Bipartisan Agenda for Oregon

BIPARTISAN AGENDA FOR OREGON

Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, there has been a tumultuous start to this session of Congress with often acrimonious debate about judges, budget, and the tragic situation involving Terri Schiavo and her family. But I rise this morning with my friend and colleague, Senator Gordon Smith, to speak not of division but of bipartisanship and of the hopes we share for our home State of Oregon and for our country.

This morning marks the fifth time Senator Smith and I have unveiled what we call our bipartisan agenda for our home State. It has been our privilege and our pleasure at the beginning of each Congress to travel together around Oregon to listen to our fellow Oregonians and to find common ground on issues that matter to our citizens around their dining room tables and in their kitchens.

We suspect that what we hear in our joint townhall meetings is what other Members of the Senate hear as well. Oregonians, and all Americans, now struggle with health care--families and farmers and business owners and health care providers. Oregonians and all Americans are struggling to make ends meet in this economy, and this means workers and employers. Oregonians and all Americans want opportunities--educational opportunities, job opportunities, opportunities so their children have better lives.

Oregon has two U.S. Senators--a Democrat and a Republican--but we realize that for the most part, our citizens are not interested first in Republican solutions or Democratic solutions; they want solutions that work for Oregon and for our country. They want ideas, and they get frustrated when they see political figures letting petty and partisan differences get in the way of their interests.

In the bipartisan agenda for Oregon in the 109th Congress, we are seeking to expand a number of our shared legislative goals to seek good for our fellow Americans. I was especially pleased to join Senator Smith as a member of the Senate Finance Committee this year. The committee oversees vital areas of policy, including health care, technology tax, trade policy, and many of the items on our agenda fall under the jurisdiction of the Senate Finance Committee.

We are also, in this agenda, working to expand our reach not only for Oregonians but for all Americans by working to tackle one of the most important and difficult issues in American health care, and that is providing catastrophic health care coverage so that our citizens do not have to go to bed at night fearing they are going to get wiped out by medical costs. This is a matter about which Democrats and Republicans have been talking for years, and there have been good Democratic and Republican ideas about catastrophic coverage for years. The fact is that if you own a hardware store in Alaska, Oregon, Iowa, or Florida, and you have five or six people and one of them gets sick, everybody gets wiped out in terms of their medical bills.

Senator Smith and I believe we can develop a plan that will bring this Congress together, give us the opportunity to pass catastrophic health care legislation to be enacted and the President can sign into law.

So ours is a bipartisan agenda for Oregon, but it is also an invitation on the part of the two of us to contribute ideas and good will on issues where Ðwe have struck common bipartisan ground.

Our intention for a few minutes this morning is to speak on a number of these items--in effect, one of us speaking for both of us. I am very pleased to yield to my good friend and colleague, Senator Smith, and to thank him for all of the opportunities to work with him, particularly for his willingness to consistently meet me more than half way in our efforts to try to work for our State. I thank Senator Smith.

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Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, the Senator has summed it up very well. I pick up on his comments with respect to health care. As my friend knows, this has always been my first love, going back to my days with the Gray Panthers. I have been especially proud that Oregon has been a leader in this area, first essentially in home health care, using dollars that could have gone for institutional care for home care, or the Oregon health plan, which began the debate about tough choices.

I particularly want to note with Senator Smith on the floor this morning that Oregon again is in a position of leading on health care, and that is because my friend and colleague, through an extraordinary effort, has been able to send a message across this country that those on Medicaid, the most vulnerable people in our society, people who always walk an economic tightrope, balancing their food costs against their fuel costs and their fuel costs against their medical bills--because of Senator Smith's efforts during the budget, there is an opportunity now to renew the protections those vulnerable people have.

He and I agree completely that there are opportunities to promote reforms in Medicaid and we are committed to that, but because of Senator Smith's effort we are not going to put budget cuts ahead of reforms. So as we go to this discussion about health care, I particularly want to commend my colleague because his leadership on Medicaid is part of the long tradition of Oregon being first in terms of making judgments about health care. I am proud to be able to assist in his efforts.

My colleagues will see that the Medicaid reform commission Senator Smith envisions and other reforms we have worked on are a big part of our effort.

With respect to catastrophic care, what is so striking about this debate is that experts have known what to do about this issue for years. One can get an awful lot of protection for a relatively small amount of dollars. For example, on any given day in our country, if somebody gets sick in a small business, it essentially blows the whole premium structure for everybody. If just one of the employees, where there is a little store of five or six people, gets sick, then rates skyrocket for everyone.

What Senator Smith and I are going to do in our catastrophic care bill is spread the risk, look to a way, for example, where Government might pick up a bit of that risk. Democrats have proposed it. Republicans have proposed it. Once there is that kind of risk spreading, instead of what happens now when one person gets sick and everybody pays higher bills, Government picks up a bit of that risk and the costs go down for everybody.

The two of us are on the Senate Finance Committee and we are going to do everything we can to try to bring the committee and the Senate together around these ideas.

