Frank Pallone

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank both of my colleagues for joining me tonight. The point is we are going to probably be here a few more days, and we just have to keep pressing. Whether we deal with the larger issues of Medicare, prescription drugs, HMO reform, or even if we are just able to do something to provide more funding for the basic providers, like the hospitals and nursing homes, as opposed to the HMOs, we are just going to continue to speak out and make that point.

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, my understanding is we only have 15 percent of Medicare recipients, seniors, that are in HMOs. Yet, in that tax bill, over 40 percent of the money was going to HMOs. And they had a certain pot of money in this Republican tax bill and when you started taking out over 40 percent for the HMOs, you do not have much left to deal with rural hospitals and rural health care facilities and some of these other things. That is the problem, they just prioritize the HMOs too much with no strings attached.

Mr. PALLONE. First of all, I would say that the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Udall) was right, the Nevada plan is almost exactly the same as what the Republican leadership brought forth in the House. It is almost exactly the same, but Governor Bush's proposal basically gives money to the States in a block grant to try to cover people in some way. That is his proposal. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. Thurman).

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. I object, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Regular order, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman asked for 1 minute.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I find it very sad when I listen to the dialogue from my colleagues on the Republican side because when I listen to my colleague, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Foley), and also the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, I think that they really do want to come to an agreement and they would like to see this agreement on the Labor HHS bill come to fruition. The problem is they cannot because of the special interests. They negotiated on the other side in good faith and they came to an agreement that would allow these worker safety rules to go into effect, but then they go back and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the business interest, says no we cannot do it because we do not want you to protect the workers. We are giving you the money for the campaigns. We are the special interests. You cannot do it for the average person. We saw the same thing. My colleague, the gentleman from Florida, talked about the patients' bill of rights and how we supported the Norwood-Dingell bill; but after it passed, the HMOs said, no, we cannot have that because that is going to help the people and we cannot make any money. So you cannot do it. You forget it even if you care about the people. We saw the same thing with Medicare prescription drugs. Maybe some of them would like to see a prescription drug benefit under Medicare. I have no doubt that some of my colleagues on the Republican side would love to see that, but they cannot do it because the pharmaceutical industry says, no, no, no, no, we cannot make any money. That is going to hurt us. We are not going to be able to finance your campaigns. We are not going to be able to run the ads. So what does it say? Oh, sure, you may want to help. Maybe even the leadership wants to help, but you cannot because you are in the pockets of the special interests, the corporate interests, the pharmaceuticals, whoever it happens to be, the insurance companies. Well, it says a lot about what you can accomplish here in the majority party. You cannot accomplish anything for the little guy. You cannot help the senior who wants prescription drugs. You cannot help the person who is suffering from HMO abuses. You cannot help the individual that the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) showed that is having problem with their hands and cannot work because of this repetition. You cannot do it. Be honest. Explain to the American people that you cannot help the little guy. You cannot help us with the problems that the American people face because you are in the pocket of the special interests, and they say what to do even after you have negotiated the agreement.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. I object, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Let me say, Mr. Speaker, that again I know we only have a few days left here; but we certainly, and I will speak for my Democratic colleagues in the leadership, are going to continue to push every day and every night both on the floor, during the legislative day and as well as during the Special Orders at night to make sure that these health care initiatives are addressed and that these concerns for the average American with regard to health care are met.

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I agree with the gentlewoman. I am glad that she came down to voice her concern. As I said, although some of these larger issues probably cannot be addressed in the last few days that we are here, certainly her issue and I think the whole issue of changing the priorities in this tax bill so that we address the problems of the providers, the hospitals, the nursing homes, the home health agencies, and also trying to make sure that whatever money we give to the HMOs has some strings attached so that we know that they will stay in the Medicare system for our seniors. These things still can be addressed. You and I will work together and keep speaking out to make sure that in the last few days they are addressed.

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentlewoman for her remarks. I hesitate to put this in the context of everything else I have discussed tonight, but unfortunately it seems to fit the pattern where the Republican leadership does not want to address so many of these health care issues. But unlike with most of the things I discussed tonight that are probably too late, it is not too late for that of the gentlewoman. I hope we can get the leadership to bring it up on suspension.

Mr. PALLONE. Absolutely. I have mentioned before a couple times on the floor, I have not mentioned it lately, that I think it was in March sometime in the spring of this year that the State of Nevada, under Republican controlled legislature and Republican governor, passed a State prescription drug benefit that was very similar to what Governor Bush and the Republicans here in the House have proposed, basically a subsidy below a certain income. I am not sure about the income aspect, but it was a subsidy in a voucher that let people go out and buy their own prescription drug insurance plan. For the longest time, I mean at least until the end of the summer when we got back after Labor Day, there was not one insurance company in the State that would offer the benefit. And so, the seniors were going without. Now, I was told a few weeks ago that now there is an insurance company that says that they are going to offer the benefit. But again, I wonder what kind of benefit it is going to be and how long they will stay in the program. I get the impression, I think it is the ideology when I talk to so many people on the Republican side, not everybody but a lot of them, it is sort of this ideological thing that, we like the fact that we are going to give them the voucher and they are going to go out and shop around because it is sort of like a capitalist thing and, so, idealogically it is very good. But so what? It does not work. I am a capitalist, too. But what is the point if it does not work?

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, this goes right to the heart of what I have been discussing and my colleague and others on the other side of the aisle have been discussing over the last 2 years and particularly in the context of this tax bill that the Republicans put up. What we are saying, with the prescription drug issue in particular, is we would rather have the Medicare program cover it because then they have a guarantee, they know what the premium is, they know what the benefits are, they know what drugs they are going to get, they know what the co-payment is, all those things that provide stability and I think are important for seniors. Because they look for stability in particular. What we have now is the system where they get a notice I guess 6 months before, at least they have 6 months before they are dropped or they are told that the premium is going to double or they have a higher co-payment and they just do not know from one day to the next where they are going to be with the HMO. I mean, this is a good example of the problem.

