Brian Schatz

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Madam President, I think the Senator is right. I agree with him. I think that one of the most encouraging things over the last 5 weeks has been Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray and their ability to work together. I mean, if you had told, I think, either of us that we were going to repeal and replace No Child Left Behind with 77 votes in the Senate, I would have said: I don't know. That seems like it is going to get into some pretty difficult, partisan, thorny territory. Yet what Lamar and Patty were able to do is to conduct hearings and bring us through a process by which we acted like a Senate, and we got all the votes. Now we are in that process when it comes to healthcare, and I think some people feel deeply uncomfortable with empowering the chair men and women of this body. They feel deeply uncomfortable. They talk about the regular order, but they really just want to get their way on the floor. I will just make one other point here. As people on the Republican side were justifying their ``yes'' votes in BCRA and whatever the other one was called before that, they were always talking about advancing the conversation and bringing us into a conference committee negotiation. Now, because September 30 is the deadline, there will be no negotiation. If Graham-Cassidy passes the Senate, it will pass the House, and it will be enacted into law. Nobody will get to hide behind: Well, this is not perfect, but I want to advance the conversation, and maybe we can fix this in the House or fix this in the conference committee. This is the bill. The bill that gets voted on next week is the bill. Everybody owns it, and you own the fact that you don't even know what it is going to do to your own constituents.

Mr. SCHATZ. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Connecticut. That is right. I would just point out that they are going to get the fiscal impact from the CBO in order to comply with the terms of reconciliation, but that is, actually, not what impacts the American people the most. When you get a CBO score--and it is exactly right, what the Senator from Connecticut said--you find out what impact it has on your home State. You find out the number of Americans who are going to be harmed by this bill or helped by this bill. What we do know is that, basically, this contains elements of all of the previous pieces of legislation. It, actually, just kind of combines them all and puts them in a pile. So it is very hard for me to imagine, when they do come back with their analysis, that it will not be 20, 30, 35 million people who will lose healthcare. The craziest thing about this is that these Republicans who will vote yes are going to vote yes and then find out 10 days later that 25 million people are going to lose their healthcare. Why they will not wait is beyond me, except that they have a deadline to deliver a win for the President. As near as I can tell, that is the only reason that they are in such a rush.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, there are two reasons why every Member of the Senate should vote against confirming Marvin Kaplan to the NLRB. The first is that he is just not qualified. The NLRB is the Federal agency that enforces our labor laws. It protects the rights of workers and the private sector to organize for better wages and better working conditions. It is up to them to make sure that their employers follow the law and that when there is an issue between employers and employees, everyone acts reasonably. Democrats and Republicans who have served on the NLRB have been the top labor and employment attorneys in their fields. They have had long careers working on labor issues, either as lawyers or as law professors. Many of them have spent time as staffers on the NLRB board. In other words, they understand the labor issues better than anyone. They may have a unique perspective on it one way or the other--sort of pro-management or pro-labor--but there is no question that previous nominees and previous members of the Board know labor law. Marvin Kaplan doesn't fit this profile. He is not a lawyer with any relevant labor experience. He has no record and no public positions on relevant labor law. What he is is a well-connected Capitol Hill staffer. His only qualification, that I can find, is that he has drafted some legislation for a committee in the House of Representatives. That does not stack up against the resumes of any other member who has served on the Board--Democrat or Republican. This lack of experience is dangerous. It means he will not know the intricacies and the historical development of labor law. He will simply be a rubberstamp who brings a political agenda to the Board, because he has no on-the-record opinions on these issues of his own. That was clear from the hearing on his nomination, when he would not properly commit to recuse himself from any issues he had worked on and to approach issues with an open mind, which brings me to the second reason. If somehow Senators can make an excuse for his lack of experience, we can't deny that this is the opposite of the message that Congress should have received during the 2016 election. In November, Americans made clear that Washington had failed working families and that we have not done enough to stand up for American workers. Now here we are about to confirm a nominee to the NLRB, and the only experience he has is that he has drafted legislation to hurt American workers. The Board is about to face some important decisions. They could reverse a decision that holds big companies accountable for how their contractors treat workers. The future of American workers and their ability to organize will be influenced by this Board, which includes any members confirmed by the Senate. If Mr. Kaplan is appointed, it will further silence workers who already feel that they aren't being heard in Washington, DC. A vote for Mr. Kaplan is a vote that ignores the voices of American workers. It is a vote that further politicizes the NLRB at a time when we need to shore up our institutions against blind, corrosive ideology. I urge my colleagues to vote no on this nominee. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, you know, late this afternoon, around 5 o'clock, a number of Republican Senators indicated their unwillingness to support the so-called skinny bill, which would rip healthcare from 16 million people, according to CBO, and increase health insurance premiums by 20 percent--and not 20 percent over several years, 20 percent per year for the next several years, doubling health insurance premiums over the next 4 or 5 years. That is the bill we are talking about. They said that they don't like this bill, but they are willing to vote for it if they are provided assurances that this is just sort of a procedural vote. We just had a motion to proceed that was procedural in nature, according to them. We think it is the vote on healthcare. Now, this second vote, which is actually a vote to enact legislation--they are saying they are going to vote for it but only on the condition that we go to conference committee. Something just happened over the last couple of hours that is actually pretty astonishing. The House Rules Committee adopted what they call martial law. Now, it is not quite as bad as it sounds, but it is pretty bad. What that means is it gives total control over the procedures to the House majority. The House majority now is in a position to enact the skinny bill right away. There are a lot of Members of the Senate who want to talk about this, but I will just give you my little indicators that they are going to enact this into law by Sunday. They are going to enact this into law by Sunday. No. 1, the White House already has a name for it, the President has indicated a willingness to sign it sight unseen, and Paul Ryan just issued a statement that was not at all reassuring. There were lots of words, but none of them included ``We will not enact anything that comes from the Senate. We will go to conference committee, and if we don't have an agreement, we will not enact the Senate version of the bill.'' They are desperate to enact a bill before the summertime starts, and that is why we are all terrified here. There are a lot of people on the Republican side who hate the bill that they are going to be asked to vote for, and the only reason they are entertaining the possibility is that they want to go to conference. But they are not going to end up in a conference committee; they are going to end up in a signing ceremony over the weekend. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, would the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I make a point of order that the pending amendment violates section 302(f) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, we just took one of the most reckless legislative actions in this body's history. We are blowing up the American healthcare system, and we don't even know what comes next. I want to be clear. The Senate has never before voted on major legislation that would reorder about one-sixth or one-fifth of the American economy and impact millions of lives without actually knowing what the bill would even do. There has been no bipartisanship. There has been talk of it, but there have been no real discussions. There have been no public hearings. Let me say something about hearings. This is not a technical point. This is the way a legislative body does its work. This is the way we figure out whether our bill is any good or not. This is the way the Senate has always worked. We don't do major legislation without hearings. But that is what we are doing today, and that is because people don't want to disclose what is in this bill. It is true that we don't know exactly what is in the bill, but we can be sure of a few things. First, whatever problems there are with the ACA, this bill doesn't even bother to take a swing at them. To the extent people are worried about high deductibles, it will increase the deductibles. To the degree people are worried about the choices on the exchanges, it doesn't even try to solve that problem. We don't know exactly how much Medicaid will be cut, whether it is just rolling back the Medicaid expansion or making these radical structural reforms, but we know there will be deep cuts to Medicaid. This will hurt people. It will hurt people in nursing homes. It will hurt people with drug addiction. Medicaid is a program that works for tens of millions of Americans, and it will be slashed massively. We don't know whether they are going to get rid of the capital gains tax or just other revenue, but we know they are going to reduce many of the taxes in the original Affordable Care Act, and they are going to pay for it by cutting Medicaid. So under the guise of fixing the ACA, they are actually doing nothing about ACA. What they are doing is cutting taxes and cutting Medicaid. We don't know exactly what is in the bill, but we do know that. People are going to be hurt--people with preexisting conditions, families with loved ones struggling with opioid abuse, people in nursing homes, people who rely on Planned Parenthood, and the tens of millions of people who will lose their insurance almost instantly. That is why every group--from the American Medical Association to the nurses, to the American Cancer Society, to the March of Dimes, to the National Physicians Alliance, and the AARP--opposes this bill. There are 14 different versions of this bill, but, actually, these organizations oppose them all. There are some core elements of the vote we took that are going to be true no matter what. It will cut Medicaid and cut taxes. It will reduce patient protections. It will reduce the number of people who have insurance. It was all done with no hearings, with no Democrats, with no experts on healthcare. This thing is going to be dropped on us without enough time to review it and without enough time to interact with our home State and figure out the impact. Make no mistake, the reason they will not tell you what is going to be in the final bill is because the moment they do, this thing will come crashing down. What the American people have to do is to make sure that this thing comes crashing down anyway. We have to do it for the tens of millions of Americans who depend on Medicaid and the ACA. We have to do it for our rural hospitals. We have to do it for the people with preexisting conditions. We have to do it for the people without power, without money, without the ability to walk 200 yards from this gilded Chamber and get the best healthcare in the world. I will be fine. All the Members of this Chamber will be fine. But our job is not to take care of ourselves. Our job is to represent our constituents, and this bill has earned the title of most unpopular major bill in American history, most unpopular major legislation in American history. There is still time to walk back from the brink. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ. Four-and-a-half years.

