Health Care

Floor Speech

Mr. President, President Kennedy, from the Presiding Officer's home State said, if I could paraphrase a bit: A nation reveals itself not only by the men and women it produces but also by the men and women it honors, the men and women it remembers.

It is our duty to take care of those who served in uniform. Today, this Nation has revealed itself, and the image is shameful. This body failed to consider the important veterans legislation of this Congress--the most important veterans legislation of this Congress: the Comprehensive Veterans Health and Benefits and Military Retirement Pay Restoration Act of 2014.

I sit on the Senate Veterans Affairs' Committee. I am the first Senator from my State ever to sit on that committee for a full term. I consider that an honor. I consider it a privilege to serve those who served us in this Nation.

I have worked alongside Republicans and Democrats, as has Chairman Sanders and Ranking Member Burr. We have produced good legislation here. Next to the post-9/11 GI bill, which Senator Webb worked on 4 or 5 years ago, it is the most important advancement in veterans legislation and assistance to our Nation's veterans at my time in the Senate. That is the good news.

The bad news is this debate has been about politics, not about veterans. Again, people in Washington want to score political points by filibuster, by obstruction, by blocking good bipartisan legislation, supported by a whole panoply of veterans organizations and community groups.

There are those who have concerns who want to add to this bill, concerns that are not related to veterans. To hold up this bill with something unrelated to veterans is unconscionable.

Whether you are in Marblehead, MA, or Mansfield, OH, we all have heard our constituents say: Why do they attach these unrelated things to legislation instead of voting them up or down on their merits? That is what people want to do here. Those who want to filibuster this bill are the people who want to add things to the bill that have nothing to do with serving our veterans.

This legislation by itself improves vital programs to honor our commitment to those who served in uniform and for those who care for our veterans. Whether it is a community-based outpatient clinic in Zanesville or Chillicothe or Springfield, whether it is a VA center in Dayton or Chillicothe or Cleveland, we care about those who care for our veterans, many of whom are veterans themselves, and we take care of those veterans.

This corrects errors in programs and benefits and, as I said, has widespread support in the veterans community. The American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans, Vietnam Veterans of America, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America all support this legislation.

I will not go through a lot of the details we have discussed before that Senator Sanders brought to the floor, but I want to talk about a couple.

This bill renews our VOW to Hire Heroes Act by reauthorizing provisions such as the VRAP, the Veterans Retraining Assistance Program. This program retrains unemployed veterans for high-demand occupations.

I traveled across Ohio throughout 2012 spreading the word about VRAP, encouraging our veterans to apply. Ohio veterans applied in larger numbers than our State's population would suggest because of the outreach of so many in encouraging people to sign up for VRAP.

I met veterans such as Everett Chambers in Cleveland, who used VRAP funds to get retrained as an electrical engineering technician at Cuyahoga Community College, or Tri-C.

I remember meeting a veteran in Youngstown who went back to school because of VRAP and got the opportunity to work at a health care center in information technology.

We know VRAP works. It helps our veterans get back to work. It lowers the unacceptably high unemployment rate for recently separated servicemembers who have so much to offer employers.

This program is aimed for those veterans who are a little bit older who are no longer eligible for the GI bill and those veterans who have been out of the service for a while. But it does not stop there. It adds other important improvements in education benefits, in reproductive health, in the delivery of care and benefits to veterans who experienced sexual trauma while serving in the military.

Too many Members in this body will say they support the programs in this bill but that finding the money to do so is not possible. So they are for the bill, they say, until they are not. Well, there is a disconnect between what they say and what they do. Those same elected leaders--those same elected leaders who say: I am for this bill, but we can't pay for it, so we can't pass it--those same people want to give tax breaks to companies that take jobs and factories overseas when we say we cannot find the money to provide a caregiver the support he needs to care for his wife, a veteran. We fight a decade-long war in Afghanistan that goes unpaid for and we cannot find the resources to ensure the very people who fought that war will be cared for.

It would be a little more simple than that. When a company closes down in Springfield, or Springfield, MA, and moves to Wuhan, China, or Shihan, China, they can deduct the cost of the plant shutdown in one of the Springfields and they can deduct the cost of building the new plant in Wuhan, China. That is a loophole we could close. It would mean more companies would stay in Springfield, OH, or Springfield, MA, helping our communities, helping our tax base, and it would mean those companies would not be deducting that move and that money could then be used for these veterans programs. But no, they say: We can't find the money.

It is important to end this filibuster and pass this bill.

BUYING GOVERNMENT

Mr. President, I heard my friend from Kansas talk about what he calls the personal attacks on two I believe he said great Americans, but Americans nonetheless, which they are, and prominent businesspeople in Kansas and around the country.

These two Americans--and this is not personal to me--these two Americans have spent millions of dollars trying to defeat me, as they have tried to defeat a number of people in this Chamber who think government has a role in preserving Medicare and government should provide funds for Head Start and government should give tax breaks to low-income people, not just rich people, and government should play a role, as the Presiding Officer has, in a cleaner environment and deal with climate change. But I disagree with these two Americans. I do not personally dislike them or personally know them. But I do know they have spent millions of dollars in ads, millions of dollars in an unprecedented way--they and a small number of people--to try to hijack our political system.

People are sick and tired, first, of the TV ads; second, of the lies in the TV ads; and, third, that there are people--a few billionaires--who are trying to buy elections in this country, billionaires who are looking for tax breaks for themselves, billionaires who are looking for the opportunity to weaken environmental laws, billionaires who want to kill the union movement in this country.

