From the office of U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski:
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) today spoke out against a government shutdown, asking her Senate colleagues to protect the health and safety of women, children and middle-class families by rejecting the long-term continuing resolution proposed by House Republicans.
Senator Mikulski outlined the reasons HR-1 is bad for women and children, including cuts to Head Start, Pell grants, Social Security and health care reform. She was joined on the Senate floor by her Democratic women colleagues in the Senate.
“As we move ahead in what we hope will be a settlement and a negotiation, we, the Democratic women of the United States Senate, will not surrender the women and children of this country. We will not let them be thrown under the bus and run over by H.R. 1,” Senator Mikulski said.
The full text of Senator Mikulski’s statement follows:
Mr. President, I’m here representing 150 million women in the United States of America. They are bewitched, bothered and bewildered by what the House of Representatives has done to women in H.R. 1.
Women all over America have to balance the family budgets, so they know that the United States of America needs to get its fiscal act together. They also know that we need to live in a more frugal time – they understand that.
What they don’t understand is that what the House did in H.R. 1. The entire burden has come from a very limited amount in discretionary spending. When you take off defense, homeland security, women and children are actually thrown under the bus.
Well, they’re mad as hell and they don’t want to take it anymore. So the Democratic women today are going to lay out the consequences of what H.R. 1 means. Now, we women in the Senate, and we your Appropriators, of which there are many women – Senators Landrieu, Feinstein, Mikulski, and Murray – we know that we had to bring about fiscal discipline. The Senate Appropriations Committee, with one of the great men of this Senate, Senator Inouye, has already worked to reduce the Appropriations in the Senate by $41 billion.
Now, Mr. President, that’s really meat and potatoes. So we feel we’ve already given an option but, my god, enough is enough.
Let me give you just the top ten reasons why H.R. 1 is bad for women and children and examine why we’re ready to negotiate so that we don’t have a shutdown of the government. We need a final settlement on the budget for 2011.
Let’s just go through them. One, we defund the entire health care reform law. That is bad for saving lives and for saving money. It also eliminates the Title X family planning money. It jeopardizes breast cancer cervical screening for more than 5 million low-income women.
They even went after Head Start. Little kids in Head Start have to take it on the chin. It’s going to cause 218,000 children to be kicked off of it. But we go farther. Republicans say they are pro-family, pro-family values, and that they’ve got to defend life, yet they slash the nutrition programs for pregnant women by $747 million, affecting 10 million low-income pregnant women, new mothers and children.
We also cut funding for Pell Grants. We terminated funding that helps schools comply with Title IX funding for job training. That hurts over 8 million workers, many of them getting new training for the jobs of the new economy.
They went after the Social Security Administration. Not social security in terms of benefits, but they went after the people who work at the Social Security Administration. The people work on everything from the direct social security benefits to the disability benefits.
If H.R. 1 passes, more than 2,500 people at Social Security will be laid off. They go to work every day, provide actuarial information on how to keep it solvent, make sure the checks are out there on time and in snowstorms we’re showing up to make sure everything works, but at the end of the day, they’re going to be told we’re “non-essential.”
This whole “non-essential” talk drives me crazy, because ironically, Members of Congress are considered essential during a government shutdown. If we’re going to be essential, we need to get real about how we come to an agreement on this Continuing Resolution. So, Mr. President, we in the Senate feel we’ve given $41 billion already and we think H.R. 1 just goes too far. It goes too far by leaving so many things off the table.
Now, I want to talk about health care reform. We had many goals during health care reform, one of which was to expand universal access. Again, the presiding officer has been a champion of that, a stalwart defender of the public option and a stalwart defender of the single-payer system. And as we worked on it and we came up with a compromise, what was very clear was there were certain things we had to do. One was whether we reform the public option or not, whether you’re for a single-payer system or the system we have now, we knew we had to end the punitive practices of insurance companies.
We know that in the health care reform bill, we also had to improve quality measures that would actually save lives and save money. We also knew that there should be a strong preventive care benefit, that through early detection and screening we could minimize the costs to the insurance companies in the federal budget and also the terrible cost to families who face all kinds of problems – particularly cancer. So that’s why we passed health care reform.
