Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 2017--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, every morning paper and most of the newscasts this morning focused in on a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee yesterday. It was a hearing where the President of the Wells Fargo bank was called on to testify. At issue was a recent disclosure that over a period of many years, Wells Fargo bank was enrolling its customers, without their knowledge, in the ownership of bank accounts and credit cards. Many times they faced penalties and charges which they did not understand because they had not asked to be enrolled in these programs. The employees at Wells Fargo bank did it in an effort to win favor within their corporate ranks and even to receive bonuses.

This defrauding of thousands of Wells Fargo customers was finally unearthed by the media and by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As a result, a substantial fine of millions of dollars was paid by Wells Fargo bank, and the President, Mr. Stumpf, was called before the committee yesterday to explain the situation. He faulted the over 5,000 employees of Wells Fargo bank, who he said were not honest in their dealings with their customers, and they were dismissed. There were questions asked of Mr. Stumpf about the responsibility of the management of Wells Fargo bank for this terrible miscarriage of justice and apparently very few, if any, managers were held accountable.

One particular woman who was in a management capacity had been allowed to leave the bank under extremely positive circumstances. She was given a golden parachute of over $100 million when leaving the bank. So while 5,300 people, making around $12 an hour, were being dismissed because of their lack of ethics, this managing woman was, in fact, rewarded with a golden parachute of over $100 million as she left.

Questions were raised by many of my colleagues, including Senator Brown, and even Republican colleagues were skeptical of this Wells Fargo presentation. Senator Elizabeth Warren was particularly poignant in her remarks that so many of the lower echelon employees were found morally culpable and paid a heavy price, while those at the highest ranks, including Mr. Stumpf himself, were compensated grandly for their leadership during this terrible time. It is an indication of what it takes to bring real justice to a free market system.

I am a person who believes America is lucky to have the economy it has, but I also know that throughout history, there have been excesses where people have had to step in--sometimes the media with disclosure and many times the government with oversight and regulation--to right the wrongs which occur in runaway, rampant capitalism. We saw it, of course, in the recession that hit our country in 2008. Many of the largest banks in this country took advantage of individuals and families and businesses. At the end of it, many people lost their savings, their homes, and their jobs because of the greed of Wall Street, but what we are talking about in the area of justice doesn't just apply to financial institutions, it applies to health insurance as well. Affordable Care Act

Mr. President, on a regular basis now, the leadership on the Republican side of the aisle has come forward to condemn the Affordable Care Act. It apparently is a big issue which they want to take into the election in November. I hope the American people listen carefully to what we have just heard from Senator McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year, for the last 5 years, Republicans have come to the floor and said: Let's abolish ObamaCare. Let's end the Affordable Care Act. I am still waiting for the first Republican to come to the floor and say: And here is what we will replace it with.

There is a saying in downstate Illinois--I will clean it up a little bit--that any mule can kick down a barn door, but it takes a carpenter to build one. In this situation, the Republicans can't wait to kick down the Affordable Care Act, but they don't have any plans to build a replacement.

So here is what they want to do. They want to go back to what they consider the good old days of health insurance in America.

Six years ago, let me tell me colleagues, health insurance in America was no picnic for most American families. Not only was there a steady increase in premiums year after year, but health insurance companies were very picky about the people they would insure. If you happened to be the parents of a child who had weathered the storm and survived cancer treatment, your child had a preexisting condition. If you could get health insurance, you paid a lot for it. The same thing was true if your wife had survived a heart attack, for example, and was now on the mend and doing well. She had a preexisting condition.

So preexisting conditions became the basis for discriminating against American consumers. Who among us comes from such a perfect family without any health record that we can say there are no preexisting conditions in my family. If you don't have one today, you might have one tomorrow.

One of the things about the Affordable Care Act is, we said health insurance companies cannot discriminate against people because of preexisting conditions. In the bad old days, which the Republicans would return to, they could. Under the Affordable Care Act, they cannot.

We also said that lifetime limits on health insurance policies were unacceptable. So $100,000 may sound like a lot of money until you are diagnosed with cancer, and then you realize the course of treatment is going to blow through that $100,000 before you are ultimately going to get what the doctor has ordered. So we eliminated the lifetime caps on these policies that were, in fact, creating poverty among many Americans families because of medical diagnoses.

We also eliminated discrimination based on gender. Why was it that a man applying for a health insurance policy was paying less than a woman applying for a health insurance policy? That discrimination was allowed under the bad old days of health insurance that the Republicans want to return to.

We went further and said: If you are parents and have a young son or daughter, they can stay under your family health insurance plan until they reach the age of 26. Why is this important? Because kids out of college are still looking for work. They may not get a full-time job, they may not get health care benefits, but families want the peace of mind to know they are covered until age 26, until they can have a chance to develop their own health insurance coverage. Under the bad old days, that coverage was not there. The Republicans would like to go back to that. That is a mistake as far as I am concerned.

