Regular Session - March 12, 2007
1136
1 NEW YORK STATE SENATE
2
3
4 THE STENOGRAPHIC RECORD
5
6
7
8
9 ALBANY, NEW YORK
10 March 12, 2007
11 3:18 p.m.
12
13
14 REGULAR SESSION
15
16
17
18 LT. GOVERNOR DAVID A. PATERSON, President
19 STEVEN M. BOGGESS, Secretary
20
21
22
23
24
25
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1 P R O C E E D I N G S
2 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
3 Senate will come to order.
4 I ask everyone present to please
5 rise and repeat with me the Pledge of
6 Allegiance.
7 (Whereupon, the assemblage recited
8 the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag.)
9 (Whereupon, the assemblage recited
10 the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag.)
11 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: In the
12 absence of clergy, may we bow our heads in a
13 moment of silence.
14 (Whereupon, the assemblage
15 respected a moment of silence.)
16 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Reading
17 of the Journal.
18 THE SECRETARY: In Senate,
19 Sunday, March 11, the Senate met pursuant to
20 adjournment. The Journal of Saturday,
21 March 10, was read and approved. On motion,
22 Senate adjourned.
23 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Without
24 objection, the Journal stands approved as
25 read.
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1 Presentation of petitions.
2 Messages from the Assembly.
3 The Secretary will read.
4 THE SECRETARY: Assembly
5 Resolution advising the Members of the Senate
6 of the time and place of the joint session to
7 cast a joint ballot for the purpose of
8 electing Regents of the University of the
9 State of New York.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER:
11 Messages from the Governor.
12 Reports of standing committees.
13 Reports of select committees.
14 Communications and reports from
15 state officers.
16 Motions and resolutions.
17 Senator Young.
18 SENATOR YOUNG: Thank you,
19 Mr. President.
20 I move that the following bills be
21 discharged from their respective committees
22 and be recommitted with instructions to strike
23 the enacting clause: Senate 1863.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: So
25 ordered.
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1 Senator Young.
2 SENATOR YOUNG: Mr. President, on
3 page number 14 I offer the following
4 amendments to Calendar Number 161, Senate
5 1116A, and ask that the said bill retain its
6 place on the Third Reading Calendar.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
8 amendments are received and adopted, and the
9 bill will remain on the Third Reading
10 Calendar.
11 SENATOR YOUNG: Thank you,
12 Mr. President.
13 Mr. President, on page number 13 I
14 offer the following amendments to Calendar
15 Number 128, Senate 1092, and ask that said
16 bill retain its place on the Third Reading
17 Calendar.
18 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
19 amendments are received and adopted, and the
20 bill will remain on the Third Reading
21 Calendar.
22 Thank you, Senator Young.
23 SENATOR YOUNG: Thank you,
24 Mr. President.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
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1 Duane.
2 SENATOR DUANE: Thank you,
3 Mr. President.
4 On behalf of Senator Stavisky, I
5 move that the following bill be discharged
6 from its respective committee and be
7 recommitted with instructions to strike the
8 enacting clause: Senate 2908.
9 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: So
10 ordered.
11 SENATOR DUANE: Thank you,
12 Mr. President.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
14 Skelos.
15 SENATOR SKELOS: Mr. President,
16 if we could go to the noncontroversial reading
17 of the calendar.
18 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
19 Secretary will read.
20 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
21 70, by Senator Skelos, Senate Print 642, an
22 act to amend the Real Property Law, in
23 relation to reverse mortgage loans.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Read
25 the last section.
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1 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
2 act shall take effect on the 180th day.
3 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Call
4 the roll.
5 (The Secretary called the roll.)
6 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 51.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
8 bill is passed.
9 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
10 98, by Senator Maziarz, Senate Print 106, an
11 act to amend the Labor Law, in relation to job
12 protection.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Read
14 the last section.
15 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
16 act shall take effect immediately.
17 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Call
18 the roll.
19 (The Secretary called the roll.)
20 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 51.
21 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
22 bill is passed.
23 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
24 114, by Senator Robach, Senate Print 2084A, an
25 act to amend the Retirement and Social
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1 Security Law, in relation to extension.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Read
3 the last section.
4 THE SECRETARY: Section 5. This
5 act shall take effect immediately.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Call
7 the roll.
8 (The Secretary called the roll.)
9 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 51.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
11 bill is passed.
12 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
13 184, by Senator Marcellino, Senate Print
14 610 --
15 SENATOR SKELOS: Lay it aside
16 temporarily.
17 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
18 bill is laid aside temporarily.
19 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
20 188, by Senator Padavan Senate Print 1662, an
21 act to amend the Penal Law, in relation to
22 disposal.
23 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Read
24 the last section.
25 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
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1 act shall take effect on the first of
2 November.
3 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Call
4 the roll.
5 (The Secretary called the roll.)
6 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 51.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
8 bill is passed.
9 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
10 191, by Senator DeFrancisco, Senate Print
11 1824, an act to amend the Criminal Procedure
12 Law, in relation to statements at sentencing.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Read
14 the last section.
15 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
16 act shall take effect on the 90th day.
17 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Call
18 the roll.
19 (The Secretary called the roll.)
20 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 51.
21 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
22 bill is passed.
23 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
24 220, by Senator LaValle, Senate Print 1277, an
25 act to amend the Correction Law, in relation
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1 to requiring.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Read
3 the last section.
4 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
5 act shall take effect immediately.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Call
7 the roll.
8 (The Secretary called the roll.)
9 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 51.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
11 bill is passed.
12 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
13 223, by Senator Skelos, Senate Print 1772, an
14 act to amend the Correction Law, in relation
15 to the maintenance of information.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Read
17 the last section.
18 THE SECRETARY: Section 11. This
19 act shall take effect on the first of
20 November.
21 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Call
22 the roll.
23 (The Secretary called the roll.)
24 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 51.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
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1 bill is passed.
2 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
3 234, by Senator Flanagan, Senate Print 891, an
4 act to amend Chapter 672 of the Laws of 1993,
5 amending the Public Authorities Law.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Read
7 the last section.
8 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
9 act shall take effect immediately.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Call
11 the roll.
12 (The Secretary called the roll.)
13 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 51.
14 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
15 bill is passed.
16 Senator Skelos, that completes the
17 reading of the noncontroversial calendar.
18 SENATOR SKELOS: Please recognize
19 Senator Duane.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
21 Duane.
22 SENATOR DUANE: Minority
23 conference, Mr. President, in Room 315.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
25 Skelos.
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1 SENATOR SKELOS: Mr. President,
2 Senator Duane has assured me that it will be
3 brief, so we'll take the stand at ease for a
4 few brief moments and then we'll reconvene.
5 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
6 Senate stands at ease.
7 (Whereupon, the Senate stood at
8 ease at 3:26 p.m.)
9 (Whereupon, the Senate reconvened
10 at 3:54 p.m.)
11 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
12 Skelos.
13 SENATOR SKELOS: Mr. President,
14 if we could return to the noncontroversial
15 calendar, I believe Calendar Number 184 was
16 not voted upon.
17 I believe Senators Hassell-Thompson
18 and Montgomery wish to cast negative votes.
19 So if we could bring up that bill at this
20 time.
21 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
22 Secretary will read.
23 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
24 184, by Senator Marcellino, Senate Print 610,
25 an act to amend the Penal Law, in relation to
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1 establishing.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Read
3 the last section.
4 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
5 act shall take effect on the first of
6 November.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Call
8 the roll.
9 (The Secretary called the roll.)
10 THE SECRETARY: Those recorded in
11 the negative on Calendar Number 184 are
12 Senators Hassell-Thompson and Montgomery.
13 Ayes, 58. Nays, 2.
14 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
15 bill is passed.
16 Senator Skelos.
17 SENATOR SKELOS: Mr. President,
18 there will be an immediate meeting of the
19 Finance Committee in the Majority Conference
20 Room, and that will be followed by a meeting
21 of the Rules Committee in the Majority
22 Conference Room.
23 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
24 you, Senator Skelos.
25 There will be an immediate meeting
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1 of the Senate Finance Committee followed by an
2 immediate meeting of the Rules Committee.
3 SENATOR SKELOS: If we can stand
4 at ease, Mr. President.
5 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
6 Senate will stand at ease.
7 (Whereupon, the Senate stood at
8 ease at 3:55 p.m.)
9 (Whereupon, the Senate reconvened
10 at 4:58 p.m.)
11 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
12 Senate will come to order.
13 SENATOR SKELOS: Mr. President.
14 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
15 Skelos.
16 SENATOR SKELOS: If we could
17 return to reports of standing committees, I
18 believe there's a report of the Rules
19 Committee at the desk. I ask that it be read
20 at this time.
21 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
22 Secretary will read.
23 THE SECRETARY: Senator Bruno,
24 from the Committee on Rules, reports the
25 following bills:
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1 Senate Print 2100B, Senate Budget
2 Bill, an act making appropriations for the
3 support of government, PUBLIC PROTECTION AND
4 GENERAL GOVERNMENT BUDGET;
5 2101A, Senate Budget Bill, an act
6 making appropriations for the support of
7 government, LEGISLATURE AND JUDICIARY BUDGET;
8 2102A, Senate Budget Bill, an act
9 making appropriations for the legal
10 requirements of the state debt service;
11 2103B, Senate Budget Bill, an act
12 making appropriations for the support of
13 government, EDUCATION, LABOR AND FAMILY
14 ASSISTANCE BUDGET;
15 2104A, Senate Budget Bill, an act
16 making appropriations for the support of
17 government, HEALTH AND MENTAL HYGIENE BUDGET;
18 2105B, Senate Budget Bill, an act
19 making appropriations for the support of
20 government, TRANSPORTATION, ECONOMIC
21 DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION
22 BUDGET;
23 2106B, Senate Budget Bill, an act
24 to amend the Civil Service Law and the State
25 Finance Law;
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1 2107B, Senate Budget Bill, an act
2 to amend the Education Law;
3 2109B, Senate Budget Bill, an act
4 to authorize funding for the Consolidated
5 Local Street and Highway Improvement Program;
6 And Senate Print 2110B, Senate
7 Budget Bill, an act to amend the Tax Law.
8 All bills ordered direct to third
9 reading.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
11 Skelos.
12 SENATOR SKELOS: Mr. President,
13 move to accept the report of the Rules
14 Committee.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: All
16 those in favor of accepting the Rules report.
17 (Response of "Aye.")
18 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Nays.
19 (No response.)
20 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
21 Rules report is accepted.
22 Senator Skelos.
23 SENATOR SKELOS: If we could now
24 go to the noncontroversial reading of Senate
25 Supplemental Calendar 21A.
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1 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
2 Secretary will read.
3 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
4 297, Senate Budget Bill, Senate Print 2100B,
5 an act making appropriations for the support
6 of government, PUBLIC PROTECTION AND GENERAL
7 GOVERNMENT BUDGET.
8 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Last
9 section.
10 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
11 act shall take effect immediately.
12 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Call
13 the roll.
14 (The Secretary called the roll.)
15 SENATOR DUANE: Lay it aside,
16 please.
17 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
18 bill is laid aside.
19 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
20 299, Senate Budget Bill, Senate Print 2102A,
21 an act making appropriations for the legal
22 requirements of the state debt service.
23 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Read
24 the last section.
25 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
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1 act shall take effect immediately.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Call
3 the roll.
4 (The Secretary called the roll.)
5 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 61.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
7 bill is passed.
8 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
9 301, Senate Budget Bill, Senate Print 2105B,
10 an act making appropriations for the support
11 of government --
12 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Read
13 the last section.
14 SENATOR STACHOWSKI: Lay it
15 aside.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
17 bill is laid aside.
18 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
19 302, Senate Budget Bill, Senate Print 2106B,
20 an act to amend the Civil Service Law and the
21 State Finance Law.
22 SENATOR DUANE: Lay it aside,
23 please.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
25 bill is laid aside.
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1 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
2 304, Senate Budget Bill, Senate Print 2109B,
3 an act to authorize funding for the
4 Consolidated Local Street and Highway
5 Improvement Program.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Read
7 the last section.
8 SENATOR DUANE: Lay it aside,
9 please.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
11 bill is laid aside.
12 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
13 305, Senate Budget Bill, Senate Print 2110B,
14 an act to amend the Tax Law.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Read
16 the last section.
17 SENATOR DUANE: Lay it aside,
18 please.
19 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
20 bill is laid aside.
21 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
22 333, Senate Budget Bill, Senate Print 2104A,
23 an act making --
24 SENATOR DUANE: Lay it aside,
25 please.
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1 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
2 bill is laid aside.
3 Senator Skelos, that completes the
4 noncontroversial reading of the supplemental
5 calendar.
6 SENATOR SKELOS: Mr. President.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
8 Skelos.
9 SENATOR SKELOS: If you would
10 call up Resolution Number 895.
11 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
12 Secretary will read.
13 THE SECRETARY: By Senator Bruno,
14 Concurrent Resolution Number 895 --
15 SENATOR DUANE: Lay it aside,
16 please.
17 SENATOR SKELOS: Lay it aside.
18 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
19 bill is laid aside.
20 SENATOR SKELOS: And please call
21 up Resolution Number 898.
22 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
23 Secretary will read.
24 THE SECRETARY: By Senator Bruno,
25 Concurrent Resolution Number 898, adopting a
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1 budget resolution --
2 SENATOR DUANE: Lay it aside,
3 please.
4 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
5 resolution is laid aside.
6 Senator Duane.
7 SENATOR DUANE: Thank you,
8 Mr. President.
9 I'd like to call a very brief
10 Minority conference in Room 315.
11 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: There
12 will be a very brief Minority conference in
13 Room 315.
14 Senator Skelos.
15 SENATOR SKELOS: I would point
16 out that Senator Duane mentioned that the
17 conference would last five minutes, so we will
18 give him the benefit of the doubt and
19 reconvene at ten after 5:00.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
21 Senate stands at ease until ten after 5:00.
22 (Whereupon, the Senate stood at
23 ease at 5:04 p.m.)
24 (Whereupon, the Senate reconvened
25 at 5:25 p.m.)
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1 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
2 Senate will come to order.
3 Senator Bruno.
4 SENATOR BRUNO: Mr. President, at
5 this time if we can start with the
6 controversial calendar, with Number 333.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
8 Secretary will read.
9 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
10 333, Senate Budget Bill, Senate Print 2104A,
11 an act making appropriations for the support
12 of government, HEALTH AND MENTAL HYGIENE
13 BUDGET.
14 SENATOR SMITH: Explanation.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
16 Bruno, an explanation has been asked for.
17 SENATOR BRUNO: Thank you,
18 Mr. President, Senators.
19 The bill that's before us
20 represents the Governor's proposal for
21 healthcare reform as part of the budget.
22 And let me share a point of view.
23 Tax increases on the healthcare delivery
24 system are not reform. Most of what is here
25 has been proposed to the Legislature over the
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1 last ten years and rejected, sometimes
2 unanimously, both sides of the aisle. This
3 proposal before us is not reform. You have
4 rejected most of this year after year after
5 year.
6 So what is in this budget?
7 Depending on how you count, about a
8 billion-three to a billion-five in cuts or
9 increases in assessments in your districts for
10 your constituents who need a quality of
11 healthcare that's accessible and that's
12 affordable and that really puts patients
13 first.
14 So we respect this Governor and his
15 great desire for reform. We have done a lot
16 of things together this year, things that we
17 have been, for years, in this house trying to
18 get done. You know what they are. And
19 there's a lot more we're going to do.
20 But what is before us is not
21 healthcare reform. It doesn't do anything to
22 encourage doctors to practice, stay in
23 practice. It doesn't do anything to attract,
24 retain, retrain healthcare delivery personnel.
25 It deprives even some of the home care, the
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1 rural care to people that are presently
2 getting it. And the ramifications can mean up
3 to 12,000 layoffs in healthcare delivery here
4 in this state.
5 So that when you go down the litany
6 of what is here, every member here can access
7 specifically what the negative impact of the
8 bill that's before us will cause to their
9 constituency. So this gets to be a moment of
10 truth. A moment of truth. Do we politicize
11 this whole process? Do we just choose up
12 sides? Or do we do what we're elected to do,
13 to be representatives?
14 And if I went down some of the
15 specifics, as I'm going to ask you to do as
16 you examine this, take a look at the cuts in
17 the hospitals in your districts, take a look
18 at the cuts in the nursing homes in your
19 districts. Take a look. They're on the
20 sheet. And if you need them, ask me. I will
21 read them to you.