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, how much time remains?

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, the Senate Republicans are about to take one of the most reckless actions in Senate history. They are going to vote to blow up the American healthcare system and do I don't know what next. I want to be really clear about this. Never before has the Senate voted on major legislation that would reorder one-sixth of the American economy and impact tens of millions of American families without even knowing what the bill does. There has been no bipartisanship. There have been no hearings. Let me just say something about hearings. This may seem like sort of a process or procedural complaint, but this very much matters. Hearings matter because it is how you get experts to tell you whether your bill is any good, whether it is smart or stupid, harmful or helpful. Hearings matter because they subject your bill and the process to public scrutiny. The media is able to report on what you are up to, and your constituents know what you are up to. So it is not a small thing to complain about no hearings. In fact, you can't be a good legislator without having hearings, and you can't be an effective legislative body without conducting public hearings. We never have major legislation without hearings, but that is exactly what they are doing, and there is one very simple reason for this. They are embarrassed by what is in this bill. It is true we don't know exactly what is in this bill. There are lots and lots of versions and lots of notions being kicked around, but we can be sure of a few things. First, we know this; that whatever problems there are with the Affordable Care Act, this bill doesn't even bother to try to fix them. To the extent that people are worried about high deductibles, it actually increases the deductibles. To the extent that people are worried about the lack of choices on the healthcare exchanges, it doesn't even try to fix that. Second, we don't know exactly how much they are going to cut Medicaid, but they are going to cut Medicaid. Whether it is rolling back the Medicaid expansion or making these radical structural reforms, essentially block-granting Medicaid to the States, they are going to deeply cut Medicaid. This hurts people. It hurts people in nursing homes. It hurts people with drug addiction. Medicaid is a program that works and delivers care for millions of Americans, and it will be slashed massively tomorrow. We also don't know whether they are going to keep the capital gains tax cut or get rid of it. In any case, they are going to get rid of most of the revenue in the Affordable Care Act. They are cutting taxes for the very wealthy, and the way they pay for that is to cut Medicaid. So under the guise of fixing the ACA, they do the thing they wanted to do all along--cut taxes, cut Medicaid. It has nothing to do with ACA: cut taxes, cut Medicaid. That is what the bill tomorrow will do. I don't care if it is the 2015 version. I don't care if it is BCRA. I don't care if it is a new Senate version. I don't care if it is Cruz's. All this cuts taxes for the wealthy and cuts Medicaid. That is what this legislation does. Americans are going to be hurt by this legislation; people with preexisting conditions, families with a loved one struggling with opioid abuse, people in nursing homes, people who rely on Medicaid, people who rely on Planned Parenthood. The tens of millions of people who will lose their insurance almost instantly. That is why every single patient advocacy group, from the American Cancer Society to the March of Dimes, to the National Physicians Alliance, to disability groups, to the AARP--everybody hates this bill. Make no mistake, they hate every version of it. It is not like there is a less harmful version. Either 22 million or 23 million or 32 million lose their healthcare. We don't have to do this to ourselves. We don't have to do this to the American people. So there are lots of different versions of this legislation. What the leader is doing, very cleverly, is allowing people to believe that the thing they are moving to is the thing they may prefer. In other words, it is a blank canvas. It is just a motion to proceed. It is just a motion to begin debate. Make no mistake, the vote tomorrow is to repeal the Affordable Care Act with no plan to replace it. That is what they are doing tomorrow, and they have been totally secretive because they know the moment they start talking specifics, the whole thing comes crashing down. There are core elements of this vote tomorrow that are true no matter what. It cuts Medicaid; it cuts taxes for the rich; it reduces patient protections; it reduces the number of people who have insurance; and it will all be done with no hearings, no Democrats, no experts in healthcare. This thing will be dropped on us without enough time to review it, without enough time to interact with our home State to figure out what the impact would be. We are being asked to do one of the most reckless things any group of legislators has ever been asked to do, which is to jump off a policy cliff--a healthcare cliff, a political cliff--and eventually they are going to tell you it is going to work out. Make no mistake, the reason they can't tell you what is in the bill is the moment they do, this thing will come crashing down. What we have to do is make sure this thing comes crashing down anyway, and we have to do it for the tens of millions of Americans who depend on Medicaid and the ACA. We have to do it for our rural hospitals, we have to do it for people with preexisting conditions, and we have to do it for people without power, without money, without the ability to walk 200 yards from this Chamber to the U.S. Senate doctor, the best healthcare in the world. Not only are we on the exchange--I have a Kaiser plan so we are on the exchange, we are in ACA--but also, anytime I want, if I have a headache, if I have a stomach ache, if I have something more serious, I can literally walk about 200 yards from here, go to the Senate doctor, and get whatever kind of healthcare I need. I want you to understand how lucky the people who are voting on your future are and how privileged we all are in this literally gilded place, when people's lives and livelihoods and life savings are on the line tomorrow, and if I get so much as a hangnail, I get to call my staff and have them help me out. We are lucky people, and we need to think about whom we are representing. I will be fine. Every Member of this Chamber will be fine, but our job is not to take care of ourselves. Our job is to represent our constituents. This bill has earned a really historic title: Most unpopular major bill in American history. Most unpopular major bill in American history. How that can get 20 votes, let alone 51, is beyond me. I want to make one last point. We need to kill this bill, not just because of all the harm it is going to do to the country, we need to do it for the legislative branch of the U.S. Government. We just can't make laws like this. Right now, the majority party is shortsighted because at some point Democrats are going to have the gavel. The temptation to follow this precedent being set this week, to enact major legislation without hearings and without the other party, might destroy the Senate itself. There is still time. There is still good will. We can walk back from the brink and do the right thing. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Washington for her leadership on tech and technology issues and, in particular, on net neutrality. I would like to amend one thing she said. She said that we got about 5 million comments in favor of net neutrality on this question. It is true. Yesterday we had 5 million and change, but I just checked, and we are at 6.728 million, and more and more people are weighing in on this important issue. As of today, it is important to point out that net neutrality is the law of the land. We are not asking for a change in the way that the internet operates. We are asking for the internet, as we know it, to be preserved. What does that really mean? It means you have an arrangement with your ISP. You pay your internet service provider for access to the internet, and you get the whole internet. Your provider does not get to decide what you access. You do. Whether it is NBC or ABC, Hulu or Netflix or Breitbart or Google or Yahoo or Facebook or the New York Times or RedState or HotAir or whatever you want, you get to go there, and everything comes down from the internet at whatever speed it comes down. But without net neutrality, that arrangement could change. The free and open internet, as we understand it, is a premise of the way we use the internet. It is a premise of the internet economy. It is a premise of Silicon Valley. It has now become a premise of car companies and real estate companies and anybody who does business online that, of course, you wouldn't have to pay money to an ISP to make sure your website loads fast enough so that consumers can see it. But that freedom, that free and open internet, really is in danger. Here is what is happening: The FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, is trying to change the internet by ending the net neutrality rules that were put in place. If they succeed, your ISP will have the power to stop you from seeing certain kinds of content. They will be the ones that get to make decisions about what you can access and how fast--not you. It is a foundational change in the way the internet operates. Now, some people--including the internet company lobbyists and their CEOs--will say: Look, the companies aren't going to change the internet even if the law goes away. In fact, we are committing to voluntary net neutrality. That is what they say. But I want you to think about how likely it is that a publicly traded company will not at least explore the possibility of different business models, and here is the problem: There may be opportunities without net neutrality for them to make more money. Right now I have basic cable in my apartment. I don't