Billy Tauzin

Mr. TAUZIN

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Shimkus), a distinguished lieutenant colonel. (Mr. SHIMKUS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Gillmor), the distinguished chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment and Hazardous Materials of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 427, I call up the conference report on the bill (H.R. 3448) to improve the ability of the United States to prevent, prepare for, and respond to bioterrorism and other public health emergencies.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time for closing.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the remaining time. Let me first thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) for his kind comments and for the extraordinary work that he and other colleagues on the other side of the aisle have provided us in producing, I think, an excellent bill from conference. Let me first clarify something. In debate earlier, I think I heard the suggestion that the EPA would be required in the bill to review the vulnerability assessments submitted to it under title IV. I want to be very clear about this. Nothing in this conference report contains that requirement. The report simply makes that discretionary with the EPA. The reports are submitted to EPA, and they are not required to review them. It is a discretionary matter with EPA. Mr. Speaker, let me first make a point that I think is important. This bill comes up at an extraordinary time in our Nation's history. It comes up in a week when partisanship reared its ugly head as we discussed issues involving 9-11 over the last several weeks. But I want to make something very clear. This bill represents the best of bipartisanship. This bill, shepherded through by the staff, by Reid Stuntz on the Democratic side and Mr. Dave Marventano on our side and the incredible work of the staffs on all three committees, the Committee on Agriculture and the Committee on the Judiciary, has produced a huge bipartisan response to the enemies of our country who think they can threaten us with biological agents or threaten us with attacks upon our food or water supplies and make this country more and more vulnerable. There was a time before 9-11 when we did not think these thoughts, when we did not have to do what this bill requires. But 9-11 taught, I think, all of us some lessons; and I think it also demonstrated something to the world and to our enemies around the world, that this country is full of heroes. There are heroes who work in our own forces who are in Special Forces right now in Afghanistan and parts of the world we may not even read about who are defending us right now against al Qaeda and the folks around the world who would indeed threaten our security here at home. There are heroes who work in much more quiet and obscure places, in little hospitals, in the CDC, and they work at a border station where they inspect food and drugs coming into this country. They may be members of an ambulance team. They may be members of a first response team. But those heroes in America who demonstrated on 9-11 just how this country can respond when we need to are going to be better armed today with $4.6 billion of new tools. This is an incredibly important bill. It is a statement, bipartisan statement here in America that we are ready to defend this country, and we are ready to make sure our heroes, both abroad and at home, are equipped with all of the tools they need to make us safer and more secure.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Maryland (Mrs. Morella).