22 And right around here, Senator
23 Breslin's district, my colleague, my friend.
24 Sometimes.
25 (Laughter.)
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1 SENATOR BRUNO: Albany Med, right
2 here, greatest healthcare delivery provider in
3 17 counties. What we're talking about here is
4 what the Governor proposed, match most of
5 Medicaid with the feds. You're up to almost
6 $3 billion in cuts, in pain and in punishment.
7 Albany Med I think is somewhere in the
8 neighborhood of $13 million, combined cuts.
9 Cuts. St. Peter's, 7 or 8 million.
10 What does that mean? What does
11 that mean to people who go in when they're
12 sick, when they're injured? What does that
13 mean? That's not reform. That's pain.
14 And unless I'm mistaken, there's an
15 expansion plan in your district that may not
16 take place, approximately 170 people being
17 added there in every aspect of healthcare,
18 which may not take place.
19 So those are the decisions that
20 we're asking you to make. Senators, we want
21 you to take a look at the responsible thing --
22 and I'm not lecturing and I'm not preaching.
23 But as I take a look here -- and I'm not go to
24 take the time to read through the impact of
25 these cuts -- not reform, cuts.
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1 You want reform? You want reform?
2 Two or two and a half years ago this body had
3 a Task Force on Medicaid Reform. There were
4 40 bills that resulted from that. We in this
5 house passed, I believe, every single one of
6 them.
7 How many of them made it through
8 the Assembly? How many made it through the
9 Assembly? Well, let me share with you. I
10 don't think three of them made it through the
11 Assembly.
12 So this Governor, who has done some
13 great things in getting to the Assembly to do
14 what we've done in budget reform, workers'
15 comp reform, civil confinement that we
16 couldn't get done, lobbying, ethics reform --
17 a bill that we did four or five years ago, a
18 lot of it. I'm asking this Governor to get
19 the Speaker, get the Assembly or the great
20 majority of your colleagues there to now pass
21 those reform bills that we did. Most of
22 you -- and people on the second floor, through
23 no fault of theirs, because most of them are
24 new, they don't know that we did this two or
25 three years ago.
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1 So what do we look at? We look at
2 what we unanimously rejected last year, when
3 we had a different Governor, in this chamber.
4 That's what we're looking at. And that's what
5 the Assembly rejected. Why? Because we had a
6 different Governor. We had a Republican. Is
7 that the way you govern, depending on whether
8 the Governor is Democrat or Republican? Is
9 that how we're going to govern? Is that how
10 you're going to represent your constituents?
11 So I'm asking you, take a look at
12 the impact of the bill that's on the floor in
13 your district -- not collectively, not
14 generally, with the 2.5 to 3 billion in
15 combined cuts.
16 And yes, President Bush erroneously
17 makes recommendations and proposals to take
18 $100 billion out of the healthcare delivery
19 system in the next five years, 2.8 billion
20 impacting New York over the next several
21 years. That's wrong. That is wrong. And
22 that's why we were in Washington last week,
23 with the Speaker, with Congressman Rangel,
24 with Senators Schumer and Clinton and the
25 whole Congressional delegation, appealing to
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1 the President not to go where they are headed
2 in depriving people of healthcare.
3 So when we look at the Bush
4 proposal, we look at this proposal by the
5 Governor, it is well-intentioned, but it is
6 wrong. It is wrong. It is not representing
7 the best interests of putting patients first.
8 Child Health Plus, we hear we have
9 to encourage people for Child Health Plus.
10 When we're depriving their enrollment with
11 employers, we're making it more difficult for
12 them in this proposal to provide insurance.
13 That's not where we want to be.
14 We have 2.7 million uninsured in
15 this state. We keep hearing we're going to
16 take 800,000 of them off the rolls. How?
17 How? How? By diminishing healthcare? By, in
18 your districts, Senators, diminishing
19 healthcare? Tens of millions of dollars in
20 cuts, that's how you're going to reduce the
21 uninsured in this state? I don't think so.
22 And if people will take a look
23 objectively, honestly, responsibly at what we
24 are purporting to do to our constituents, we
25 will vote no on this proposal as part of this
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1 budget and then we will go on to fix the pain
2 and the hurt that is before us in this
3 proposal.
4 Thank you, Mr. President.
5 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
6 you, Senator Bruno.
7 Senator Hannon.
8 SENATOR HANNON: Thank you.
9 I rise to oppose this legislation.
10 At the beginning of this year I thought, when
11 we had a new Governor, we had new hope in
12 regard to what we needed to do in this state
13 in regard to health. And when the budget came
14 out, I was sorely disappointed. I was struck
15 by the number of inconsistencies that exist in
16 this whole area of health.
17 I see the Governor takes a look at
18 education and says things don't work in
19 education, and he adds money in that arena.
20 And then he takes a look at health and says it
21 doesn't work, the system is broken, and then
22 he says we'll take money away from it. I
23 can't understand that as a contradiction.
24 Senator Bruno already mentioned
25 that he has this great goal in regard to
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1 covering children, making sure every child in
2 the state has health insurance, and talks
3 about raising the level for children's health
4 insurance to 400 percent of poverty. And then
5 you look at the document that is proposed and
6 you look at the appropriation, and there's
7 only $11 million in that for this proposed
8 expansion. I don't understand this as a
9 contradiction. Where is the actual
10 implementation?
11 And then how would there be an
12 expansion for kids if we're going to be
13 cutting back on everybody who's had a
14 healthcare provider? It doesn't make sense.
15 A catchy phrase I've heard very
16 often, I had a nurse in my office last week
17 who said, "I was just briefed by the
18 Governor's people and I was told, you know,
19 Medicaid dollars ought to follow Medicaid
20 patients."
21 I said, "Well, that sounds pretty
22 interesting. You're a nurse. You've been on
23 the floors of several hospitals. Have you
24 ever seen a Medicaid pill? Have you ever seen
25 a Medicaid bed? We don't have a Medicaid
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1 pharmacy." What we try to do is, by formulas,
2 allocate the money for the patients that are
3 taken care of. And that's what we've being
4 been doing in this state.
5 Another thing is we hear the talk
6 about how many people we educate in this
7 state, and they go elsewhere after they're
8 physicians. We know that. This is a state
9 that has great academic medical centers. They
10 are the pinnacle of the health care in this
11 state. We have constructed it. Both sides of
12 the aisle, several generations of governors,
13 we have said that's what we want.
14 The last time we did a major review
15 of graduate medical education -- that's what
16 GME stands for -- there was a movement in the
17 nation that said we have too many doctors. So
18 what we will do, they said, as incentives to
19 the medical centers, we'll cut back. But if
20 you -- because those doctors, when they're
21 being trained are valuable staff members,
22 we'll pay you more because you're going to
23 have to replace them with other staff people.
24 So we set up a formula to do that.
25 And in the meantime, life has changed. It
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1 turns out that we need more doctors, not less.
2 We need more nurses, not less. We have a
3 system that is facing, every year, continued
4 increased pressure because the baby boomers
5 are getting older and when you get older you
6 need a lot more healthcare.
7 People aren't happy with the
8 system. There's nobody in this state
9 connected with healthcare, connected public
10 policy, that's going to say to you this system
11 works. None. What we want is someone with a
12 vision who will actually set forth a system of
13 healthcare that we can work on making sure the
14 processes are efficient, making sure it's
15 funded, and provide the healthcare to our
16 constituents.
17 Senator Bruno mentioned that we had
18 a Task Force on Medicaid Reform. We started
19 that with Senator Meier, and we came up with a
20 whole mess of recommendations -- disease
21 management, comprehensive utilization review,
22 maximum use of technology, and I could go on.
23 Disease management. It sounds
24 pretty complicated. Just last week we had the
25 head of Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx
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1 telling us what they have done to implement
2 disease management in the Bronx, to prevent
3 people who don't have to come into an
4 emergency room for care from having to come
5 into that emergency room.
6 By simple contact, by simple calls,
7 by making sure that all of their medication is
8 taken care of. For exotic diseases? For
9 something wrong with the heart. And to make
10 sure they don't have to visit the emergency
11 room. Saves money. Saves lives. Gives
12 better healthcare to the patients involved.
13 Our task force said we want that as
14 part of Medicaid. We had to work so hard to
15 get the demonstration programs out there.
16 They're up. They could be adopted, they could
17 be scaled up. It could make Medicaid much
18 more than a bill payer; it could make it a
19 healthcare system. That's what we want in
20 this state.
21 In the same vein, telehealth. Now,
22 the Governor talks about, oh, you know, we
23 need to have better community health. Well, I
24 don't see it in the budget. But I'll tell you
25 what we did a couple of years ago. We set up
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1 a whole series of grants throughout the state
2 on telehealth. There's now about 40 of them.
3 And the people who testified at the
4 budget finance hearing with regard to health
5 said it's time to make this an ongoing
6 program, time to build this in as a
7 reinvestments stream in Medicaid so we don't
8 have to have people come to the hospital, we
9 don't have to have people come to the nursing
10 home.
11 The information is there. Is it in
12 the budget? No. That's what we need. We
13 need a vision, and we need an implementation
14 of that vision.
15 Thank you, Mr. President.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
17 you, Senator Hannon.
18 Senator Smith.
19 SENATOR SMITH: Thank you very
20 much, Mr. President.
21 I for one moment thought that you
22 couldn't see me from there, though perhaps it
23 was something more to do with my tie than the
24 seat in which I sat in. But then I looked
25 over at Senator Hannon. I recognized that
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1 he's the chair of that committee, and I'm only
2 the Minority Leader for now, so I guess you
3 chose to support him first.
4 But let me just --
5 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
6 Smith, we try also to recognize those who put
7 their hands up first. Senator Hannon was
8 chose to be -- to speak prior to you.
9 So I apologize if there's any
10 slight. None was intended.
11 SENATOR SMITH: Thank you very
12 much, Mr. President. And none taken.
13 Let me -- first of all, let me
14 acknowledge the passion of the leader, Joe
15 Bruno. Passion that I can appreciate, passion
16 that I accept, passion that those of you that
17 are watching on these video screens are going
18 to accept.
19 Let me also acknowledge what
20 Senator Hannon stated. I'm not sure whether
21 or not it's factual, but I will at least
22 acknowledge what he said.
23 One of the things that interests me
24 and I guess interests many of us is that here
25 we are today talking about healthcare, and
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1 there is debate or expressions that there is a
2 lack of interest on someone's part because
3 there is some belief that they're not trying
4 to do the right thing by the people of this
5 state.
6 I think, for the record, we need to
7 be real clear about the fact that I'm
8 assuming, at least given the remarks of the
9 leader, that everyone wants to do the right
10 thing by the people of this state, whether you
11 are in Joe Bruno's party or whether you are in
12 the Democratic Party.
13 Some people got that; some people
14 didn't.
15 (Laughter.)
16 SENATOR SMITH: But the point of
17 the matter is what we are trying to do today.
18 And by supporting this bill, we are saying to
19 the people of the State of New York that we
20 got their message. And it was a simple
21 message. Three, four years ago, two years
22 ago, when $2 billion was given to health
23 organizations and other people were hurt by
24 that across the State of New York, there
25 wasn't a tremendous outcry.
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1 Now what we are trying to do is to
2 just rightsize that. This is not difficult.
3 This is not something that we need to spend a
4 lot of time on. I know the politics of it.
5 But the bottom line is all we're doing here is
6 trying to correct the past that had some
7 challenges.
8 All we're trying to do here is to
9 make sure 400,000 uninsured youngsters are
10 insured. That's not difficult to understand,
11 gentlemen, ladies. All we're trying to do
12 here is to make sure 900,000 adults,
13 uninsured, who live in your district, live in
14 our districts, are insured.
15 All we want to make sure is that we
16 get this right. We're not saying that what
17 has happened in the past was totally wrong.
18 All we're saying now is now we have an
19 opportunity to fix it and we should take that
20 opportunity to do that right now.
21 You've heard from your
22 constituents, you've heard from ours, and all
23 they're saying is make sure that patients come
24 first. Nothing wrong with CEOs making
25 $5 million or $6 million. Nothing wrong with
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1 people advocating their position on the issue.
2 But if you're going to spend $21 million here,
3 $30 million here, salaries of 8 or 9 million,
4 the need of the patients outweigh what you're
5 paying and what you're offering up to make
6 this case.
7 It's very simple. The people that
8 are watching us today are saying why don't we
9 just use common sense. One plus one equals
10 two. If I'm not insured, help me get insured.
11 If I go to the doctor and I can't see the
12 doctor because the actual doctor says, Well,
13 let me check your insurance, and you may not
14 have it, you've got to go somewhere else -- we
15 have to correct that.
16 Senator Diaz has that problem in
17 his district. Senator Gonzalez has that
18 problem in his district. Senator Ruth
19 Hassell-Thompson has that problem. Senator
20 Tom Duane has that problem. Senator Bill
21 Perkins had that problem. Senator
22 Schneiderman has that problem. Senator Sabini
23 has that problem. Senator Carl Kruger has
24 that problem. Senator Huntley has that
25 problem. Senator Klein, Senator Johnson,
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1 Senator Connor, Senator Valesky, Senator
2 Serrano, Senator Toby Stavisky, Senator
3 Sampson, Senator Dilan, Senator Parker,
4 Senator Eric Adams, Senator Bill Stachowski,
5 Senator Shirley Huntley, Senator Neil Breslin.
6 Senator Wright, Senator Dean
7 Skelos, Senator Saland, Senator Johnson,
8 Senator Bruno. Senator.
9 (Laughter.)
10 SENATOR SMITH: Senator Hannon,
11 Senator Farley, Senator Bonacic, they all have
12 that problem.
13 I only named 11 on your side. I
14 only need 11.
15 (Laughter.)
16 SENATOR SMITH: They have that
17 problem. So all we're saying is do the right
18 thing.
19 Now, let me explain to you what the
20 right thing is. Let me tell you -- because
21 you are very right on, Senator Bruno. You
22 said specifics. And I think it's important.
23 I need you, ladies and gentlemen, to
24 understand what it is that you're not doing
25 when you vote no on this bill, and I don't
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1 think you know that.
2 I don't think you know if you vote
3 no you're going to eliminate $5 million that
4 would expand access to cervical cancer
5 vaccines. I don't think you know if you vote
6 no you're taking $5 million for public
7 education, mammographies, colorectal
8 screening, infection control, prenatal care,
9 green cleaning products. I don't think you
10 know, if you vote no for this, $3 million
11 would have been used to prevent childhood lead
12 poisoning. I don't think you know, if you
13 vote no, you eliminate $2 million for obesity
14 prevention.
15 I don't think you know if you vote
16 no, especially in some of these districts, in
17 our districts, $2 million dollars for prenatal
18 postpartum home visits. Do you know how many
19 of our young ladies cannot afford, do not have
20 the ability to go to the hospital? You're
21 talking about home visits.
22 I'm not even talking about
23 $82 million for AIDS/HIV. I'm not even
24 talking about what you're going to do about
25 nutritional programs at $41 million.
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1 I don't know if you got all the
2 facts. I think somebody held some of that
3 back from you. So it's our obligation to help
4 you understand the importance of being on this
5 side of the fence. So --
6 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
7 Bruno, why do you rise?
8 SENATOR BRUNO: Mr. President, I
9 wonder if Senator Smith would be kind enough
10 to yield for a question.
11 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
12 Smith, do you yield to a question?
13 SENATOR SMITH: I will yield as
14 soon as I finish my statement.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
16 Senator refuses to yield at this time.
17 SENATOR BRUNO: Thank you,
18 Mr. President. That will be sometime today?
19 (Laughter.)
20 SENATOR SMITH: Vital records
21 requirements, $6 million. Emergency
22 contraception, $2.6 million. System
23 improvements, tracking contagious disease,
24 $2.5 million. I don't think you know. I
25 don't think you know.
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1 So what becomes important, before
2 you cast that vote and when you have to go
3 back home and talk to not only your
4 constituents but your family about what you
5 did, know the facts. Know the facts. I'm not
6 asking not to vote your conscience. Vote your
7 conscience. That's your right. But at least
8 know the facts. Check all the facts. That's
9 important.
10 You are going to do something today
11 that I hope you recognize many people will
12 follow from this day forward. This was a good
13 day for the people of the State of New York.
14 A lot of people that's uninsured are going to
15 be insured. A lot of people that need
16 healthcare are going to get that. A lot of
17 people that need the help and the education
18 are going to get that as well.
