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.