have HBO. Back in Hawaii I have HBO and the whole deal, but in my apartment here I have more basic cable. I pay for a certain number of channels. I don't get access to the entire TV universe. I pay for packages. There is no reason under the law, should they repeal net neutrality, that an ISP couldn't give the liberal package, which you could pay $75 for, or the conservative package, which you could pay $75 for, or the NBC- related families package, which you could pay $120 for--or maybe it is free because it is part of a vertical, which is included in your ISP. The whole idea is that there is nothing preventing them--except these net neutrality laws--from deciding whom you get, where you get to visit, and how fast the downloads come. This is especially important, of course, in the entertainment space, when we are all streaming TV, news, movies, and even gaming online so the relationship between the person who creates the content and you is going to be intermediated by an ISP. If you have a great app idea, right now you just have to have a great app idea. If you have a great website, people can log on to your website and you are in business. If you have the next great website, if you have eBay or Craigslist or Amazon, but it is post-net neutrality and the FCC goes through with this, you will not need a bunch of engineers but a bunch of lawyers and business sharks to try to negotiate with the ISP to even get in the door. Students could have less access to online resources, including online classes. Realtors would be stopped from using online tools to sell their homes. Patients might not able to use the internet to communicate with their doctors or monitor their health. Musicians, photographers, entrepreneurs will use the tools everybody depends on to make a living or share their art online. I was talking to somebody I know in the tech community, and they were saying that this is a parade of horribles. None of this is going to come true. I asked: Why do you think that is true? Why do you think this is just some apocryphal scenario I am describing? If you were an ISP, why wouldn't you slice up the internet and sell it for more? If you are the one controlling the access to it and you are a publicly traded company, you have no duty to a free and open internet. You have a duty to maximize shareholder profits. If your board of directors comes to you and says: You know what, this whole ``you pay a flat fee and you get the whole internet,'' that is not the right business model. Look at these areas where ISPs are the only provider in many communities. The idea that the consumer has a choice in lots of rural communities, you have only one broadband provider in the first place. Why wouldn't a broadband provider slice and dice up the internet and charge you a la carte? They can get more money for this. It is not that they are bad people. It is that they are duty bound to maximize profits. Today, July 12, is the day of action. The internet is pushing back. Today we stand up to the FCC so the internet remains free and open. As we speak--I mean literally as we speak--thousands and thousands of people across the country by the minute are logging on to the FCC website to express themselves. I have to say, this has become a Democratic issue. This has become a progressive issue, but it wasn't so long ago that people in the conservative movement were worried about media consolidation and the conservative movement was saying: Hey, listen, I don't know who is going to own my media company, but I want to get to my websites to get my content at whatever rate it comes down. Don't tell me what information I get to have access to. Everybody uses the internet. Many people are spending dozens of hours a week on the internet via their phones, via their television, via their broadband connection at home, and the innovation economy that underlies our economic growth is really in jeopardy. I know it is an arcane process. I know most people probably haven't even heard of the FCC. To talk about net neutrality and lay all this jargon on you, it is concerning that the free and open internet is really in danger. We have this unique opportunity because unlike what happened a few months ago with consumer privacy, where very quickly this body reversed a rule that provides for privacy so your broadband providers can't resell your personal browsing data to a third-party advertiser or any other company--that happened very quickly and without any public input. Here is the really good thing about the FCC process. The statute provides for public input. We are in a public comment period, and July 17 is the deadline. There is an opportunity for people to let their voices be heard. The internet should be in the hands of people, not in the hands of companies. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that two fellows from my office, Micaela Klein and Sunmin Kim, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the calendar year.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, this is the beginning, not the end. Today, we claim an important victory because of thousands of people across the country. There are not enough Senators who support this Republican healthcare plan, so there will not be a vote this week. Because of all of the people who spoke up, the realities of this bill are delayed--the tens of millions of people without insurance, a decimated Medicaid Program, the closure of health clinics and hospitals. Yet that is the key word here--that this bill is delayed. This bill is not dead. Everyone who spoke up about this bill should take a victory lap. Pat yourselves on the back tonight. It is an extraordinary moment in terms of what grassroots democracy can accomplish. You did what you had to do with what you could, and you succeeded but only for tonight. Tomorrow morning, we have to get ready because the minute that the Senate comes back from the July 4 recess, they will have 3 weeks to ram through a bill. They are not done. I heard the Vice President say today that they are going to keep working until they get it done. They are not giving up, so we cannot rest either. Most importantly, we cannot let them forget that we are watching, that we are waiting, and we will still be here when they try to come back and jam this bill through. I really hope that the Republicans take another course. In setting aside the policy disagreements that we are having, there is really a better way. There is a way for the Senate to be a Senate, which is to empower two of the best Republican Senators whom we have seen in generations. They are Lamar Alexander and Orrin Hatch--two people whose conservative credentials nobody doubts. They are the chairmen of two of the biggest committees in the U.S. Senate--the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and the Finance Committee. They have done bipartisan work-- Orrin Hatch for decades and Lamar Alexander for decades. Both of them, relatively recently, have done bipartisan work on tax extenders and on repealing No Child Left Behind. These are not easy issues. For these two chairmen, because they understand the committee hearing process and because they earned those gavels, I can only imagine their frustration. Look, I am a Progressive, and I support the Affordable Care Act, but if I were sitting there as a Republican member of the HELP Committee or the Finance Committee and if these bills were going through and taking the country in a direction to which I objected and if I were the ranking member or were, maybe, a couple off from being the ranking member, I would be thinking to myself that I cannot wait until I get that gavel back. I can tell you that I can have my own hearings, and I can listen to expert testimony, and I can craft a bill. That is what I want to do. The point of being a legislator is to actually work together on a bipartisan basis. Everybody knows that the chairman or the chairwoman has the lion's share of the authority, but it is still a collaborative process. It is politics. You try to accommodate people on both sides of the aisle, and you have quite an ideological spectrum, both on the D side and the R side, but that is the fun of it. That is the way the Senate is supposed to work. You have a hearing, and the thing that we should remember about a hearing is that, generally speaking, if you have four testifiers--I do not know if it is a rule or just kind of an operating assumption--the majority party gets to pick three out of the four testifiers. So you are going to get three Republican witnesses and one Democratic witness if you have a normal hearing in HELP or Finance about the Affordable Care Act or what ought to happen with the American Health Care Act or whatever it may be. So it is not as if you cannot control the message, and it is not as if you cannot, in the end, do whatever bill you want to do. Isn't that the fun of being in the Senate? Forget the Democrats for the moment. I mean, the Democrats were totally in the dark, and the public was totally in the dark. Even for the Republican Members, I mean, this has to irritate them that 13 people were sort of kept in the loop--some more than others, some less than others--but it was like these consecutive conversations: What will it take to get you to yes? OK. We will consider that. We will let you know what we are able to do. Why not just have a public hearing? That is, literally, what we do for everything--for the Defense authorization, for appropriations bills. Of the 12 subcommittees, we have several hearings. Whether it is telecommunications or railroads or education or even other healthcare issues, we have public hearings, and we do so on a bipartisan basis. As tough as we are on each other in the election context and as tough as we are sometimes with each other on the floor, the committee hearing process is rarely as partisan. The committee hearing process allows you to kind of get to the work of legislating. All I am suggesting is that I understand what Leader McConnell is going to try to do. He is going to try to peel off votes. Senator Markey is exactly right in that he is going to try