19 So I look forward to supporting
20 this bill, and I would hope that some of you
21 recognize the importance of it as well.
22 Now, Mr. Chairman, I will yield for
23 a question.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
25 Bruno.
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1 SENATOR BRUNO: Thank you,
2 Mr. President.
3 Four hundred thousand children
4 added to Child Health Plus?
5 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
6 Bruno, are you asking Senator Smith to yield?
7 SENATOR BRUNO: I am.
8 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
9 Smith, do you yield to Senator Bruno for a
10 question?
11 SENATOR SMITH: Yes, I do.
12 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
13 you.
14 SENATOR BRUNO: And I am asking
15 Senator Smith, through the chair,
16 Mr. President, how in this proposal do you add
17 400,000 young people to Child Health Plus and
18 how do you, secondly, get 900,000 uninsured
19 insurance by cutting almost $3 billion out of
20 the system, Senator? Can you answer that for
21 us?
22 SENATOR SMITH: Well, let me
23 answer. One is we need federal approval,
24 which we will get in short order.
25 And the bottom line is what we have
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1 done in this entire budget, Senator, as you
2 know, you pulled out one small portion of an
3 entire budget. And the reason why you pulled
4 it out was because you wanted to place our
5 conference, if you will, in the position of
6 trying to show where they are on this one
7 issue.
8 The entire budget that the Governor
9 has, as you know, the entire budget calls for
10 a savings on one portion to fund the other.
11 It's just that simple.
12 We are going to be working, you
13 went to Washington -- you went to Washington,
14 and you know that when we go to Washington, we
15 get that approval, a month or two, and the job
16 will get done.
17 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
18 Bruno.
19 SENATOR BRUNO: Mr. President,
20 would Senator Smith yield to another question?
21 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
22 Smith, will you yield?
23 SENATOR SMITH: Yes.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
25 Bruno.
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1 SENATOR BRUNO: You're assuring
2 this conference that the feds are going to
3 approve what you're relating to so we can get
4 400,000 children insured and 900,000 people
5 insured? Is that what you're assuring us?
6 That's my question.
7 SENATOR SMITH: My answer to you
8 is the process is we go to Washington, as
9 we've done years in the past, and we will move
10 forward with this once we get their approval.
11 SENATOR BRUNO: Would Senator
12 Smith yield to another question?
13 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
14 Smith, do you yield?
15 SENATOR SMITH: Yes.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
17 Senator yields.
18 SENATOR BRUNO: Thank you.
19 You're very kind.
20 Senator Smith, do you know that
21 Senator Craig Johnson sitting behind you,
22 listening attentively, will have hospitals in
23 his district cut $38 million and nursing
24 homes, Senator, cut in your district
25 $6.575 million? Senator Smith, do you know
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1 that negative impact?
2 SENATOR SMITH: Yes. And I what
3 do know is that if you have did your job three
4 years ago, we would not be here today.
5 Thank you.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
7 Bruno.
8 SENATOR BRUNO: Mr. President, I
9 don't quite understand that answer.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER:
11 Senator, are you asking Senator Smith to yield
12 to clarify his answer?
13 SENATOR BRUNO: If he wouldn't
14 mind.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
16 Smith, do you yield to Senator Bruno to
17 clarify your answer?
18 SENATOR SMITH: Sure I do. My
19 answer stands.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
21 you, Senator.
22 SENATOR BRUNO: Mr. President, do
23 I have the floor?
24 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Yes,
25 Senator Bruno.
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1 SENATOR BRUNO: There is no
2 answer.
3 And, Senator Smith, we're trying to
4 keep a congeniality here and not be personal.
5 And I would respect that. I give respect and
6 would appreciate respect.
7 And when I go through -- these are
8 facts. This is not rhetoric. This is not
9 supposition. This is not dreaming and wishing
10 about what will be delivered out of
11 Washington.
12 And I can go down through, if you
13 Senators haven't looked at this -- and I would
14 like not to go down through. But many of you
15 are going to answer to the people who are
16 looking for quality healthcare. We're going
17 to have to answer to them.
18 As I look at the millions and
19 millions of dollars, like the almost
20 $17 million cut in nursing homes in Senator
21 Malcolm Smith's district -- $17 million for a
22 system that is distressed already. Two
23 million in the hospital cut in a system that
24 is distressed already.
25 Senator Stavisky, $3.5 million cut
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1 from your hospitals that are already stressed,
2 $9.5 million in nursing homes, off the bottom
3 line. What will you answer to the people when
4 they ask you why, why am I being depressed,
5 why am I being deprived?
6 Senator Montgomery, $18 million cut
7 to hospitals, $5.7 million to nursing homes
8 cut. How will you answer your constituents?
9 Senator Sampson, almost $4 million
10 to hospitals, almost $7 million in nursing
11 homes. How will you answer people who will be
12 deprived of healthcare?
13 This is reality, Senator Adams.
14 Nineteen million cut, cut for hospitals. How
15 do you feel about that, when the patient's
16 first, 11 million cut from nursing homes? Is
17 that a good thing? Is that a reform to the
18 system?
19 Senator Savino, nursing home cuts.
20 Do you know how much, Senator? Over -- do
21 you? Over $17 million. That's what you're
22 about to support? I hope not.
23 Senator Connor, hospitals -- very
24 distressed hospitals, by the way --
25 $20.7 million; nursing homes, $9.67 million.
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1 I'm not making these numbers up.
2 These are from -- Senator Krueger, this is
3 from the budget: $77.5 million cut from your
4 hospitals. Do you applaud that? Do you
5 support that? That's a rhetorical question.
6 (Laughter.)
7 SENATOR BRUNO: I'm afraid you
8 might answer.
9 Nursing homes, $5.4 million. I'm
10 just picking numbers.
11 Senator Serrano, you'll be sad to
12 hear, $16 million cut from your hospitals who
13 desperately need the income. Nursing homes,
14 $11.7 million plus.
15 Senator Duane, this Governor, I've
16 got to tell you, is certainly fair in the
17 pain, Senator. Because your hospitals will be
18 $29 million less going forward than they have
19 in revenue now to deliver quality healthcare
20 to your constituents, and $5 million to your
21 nursing homes.
22 Now, Senator Schneiderman, I don't
23 want you to feel deprived, and the Governor
24 didn't either.
25 (Laughter.)
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1 SENATOR BRUNO: $24.4 million,
2 thank you, to deprive patients of healthcare.
3 And $18 million to nursing homes cut.
4 Now, I wish that I would make this
5 up. Senator Gonzalez, I wish that this
6 weren't true, $19 million cut to the
7 hospitals, $13.5 million cut from nursing
8 homes.
9 Now, when people are asking --
10 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
11 Smith, why do you rise?
12 SENATOR SMITH: Would Senator
13 Bruno yield for a question?
14 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
15 Bruno, will you --
16 SENATOR BRUNO: When I've
17 finished, Mr. President. Thank you.
18 (Laughter.)
19 SENATOR BRUNO: Senator Klein
20 wants to know how much is going to be cut in
21 his district to hospitals. $22.6 million
22 plus.
23 You got it? Okay. You got the
24 mailing? You're going to get another one.
25 (Laughter.)
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1 SENATOR BRUNO: Total -- oh.
2 Sorry, Senator. Eleven million cut from your
3 district there in Westchester, Senator Andrea
4 Stewart-Cousins. That surprises me some.
5 Shall I go on? Don't answer.
6 (Laughter.)
7 SENATOR BRUNO: This is fact.
8 This is not rhetoric, Senator. This is not
9 personal. These are facts. This is pain.
10 This is suffering. This is deprivation of
11 services to a community.
12 And when I look at Senator Ruth
13 Hassell-Thompson, $19 million taken out of
14 your nursing homes. Again, I wouldn't want to
15 hear your answers if we asked you
16 individually. Can your nursing homes sustain
17 that? Can the patients that are there sustain
18 that? I don't think so.
19 And Senator Breslin we've gone
20 through. And I don't want to just keep
21 repeating. But the major impact is right
22 here.
23 And Senator Thompson, $14.5 million
24 cut for hospitals, $6 million -- you
25 understand what I'm trying to clarify?
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1 We're not talking politics. This
2 isn't rhetoric. These are facts. These are
3 dollars. And cutting and creating this kind
4 of pain is not reform.
5 Where's the reform that takes the
6 waste and the fraud out of the system? Where
7 is that? Federal studies that have been done
8 showing that there's as much as a third of the
9 system that's in waste, inefficiency, fraud.
10 Do you know what that is in this state?
11 $15 billion. Where's that in this?
12 Now, be conservative. Take
13 10 percent out of the system. Where is that?
14 That's $4.7 billion. You want reform? Let's
15 join together and let's do that, Senators.
16 Let's do that. But let's not take the dollars
17 out of the hospitals, out of the nursing
18 homes, out of community service, out of home
19 care. Let's not do that.
20 Let's do the right thing.
21 Thank you, Mr. President.
22 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
23 Adams.
24 SENATOR ADAMS: I'm not going to
25 be and I apologize for not being as articulate
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1 as Senator Bruno was just now.
2 I remember when I first came up
3 here to Albany, I sat on the right side of the
4 train. And a friend of mine who was also
5 elected sat on the left side of the train.
6 And as we rode up and we moved into Rensselaer
7 Station and I got off the train, I talked
8 about some of the great houses along the way.
9 And Hakeem Jeffries stated that there were no
10 houses we were looking at, it was just water.
11 That's all he saw.
12 Two different sides of the train.
13 We were in the same car, the same ride, but
14 based on where you were seated determined what
15 you saw. What you saw.
16 What we need to do, those of us
17 who's on the left side of the train talking to
18 those of us on the right side of the train, we
19 need to have a dialogue and not only talk
20 about reform, we have to live it out.
21 And reform is not this romantic
22 terminology that we use merely when it's
23 popular on a popular issue. It is a process
24 that we embody and embrace in every aspect of
25 this chamber. So when we come together on
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1 both sides of this ride and talk about real
2 things, then we'll see real results.
3 I'm so glad the Majority Leader
4 announced the cuts that are take placing in
5 our districts. Because it shows you if we're
6 willing to stand up for this issue, we know
7 how deep it is, particularly in those
8 districts of color.
9 When I visit my momma's friends and
10 they cut prescription drugs in half to make a
11 decision if they're going to take that drug or
12 eat, the issue is real, not make believe. You
13 can't be no great medical illusionist and all
14 of a sudden say it's popular now to talk about
15 these issues that our democratic values have
16 always talked about.
17 So I say to my counterparts across
18 the aisle, let's ride the train together.
19 Let's not merely stand up now, when we know
20 that this is a long process -- let's not kid
21 ourselves and insult the intellect and
22 intelligence of the public to make believe
23 one-house bills are going to go far. Let's
24 make this real and do some real things.
25 Criss-cross my seat. Sit in the
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1 seat of Bed-Sty and Brownsville, and I'll sit
2 in the seat of Rochester and Troy. Let's
3 embrace each other and not only just merely
4 give some insignificant terminologies of how
5 great this is. No. Real reform, real
6 results, let's do it together. That's what
7 I'm willing to do.
8 If I'm willing to take $19 million
9 out of my district, which I am not -- I
10 realize that hospitals do so much more than
11 just take care of patients, take care of
12 patients. When that doctor leaves out and
13 goes to buy a newspaper, when that orderly
14 leaves out and decides to take one of the
15 livery cabs -- that's what we have in
16 Brooklyn -- it's about the economic value and
17 stability that comes with the medical
18 facilities in our community.
19 That's why we're willing to take a
20 stand here. That is why we can take your
21 numbers and hear you say 11 million and
22 13 million and 20 million. Because we realize
23 that there's more to this process, and we're
24 going to fight tooth and nail to see some of
25 those things that our Minority Leader
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1 mentioned that we'll be losing that you,
2 amazingly, is willing to just dismiss, pretend
3 as though those items are not in this bill.
4 They are. They are.
5 So here's my challenge to you,
6 those of my colleagues who I've met in the
7 last two months and couple of days -- but
8 who's counting? Here's my challenge to you.
9 I'm willing to ride with you. I'm willing to
10 see the train from your view. I'm willing to
11 look out the window on my side and your side.
12 Are you willing to do the same?
13 Are you willing to really talk
14 about this terminology that has become almost
15 a curse in this institution called reform?
16 Transform, reform. Are you willing to do it?
17 Are you willing to be transparent and not
18 allow us to come here on a Monday after
19 turning our clocks up and handing us a
20 document on some trickology that you just
21 pulled today? Are you willing to do it?
22 Are you willing to talk about
23 sharing chairmanships and not merely giving
24 one because it's popular during the time? Are
25 you willing to do it? Are you willing to make
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1 sure --
2 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
3 Skelos, why do you rise?
4 SENATOR ADAMS: And let me
5 finish. I'm not willing to yield.
6 Are you willing to make sure that
7 I'm not giving merely $70,000 in my community
8 while $7 million is going in another
9 community?
10 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
11 Adams. Senator Adams.
12 Senator Skelos, why do you rise?
13 SENATOR SKELOS: Would Senator
14 Adams just yield for a question.
15 SENATOR ADAMS: Yes, I will, when
16 I'm finished.
17 (Laughter.)
18 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
19 Senator refuses to yield at this time.
20 SENATOR ADAMS: That's the
21 challenge. That's the -- I don't have the
22 gavel, so I can't hit it and ask for people to
23 give me the respect I give others.
24 That's the challenge that we are
25 facing. That is to say why I'm willing to
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1 vote yes on this bill. That is why I'm
2 willing to do it with more hospitals than
3 probably anyone in here, because I'm going to
4 fight tooth and nail that the medical
5 facilities in my district and throughout this
6 state obtain what they need so we can turn the
7 door on healthcare. And I hope in the process
8 we can turn the door on real reform.
9 I thank you, Mr. President.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
11 Skelos.
12 SENATOR SKELOS: If Senator Adams
13 would just yield for a question.
14 Maybe I didn't --
15 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
16 Adams, do you yield to Senator Skelos?
17 SENATOR ADAMS: Yes.
18 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
19 you.
20 SENATOR SKELOS: Senator Adams,
21 maybe I didn't hear you correctly. But right
22 now we're on Senate 2104A, which is the
23 Governor's healthcare budget bill. And do you
24 understand that it's Governor Spitzer's bill
25 that many people in this chamber will be
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1 voting against because the harm that would
2 occur throughout the State of New York -- and
3 specifically, as mentioned in your district, I
4 think it was $19 million -- would diminish the
5 quality of care throughout the state, but
6 specifically for the underserved communities?
7 Because Senator Smith can mention
8 all these wonderful programs that are in this
9 budget, but I guarantee you, when the budget
10 is finally adopted, they'll all be in there.
11 The question is, are you supporting
12 a budget that's been proposed by the Governor
13 that takes $19 million out of your
14 constituency and severely hurts those
15 individuals who work within the hospital
16 industry that are making at times very low
17 wages, certainly do not live in mansions in
18 the city, do not live in country estates, but
19 earn maybe $10, $12 an hour and are struggling
20 to make ends meet and to provide for their
21 families?
22 These are the people and the
23 individuals that, quite frankly, we're looking
24 to protect. And we're looking to protect the
25 services that your constituents deserve,
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1 healthcare in your district and my district.
2 It's no different.
3 So I would hope that you'd join us
4 in voting down this ill-conceived budget.
5 Because as I mentioned last week, if this
6 happened last year, many of you who were here
7 in the past would be wringing your hands in
8 anguish, in anguish, that Governor Pataki
9 would have proposed such dramatic cuts to the
10 healthcare industry. Wringing your hands.
11 And quite honestly, I think we
12 should be voting this down. I think
13 ultimately, if we stand firm as a legislative
14 body and say we want to protect healthcare in
15 this state and enact real reform, it will
16 happen.
17 And as I mentioned last week after
18 your eloquent comments, Senator Adams -- not
19 that I agree with them all the time -- but
20 Reverend Sharpton, Reverend Jackson, they
21 agree with us. They agree with the
22 Republicans that we're looking to protect
23 healthcare in this state. So I would ask you
24 to join Reverend Jackson and Reverend Sharpton
25 in supporting what we're trying to do to
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1 protect healthcare in this state.
2 SENATOR ADAMS: Well, first of
3 all, Senator, I don't speak for those people,
4 I am those people.
5 And I find that reform gets me
6 troubled when this is the first time that my
7 colleagues on the other side of the aisle has
8 put a bill on the floor and got a no vote or
9 looking for a no vote. I find that a lack of
10 reform.
