Economy & Budget

After logging nearly 800 miles on the road since last Wednesday, a caravan of long-term caregivers and senior advocates arrived on Capitol Hill yesterday with a message: Private equity firms -- the ones that buy public companies, take them private, and make dramatic changes before re-selling the companies for a profit -- have a responsibility equal to their size; these buyout firms should be held accountable for the impact of their actions on seniors, taxpayers, and workers.

After meeting with the workers, Chairmen John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Barney Frank (D-Mass.) announced the first congressional hearings on private equity ownership of nursing homes. The announcement comes on the eve of the biggest private equity nursing home takeover in history, the $6.3 billion buyout of HCR Manor Care by The Carlyle Group.

It’s been a landmark month for families, workers, and advocates concerned about what happens when decisions about nursing home care delivery are placed in the hands of buyout kings accountable only to their investors. A recent New York Times investigation depicted these concerns all too vividly. Read more...

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) rocks! In what amounts to an awesome victory for taxpayers, the Senator managed to roll a $1 million earmark right out of the H.R. 3043, the FY 2008 Labor-HHS-Education and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. The earmark was targeted at the Bethel Performing Arts Center Museum in New York, which includes a tribute to the 1969 Woodstock Festival. Coburn got the votes to transfer the $1 million to the Maternal and Child Health block grant program. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), a sponsor of the earmark along with Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), attempted to table or kill the amendment, but was rebuffed 52-42. This is the congressional earmark that made for maybe the funniest moment in Sunday night’s Republican Candidate debate on Fox News Channel, when Sen. John McCain made light of it in order to criticize Sen. Clinton and tout his own record as a long-time Senate pork-buster.

The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste supported Coburn’s Bethel Museum amendment as well as three others, including one to eliminate the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Entertainment Education program, an ombudsman program, and prevent the CDC from purchasing additional rotating pastel lights, zero-gravity chairs, or dry heat saunas for the agency’s fitness center.

Today I once again called on Speaker Pelosi to appoint conferees to the Military Construction & Veterans Affairs Appropriations bill after delaying for 130 days.  Our men and women in uniform are winning a war, and when they return home from Iraq, we'd better be ready to pay them what is due.

If Speaker Pelosi isn’t ready to appoint conferees to this critical bill after 130 days, I challenge her to share her reasons why.  I hope that what I have read about the Democrat leadership using this legislation as a vehicle to sneak massive spending bills past the President’s veto isn’t true.  I would trust that the needs and concerns of our veterans and military families would have more priority than a sneaky political scheme to increase government spending by billions.

Holding funds for our troops and veterans hostage for political gain is disrespectful to the men and women who have fought and are fighting to protect our country.  Speaker Pelosi has kept these funds from our soldiers long enough.  I am ready to work with Democrats to get our men and women in uniform the funds they need.  It is time for the Speaker to make a move.

Today I offered an amendment to ensure that no appropriations bill can be used to overturn the bipartisan, bicameral agreement on the Ryan White CARE Act reauthorization passed last year, and cheat communities in the South and rural America out of new funds they desperately need to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS.

House Democrat Leadership has craftily and quietly snuck a provision into an appropriations bill that would rob disadvantaged individuals, living in underserved areas of the country, of money they desperately need for HIV/AIDS treatment. This end run goes against the very core of the mission of the Ryan White reauthorization passed last year, which revised critically flawed funding formulas to ensure that federal dollars are used to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic of today, not yesterday.

Where I come from, that’s called cheating. Read more...

For many, talking about the weather is a pastime or perhaps even a hobby. For others, watching the mercury rise or fall can mean much more -- even life or death . This summer, many individuals were faced with the critical decision of whether or not to keep the air conditioner on when the nation experienced heat waves that killed people. This winter, families will need to decide if they can afford to keep the heat on.

Some of the anguish and suffering can be avoided through the sufficient funding of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps approximately 6 million households get through extreme weather. LIHEAP was born at a moment of historical need -- the energy crises of the 1970s.  It was, and still is, intended to be a partnership between federal and state governments, the private sector, and community organizations designed to help reduce the energy burden on low-income households.

Unfortunately, federal funding for this program has not kept up with its need. Read more...

We have heard a lot about the need to promote work over the past decade, but we’ve talked less about whether or not there are good jobs for everyone who needs one. According to a new report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Center for Social Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston, one-in-five people in working families – nearly 41 million – around the country are struggling to make ends meet.

The authors find that many workers are in jobs that do not provide health insurance or enough earnings to cover basic expenditures, but earn too much to qualify for work supports such as Medicaid or SCHIP.

The researchers worked with partners in nine states and the District of Columbia to assess the reach of six public work supports – child care assistance, EITC, Food Stamps, housing assistance (Section 8 and public housing), Medicaid/SCHIP and TANF. While helpful for those who receive them, they find more needs to be done to ensure that hard work pays.

Fully-funded programs with simple applications that have been designed to support working families, like the EITC, make the biggest difference for those who are employed, but not getting ahead. Accordingly, it would seem that effectively capping SCHIP to help only the poorest would be a great step backward for working families

Yesterday, I voted to sustain President Bush’s veto.  This debate is not about providing health care to America’s low-income children.  That idea has widespread support -- including mine -- and SCHIP is an important part of reaching that goal.  Instead of working to ensure those who need this assistance receive it, earlier this year Congress passed a bill that opens loopholes for illegal immigrants, expands the program to cover individuals with high incomes, encourages more federal spending, and forces the program to rely on an unstable funding source -- increased cigarette taxes.  The President was wise to veto it.

Now we must move forward and craft a sensible bill that makes sure the poorest children receive coverage. But time is of the essence.  Political gamesmanship has delayed this matter for far too long already.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), in her campaign's newest ad, says the Bush economy is like a trapdoor, with too many Americans close to "falling through" and losing everything. Clinton says the country needs to build its middle class to be prosperous again.

The ad will begin airing on TV Friday in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The scene on the Floor of the U.S. House after Members voted to sustain the President’s veto of the Democrats’ plan to expand S-CHIP today was bizarre. I would submit it revealed what is really going on with the S-CHIP issue. Republicans, who had prevailed by sustaining the veto, did have a reason to celebrate. They didn’t. Not a single cheer. No applause from the Republican side. But, on the other side of the aisle, Congressman Rahm Emanuel and several other Democrats applauded when the vote was over.

One would have thought if Congressman Emanuel was concerned with children’s health care, he and other Democrats would have been disappointed. Why then did they applaud? It couldn’t be that they would rather have a crass political issue to exploit! It couldn’t be that they were happy that rather than extending a program for children, they had gotten what they really wanted all along…an opportunity to demagogue the issue. After all, they would never exploit a program for children for political gain. Read more...

Not so long ago, the President pledged to expand coverage of SCHIP to include eligible children who are not yet enrolled in the program. In his September 2004 speech to the Republican National Convention, the President stated – and I am quoting here, “We will lead an aggressive effort to enroll millions of poor children who are eligible but not signed up for the government’s health insurance programs. We will not allow a lack of attention, of information, to stand between these children and the health care they need. Read more...