to peel off votes. Yet there is another way to go here, and that is to legislate. Let me just make the political argument for this on behalf of Republicans. The problem with being the majority party and trashing the healthcare system by not properly funding the exchanges right now and by creating all of this uncertainty is that prices go up, and everybody understands this. Barack Obama is not the President. He was river rafting when all of this was happening, and he deserves it. I am happy for him. He is not the President. So the idea is that you are going to sort of say: Well, we are going to cut Medicaid, cut opioid funding, and we are going to turn this into a big tax cut for people who are already doing well financially because that last bill was called ObamaCare. It had the word ``Obama'' in it. Listen, Republicans and Democrats across the country may not be politically sophisticated like we pretend to be, but they are smart. They are thinking to themselves, I am a Republican, I am a conservative, but I don't care about Barack Obama anymore. He is gone. He is not the President. So if you sit there and tell me we need to slash funding for mental health services or slash funding for my community health center in a rural neighborhood, I don't care--your argument cannot be: Because ObamaCare, right? You can't be: Because ObamaCare. Now you have a majority in the House, a majority in the Senate, you have the Presidency. So now Republicans own the healthcare system. So here we are trying to figure out a way where we can both own the healthcare system. We are acting like this is impossible to discover. We are acting like: Gosh, what way would we work where we can each sort of shoulder some of the political and policy responsibility, the personal responsibility for the American healthcare system? There is a very simple answer to that. We just do this through the regular order. If you do this through the regular order--what that means is--it is interesting to me that the difference between now and, say, 6 months ago is people actually know what reconciliation is. They know there is a threshold for regular legislation of 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, but it is a really important point. The moment the Republicans decided to do this via reconciliation, that was tactical, and that was kind of technical, but what that meant was, they said: We have 52. We only need 51. We don't need to talk to you. I understand that kind of rationale. You have 52 votes. You can give up actually two and have Vice President Pence break the tie. That may be a judgment they made; I am not sure if they regret it or not. So here we are. The way to take this off the table as a political liability for the Republicans is to get a bill that could get 60 votes because once it becomes a bipartisan enterprise, it cannot be a cudgel. We cannot beat each other up over it. When the Affordable Care Act passed originally, one of the challenges we had as a political matter is that we had not a single, solitary Republican vote. I will take everybody at their word that they just couldn't vote for it because it was against their political ideology and their principles, but it also had the side benefit of, the moment a bill doesn't have the patina of bipartisanship--the moment only one party participates in a process--boy, do you own it. So the question I have is, Do you really want to own the American healthcare system, whatever happens, good or bad? You become like the utility company. Nobody likes their utility company. The best thing that can happen, if you are a utility company, is the lights stay on and the rate of increase slightly slows. You are never going to have cheaper rates, right? And when you flip your light switch on and your lights go on, you don't say: Gosh, I am so pleased with my utility company. You ignore it. The best thing that can happen is, you come up with a brilliant bill, without any Democratic support, and then everybody shrugs their shoulders and moves on. More likely you are going to own all the problems you are creating, and you are creating myriad problems. I just want to say, there are a lot of Democrats who are on the level about wanting to legislate here, and we will do it the moment repeal is taken off the table, the moment there is a commitment to public hearings, the moment there is a commitment to doing things through the regular order. Now, those were not my prepared remarks, but that really matters to me. I really believe in the Senate. For all of our flaws, we are still the place that has to solve the problems. We are still the world's greatest deliberative body because we must be, because these are Federal problems and we are the Federal legislature so we have to fix this ourselves. There are only two paths; one is the partisan path, which is great peril for people across the country and great political peril, and then there is the path of statesmanship and stateswomanship--the path of us working together and being a Senate again. We can do that, but we have to decide that is what we want to do. I am hoping we go home, we participate in our parades, we hang out with our families, we cook some burgers, we cook some hot dogs, and we think: You know what, I want to legislate again. That was the battle, that was tough, I am angry, I am disappointed, I am relieved--it depends on who you are-- but I would like to start legislating again, and I would like to do so in the regular order. I am hoping that is what happens over the next week. If it doesn't, then we will be ready to fight again, and I know there are literally millions of Americans who are not going to let up until this bill is dead. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, you might think that for the last 7 years, the major complaint people had about the Affordable Care Act was that it hurt rich people, because they seem to be the only people who stand to gain with this Republican Senate healthcare plan. They get a giant tax break. The rest of America, on the other hand, is in trouble. With TrumpCare, healthcare will cost more, and 22 million people are going to lose their healthcare altogether. Some healthcare bill. To put this in perspective, imagine if everyone lost their healthcare in Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Alaska, West Virginia, Ohio, Idaho, and Wyoming. That is what TrumpCare does. That is 22 million Americans. It also devastates one of the best healthcare programs this country has. With this bill, Medicaid is going to lose nearly $800 billion. If your only worry is that your investment income gets taxed at 3.8 percent every year, you can breathe a sigh of relief. Let me drill down on that because one of the most egregious tax breaks in this bill--and this is mostly a tax cut bill and not a healthcare bill--is the following: If you are making $200,000 as an individual or $250,000 as a couple, capital gains income is currently taxed at 3.8 percent. If you are making $200,000 as an individual or $250,000 as a couple and you have capital gains, not regular income, it is taxed at 3.8 percent. This bill zeros that tax out. This bill zeros that tax out. On top of that, it is retroactive. Think about the absurdity. Here we are. I am looking at the Senator from Pennsylvania and how much he has advocated for children and especially for children with disabilities. I am looking at the Senator from Connecticut and the work he has done for people with chronic diseases and mental health challenges and the resources we need for that. And in the middle of a supposedly oriented toward healthcare piece of legislation, we are giving a retroactive capital gains tax cut to people who make over $250,000 a year in combined income. It is absurd. It is not a healthcare bill. If you have a loved one in a nursing home, if you are pregnant or thinking of having a baby, if your kid has a disability that requires costly care, if you work two jobs but your employer doesn't provide health insurance, then this bill does not take care of you. Instead of less taxes, you get less care, and you are going to pay more for it. This is what happens when legislators don't have committee hearings or they refuse to meet with patients, doctors, nurses, advocates, their own constituents. There have been so few townhalls about healthcare. There have been so few real Senate debates about healthcare. I have seen every single Democratic Member of the Senate come here and talk about this piece of legislation. I have seen every single Republican Member of the Senate talk about legislation that they are proud of. I have seen very few people on the Republican side of the aisle come down and talk about this bill because they know it is not a good piece of legislation. At this point, we are not even debating healthcare policy. It is not a question of what is the best way to get people to sign up for insurance or how we can lower premiums and deductibles or how we can improve the delivery system; it is a question of how many people are going to lose their healthcare so that insurance company CEOs can continue to make millions of dollars a year. That is literally what is in this bill. Those are the conversations we are having--nothing related to reforming the healthcare system or getting people more coverage for less but, rather, tax cuts for people who are involved in the healthcare industry. How many grandparents are going to get kicked out of nursing homes? It is not a rhetorical question. My wife's grandmother was in a nursing home 2 months ago. It was a beautiful facility. They took great care of her. They had three beds, three nursing home beds. I think the normal reimbursement is about $9,000 a month. They took wonderful care of my wife's grandmother. They won't exist. That nursing home and all the nursing homes like it won't exist if there is an $800 billion cut to Medicaid. This is not a theoretical conversation. This isn't even a partisan conversation. Everybody has nursing home beds in all of their home States. Everybody at least ought to know some middle-class people who rely on Medicaid for nursing