11 I believe in my conversations --
12 not only what you may have read from Reverend
13 Sharpton or Reverend Jesse Jackson -- but my
14 conversation with Reverend Sharpton, one of
15 them, this weekend, his concern is protecting
16 our healthcare system. And I believe I'm
17 going to be a voice in doing so.
18 SENATOR SKELOS: Senator Adams,
19 you know --
20 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
21 Skelos, are you asking Senator Adams to yield?
22 SENATOR SKELOS: Yes, if he would
23 yield for a question.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
25 Adams, will you yield to Senator Skelos for a
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1 question?
2 SENATOR ADAMS: Yes, I will.
3 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
4 you, Senator.
5 SENATOR SKELOS: Senator Adams,
6 do you realize that your hospitals -- and I
7 think you do -- would lose $19 million? Do
8 you also realize that the Governor's cuts on
9 your nursing homes -- Caton Park Center for
10 Nursing, Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Nursing
11 Home, Marcus Garvey Nursing Home, New York
12 Congregational Nursing Center, Rutland Nursing
13 Home -- they would lose $11 million?
14 So in your district alone,
15 $30 million would be stripped out of
16 healthcare within your district. Do you
17 realize that?
18 SENATOR ADAMS: In my meetings
19 with all of the nursing homes, Senator -- CNR
20 Nursing Home on Classon Avenue, Albany Nursing
21 Home on Albany Avenue, all of my nursing
22 homes -- there's one thing that they're clear
23 on, that we're in the embryo stage of this
24 process.
25 Before we give birth to any
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1 legislation or bill, we will address those
2 issues, I will be a fighter for those nursing
3 homes. And even hospitals in your district I
4 will fight for, I assure you of that.
5 SENATOR SKELOS: And I thank you
6 for that, very much.
7 But also, before, you mentioned
8 that the bill is just being presented to you.
9 I believe the Governor's cuts that we're
10 discussing today in this legislation have
11 certainly been on the desks and been since
12 January, that this has been out there in the
13 public domain, that many of us in this chamber
14 have studied or should have studied to
15 understand the impact that would occur in our
16 districts or statewide.
17 SENATOR ADAMS: The beauty of
18 having a stenographer here is when someone
19 attempts to take your statements and turn them
20 to what they want. That is not what I stated.
21 And I'm sure your colleagues will inform you
22 on exactly what I stated.
23 When we came in today, we found
24 out -- trickology was the terminology I
25 used -- that you were going to present this
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1 bill today. You had the entire weekend to
2 share it. You could have told us last week
3 what was your game plan of all of a sudden
4 forcing this bill to the floor today. That is
5 what I stated.
6 I read and I was addressed of the
7 Governor's bill.
8 SENATOR SKELOS: Senator Adams,
9 if you would continue to yield.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER:
11 Senator, do you continue to yield?
12 SENATOR ADAMS: Yes.
13 SENATOR SKELOS: I certainly
14 would hope that you know that there have been
15 hearings on all of these issues.
16 And in fact, the Senate -- through
17 our leader, Senator Bruno -- the Assembly, and
18 the Governor have set up a schedule so that we
19 can get an on-time budget. And certainly what
20 we are doing today and will do the rest of the
21 week is working towards conference committees
22 so that we can have an on-time budget.
23 And in fact, I don't understand it,
24 Governor Spitzer was critical of us today,
25 harshly critical, for not being on time, when
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1 we're right on schedule.
2 So the idea of what we're doing
3 today is, number one, to reject these
4 ill-conceived cuts, and I underline cuts, and
5 to move forward to have real reform to protect
6 our mutual constituents to make sure that they
7 have the quality of care that they deserve,
8 and that we have an on-time budget.
9 SENATOR ADAMS: Senator, I
10 applaud you and your desire of moving with an
11 on-time budget. But you and I both know --
12 although I'm a freshman here in the Senate,
13 I'm not a freshman to life -- you know we have
14 never voted on this budget at this early a
15 part of the process. You are aware of that.
16 And I hope that the same enthusiasm
17 that you are showing now to move things ahead,
18 you're going to continue to show that
19 enthusiasm as we move through the entire
20 process. Because I know on this side of the
21 aisle we are very enthusiastic, extremely
22 enthusiastic of assisting in any way possible
23 of moving this process ahead in a very
24 transparent and very clear manner. And we are
25 looking forward to doing that with you.
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1 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
2 LaValle.
3 SENATOR LaVALLE: Thank you,
4 Mr. President.
5 As each of us have served in the
6 Legislature we have gotten into little niches
7 in terms of program issues. Most of my career
8 has been spent in education and higher
9 education. But because of healthcare issues
10 in my district, several years ago I got
11 involved in a discussion and a dialogue with
12 the hospitals in my district. And there are
13 five in the First Senatorial District.
14 I now appreciate education and
15 higher education, because the healthcare
16 issues are so complex and there is no linear
17 methodology to resolving an issue. But
18 through a great deal of discussion, we were
19 able, with three hospitals in the east end of
20 my district, to come together and form
21 alliances and a network to utilize the
22 financial resources and the physical resources
23 and the doctors and nurses to the utmost.
24 That took about two years and was codified by
25 the Berger Commission, and brought in a fourth
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1 hospital.
2 I mention that because one of the
3 things in all of forming an alliance is the
4 grease are the dollars. And so the dollars
5 are out there, there are some dollars out
6 there in pots that only Senator Hannon quite
7 knows, both from federal and state, to make
8 part of it work.
9 But when you take out of the system
10 a million dollars for the Peconic Bay Medical
11 Center, $297,000 for a small hospital, Eastern
12 Long Island Hospital, $2.1 million for John T.
13 Mather, $627,000 for Southampton Hospital, and
14 $1.7 million for St. Charles Hospital, that
15 really is a torpedo to the bow of trying to do
16 anything creative or anything in the way of
17 reform.
18 When you add to it -- and all of
19 you know, as you talk to constituents, elder
20 care is a big issue. People talk about it all
21 the time. You take out of the system for the
22 hospitals $5.8 million and then you take out,
23 to boot, another $6.7 million out of the
24 nursing homes. And all of that, in the First
25 Senatorial District, computes to 12,000 jobs.
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1 When you take 12,000 jobs out of the system,
2 you cannot possibly be putting patients first.
3 You just can't.
4 Senator Bruno talked about that
5 this reform came before us in another
6 Executive Budget or two and this house
7 rejected it. This house said it didn't
8 provide patient care and it hurt the
9 healthcare system in our communities. So when
10 I just look at -- and I can't speak about any
11 other Senate district. I've heard Senator
12 Bruno talk about cuts in other districts, both
13 to the hospitals and to the nursing homes.
14 But all I can say is that when I
15 get letters, as I did from someone involved
16 with the Eastern Long Island Hospital -- and
17 it says: "I know Eastern Long Island Hospital
18 cannot withstand further reimbursement cuts.
19 Our costs for everything from medicine to
20 staff salaries continue to rise.
21 Reimbursement from insurers and government has
22 failed to keep up with these rising costs. By
23 imposing these new cuts, the Governor would
24 harm not only our facility but the communities
25 and patients who rely on our services.
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1 "Eastern Long Island Hospital puts
2 patients first 24 hours a day, 365 days a
3 year. We strive to improve the quality of
4 care and to improve the health of our
5 communities while reaching out to the
6 underserved. The Governor's proposals would
7 seriously undercut our efforts to provide
8 access to care within our communities."
9 So the two issues are providing
10 access to quality care and the issue of
11 quality patient care. So from the perspective
12 of the people of the First Senate District, I
13 couldn't possibly support this bill. And when
14 the time comes, I will vote the way the people
15 of the First Senatorial District, if they were
16 sitting in this seat, would vote.
17 Thank you, Mr. President.
18 THE PRESIDENT: Senator
19 Marcellino.
20 SENATOR MARCELLINO: Thank you,
21 Mr. President.
22 Senator Hannon said it right. He
23 talks about Governor's comments about the
24 education system being broken and let's put
25 more money into it.
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1 The healthcare system is in
2 trouble, broken. We all agree it needs
3 reform, we all agree it needs to be fixed.
4 But he also took all the money out of it. And
5 this bill, this budget bill that we're voting
6 on now, which some have referred to as
7 trickology, this bill is what's on the floor.
8 This bill will take out of my district nearly
9 $18 million from the hospitals and another
10 $13 million from the nursing homes.
11 In talking to these people, in
12 talking to the leadership of the hospitals and
13 the nursing homes that I represent, they are
14 unanimous in their statement to me they cannot
15 withstand these cuts. They cannot handle
16 these cuts. These cuts will mean reduction in
17 services. Reduction in staff, as Senator
18 LaValle correctly points out, means a
19 reduction in services.
20 You cannot tell me that math has
21 changed all that much in a system where, when
22 you take away, you're somehow adding. I don't
23 believe a minus equals a plus. I never did
24 believe that robbing Peter to pay Paul works.
25 We're taking money out of the healthcare
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1 system to fix an education system? I think
2 that's where I heard that before, that some of
3 the money is going.
4 It's my understanding that the
5 healthcare system is about $47 billion in this
6 particular budget. More than half of that is
7 federal money, driven by the money that we
8 spend here. That isn't a system that was set
9 up by George Pataki, that's a system was set
10 up under Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo. The
11 money that we spend on healthcare drives
12 federal dollars. You spend less, you get
13 less.
14 It's very simple. It isn't hard to
15 figure out. And it's not trickology. It's
16 real. You take money away from people and
17 then you ask them to give more service. What
18 is that, another version of doing more with
19 less? It didn't work with the prior
20 administration. It's not going to work under
21 this administration.
22 I stood up here and we all stood up
23 here and voted against Governor's vetoes, we
24 voted against bills that were presented by the
25 prior administration when we thought they were
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1 wrong. We're asking you to stand up now and
2 say to Governor Spitzer, look, this is bad.
3 This isn't good for us. This doesn't help us.
4 It doesn't help our constituents, who you want
5 to put first, who we all want to put first.
6 I don't doubt anybody's motives
7 here. I don't doubt the Governor's motives.
8 I don't think he wants to give pain. But he
9 is. He is, by an ill-conceived process.
10 Frankly, there isn't much of a process. It's
11 a lot of cuts. It's a meat ax when we should
12 be using a scalpel, if you'll pardon my use of
13 a bad metaphor.
14 This is not good budgeting. We
15 need a plan that talks to reform, real reform.
16 And that means you've got to work with the
17 hospital community, you've got to work with
18 the unions, you've got to work with everybody,
19 bring them all together.
20 Senator, I accept your challenge.
21 We'll sit at the same table in the conference
22 committees and negotiate a good budget bill.
23 But it begins here. We must pass the right
24 bill. We must pass a version.
25 And yes, we've done this at this
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1 period of time before. You haven't been here,
2 but we've done this before. When it's
3 necessary, we'll come to the floor, we'll vote
4 this bill, we'll put a Senate budget up which
5 will have all the good things in it and take
6 out this -- reject these bad cuts. Because
7 these cuts are painful to my constituents, to
8 all of our constituents.
9 And it's time. It's time to stop
10 the campaigning and, I agree with you, stop
11 the rhetoric. And let's sit down at the table
12 across from one another as coequals and work
13 it out. When that has happened, good things
14 have come. Budget reform has come. Ethics
15 reform has come. Civil confinement has come.
16 They all came when all three sides, two houses
17 of the Legislature sitting at the table with
18 the Executive, as coequals, talking to each
19 other, working out compromises and working out
20 the proper bills.
21 That can happen with the budget in
22 the next three weeks to get a on-time budget.
23 But a good budget. Not one that robs from
24 Peter to pay Paul, not one that pits upstate
25 versus downstate. One that represents all of
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1 our needs.
2 Mr. President, I urge my
3 colleagues, vote no on this one. Let's send
4 the right message. Let's put the right bill
5 on the floor, let's get it passed and move on
6 so that we can get to the negotiations and get
7 an on-time budget, one that does serve all of
8 our constituents, one that does put more
9 people under the system, one that does
10 guarantee insurance for all, and one that
11 guarantees access to good-quality healthcare
12 which this state has become noted for
13 throughout this country.
14 People may move to other states,
15 but they come back here when they get sick. I
16 know an awful lot of people who went to
17 Florida but got ill and came back here to
18 New York because they want our healthcare
19 system. You can't get it anyplace else.
20 So let's not kill the goose that
21 laid the golden egg here. Let's make sure we
22 keep it and protect it, but make it work
23 better. And that can be done with good, clear
24 negotiations.
25 I intend to vote aye on this bill,
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1 Mr. President. I urge all my colleagues to do
2 so -- I vote no on this bill. I intend to
3 vote no on this bill. And I urge all my
4 colleagues to vote no also. Excuse me.
5 THE PRESIDENT: We're not on a
6 roll call, Senator. You still have time to
7 decide what to vote.
8 Senator Golden.
9 SENATOR GOLDEN: Thank you,
10 Mr. President.
11 I've heard a lot of conversation
12 here today. I've heard us consider why we
13 wouldn't put our game plan out, like this is a
14 game. What this is, Senators, it's a
15 crapshoot. And the Governor threw the dice
16 right here on this floor. And what we're
17 doing right here is gambling on the lives of
18 the citizens of this great state and our great
19 city.
20 I take a look at your cuts, I look
21 through your window in your train, Senator,
22 and I see Kings County Hospital, $5 million;
23 Kingsborough Jewish Medical, $4 million;
24 Maimonides, almost a million; New York
25 Methodist, $6 million, almost $7 million; SUNY
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1 Downstate, one of our top hospitals,
2 $2.5 million.
3 I don't know if Senator Liz Krueger
4 was on your train, but I look at her hospitals
5 and I see the Hospital of Special Surgery,
6 $4.4 million; Lenox Hill Hospital, $6 million;
7 Manhattan Eye and Ear, over $1 million;
8 Memorial Sloan-Kettering, over $15 million;
9 Mt. Sinai, over $15 million; NYU, over
10 $10 million; Rockefeller University, $175,000,
11 God bless them. New York Presbyterian -- are
12 you ready for this? New York Presbyterian,
13 $24.5 million.
14 That is a devastation of this
15 system. It is ruining this system. We are
16 going to cause debts in this system.
17 Let me tell you about a hospital --
18 I'm not going to mention the names of the
19 hospitals. But in Kings County, do you know
20 how long you wait in an emergency room today
21 without these cuts? You can wait in a
22 hospital emergency room 100 to 125 hours
23 waiting for a bed. Can you imagine that?
24 That's today, before we do these cuts, over
25 125 hours to get into a bed.
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1 I don't know, I go into my nursing
2 homes, I go into my hospitals, I don't see
3 them overstaffed. As a matter of fact, I hear
4 the patients yelling, "Where's the nurse?" Or
5 in a nursing facility, "Why wasn't my aunt
6 fed?" I don't see an overabundance of staff.
7 But if you take these cuts, there's only one
8 place that these cuts are coming from, and
9 that's from the staff.
10 Think about this. You're going to
11 also put 400,000 kids on insurance and 900,000
12 adults. We have 3 million seniors here in
13 this great state today, 3 million. And in the
14 next 10, 12 years, they're going to grow to
15 5.5 million seniors.
16 We are going to devastate a system
17 that we haven't even taken into consideration
18 what those cuts will do to the future. What
19 this is, a crapshoot. It's blinking. It's
20 saying we're going to cut and freeze rates,
21 cut trend factors, and we'll come back to it
22 next year and we'll look at it. And you know
23 what? We'll see what we can do then.
24 We went through that. That's not
25 reform, ladies and gentlemen. But I want to
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1 work with you to do reform. But this is not
2 reform. And I'll work with this great
3 Governor to do reform. But this is not
4 reform. This will cost lives. People will
5 die.
6 Victory Memorial Hospital, a
7 hospital in my community, insults to injury,
8 it's on the closing commission. Closed, going
9 to be closed. Going to try to close it.
10 Nursing home as well. They're going to try to
11 sell the nursing home off, if they can. I
12 don't see any abundance of staff at that
13 location. And it's in Chapter 11. And
14 they've asked for $1.274 million to cut from
15 the hospital and another million from the
16 nursing home. Something that they slated to
17 close.
18 So they're taking money from
19 something that they slated to close. They're
20 not even giving it the opportunity to be able
21 to give the proper care to the people that are
22 in that hospital today and to give those
23 employees an opportunity to find someplace
24 else to go.
