Providing for Consideration of Senate Amendment to H.J. Res. 66, Permanent Tax Relief for Families and Small Businesses Act of 2012, and Providing for Consideration of H.R. 6684, Spending Reduction Act of 2012
Floor Speech
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Mr. COHEN. Thank you, and I appreciate the time and the opportunity to speak on this measure.
I'm concerned about the fiscal cliff. And it's important. President Obama has tried to work with the opposition party and has gone from what he was elected on--increasing taxes, for fairness, on families earning over $250,000--to $400,000. But no, that wasn't enough. This proposal goes to a million dollars a year. Now $400,000 is plenty comfortable. The President's gone a long way. The fact is that there's a lot of revenue that's being lost between $400,000 and $1 million. We need that revenue to rectify some problems in our society, of which there are still many.
This bill would cut funding for the National Institutes of Health. That is our physical cliff. And I want to talk to you how this fiscal cliff affects the physical cliff. The National Institutes of Health is the agency that comes up with research dollars that allows our lives to be extend and bettered. At Duke University there is a great lung transplant program, headed by Dr. Robert Davis. Duke needs more money to perfect their lung transplant program that's the best in the country. But still, it's only a 50 percent chance that a person will live 8 years with a lung transplant because the transplanted lung tends to be rejected. They don't know why. They need know find out it. It's National Institutes of Health funds that will find out and give people a chance to breathe and live.
In my hometown of Memphis there's research at the Methodist Hospital. We have Dr. James Eason, one of the finest liver transplant doctors in the country. But throughout the country there are people in places like St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis finding cures for childhood cancers and childhood catastrophic illnesses. This bill cuts funds to the National Institutes of Health. They should not be cut ever. They should be increased. And some of the funds that they are missing are the funds that will go to people earning over $400,000 and up to $1 million that tax relief is being given to. They don't know right now that they might not be the people that need that lung or that liver transplant or some other medical science cure or discovery. But there are people out there in the lottery of life that will. This bill doesn't take that into consideration.
Any bill that cuts funds to the National Institutes of Health will eventually cut people's lives short--and the quality of their life--because it's through research funded at the National Institutes of Health that we find these cures and these new procedures. Doctors need to be paid, hospitals need to be paid, research needs to be undertaken.
I believe the President has gone a great distance on the fiscal cliff to get to $400,000. He's even talked about cutting some programs that deal with the most vulnerable people, the poorest, on Social Security cost-of-living increases, which I oppose. But the President has tried. I hope that this bill fails and we deal with the President in a responsible way and avoid the fiscal and the physical cliff.
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