community has ever belonged to any of these New York Accessible Care organizations, but at least it was a beginning, and I want to applaud the Governor for making the beginning, and they think they have a bill, they have an agreement, which all parties will agree to and they can have legislation develop as a result. That is a beginning. It is important to get that legislation out, it is important to have it start on a positive foot. It is a positive move forward, but there needs to be a lot of refinement, there needs to be a lot of new input from nurses. There needs to be a lot of input from patients. There needs to be a lot of input from city council people, from assemblymen, from State senators, from Congress people. We have said that what we want is a freeze. In New York we are asking for a freeze on the situation. One of the demands for health care support certainly which is going to take place on this next Sunday, May 19, is that there be a freeze to stop the health care industry from stampeding us into a situation which will make the health care system more difficult to improve. We want to freeze so that profits will not be the utmost consideration; freeze everything for 6 months, do not do anything until more people have a chance to have input into the systems that are being proposed for change. Do not sell any hospitals. We have a mayor, a Republican mayor, who is obsessed with privatization; any privatization is good. So he wants to move forward and privatize. They have a situation now where $43 million was given to, a contract was given to, an organization, and they were in such a hurry to privatize until the total contracting process was illegal. They signed the contract with a staff member, and the board had never approved it. They found out that members of the mayor's own staff had family that was later employed by this company that got the $43 million contract. That kind of conflict of interest and nepotism was rampant. So they withdrew the contract, and now the FBI is in New York investigating the way the mayor's office puts out these contract. So privatization, moving at breakneck speed, will generate a lot of problems for government and for the taxpayers. Let us freeze the selling of hospitals, let us freeze the granting of contracts, let us freeze the privatization process for 6 months. Then we are asking that we have a disclosure of current and long-term plans. Whatever the mayor has on the drawing table for his municipal hospitals, let it put it out publicly, let us see it, let us have full disclosure, let us see what the current plans are, let us see what the long-term plans are, and let us all take a look at it and have a chance to comment on it. This is just simple democracy, the kind of democracy we used to have here in the House of Representatives. When the minority Republicans were in the minority, the Democrats shared information and we had hearings and we did not push bills through without notification. That old-fashioned democracy that we used to have here, we need it at the level of city government and we need it at the level of State government, in the health care areas. So we want full disclosure and an opportunity to comment. And the final item is we want inclusion in the process, recognize some of the nursing organizations, and the patient organizations and the doctor organizations, recognize them officially and accept from them alternative proposals for the way the health care system is going to be restructured, accept alternative proposals and accept a process of negotiation. If the alternative proposals that are prepared by citizens groups, and we were going to set up a commission in New York, a citizens commission with representatives from the unions that are in hospitals and representatives from the patients, representatives from the nurses and other medical professionals and representatives from community leaders. With all three of those, all those groups represented, four, plus additional people, senior citizens and groups that are impacted most intentionally by health care services, if all of them are represented in the process, then we think we can negotiate systems that benefit everybody. There is not going to be an overnight process. We know it is going to go on for a large number of years. We know that there are going to be a lot of tensions. We know we will be up against the health care industrial complex. But here is an opportunity for our health care industrial complex to show us that it can be in the interests of the people, a health care industrial complex can act to improve health care in America. You know, I think the older I get the more I understand how America runs, and if you do not have one of these complexes, you are not going to get very far in terms of government. We have a military industrial complex that is totally out of control and obsolete, but very powerful, and it still commands the greater part of the budget. It is now going to get an increase of $13 billion. A military industrial complex is the kind of complex that we have to have in order to defeat Hitler's Germany. If we had not had a military industrial complex operating effectively and efficiently when it was needed, we would not have won the war, we would not have been able to stop the spread of communism. So the military industrial complex made a great contribution. It costs too much, it abused its power, it charged too much, it spent too much, and even now when the danger is over, communism is collapsed, and we have no wars of the magnitude of World War II, they want to continue to spend money and use the taxpayers' funds to make profits when it is just not moral anymore, it is not needed. But let us salute them for what they did. Let us understand that they have to be brought under control by the taxpayers, they have to be brought under control by the Members of Congress and other legislators. It