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I listened to the previous speaker on the Republican side, and I know he is well intended. But I wanted to say that I feel very strongly that one of the reasons we are still here, and certainly one of the reasons that has been articulated by the President in his opposition to this Republican tax bill that he has said he will not sign, he will veto if it comes to his desk, is because Democrats and the President and the Vice President feel very strongly that with regard to a number of issues, and I am going to spend time primarily this evening on the health care issues, that the Republican leadership has simply not done its job. Mr. Speaker, we as Democrats are very concerned about the average citizen and what we do in the House of Representatives and feel very strongly that on a number of issues, and again particularly with regard to health care, that the Republican leadership has simply failed to address the problems that the average American cares about. We know that we are in times of great economic prosperity and as a result of the President's programs, that prosperity continues. There is a significant Federal surplus for the first time now in a long time. But the problem is that we still have some unmet needs, and particularly with regard to health care. What we see in this tax bill that the previous gentleman from South Dakota (Mr. Thune) mentioned, and that has been the discussion of much debate over the last few days, is that the Republicans really are prioritizing what I call special interests, particularly with regard to HMOs, as opposed to the public interest. I have been very critical of the fact that this tax bill that came to the floor last Thursday gave the lion's share of the money to the HMOs without any strings attached, without any requirement that they stay in the Medicare program. Many of my constituents have complained to me about the fact that they signed up with an HMO under Medicare, and then a year later or so they were notified that the HMO was no longer going to cover them and they had to find some other way to cover their health insurance. Granted, they can go back to the traditional Medicare fee-for-service system, and that is fine. For most people, 85 percent of people who are under Medicare, that is fine and that is great. But there are problems in the sense that traditional fee-for-service does not cover prescription drugs. Many of my seniors signed up for HMOs because they were sort of lured into it by promises on the part of the HMOs that they would get a prescription drug benefit, and then all of a sudden they found that they did not have one. Well, what the HMOs did is they came back to the Republican leadership and said, look, we are getting out of Medicare because we are not getting enough money, so give us more money. Give us a larger reimbursement rate, and we will get back into the program. The problem is that the tax bill the Republicans put up last week did not attach any strings. They are saying, okay, we are going to give 40 percent of this new money that we have in the surplus, or 40 percent of the money allocated in this bill, to HMOs. But they do not say that they have to stay in the program for more than a year. They do not say that they have to guarantee any particular level of benefits. Mr. Speaker, I actually had a motion which I brought to the floor yesterday, or the day before last, which said that in order to get this additional money they would have to agree to stay in the Medicare program for at least 3 years and they would have to provide the level of benefits that they initially promised for that 3-year period. Of course, the reference is primarily to prescription drug benefits, which is why most seniors signed up for HMOs in the context of Medicare. The Republican leadership opposed that motion and they basically say, look, we want to give this money to the HMOs, and we are not going to have any real strings attached to it. The Democrats and the President have been saying that in addition to the fact that they are giving this money to the HMOs with no strings attached, they are taking away or they are not giving sufficient funds or prioritizing funding for the providers of Medicare, the hospitals, the nursing homes, the home health care agencies. They get significantly less percent of this money under the Republican bill than the HMOs do, and yet they are the ones that are really providing the service. The HMOs are just insurance companies that ultimately go to the hospitals and the nursing homes to provide the service. And these primary providers are getting less of a percentage of this pot than the HMOs. Again, I would say it is because the HMOs are aligned with the Republicans and basically the Republican leadership is doing their bidding. Now, what do the HMOs do with the money that they get from the Federal Government? Well, first they provide services. But we know a lot of them spend a significant amount of that money paying for their CEOs. They have huge overhead, huge administrative expenses for a lot of their executives. They do a tremendous amount of advertising. That is how they get the seniors to sign up for the HMOs, doing all of this advertising and having these meetings and giving out free dinners and different things to get the seniors to come and sign up. Then they also spend a significant amount of their money lobbying and spending money on political ads to lobby against the Democrats' initiative, the Medicare prescription drug program that we have proposed, and the HMO reforms, the Patients' Bill of Rights that we have proposed. They also spend a lot of their money just in direct or indirect independent expenditure contributions to argue against and for the defeat of Democratic candidates. I was one of the victims of that. I found myself, 2 years ago in 1998, the target of an independent expenditure primarily financed by HMOs and the pharmaceutical industry to the tune of $5 million spent in the last 2 or 3 weeks of the campaign to try to defeat me. So it is no wonder that it costs the HMOs so much money to operate and why they feel they need more money to operate, because so much of their expenditure goes for these other things that are not health care related. Now, what the Democrats did today is we tried, when there was a bill that came up to correct this tax bill with regard to another aspect, a minimum wage, the Democrats tried to bring up an alternative bill or amend the Republican legislation so that it included some changes that would diminish the percentage of the money that went to the HMOs and give more as a percentage basis to hospitals and primary providers, nursing homes, home health care agencies. At the same time, it would say that if the HMOs wanted to benefit from this additional money that was being provided under the bill, that they would have to stay in the Medicare program for 3 years and they could not reduce their benefits. It seems to me that makes a lot of sense. We know the HMOs are getting out of the system. There have been many reports, one done by the GAO, the General Accounting Office, just last month in September that said that providing more money to the HMOs is not necessarily going to make them stay within the Medicare system. So why not try a different way of trying to get them into the system. I want to talk a little more about some of the other things that we had in this proposal today because I think it goes to the heart of my initial contention that the Democrats are trying to deal with the problems, the health care problems that the average American faces; whereas, the Republicans keep trying to do something with this bill that is primarily for the special interests and for the HMOs. Just to give my colleagues an idea, we had additional money, as I said, for hospitals. We had additional money for the staffing and quality control for nursing homes. We had additional payments to home health agencies. I have been critical of the fact that the Republicans have not been willing to bring up the patients' bill of rights, which is the HMO reform that prevents abuses in HMOs and says the decisions about what kind of care one gets, what kind of operation one gets, what kind of hospital stay one gets, that those decisions should be made by the insurance company and the patient and not by the HMO, the insurance company. The Republicans have not been willing to bring up the patients' bill of rights. They passed it in the House, but it is dead in the Senate. So what we put in this bill as an alternative to the Republican tax plan today also was a provision that says that, if one has to appeal a decision under Medicare because one has been denied care by an HMO, that one would have a better way to appeal that, go to an outside review board, if you will, to make that appeal so the HMO would not, basically, be reviewing its own decisions. Somebody else would. This is part of what we had proposed in the patients' bill of rights. So we were, not only trying to give more, we were not only trying to level the playing field with the HMOs and require them to stay in the Medicare program for longer period of time, we were also trying to address the issue or the need for HMO reform. Now, the other thing that we were trying to do in this bill today, which I think is a distinct improvement over what the Republicans had in mind, is that it relates to the issue of the uninsured. If we ask Americans today about health care and what are the primary problems, they will say HMO abuses, they will say the need for a Medicare prescription drug. But for those who do not have health insurance, which is about 42 million Americans, they will say it is the need to provide affordable health insurance so that they can get health insurance. Well, in this bill, in this tax bill that the Republicans put forward last week and has been the subject of discussion for the last few days, the Republicans said that they are going to give an above-line deduction for individuals who buy their health insurance. I have been critical of that because it is not going to help, again, the people who do not have health insurance. In other words, most of the people that would be able to take advantage of that are people who already have health insurance and they will get a deduction. But what about the 42 million people that do not. The type of deduction that is provided is not really going to provide a system for those 42 million, or few of them, to buy health insurance because their problem is their employer does not provide it, and they cannot afford it on the private market. A little bit of a deduction the way the Republicans have set forth is not going to get them to be able to afford health insurance. What the Democrats have been saying with regard to the uninsured, and, again, this is Vice President Gore's proposal, is that we have to build on the existing kid's health initiative which was passed here in the House of Representatives and became law a few years ago, that provides Federal monies back to the States so that they can sign up children of working parents who now cannot afford health insurance. What Vice President Gore has been saying, what President Clinton and what the Democrats have been saying is let us expand that program to a little higher income level so that the kids whose parents work but maybe are a little above the current guidelines will still be able to take advantage of this program. We have also been saying that, perhaps, we should let the parents of these children buy into the program. It is more likely that if a parent can provide or get health insurance for their children, that they would like to sign up the whole family for this program with these Federal dollars. So I have been critical of this Republican tax plan because it really does not do anything to get more people enrolled in health insurance who do not have it. I would like to see some changes, instead, in some money used under this bill to sign up more people and get more people involved in this kids health initiative. So what we have in the Democratic alternative that was discussed today but, of course, defeated was a way of providing additional