Making Continuing Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2013--Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. KING. Madam President, we are going to have a historic vote this afternoon--historic at least in recent history--because for the first time in 3 or 4 years we are going to pass a budget--at least I certainly hope so. It is historic because, while the process was not perfect, it is a budget that was arrived at fundamentally through negotiations, through discussions, and through compromise between the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and the chairman of the House Budget Committee. We are finally talking to each other.

This agreement is important. This vote is important for three basic reasons. One is that the agreement maintains the momentum of deficit reduction that has been in place here since the summer of 2011 when the Budget Control Act was passed. In fact, rather than breaking the budget numbers, it actually improves them in terms of deficit reduction by some $22 billion. And it maintains, as I said, the momentum.

One of the points that has been lost in the discussion about the budget and the budget deficit is that the Federal budget deficit has fallen faster in the last 2 1/2 to 3 years than at any time in the past 40 or 50 years. It has fallen from almost 10 percent of GDP to under 4 percent of GDP over the past 2 1/2 years. That is progress.

I think one of the problems we have around here is that often we don't know how to declare victory. We don't celebrate our successes. I am not prepared to declare victory in the fight for fiscal responsibility, but I am prepared to declare progress, and I think that is what we have made when we have more than trillion-dollar deficits that have been cut more than in half.

So the first reason I think this bill should be supported is that it is not a budget buster by any means; instead, it is a continuation of the momentum toward rational fiscal policies that we have been on, and I think it is something we should continue.

No. 2, this budget bill will finally get us out of the business of governing by crisis, of lurching from crisis to crisis and threats of shutdown and continuing resolutions year to year, month to month, quarter to quarter. It will provide some certainty to the Congress, to the government, and to the country about what the budget numbers are going to be.

I think it is important that people realize exactly what it is we are voting on today. Essentially, it is one number. It is what is called a top-line number. This is not the budget that embodies all the detailed decisions about where those dollars go. Those decisions will be made by the two Appropriations Committees of the two Houses between now and the middle of January. But by providing a number, those committees now know what their targets are. They know what their limits are. They know what they have to work with. It will enable them to make the kinds of decisions on priorities and spending that we should have been making all along.

By governing by continuing resolution, essentially what we are doing is using the priorities of last year and the year before and the year before that. And then, of course, the sequester on top of a continuing resolution is really a double budgetary whammy because the sequester is a cut. That is difficult enough to deal with, but it is a cut that was designed to be stupid, and it succeeded. It was designed to be so unacceptable that Congress would feel they had to find an alternative. Unfortunately, this past March that didn't happen. So the sequester, which was across-the-board cuts by account, went into place. That meant that within the military, within the Pentagon, within the Navy, within the FAA, and within the Department of Transportation, each account had to be cut. Some accounts probably could use some cutting and other accounts desperately needed the funding that was made available. This bill relieves the irrationality of the sequester while maintaining the sequester's downward pressure on spending.

Finally, and I think most importantly, what this bill we will be voting on this afternoon will do is demonstrate to the country that we can do our job.

I was talking to people in Maine yesterday, and they said: Well, why should you be puffing up your chest and pounding your chest about just doing what you ought to be doing all along?

I couldn't really argue with that, except that we haven't been doing our job. And the fact that we are now at least inching toward doing it in the manner we are supposed to is progress--at least it is progress in recent history. I think that is one of the most important parts of this bill. I think that is the signal it sends to the country--that we can, in fact, talk to each other; we can compromise; we can make financial and fiscal arrangements around here that make sense, that are rational, that are prioritized, and we can do our job.

When I was in Maine last weekend, the most common question I got was this: Why can't those people down there talk to each other? Why can't they work things out? We do that in our town meetings, we do that in our businesses, and we do that in our families. Why can't they?

Well, in this case, they have. It wasn't a perfect process, but at least it involved bipartisan, bicameral negotiations that get us to the point where we have a budget we can vote on today. Do I like it? I don't like every piece of it. I don't like the pension hit the Senator from Texas described. That wouldn't have been in my proposal. In fact, I made a proposal at the budget conference that was quite different from this one. It wasn't accepted. That is how this place works.

My favorite philosopher, Mick Jagger, said, ``You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.'' What we need right now is a budget. It is something we can work from that gives us some certainty.

I believe we can fix this pension problem. In fact, I have joined with Senator Shaheen of New Hampshire on a bill that would replace the cuts to the military pension, dealing with some offshore tax benefits that I think is a much more sensible way to fill that $6 billion gap. We can do that because the pension proposal doesn't take effect for 2 years--not until December 2015. So we can fix that, but we have to get this budget passed now.

To answer the question ``Why can't they talk,'' they have talked, and I think that is important.

Now I would like to turn to a slightly different topic, but it is related to the budget. In 1997 the Congress passed something called the sustainable growth rate, which was designed to control reimbursement rates for physicians and providers under Medicare. The problem is that it has turned into a monster that reduces physician fees to the point where they won't serve Medicare patients unless it is fixed. Each year since 2002 we have fixed it year by year, but it is always temporary. It is always a patch. In fact, it has gotten its own name in the lexicon of Washington: the ``doc fix.'' It is something we have to do. Everybody knows we have to do it. But why not fix it for good?

The Congressional Budget Office tells us that if we fix it once and for all, it would cost $116 billion over the next 10 years. That sounds like a big number, but it happens that there is a place we can go to get that money that I think fits with it very well. In 1990, under President George H.W. Bush, the Medicaid drug program was created, and because the government was buying drugs under Medicaid in very large quantities, they sought a volume discount from the pharmaceutical companies--perfectly rational; any of us would ask for a volume discount if we were buying in large quantities--and, indeed, Medicaid-eligible beneficiaries had discounts or rebates on their drugs from 1990 to 2006.

In 2006, Part D of Medicare was passed. We provided a drug benefit to Medicare recipients. But one of the wackiest parts of that bill said that the government could no longer negotiate for volume discounts. I hear a lot of discussion around here about private enterprise and business and how we should run the government like a business. No rational business would buy any product--cars, gasoline, drugs, or anything else--in enormous quantities and not seek and gain from the sellers some kind of volume discount.

Senator Rockefeller has introduced S. 740, which essentially says: Let's return Medicaid beneficiaries--not all Medicare beneficiaries but Medicaid recipients--to the status of prior to 2006, where they will get applied to their drug purchases--or the government actually gets--the same kind of rebates they got for the 16 years from 1990 to 2006. This will produce $140 billion over the next 10 years. It will not cut expenses to recipients; it will only save the government money.

It seems to me this is a sensible way to fix the doc fix once and for all and to do something that makes sense for the taxpayers, which is to acquire for them volume discounts, volume rebates that are available today for other Medicaid recipients who aren't under Medicare and for the VA, and it puts them on the same status, these so-called dual-eligibles, people who are eligible for Medicaid and Medicare. Just this change would save $140 billion, and it would enable us to fix the doc fix permanently. It would also contribute about $30 billion to deficit reduction over the next 10 years.

I think we have a historic opportunity this afternoon to pass a budget--the first budget, by the way, produced by a divided Congress, where the two Houses were in different political hands, since 1986. And I think that is an achievement. It is something that a month ago I wouldn't have bet too much on, but I am very appreciative and admiring of Chairman Murray and Chairman Ryan for coming together and putting their ideological issues aside and coming up with an arrangement, an agreement which allows us to have some certainty and which can signal to the country that we are, in fact, capable of doing the most fundamental responsibility we have, which is to pass a budget.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

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