homes. CBO gave us the answer today. Too many people are going to be locked out of the healthcare system if this bill goes forward, and all for giant tax cuts. Look, our healthcare system is not perfect. Changes need to be made, but this bill is just not it. It has no clear guiding principle other than slashing Medicaid to pay for tax cuts. We have to start over. I am looking at the Presiding Officer, who was a speaker of the house in North Carolina and understands how to do a bill on a bipartisan basis. I am thinking of the numerous Republicans who are capable of working on a bipartisan bill that can get 60 votes. By the way, the politics would change because if we worked on a bill that could get 60 votes, we would be in a wonderful position--the Senate is set up to encourage us to work together--because if we abide by that 60-vote threshold and we come up with a bill together, we would own the American healthcare system together. We don't get to play this blame game about what is happening with premiums or what is happening with coverage numbers. We actually, on the level, collaborate. When you think about a bill or an issue that used to be as partisan as public education, we had Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray come together. Heck, in the last Congress, we had Jim Inhofe and Barbara Boxer do a bill together. It is possible for us to do a bipartisan piece of legislation. The decision was made to go with reconciliation, and that is backfiring because the problem with not involving Democrats is that there are Democrats across the country. The problem with not involving experts is that you end up with a product you can't defend. What we really need to do is take a breath, take the Fourth of July weekend, and reconvene as a Congress--not as Democrats and Republicans but as Americans who understand that our healthcare system is not perfect, that it is in need of improvement, but this bill doesn't get it done. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

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

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, there are two things Americans need to know about this Republican healthcare plan. The first is that it is going to make insurance more expensive, and the second is that it is going to make it harder to get healthcare in the first place. That is the bottom line of this bill: higher costs for less care--and all for a tax cut for the rich. That is what we are doing. We are taking about $800 billion worth of revenue, eviscerating it, eliminating it. Those tax revenues were basically tax increases passed under the Affordable Care Act. They were tax increases on the wealthiest among us. What we are doing is getting rid of all those tax increases in order to cut Medicaid. That is what this bill does. That is not what Americans had in mind when they said on a bipartisan basis, on a majority basis--when they asked Congress to fix healthcare. When you read the fine print, you see that it gets worse every moment, and you realize how bad this plan is. The Senate version did something extraordinary: It actually moved to the right. And that is a real legislative achievement. Look at Medicaid. This is a program that helps one out of every five Americans, two out of every five children in the United States. It helps one out of every two families who have a newborn baby. And it covers three out of every four long-term nursing home residents. This program literally saves lives--nursing home patients; people struggling with opioid addiction; people who are working two jobs but still don't make enough to cover their own healthcare insurance--but with this bill, Medicaid as we know it will be destroyed, all so that people at the top of the food chain can pay less in taxes. This bill actually has a certain symmetry to it. There are at least $800 billion worth of cuts to Medicaid--probably more but at least $800 billion--and it just so happens that there are also around $800 billion worth of tax cuts for the wealthy. So insurance executives will be OK. Don't worry about them. What we should worry about is women who need Medicaid for maternal health services. We should worry about seniors and people with disabilities. Activists for disability rights are appropriately freaked out about this bill. People in wheelchairs protested outside of a Senate office earlier today, and some of them said that they would literally die if this bill passes. It was an intense protest. And we hope everybody is OK, but it is intense because these are intense issues. These are personal issues. These are healthcare issues. People are worried--not about some abstract public policy or political debate; they are worried about their own lives. And they are not wrong. Because of Medicaid, people now have access to physical therapy and immunizations. They can see a counselor for mental health problems and opioid addiction. They can afford the medication they need instead of relying on free samples from clinics. Medicaid has changed everything for them. This is not just good for patients, it is also good for taxpayers. By giving preventive care, we save money. And if TrumpCare becomes law, those services will go away, thanks to $800 billion in cuts. This bill also lets insurance companies opt out of covering essential health benefits. I want to be very clear about this. This is a term of art. It is a piece of jargon. I am going to go slowly here and not assume that if you are not in politics, you would understand what an essential health benefit is. Basically, if you are getting a healthcare plan, there are 10 things that, under Federal law, a healthcare plan has to cover. It just makes sense. I will list them. They are ambulatory patient services; emergency services, so ER visits; hospitalization--if you have to stay overnight in the hospital, it has to be covered in your healthcare plan; maternity and newborn care; mental health and substance abuse services, including behavioral health treatment; prescription drugs; rehab; laboratory services; preventive wellness and wellness services; chronic disease management; and pediatric services. So I want you to imagine a world where you can get an insurance plan--a so-called insurance plan--but under the law, they can tell you: By the way, we don't cover hospitalization. By the way, we have this great insurance plan, but if you need any prescription drugs, those are out-of-pocket--not a copay; you have to pay all of it. By the way, we will give you an insurance plan, but if you have mental illness, you are on your own. By the way, if you get pregnant, we don't cover that. It is a healthcare plan, which is why we have a statute, a Federal law, that says ambulatory patient services, emergency services, hospitalization, maternity and newborn care, mental health and substance abuse services, prescription drugs, rehab, lab services, preventive and wellness services, and pediatric services have to be covered. Otherwise, it is not insurance. Every one of these benefits is covered full stop under the current law, but what the proposal does is it eviscerates essential health benefits. I don't know what the CBO is going to say, because they got rid of the individual mandate, and it is going to be unclear. There is a real possibility that there will actually be an increase in the number of people who are covered, but that coverage is going to be nonsense. Can you imagine having a health insurance plan that doesn't cover maternity care? Can you imagine--especially nowadays, when half the time when you go to the doctor, they give you a prescription--so you go to the doctor, and they say you need this, and you say OK, and then you have to pay out-of-pocket? What is the point of insurance if none of the things you need are covered by the insurance? That is what this bill does. I am also worried about the distractions in this bill. It defunds Planned Parenthood and doesn't provide nearly enough for opioid addiction programs. I want to be clear about what I mean by ``distraction.'' It is my supposition--I don't know for sure that these things were intentionally either omitted from the bill or put in the bill to allow some of my Republican colleagues to get well legislatively. What do I mean by that? Opioid treatment was tens of billions of dollars in the House version. They brought it down to less than $1 billion. That puts somebody on this side of the aisle in a position to say: Even though I am for $800 billion of Medicaid cuts, which will eviscerate opioid treatment across the country, I am going to introduce an amendment and we are going to increase opioid treatment. Once we get a ``yes'' vote, well, you know, I was really concerned, but with my amendment, we have more money for opioid treatment. Don't fall for that trick. It is a trick. The way to fund opioid treatment is to fund opioid treatment. Medicaid is both the best way to do it clinically and the best way to do it fiscally. So I am afraid they intentionally left that out so somebody can go in and be the hero on the other side, while not actually solving the problem--likewise with Planned Parenthood. The way you fund opioid treatment is through Medicaid. We had 13 men working in secret without input from any women or Democrats or experts or advocates. Part of the thing about healthcare, as the President says, is nobody knew it was so complicated. But you really need hearings. You really need to understand how all of the parts of a system interact with each other. Let me give an example. You cut Medicaid, and somebody who is Medicaid-eligible but also a veteran--you don't know for sure whether, if Medicaid services are not available, they are going to go back into the VA system and cost the VA system more money. If you cut preventive treatment, you don't know if you are going to end up having to pay on the back end with more ER services. So the reason you have hearings is you have to have some rather technical expertise in the room to say: Hey, if you do this, this might happen. If do you that, this might happen. If you do this, we are not quite sure