coverage, money that would be used to do outreach to get more children enrolled in the program. Again, it is a different approach to what the Republicans have proposed, but I think it is an approach that will work in getting more people provided and covered by health insurance; whereas, I do not think the Republican proposal accomplishes that. I want to stress throughout this because I hear my Republican colleagues say that this tax bill is a great bill, and the President should sign it because it is going to help. Well, I am not going to argue that in some ways it might help a little; but given the amount of money that is being thrown to the HMOs, given the amount of money that is being given to a lot of these special interests, it is not going to help very much. We could use that same amount of money in a different way under the Democratic proposal to really do a lot more to make sure that seniors who are on Medicare can find an HMO that provides them with decent coverage, including prescription drugs, we can do a lot more to cover the uninsured with that same amount of money than what the Republicans are doing. Now, just to give my colleagues some perspective on this, in the tax bill that the Republicans put forward and passed, over one-third of the Federal dollars were allocated to HMOs. It is almost 40 percent, 41, 42 percent. The Republican plan increases payments to Medicare HMOs by over $10 billion over 5 years and over $30 billion over 10 years, despite the fact that only 16 percent of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in HMOs. Well, keep that in mind. In other words, if one has this senior, group of seniors and disableds that are in Medicare now, only 16 percent of them are in an HMO. Yet, when we address the issue of trying to provide additional funding for Medicare, we are going to give for those 16 percent 40 percent of the money. The other 85 percent who would benefit more from having this money go to the hospitals or the nursing homes or the home health agencies directly, they are only getting 60 percent of the money. It makes no sense, other than if one looks at it from the perspective that the Republicans are with the HMOs because they are helping them with their campaigns. They are trying to get rid of Democrats, and they are doing all these other things to help the Republican cause. I also wanted to give my colleagues another example. This was an article that I took from USA Today back in February of 2000, but I have kept it because it really kind of says a lot about what the HMOs do with the money. This report found $4.7 million in questionable administrative costs among nine Medicare HMOs, including lobbying and gifts. One insurer spent $249,283 on food, gifts and alcoholic beverages. Four HMOs spent $106,490 for sporting events and theater tickets. Another leased a luxury box at a sports arena for $25,000. Customers, insurance brokers and employees at one HMO were treated to $37,000 in wines, flowers, and other gifts. I gave the example the other day, Mr. Speaker, of where an HMO in my district did this huge advertising campaign to get people to go to the local diner. They offered them a Maine lobster dinner for the evening to get good people to sign up for the HMO. I mean, this is crazy. Here we are being asked to give more money to the HMOs so that they can spend the money for these administrative costs, for this advertising, and these other things that ultimately do very little, if anything, to help the average senior or the average American. Now I wanted to, if I could, Mr. Speaker, spend a little time talking about the Democratic alternatives on the two issues of prescription drugs and HMO reform, and I will probably also get in a little bit to the issue of dealing with the uninsured. I talked so far about these issues in the context of this tax package today. But what I want to reiterate to my colleagues is the fact that, over the last 2 years, and even beyond, since the Republican leadership has been in the majority here, there are major overhauls of all these programs that could have been done and that, in fact, were proposed and even in some cases voted on by the House that were initiated by the Democrats with the help of some Republicans that would have made a huge difference in people's lives with regard to seniors access to prescription drugs, with regard to HMO abuses, with regard to the problem of these over 40 million Americans that have no health insurance. Yet, in each case, the Republican leadership stymied and tried to prevent this legislation from coming to the floor or, even if it did pass, they killed it in the other body or they did whatever they could in conference between the two Houses to make sure that it did not move forward. I guess the best example of that is the issue of HMO reform, which I still think, along with Medicare prescription drugs, is the number one issue that I hear back at home in my district in New Jersey. What the Democrats were saying with regard to the HMO issue is that we are tired of the abuses where the HMOs will say to an individual or a patient, okay, you cannot have this particular operation or you cannot stay in the hospital this particular length of time, or we are not going to let you have this particular medical equipment because we do not think it is necessary. We want to change that. The Democrats and some of the Republicans want to change that so the decision about what is medically necessary and what kind of care one gets is made by the physician and the patient, not by the insurance company. In addition, we want to give one some enforceable way of rectifying a grievance if one has been denied care because the insurance company said one cannot have it. Now, the answer to this that we put into bill form was a bill called the patients' bill of rights, also known as the Norwood-Dingell bill. It was mentioned by the Vice President in the last debate that he had with Governor Bush. He actually asked Governor Bush whether he would support the Norwood-Dingell bill and Governor Bush did not respond or certainly did not indicate that he would support it. The patients' bill of rights really does two things. It switches the decision making from the insurance company to the doctor and the patient; and it says that, if the insurance company denies one care, we are going to give one a way to go to an independent board that could overturn that negative decision, or failing that, or absent that, one could go to court and have the court enforce one's rights and make sure that one has the service that one and one's physician thinks are medically necessary. But let me just go into some of the other provisions of this bill before I talk about its fate and why I blame the Republican leadership for its not passing in this Congress. The legislation, first of all, protects all Americans and all health plans, it is not limited to certain types of health plans. It assures access to all emergency rooms when and where the need arises. Many of the HMOs now will say one can only go to certain hospital emergency rooms even if one feels that one is having a heart attack. If one goes to the local emergency room rather than the one they tell one to go to that is 50 miles away, and one does not die, then they will come back and say, well, you should have gone to the other emergency room 50 miles away, and they will not pay for it. Well, this says that is not acceptable if one thinks that one needs to go to the emergency room, one has a legitimate reason, one has chest pains or whatever, they have to pay for it. Some people are surprised to find that is true until they have the emergency and they find out it is not paid for. The patients' bill of rights also guarantees access to the specialists the patients need. One of the ways that HMOs limit care is they will say you could go to a particular specialist. I will give my colleagues an example of pediatrics. They will say one can only go to a certain pediatrician, but one cannot go to a pediatrician who specializes in certain disorders. Well, we say no. One has to be able, if they do not have the physician or the pediatrician in my example who deals with that specialty care within their network, then one has to be able to go to the doctor outside the network, and they have to pay. It guarantees that one has access to a fair and timely internal and independent external appeals process. This is what I said before. The HMO does not hear one's appeal. An independent group does outside of the HMO. It also assures access to clinical trials, assures patients can keep their health plans. There are a number of other things. I am not going to go into all the details because, you know, for lack of time. What happened to this Patients' Bill of Rights? Well, when it was put together by the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Norwood), who is a Republican, and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Dingell), who is the chairman of our Committee on Commerce on the Democratic side, we could not get it brought up on the floor of the House. The Republican leadership did not want it brought up. So we got a discharge petition. This is where we all come to the floor, as many of us as we can, and sign a petition demanding this bill be voted on, be considered on the House floor. As the number of that discharge petition increased and got to be almost a majority, the Republican leadership decided that they would let a bill come to the floor. Eventually, not easily, it was approved by a majority of the House. I think something like 60 Republicans even voted for it. But then, when it went over to the Senate and there was a conference between the two Houses, the Republican leadership here continued to oppose it, and the Republican leadership in the Senate had always opposed it; and so they just basically let the conference die. I think the conference met once or twice; but that was it, and the bill is dead. They will not bring it up. So when I blame the Republican leadership for not addressing the issue of abuses within HMOs, it is because of the fact that they have basically killed this bill. The second major issue is the one with regard to prescription drugs, and this of course has become a major issue in the Presidential campaign. What the Democrats have been saying, and Vice President Gore of course the same, is that we have an existing Medicare program for seniors and the disabled that works well. Medicare does not have a huge overhead, administrative costs, and it works well. It is a government- run system in the sense that the government pays the cost. So why should we not expand it to include prescription drugs? When Medicare started in the 1960s, prescription drugs were not that important. Preventive medicine was not that important. It has become so. People now can pay incredible bills, $4,000 or $5,000 a year, sometimes more, for prescription drugs. So we need to cover this under the rubric of Medicare. And rather than hoping that people will be able to find an HMO that covers it, and only 15 percent have, 15 percent of the seniors as we have said are all that are in HMOs right now, let us provide it as a basic benefit under Medicare that anyone can sign up for. Well, I will not get into the details, but that is essentially what the Democrats advocated. And what do we see on the other side? The Republicans say, no, we do not like Medicare, why in the world would we want to expand it to include prescription drugs? Instead of doing that, we recognize the fact that people below a certain income, seniors below a certain income need some sort of help; and so we will provide a subsidy or a voucher for them if they are below a certain income, and they can go out and either get an HMO to cover their prescription drugs with that voucher, or that subsidy, or they can find maybe some insurance company that will just cover prescription drugs. Well, that is not the answer. It is not the answer for a number of reasons. First of all, because the majority of the seniors would not be covered. The seniors that complain to me about not being able to afford prescription drugs are not just the poorer ones, they are the average senior. They are