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, when the Joint Statement of Managers was filed last night, it inadvertently omitted some important language concerning a Performance Goals Letter for the authorization of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA). Chairman Tauzin and Ranking Minority Member Dingell hereby submit the following additional statement which they view as authoritative legislative history on the provision in question. Performance Goals Letter Authorization of PDUFA is accompanied by a letter entitled ``PDUFA Reauthorization Performance Goals and Procedures.'' The goals letter is unique to PDUFA. It does not have force of law, but nonetheless the Agency views it as a statement of their obligations, and they issue a yearly report on their performance in meeting the goals specified in the letter. Title IX of the goals letter is entitled ``Independent Consultants for Biotechnology Clinical Trial Protocols.'' Contained in this title, as negotiated by the agency, is a paragraph ``D. Denial of Requests.'' As forwarded to the Congress, this paragraph previously read: ``except in the most unusual circumstances (for example, it is clearly premature) FDA will honor the request and engage the services of an indep4endent consultant, of FDA's choosing, as soon as practicable. If the Agency denies the request, it will provide a written rationale to the requester within 14 days of receipt.'' Upon agreement of the Conferees, this paragraph shall now read ``D. Denial of Requests: FDA will grant the request unless the Agency determines that engagement of an expert consultant would not serve a useful purpose (for example, it is clearly premature). FDA will engage the services of an independent consultant, of FDA's choosing, as soon as practicable. If the Agency denies the request, it will provide a written rationale to the requester within 14 days of receipt.'' The requirement of the Agency to provide a written rationale for the refusal to engage an independent consultant is not intended to burden the Agency but rather to assist the applicant in understanding the reason for Agency action. The goals letter also, for the first time, includes a title on ``pre- and Peri-NDA/BLA Risk Management Plan Activities'' (Title VIII). The Managers view this title as a strong addition to the PDUFA regimen. Under this title, user fee monies will be available for postmarket surveillance for up to three years for drug and biological products. The Managers strongly support this Title, and upon agreement of the Managers, the title will now include the following additional language at the end Section D of Title VIII: ``FDA will allocate $76,319,879 in user fees over 5 years to the activities covered in this section. FDA will track the specific amounts of user fees spent on these activities and will include in its annual report to Congress an accounting of this spending.'' W.J. ``Billy'' Tauzin, Chairman.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, first, let me acknowledge the hard work the gentleman has already put forth on this issue. I agree with the gentleman, frankly, and applaud his efforts. Plasma lot release times have varied greatly over the last few years. Predictability is important. I think the industry and FDA should sit down and begin a dialogue which will lead to greater cooperation and predictability in lot release, and I intend to help the gentleman make sure that dialogue occurs.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Burr), the distinguished vice chairman of the full committee.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Lucas), a member of the Committee on Agriculture.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Buyer), a distinguished and valued member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds simply to commend the gentleman for his statement. Mr. Speaker, those provisions were agreed upon in a bipartisan fashion in the regulatory relief bill, which earlier passed this House, and I believe are in the interests of the beneficiaries of the Medicare system. I thank the gentleman for his similar conclusion. They were signed off on by all the committees of jurisdiction as well. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Pitts) for a colloquy.

Mr. TAUZIN

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, the Speaker's office has authorized me to announce that it is the Speaker's intention to appoint House conferees to the conference of the disagreement between the House and the Senate on H.R. 4, the House energy bill, and the former S. 517, the Senate version of the same bill. Upon our return from the Memorial Day recess those conferees will be appointed. Work in preparation for the conference is proceeding at a steady pace, and the House will be prepared to meet the Senate in the conference upon our return from the Memorial Day recess.