is out of control, and it is obsolete. But we need a health care--if we are going to have a health care industrial complex to move things, let us make sure the abuses that took place with the military industrial complex do not take place with the health care industrial complex, that it does not become an oppressive force dominating the budget and forcing us to cut our libraries. We cut the budget for libraries, we cut the budget for title I, cut the budget for Head Start. Let us not cut the budgets of all these programs to keep our health care industrial complex going because we want to increase the profits. Let us make certain it is trim so that we have a complex that is providing maximum service and maybe some people will make some money, maybe they will not. Possibly they will. Maybe we need an industrial complex in order to offset the other industrial complexes like military industrial complex and the health care industrial complex when we really need librarians, teachers, and educators, and publishers, and manufacturers of computers for schools and school construction companies. You ought to get all involved in the education industrial complex. We need industrial complexes to offset industrial complexes. Maybe the future of the American economy and the future of our whole political society has a lot to do with how we balance off these complexes. There is a banking industrial complex. The banking industrial complex is probably the wealthiest, and they have done the most harm to our society in terms of taking money out of taxpayers' pockets. The banking industrial complex pulled the largest swindle in the history of mankind. The banking industrial complex is responsible for the savings and loan swindle. The savings and loan association swindle has cost the American taxpayers already about $300 billion. Taxpayers have paid $300 billion to prop up the banks that were destroyed in the savings and loan banking swindles. It was not just savings and loan banks, but also other banks. So we have the banking industrial complex that really should be brought under control, we have the military industrial complex that ought to be brought under control. Now we have a new health care industrial complex that we ought to try to get control of before it runs away and destroys large segments of the society and misuses money. But that is the way it is. These complexes are going to be there, one way or another. We have to face up to that and start looking at them with clear eyes, at what runs America. These complexes have a lot to do with how America runs. There is an oil industrial complex. The gulf war was all about making certain that the oil industrial complex did not get put into a position where it was begging Saddam Hussein. That was a good move in terms of the fact that, in hindsight, Saddam Hussein had to be stopped. But let us understand what is happening. Let us understand that a health care industrial complex is dangerous if it gets to the point where their drive to make money is destroying lives in America on a day-to-day basis, and therefore it must be brought under control. One of the good things that happened this week was that the nurses came to Washington today. The nurses are here. That was good. That is in line with making America safer and more acceptable for mothers and for children and for families, very much in line. On May 19, back in New York, we are going to, again, try to get the input of the nurses, the input of the doctors, the input of the patients into the restructuring of health care in New York City. There are rallies being held in all five boroughs. In Brooklyn the rally is going to take place at Kingsborough Hospital on Clarkson Avenue. In Queens, it is at the Queens Hospital Center, Grand Central Parkway. In Manhattan, it is at the Harlem Hospital. In Staten Island, it is at the Staten Island University Hospital. In the Bronx, it is at Lincoln Hospital. People are getting involved. What Americans are saying in New York, in California, in Massachusetts, and in a few other places is that we understand now what is happening. Our first demand is that you let us make democracy work. Let us get involved. Let us make certain that whatever new system is being developed is for the benefit of all the people. I want to close by asking that all groups all across America take the time out to focus in the next few days on health care, take the time out to focus specifically on Medicaid as a part of our health care system. Medicare is a kingpin of the American health care system. Medicare is the forward step in the American health care system, Medicaid. Medicaid is the forward step, Medicare and Medicaid, but Medicaid is the forward step toward universal health care. Medicaid is for people who cannot afford health care. It is the only step our Government has taken to reach out there and say that we take responsibility for what is most basic: whether you can live and breathe and be healthy. Medicaid is for poor people. You have to show that you are poor through a means test. The farmers who get subsidies in Kansas and other western States, they do not have to show a means test. They do not have to show they are poor. They get lots of money. The average in Kansas, I think in the last 5 years, has been $40,000 to $50,000 that has been given to every farm family, at least $40,000 to $50,000, without any strings attached in terms of you have to prove you are poor. The Freemen in Montana, the group out there with the FBI surrounding them, they are angry because the Government wants its money back. The Freeman, the guy who heads that whole operation, owes the Government $830,000, almost $1 million; $830,000-some. His ranch has been repossessed because he had a farmers home loan mortgage. He is angry and ready to kill somebody because he got away with that for so long, he received Government largesse for so long that be began