I want to read from one editorial that was printed in, I believe, Roll Call or The Hill newspaper talking about some of these ads. Here is what this editorial said:

Were this an ad for Stainmaster carpet, a Koch product-- Koch, this is the family, the brothers--

Were this an ad for Stainmaster carpet, a Koch product, Federal Trade Commission guidelines would require the ad to ``conspicuously disclose that the persons in such advertisements are not actual consumers.'' Moreover, the FTC would require them to either demonstrate that these results of ObamaCare are typical or make clear in the ad that they are not.

Needless to say, the ad meets none of these requirements, thereby conforming to the legal definition of false advertising.

That tells you a lot. I rest my case in just those terms. It is never personal. It should never be. It is whom you fight for in this body and what you fight against. But there are people in this country who think they can buy our government. We have seen that throughout our history. We have seen the oil companies try to do everything they can to at least if not buy government take a long-term lease. We saw the robber barons 100 years ago, including one from my State, Mark Hanna, who used to try to control the legislature. They used to say that he wore President McKinley like a watchfob when he was Governor of Ohio.

So we have seen this in the past. We have never seen it in such an incredibly big way as we have seen it in the last few election cycles.

MINIMUM WAGE

Mr. President, I want to speak about the minimum wage, something this Chamber, frankly, needs to do. The Presiding Officer in his time in the House saw, as I did, a number of Members of Congress who would vote to raise their own pay but then vote against a minimum-wage increase, which I find morally inconsistent or worse. But let me make a couple comments about that.

In 1991, the average price of gas was $1.15 a gallon, a loaf of bread around 70 cents, a dozen eggs about $1. The tipped minimum wage--that is the minimum wage for people who work in a diner who get tips, people who push a wheelchair in an airport who rely on tips, a valet, someone who does nail manicures, people who work in jobs where they are receiving tips--the minimum wage in 1991 for those workers at the local diner or the local airport was $2.13 an hour--in 1991.

Today, the average price of gas is $3.30 a gallon; a loaf of bread costs $1.35, more or less; eggs are about $2. The tipped minimum wage is still $2.13. Its value has fallen by 36 percent in real terms. Think about that--$2.13 an hour.

Americans who work hard and take responsibility should be able to take care of their families. That is why I support the Fair Minimum Wage Act, which would raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour in three 95-cent increments and then provide annual cost-of-living increases linked to changes in the cost of living. The bill would also gradually raise the Federal minimum wage for tipped workers at the diner, the valet, the person doing the manicure from $2.13 an hour to 70 percent of the regular minimum wage.

In 1980 the minimum wage for tipped workers was 60 percent of the regular minimum wage. It is now less than 30 percent of the regular minimum wage. In Canada the minimum wage in Ontario is $11; the tipped minimum wage is $8.90. The United States is the only industrialized nation in the world--except for Canada--where a large number of workers must depend on tips for a large share of their income. So in Canada the tipped minimum wage is only slightly less than the minimum wage. In the United States it is less than 30 percent of the minimum wage. In the rest of the world it is 100 percent of the minimum wage.

Interestingly, servers in the United States, people who work at diners or restaurants in the United States--when a European comes across the ocean and eats at a restaurant in Cleveland or in Cincinnati, the European will usually leave a really small tip because they are not used to tipping. The American worker relies on those tips for any kind of a decent wage.

Ohio's current tipped minimum wage is a little higher; it is $3.98. That is still not enough. These are men and women who have bills to pay and families to support.

Most tipped workers do not work at fine dining establishments where the average bill is $50, $60, or $70, so someone is making pretty good money on tips. A server in a high-class restaurant, an expensive restaurant, can make hundreds of dollars in a night. But for a server who works in a diner where four people come in, get coffee, spend an hour there, and have a bill of $6, the tip might be $1. That person has worked for an hour. They are not getting to the minimum wage with the tipped wage, and, often, neither is the valet or the person at the airport who is getting someone off the plane and pushing their wheelchair to their connecting flight. They often do not even receive tips because so often the person in the wheelchair never thinks about it, does not know that these are tipped workers, that they are only making $2, $3, or $4 an hour. They are working hard.

We work hard for the money we make. We are very well paid here. It is a privilege to serve in the Senate. But when you think about those workers who are working very hard, their minimum wage is $2.13 an hour. There is something not right about that.

One more point. The Center for American Progress completed an analysis of 20 years' worth of minimum wage increases in States across the country. They conclude that there is no clear evidence that the minimum wage leads to further job loss during periods of high unemployment.

The opponents of raising the minimum wage say that it is going to cause price increases and that there are going to be layoffs. But what is interesting is that every time there is a minimum wage bill we are debating, the opponents say: You know, these businesses are going to have to raise their prices or lay people off to pay the minimum wage. But when an executive gets a $1 million bonus, when a CEO gets paid $12 million and gets a raise to $16 million the next year, I never hear them say: Boy, they are going to have to lay people off to pay those executive salaries. It is only when it is low-wage workers that my friends on that side of the aisle stand and say: This is going to hurt business. This is going to hurt commerce. This is going to hurt employment.

Their arguments are weak. Their arguments are, in many cases, a bit hardhearted. I wish my colleagues would do what Pope Francis said. Recently, Pope Francis exhorted his parish priests to go out and smell like the flock; go out among your parishioners and listen to them and try to understand their lives and try to live like them.

Well, a lot of those parishioners are minimum wage workers or slightly above minimum wage. Smelling like the flock might help some of my colleagues come to the conclusion that raising the minimum wage is important to do, is humane, is right for our country.

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