Now, over in the House they thought it was really cool to say they could repeal health care reform. Remember, they said repeal and replace. They’ve only talked about repeal, because they don’t know how to replace. They decided through H.R. 1 to defund it, to take the money away. So let me outline very quickly what it means to women and children. First of all, we ended gender discrimination by the insurance companies in health care reform. Before we reformed health care, women were charged 40 percent more, in many instances, for health care premiums, compared to men of comparable age and health status. Forty percent more. There was a gender tax of 40 percent put on by the insurance companies. We ended that.
The second thing was that the insurance companies were treating simply being a woman as a pre-existing condition. So we went to the floor, and with the great guys in the Senate, we passed the preventive care amendment. We wouldn’t let them take our mammograms away from us. We also made sure that our children could have early detection and screening in schools. And because it’s not about gender, it’s about an agenda, we included men in these preventive health services as well.
Now, if we agree to H.R. 1 and defund health care reform, we will take away the preventive health care benefits. We cannot go back. It would also repeal the quality measures like the famous Pronovost checklist developed in Maryland by a Johns Hopkins doctor. When used at Michigan hospitals alone, the simple, low-tech way to lower in-house infections
in hospitals, it saved Michigan hospitals 2,000 lives and saved the state $200 million. We can do this, Mr. President. There are so many things that were important in the health care reform bill. We cannot defund it.
As we move ahead in what we hope will be a settlement and a negotiation, we, the women of the United States Senate, we, the Democratic women, will not surrender the women and children of this country. We will not let them be thrown under the bus and run over by H.R. 1.
racheltucke says
Overall, I am happy with my health insurance I found through wise health insurance network. It is not perfect, but in today’s world what is? The health insurance plan has worked quite well for me and my family.
Rob in Bel Air says
Barbara,
Please tell us where the money is coming from for all things you and your president want to do in this country. If you can come up with a way to pay for all these things without sticking it to the middle-class, and without adding to the deficit, I’m all for your plan. However, based on what I have seen so far, it is the middle-class folks that get stuck paying for your (and Obama’s) liberal-minded social ideas and programs.
And please, do not try the “Cardin” spin in an attempt to convince us that in the long run, we (whoever we are) will save money. It’s not going to happen. My taxes, as well as all the taxes paid by middle-class Americans, will continue to go up. Most of your constituents do not caredon’t pay taxes … so why should they care.
Phil Dirt says
“Mr. President, I’m here representing 150 million women in the United States of America…”
Maybe someday for the first time in her 35 years in Congress, Babs will represent me in something. No, wait, I’m a conservative man living in Harford County. Never gonna happen.
Miles Kress says
Mr. President, I’m here representing 150 million women in the United States of America. They are bewitched, bothered and bewildered by what the heck Barbara is talking about.
Women all over America have to balance the family budgets, so they know that the United States of America needs to get its fiscal act together. They also know that we need to live in a more frugal time – they understand that.
They understand, Barbara and the Democrats have no clue. We are broke, with 14,000,000,000,000.00 of debt there is no more that can be borrowed. At this time every man, woman and child in the U.S. owes about $50,000. For the 150 million women and children, that is $7.5 TRILLION dollars. Lets keep the spending up and stick them further into debt.
Jen says
“Miles”, you do NOT represent me.
Rob in Bel Air says
Jen,
What Miles said is true . . . perhaps you would be better off if Miles does represent you.
MD momster says
Babs, you are so off base w/ your demands. Most of the 150 million women that you speak of do not want to be bankrupt, broke and on welfare. Obamacare would do that to all Americans, w/t the benefit of fixing the problems you describe. Have you spoken w/ any veterans about the wait at Perry Point VA hospital? The Obamacare problems far outweigh the fixes that it proposes to fix. I want to choose my own health care providers. I want to make my appts. w/ my doctor and I don’t want you telling me when I have to stop treating my dad for his dementia. Obamacare is not my choice. If defunding it is the most effective way to repeal it, go for it! The House has offered solutions at each turn and the “former” Speaker Pelosi, shot down all other opinions but her own. I am grateful that she is no longer in charge.
Babs, please, pay attention to the folks that are paying your salary. The recipients of many of your social programs, most don’t know who or what you stand for, but cutting off their funds may encourage them to find out what can be done in their lives by themselves.
