Jay Rockefeller

I am pleased to be reintroducing a bill with my colleague from Rhode Island, Senator Chafee, to improve the security and protection of Medicare supplemental policies, so-called MediGap policies. I am especially pleased that Senator…

Today hope is restored as we turn the desire for health care reform into reality. When the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill is signed into law, which will happen very soon, some of the most maddening, often cruel problems with America's health care…

This is not small, this legislation, Mr. President. It is not universal health coverage, but it is going to affect between 25 and 30 million Americans, and about 300,000 West Virginians. And it is extraordinary that it is being done…

today I offer a bill that is very important to my State of West Virginia, and can benefit the entire Nation. This very small bill will have a very big impact on the ability of small oil and gas producers in my State and across the Nation…

I believe our welfare system desperately needs reform, and most Americans agree. It is obvious that there is a strong consensus that parents seeking public assistance must be required to work or prepare for work. I wish it were more…

I join Senator Hollings and others as a cosponsor of the Emergency Safeguard Act of 1996, and call on the Congress to move this bill with great haste. This is vitally important to over 600 employees of Corbin Limited in West Virginia, who…

I hope Members on both sides of the aisle will vote for this amendment offered by my colleagues from Rhode Island and Louisiana, Senators Chafee and Breaux. It is the kind of amendment that deserves strong support from this body. There is…

I am proud to recommend a very distinguished West Virginian be confirmed today to the post of Federal district judge for northern West Virginia. I'm honored to have joined with my senior colleague, Senator Byrd, in recommending that the…

I think our business is relatively easy here, or ought to be. I really think there are only two things we ought to do from the side of the aisle that I represent. We are interested in paycheck security, health care security, retirement…

a long time ago, I was a Republican, and I was brought up in a Republican family. It was not the kind of Republican family which is very much respected these days because it was referred to as ``Rockefeller Republicanism,'' and that is…

I thought this would be a good time to remind my colleagues of the unfinished business that is still waiting to get done. As we head toward the Fourth of July and another recess, we also need to remember that the days to take action in…

I simply ask the Senator from Massachusetts, when he was referring to the 1993 Budget Reconciliation Act--where I think we reduced Medicare expenditures because that had to be done, but we did it consistent with beneficiary purposes--the…

I want to acknowledge the very serious implications of the Medicare trustees' report released yesterday. The Medicare part A trust fund, the part that pays the hospital bills of beneficiaries, is likely to be insolvent by 2001, a year…

That the Senator and this Senator and all those who work for the Federal Government have, in fact, between 25 and 29 different plans that they can choose from every single year. I have watched my daughter go through this process of…

Amendment No. 3979 (Purpose: To restore $50 billion in excessive Medicare cuts designed to pay for new tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, offset by the extension of expired tax provisions or corporate and business tax reforms; to…

I rise today in order to offer an amendment to restore $50 billion to the Medicare Program. This amendment restores $50 billion by closing corporate loopholes and by extending expired tax provisions already included in the Republican…

There were many more insurance plans than Blue Cross-Blue Shield involved at that time. I just ask the Senator to contemplate the difference between the 25 to 29--and yes, there might be 30 on the one hand--as compared to the one that the…

If I might then just go back for a moment to the thoroughly savaged Clinton health care plan on the floor this evening, which, as I indicated is now a part of history. One of the things that the Senator is now able to do, if he in fact…

This amendment is about restoring $50 billion that was cut by the Republicans from Medicare. That is what my amendment is about. That is kind of what I would like our discussion to be about.

The Senator--and I apologize to my colleagues because we are no longer debating this amendment, which is about restoring $50 billion in Republican cuts to Medicare. That is what will be, hopefully, voted up later. But when the Senator…

I submit to the Senator what we are now seeing increasingly in private sector managed care... Then we see the introduction of for-profit HMO's, which are now sweeping the Nation.

That is a very powerful statement. What that basically says is that the employees were denied any choice as to whether or not, for example, their doctor happened to be included in that program or not.

in responding, first of all, I say to my friend from Michigan, this is a resolution of the Congress as opposed to hard law. This is, I think, something by which the Senator is trying to express his views. Just a few moments ago I went…

this letter is signed by the American Hospital Association, the Catholic Health Association, the Federation of American Health Systems, and seven or eight others, in which they say the budget drastically changes how the reductions would be…

I think it is an absolutely classic example of what it is the American people do expect us to do in Congress and what they would like us to take on. It is a very real problem. As he indicated, they are very real families, very real people…