everybody. Obviously, maybe the people that are above a certain income do not care, but I find that 90 percent of my seniors feel that they are having a problem paying for their prescription drugs. So the Republican bill does not even address the problem for the majority of the middle-class seniors. In addition to that, I do not think the Republican proposal works. Again, it is primarily linked to HMOs, a person's ability to find an HMO that will cover them. We have already had experience with the HMOs, so many of which have dropped Medicare. Why should we believe this is the answer, particularly since only 15 percent of seniors are covered by an HMO? Or even worse, why should we believe if we give a voucher they will be able to find a company to cover just prescription drugs? I do not know any company that would do that. They might find one, but I feel confident it will be a pretty lousy policy, if they can even find it. So Democrats are saying forget the ideology. Practically speaking, the only way we will get all the seniors, or most of the seniors being able to have a prescription drug program that covers most of their needs is if we put it under Medicare. Forget the ideology, forget liking or not liking Medicare, forget the fact that it is a government program. It works. This is the way to do it, and probably the only way to do it given the marketplace and what is out there. Again, we tried to bring this up; but it was opposed by the Republican leadership. They did not want to bring it up. They brought up their own proposal, defeated ours, and even their proposal has not moved in the Senate and nothing has happened to it. So they are simply not addressing the issue at all. I suppose they would argue that this tax bill that I started talking about earlier this evening addresses it in some way by giving more money to the HMOs, but unless they guarantee the HMOs stay in Medicare and provide a prescription drug program at a certain level, I do not see how it helps. Practically speaking, I do not think it helps. So there again, the second important health care issue that affects the average American has basically gone down in flames in this Congress. There are a couple of days left here, but the Republican leadership refuses to address it; yet they keep saying they care about the average person and they are going to do something to help. Now, the last thing I wanted to discuss with regard to health care, and I have already touched upon it in the context of this tax bill that I talked about earlier, is the need to cover the uninsured, over 40 million. How do we do it? Well, what the Democrats have been saying is that absent universal health care insurance, which some are for and some are against, I happen to be for it, but not everyone is even within the Democratic party; but absent universal health care, what can the government do to try to address the problems of these 40 million-plus Americans that have no health insurance? Well, when we break it down, we realize that the largest group that was not covered were children, and the second largest group that were not covered were the near elderly, people between 55 and 65 that are not yet eligible for Medicare but a lot of times find themselves, either because the working spouse died and the nonworking spouse, usually the wife, is not covered at that age, or because her husband died she does not have coverage, or in some cases a person got an early retirement and the early retirement did not cover their health benefits. Basically, they are waiting for Medicare to cover them at 65, but for those 10 years or so they are without health insurance, and they find it unaffordable to buy it in the private market. So what the Democrats have been saying, what President Clinton and Vice President Gore have been saying, and we actually managed to get one part of this addressed on a bipartisan basis, is let us see what the government can do to cover these people in some way. A couple of years ago we got together with the Republicans, and again I will not give them too much credit because they fought this thing tooth and nail until the bitter end, when they finally agreed to it, but they finally agreed to the CHIP program to give money back to the States so that they could sign up kids below a certain income. Now, I want everyone to understand that this is not welfare. These are not people that are not working. They are eligible for Medicaid and are already covered. These are working people who have children, but because the employer does not provide a health care benefit or because they cannot buy it privately, it is too expensive, they do not have coverage. So we put together this CHIP program, and we covered kids up to a certain percent of poverty. But again these are not kids in poverty. I am not sure what we would call them, perhaps lower middle class, working class parents. I have to point out also that not only did we have initial opposition by the Republican leadership to this, but when it went back to States, and particularly to Texas in the case of Governor Bush, he tried to limit the program to, I think, 150 percent of poverty rather than 200 or 250 percent of poverty. But he eventually went along with it, with I guess the Democratic legislature insisting on the 200 percent, and it was passed. What the Democrats have been saying, or Vice President Gore has been saying, is let us raise the level of that to 250 percent of poverty or even higher. That is not really poverty, that is an income of maybe $25,000 or something like that. But a lot of people that are making $25,000 or $30,000, or even $35,000, they cannot afford health insurance for their kids if they have to go out and buy it privately. So that is what we are proposing for the kids. With regard to the near elderly, what we are saying is we will let them buy into Medicare and pay so much a month, maybe $300 or so a month, and they can get into Medicare by purchasing Medicare at the going rate of whatever it costs the government. Then, as I mentioned before, the Vice President has also proposed, and I have been in favor of the idea, of letting the parents of the kids who are in the Federal kids care program to sign up and be eligible for the kids care program as well. If we did all that, we would make a significant dent in that 40 million or so who do not have health insurance. We could also link that to a tax deduction as well. We could also provide some sort of tax incentive or tax deduction to the employer to try to get more of them to provide health insurance for their employees, but it would have to be at a much larger amount than what Governor Bush and the Republicans have proposed. These are the things that need to be done. Again, they are not being addressed here by the Republican leadership; and I just find it tragic that at a time when we have a surplus, and when we know that most of the American people would support these initiatives, that the Republican leadership refuses to go along with them. I guess the last thing I want to do this evening, Mr. Speaker, is to point out that what I am proposing, what the Vice President has proposed, and what the Democrats have proposed, not so much based on any partisan ideology or any notion about Democrats being better than Republicans, but only because we have been out there and we have talked to people and we realize what can be done by the Federal Government in practical terms that would make a difference in people's lives. I do not come down here to argue D versus R, or who is going to be President or anything like that. I really want to get things done that will help my constituents. Every one of the things I mentioned tonight is directly related to somebody or some group of people who have come to me personally and said this is what should be done. I would just give a few examples. I can give an example of a woman who is a waitress in a restaurant in my hometown. When I am back in the district, I often go to lunch there. She came to me one day and said, I work in this luncheonette, and I have a very good relationship with the owner of the place. It is a small place. And I know the owner as well. He actually came over to me at one point and said that he really would like to provide health insurance, but given the way things are, he could not afford it. But I told her about the CHIP program and how we were trying to pass the CHIP program. I think she had a daughter. I am not certain exactly, but she hoped to get her child enrolled in the program. When we finally did pass it and it became law and I made her aware of it, she went out and enrolled her in the program. She came back a couple of months later and told me that she had enrolled and she had the benefits. It gave me such a good feeling that I could come down here, and that we all can come here, and accomplish something. Of course, then she found out that the Vice President is now talking about letting the parents of these kids enroll in the same program, and she is hoping that we will be able to accomplish that as well. Then I have another example, which I have mentioned a couple of times on the House floor, about HMO abuses. I have had so many people contact my office because they were denied care, they were thrown out of the hospital early, or they could not get a particular operation that they needed. I mentioned the example with the senior citizens that were, I say, lured into this diner one night for this lobster dinner. What we have to keep in mind is that many of these seniors, before they were in HMOs, had pretty good coverage under traditional Medicare. The only reason they got into the HMO is they thought they would get a better deal. Sometimes they are not very sophisticated about what that deal is. They do not necessarily read the fine print in the contract when they sign up. And then they do sign up and find out that it is not what it is supposed to be, or they are told or they get a notice saying they are going to be thrown out of the program within 6 months, and they do not necessarily understand that they can go back to the old traditional fee-for-service program. It has to be explained to them, and a lot of times they do not even believe that. So this disruption in their lives, going back and forth, and the idea that somehow they will be able to choose and they will be able to make decisions easily about which program is better, to some extent it is a hoax. I would like to believe that all seniors can make intelligent choices, and I am sure many can, but a lot of people, when they become older and frail, they do not have the ability to make those choices. So they buy into these ads, either on TV or on billboards or in the local media, that convinces them that somehow this is something better, and then they are shocked when they find out it is not better or they cannot even continue with it if it happens to be a good program. So again, when I talked earlier about why we are giving so much money to the HMOs and not to the hospitals, well, I had a hospital close in my district. South Amboy Memorial Hospital closed in my district and cited the fact that they had inadequate Medicare payments. So when I say we are giving money to HMOs when the hospitals need it, I am not talking pie in the sky. I am talking about a hospital that closed and was serving people and now people have to go farther away to an emergency room in another hospital. I know we are at the end and there is probably not much that is going to be done. But even if the only thing that we can do is correct this tax bill that the Republicans have put forth by staying here a few more days and having the President threaten to veto, even if we can just accomplish that and the alternatives that we propose today, at least we will have accomplished something and I will feel that the last 2 years have not been in vain in this regard on so many of these important health care issues. I am glad to see that one of my colleagues from the Democratic side is here. And, of course, the gentlewoman is the representative of the Virgin Islands and is a physician and has been very active on these issues. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from the Virgin Islands (Mrs. Christensen).