to believe he had a right to it. If you tried to take it away, he would kill you. It is that mixed up out there, out west, where the Agriculture Department has forgiven about $11 billion in loans. That was on the front page of the Washington Post, that $11 billion had been forgiven, $11 billion forgiven. So Medicaid is for people who prove they are poor. There are some Federal subsidies, some taxpayer giveaways, that have nothing to do with you proving you are poor. You just get it because you have the right kind of connections: your are a farmer and you live in Kansas, Montana, or New Mexico, you get it. But Medicaid is for people who prove that you are poor. You have to prove that you are poor. One-third of Medicaid funds go to poor families. Two-thirds of Medicaid funds go to nursing homes. People in nursing homes have to prove they are poor. Many people who go into nursing homes were middle- class people before they became poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. They got sick, they had problems, they had to spend a large amount of money on doctors and medicine, so they lost their income and they become eligible then to go into nursing homes, so two-thirds of the money for Medicaid goes to nursing homes. So when you get rid of Medicaid, you are getting rid of health care for poor families and you are getting rid of health care for the elderly, people in nursing homes. There is a threat now that the Medicaid entitlement will be taken away. They are going to have block grants that go to the States. The States say, we want the money, but with the block grant there will be a limited amount of money. It will not be that every person that gets sick, every family that is poor and needs health care will get it because the Federal Government stands behind it as a right, but it will be in accordance with the amount of money available. When the State runs out of money, if you are sick, you do not get any help. When the State runs out of money, if you need to go into a nursing home, you will not be able to go into a nursing home. The States will be in charge. There will be all kinds of new forms of corruption and all kinds of new forms of waste, because State government is the worst-run government in America. We have had a lot of talk on the floor of this House about States should be allowed to do certain things because they are closer to the people. They are closer to the people, but they are the least visible forms of government. There are all kinds of things that go on in State governments that never get exposed, you never get to hear about. State governments usually do not keep a record of their legislative proceedings that is made available to the public. Yes, they have minutes and you can get them, but most State governments, it costs money to buy the minutes of the proceedings of the State legislature. Here you get a record every day of what is happening on the floor of this House. The Federal Government is very visible. The Federal Government is complicated but highly visible. There are certain things done at the State level that can never go on at the Federal Government level. There are all kinds of favor-granting, all kinds of nepotism, all kinds of things happen, all kinds of granting of contracts that would be illegal at the Federal level. But we are going to hand all this to the State government. The care of our health will be handed to the State government. State governments will be able to decide which people have disabilities. The Federal Government in the legislation that is being proposed has not defined what a disability is. A person with a disability will have to have his disability defined by the State government. There is a conflict of interest, because the State wants to save money. They do not want to have too many people with disabilities that cost a great deal of money to take care of in terms of health care, so they will, in their attempt to save money, define away many legitimate disabilities. State governments have a history. If you look closely at some of the monumental cases of corruption in American public life, they have happened at the State government level. I want to close by acknowledging that on public radio this morning, National Public Radio, they talked about a State Senator in Alabama who said that ``Slavery was good for black people. Slavery was good, and slavery was a form of States rights at its best. It is the best form of States' rights.'' That is a good example of what we are talking about. Slavery is praised as a form of States rights at its best. The States had the power to do what they wanted to do. Of course, beyond the States you had the planters and plantation owners, and anybody who owned the slave had the power to do whatever they wanted to do with a human life. What you have, if you push the power of life and death down to the State level, is the beginning of what I call decentralized genocide. Health care is a life and death matter. If you put that in the hands of people who cannot be watched, who are not held to any Federal standard, if you put it in the hands of people who are making decisions to save money instead of providing maximum health care, if you put it into a situation where every State will be trying to outdo the other in terms of lowering its benefits, they are ratcheted down. The State with the lowest benefits will be the guide for all the other States. No State will want to have higher health care benefits than another, because if you have better health care benefits in one State than you do in another, they will say that people are going to tend to move into the State with the better health care benefits, so everybody is going to go down to the level of the lowest common denominator. A lot of lives will be lost in the process of going down to the level of the lowest common denominator. We will have the beginning of decentralized genocide. There