Wednesday, August 8, 2001
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Wednesday, August 8, 2001 |
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Patients' Bill of Rights, energy bill pass in the House By MAC COLLINS Patient's Bill of Rights The passage late Thursday night of the Patients' Bill of Rights marks a victory of common sense. Recent negotiations between the Congress and President Bush yielded a new version which includes language that protects small businesses from legal liability for the simple act of providing workers with health plans as part of the employees' benefit package. While the trial lawyers and their supporters in the House of Representatives were unhappy with provisions capping noneconomic damages and drawing lines of jurisdiction between federal and state courts, workers needing access to affordable healthcare benefitted. A majority of the House knew that the bill had to protect a patients' rights and hold HMOs accountable for bad decisions. But they also knew that if we are serious about ensuring Americans have access to health care, we could not pass a bill which would drive costs through the roof and frighten employers into dropping coverage because of legal liability problems. The legislation helps decrease the number of uninsured Americans with measures to encourage workers and small businesses to join area health plans. Provisions which expand access to Medical Savings Accounts are also part of the bill. This means that the modified Patients Bill of Rights, taken as a whole, is good legislation, and shows the value of using common sense. Energy bill The House passed the Securing America's Future Energy Act of 2001 (H.R. 4) to give us what this country has been missing for the past 10 years a comprehensive energy strategy. Without energy, our economy will grind to a halt. This balanced bill works to increase our supply by encouraging conservation as well as production. The bill includes tax benefits for buying electric vehicles similar to legislation I had previously introduced. This should reduce the cost of getting electric vehicles into the hands of consumers. The bill also expands incentives for energy conservation in homes, as well as solar, wind, or renewable energy generation. In addition, it provides incentives to increase energy production. Finally, a measure I introduced to allow municipal gas companies to use tax free bonds to make cost-saving long-term energy contracts was included in the bill. Budget process The House Budget Committee voted out H.R. 981, "The Budget Responsibility and Efficiency At of 2001" to create a commission to reexamine the cumbersome federal budgeting process. The commission will evaluate the structure and concepts of the federal budget process. The current budget process has not been thoroughly reviewed for decades. The Commission will provide an opportunity to examine how Congress can make the accounting process more efficient. We need to come up with a system which provides more timely information and allows for a better decision-making process. One proposal the commission will examine is the idea to budget for two-year periods, instead of one year at a time. Foreign textile threats Reps. Howard Coble and Robin Hayes, of North Carolina, and I met Wednesday with Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill to urge the enforcement of existing trade laws to protect American textile jobs from unfair foreign competition. I believe Secretary O'Neill now understands the gravity of the situation facing Americans in the textile and cotton-growing industries. He assured me trade violations which harm the textile industries and destroy jobs will be taken seriously. Since 1996 over 600,000 textile and apparel jobs have been lost in the United States. Georgia alone bore the loss of 100,000 of those jobs. During that same period, textile imports grew, while our industry shrank and jobs were destroyed. At the same time, domestic cotton growers and spinners are losing sales and laying off workers. Not long ago, we were using 11 million tons of domestic cotton. Now we are using 8 million tons, a more than 20 percent decline. We told Secretary O'Neill trade cheating from many Asian countries, including mainland China, has become more sophisticated and is taking advantage of tariff reductions enacted between the United States, Canada, and Mexico as part of the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA). Asian importers ship yarn and fabric to the United States, put "U.S. origin" labels on them and then ship them to Mexico duty-free. The products are then sewn and shipped to the United States duty-free as Mexican-made products with this fraudulent Asian content. The Mexicans are doing their part to crack down on Asian transshipments. The have cut direct imports of Asian cloth into their country, and appointed a transshipment czar who has revoked importing licenses of hundreds of business caught illegally transshipping Asian textiles. Our Customs officials must get tough on this illegal trade practice as well, before more of our textile jobs are lost. Secretary O'Neill has pledged to cooperate in fighting this unfair trade tactic. We also spoke with him about the need for the Department of Treasury to look into the practice of devaluing currency to encourage exports to the United States as well as the need to ensure that agriculture food products imported into the United States must be required to meet the same FDA health and safety standards which are applied to domestic products.
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