25 It's wrong. It's wrongheaded.
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1 It's not reform. It's a crapshoot. And this
2 crapshoot will cost people's lives. That's
3 why I'm voting no, and that's why I'm going to
4 fight to keep hospitals like Victory Memorial
5 open and, yes, try to find where this reform
6 is. Because it definitely isn't in this bill.
7 I vote no. Thank you.
8 THE PRESIDENT: The chair
9 recognizes Senator Young.
10 SENATOR YOUNG: Thank you,
11 Mr. President.
12 I've listened intently to the
13 debate today, and I would implore those who
14 support these cuts to reconsider. I heard
15 Senator Smith characterize the Governor's
16 budget in healthcare as being a good day for
17 the people of New York and a lot of people
18 will get better care. Actually, a lot of
19 people will get no care.
20 Senator Adams talked about reform
21 and results. Cuts are not results, and cuts
22 are not reform. Cuts are just plain bad.
23 I live in a very rural area, and I
24 just want my colleagues on the other side of
25 the aisle to realize what this does to rural
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1 areas. I represent some of the poorest
2 counties in the state. They already are very
3 short on healthcare. I've lost 20 percent of
4 my doctors over the past three years in my
5 district. Think about that, 20 percent. And
6 a lot of the primary-care physicians who are
7 left have caseloads of up to 5,000 patients,
8 5,000. Think about that.
9 The Governor's budget takes
10 recruitment and retention dollars out of my
11 facilities and puts it somewhere else. So we
12 already have lost our healthcare
13 professionals. In Olean -- I live in Olean.
14 In Olean they have been looking for a
15 urologist to come provide patient care for
16 eight years without any success. And what
17 these cuts do is make that very dire situation
18 much, much worse. I will have facilities
19 close their doors if these cuts go through.
20 You know, you have to think about
21 the rural areas because people have very
22 limited access to healthcare already. It can
23 be 10, 20, 30 miles away from the closest
24 hospital. So you think about it. Your spouse
25 is having a stroke, you have to drive through
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1 windy roads already, miles and miles to get to
2 healthcare. This is going to make it even
3 more difficult. And as Senator Golden said,
4 lives will be lost, people will suffer, people
5 will be hurt if these cuts go through.
6 So I'm asking you, reconsider. You
7 are losing millions of dollars in your very
8 own districts and you're hurting other parts
9 of the state, you're hurting people across
10 this state.
11 Senator Smith said do the right
12 thing. The right thing is to reject these
13 cuts.
14 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Flanagan.
15 SENATOR FLANAGAN: Thank you,
16 Mr. President.
17 A couple of observations. Senator
18 Adams raised the point about reform in a
19 couple of different ways. And I would
20 respectfully offer that this is my fifth year
21 in the Senate, but in the time I've been here,
22 I've watched Senator Hannon and former Senator
23 Meier chair a Task Force on Medicaid Reform
24 that held hearings all across the state, came
25 up with a litany of recommendations, and we
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1 have acted on those. So that's one very
2 positive thing.
3 The second thing is, everybody sort
4 of glosses over this at this point, but one of
5 the big hues and cries from our counties was
6 that they were getting killed on Medicaid. We
7 changed that and saved our counties hundreds
8 of millions of dollars and, frankly,
9 transplanted that burden back onto the State
10 of New York. That's sort of been forgotten in
11 this dialogue, but that was a reform because
12 it put the onus back on the State of New York
13 and provided hundreds of millions of dollars
14 for counties across the state.
15 And then finally, the Senate has
16 really, through the efforts of Senator Skelos,
17 in particular, on antifraud -- and looking at
18 Medicaid reform, that is real reform. That's
19 billions of dollars that we tried to pull back
20 into the system in the right way.
21 So I can think of at least three
22 very salient and important things that we have
23 advocated for, some we've implemented. And I
24 think we have a lot left to do, and we're
25 going to need partners in that fight as we
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1 move along the way.
2 In the district that I represent --
3 you know, I was feeling bad until I listened
4 to some of the other numbers -- $25 million,
5 roughly, between hospitals and nursing homes
6 in my district. Senator Serrano, Senator
7 Krueger, Senator Johnson, the numbers are
8 staggering. And I know when you add in the
9 federal cuts, that doubles in my district, so
10 it's got to double in other districts.
11 But I want to focus on one positive
12 thing and use this as an example of something
13 that is actually working that will be
14 decimated by this proposal.
15 The Long Island State Veterans Home
16 at Stony Brook happens to be in the district
17 that I represent. And for anyone who wants to
18 look at a model facility, you should go look
19 at that. It's celebrated its 15-year
20 anniversary. And for the last four years in
21 particular, they've worked on a program with
22 the state, through the Senate, and the federal
23 government to upgrade their facility, to
24 renovate their facility, to keep it
25 state-of-the-art, and they win awards all the
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1 time.
2 It is a model facility. Their
3 costs per day are much lower than many other
4 facilities not only in the state but across
5 the country. So they do it right, they do it
6 well, they deliver excellent care, their
7 employees get recognition every single year by
8 statewide organizations. But they're going to
9 get a $2.5 million cut under this proposal.
10 I know what it's like working with
11 them, and I am very proud to do it. But
12 that's just one small example of a facility
13 that's going to be absolutely destroyed by
14 these types of cuts. All the good work that
15 they've started and accomplished through the
16 years would be undermined by the guts of this
17 proposal.
18 I'm going to be voting no.
19 Thank you, Mr. President.
20 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Volker.
21 SENATOR VOLKER: Mr. President,
22 let me just say this from my perspective, and
23 I've been here for a couple of years. Senator
24 Adams, you know, I have to say something to
25 you, and it's not because -- it's not a knock
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1 on you. One of the things -- and we don't
2 often talk about it, but one of the reasons
3 it's important to deal with this bill -- and
4 by the way, this was introduced January 31st,
5 I guess, when the Governor put it in.
6 Thanks to a lot of court decisions,
7 we are not able to do some of the things that
8 we used to be able to do. And thanks to the
9 major business community, that again opposed
10 us on a constitutional amendment which was
11 defeated, we don't have the flexibility we
12 used to have in negotiating budgets. One of
13 the ways you get better flexibility is to put
14 a budget out there and act on it. Well, we
15 are acting on it. We're going to defeat it, I
16 think. We're going to try.
17 So it gives us more flexibility in
18 dealing with this issue. And I know it's very
19 hard to explain. The media doesn't understand
20 it. But it's the facts. And hopefully,
21 someday, democracy will be restored, because I
22 think it is, and this Legislature can get back
23 to where it should be.
24 Unfortunately, the courts, in
25 agreement with the Governor -- and, frankly, I
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1 am going to say it, some of the big business
2 people that think we spend too much money
3 supported him. But the truth is, this budget
4 is very familiar. I mean, three years ago, if
5 I remember right, we saw it then. It was
6 almost identical numbers. It was Medicaid
7 reform.
8 This house was taunted, if I
9 remember right, by some people on this side of
10 the aisle -- in fact, I think you put
11 amendments in and we defeated the amendments
12 and then we finally, of course, got all the
13 cuts out. But in the meantime, I think I
14 remember that some of those clips ended up in
15 campaigns two years ago.
16 And, you know, it was on the floor
17 that -- I just want to point that out because,
18 you know, what goes around sometimes comes
19 around. I just want to tell you that. And I
20 seem to remember Senator Krueger was
21 particularly vociferous in that. I only
22 mention that because it's a political reality.
23 But I have to tell you something.
24 Forget all this stuff. Nobody believes this
25 is reform, except maybe some major business
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1 people. I was talking to one guy, and he
2 said, "Well, stick with us, it will help."
3 How? How does it help to cut
4 hospitals and nursing homes and the healthcare
5 industry? That makes no sense. Patients
6 first. Really? I mean, how does that help?
7 Listen, I only know my area. And I
8 can tell you -- and by the way, it's not just
9 Governor Spitzer. The combined hit of the
10 state and the federal government to Erie
11 County alone -- well, no, it's Western
12 New York, I'm sorry. It says Erie County, but
13 it's really more Western New York -- it's
14 $44 million. Now, in New York City that's not
15 big, I suppose. But to us, that's huge. The
16 state cuts are $17 million, and the federal
17 cuts are about $16 million. And that's just
18 hospitals.
19 Nursing homes -- and remember that
20 our nursing homes are not as big. In fact, it
21 probably concerns me more -- I have to admit
22 to you, I have a lot of nursing homes in my
23 district. I don't have a lot of hospitals. I
24 only have a couple that are actually in my
25 district, because most of the hospitals are in
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1 Buffalo. One big one is in Cheektowaga, which
2 Billy and I, although it's in his district --
3 Senator Stachowski, I'm sorry -- we share.
4 That gets hit pretty hard. Of course it could
5 get hit even harder if we let the Commission
6 on Destruction -- or the Berger Commission go
7 through.
8 But let me just say this. This is
9 not -- by the way, when you're voting for this
10 bill, in my opinion, you're voting for status
11 quo. You're not voting for reform. We went
12 through this before. In Pataki's time -- and
13 I know the media said that. Well, you know,
14 right now my paper in Buffalo is in lockstep
15 with the big business people. And they don't
16 care.
17 I mean, sincerely, this -- the
18 problem with voting for this bill is you're
19 voting against the poor and the middle class
20 and you're hoping, or they're hoping that
21 somehow this will all work out, it will all
22 work out and we'll get sort of some sort of
23 reform.
24 Well, I'll tell you this.
25 Personally, if we're going to do reform, let's
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1 do reform. And when you say, Well, why don't
2 you do it? If we could do reform with the
3 Assembly -- we all know it, it's no secret.
4 This house passed like 34 bills here a few
5 years ago. The whole reform movement came out
6 of this side. Not that the Assembly wouldn't
7 do certain things; they would. But not the
8 real difficult things that need to be done in
9 downstate New York. And I admit it.
10 And some of that is what I call
11 poor Medicaid, and some of it is wealthy
12 Medicaid. There's no question, it's very
13 tough, because you're talking here more about
14 long-term care than anything else, because
15 that's where the big dollars are today.
16 But I have to tell you, my -- let
17 me give you an example. There's a great
18 hospital in Ontario County. And, you know,
19 most people don't realize I represent four
20 counties: Erie, Livingston, Wyoming, and
21 Ontario. It's called F.F. Thompson Hospital.
22 It's a fairly small hospital, a great
23 hospital. It gets reductions of somewhere
24 more than $450,000. And based on their total
25 budget, it hits them harder than any other
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1 hospital because it's a comparatively small
2 hospital.
3 If this bill passes, which I hope
4 it won't, we would be in a position in all
5 those hospitals where the delivery of services
6 would be impaired. And as somebody said to
7 me: Well, they just have to cut some more
8 staff. Well, the problem is, I don't know of
9 any hospital in any area -- and I say area --
10 that has more staff than they need. I don't
11 know of any. If there is, I don't think so.
12 I've been in some of those hospitals myself,
13 and I can tell you it gets tougher and tougher
14 every year.
15 What we need is true healthcare
16 reform. Not the kind of phoney reform that
17 says we will just take the money off the top
18 and somehow it will all work out. It doesn't
19 work that way.
20 So I beseech you -- and I know how
21 difficult it is. And I know, Senator Smith,
22 you're in a tough position because you have a
23 Governor that has a fairly high rating and
24 he's wading into the same things that our
25 former Governor waded into, and I understand
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1 it.
2 But in the end, this house is the
3 one, in my opinion, that is going to drive
4 real reform and is going to break the
5 so-called status quo and make sure that when
6 we pass a budget it will be a budget that we
7 can all be proud of, not just for education,
8 for criminal justice but also for healthcare.
9 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Libous.
10 SENATOR LIBOUS: Thank you,
11 Mr. President.
12 I'm upset because I think we're
13 hiding behind the word "reform." You know,
14 that seems to be the political thing to do
15 this year because all the polls say that the
16 public wants reform. So we're hiding behind
17 that word on this very, very important
18 healthcare bill that dismantles the healthcare
19 system in New York State.
20 Because this isn't about reform.
21 This is about children, this is about
22 families, this is about access to healthcare.
23 This is about taking care of our elderly who
24 can no longer take care of themselves. That's
25 what this is about: Our families, our
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1 children, our parents and our grandparents.
2 It's not about reform.
3 This legislation dismantles the
4 healthcare system. It does not allow us to
5 take care of our loved ones in our
6 communities. You heard the numbers, and the
7 numbers go on. And, you know, I get very
8 disturbed when I look at my own community.
9 Ten million dollars, $10 million out of our
10 community, a community who one of its major
11 hospitals last June got devastated with a
12 $20 million bill because of a flood. Wiped
13 out the whole first floor of the hospital.
14 And now we have to take another hit. A
15 community that desperately needs healthcare
16 service providers, as Senator Young said.
17 I have rural communities. I have
18 several rural health centers that will be
19 closed under this legislation.
20 Economic development and jobs?
21 Healthcare is probably, in our community and
22 upstate New York, probably the second largest
23 employer. And I would think if you look
24 around the rest of upstate New York, where
25 we're looking in small communities and bigger
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1 communities like Syracuse -- and I know
2 Senator DeFrancisco is not here, and I wish
3 Senator Valesky were here, but -- Senator
4 Valesky, $22 million, Senator DeFrancisco,
5 $22 million out of the City of Syracuse. Not
6 only does that devastate the upstate economy
7 when it comes to healthcare jobs, but it
8 devastates access to affordable healthcare.
9 Westchester County, Senator Andrea
10 Stewart-Cousins. If Senator Spano were here,
11 he'd be on the floor fighting, fighting for
12 Westchester Medical like he has the last three
13 years. He'd be fighting for Westchester
14 Medical, not allowing -- not allowing a
15 $9 million cut. That's what he would do.
16 So it's funny when the shoe is on
17 the other foot. The change is we have a
18 different Governor now. He happens to be a
19 Democrat. So your views on healthcare have
20 changed in the last 12 months. Your views on
21 healthcare have changed. You don't care
22 anymore. You'd rather take these cuts, you'd
23 rather deny your constituents to stand up for
24 political reasons.
25 Mr. President, it's not about
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1 reform, it's about doing our job, taking care
2 of and providing for our citizens, providing
3 for our family members, as I said when I began
4 this conversation, providing for our children,
5 providing for our families, providing for the
6 elderly. That's why I'm voting this bill
7 down.
8 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Saland.
9 SENATOR SALAND: Thank you,
10 Mr. President.
11 Mr. President, certainly everybody
12 in this chamber and at the very least
13 everybody who has been here during a prior
14 session is well aware that this is a retread.
15 Slice it, dice it, do anything you want with
16 it, this is a retread.
17 The only difference basically is
18 its genesis. We have seen this offered by
19 Governor Pataki. We didn't consider it to be
20 reform then. We rejected it with virtual
21 unanimity. We're seeing it now being offered
22 by Governor Spitzer. There's no reason for
23 any distinction between the way we should
24 treat this bill. If it was rejected under
25 Pataki, as it was time and again, it should be
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1 rejected again under Spitzer.
2 The logic -- not the semantics, not
3 the dancing -- the logic is irrefutable. You
4 can dance, you can dodge, you can weave, but
5 the bottom line is it's the same garbage we've
6 rejected on multiple occasions previously.
7 Packaged ever so slightly different along the
8 perimeter, but the same core of garbage.
9 Is there anybody, here by the way,
10 who has not stood in solidarity with their
11 nurses and said, We don't like the idea of you
12 having forced overtime, we're with you? Are
13 we all going to stand up en masse and say
14 we've changed our mind, it's okay now to have
15 mandatory overtime? Because guess what, the
16 workforce is going to be reduced.
17 So each and every one of you who
18 has proudly said you oppose the idea of those
19 in our hospitals who are being required and
20 subjected to something they really don't want
21 to have mandated on them, overtime, are you
22 now going to say, I changed my mind, it's okay
23 because we're cutting hundreds of millions of
24 dollars -- compound that with the feds,
25 billions of dollars -- out of the system? I
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1 don't think so.
2 Now, Senator Smith appealed to my
3 common sense, he appealed to do the right
4 thing. I believe Senator Adams said to do the
5 real thing. Well, the only real thing here is
6 this gubernatorial proposal that's already
7 been rejected time and again in this chamber
8 and, if my memory serves me correctly, in the
9 other chamber too. Call it right, call it
10 real, by whatever name you call it, it's
11 wrong.
12 He also asked if I know what I'm
13 doing. Yes, I know what I'm doing. I very
14 well know what I'm doing. I'm sparing my
15 already fragile hospitals and my distressed
16 nursing homes in my district some
17 $13.5 million in cuts, which will be
18 compounded. This is only the first year. Run
19 it out two, three, four years and see how much
20 money you come up with. And that's without
21 the federal cuts.