is a story in the paper about Brazil having put on trial policemen who went out and shot poor kids in the streets every night. They kept finding bodies of children. This is Mother's Day coming up. Mothers always make you think of children. Mothers and children are inseparable. Think of this, as a closing thought. In Brazil the policemen were going out to shoot down the children because the children were poor children who ran around the city all day long picking pockets, making havoc. The store owners did not like them, nobody liked them. Policemen started killing them. Now you have the policemen on trial, and the policemen are saying that they were doing what the public wanted them to do by shooting down poor children. These are poor children who have no health care. These are poor children who have no welfare, because there is no welfare system. There is no Aid to Families with Dependent Children. When you take these steps by changing public policy so there is no aid to people who are in desperate straits, you throw them onto the streets, you create a situation where, in the end, the apparatus of the State, the police, will begin to be used to destroy people. It is a very serious matter. As we go into Mother's Day, and really care about mothers and really care about children, we ought to resolve that we ought to take another look at the policies that are being generated on the floor of this House. We ought to take a hard look at the proposals in next week's budget that are going to cut Medicaid and Medicare. We ought to take a hard look at the effort to get rid of Medicaid as an entitlement. If Medicaid goes as an entitlement, it is the first step into systematic decentralized genocide in America.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I do not know whether the gentleman here comes from a farm State or not, but the people in my district want to know how you have a situation where farmers' home loan mortgages are forgiven. Over a 5-year period, the Department of Agriculture forgave $11 billion; $11 billion were forgiven in farmers' home loan mortgages. They want to know how our Government does such things, and then worries about people who do not have $25. I met a lady just last Monday, I have known her for a long time, I did not know she was in such hard times, 85 years old she is. She has always been a tenacious entrepreneur all her life. She has never worked for anybody else. She does not have Social Security. She once owned a home, she lost it. She once had two children, they are dead now. Eighty-five years old. She has no income. Zero income. When we say 30 percent of your income, the Brooke amendment we fought for, 30 percent, 30 percent of nothing is nothing, of course. But most of us, nobody in this Congress pays 30 percent of their income for rent. Nobody pays 30 percent of their income for rent. That is enough of a standard that is imposed on the poor that nobody else has to live up to. Certainly anybody who has come to the point where they absolutely have no income, and there are many people who, for very good reasons, they are not drunkards or dope addicts, there is nothing wrong with them, they are hard-working Americans, at the ends of their lives, down and out, they need some help. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the United States Housing Act (H.R. 2406). This bill would, in effect, lead to the dismantling of the Federal Government's role in providing safe, decent, and affordable housing to its citizens. H.R. 2406 does a good job of corroding what the Republican leadership in the other chamber has termed, ``one of the last bastions of socialism''--public housing. Agriculture, which funnels billions of dollars to agribusiness, is neve seen as socialism; but now public housing is bastardized as the last bastion of socialism. Using such euphemisms as local flexibility, income diversity, and resident security, H.R. 2406 would shamefully take from our poorer and more vulnerable citizens the basic right to sleep comfortably at night. I support many of the amendments offered today, including the Velaquez amendment. My Republican colleagues need to be reminded that U.S. public housing policy is embarrassingly inequitable. Despite the low-income housing needs of this country, only 20 percent of housing outlays is allocated for providing housing assistance and subsidies to families in need. The other 80 percent is tax expenditures enjoyed by wealthier families who are able to deduct mortgage interest, property taxes, capital gains, and other investor homeowner perks from their tax liabilities. The result of this unjust, inequitable housing policy: Over 70 percent of the families who qualify for low-income housing assistance, are not receiving it. This means that the richest Nation in the world has allowed, and will continue to allow, more than 20 million families to simply deal with substandard housing conditions with serious building code violations such as dangerous electrical wiring and inadequate plumbing; exorbitant rents; and even homelessness. H.R. 2406 reflects a blatant disregard for those Americans who truly need assistance. Using income diversity as a goal, the manager's amendment would reserve only 30 percent of public housing units for those earning 30 percent or less of the median income in an area. Under current law, 85 percent of public housing units must be provided to low-income families. In most communities, 30 percent of the area's median income is roughly equivalent to the poverty line. However, the Republican solution to diversify the public-housing population is too extreme. To reserve such a small percentage of public housing to our poorest families, when they need it the most, is unforgivable. Again, the affront to the less-fortunate is evident in this Congress. H.R. 2406 would further eliminate the caps on rent paid by seniors and working families. The Brooke