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Floor Statement: Wyden Fights to Ease Oregon's Economic Woes
May 14, 2003
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, I thank Senator Murray, the lead sponsor
for this legislation.
Oregon and Washington are really ground zero as far as the economic
hurt in this country, and I thank her for all of her leadership
and support. I will take only a few minutes tonight because I know
we have had a number of speakers on this topic, but I think it is
time to put a human face on this issue and try to make sure that
people really understand what is at stake.
In Eugene, OR, where I went to school, parents have recently been
selling their own blood plasma -- that's right, their own blood
plasma -- to pay for a math teacher's salary for one more year because
the school district has been unable to come up with the cash to
pay for a math teacher. I think that really says it all.
As Senator Murray and other colleagues talked about, we are not
talking about luxuries. We are not talking about something that
would be frivolous or on somebody's wish list. We are talking about
the most essential services in our society, making sure that kids
get a good start, and decent health care. What it has come to in
my State, which is in its third year now of financial meltdown,
is we have parents actually going out and selling blood and this
is what it has come to with respect to the finances of basic services.
Something is really out of whack in this country when somehow the
Congress is going to find ways to come up with billions of dollars
to rebuild Iraq, but the Congress of the United States will not
come up with the dollars that
are needed to rebuild the States. That is what this effort on a
bipartisan basis is all about.
In my home State, we now have schools closing a month early. We
brought an end to the medical-needy program which helped nearly
9,000 low-income Oregonians with unusually high health costs who
do not qualify for our
innovative health plan. More than 2,500 older adults and persons
with disabilities have lost adult care, assisted living care, nursing
home care, and the list really goes on.
I particularly wanted to highlight the fact that these cuts and
the hardship that has been engendered as a result of these cuts
comes about at a time when some of our States have been on the cutting
edge of innovation. I will take a minute to describe our health
plan. The State of Oregon has been the only State in the country
-- in fact, the only political jurisdiction on the planet -- that
has been willing to force a discussion about tough calls in health
care. Many feel, given the demographics tsunami that is ahead with
millions of baby boomers retiring and the technology explosion,
it is not on the level if you are not willing to make some tough
choices in health care. That is what my home State did a number
of years ago with the Oregon Health Plan, where we held the first
nationwide debate about how to go about making choices in health
care, making sure you are doing prevention first in kids and pregnant
mothers. And all the services we know will reap great benefits in
the years ahead.
That is the program that has been slashed. It was not a program
that engendered a lot of fancy services or Cadillac health care
or profligate spending. It was a program that focused on the basics,
on the essential health care services, on services that by anyone's
analysis are just plain vanilla, essential services for our citizens.
I bring this up by way of saying, as we move tonight to close out
the discussion of these amendments, I certainly support the Collins
amendment. It is very helpful. I would like to go further, for all
the reasons Senator Murray has described tonight, that we think
about these consequences in human terms: What is going on today
in Eugene, OR, what is going on with the Oregon Health Plan where
people did make tough and courageous calls. A lot of the States
must be wondering now, what was the point of trying to be innovative?
What was the point of trying to be innovative because when there
were tough financial circumstances nationally beyond their control,
the Federal Government said: That is the way it goes, we are not
going to do anything to help tide you over so innovative programs
such as the Oregon Health Plan are not decimated. These are critical
issues. The budget cuts we have seen in health care and education
are not going to be quickly healed. Regarding the national economy,
we all hope for a speedy recovery, but it seems to me, by any calculation,
the States are going to need significant and ongoing help to ameliorate
the damage that has been done and to start pulling together the
tatters of the social safety net and begin to help our citizens
again. We are not going to repair that tattered safety net with
just a few needles and thread; we will do it with real and tangible
help, the way the Murray amendment seeks to do.
I come to the Senate tonight to make it clear, what we seek to do
in these important amendments is to try to give our States the tools
in this struggle to provide the most critical of services, to tell
them they are going to have a little bit more to get by with during
unprecedented times. School finance in Oregon has been cut so drastically
that they have curtailed the school year in some districts. We have
been laying off teachers left and right. We have no way to attract
them. Senator Smith and I co-hosted an important economic development
summit at the end of last
year with 1,300 business leaders from all over the State. They are
worried, as a business community, that with the shortening of the
school year in the country, it will be very tough to grow existing
businesses and to attract
new ones.
Suffice it to say, we are not really happy about the Doonesbury
cartoons either. We have been first so often in my home State --
with environmental protection, mass transit -- but we are not pleased
to be first in terms of economic hurt and unemployment and the kinds
of problems we have been outlining on the floor tonight.
We have to start filling the holes in these devastated budgets.
The situation is dire. In the face of this unprecedented suffering,
many in the Senate believe the $20 billion allocated is not enough
and the Senate must
do better.
Ultimately, budgets are about choices. Budgets are not just about
charts and graphs and figures and lots of dark ink on paper. Budgets
are about hopes and aspirations and what kind of country we want.
I don't want a country and I don't want a State to have to sit by
while the Government does not respond when people have to sell blood
to finance a teacher's salary and we end up having the devastation
to an innovative state-of-the-art health plan, the way the Oregon
Health Plan was at the outset.
I don't want to tell the people of my home State, and I don't think
others in this body want to either, that the U.S. Congress can figure
out a way to come up with billions and billions of dollars to reconstruct
Iraq, hundreds of millions of dollars for tax cuts, and simply not
come up with the critical dollars needed to keep our kids in school
for a full year, to keep older people in health care systems that
are a lifeline for them. I hope our colleagues will support the
Murray amendment. The very least the Senate can do is to keep the
huge budgetary hole the States have found themselves in from getting
deeper and wider. The Murray amendment ensures that can be done.
I urge the passage of this critical amendment. I yield the floor.
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