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I ask that we defeat the previous question and allow the Democrats to bring up an initiative which the gentleman from Florida is very much aware of. It basically seeks, among other things, to correct a lot of the health care inequities that the Republicans have refused to address in this Congress. Now, we know that what the Republican tax bill did was to basically give all the money to the HMOs, or most of the money to the HMOs because they are their special-interest friends. The Republicans refuse to bring up the Patients' Bill of Rights. They refuse to bring up a prescription drug program. The Democrats are saying simply that we want to correct this situation and make sure if the HMOs are going to get more money that they have to provide a 3-year guarantee that they are going to continue with the program with the seniors who sign up and that they get the same level of benefits, including prescription drugs. That makes sense for the average person. Mr. Speaker, we are worried about the average person and how they are going to benefit from these health care initiatives. At the same time what we are saying too is that we are going to try to address the Patients' Bill of Rights in a small way by improving the appeals provisions for Medicare beneficiaries in this bill. The other thing we have been saying is that too much money is going to the HMOs and not enough to the hospitals and the home health care agencies and the nursing homes that need more money, because a lot of them are closing or not able to provide a sufficient quality health care. So we correct that as well. Finally, what we have been saying is that the Republicans refuse to do anything to improve the problem for the uninsured. There are 42 million Americans that have no health insurance. We passed a bill a few years ago that expanded health care insurance for children, the CHIPS program, and we have had a number of other ideas. But the Republicans instead, they come up with this above-line tax deduction in their tax bill that does not help anybody but people who already have health insurance. Mr. Speaker, what we are doing in this motion, if we are allowed to bring it up, is we are saying we want to expand the kids health care initiative, the CHIPS program. We want to enroll more children. We are trying in a small way with our initiative here today to make sure that the HMOs have to provide the same level of benefits for 3 years. They have to make sure that there is some way to deal with the Patients' Bill of Rights and try to enroll more children. It is a small measure, but at least something for the average guy.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Madam Speaker, I rise today to express my deep disappointment regarding the withdrawal of H. Res. 596, the Armenian genocide resolution from the House floor. As it has been said on many occasions, H. Res. 596 is not about the Republic of Turkey. In fact, an amendment was adopted in the Committee on International Relations which made it perfectly clear that this resolution was not about modern day Turkey. Unfortunately, the Republic of Turkey decided to make a sense of the House resolution about the extensive U.S. record on the Armenian genocide a litmus test of its relationship with the United States. I deeply regret that Turkish officials have opted to use coercion and threats too make their case. A recent report by the Anatolia news agency that a Turkish human rights activist, Akin Birdal, faces charges for acknowledging what happened to the Armenian people as genocide, demonstrates the lengths Turkey will take to deny the truth. Birdal reportedly made the comment during a recent conference in Germany, and now faces the possibility of a 3 year sentence in Turkey. In addition to prosecuting this human rights activist, Turkey also coerced a statement from the head of the Armenian Church in Turkey, distancing his church and the remnant 35,000 Armenians who still live in Turkey from H. Res. 596 and its meaning. Setting aside for the moment how a population of some 2 million Armenians has been reduced so catastrophically, is there any doubt in the minds of any Member that virtually every living Armenian in Turkey is anxiously waiting for the world to acknowledge the truth about their near total destruction or the near total destruction of their community? Madam Speaker, is there any doubt that the statements made by the Armenian Patriarch were made under duress? There is only one place in the world where an Armenian Church leader cannot tell the truth. There is only one place in the world where nobody answers Hitler's chilling question, ``Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'' And that place is modern, secular and democratic Turkey. Madam Speaker, I ask what kind of message we are sending to the Patriarch of the Armenian Church in Turkey and all others in that country who are prevented from speaking their conscience. I call upon our Ambassador to Turkey, who has so forcefully advocated against H.R. 596, to immediately visit the Armenian Patriarch as a show of solidarity with His Eminence and with his dwindling Armenian flock. Madam Speaker, we must remain vigilant in the face of threats and those who continue to deny the Armenian genocide. As Van Krikorian, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Armenian Assembly noted in remarks given over 10 years ago to the Capitol Legal Council of B'nai B'rith, ``Make no mistake, those who are denying the Armenian genocide today are paving the way for those who deny other genocides and for those who will undoubtedly plan future episodes of race extermination.'' I will introduce the remarks of Mr. Krikorian for the record. Madam Speaker, I just want to say that these remarks are as valid today as they were 10 years ago. I urge all of my colleagues to reject the ongoing campaign of denial regarding the Armenian genocide. [Remarks to the Capitol Legal Council of B'nai B'rith--Dec. 21, 1989] Fighting Denial of the Armenian Genocide (By Van Z. Krikorian, Director, Government and Legal Affairs, the Armenian Assembly of America) In the spring, you heard a speech from a Turkish Embassy official contending that the Armenians did not suffer a genocide between 1915 and 1923. That contention is patently false. But, Turkey's and its agents' insistence on vigorously pursuing it poses a frightening threat to all people who believe in democracy and human rights. Make no mistake, those who are denying the Armenian genocide today are paving the way for those who deny other genocides and for those who will undoubtedly plan future episodes of race extermination. I am sure you are aware that Hitler publicly laid the foundation for the Holocaust by referring to ``the extermination of the Armenians'' starting, at least, in 1931 and most forcefully in 1939 when he commanded his military to show no mercy by asking: ``Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'' Those who deny the Armenian genocide are removing the underpinnings of all human progress by pretending that nothing exists which, for whatever reason, they do not want to exist. This approach is often viewed as politically expedient. But, in the end, it only aborts the cause of civilization. This is why I am especially glad to address you this afternoon and to publicly challenge the arguments of the deniers. I am also glad to know that the Holocaust Memorial Council has publicly and unequivocally committed to include the Armenian genocide in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a decision which rebukes the deniers and promotes historical integrity. Today, I plan to discuss some of the reasons why the Armenian genocide is properly classified as a genocide and then refute some of the more popular arguments offered by the Turkish government and other deniers. First of all, what does the term genocide mean? Literally, it means the killing of a race. An attorney and Holocaust survivor, Rafael Lemkin, coined the term in 1944 and then dedicated himself to creating and promoting the United Nations Genocide Convention. Before, during, and after coining the term, Lemkin used the Armenian case as a definitive example of genocide. In Lemkin's view, it would be impossible to question whether the Armenians suffered a genocide, because the term was created to be a synonym with the Armenian experience. Similarly, the United Nations legislative history of the Genocide Convention is clear that the Armenian case is an example of genocide, a position from which the United Nations has not moved. In the United States, the legislative history of ratifying the Genocide Convention and the implementing legislation is equally clear that the Armenian case is synonymous with the term genocide. These legislative histories, of course, merely reflect the overwhelming evidence of the Armenian genocide. Yet, the deniers argue that the Armenian case somehow does not fit the definition of genocide. The Genocide Convention provides: Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. No one realistically questions whether Ottoman Turkey engaged in the specific acts enumerated in this definition. That would be absurd because the Armenian population of over two million was unquestionably reduced to under 100,000, and