Mr. TAUZIN

Mr. TAUZIN. I thank my friend for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to read into the Record some of the names of the incredible staff who helped finalize this important work for the country. They include the head of our health team, Pat Morrisey, Brent DelMonte, Amit Sachdev, Nandan Kenkeremath, Allan Slobodin, Tom DiLenge, Steve Tilton; and of the legislative counsel, Pete Goodlow. These are staffers who worked tirelessly day and night and, believe me, all night, weekends, to make this possible. So many times we fail to say thank you to them. I just wanted to say on the record, thank you, team.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the Committee on Rules for bringing this rule to the floor today. After 9-11, the Committee on Energy and Commerce began a series of roundtables with the agencies under our jurisdiction and members of both sides of our committee. The gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Dingell), leading the minority, and myself representing the majority, had meetings with the agency officials under our jurisdiction to ask several questions, the most of important of which was: tell us a little bit about where your vulnerabilities are; tell us a little bit about where you are not prepared; and tell us a little bit about how Congress might enact new laws and new authorities to make you better prepared for the things we might now expect, that indeed might now threaten our country in ways we were never before threatened. 9-11 taught us a lesson, in effect. It taught us that we have to be willing to think like evil people. And that is not our custom. We think like good people in America. We do not think like evil people, designing ways and means to kill and destroy and to disrupt the lives of citizens who are innocent and have nothing to do with our cause. We think literally so totally different from the kind of enemy we now face in this terrorist situation that it was difficult for agency heads and even Members of Congress to think about all the things that someone with an evil mind might want to do to our citizens and our constituents; what they might want to do to this country and to the people that live here. So as we began to have those discussions with agencies under our jurisdictions, we suddenly realized how necessary it was to put together a bioterrorism package. And here, Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Linder) for the excellent work he did in bringing to our committee ideas about how to make the CDC a much more functional and a much more effective agency for our country, in not only just studying the prevention and treatment of diseases that are normal in our society, but now making sure we have the vaccines and the research going forward to protect us against the artificial insertion of biochemical and biological threats to our people, as we have now learned is possible. I want to thank him for bringing to our committee and to this bill the great ideas he had about beefing up the capacity of the CDC to do that for our country. But as we began to hear from these agency heads, we began to learn that, indeed, we had a lot of vulnerabilities in our country; that we did not have enough vaccine, for example, to make sure if anthrax were introduced into our society to harm us we could vaccinate enough people in our country. So we set to work immediately to make sure our health department not only got the right amount of vaccine available for us, but that our health agencies were all preparing to make sure that other vaccines and other treatments were available to first responders in case we had such an evil attack on our people. We learned, for example, that we had to organize better the laws that protected against people owning and transferring biological agents to one another so that we might find the owner or the possessor of an agent that enters our mail, for example, and begins to kill our people, whether it is a domestic threat or a foreign threat; that we had to make it illegal for someone to transfer the possession of some of these agents, if in fact they were legally in their possession, to make it criminally wrong for them to transfer it without authority, without a permit. We learned, for example, that our first responders were woefully unprepared in the case of a biological or chemical threat to our country to deal with the kind of casualties we might expect if something like that happened. We learned that we needed, for example, to beef up the capacity of our ambulance services and our nurses and our hospitals to deal with those kinds of problems, if, God forbid, they should happen in our country. This bill, for example, will provide another $520 million to the hospitals of America, a special help in grants, to make sure they are prepared for those kinds of emergencies. We learned also that our drinking water supplies needed to be better protected and safeguarded. We learned that, indeed, the incredible ability of someone to damage our country, who thinks as evilly as some of these people do, might find its way into threats against our water supplies. Just recently, I think last month, people were caught filming a water reservoir, I think in Connecticut. And we began to think, well, maybe people might indeed want to threaten the safe drinking water of our citizens, if they have such evil minds. I was reminded in all these meetings of that aircraft that took off from New York City, I think it was Egyptian Air; and instead of landing somewhere at its final destination, some pilot dove that plane into the ocean. I was reminded of when that happened and reminded that most of us in America thought how awful it was that if this pilot did indeed want to commit suicide, if that was really his purpose, why did he have to take all these innocent people along with him. It dawned on us, that is the way good people see an incident like that. The way evil people saw that incident was, perhaps in a desert somewhere or a cave somewhere in Afghanistan, he could have taken out more people had he taken that plane into a building. That is the way evil people think, how much more destruction he could have rendered had he done something different