We also basically said as well that if you are a senior citizen in America, you are not going to be burdened by what was known as the doughnut hole. People in Medicare are given a benefit for prescription drugs, but as the law was originally written, there was a gap in coverage in that benefit called the doughnut hole. You would be covered for the first few months of the year on expensive drugs; then you would be on your own to either pay out of your savings or not take the drugs for several months before coverage started again. We are closing the doughnut hole as part of the Affordable Care Act. The Republicans would take us back to the days of the doughnut hole, where individual retired Americans would face expenses of $2,000 or more for drugs each year. We are in the process of closing that doughnut hole. The Republicans would take us back to the bad old days when we didn't have that closure.

They would eliminate the coverage of health insurance brought on by the Affordable Care Act for over 20 million Americans--20 million Americans. Senator McConnell would say: Sorry, we are going back to the bad old days. You and your family don't get health care coverage.

There is something we discovered. Even families without health insurance get sick, and when they do get sick and, in the worst of circumstances, turn up at the doctor or the hospital, they are treated, and many times can't pay for it. Who pays for that care? Everyone else. Everyone else who is paying health insurance will pay for it.

We think it is better under the Affordable Care Act. We achieved this: More and more Americans have their own health insurance, both for care when they are sick as well as for preventive care. We provide preventive care under the Affordable Care Act, particularly for senior citizens so they will avoid serious illnesses that get very expensive down the line.

So what has been the net result of this? Not only are there 20 million more people who have health insurance in America because of the Affordable Care Act, but also the fact is, the rate of increase in costs in health care has slowed down--slower than at any time in recent records or modern memory. It has extended the life of Medicare for another 12 or 13 years because the cost of health care is not rising as quickly as we thought it might.

The Republicans would take us back to the bad old days when the cost of health care was going up even more rapidly. I don't think most Americans would sign up for that.

We also understand that when it comes to the Affordable Care Act, there are ways to improve it. I signed on to one of the provisions that Senator McConnell took exception to this morning. It is a provision for us to consider a public option when it comes to health insurance. I am all for private health insurance companies competing, doing their best, trying to win the support and the enrollment of American families, but what is wrong with creating a Medicare-like proposal that is a not-for- profit entity providing health insurance along the style of Medicare?

Senator McConnell was pretty critical of that this morning. He hadn't asked most Americans what they think about Medicare. He should. Many of them thank God we have it. For many of them, it meant health insurance when they had no place to turn. The creation of Medicare over 50 years ago was liberating to many seniors. Now they finally have affordable, quality health care after they retire. So putting that on as a public option to be considered by those who are signing up for health insurance would let them shop and let them compete. That to me is consistent with what we want to achieve when it comes to health care in this country.

So we listen time and again to these attacks and critiques of the Affordable Care Act. We have yet to see the Republican alternative. The only alternative they suggest is going back to the bad old days when health insurance cost too much, when health insurance discriminated against people with preexisting conditions, and when health insurance was a gamble as to whether you would have it from this year to the next.

There are ways to improve the Affordable Care Act. I won't come to argue and will be the last to say that it is perfect as written, but in order to improve it, we need bipartisan cooperation, which we don't have. On the Republican side of the aisle, there have been 60 or 70 votes to abolish it, but not 1 vote to step up and try to improve it, which I would be happy to join in on a bipartisan basis. That is what the American people expect of us.

The last point I would like to make on the issue of health care is to state for the Record of the U.S. Senate that we had a meeting yesterday on medical research. This is a good news story, and there aren't a lot of them on Capitol Hill. But we moved forward on a bipartisan basis to make substantial increases in the medical research budgets of the National Institutes of Health. This is the premier medical research facility for the world, and we are lucky to have it right here in the Washington area.

Dr. Francis Collins heads it up. He told me years ago that if he could get 5-percent real growth in medical research for a number of years, we could make dramatic advances when it comes to medical research and cures for diseases. I took him up on that, and I enlisted a joint effort--first with Patty Murray, my colleague from the State of Washington, who is in a key position on the Appropriations Committee and the authorizing committee in the area of medical research and is totally committed to the effort, and on the Republican side Senator Blunt of Missouri and Senator Alexander of Tennessee. Then Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina joined me to cochair the NIH Caucus.

Here are some things you may not know about medical research and how important it is. There was a briefing yesterday on diabetes. I didn't realize until I walked into that briefing that one-third of the annual expenditure for Medicare is for the treatment of diabetes. In addition to that, 20 percent of the annual expenditure for Medicare is for Alzheimer's. So for two diseases, diabetes and Alzheimer's, more than 50 percent of our Medicare budget is being spent each year. If we could develop new drugs, new treatments, new approaches that deal with diabetes and Alzheimer's, it would not only spare the people from the suffering they are going through and from the need for medical care, but it would greatly help our Medicare Program to be more solvent for years to come.

Is medical research a good investment? I think it is the best investment. We have seen it pay off over and over and over again. Do you remember not too long ago when we were talking about people who were making their last trek down to Plains, GA, in the hopes that they would see former President Jimmy Carter for the last time because of his cancer diagnosis? Then, do you remember when President Jimmy Carter held a press conference and said: I am cancer-free. It was because of the development of drugs and medical treatments through medical research. That has given him back his life. For many Americans, it is the same story every day.

We may do a lot of things wrong in Washington, but let's not get medical research wrong. Let's get it right. Let's make it bipartisan, and let's invest in it. I can't think of a better investment for future generations in this country.

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