amendment, which sets a maximum percentage that tenants could be charged for rent, 30 percent of adjusted gross income, would be abolished. The manager's amendment would maintain the 30 percent cap only for current elderly and disabled tenants, and current residents earning 30 percent or less of an area's median income. It is clearly insufficient. Any elderly or disabled person who is lucky enough to secure public housing after enactment of this bill, would be forced to sacrifice food, medicine, and other necessities for rent. Furthermore, H.R. 2406 would allow housing authorities to set minimum rents at $25 to $50 a month, without any exception for hardship cases. To individuals who make more than $100,000 per year, a minimum rent of $25 to $50 may seem reasonable. Such reasoning illustrates how far removed from reality supporters of this bill really are from the people they represent. For the State of New York, a $50 minimum rent would affect 900 households, and a $25 minimum rent would affect 1,828 households. For homeless families utilizing special rent assistance, but who have no income, this minimum rent would be a hardship. For large families receiving AFDC in low-benefit States, this minimum rent would be a hardship. For families, elderly and disabled households awaiting determination of eligibility for public benefits, this minimum would be a hardship. Yes, many of the people that we represent have little to no income at all; and this Congress should be compassionate enough to grant these families some leeway. Support the Valazquez amendment to set a minimum rent of $0 to $25; and to allow for a waiver in cases of extreme hardship. And in an interesting twist, H.R. 2406 would mandate that all able- bodied, non elderly individuals work in some capacity for the local housing authority. In a despicable regard for the value of the work that such persons may perform, H.R. 2406 would exempt these workers' wages from the Davis-Bacon prevailing-wage requirement. The assurance that a job is a real job that pays a living wage and provides certain benefits is on the attack, again. I ask my colleagues to stand up to this typical Republican contempt for the American work ethic. Last year, some Republicans promised to mount an aggressive campaign to eliminate the Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD]. Recognizing that such action would be politically damaging, this year, the Republicans have weakened the agency's responsibilities, and eliminated numerous federal controls. Thus, they have defeated the economic, social, and historical purpose of the Federal Government's direct role in developing affordable housing. Yes, HUD will still be around, but 60 years of it's work will have been ignored. H.R. 2406 has little to do with ensuring housing for the low income. I challenge my colleagues to vote against this apparent disdain for nonwealthy Americans; and support the Valazquez amendment.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. You are a good lawyer. You said I accused. Who did I accuse?

Mr. OWENS. We need employers who understand that it is better for them, like Henry Ford understood at a certain point that he had to pay his workers a decent hourly wage so they could buy the cars.

Mr. OWENS. No, I will not yield. I will yield in a minute.

Mr. OWENS. An enlightened employer would know that paying the minimum wage helps the economy as a whole. These are very poor people and every dollar they make they are going to spend in this economy. They are not like the CEO's, who make millions of dollars and travel around the world spending their money somewhere else. An enlightened employer would know that the effort we made in the last Congress to pass health care legislation would greatly help them in their woes. They would not have to moan so much if we had a health care plan which took care of everybody's health care. We did not ask for a minimum wage 2 years ago because we were concentrating on a universal health care plan, which meant that the poorest person would also be able to have a health care plan and maybe he would not need an increase in the minimum wage. Here is an opportunity where you might have helped yourself and helped the Government and helped the people who work for you if you had supported a health care plan. But most employees are not enlightened. they can only see tunnel vision, and we need to give them some help in understanding how the economy really works in the rest of the world. The economy works for everybody. The workers at the lowest level----

Mr. OWENS. It is an insult to workers who make the minimum wage to say that they are there because they are no good, they cannot improve themselves. My father is one of the smartest men I ever knew. He worked in the Memphis furniture factory all his life, never paid more than the minimum wage. He went to school to the sixth grade. He was the smartest man. When the machines broke down, he made them operate. He understood the mechanics. They had to come get him when they laid him off because of the fact the machines could no be run by anybody else, yet they still never paid him more than the minimum wage because the supply and demand was such that they could get people who would work for the minimum wage.

Mr. OWENS. We are encouraging them to improve by saying we are going to pay you what you should be paid in this economy. In this economy you cannot live on $8,400 a year. You need more than that. You cannot live off $4.25 an hour. So we are going to pay you for your work. We are not going to have you work at the level of a peasant or just above slavery just because the supply and demand is such that your employer can pay you that because he can always get more people. We want to have enlightened employers.

Mr. OWENS. We would have to go up to $6.25 an hour. If we put it on an index inflation now it should be at $6.25 instead of $4.25.