instead of just crashing the plane into the ocean. So through these meetings, through all this work we have done on the bioterrorism legislation, we have tried the awful exercise of thinking as evilly as we could. What would the most evil person try to do to us with biological threats, with chemical threats, with agents of destruction? What would the most evil person do to disrupt our health supply system or to disrupt our clean water system, to make sure we did not have enough clean drinking water perhaps, to poison that system or cause people death and injury? What would the most evil mind try to do if they learned how to fly a crop duster or a mosquito spraying plane and take that equipment somewhere and spread biological or chemical agents upon our people? We went through that awful exercise of trying to think like the most evil person on Earth and then tried to write a bill to make sure the agents of our government, those who are in charge of our health care system, those in charge of building our vaccine supplies, those in charge of testing biological agents, the first responders and those in charge of our incredibly sensitive clean drinking water supplies, what would we do in a bill to bolster our ability to meet those kinds of threats? So, last December, our committee presented to this body our bioterrorism package, and this body approved it overwhelmingly, I think 430-some odd votes to 2, and sent that package on to the Senate. The Senate, similarly, passed a bill that mirrored in many aspects the House-passed version. It was passed unanimously in the Senate, and Senator Ted Kennedy and I have worked since that date in December to bring the best of those two packages together into a single package that we might present to the House and get signed by the President so that this country might be just a little safer from those evil minds who threaten, or would try to threaten, our country. This week we have learned about new threats. This week we have learned that the level of communications among al Qaeda operatives around the world is beginning to rise again, and that there are conversations about hitting this country again. We have heard testimony in the last few days that maybe it is not if, it is when. Maybe, indeed, we have to think about the inevitability of some strike against our people again. So we better have our first responders ready. We had better have enough vaccines ready. We had better have enough treatment facilities available. We had better make sure we protect the drinking water of our people as much as we can. We had better make sure our hospitals and our nurses and our ambulances, and all our firefighters, all those heroes of 9-11, are as well equipped as we can make them to respond as quickly as possible to the next set of threats that are leveled against our country. And so we have brought together in this conference the best of the Senate bill and the best of the House bill. And I want to compliment Senator Ted Kennedy and the Senate team for working so well with our team on the House side. In the end, I think we present an excellent package for the consideration of both bodies for the President to sign. And I cannot think of a better week than this week, when everybody's attention is riveted again on the new threats that are being talked about in conversations around the world against our people, that we pass this bioterrorism package and put it on the President's desk for his signature. We have included one extra thing of significant importance that I also want to mention. Up this year for renewal is something called PDUFA. It is an acronym for a policy that has allowed this country to collect user fees from the drug companies, the big pharmaceutical companies of America, and those user fees pay the salaries of people who work at the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration. That Food and Drug Administration set of personnel then do the testing, the analysis, all the research, all the professional analysis that goes into making sure that the pharmaceutical drugs that are patented in this country are tested first before a pharmaceutical company is allowed to sell them to your mom and your dad and your relatives, and even to those of us who need those drugs to survive or treat an illness. The importance of that program, that prescription drug user fee program, is critical in America, and it is about to expire. It expires in September. If we do not reauthorize it this year, immediately, we begin laying off people at the Food and Drug Administration. So we have included in this package the reauthorization of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act which funds the work that goes forward to make sure that new prescription drugs are properly tested before the Food and Drug Administration authorizes any pharmaceutical company to allow a doctor to prescribe them to the citizens of this country. And so we have brought you a good package that we think draws from the best of the House and the Senate versions of bioterrorism and we have added to it the reauthorization of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act. This package again represents this Nation's first line of defense against bioterrorism at a day and at a time when all of us know now that there are people who would love to disrupt this society by attacking us with one of those forms. When you think about 9/11 again and the awful consequences of 9/11 and you sit in a cave now in Afghanistan and think about how much more damage you might do to this country than you did on 9/11, bioterrorism is one of those areas we have to be concerned about. This bill gives this country many more tools to work with to defend and protect our people. It adds a whole new arsenal of first responder capabilities to in fact respond if we do get hit again, and it gives us the reauthorization of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, a critically important act for the continuation of prescription drug protections for our country. I again want to thank the Committee on Rules for doing such an expeditious job last night late in bringing this rule to the floor so we can pass it before the Memorial Day recess.

