Opioid Epidemic

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. TENNEY. Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to highlight a couple of things. First of all, I will comment on a really important issue in my region. Upstate New York communities have suffered tremendously from the opioid crisis ravaging our Nation.

In 2016, opioid overdoses rose by 121 percent in New York State and opioid deaths doubled in Broome County, which is part of New York's 22nd District, during the very same time.

During the most recent district work period, the President signed into law the Substance Use-Disorder Prevention Act that Promotes Opioid Recovery and Treatment--SUPPORT--for Patients and Communities Act, which included the Expanding Oversight of Opioid Prescribing and Payment Act, which I coauthored.

This bipartisan legislation directs the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, or MedPAC, to issue a report regarding perverse incentives that lead to overprescription of opioid-addictive drugs.

This legislation is important in my district because studies have shown that 29 percent of patients prescribed an opioid for pain, go on to misuse the drug. The Federal Government should be doing all it can to prevent overprescribing. Enacting this important bill is a critical first step in this process. Recognizing Small Businesses

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. TENNEY. Mr. Speaker, I also wanted to recognize a very important industry in my region, and it is a great honor for me to be able to represent a place called Revere Copper Company in Rome, New York. Yes, Revere was actually founded by none other than the great Paul Revere of our great history in this country.

This great company was North America's first copper rolling mill and it was founded, again, by our great patriot, Paul Revere, in Rome, New York.

It still resides in Rome, New York over 200 years later. Small businesses like this are the backbone of employment in New York's 22nd District, accounting for 98 percent of jobs created in our private sector. While everyone thinks all jobs are created by big companies, in fact, our small business community has 98 percent of those jobs created.

In Congress, we need to make sure that we keep empowering our small businesses, creating a fair tax and regulatory environment that allows them to grow, to hire more workers, and to reinvest in our communities. Too many of our local businesses are held back by skyrocketing healthcare costs which cut into their bottom line, and our regulatory code, which requires a team of lawyers to decode, just to comply with the endless amounts of bureaucracy--something that I have experienced personally as the owner of a small manufacturing business in upstate New York.

The time for debate and verbal platitudes need to end when it comes to our small business community, our employers need solutions. We must work to make the middle class and small business tax cuts permanent.

I am very proud to be a person who voted for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which tremendously helped our community. We have seen an unprecedented amount of gains in our economy locally; a glimmer of hope in an area where we have seen very little progress over the decades because of some of the policies that have been enacted that really have hurt our small business community and have caused New York to have the highest out-migration of people in the entire Nation. Over 1 million New Yorkers have left New York State because of these policies just since 2010.

We must fight to continue to contain healthcare costs, to provide for a public healthcare system, but also an affordable care system for people who are just simply not able to see their doctors.

We must stand for a country that represents everyone and not just the powerful. That is something I have done as a corruption fighter. As a person who stood up to the leaders in both parties, to the most powerful and wealthiest people in our community, I stood up to them and fought for the middle class, and fought for the average worker, people across our Nation.

To our small businesses, I just want to say thank you so much for all you do every day. As a small business owner, I know how difficult the fight is, how difficult the struggle is. You are the American Dream in our communities. You provide the hope for our future, and you provide the most jobs that we are going to see as we grow into the coming years, and hope that we can keep our economy moving.

To my small business community, I just want to say thank you so much for all that you have done in adding jobs, in providing responsible employment for our communities, for individuals, for giving hope, for giving people first starts, for everything you have done in our community.

It has been an amazing opportunity for me to represent a community that really cares. My community is well-known for its generosity. I find that in our small business community, much like the business I own, we do so much for our communities that doesn't get recognized. We don't have big profits. Many of us operate at less than profit.

But what we do is we give dearly to our communities. We provide for the Little League teams, and for the people who are struggling from diseases that cannot be cured.

We provide in greater numbers. While, yes, big companies can provide a large check, our small-business community does what it can on a scale that is much greater by proportion.

So I am really grateful to all the people I have served in my community who do so much to help all of us. I want to make sure that our small-business community is recognized. Often in government, we hear an awful lot about the big businesses. But it is really the small businesses that are the backbone of our community. They are the heart of entrepreneurship.

I just want to say that, as a small-business owner, I am deeply grateful for all the work that you do, the late nights, the hard work of your employees to put out a beautiful product. It is something that you are helping your local and fellow citizens, even across the country. I am just really grateful.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source