those people did not simply disappear--they were killed, forcibly converted to Islam, and, in small numbers, escaped. What the deniers question is whether the government committed the acts with the intent to destroy the Armenian presence in their homeland of three thousand years. This contention is shamefully absurd. I cannot go over all the admissions and evidence establishing beyond any doubt that the government planned and implemented a campaign of race extermination, but the archives of the United States and almost every European country (including the Central Powers, Turkey's allies) are overflowing with this evidence. Today, I would like to call your attention to the following pieces of evidence: (1) a December 1914 authenticated blueprint for genocide issued by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress Party which can be found in the British archives; (2) the post World War I, Turkish trials and convictions (based on substantial, irrefutable testimonial and documentary evidence) of the government officials responsible for ordering and implementing the extermination of the Armenians; (3) a November 8, 1920 order for the military to exterminate the Armenians living in Russia; (4) and the acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide by the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk. The December 1914 order reads as follows: (1) Profiting by Articles 3 and 4 of Committee Union and Progress, close all Armenian Societies, and arrest all who worked against Government at any time among them and send them into the provinces such as Bagdad or Mosul, and wipe them out either on the road or there. (2) Collect arms. (3) Excite Moslem opinion by suitable and special means, in places as Van, Erzeroum, Adana, where as a point of fact the Armenians have already won the hatred of the Moslems, provoke organized massacres as the Russians did at Baku. (4) Leave all executive to the people in provinces such as Erzeroum, Van, Mamuret ul Aziz, and Bitlis, and use Military disciplinary forces (i.e. Gendarmeris) ostensibly to stop massacres, while on the contrary in places as Adana, Sivas, Broussa, Ismidt and Smyrna actively help the Moslems with military force. (5) Apply measures to exterminate all males under 50, priests and teachers, leave girls and children to be Islamized. (6) Carry away the families of all who succeed in escaping and apply measures to cut them off from all connection with their native place. (7) On the ground that Armenian officials may be spies, expel and drive them out absolutely from every Government department or post. (8) Kill off in an appropriate manner all Armenians in the Army--this to be left to the military to do. (9) All action to begin everywhere simultaneously and thus leave no time for preparation of defensive measures. (10) Pay attention to the strictly confidential nature of these instructions, which may not go beyond two or three persons. In fact, these orders basically describe the actual pattern of the genocide. Of course, during implementation, the ruling party issued additional orders on massacring Armenians (I will share another with you shortly) as well as orders to punish those Turks who showed mercy to the Armenians. The post-war trials are also dispositive not only for their indictments and verdicts, but also for the overwhelming evidence used to secure the verdicts. Specifically, both central and provincial government officials were tried and convicted for the ``massacre and destruction of the Armenians.'' Besides a major trial in Istanbul, moreover, local trials for the same crimes, which have yet not been widely publicized, also took place. (Parenthetically, I would add here that these trials were cited as precedent for the Nuremberg trials following World War II.) Next, I would like to share a November 8, 1920 central government order, quoted from a Turkish source. This order commanded General Kazim Karabekir to essentially continue the job of exterminating the Armenians after World War I by wiping out the Russian-Armenian population: By virtue of the provisions of the Sevres Treaty Armenia will be enabled to cut off Turkey from the East. Together with Greece she will impede Turkey's general growth. Further, being situated in the midst of a great Islamic periphery, she will never voluntarily relinquish her assigned role of a despotic gendarme, and will never try to integrate her destiny with the general conditions of Turkey and Islam. Consequently, it is indispensable that Armenia be eliminated politically and physically [siyaseten ve maddenten ortadan kaldirmak]. Since the attainment of this objective is subject to [the limitations of] our power and the general political situation, it is necessary to be adaptive in the implementation of the decision mentioned above [tevfiki icraat]. Our withdrawal from Armenia as part of a peace settlement is out of the question. Rather, you will resort to a modus operandi intended to deceive the Armenians [Ermenileri igfal] and fool the Europeans by an appearance of peacelovingness. In reality, however, [fakat hakikatde] the purpose of all this is to achieve by stages the objective [stated above]. . . . [I]t is required that vague and gentle-sounding words [mubhem ve mulayim] be employed both in the framing and in the application of the peace settlement, while constantly maintaining an appearance of peacelovingness towards the Armenians. [t]hese instructions reflect the real intent [makasidi hakikiyesi] of the Cabinet. They are to be treated as secret, and are meant only for your eyes. Again, documents like these as well as direct admissions of guilt by the government officials are literally everywhere. Recognizing that indisputable fact, Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, did not hesitate to condemn the responsible Ottoman government for its actions. In an interview published August 1, 1926 in the Los Angeles Examiner, he said that all those responsible ``should have been made to account for the lives of millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse from their homes and massacred.'' Today, the Turkish government has called the authenticity of this quote into question. Yet this 1926 statement was not an isolated event. In 1918, Ataturk called for the execution of the genocide's perpetrators. In 1919, as recorded by a presumably unimpeachable source, future Turkish prime minister Rauf Orbay, Ataturk acknowledged the government's massacres ``of 800,000 Armenians'' and ``decried the extermination of the Armenians.'' In a 1920 speech, Ataturk explicitly condemned the massacres as ``scandalous.'' Again, this type of documentation is indisputable and overwhelming, but we still face those who act as if it does not exist. When such denials are funded from a country as important as Turkey, we face the prospects of the Nazi operating principle: ``a lie told 1,000 times becomes the truth.'' Accordingly, I would next like to refute the predominant arguments used by the deniers today. Let me start with one that the embassy official who spoke here in the spring touted as dispositive--``It was not a systematic effort to kill all Armenians [because] no harm was done to the Armenian communities living outside the war zone--in Istanbul, the Ottoman capital, for example.'' Initially, I would note that this argument is as fallacious as saying that Jews did not suffer a genocide because they were relatively safe in Rome and Bulgaria. But, more importantly, the factual assertion is not true. Armenians certainly were exterminated in Istanbul and every other part of Turkey, and it was clearly systematic. For example, on December 7, 1915 German Ambassador Metternich informed Berlin that the Government wiped 30,000 Armenians out of Istanbul and that ``gradually a clean sweep will be made of the remaining 80,000 Armenian inhabitants of the Ottoman capital.'' Indeed, the government massacred or tried to massacre all Armenians from European Turkey by first shipping them over the Bosporus and then killing them. One example is the eradication of the Armenians from the European town of Rodosto. In fact, Armenians and their friends commemorate the genocide on the anniversary of April 24, 1915 because on that date the government gave the clearest signal of systematic race extermination. It arrested and killed hundreds of unquestionably innocent Armenian community leaders (including legislators, clergy, educators, and attorneys) in Istanbul. Another argument which the deniers forward is that Armenians died of natural causes (famine, cholera, diseases), not government ordered massacres. Putting aside all the direct evidence of the genocide, this argument is ridiculous. It would be the first time, that I know of, in which famine and diseases moved form town to town across an entire country removing all but less than 100,000 Armenians from over 2,000,000, and leaving the Turkish Moslem population as the sole survivors. Frankly, such a ``selective disease'' argument has no historical or scientific credibility, and those who make the argument must not expect their audience to reflect on its merits very deeply. But, then the deniers argue that there was also a great civil war in which Armenians took up arms against Turks. In that supposed war, great, mutual killings