22 This is an abomination for
23 healthcare. This is an abomination for
24 patients. The hospitals in my district, the
25 nursing homes in my district, just as in your
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1 district, are dedicated to providing a quality
2 of healthcare. And I know full well, I can
3 remember briefly -- recently, as recently as
4 15 to 20 years ago, having grown up in my
5 community, where we often had to go out of the
6 community because the delivery service was not
7 as sophisticated as many had in more
8 metropolitan areas.
9 Well, we've come a long way in the
10 last 15 to 20 years. We now have the ability
11 to deliver healthcare that I previously had to
12 run to Yale-New Haven for or to the Capital
13 District or to the city. And it's a delivery
14 of healthcare that the people in the 41st
15 Senate District and the people throughout my
16 region, whether they're in the district or
17 not, welcome and would like to preserve.
18 This guts it. This sends it not
19 down the slippery slope, this sends it on a
20 very fast pace spiralling down to a point of
21 which there will be no return. It's reform
22 only because someone chose to call it reform.
23 It's reform in name only. To call it reform,
24 if I can draw on Senator Adams, is the height
25 of trickology. Man, oh, man, how this can be
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1 reform would baffle anybody who has the
2 slightest bit of logical capacity.
3 It's a substantial retread, as I
4 said before. It's not a one-house bill, as
5 was alluded to earlier, I believe, by Senator
6 Adams. This is the real deal. This is the
7 Governor's real deal.
8 The bottom line is that it would be
9 hypocrisy not to oppose it with the same
10 virtual unanimity that we have opposed it with
11 time and again over the course of the past two
12 or three years.
13 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Lanza.
14 SENATOR LANZA: Thank you,
15 Mr. President.
16 I rise also to oppose this
17 legislation and to say to my colleague,
18 Senator Adams, I accept your offer to take a
19 ride on that train. But first we've got to
20 fix that train. And I suggest to you that the
21 problem with the train is not which window you
22 look out but who is driving the train. It
23 seems as though some of your colleagues have
24 allowed that train to be hijacked by the
25 Governor.
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1 So I'll take that train ride, but
2 first we've got to agree to drive it together
3 and be guided only by the best interests of
4 the people who send us here.
5 Senator Smith said this is simple,
6 that it's one plus one and that equals two.
7 And I agree it is simple. But I have another
8 equation, and it's that New York State's
9 healthcare system minus $1.3 billion equals
10 disaster.
11 Take a look at that, $1.3 billion
12 in cuts. That suggests, that suggests that
13 the healthcare system in this state is not
14 only just fine, but it's overflowing with
15 resources. That it's bloated, that we've got
16 room to cut it. And I'm glad that Senator
17 Bruno illustrated the numbers of cuts in the
18 various districts that would be suffered
19 across this state in my colleagues' districts.
20 And it's been suggested that we're
21 not seeing this thing clearly, that we're
22 missing something. So I've taken a look at it
23 and I wonder what it is we're missing. It
24 certainly can't be because my colleagues are
25 not supporting this, I'm sure not because it's
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1 Governor Spitzer proposing the cuts instead of
2 Senator -- instead of Governor Pataki. It
3 must be something else.
4 When I hear numbers like
5 $27 million in cuts in one district,
6 $77 million in another, $15 million in one,
7 $80 million in another, perhaps there's a
8 different reality than I know in my district.
9 Perhaps it's because when patients enter
10 hospitals in your districts, into the
11 emergency room seeking urgent care, perhaps
12 it's because there's no wait. Maybe it's
13 because there are too many nurses in your
14 emergency rooms. Perhaps patients in nursing
15 homes in your district have the luxury of
16 having care workers who are underworked and
17 overpaid. Well, that's not the reality in my
18 district.
19 If we allow these cuts to go
20 through, one hospital and seven nursing homes
21 will suffer $27 million in cuts in my
22 district. And I can tell you, the reality in
23 my district is that they can't afford that.
24 In my district the hospitals and nursing homes
25 are on life support already. These cuts would
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1 pull the plug. These cuts would spell
2 catastrophe.
3 You know, I'm just the new guy
4 around here. I said I wanted to come up here
5 to Albany to fight for Staten Island
6 University Hospital, to fight for Carmel
7 Richmond Nursing Home, Clove Lakes, Eger
8 Health, Golden Gate Health Center, Seaview
9 Hospital, Silver Lake and Verrazano Nursing
10 Home. That's the promise I made to the people
11 in my district, that I would come here to
12 fight, not to cut, knowing that they can't
13 afford those cuts.
14 So I ask you to join me and to
15 fight to continue to ensure that the people of
16 this state enjoy the best first-class health
17 system in the country.
18 Thank you.
19 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Sampson.
20 SENATOR SAMPSON: Thank you very
21 much, Mr. President.
22 I just want to rise, and I had an
23 opportunity here today to listen to all of my
24 colleagues. And I understand your issues, and
25 we too -- and I'm going to feel the pain like
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1 anyone else.
2 But the bottom line here is this,
3 and I like to deal in realism. And this is
4 reality. The reality is the following. This
5 is a one-house bill. This is nothing but
6 rhetoric, politics and basically fiction.
7 You know, Senator Bruno talked
8 about we need to fix, fix the pain and the
9 hurt. Why couldn't we fix the pain and the
10 hurt before bringing this bill to the floor?
11 We could have done it by getting
12 together with the -- as we did last Friday,
13 with the CEOs and the nursing home executives
14 to deal with this issue. But at this point in
15 time, you decided to bring it. And it's all
16 about politics.
17 You know, I signed the pledge
18 saying that I would fight those cuts, and I am
19 going to fight those cuts. But I'm not going
20 to fight these cuts with a one-house bill.
21 This side of the aisle, we're concerned about
22 real reform, real revitalization and real
23 results. And that's what it is at the end of
24 the day, it's all about results.
25 What's going to happen tomorrow or
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1 later on today, those who voted yes on this
2 aisle, in marginal districts, the next thing
3 you're going to see is press releases down at
4 their communities saying how could they vote
5 for such a heinous budget.
6 But the end of the day we all know
7 that as soon as we go into conference
8 committees, this fiction -- as I'm going to
9 tell my constituents when they ask me
10 tomorrow, this is about fiction and this is
11 about a nightmare. So when you wake up in the
12 morning, it's going to be reality. And the
13 reality is we're going to restore some of
14 those cuts that the Governor talking about.
15 And, Senator Lanza, I hear you. I
16 hear your pain and I hear your hurt. But by
17 voting for this proposal, do you know that you
18 save Sisters of Charity Medical Center an
19 additional $4.1 million?
20 You know, if we are going to say
21 you're going to cut, you're going to lose,
22 you're going to -- the bottom line is this.
23 If we're serious, if we're serious, if we're
24 serious about getting to real reform, real
25 revitalization and results, you know we need
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1 to get together with the CEOs from the
2 hospitals and the nursing homes and sit at a
3 table and come together and put a package
4 together that we all can live with. And
5 that's what it's all about. It's not about
6 rhetoric or politics.
7 You know, and times have changed.
8 Because I remember at times when we'd bring
9 our hostile amendments or these amendments,
10 all of a sudden you're saying we're
11 grandstanding. You're doing what we did,
12 you're grandstanding.
13 At the end of the day, if you want
14 real results, let's get together in a
15 conference committee or whatever committee or
16 whatever hearings, and at the end of the day
17 let's get to results that are really going to
18 have an impact on all of our constituents.
19 Thank you very much, Mr. President.
20 THE PRESIDENT: The chair
21 recognizes Senator DeFrancisco.
22 SENATOR DeFRANCISCO: Thank you,
23 Mr. President.
24 I never thought I'd see the day
25 where a Governor's budget, a Governor from the
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1 same party, was called rhetoric, politics and
2 fiction. And that's exactly the bill we're
3 voting on here. This isn't a one-house bill,
4 it's a Governor's bill which he believes is
5 the best way to do business in the State of
6 New York. And that's what we're debating at
7 this point in time.
8 Now, it's probably true, as Senator
9 Sampson said, that this may not be the final
10 version of what becomes law. But let me ask a
11 rhetorical question here. If you're going to
12 negotiate a budget in order to restore money
13 to hospitals and nursing homes, do you vote
14 for a budget bill, the Governor's bill, that
15 cuts everything? Does that give you
16 negotiating power? Does that give you the
17 ability to try to get more money back in?
18 I thought when you were trying to
19 negotiate something to get more money back in
20 the budget, you vote for something that puts
21 more money back in the budget so you're in a
22 better negotiating position for the final
23 vote.
24 But here we're told -- I think
25 Senator Adams mentioned we're in the embryonic
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1 stage. Well, if I'm in the embryonic stage of
2 a negotiation, I simply don't try to put
3 myself in the worst position by what I
4 support. I try to support my position by
5 moving in the direction that I want the bill
6 to go to. And that's basically what is
7 important here.
8 The other thing that's very
9 important here, for those who were here last
10 year, you know, it doesn't show a heck of a
11 lot of integrity that because there's a change
12 in governor we're going to change our position
13 on the exact same cuts to hospitals. That
14 doesn't show much integrity at all. I think
15 we last year and the year before were fighting
16 these cuts together, and we were fighting
17 against a Republican governor.
18 Now, I don't quite understand if
19 the position is let's work together, why we're
20 working apart this year as opposed to the last
21 couple of years.
22 And we definitely -- as to the
23 issue of cuts, we definitely need cuts. But
24 cuts in the cost of Medicaid are not from
25 simply stripping hospitals and nursing homes.
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1 Cuts that are logical are cuts in something --
2 in the benefits that are provided as far as
3 Medicaid are concerned and what optional
4 benefits there are, what we should be
5 considering as far as fraud, cutting back on
6 various waste. That's how we take care of
7 reform. Cuts are not reform.
8 So I guess my point is simply this.
9 Everybody in this chamber is hurt. My city of
10 Syracuse gets cut, nursing homes and
11 hospitals, about $20 million. Everybody has a
12 different number. We should be joining
13 together to vote no on the Governor's budget,
14 to say this is unacceptable, so we're in a
15 better position to help our hospitals.
16 Secondly, if we need to save money
17 in the healthcare business, we need to reform
18 the system. Reform is a bunch of the bills
19 that we've passed in the past which dealt with
20 changing the system and dealing with how the
21 health delivery system works.
22 And lastly, it's a matter of
23 integrity. You can't change your position,
24 which was so firm last year, because we've had
25 a change in the party of a governor. And I
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1 would certainly hope that people reconsider
2 the way they're going to vote on this bill for
3 all of those reasons.
4 Thank you.
5 THE PRESIDENT: The chair
6 recognizes Senator Maziarz.
7 SENATOR MAZIARZ: Thank you very
8 much, Mr. President.
9 You know, I, like many of my
10 colleagues, intend on voting no on this
11 legislation. When Senator Smith spoke, he
12 said if you vote no on this, you're voting
13 against, and he listed a whole long list of
14 very good programs in this state which we all
15 know will be in the final version of this
16 budget.
17 I want to concentrate, if I may for
18 a couple of minutes, on the nursing home cuts
19 as proposed by the Governor.
20 You know, my late mother was a
21 resident of a nursing home for approximately
22 three years. And like all nursing homes
23 across this state, I'm sure -- you know, she
24 was like a lot of residents there. She
25 couldn't walk, she really couldn't do much for
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1 herself at all. And there was a little button
2 next to her on her bed, and she'd push that
3 button and that's when an aide would come in
4 and help her out. And I'm sure it's the same
5 in nursing homes in every one of these
6 districts.
7 And I notice that the nursing home
8 that she was in is going to suffer a cut under
9 this budget of a half a million dollars. Now,
10 you know, that nursing home is not going to
11 close with a half-million-dollar cut. But you
12 know what they're going to do? They're going
13 to lay off the janitors, they're going to lay
14 off some of those nurse's aides, they're going
15 to lay off the dishwashers and some of the
16 cooks. And when a resident of that nursing
17 home pushes that button for help, that help is
18 going to take a longer time to get there.
19 Senator DeFrancisco said it very
20 well. When some of these same cuts were
21 proposed, we did what Senator Adams suggested
22 that we do. We together rejected those cuts
23 under the former Governor by voting to
24 override his vetoes.
25 So from this side of the aisle, I
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1 want to say that I agree with Senator Adams.
2 I think that we should get on that same train,
3 on the same side of that train, and look out
4 the same window. And we together, all of us,
5 should say that we care about that janitor and
6 we care about that dishwasher and we care
7 about that nurse's aide, because all of us
8 care about that elderly person laying in that
9 bed who doesn't walk anymore, we care about
10 that person getting healthcare quickly.
11 If you vote yes on this bill, the
12 message that you are sending -- and I know
13 it's going to be difficult for those people on
14 that side of the aisle. It was difficult last
15 year when we had to vote to override a
16 governor who was of our same political party
17 who had personal relationships with a lot of
18 people on this side of the aisle. That was
19 difficult. But we did it. And today, you
20 should do the same thing for that elderly
21 person laying in that nursing home bed.
22 Thank you, Mr. President.
23 And by the way, Mr. President, I
24 have to tell you that Senator Smith is not
25 here, he left, he was angry that you were
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1 late.
2 (Laughter.)
3 THE PRESIDENT: Thank you,
4 Senator Maziarz.
5 Senator Robach.
6 SENATOR ROBACH: Yes,
7 Mr. President. I too rise to oppose this
8 bill. And I'll try to be brief.
9 And it's probably good that there
10 was a lot of speakers, it's an important
11 topic, and I've gotten a little calmer now
12 from some of those earlier comments.
13 I can assure you that there is
14 nothing rhetorical, there is nothing political
15 about my support for this. It is obligation,
16 focus, and merit. And I do have to say to
17 some of my colleagues, I am becoming a little
18 bit tired and a little bit surprised and a
19 little bit resentful when other people try to
20 paint everyone with the same brush or tell
21 people why they're doing something.
22 I'm going to tell you exactly why
23 I'm voting for this bill --
24 (Laughter.)
25 SENATOR ROBACH: -- or against
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1 this bill and am going to vote for the
2 resolution that's going to make some of these
3 restorations.
4 And we can laugh, and I like to be
5 entertaining. But I can tell you, in this
6 budget debate because the education portion
7 adds, I don't think there's going to be
8 anything more important than this.
9 And the question has been asked why
10 now, how come -- if we didn't do this, who is
11 going to set the tone for what those
12 conference committees are going to be? What
13 is the yin to the yang if everyone rolled over
14 and played dead?
15 I'm probably not going to change
16 anybody's mind, but I can assure you, and you
17 should know it, that my mother taught me right
18 from wrong before she taught me Democrat and
19 Republican. And this is one of the few things
20 I can honestly say this would be the wrong
21 thing to do, now or ever.
22 And as many of my colleagues have
23 pointed out, it's been rejected in the past.
24 We have finally made, and sometimes at odds
25 with Governor Pataki, incremental increases in
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1 healthcare, things that are important. And
2 even with those increases, especially in the
3 nursing home side, in upstate New York in
4 particular, while this hurts everyone in the
5 state, where the nursing home reimbursement
6 rate is so low for Medicaid it's half of what
7 it really costs, it is ridiculous to call
8 trying to do more with even less any kind of
9 reform.
10 So we do have to go to the table,
11 we do have to talk about real things. But I
12 am telling you, as people who care about
13 healthcare -- and I believe you do on that
14 side of the aisle, just as we do -- we have in
15 the past, we will again, somebody has to say
16 this isn't the right way to go, we've got to
17 do something different.
18 I cannot return in good conscience
19 and say while we're doing a budget, the
20 largest increase in the history of the state,
21 $120 billion budget, but we're cutting nursing
22 homes, hospitals and healthcare to the tune of
23 $25 million in my district. I won't talk
24 about anybody else's.
25 But I can assure you, my
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1 motivation -- and I really do believe your
2 motivation ought to be the same as mine --
3 let's just on this important topic skip a
4 little bit of the political insider baseball
5 and let's do the right thing for healthcare
6 recipients, senior citizens, their families,
7 nurses, healthcare workers and things that are
8 going to benefit our community.
9 At least let us be the ones to
10 start the dialogue. And yes, I believe, I
11 really do believe we will get to a better
12 place in the end. But understand this, and
13 this is important. The motivation is to frame
14 that so we get to the right place. And I say,
15 if not us, who? And that should be all of us
16 in this room.