The Pell grants, Head Start,Title X1, I find humor in your defense of the Obamacare bill’s answer to family planning and childcare by it’s funding of Abortion clinics and the promotion of the defense of marriage act promoting same sex marriages as an option to limit single parent homes. The Pell grants are funded through the Health care bill? Does this make any sense if they are to promote college education and job training? Talk about double dipping. The Soc. Security Jobs that you say will be defunded, aren’t these folks protected by the public sector unions that your party supports and is supported by, (SEIU comes to mind). Where do the Soc. Sec. jobs exist? What are the functions of those jobs? Are they duplicated w/n other depts? Why does it take 6-10 months to get answers from the SSA on questions concerning aged citizen care? Maybe the SSA needs to do some housekeeping, and determine what is needed and what is not.
You claim success w/n the Obamacare bill for women by saying that women will no longer be charged 40% more than men for their health insurance. Good. What will both men and women have to pay to cover all of Obamacare’s health care insurance? My guess is it will be at least 75% more than I pay now. How is that fair? If I am working and providing care for my family, how is it fair for me to provide for all families?
The health care bill covered medical expenses for illegally present folks here in this country from childhood to death. I support emergency care for all. The illegally here should not be here and awarded the same rights that our citizens earned and pay for with our taxes. Illegals should not get Pell grants, Social Security benefits and long term health care. If the only way to stop it is to defund it, I say go for it.
Fed Up says
I’m so sick of hearing about “our need to fund” anything coming from Washington, DC! Do you even breathe the same air as the rest of us? This bill was bad before it was printed and only the detached, dillusional, parasites who voted for and occupy the Senate and House support it. So what exactly do you stand to gain? We surely have only losses in our future if this bill is not defunded NOW!
MD Taxpayer says
Ms.Mikulski,
The budget needs to be reduced.
By the former House Speaker Pelosi’s own words,
‘We have to pass the bill before we can know what’s in it’ the bill, Obamacare, is poorly constructed, bloated and in my opinion, probably illegal. Shame on you for defending something so destructive to the American people.
Rob in Bel Air says
Here’s a bigger question . . . is Senator Mikulski actually reading any of these posts? My guess is, some minimum wage office worker was given the job to find various outlets to get the message out and that the Senator has no idea what the Daggar is.
decoydude says
Are you retired because posting here seems to be your full time gig? I would suggest maybe going fishing or some other low stress activity. I just think life is too short to be unhappy about everything.
Joe says
Sen. Mikulski what are your recommendations that you will crusade for to reduce the budget? We have seen a few million dollars of suggestions from you just to say (or rather so your press secretary had something to write) that you are of course looking out for us. I think your time has come to an end but my fear is that Martin O’ will run for that seat and be in there for the next 30 yrs.
There are many programs that can be scaled back and better coordinated for more bang (it takes good management to do it) and then you will see the waste go away because the resource is scarce. To much dough and they don’t manage it. Some programs need to go and some need to have their automatic formulas reduced to save money.
Ms. Mikulski you have not represented me well.
amazed says
Mighty fine words Babs… unfortunately it’s the same old politispeak. You are doing a fine job representing the folks that keep voting for you, just not for the ones paying for it all. To speak of fiscal discipline and then mention Inouye one of the self avowed “kings of earmarks” show how completely out of touch you are. Congress knows nothing of fiscal responsibility – that’s why political toadies like you vote for bills you’ve never read simply because the party heads have told you to do so. You all live in a bubble of isolated privilege. You’ve been at the trough far too long – it’s a shame you’ll never read this. Of course, if there isn’t a posting that agrees with her soon her staff is going to have to cook some up to show her if just to soothe her ego.
amazed says
Oh, and the precious health care bill was unconstitutional as soon as it forced people to buy something they may not want. If you don’t want to buy car insurance you can choose not to drive… if you don’t want health insurance must you choose not to live?
Legal American says
Women do not have to pay 40% more for insurance, Obama care ‘s solution is to increase the mens insurance by 40 % and hen they will be even.
Don’t believe one word coming out of a democrats mouth they are still reading the Health Care bill to find out whats in it.