what might happen. But the idea that 13 men with very little expertise in healthcare policy--they are not unintelligent, they are not unqualified to be public policy makers, but the whole thing about being in the Senate is that, for the most part, we are supposed to be, as they say--Jack or Jane--Jack of all trades, master of none. We are supposed to be pretty good at receiving information, kind of distilling it, asking the right kinds of questions, listening to our constituents, and then crystallizing all of that into a bill. The problem with this process is they did about one-third of that. They talked to each other, and they talked to Republican lobbyists, but they didn't talk to the people back home. They didn't talk to people who run community health centers. They didn't talk to mental health advocates. We have people who come from Hawaii and across the country who advocate for every specific disease treatment and disease research. These people usually are touched personally by their issues. They come in, and most of us receive them and talk to them and think about how to get them more funding or more reimbursements through NIH or CDC or the Department of Defense or wherever we can find resources for them. That is the process of being in a legislative context if you are not personally an expert on healthcare policy. If you do it in the dark of night, if you do it literally without any women, if you do it literally without any people from the other party, you are going to get a bad product. They knew they were going to get a bad product, but they made a judgment. They made a judgment. They decided that the longer this bill sees the light of day, the lower the chances it has of passing, and I think they are right. I mean, if this thing is subjected to real sunshine, it will just wither. That is just a fact. This is why they didn't have any hearings in the House, this is why they are not only not having any hearings in the Senate, but they are going to allow for I think it is 20 hours of debate under this silly vote-arama procedure. What they will do is, I think, yield back a lot of their time. What does that mean? That means 20 hours will become 10 hours because they don't want to defend their bill. They are absolutely happy to trash the Affordable Care Act and say it has a series of problems and all the rest of it. You know what, the Affordable Care Act has a series of problems. No doubt about it. I will tell you it is way better than this. I will also tell you it is way better than the situation we had before the act was passed. The No. 1 cause of bankruptcy in the United States was getting sick. Think about that. Before this act, people would not be just afraid for themselves when they got sick, when something catastrophic happened to them, either a chronic disease or something that imperiled their lives or an accident, but you would have dual anxieties, right? You wondered whether you were going to be OK, but you also wondered whether you were going to be able to make it financially. So we are sort of beyond that, and now we have a law that has been on the books that does need fixing. I know the Presiding Officer and the Senator from Missouri, who is waiting to speak, would be pleased-- really would be pleased to participate in a bipartisan process. I think about the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, one of the best statesmen in the U.S. Senate, Lamar Alexander, a Republican with whom I disagree on a lot, but he and Patty Murray did a bill on public education that got--I don't know--84 votes or something. Liberal Patty Murray and conservative Lamar Alexander did a deal. Orrin Hatch, President pro tempore of the Senate, is someone who worked with my predecessor, who worked with Teddy Kennedy, who did bills and did deals. So I understand we are kind of in this squabble about whether there is good faith or there was good faith. Our view of this is you went into the reconciliation process before even, in any serious way, pursuing bipartisan legislation. You decided you wanted 51 votes, not 60 votes, and that was sort of poisonous fruit from the tree. Fine. That is our view. Your view is that you serially tried to reach out to us, and we have rebuffed your overtures. I have my view; the Republicans have their view. Right now, you are about to walk one-sixth of the American economy off a cliff, and you are also about to harm tens of millions of individuals in all of our home States--not Republicans or Democrats or Greens or Independents or Libertarians or people who don't vote or whoever it may be, but people are going to really be hurt by this bill. People are really going to be hurt by this bill. Forgetting the politics, I think we have an opportunity to avert the harm. If this bill does come crashing down, then I think we have an opportunity to work together on healthcare. I, for one, pledge that if we are in a position to sit down on a bipartisan basis and come up with improvements to the existing statute, I will be the first person to say yes to that kind of process. It is not too late. All we need are three Republicans to say: Let's slow down. Let's have a hearing. Let's work with Democrats. Let's do this the right way. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, the Senate recently passed the Department of Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act. This legislation is intended to improve the VA by strengthening the process of holding nonperforming VA employees accountable, but it does this by removing certain due process protections that are currently in place to protect VA employees from unlawful discrimination or retaliation. Dr. David Shulkin, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, asked for this authority to reform the personnel system, and the Senate obliged his request. In Hawaii we have a much different and more pressing problem that this legislation does not address, and that is the challenge we face with recruitment and retention of VA leaders and filling vacant positions at the VA. Nowhere is this challenge more evident than in the VA's yearlong search to recruit a new executive director for the Pacific Island Health Care System in Honolulu. During this time, six executive directors from six different VA healthcare systems on the mainland rotated through Hawaii on an interim basis. The VA said that its search dragged on for so long because it faced a shortage of individuals with the right skills to fill these medical director positions, but that is no excuse. The VA should have been doing more to develop a pool of qualified people to fill vacant medical director positions. Failure to find long-term, stable leadership undermines accountability not only at the highest level, but across the entire healthcare system. I am also bothered by the decision to rotate medical directors in from other healthcare systems, even on an interim basis. This stopgap measure failed to ensure the proper leadership required to provide long-term direction for the Pacific Island Health Care System and to make sure that there was someone to hold accountable for the delivery of services to the more than 120,000 veterans that the VA is responsible for in the Pacific. Those veterans and their families deserve better. Leadership recruitment is not the only staffing issue we face. In its September 2016 report on the Pacific Island Health Care System, the VA's Office of the Inspector General specifically noted that recruitment and retention of staff is an ongoing challenge across our neighbor islands, in large part due to cost of living, distance, and physical isolation. At the time of its report, the OIG noted that there were 75 unfilled positions at community-based outpatient clinics across Hawaii. These are vacant positions at clinics that directly affect veterans' access to healthcare. I worry that removing important due process protections for VA employees will only make this problem worse, because, where there are already issues in physician recruitment and retention, the VA could compete through the promise of a stable job, in an environment free from unlawful discrimination or retaliation. Knowing that those protections are in place is not only helpful to attracting recruits, but it is helpful to promoting a culture free of inequity and intimidation because people know they will be held to account for their actions. That kind of culture is critical to recruitment and retention because the last thing the VA wants is hard-working employees to search for jobs that offer better working conditions elsewhere. At our recent subcommittee hearing on military construction and veteran affairs appropriations, Secretary Shulkin acknowledged that the VA has seen cases of documented whistleblower retaliation, and that is important, because it means that Secretary Shulkin is going to have to be vigilant so that this new legislation is not abused. In his mind, he is not seeking this legislation so that the VA can fire employees without any reason or to allow supervisors to abuse them, and I hope that is how this plays out in practice across the country, but there is going to be more risk for a workforce of 360,000 that is decentralized, where decisions are made locally, and so we will be vigilant with him and will hold Secretary Shulkin accountable for any wrongdoing. We are still left grappling with the challenge of recruitment and retention, and unfortunately, this legislation does not address it, and it may make addressing it even harder. With nearly 50,000 vacant positions across the VA workforce, Congress needs to get a handle on this issue because these vacancies risk undermining the delivery of services and care to our veterans who rely on the VA. We can and need to do better by them. Thank you.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Madam President, I have a parliamentary inquiry. I have information that indicates that approximately 300 amendments were considered and that of those amendments, 161 amendments offered by Republican members of the committee were adopted during the consideration of S. 1679. Is that correct?