17 And it's the only part I agree with
18 Senator Adams, we should all be on the train.
19 Tell me what train is more important than this
20 in light of what's gone on in this budget. I
21 don't think there is one.
22 So if I don't change your mind, I
23 hope I've at least explained to you where I'm
24 coming from. And there's nothing political,
25 there's nothing rhetorical, there's nothing
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1 fake about it. And hopefully, if you can't
2 join me, you'll at least understand that.
3 I cast my vote in the negative.
4 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Alesi.
5 SENATOR ALESI: Thank you,
6 Mr. President.
7 My colleagues, to be sure, I'd like
8 to speak on the budget bill that starts out a
9 bill submitted by the Governor. Not a
10 one-house bill. This is a bill submitted by
11 the Governor that attacks the healthcare
12 system in this state in a way that is going to
13 impact the people in the greater Rochester
14 area in my district to the tune of some
15 $12 million. Probably a lot more when you
16 take the greater Rochester region into
17 consideration collectively, with my
18 colleagues. Significantly more when you go
19 all across the state.
20 So when I'm voting no, it's not
21 just because of the $12 million in my
22 district. It's not just because of those
23 frail and elderly people and those premature
24 babes and those underserved people that I'm
25 voting no, whose faces I know to some extent,
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1 whose families I know to some extent, whose
2 sickbeds I have visited. It's also about the
3 doctors and the nurses, the administrative
4 aides, the healthcare workers, the people that
5 take the buses 24 hours a day back and forth
6 to operate our healthcare system in the
7 greater Rochester area, just like they do
8 everywhere else in the state.
9 So when I'm voting no on this
10 budget bill submitted by the Governor -- not a
11 one-house bill -- when I'm voting no on this
12 budget bill, I'm voting no against the cuts
13 and the devastation that are going to impact
14 the sick and the frail, the elderly, those
15 people that are desperately in need and those
16 people that care for them. Not just in my
17 district, in your district and in your
18 district and your district and everybody's
19 district here.
20 Senator Smith made a point of
21 naming many of the names of the Senators in
22 here. I'll name the same names if you'd like
23 me to. But there's no point in doing that.
24 This is about New York State. It's about the
25 people that live here. It's about the people
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1 that depend on us to do something reasonable,
2 like we did last year and the year before.
3 And now there's a departure. Now
4 the train is leaving the station, and it's
5 only going one way. What an analogy.
6 My train is going both ways. You
7 don't have to change seats. When you leave
8 New York City and stay north, you can stay in
9 Seat Number 10. Stay in Seat Number 10 going
10 south, and you see the other side. You don't
11 have to change anything, you just have to open
12 your eyes. And your eyes were opened last
13 year when our eyes were opened. We went
14 against our Governor because we recognized
15 that we were doing the right thing.
16 And all you have to do is the same
17 thing this year. They're the same sick
18 people, they're the same doctors, they're the
19 same hospitals, they're the same institutions
20 that are the underpinning of every community
21 in this state. You don't have to turn your
22 back on them this year. You didn't last year.
23 I saw a distinguished member of
24 Congress in this chamber just a few minutes
25 ago, a man that I served with in the Assembly,
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1 Joe Crowley, visiting here for a St. Patrick's
2 party tonight. I guarantee you Congressman
3 Crowley is going to vote against those federal
4 cuts that are going to exacerbate these cuts.
5 And I guarantee you that
6 Congressman Serrano is going to vote against
7 those federal cuts, because they're going to
8 have an impact on his Congressional district
9 and they'll probably have an impact on a
10 certain Senate district as well.
11 Senator Krueger, almost
12 $100 million in cuts in her area. If you want
13 to go down the list, Senator Craig Johnson,
14 almost $50 million collectively, newcomer to
15 the Senate here. I'm helping, I'm offering to
16 help. Not just the people in my district that
17 are going to suffer, I'll help your people.
18 Because your people are my people. And my
19 people are your people.
20 When it comes to healthcare, when
21 it comes to taking care of people that rely on
22 us, there are no districts, there are no
23 lines, there are no boundaries. There's only
24 a healthcare system that is being squeezed by
25 this proposal at a time when they're under
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1 incredible pressure to survive. There are
2 people who are devoted and dedicated and work
3 tirelessly in a frustrating industry where
4 people die, where people are chronically ill,
5 where there is sometimes very little reward
6 for what they do and for all the training they
7 have to go through and the blood, sweat and
8 tears that they put into it, whether it's our
9 hospitals or our nursing homes.
10 And it's not just the $12 million
11 in my district, it is the significant
12 squeezing of a system that cares for human
13 beings. It is unnecessary. It is
14 ill-advised. I am voting no on this the same
15 way I voted no on similar proposals in the
16 past and the same way that you people on the
17 other side of that train voted in previous
18 years as well.
19 I don't know what it will take to
20 make you understand that this isn't politics.
21 This is taking care of the people that rely on
22 us for their health and well-being. This is
23 taking care of an industry that desperately
24 needs our support to sustain it.
25 If you think that there's any
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1 chance at all that you can do something right,
2 then give yourself the option of voting no on
3 this bill.
4 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Morahan.
5 SENATOR MORAHAN: Thank you,
6 Mr. President.
7 I too stand in opposition to this
8 bill. I hadn't planned to speak today; there
9 was enough speakers. But as I heard the list
10 of the hospitals rolling off the tongues of
11 other speakers, and the cuts, I thought of how
12 personal this was to me and my family.
13 When I came back from the service
14 as a young kid, I think I was making a buck
15 and a half an hour, my wife was pregnant with
16 our first child, I had to go to a clinic in
17 Manhattan to have prenatal, to have postnatal
18 and a hospital stay of seven days for the
19 birth of my first daughter. I only had to pay
20 $165. Which was three or four weeks' pay, but
21 it was still a bargain. Somebody paid for
22 that, for Tom Morahan and his first child and
23 his wife.
24 In that same hospital, my mother
25 was a patient. Right across the street, in
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1 the Hospital for Special Surgery, my one
2 daughter had a brain operation. Another
3 daughter had her legs worked on. And that was
4 all through clinic activity. Otherwise, I
5 couldn't afford that sort of help.
6 And I look at the list here -- and
7 I'm not going to talk about my particular
8 district. Yes, my district takes over a
9 $10 million hit with the hospitals and nursing
10 homes.
11 But I want to talk a little bit
12 about Sloan-Kettering. It's taking a
13 $15 million hit. Ten years ago, I went down
14 there with not a whole lot of hope. I had
15 invasive cancer, had to be operated on, had to
16 be treated, chemo, the whole nine yards. Not
17 a very happy prospect. Last Thursday I was
18 down there for my tenth annual review since
19 that operation. Thank you, Sloan-Kettering.
20 I'm not going to vote to cut your hospital
21 funding $15 million.
22 My daughter Joan, the same one who
23 was treated in the Hospital for Special
24 Surgery, was treated in Sloan-Kettering for
25 breast cancer. She now is in recovery and
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1 remission.
2 I think about Senator Cousins and
3 the Westchester Medical Center, where people
4 work 48 hours straight to save the life of my
5 daughter Theresa. Unfortunately, they lost
6 the battle, but not for lack of will or
7 resource. Around the clock, 48 hours. A
8 20-hour operation.
9 So these are very personal feelings
10 I have that prompt me to speak tonight.
11 It's unconscionable to call cuts
12 reform. Are there reforms necessary? Yes.
13 One bill I put in last year would make the
14 HMOs do hospital reinvestment with the massive
15 profits they take out of the system, to go
16 after providers who may miscalculate, to put
17 in an IBM methodology that can check the
18 accuracy of billing. These are reforms, not
19 cuts.
20 So I think as it impacts on my
21 family -- and Bellevue Hospital, where my
22 father died. I'm a city kid, born in the
23 South Bronx, raised in the Bronx, lived in
24 Queens, moved to Rockland. But my heart and
25 my soul are and my family's life has been
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1 impacted so radically and so well by hospitals
2 in the metropolitan area that I could never
3 vote for these cuts. Didn't vote for them
4 last year, fought them last year, fought my
5 Governor, our Governor who was in place last
6 year.
7 And I'm not looking to pick a fight
8 with Governor Spitzer. I think his heart's in
9 the right place. Something has to be done.
10 Something has to change. But I have to tell
11 you, this isn't it. This is not the change.
12 We can't blame the providers, the
13 hospitals. The ones in my district, every
14 time I pick up a paper, they're virtually in
15 red. One hospital now is making a comeback.
16 We just allowed -- the state has just allowed
17 them to now put in open-heart surgery
18 facilities and that's in Good Sam in Suffern,
19 New York, so we can keep our patients in
20 New York, not in New Jersey.
21 So I think you really have to think
22 about this and not get swept up with the
23 reform mentality, because this truly isn't the
24 way to go for reform. This is cutting, and
25 it's going to wind up putting hospitals under
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1 greater pressure, less personnel.
2 I'm the sponsor of a bill that
3 prevents or would prevent a hospital mandating
4 overtime, making nurses work 16 hours a day
5 because they don't have enough nurses. People
6 dealing with our parents and our children and
7 our grandparents and our fathers and mothers
8 working 16 hours a day, potential for
9 mistakes. It's not right.
10 I'm asking you, let's just stand
11 here as an institution and say we're not going
12 to cut healthcare in the State of New York,
13 we're going to reform it. We'll work with the
14 Governor on true reform. We'll work to get
15 things done right.
16 But this -- while I was not
17 compelled to speak, I was as I heard the
18 numbers rolling out as a litany of cuts. And
19 knowing what these hospitals do for us, the
20 nursing homes, what they do for us. I think
21 I'm the only one in my family ready for that,
22 okay.
23 But I think we have to really be
24 reasonable and say these cuts really are out
25 of line. Let's send our message that this is
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1 not the way we want to reform, but we do want
2 to sit with the Governor, we do want to sit
3 with the Assembly and we do want to enact
4 reforms that are meaningful and will not cause
5 pain to our clients, to the patients and the
6 people who need our care.
7 Thank you, Mr. President.
8 THE PRESIDENT: Thank you,
9 Senator Morahan.
10 Senator Leibell.
11 SENATOR LEIBELL: Thank you,
12 Mr. President.
13 I rise in opposition. And we've
14 had quite an opportunity now to hear our
15 colleagues speak on this issue. And I have to
16 say that I find it to be especially
17 disappointing because we have joined together
18 across the aisle on this precise issue, on
19 these same types of numbers, over the last few
20 years.
21 And no one likes to disagree with a
22 governor from your own party. I have to say,
23 though, on this side of the aisle we got quite
24 used to that when it was necessary. It's not
25 easy. Governor Pataki was my constituent.
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1 It's not a pleasant thing to have to go
2 through. But you do it if you're in the right
3 and if you're convinced of your position.
4 Let me suggest to my colleagues
5 that there will be no more important issue
6 that we will be discussing during this budget
7 period and possibly during this session.
8 All of us, to see friends and
9 family as well as because we're legislators,
10 we go to hospitals all the time. I daresay
11 there's not one of us that isn't there on a
12 constant, repetitive basis. And when we walk
13 into our hospitals, whether in Queens or
14 Staten Island or in Buffalo, what is the one
15 thing you see? You see incredibly dedicated
16 professionals -- nurses, aides, doctors,
17 behind the scenes, the technicians,
18 administrators, who work 4/7, 365 days a year
19 under tremendous pressure.
20 When we go to those hospitals, we
21 see the workload they carry. Most difficult
22 jobs, tremendous pressure, terrible hours.
23 We have a tremendous healthcare
24 system despite that, but it's a very fragile
25 one. The numbers we are looking at here will
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1 break a number of those facilities. For all
2 of them it will mean reduced quality of care,
3 and that will ultimately translate into lost
4 lives.
5 Senator Adams made reference to all
6 of us taking a train ride. I'm going to
7 suggest to you that a more appropriate trip
8 would be in an ambulance. And when you take
9 that ambulance ride, will there be a hospital
10 open at the end of that ride? And if you do
11 find a hospital, what will that emergency room
12 be like?
13 I think all of us have received
14 various correspondence on this issue. I
15 pulled out one earlier today from the Health
16 Care Association of New York State. And they
17 refer in their letter to an already fragile
18 infrastructure, that hospitals in New York
19 State would lose $2.5 billion over the next
20 five years, that these proposals would
21 seriously damage our healthcare system.
22 I'll tell you, as aggressive a
23 lobbying as I have ever seen occurred last
24 year. As some of you may know, I represent a
25 lot of Westchester County. Well, I had the
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1 county executive and his chief of staff and
2 the county legislature practically camped out
3 in my office. And why were they there? To
4 save a critical facility -- not just for
5 Westchester County, but for the Hudson
6 Valley -- Westchester Medical Center. And we
7 were successful. And through your kind
8 support, that very important regional tertiary
9 medical center will receive $75 million over
10 the next five years.
11 I have to say I'm somewhat
12 surprised because those same local officials
13 that lobbied me so aggressively last year, I
14 haven't heard from them this year. But
15 Westchester Medical Center, under this
16 proposal, will lose over $9 million.
17 What was that effort all about?
18 Was that just an interesting exercise? We
19 give them 75, we take back 9. What was the
20 difference between then and now? Politics
21 changed. The Governor is different. That
22 hospital still needs to survive, and if it
23 doesn't, people will die.
24 This is a terrible piece of
25 legislation. It deserves our bipartisan
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1 rejection. It certainly has mine.
2 Thank you, Mr. President.
3 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Nozzolio.
4 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Thank you,
5 Mr. President.
6 I am compelled to rise in
7 opposition of this measure, but do so with
8 great pride in the discussion that we saw and
9 heard before us this afternoon. Each of my
10 colleagues who have spoken so eloquently about
11 this policy change that would be devastating
12 to our state and nation is to be
13 congratulated.
14 The eloquence of particularly Tom
15 Morahan, who talked about what the essence of
16 this debate really is. It's not about
17 hospitals, it's not about nursing homes, it's
18 not about dollars to healthcare. What it is
19 first and last about, it's about the patients
20 of this state, those who need care. Those who
21 need to be in nursing facilities, those who
22 need physician treatment, those who must get
23 care in an emergency room.
24 This is about patients, not about
25 dollars. And I'm very proud of my colleagues
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1 who stood tall to discuss their concerns, to
2 tell us what drove them to rise up against
3 this measure.
4 What's troubling me is the attitude
5 that there is enough in this healthcare system
6 to take care of us even if this measure was
7 enacted.
8 My colleagues, I was born in a
9 hospital that no longer exists. The hospital
10 in the neighboring community was forced to
11 close. Down the road in the next county,
12 another hospital just recently had a similar
13 fate. Three hospitals in the Central Finger
14 Lakes, closed. What this measure would do was
15 to close more facilities in my region.
16 There's no question about it.
17 Auburn Memorial Hospital has
18 galvanized the community in support of them.
19 They've had some rocky times, but the
20 community has risen up and supported the
21 facility, done great things and is planning to
22 do more things to ensure the stability of
23 healthcare in the Eastern Finger Lakes. This
24 proposal hurts that effort.
25 And with Geneva and Clifton Springs
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1 just down the road, those facilities will be
2 significantly damaged by this proposal.
3 That's why I must oppose it.
4 There were, a week ago, 60 who
5 traveled from the Finger Lakes and came to
6 Albany just to discuss this issue. They got
7 up at 3:00 a.m. in the morning to be here, to
8 be part of the deliberations and to advise
9 their Senator and their Assemblyman and
10 whoever else would listen that this facility
11 was at risk and that they were striving to
12 provide patient care but could not do so if
13 this proposal went into effect.
14 I pledged to them that I would
15 fight for their concerns, because their
16 concerns are the concerns of all people. To
17 have a facility, a hospital, an emergency room
18 when you fall down and break a leg, when you
19 have a heart attack, when you're in danger of
20 a stroke, that you don't have to travel hours
21 and hours to find the closest facility and
22 hopefully get care there in our cities.
23 And as Senator Alesi and Senator
24 Robach said, even those facilities in
25 Rochester are at risk by this proposal. So
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1 that our entire region, our entire region,
2 from Syracuse to west of Rochester, is at risk
3 by this proposal.
4 I'd also like to say,
5 parenthetically, there's been a lot of
6 publicity about the upstate economy. And this
7 proposal is not about jobs directly. But
8 certainly how can we revitalize the upstate
9 economy, what business, what industry in their
10 right mind would come to an area that has no
11 healthcare?