occurred. Never mind that the government had disarmed all the Armenians, the government drafted all the able-bodied Armenian men into labor battalions of the army where they were massacred, and contemporaneous reports do not reference any civil war. In fact, in a newly published book, ``The Slaughterhouse Province,'' we can read American consul Davis's official, eyewitness report from the interior of Turkey of the disarming of the Armenians and the lack of any real resistance. He reports that after the massacres of Armenians in the Province of Harput (ultimately over 100,000), the government could ``find only four or five instances where any Turks had been killed or even injured by Armenians and less than a dozen instances of any resistance by Armenians.'' In other isolated areas, of course, Armenians fought back against Turks. But, these were either minor incidents; self-defense; or because Armenians were Russian citizens, drafted into the Russian army, and were a part of the Allied war effort fighting Ottoman Turkey. As Ambassador Morgenthau reported as early as July 1915, moreover, allegations of rebellion were only ``a pretext'' for ``a campaign of race extermination.'' Nevertheless, some people still claim that the massive Armenian deaths resulted from the legitimate quashing of a rebellion. This ``pretext'' or ``legitimate basis'' denial argument is probably the most dangerous. If it is accepted (regardless of its inaccuracy), it sanctions the murder of an entire nation based on the prodemocracy cries of only a few groups. Civilization will not progress if a justification claim can be made in defense of genocide. Otherwise, the Nazis and every subsequent perpetrator would build the defense in as the crime was committed. During the Armenian genocide, the government attempted exactly such a defense, and it was rejected as both inaccurate and immoral by the international community as well as the succeeding Turkish government. There is no reason why it should be accepted now. A more slippery denial argument on the ``mutual killings'' theme involves the amount of Turks and Moslems who also died in the war. I call this argument slippery because its proponents slide between ``Turkish'' and ``Moslem'' deaths. For example, some point to ``two million Turkish deaths during the war'' as a reason not to sympathize with Armenians. Yet this two million figure includes the 1.5 million Turkish-Armenians killed, the over 300,000 Turkish army casualties, and the tens of thousands of Turkish-Greeks and Arabs put to death at the same time. Another strand of this argument points to ``hundreds of thousands of Moslem deaths''--again implying that the genocide was really an Armenian-Turkish war. Yet in calculating the ``Moslem'' figures, these people not only include the Turkish war casualties and the massacres of tens of thousands of Arabs in Turkey, but also the Moslems who died fighting with the Allies against the Turks in the Middle East--that is Moslems which the Turks themselves killed. A third strand of this ``numbers game'' argument applies artificial formulas to the nineteenth century populations, plugs in some theoretical conditions, and concludes with ridiculous population and mortality figures which bear no relation to reality. This argument falls on its face because it completely ignores the direct, factual evidence of the genocide. Its proponents are as off base as those who recently claimed in the newspaper ``Sieg'' that only 150,000- 200,000 Jews died under Nazi rule and those deaths came during the ``German-Jewish war.'' Another denial theme is that commemorating or recognizing the Armenian genocide promotes terrorism. Initially, let me say that we unequivocally condemn all terrorism, including Armenian terrorist attacks on innocent Turks. But, the threat of terrorism does not justify rewriting history to deny Ottoman Turkey's crimes against humanity. More importantly, and again the deniers conveniently fail to mention this fact, Armenian terrorism is a moot point. In a March 1989 report, even the State Department had to acknowledge that there has not been an Armenian terrorist attack in three or four years and Armenian terrorist groups have withered away. This cessation of terrorism is attributed to lack of mainstream Armenian community support and to the growing international rejection of Turkey's denial campaign. For example, in 1985 the United Nations Subcommittee on Human Rights, after years of study, overwhelmingly recognized the Armenian genocide as an indisputable historical fact, and in 1987 the European Parliament conditioned Turkey's acceptance to the European Community on recognizing the Armenian genocide. The following denial argument is particular to deniers in the United States. They point out that in 1985 sixty-nine scholars signed an advertisement questioning the accuracy of a Congressional resolution commemorating the Armenian genocide and therefore ``there was no Armenian genocide'' or ``the issue should be left to historians''--an argument from authorities so to speak. Following the advertisement, we contacted these sixty-nine people. We found that some did not authorize use of their names on the advertisement and some said they were misled about the text and apologized. Many explicitly recognize the Armenian genocide as a fact. But, most importantly, we found that only four of the sixty-nine actually focus their work on the time span of 1915-1923. All of these individuals are subsidized by the Republic of Turkey, and none has credibility on the Armenian genocide issue. Thus, when deniers make claims like a majority of United States experts question the Armenian genocide, they are simply not telling the truth. Among those sociologists, attorneys, historians, psychologists, anthropologists, attorneys, historians, psychologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and others who seriously study genocide, there is no question that the Armenians suffered a genocide, by any definition. There is also no question among the credible genocide scholars that failure to memorialize and condemn past genocides facilitates future genocides. Before leaving this ``scholars'' issue, however, I would like to make clear that some of those people who signed the 1985 advertisement and continue to question the Armenian genocide really have little choice. These people are Turkish or Ottoman historians. If they do not assume the current government's line, they will be cut off from resources necessary for their life's work. Even Turkish sources confirm that cooperation with the government pays dividends while criticism exacts a high price. The next denial argument is one of the more interesting. This argument contends that a judgment on the Armenian genocide must be reserved until the Republic of Turkey opens its archives of the period. The argument is interesting because Armenians sought free access to the Ottoman archives for years. Then the irrelevance of these archives became obvious. For instance, Turkey does not even own all the relevant archives from the period. After the War, the government sold hundreds of thousands of its records to the Bulgarians as scrap paper. Other parts of the archives exist in Jerusalem, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and Europe. In addition, after World War I, Turkish officials readily acknowledged that the files on Armenian massacres were removed and destroyed. In fact, the documentation in archives around the world contains more direct evidence of the genocide than we can possibly digest. (The United States archives contain approximately 25,000 pages for the period 1915-1918 alone, including captured German records, which fully document the genocide.) So, while the Turkish held archives may be interesting, they are only a very minor contribution to the history of the genocide. Moreover, Turks themselves acknowledge that military and foreign service officials have been reviewing the records for years to remove whatever incriminating evidence may still exist and that the government is using the archives strictly for public relations purposes. This year, the government, in various ways, has announced that the archives on Armenian issues are open. Yet, they fail to publicize that the wrong archives are open or the restrictions which prevent any incriminating documents from coming to light. For example, in January, they announced that the archives are open, but they did not open the relevant World War I years. Recently, they announced that the Council of Ministers files were open for the war years, but they did not open the records of the party apparatus or other agencies which actually controlled the genocidal operations. (Scholars have found that the genocide was implemented through a two track system of orders--one set ordering ``deportations'' and another set ordering the translation of ``deport the Armenians'' to ``massacre the Armenians.'') Read these continual announcements on the opening of the archives carefully; you will find that there is always a caveat such as ``all previously catalogued archives are open'' or that a researcher may see only fifteen pages at a time and a government official has the right to screen the documents first. The Turkish government continues to use the archives as a delaying tactic. As