Mr. SCHATZ. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that Calendar No. 120, H.R. 1628, be referred to the Committee on Finance for the purpose of conducting a public hearing.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I want to give a status report on this bill. Right now, we think it is with the 13 men who are working on it in secret; they will show it to Republican lobbyists, and then they will send it over to the CBO for a score, and eventually the American public and the Senate will be able to see the bill. We will have a process called vote-arama, which is mostly nonsense, and there will be lots of opportunities to offer amendments, but let's be clear about what happens at the end of vote-arama. The leader will offer an amendment in the nature of a substitute. So what does that mean? That means all of the amendments that were adopted along the way get taken out, with one 51-vote margin, and all of that vote-arama was for show because Mitch McConnell will put his bill on the floor that was negotiated in secret with those 13 people. If there was any question that our democracy is being rolled over by Senate Republicans, I want you to think about these 13 men. They are drafting a bill without any input from women, from Democrats, from experts, and by working in secret they are cutting out about 250 million people who are from the 40 States who aren't represented among those 13 men. You can bet that those 40 States have unique healthcare needs and unique healthcare laws. And without the right language, the bill could throw healthcare in each of those States or any of those States into total chaos. They have also cut out Senators on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and the Finance Committee, even though these committees are actually constructed for the purpose of working on legislation like this. They know how to get things done like this. There are members of the HELP Committee and the Finance Committee who are among the experts on this issue, yet they don't get a chance to even see the bill. These Senators have jurisdiction over this legislation, but they are being left out. This is just not the way it is supposed to work. We need transparency. We need bipartisanship. But now the Republicans will try to tell us that the hearings are bypassed all the time. That is not true. In fact, this body will hold a hearing on almost anything. In 2017 alone, the Senate has had hearings on hot tub safety, self- driving cars, a treaty for outer space, multimodal shipping, the maritime administration, and dozens of other issues. Look, those are actually not to be trivialized. It is important for the Senate to have hearings. It is important for subcommittees to do their work. But nobody can tell me that hot tub safety, self-driving cars, a treaty for outer space, multimodal shipping, and the maritime administration are more important than one-sixth of the American economy. It is a joke. We are talking about one-sixth of the American economy, about millions of jobs, and about people with life-threatening diseases and life-changing medical bills, so we know how important hearings are to do legislation. When the Senate took up the ACA, there were almost 100 hearings. Think about that: 100 hearings versus 0. There were roundtables and walk-throughs held by the two committees. We considered hundreds of amendments and accepted more than 150 amendments from Republicans. But, for this bill, no markup, no transparency, no bipartisanship--just 13 men meeting in secret outside of the regular process. The only thing that has changed is now the market is under siege, but the market is under siege because of the Republican administration. They are purposefully creating uncertainty. That is not a rhetorical flourish; they are saying they are doing that. President Trump actually said he wanted to create uncertainty in the healthcare market in order to create leverage with Democrats. Think about how unusual that is. Think about how offensive that is. It is perfectly appropriate for one party to try to generate leverage in a negotiation against the other. That is part of politics, either in an election context or in the public policy context. But the way that this President and Tom Price are trying to generate leverage is by raising healthcare premiums in order to force Democrats to buckle. That is unheard of. It really is unheard of. And it hurts everybody across the country to create this uncertainty. It is bad enough that the Republicans are trying to take healthcare away from 23 million people--from nursing home patients and their families, from women who are pregnant or fighting breast cancer, from sons and daughters and moms and dads who struggle with opioids. But to add insult to injury, they are going to jam it down your throat. You don't get to read what it is about before it passes or hear from doctors or nurses or experts about how it will affect you. So why are they working on this bill in secret? The answer is very simple. The bill stinks. They are ashamed of it. The bill itself is an embarrassment. The process is an embarrassment. They have said so themselves. No matter how you look at this, this bill is a disaster for people and their families. It will be a disaster for anyone who relies on Medicaid, which will be cut by at least $800 billion, and Medicaid is a safety net for people who need care but can't afford it. Look at nursing home care. Medicaid covers three out of every four long-stay nursing home residents. My wife's grandmother was in a nursing home and just passed away, had great care, and wouldn't have been able to get the care she needed were it not for Medicaid. This is not an uncommon story--millions of Americans across the country of all income levels. People think of Medicaid as for people who are not financially in a position to get care in any given moment. That is true. It does take care of the poor. But it also takes care of nursing home care for people who worked all their lives and just don't have enough. It is $9,000 a month in the State of Hawaii for nursing home care. It is more than that for hospice care. We all know that nobody escapes end-of-life care. Rich or poor, left or right, red, blue, purple, nobody escapes this part of your life, and everybody needs help. There might be a few people who save up enough cash money to be able to shell out $10,000 a month for that kind of care, but for the rest of us, Medicaid is that lifeline. There are actually some Republicans who don't want to cut Medicaid. They have seen how the program improves people's lives. Arkansas and Kentucky, for example, expanded Medicaid. These States have seen big jumps in the number of the people who now have their own doctor or have gotten a checkup in the past year, people who are now more likely to say they are in excellent health. But under TrumpCare, we will be back to the bad old days. This bill is also a disaster for older people, who will be hit with what the AARP is calling an age tax. This will get a little wonky--not as wonky as that referred to by my colleague who spoke about 5 minutes ago but a little wonky. Right now, companies are not allowed to charge any more than three times as much for an older person as a younger person. Three times is the cap. But TrumpCare will increase that rate to five times. So what happens is every year, as you get older, your insurance costs will go up and up and up. That is why they call it an age tax. In other words, many seniors will see premium increases that can cost them thousands of dollars more each year at a time when people are already struggling to find money to pay for healthcare. This is also a disaster for patients who don't want to lose their healthcare provider. Right now, an estimated one in five women goes to Planned Parenthood clinics. I understand we have different views about reproductive choice. I understand that. But we also understand--when we are talking on the level about Planned Parenthood and when we are talking about Federal funding for Planned Parenthood, everybody who pays any bit of attention to this understands what Planned Parenthood does for women across the country--again, conservative women, progressive women; Planned Parenthood doesn't care. Planned Parenthood is not using Federal funding for abortion. We all know that by now. It is cancer screenings, and it is quality healthcare and birth control. People talk about giving more choices for healthcare and saving taxpayers' money, but the CBO estimates that defunding Planned Parenthood will take away options for nearly 400,000 women across the country and will cost taxpayers more than $130 million. It is also a disaster for those struggling with opioid addiction. This bill will take away treatment for mental health and addiction, leaving hundreds of thousands of people fighting opioid addiction without adequate health insurance. We saw the statistics that opioid addiction, I believe, is killing more people annually than HIV/AIDS killed at its apex. I believe it has either surpassed or is comparable, in terms of cause of death, with car accidents. This is one of the leading killers in the country, and Medicaid is the program that funds opioid addiction for most of the people who get help. This bill is also a disaster for patients with preexisting conditions because it means we will be going back to the dark days when insurance companies could charge you more for having a preexisting condition. I have heard from people back home in Hawaii who are terrified of what this could mean for their health. One woman wrote that she is in the middle of a fight for her life against breast cancer, and she is scared that under TrumpCare, she will lose her insurance, that she will have to stop her treatments and could lose her life. A husband wrote to me that his wife has stage IV breast cancer. She has had every possible treatment and surgery imaginable to extend her life, but without the guarantee of affordable coverage for all, her fight will quickly come to an end. She is 29. Even people without serious medical conditions will be affected by this preexisting condition's nonsense. We know that because before the Affordable Care Act became law, insurance companies were able to discriminate based on what they determined to be a preexisting condition. One woman in Hawaii told me that in the days before the Affordable Care Act, she was rejected by insurance companies because she had back pain at one point in her life. The pain never came back, and she never needed treatment again. She was young and healthy, but the insurance company wouldn't give her insurance. We cannot accept the end of nationwide protections for people with preexisting conditions. We cannot accept high premiums or so-called high-risk pools that have historically failed in giving people the coverage they need and deserve. We don't have to do it this way. We don't have the majority, and this is being done under a process called reconciliation, which means that you don't need a filibuster- proof majority; you just need 51 votes. So if you are proud of your bill--we have Senator Hatch, chairman of the Finance Committee and one of the most respected Republicans in the country, actually. We have Senator Alexander, chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Both have a long history of being able to do deals--Orrin Hatch with Teddy Kennedy and my predecessor, Dan Inouye; Lamar Alexander with just about everybody--Chuck Schumer, Patty Murray. These are conservative Members of the Senate. There is no doubt about their Republican credentials. But they are also people who are capable of crafting legislation in the right way. I have no doubt they like their gavels. I have no doubt they like chairing