Mr. TAUZIN

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I, too, want to join my friend, the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey) in congratulating the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Shimkus) and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton) for the loving care they have given this legislation. And I think it is going to be landmark legislation for the kids of America in dealing with the Internet. And I want to thank the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey) and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Dingell) in particular for the great assistance they have played in putting this together and making something very good happen for the families of America. Like other filtering tools, this is just another great tool that American families will have to have their children go to a site that is monitored and where they can enjoy, indeed, the tremendous potential of the Internet without being assaulted by so many of the bad features we find on the Internet. And I think this is exactly the right kind of response to the Supreme Court which has recently ruled that virtual pornography is somehow protected under our Constitution. When you live on the Internet in a digital age, 1's and O's can be real. They can be virtual. They can be anything. And to say while one form of presentation is legally protected while another is not was a rather strange decision for our high court. This is a good answer. This says regardless of what the court says about it, here is going to be a safe place for kids to go and enjoy, indeed, the tremendous educational entertainment features of the Internet without running into the bad features that somehow afflict their lives. Again, I want to thank the chairman of our subcommittee, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton), for his great work in working with us and, most importantly, to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Shimkus) and the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey) for the excellent work they have done in putting this together. We should also thank Senator Byron and Senator Dorgan on the Senate side who have done such a great job in advancing this legislation and give them great credit for, again, working across the two bodies and perfecting it. Again, Mr. Speaker, that is a good day for kids in America, and I think the Committee on Energy and Commerce, particularly its Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, deserves a great deal of credit for bringing this legislation to the floor. I commend it to all Members. It deserves passage.