Cumhuriyet a Turkish newspaper reported in January 1989: ``Endless and empty statements have been made over the years concerning the opening of the Ottoman archives, and it is creating a disturbance among those who follow this topic closely. For the last 8 years, every 6 months a statement is made regarding the opening of the Ottoman archives. That these don't come true indicates that Turkey is pursuing a policy of distraction.'' At this point, the Ottoman archives held by Turkey are worthless. This explains why only Turcophiles and the uninitiated place any weight on them. It also explains why the archives' administrators publicly complain that serious scholars have not come to review what has been released. The last denial argument I would like to touch on is a ``character'' argument--that is, ``Turks are hospitable, good people'' and good people would not do what the Armenians allege happened under Ottoman reign. Let me say that the character of the Turkish people is not at issue here. Turkish hospitality is well known, and many Turks proved their sense of humanity during the genocide by protecting individual Armenians. That does not change what the government did to the Armenians from 1915 to 1923, the fact that the racist ideology of Pan-Turkism (Turkey only for Turks) was and still is prevalent, or that the government continues to have a poor human rights record and severely discriminates against Armenians in Turkey today. You should also know that the 1915-1923 Armenian genocide was not an isolated event. From 1894 to 1896, Sultan Abdul Hamid openly and proudly ordered the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians, ostensibly to send the Armenians a message about their place in Turkish society. Lord Kinross gave the following example of the atrocities in this period: ``[The Massacre's] objective, based on the convenient consideration that Armenians were now tentatively starting to question their inferior status, was the ruthless reduction, with a view to elimination of the Armenian Christians, and the expropriation of their land for the Moslem Turks. Each operation, between the bugle calls, followed a similar pattern. First the Turkish troops came into a town for the purpose of massacre; then came the Kurdish irregulars and tribesmen for the purpose of plunder. Finally came the holocaust, by fire and destruction, which spread, with the pursuit of the fugitives and mopping-up operations, throughout the lands and villages of the surrounding province. This murderous winter of 1895 thus saw the decimation of much of the Armenian population and the devastation of their property in some twenty districts of eastern Turkey. Often the massacres were timed for a Friday, when the Moslems were in their mosques . . . Cruelest and most ruinous of all were the massacres at Urfa, where the Armenian Christians numbered a third of the population . . . When the bugle blast ended the day's operations, some three thousand refugees poured into the cathedral, hoping for sanctuary. But the next morning--a Sunday--a fanatic mob swarmed into the church in an orgy of slaughter, rifling its shrines with cries of `Call upon Christ to prove Himself a greater prophet than Mohammed.' Then they amassed a large pile of straw matting, which they spread over the litter of corpses and set alight with thirty cans of petroleum. The woodwork of the gallery where a crowd of women and children crouched, wailing with terror, caught fire, and all perished in the flames. Punctiliously at three-thirty in the afternoon the bugle blew once more, and the Moslem officials proceeded around the Armenian quarter to proclaim that the massacres were over . . . the total casualties in the town, including those slaughtered in the cathedral, amounted to eight thousand dead.'' Similar accounts of massive Armenian massacres during this 1894-1896 period abound. In 1909, for similar reasons, the government set another prelude to the 1915-1923 genocide. Then, it ordered and carried out massacres in Adana which killed 30,000 Armenians. Today, as I have noted, the Turkish government is engaged in an all out effort to deny the Armenian genocide. In addition to its efforts in the United States, it is eradicating the physical evidence of any Armenian existence in Turkey. At the beginning of this century Armenians had two thousand churches in Turkey. Now, under two hundred are standing. As for the rest, the government has: destroyed them; converted them to mosques, warehouses, cinemas, and other uses; or allowed them to be plundered and destroyed. In Armenian schools, Armenians are forbidden to teach history and geography, those subjects can only be taught by Turkish officials. As a final example, Turkey strictly forbids open discussion of Armenian history or any other matters which do not comply with government policy. In March of this year, the Independent Magazine reported that: ``In early December 1986 Hilda Hulya Potuoglu was arrested by the Turkish Security Police and charged with `making propaganda with intent to destroy or weaken national feelings.' The prosecutor of the Istanbul State Security deemed her offense as meriting severe punishment and asked for between a seven-and-a-half and a 15-year jail sentence. Potuoglu's crime was to edit the Turkish edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In this was included a footnote which read as follows: `During the Crusades the mountainous regions of Cilicia were under the hegemony of the Armenian Cilician king- dom' . . . The Encyclopedia Britannica was not the first publication to offend. In 1981 the authorities seized Ankara 50, a guidebook to Ankara produced by the British Institute of Archaeology. The book, when published in 1973, had been passed by the military censor. By 1981, however, times had changed. It was noticed that the book featured a map naming the Roman provinces of Asia Minor including--with perfect historical accuracy--the province of Armenia. The guidebook quickly joined the index of forbidden books along with other such politically dubious publications The Times Atlas of World History and the National Geographic Atlas of the World.'' This is the type of action that the Turkish government and those in the United States who deny the Armenian genocide are promoting--the sacrifice of truth and integrity on the altar of perceived political expedience. This is why I am especially glad to have had this time with you today, to publicly expose exactly what we are all up against in fighting denial of the Armenian genocide. Thank you.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of the time. Mr. Speaker, this motion is to protect the seniors and make sure they do not get thrown out of their HMOs and they do not lose their benefits, including their prescription drug benefits. And what the Republicans want to do in opposing this motion is they want to give all this money to the special interest HMOs so they can use it for their executives, so that they can put more ads on to try to lure seniors in to a benefit plan that they are not going to really get, and so that they can use the money for special interests for lobbying and to lobby to come down here and avoid HMO reform and the Patients' Bill of Rights and a Medicare prescription drug program. This bill that the Republicans have proposed is for the special interests. What the Democrats are saying with this motion is let us make sure that the seniors can stay in a program that they can get their benefits. We are worrying about the little person who is being thrown out of the HMO all over this country, including in my district. Mr. Speaker, I had a woman that had to go to a dinner. She was lured to a dinner with advertising by the HMO to get into a program with a lobster dinner. They gave her a lobster dinner so she would sign up for the HMO, and then she is thrown out of the HMO and she has nowhere to go. It is a disgrace. Vote for the motion to instruct.

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Dingell), the ranking member of the Committee on Commerce. (Mr. DINGELL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Udall). (Mr. UDALL of New Mexico asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds. I just wanted to read from this report of the GAO that came out in September and it says, ``Although industry representatives have called for Medicare+Choice payment rate increases, it is unclear whether increases would affect plans' participation decisions. In 2000, 7 percent of the counties with a Medicare+Choice plan in 1999 received a payment rate increase of 10 percent or more. Nonetheless, nearly 40 percent of these counties experienced a plan withdraw.'' The bottom line is, the Republicans are saying they want to give all of this extra money to the HMOs. The minimum they could do is provide a 3-year guarantee and keep the benefits the same way, because otherwise, it will not work. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Olver).

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3\1/4\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 15 seconds to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee). (Ms. Jackson-Lee of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee). (Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. Thurman).