hearings. I have no doubt they have the personal, intellectual, emotional, and political stamina to go through a process which may take more than a couple of days. I will tell you, this is the world's greatest deliberative body--it is--and these are a bunch of impressive people I serve with in the Senate. But without a hearing, you get a garbage product. You get a bill that just stinks, that staffers say they are keeping secret because ``we're not stupid.'' They are so embarrassed at this product that they are keeping it secret, because they know the moment this thing gets posted, everybody from everybody's home State--and not just Democratic States and not just purple States, but every home State is going to say: My community health center is going to get shut down. My opioid treatment center is going to get shut down. My hospital may no longer exist. They know this bill stinks. There is a simple solution. All we need is three Republicans to say: Let the Senate be the Senate. The House did whatever the House was going to do. There was a weird White House Rose Garden signing ceremony without a bill even being enacted. It was the most bizarre thing I have ever seen, where everybody was congratulating each other for inflicting pain on the American people. But the Senate has to be the Senate here, and what that means is that we have to be that cooling saucer. We have to actually slow down and have a deliberative process. All we need is three Members of the Senate on the Republican side to say a very simple thing. They can be as critical of ObamaCare as they want, they can be as partisan against us as they want, but all they have to say is this: I am not voting for a bill that doesn't get a hearing. I am not voting for a bill that doesn't get a hearing. Let this thing see the light of day. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, we Democrats are here on the floor to take a stand against a bill that is a disaster for our Nation's healthcare-- Medicaid patients, families with loved ones in nursing homes, people who struggle with opioid addiction, women who rely on Planned Parenthood, and people who work in the healthcare industry. We stand with them and for them tonight, but we also stand for the American public, who is being left in the dark about what TrumpCare will mean for them. This is not the normal order of Senate business. The Republicans are going about this in a way that is so procedurally flawed that it is an embarrassment to democracy itself. They are hiding this bill. They are hiding this bill because people will be outraged when they find out what is in it. That is why a Republican aide said that they are not releasing the bill--because ``we aren't stupid.'' Think about what that statement means. First, it means that they have a bill. Second, it means that they think it is political suicide to make the bill public. So they are bypassing the normal and necessary process that is needed to make good legislation. The way you make legislation is to allow the Sun to shine in, and that starts with hearings. Every legislative body in the country--from a school board to a county council--has hearings because we have figured out over the centuries--for all of our flaws--that you need hearings, not just to placate the masses but to figure out whether your legislation is any good or not. Republicans have not held a single hearing on TrumpCare. No one who knows anything about healthcare is allowed to say anything about this bill because they are not even allowed to see it, but anyone who has ever tried to understand the American healthcare system knows that it is complicated. The President said so himself. You need expert testimony, public input, and time to talk to your home State. That is the way you get a good product, but Republicans have totally bypassed the two committees that exist in order to consider legislation like this. Think about it. Under normal circumstances, this legislation would be in the Finance and HELP Committees' jurisdictions. There would be hearings, and there would be a markup, but that is not the process that is being used. There is no markup. There are no committee hearings. It is just 13 dudes, and they are rushing to pass a bill without women, without Democrats, and without input from the American people. Here is the order of the people who get to see the healthcare bill: 13 men in secret, Republican lobbyists, POLITICO, Republicans, Democrats, and, then, the American people. This is shameful. This is a violation of the way democracy itself should work. When they are done, the product will be the fruit from the poisonous tree. It will not be good because the process that will have produced it will have been so flawed. There are many, many Americans who do not support this bill, and I am going to highlight just three groups who stand to lose. First, you have people who are going to pay more for insurance, lose their insurance altogether, or lose the ability to choose their providers. Families will not be able to afford nursing home care for their loved ones or to pay the hospital bills for a parent after she has had a heart attack. Americans who have preexisting conditions will struggle to buy insurance because insurance companies will be able to charge more for conditions like diabetes or cancer or asthma. Women will be blocked from getting annual checkups or cancer screenings at their local Planned Parenthood clinics. All of these people stand to lose if the bill moves forward. Second, you have people whose jobs may be at risk. Healthcare makes up about one-sixth of the American economy, and it does not exist in a vacuum. It is an industry that impacts millions of workers, and you can bet that those jobs will be affected by this bill. One study found that TrumpCare will take away nearly 1 million jobs by the year 2026. We are supposed to be helping American workers, not taking away their jobs or making it harder for them to get healthcare. Finally, this bill hurts the working poor. These are the people who will struggle even more under TrumpCare, and I do not know why we would punish them. Why would we leave them with nowhere to turn? I know that millions of Americans feel the same way that I do. They care deeply about the poor, the vulnerable, and the sick among us, because they have made news in standing up for their neighbors. One woman named Jessie went to a town hall to make her voice heard on TrumpCare, and I want to read what she said: It is my understanding the ACA mandate requires everybody to have insurance because the healthy people pull up the sick people, right? And as a Christian, my whole philosophy on life is pull up the unfortunate. So the individual mandate, that's what it does. The healthy people pull up the sick. If we take those people and put them in high-risk insurance pools, they're costlier and there's less coverage for them. That's the way it's been in the past, and that's the way it will be again. So we are effectively punishing our sickest people. Look, we may not agree on policy, but I hope we can agree on the process. So what will it take? What will it take for this process to be restored and for TrumpCare to be considered in the way that it ought to be considered? The answer is actually very straightforward. We need three Republicans. It only takes three Republicans, and you can be a person who hates the Affordable Care Act or has mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act or anywhere in between. It only takes three Republicans in the U.S. Senate to restore the U.S. Senate itself--to restore the hearing process, to restore public confidence, and to restore bipartisanship. All we need are three Republican Senators to say: I will not vote for anything if there hasn't been a public hearing. I will not vote for anything that is being jammed down Americans' throats. I will not vote for anything without being able to go back home and figure out how it will impact my State's hospitals. This is not an unreasonable task. We are just asking for three Republicans to say: Let's be a Senate again. Let's restore order and transparency and do things the right way because that is the only way this bill will not be a total disaster. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, before I move into my remarks, I would like to say welcome back to the Senator from North Carolina. We are happy to see him hale and hardy. I was worried until I saw your little internet video and you looked fine. It is nice to see you. We welcome you back to the Senate floor-- and looking more energetic than the rest of us, in any case. So happy to have you back, Senator Tillis.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I thank Mr. Franken for his leadership on this issue. He is a person who understands the content industry and has been a fierce defender of people's ability to view content online, people's ability to express themselves online, and understands that a fair and open media marketplace is central to our democracy. I want to address one assertion that was made by the proponents of repealing net neutrality; that is, that somehow the investment climate under net neutrality was harmed. They say there is some reason to believe that under net neutrality, the investment climate was diminished, but the Internet Association published research today that addressed this very issue, and their findings show that since 2015, when the rules went into place, telecommunications investment has actually increased. ISPs and their consumers are enjoying historically low production costs and innovation has increased. Free Press also published a report on this question earlier this week, and they found that investment in broadband by publicly traded companies actually went up after net neutrality went into place. Here is what the research director at the Free Press had to say: ``If investment is the FCC's preferred metric, then there is only one possible conclusion--net neutrality and Title II are a smashing success.'' Here is the point. The internet is not broken. There are parts of the economy that are not working well. We struggle with manufacturing. We need to invest in infrastructure. We have a trade imbalance. We have a higher education system that is not working for everybody. We need to do more work in these areas, but the part of our economy that is working great for consumers, for entrepreneurs, for the private sector, for engaged citizens is the internet itself. Tomorrow, the FCC is going to endeavor to break it. Before I hand it over to someone who has been working on these issues for many years, I want to point out that nobody would have anticipated that the Affordable Care Act would still be on the books because of unprecedented online and inperson organizing. The FCC has a very unique process where there is going to be a 3- month public comment period. The statute actually allows the public to go and weigh in on what they think. The last time this happened when net neutrality principles were being established, 3.8 million people commented. So far, before they even take their first formal action, there are 1.6 million people who have already commented. My guess is, by the time tomorrow is done--maybe the next day--we will be well into the 2 to 3 million comment range, and they still have 3 months to go. Understand the power in our democracy still resides with the people. Somebody who has been working in the trenches on this issue and many consumer issues for a very long time is my great colleague, the senior Senator from Connecticut, and I will yield to him as I realize I think I am standing at his dais.

Mr. SCHATZ

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

Mr. SCHATZ

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