Don Nickles: “Instead of waiting for the conference to work, my colleague from Massachusetts put the Patients' Bill of Rights on…”

“Instead of waiting for the conference to work, my colleague from Massachusetts put the Patients' Bill of Rights on either the Department of Defense authorization bill or the Defense appropriations bill. There is no way in the world that bill is ever going to come out of conference. It was nothing but political theater. It disrupted the conference. I told him and my colleagues and I planned on having a conference that day with my Democratic colleagues. No, they engaged in political theater because maybe some people wanted to have a headline that said: ``Senate defeated Patients' Bill of Rights.'' We moved to table the amendment. The vote was 51-48. It accomplished nothing but headlines for my colleagues. Two weeks after the vote, we have another Patients' Bill of Rights. Maybe we will have several and do them piecemeal. Maybe we will do one on scope and one on patient protections. I tell my colleagues, this is not the way to legislate. We are on the Labor-HHS appropriations bill. Everyone knows this bill is not going to come back--maybe it will; maybe we will pass patient protections and put it on Labor-HHS. My colleagues put minimum wage on bankruptcy. Frankly, it is a complicated effort for both bills. Minimum wage did not belong on bankruptcy and patient protections does not belong on Labor-HHS. Are they seriously legislating? No.…”