Members of both political parties have had good ideas on this for literally a couple of decades. I remember talking about catastrophic care when I had a full head of hair, and we should have done it then. Senator Smith and I are going to try to tackle it. We will also look at some other issues that have great implications for our State but also for our country overall. One of them involves equity for health care providers.

Today, at a time when we have this demographic revolution, and we are going to have so many more older people, one would think the Federal Government would try to reward providers for doing the right thing, offering good quality care and holding costs down. Instead, the Federal Government sends the opposite message. The Federal Government basically says to Oregon and to other States that are doing a good job, well, tough luck, folks. Instead of rewarding you, we are going to actually stick it to you. We are going to penalize you and limit your reimbursement in spite of the fact that you provide higher quality, more efficient health care.

We are going to try to change that reimbursement system. It will obviously help our State, but I would submit, if one looks at the challenges for Medicare, the head of the General Accounting Office, David Walker, has said Medicare is seven times as great a challenge as is Social Security. And we cannot afford not to have the Smith-Wyden reforms with respect to reimbursement for health care providers. I am very hopeful we will be able to win support in the Finance Committee and in the Senate for those reimbursement changes as well. They make sense for our State, but they are absolutely critical for our country as well.

In addition to health care, which will be a prime focus of our work, Senator Smith and I want to make sure we promote the use of innovative technologies, making sure that they are accessible and affordable so as to capture the opportunity to use technology to grow incomes and strengthen our economy. Depreciation will be a topic we will focus on because right now businesses that need new technologies to keep up in tough global markets take a big tax hit if they change their equipment as frequently as they need to in order to keep up with the competition.

We intend to work together on the Finance Committee to change tax laws and be able to accelerate the depreciation of equipment and end the penalties our businesses pay for staying on the cutting edge of our economy.

We also intend to promote nanotechnology to continue to work to make Oregon a national leader in the new small science. Americans are not completely sure what this field is all about. A woman came up to me in a small store in Oregon recently and said: Ron, I do not know what this nanology is, but I am glad you are working on it.

The science of small stuff is going to be the wave of the future, and unprecedented collaboration between the public and private sectors has made Oregon one of America's leading microtechnology and nanotechnology centers.

Senator Smith and I joined to be part of an effort in the Senate to provide billions of dollars for nanotechnology that would create regional centers in this exciting field, and we intend to work to make certain that those efforts receive the Federal attention and credit they deserve.

We will also work to build out broadband and the telecommunications technologies. We intend to work again in the Finance Committee to create appropriate tax incentives that will ensure broadband gets to the four corners of our State, and, of course, to pick up on our theme that what we are doing makes sense for Oregon and for our country.

I submit that the Smith-Wyden effort, as it relates to broadband, technology, and the Web, will be of great benefit to Alaska as well. We are fortunate to have had a good relationship with Senator Stevens as well who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee.

The last point I make with respect to technology is as we try to bring all of those folks on to the Web and to be part of our Web-based economy, we should not hit them with a variety of new taxes. The bipartisan Internet tax Freedom Act makes it illegal to level double taxes or discriminatory taxes when one surfs the Web or makes Internet purchases. The two of us will be working on our committees, both the Commerce Committee and the Finance Committee, to make the Internet tax moratorium permanent to preserve Web access and Web commerce for the future.

We want to work together with our colleagues, and we have come today to say we want to promote smart solutions, the kind Oregonians and Americans should expect from the Senate.

I will yield back to Senator Smith so he can close out our joint presentation, and in yielding tell him that in addition to what we are trying to do for our State and the impact I think our ideas will have for the country in a variety of these areas, technology and health care and the issues we have mentioned, I hope what we are doing in the Senate today will be infectious and will cause other Senators to join in these kinds of efforts.

Very often colleagues have come up to Senator Smith and me and sort of said, what is in the water out there? What are you guys doing? I have never heard of this. We always respond, try it, you will like it. It is not going to be painful.

I see our friend from Oklahoma, Senator Inhofe, who has always been very kind to me in working on infrastructure and other issues, and I will say that in an acrimonious time, when there are certainly divisions, let us try to find every possible way to come together. We realize it is not always possible to do it, but what is exciting about America is we debate issues in a vigorous way. Certainly Senator Smith and I do not agree on everything under the Sun, but we certainly agree on a lot of critical matters. Even if we do not, we talk about them in a way that we think is respectful and promotes to our citizens the reality that debate can be thoughtful, it can be contemplative, and it does not always have to be about scorched earth kind of politics. I am very pleased that Senator Smith will conclude for both of us in our joint presentation. I thank him again for all of his efforts to work with me.

When I had a chance to come to the Congress, and Senator Jim Inhofe and I were then Members of the House, I dreamed of having this kind of opportunity to work in a bipartisan way in representing our State, and I thank my colleague for doing so much to make that possible.

I yield to him to wrap up not just on behalf of himself but to wrap up on behalf of both of us.

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