Mr. TAUZIN

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield \1/2\ minute to the gentleman from Rockwall, Texas (Mr. Hall), our great friend. (Mr. HALL of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. (Mr. BILIRAKIS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Pitts), a distinguished member of our committee.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise today in strong support of the Personal Responsibility, Work and Family Promotion Act of 2002. Mr. Speaker, this bill extends funding for abstinence-only education and reauthorizes transitional medical assistance, two items of particular interest to the Committee on Energy and Commerce. The 1996 welfare act included a permanent appropriation of $50 million over 5 years for abstinence-only education under title V of the Social Security Act. With tight State budgets and a requirement that States have to match every $4 Federal with $3 of their own, it is noteworthy that nearly all the States of our Nation have participated in this block grant program. The participation rates suggest high State interest in using abstinence-only education as one way to address teen pregnancy and even more importantly, in some cases, sexually transmitted diseases. Last month, my friend and colleague, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Health, held a hearing on abstinence-only education; and at that hearing we learned some pretty interesting things. We learned that problems stemming from increased sexual activity among teens has not abated. Even though teen birthrates have declined over the past decade, we still have among the highest teen birthrates of any industrialized nation in the world. Sexually transmitted diseases have grown dramatically. Every day in America 10,000 young people contract a sexually transmitted disease; 2,400 become pregnant; and 55 contract HIV. In the 1960s really only two sexually transmitted diseases were of real concern. Now, our young people, senior population as well, face a population of sexually transmitted diseases that now total 25; and these diseases primarily infecting the young people happen to be viral diseases such as human papillomavirus, HPV virus, herpes and chlamydia. These viral diseases are incurable. So while our generation was concerned with basically two venereal diseases, young kids today face 25, some of which are totally incurable, only managed. Chlamydia, for example, is a major cause of infertility in young women. It is asymptomatic in about 85 percent of the affected women but can still cause significant problems without the presence of noticeable symptoms. For example, in the population of young people entering the armed services, U.S. Army recruits, for example, we discovered that 9 percent of the female population entering the U.S. Army, 9 percent of these young women were affected with chlamydia and did not even know about it, and this is a sexually transmitted disease that leads very often to infertility in these young women, who were shocked to discover that they had this disease, apparently having been taught all along that if they protected themselves in so-called safe sex that they would be safe, only to discover to their great dismay that they were now infected with an incurable disease that could possibly ruin their chance of ever having a child. Here is another number that shocked us. Over 50 percent of the sexually-active young women in this country between the ages of 18 and 22, over 50 percent of sexually-active young women in this category are infected with HPV. HPV, the human papillomavirus, is a precursor of cervical cancer. Fifty percent of our young women are affected by it, and here is the awful truth: there is no evidence that condoms reduce the sexual transmission of this infection. And so all the work we do in this country of teaching safe sex and of being careful if a child does become sexually active has never conveyed the notion to these young women that if they took that course they could be subjecting themselves to a disease that is a precursor to cervical cancer, and they did not even know, perhaps, that condoms are not a protection against this disease. These statistics are terrifying. They show that the safer-sex model does not solve the problem; and despite more than 20 years of a variety of educational programs designed to promote condom and contraceptive use, young ladies are catching these incurable viral diseases that can ruin their lives and kill them, render them infertile and, in effect, take away their chance to ever be a mother. I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of this bill, which includes a 5-year extension of the abstinence-only education. This bill maintains the status quo. It extends the funding level of $50 million each year for the years 2003 to 2007. New research is beginning to suggest that abstinence-only education can effectively address the sexually transmitted disease prevalence among young people and the proportion of babies occurring to unmarried mothers, the children that end up being the children of poverty in America all too often. We must continue this effort begun in 1996 and support abstinence- only education programs that empower students to choose abstinence for themselves for receiving all the relevant facts and information because abstinence in so many ways is a better choice for them. In 1996, the welfare reform law also included a critical work support for former welfare recipients, something called ``transitional medical assistance.'' Former welfare recipients typically enter the low-wage jobs that are available in this country, and those generally do not offer private health insurance coverage. They offer coverage but only at very expensive premiums. Traditional medical assistance extends up to 1 year of Medicaid coverage to those individuals and their families. There is strong bipartisan support for this assistance. We provided it in 1996. We extended it in 2000 and 2001, and this bill would extend it again this year for another year. If we do not extend it, it is set to expire on September 30, 2002. This 1-year authorization, however, has a 5-year cost of $355 million. And here is the awful truth: because this money was not included in the budget resolution, we have had to find a way to pay for it. As my colleagues know, under our pay-go rule, if something is not funded specifically in the budget resolution, we have to find some other way of paying for it. Well, we have had to find that money, and so this bill includes an offset. We recognize the Medicaid budget difficulties that many States are experiencing, and we also understand that important functions are funded with Medicaid administrative costs; and for that reason, the offset included in this bill is merely a partial adjustment that lasts only 2 years to pay for this 1-year extension of this critical program of health coverage, particularly for women in welfare entering the workforce. Before 1996, a common cost of administering the food stamp program, Medicare and welfare were often charged to the AFDC program, the predecessor of our TANF program. These common costs have been included in the calculation of the States' TANF fund. So in effect, we are double-paying for administrative costs of the States in these programs. The offset we are talking about reduces this double payment, this Federal reimbursement for administrative costs, to reflect the portion of these costs that are indeed already included in the TANF block grant the States receive. We fully corrected this double reimbursement for food stamps in 1998, but we did not correct it for the Medicaid program. In effect, the States are still getting double the administrative cost reimbursements for the Medicaid program with Federal dollars, and we take some of that back. We take half of it back 1 year, three-quarters of it back the next year for this 2-year take-back in order to pay for this extraordinarily important 1-year extension of health care benefits to welfare folks entering the workforce. So this partial adjustment lasts only for 2 years. Let me also say that we are all busy seeing if we can find a better offset; and if we can, in the process of negotiating this bill with the Senate, we will certainly look for one, but in the meantime this is the offset that is available. It is a partial one, only lasts 2 years; and it makes this incredibly important program available. Let me remind my colleagues, there has been a lot of requests for us to do a larger than 1-year extension. If a 1-year extension costs 355 and we did not have the money for it except through this offset, imagine trying to extend it for longer than that at this time. Do we intend to extend it again next year? I can tell my colleagues all on the floor that this program works. By extending medical health coverage under Medicaid to folks leaving welfare and going into work, we have encouraged more and more people out of welfare and into the dignity and self-worth of a paying job and the independence that comes with it; and we will work to extend this program as long as it is necessary to make sure that we continue the progress we have seen in this vital effort in America. So we have to recognize the careful balance we have achieved with this offset and that 1-year reauthorization; and again, I want to commit we will revisit the issue next year, and, as we have in the past, continue our efforts to extend this program as long as we know it is working and as long as we know it is valuable. I urge my colleagues to join me in full support of this legislation. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of our time.

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton). (Mr. UPTON asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. TAUZIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Terry) to close. (Mr. TERRY asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)