12 How could we convince a business to
13 locate in upstate New York? And there's a lot
14 of attention being given -- we have an upstate
15 economic developer now, something that we did
16 not have before. But how can that developer
17 bring jobs to the Finger Lakes region, to
18 Western New York, to upstate New York if there
19 are no healthcare facilities to service the
20 workers who are who are going to live there
21 and work there? No business would make such a
22 move without adequate healthcare. And in
23 fact, we are at further risk if this proposal
24 goes into effect.
25 Lastly, my colleagues, I want to
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1 mention the Mercy Health and Rehabilitation
2 Center in Auburn, New York. That facility
3 loses $778,000 in this proposal. Now, those
4 numbers are small compared to those big
5 hospitals in New York City and those big
6 teaching facilities in particular in our
7 state. But $778,000 taken out of the budget
8 of the nursing facility in the city of Auburn
9 that for years has provided care.
10 I'll never forget my visit there
11 last fall when we helped them with some
12 financial assistance. And one of the
13 volunteer receptionists, who herself is
14 eighty -- well, she wouldn't like me to say
15 this, but she's 85 years old, she told me very
16 clearly: "Don't let this facility close."
17 She's giving her heart and soul into making
18 sure that those older and than her and more
19 infirm than her have a place to be cared for.
20 Mercy Rehab will close if this
21 proposal, which takes $778,000 away from them,
22 is enacted. I can't stand for that.
23 That's why I'm so proud of my
24 colleagues for standing tall in opposition to
25 this proposal. We'll oppose this and move on
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1 and negotiate a good budget, a budget that
2 will provide care and provide reform in many
3 of the areas we seek reform and have been
4 fighting for reform for many, many years.
5 But closing Mercy Rehab isn't
6 reform. That's why I oppose this measure.
7 Thank you, Mr. President.
8 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Winner.
9 SENATOR WINNER: Thank you,
10 Mr. President. Very briefly.
11 I think that one point that has not
12 really been addressed in this debate is really
13 a very, very important point when it comes to
14 some of the hospitals and nursing homes and
15 others in the upstate region. And certainly
16 the type of hospital in an area such as mine
17 is such a significant fabric of the community.
18 But one thing that's been
19 overlooked is what kind of a message does this
20 send to -- you know, when I grew up and raised
21 my three daughters in elementary school in
22 Elmira, one of the big things that we used to
23 do was we used to have this event every year
24 where the kids would come to an auditorium and
25 they'd do what's known as the Children's
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1 Miracle Network and raise money for the
2 neonatal intensive care unit at the Arnot
3 Ogden Memorial Hospital.
4 And that event was one of the
5 significant events that brought together
6 families that were all dedicated to the
7 principle that we need to ensure that there's
8 quality healthcare, particularly neonatal
9 intensive care quality, provided to that
10 community to make sure that there was the
11 necessary equipment and make sure that we had
12 a good quality healthcare particularly for
13 those young families.
14 You know, and what kind of a
15 message does this send when those kids and
16 those families and those philanthropic efforts
17 are trying to get together to raise a few
18 thousand dollars and put in all that effort
19 into a charitable, philanthropic effort and
20 then the Governor goes ahead and whacks
21 $894,000 out of the pockets of the Arnot Ogden
22 Hospital?
23 What kind of a message does that
24 send to everybody who is out there trying to
25 solicit money, providing volunteer efforts to
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1 try to support those types of facilities, when
2 he goes in front of a group and insults every
3 one of the CEOs and the other administrators
4 and managers of these things, calling them big
5 bad institutional healthcare providers who are
6 somehow evil and taking advantage of the
7 citizens of the State of New York?
8 What kind of a message does that
9 send to those of you who are doing all that
10 kind of charitable, philanthropic efforts to
11 try to support your community, support your
12 community hospital or support your other
13 institutional healthcare providers in your
14 community which have always been the fabric
15 and the backbone of our neighborhoods,
16 particularly in upstate New York?
17 I think that's a pretty lousy
18 message to send. And I think it's pretty
19 lousy to talk about demeaning all of the
20 charitable and philanthropic efforts that are
21 being done by those individuals in trying to
22 support those institutions.
23 That's why this proposal is also so
24 completely outrageous, is because it insults
25 all the hardworking men and women out there
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1 that are trying to do their efforts to try to
2 support these healthcare institutions, because
3 they know that they're essential to the fabric
4 of their communities.
5 You know, I listened to Senator
6 Smith, your leader, indicate that, you know,
7 if you vote against this bill you're voting
8 against this, you're voting against aides,
9 you're voting against community health
10 facilities, you're voting against whatever
11 you're voting against, a whole laundry list of
12 things that you're going to be voting against
13 if in fact you vote against this bill.
14 But let me tell you what you're
15 voting against if you vote for this bill. You
16 are definitely voting to cut hundreds of
17 millions of dollars out of your hospitals,
18 you're voting to cut hundreds of millions of
19 dollars out of your nursing home facilities.
20 Because that's what you're voting for.
21 And you can't get away from it,
22 because if you use our own logic from your own
23 leader, that's what he said. And there he set
24 the framework, he said what you were going to
25 do by voting no, but we know what you're going
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1 to do by voting yes.
2 Let's defeat this bill.
3 THE PRESIDENT: Are there any
4 other Senators wishing to be heard?
5 The debate is closed.
6 The Secretary will ring the bell.
7 Read the last section.
8 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
9 act shall take effect immediately.
10 (Shouts of "Slow roll call.")
11 THE PRESIDENT: A slow roll call
12 has been requested. There are five members
13 standing. The Secretary will call the roll
14 slowly.
15 May we have some order in the
16 house.
17 The Secretary will call the roll
18 slowly.
19 THE SECRETARY: Senator Adams.
20 SENATOR ADAMS: Yes.
21 THE SECRETARY: Senator Alesi.
22 SENATOR ALESI: To explain my
23 vote.
24 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Alesi, to
25 explain his vote.
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1 SENATOR ALESI: Thank you,
2 Mr. President.
3 Very briefly. I think I've made my
4 position very well known, and I can speak to
5 this with the same degree of passion; however,
6 much more briefly.
7 It really comes down to this. When
8 we're taking this vote, we are rejecting a
9 proposal to devastate the healthcare industry
10 in this state. And that kind of devastation
11 visits itself not only on the jobs and the
12 efforts of those people involved in this
13 industry, it also devastates those people who
14 depend so much on healthcare at their most
15 vulnerable hour.
16 I spoke to this in my comments. I
17 would also like to remind my constituents that
18 when I said I am voting no not just for my
19 district, I'm voting no for everybody in this
20 state, I'm voting no for the cuts in your
21 districts regardless of where it is.
22 I mentioned some of my colleagues I
23 could go upstate on the Thruway -- I could
24 talk about Senator Valesky's district, which
25 is very similar to mine. It has a university,
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1 it has a hospital, it has all of the same
2 things that I talked about earlier. When I
3 vote no, I'm voting no for cuts against his
4 people and your people and your people and my
5 people and our people.
6 Summarized, this cannot be
7 political vote. This has to be a vote for
8 healthcare and for the vulnerable people in
9 our state. I vote no.
10 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Alesi
11 will be recorded in the negative.
12 The Secretary will continue the
13 roll.
14 THE SECRETARY: Senator Bonacic.
15 SENATOR BONACIC: No.
16 THE SECRETARY: Senator Breslin.
17 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Breslin,
18 to explain his vote.
19 SENATOR BRESLIN: Thank you,
20 Mr. President.
21 When Senator Morahan said that the
22 Governor's heart is in the right place, I
23 applaud that. Because the Governor has looked
24 at our healthcare system, and the Governor has
25 concluded it's broken.
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1 And many of us on the other side of
2 the aisle talked about prenatal care and how
3 good it is. Yet in New York City, we have one
4 of the highest infant mortality rates in the
5 civilized world. Monies are being rearranged
6 to make sure that improves.
7 When we look at the state, we look
8 at obesity among the young; again, one of the
9 highest rates in the civilized world. This
10 Governor has added additional funds in that
11 area.
12 We look at cancer screening, we
13 look at juvenile diabetes. This Governor is
14 placing money for preventive care, preventive
15 care and continuing care.
16 And he's breaking the old status
17 quo, the old status quo of entrenched unions,
18 albeit particularly one, and the hospitals.
19 We have to look for a new dynamic of care.
20 Will we be back in negotiating to
21 help and assist the hospitals, ones in my
22 district, the nursing homes? Yes, we will.
23 But this Governor has caused this debate, and
24 this debate is very, very necessary.
25 And it's very, very necessary to
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1 change the way we do business in New York
2 State to help our young, to help our elderly,
3 to make sure that a lot of our -- and both my
4 mother and father were in nursing homes. And
5 a lot of the chronic conditions you see in
6 nursing homes, if there was an early method to
7 prevent them, those conditions wouldn't exist.
8 So for that reason and many others,
9 I vote aye.
10 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Breslin
11 will be recorded in the affirmative.
12 The Secretary will continue the
13 roll.
14 THE SECRETARY: Senator Bruno.
15 SENATOR BRUNO: No.
16 THE SECRETARY: Senator Connor.
17 SENATOR CONNOR: Aye.
18 THE SECRETARY: Senator
19 DeFrancisco.
20 SENATOR DeFRANCISCO: No.
21 THE SECRETARY: Senator Diaz.
22 SENATOR DIAZ: Aye.
23 THE SECRETARY: Senator Dilan.
24 SENATOR DILAN: Aye.
25 THE SECRETARY: Senator Duane.
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1 SENATOR DUANE: Yes.
2 THE SECRETARY: Senator Farley.
3 SENATOR FARLEY: No.
4 THE SECRETARY: Senator Flanagan.
5 SENATOR FLANAGAN: No.
6 THE SECRETARY: Senator
7 Fuschillo.
8 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: Mr.
9 President, just briefly to explain my vote.
10 THE PRESIDENT: Senator
11 Fuschillo, to explain his vote.
12 SENATOR FUSCHILLO: I'll be
13 voting in the negative.
14 I've heard a lot of interesting
15 comments today. Senator Adams, yours is the
16 best. "Trickology," never heard that word
17 before in my life.
18 Last week in the Senate Health
19 Committee, the president of Montefiore Medical
20 Center was there and he was giving a 45-minute
21 PowerPoint presentation about information
22 technology and how they're trying to survive,
23 how they're communicating with their
24 outpatient clinics and other healthcare
25 facilities. Terrific presentation.
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1 At the end, the president said that
2 he's known Governor Spitzer for so many years,
3 he's a personal friend, he's a professional
4 friend, he considers him a very close friend.
5 But he said to him: "If you want to take
6 $15 million out of my hospital, fine. Give me
7 the reforms to show me how to save that
8 $15 million."
9 I would agree with the $6 million
10 in cuts to nursing homes and hospitals in my
11 districts if the reforms were real.
12 Senator Smith, you spoke and you
13 said we are saying to the people of
14 New York -- and I wrote it down, because I
15 didn't want to misquote you -- we get your
16 message.
17 This isn't the message. These
18 hospitals, these healthcare facilities, the
19 healthcare industry in New York State is on
20 life support. We're tripping over the plug
21 now with the Governor's budget. We're pulling
22 it out. We're stopping it.
23 Senator Maziarz talks about a half
24 a million dollars in a nursing home, that if a
25 patient pushes a button, somebody may not
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1 come. I have a nursing home that's losing
2 $601,000. It's a small building. Senator
3 Maziarz, if they push that button, there's
4 going to be nobody even at the desk.
5 Senator Leibell talked about this
6 is going to cause deaths. You talked about
7 when heart attack victims come to the
8 hospital, who's going to be there? You talked
9 about driving in an ambulance. I wonder who's
10 going to be driving the ambulance.
11 I like the fact that, Senator
12 Breslin, you said the debate is necessary.
13 Because it is necessary. And if the Governor
14 did anything right today, he's heightened our
15 awareness of this issue.
16 But he's done it in the wrong way.
17 I vote no.
18 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Fuschillo
19 will be recorded in the negative.
20 The Secretary will continue the
21 roll call.
22 THE SECRETARY: Senator Golden.
23 SENATOR GOLDEN: No.
24 THE SECRETARY: Senator Gonzalez.
25 SENATOR GONZALEZ: Yes.
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1 THE SECRETARY: Senator Griffo.
2 SENATOR GRIFFO: To explain my
3 rote.
4 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Griffo,
5 to explain his vote.
6 SENATOR GRIFFO: These cuts are
7 dramatic and drastic. They will have such an
8 impact on all of our communities. Physician
9 retention and recruitment will be compromised,
10 the delivery of critical health services
11 impugned, and access and availability to
12 quality healthcare facilities jeopardized.
13 So I don't see this as reform, I
14 see this as risky business. I vote no.
15 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Griffo
16 will be recorded in the negative.
17 The Secretary will read.
18 THE SECRETARY: Senator Hannon.
19 SENATOR HANNON: I'd like to
20 explain my vote.
21 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Hannon,
22 to explain his vote.
23 SENATOR HANNON: Unfortunately,
24 there are members of the Democratic side of
25 this house that are voting yes for this budget
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1 under the impression that there are things in
2 the Governor's proposed bill that are not
3 there.
4 Now, this is a proposed bill that
5 was originally submitted at the end of
6 January, amended by the Governor, as is his
7 right under the Constitution. But it does not
8 have healthcare reform in it. Tax increase is
9 not healthcare reform.
10 There is no increases for primary
11 care, there is nothing to ensure there will be
12 enough doctors, there is nothing to expand
13 community-based long-term care, there's
14 nothing to provide for the training of
15 hospital or nursing home workers. There's
16 nothing to specifically focus on helping kids
17 except $11 million for 32,000 kids. That's
18 hardly covering every kid in this state.
19 Basically, there's nothing to help
20 employer-based health insurance on a broad
21 base. There's no patients first. It's just
22 not there.
23 And this is the Governor's own
24 proposal. The rhetoric has been great, and
25 the press releases. It's not in the bill.
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1 I vote no.
2 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Hannon
3 will be recorded in the negative.
4 The Secretary will continue the
5 roll.
6 THE SECRETARY: Senator
7 Hassell-Thompson.
8 SENATOR HASSELL-THOMPSON: No --
9 yes.
10 (Laughter.)
11 SENATOR ROBACH: You were right
12 the first time.
13 SENATOR HASSELL-THOMPSON: Yeah.
14 No, Joe, I was not right the first time.
15 THE PRESIDENT: Senator
16 Hassell-Thompson, to explain her vote.
17 SENATOR HASSELL-THOMPSON: Whew.
18 I'll tell you. I'll tell you. That tells you
19 what the atmosphere in this place will do to
20 you if you blink.
21 Mr. President, I rise to vote in
22 support of this budget, primarily because I
23 understand very clearly, very clearly, that if
24 we do not support this budget several of the
25 main things that I came to this Senate
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1 chambers to support will be lost.
2 Five million dollars that would
3 have expanded access to cervical cancer
4 vaccines will be lost. Five million dollars
5 for public education, mammographies, rectal
6 screening, infection control, prenatal care
7 and green cleaning products. Three million
8 that would have prevented childhood lead
9 poisoning, high in my districts. Two million
10 for obesity prevention, which you have heard
11 me talk about on this floor. One-point-one
12 million for breast and ovarian cancer
13 screening, for which I have stood here and
14 asked and begging for support for. And
15 $250,000 -- though it is not enough, but it is
16 a start -- for diabetes centers for
17 excellence.
18 I will not vote against this
19 budget. I will not take the risk that these
20 things that I have fought for will be lost.
21 Thank you, Mr. President.
22 THE PRESIDENT: Senator
23 Hassell-Thompson will be recorded in the
24 affirmative.
25 The Secretary will continue the
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1 roll.
2 THE SECRETARY: Senator Huntley.
3 SENATOR HUNTLEY: Yes.
4 THE SECRETARY: Senator C.
5 Johnson.
6 SENATOR CRAIG JOHNSON: Yes.
7 THE SECRETARY: Senator O.
8 Johnson.
9 SENATOR JOHNSON: I'd like to
10 explain my vote.
11 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Johnson,
12 to explain his vote.
13 SENATOR JOHNSON: It's pretty
14 simple, actually. We have hospitals, one of
15 my hospitals, Good Samaritan, is losing
16 $2.5 million; another one is losing
17 three-quarters of a million. I have seven
18 nursing homes; they're losing an average of a
19 million dollars each. They were running in
20 the red last year. This year, I hate to see
21 what they'll do.
22 And you know the service will be
23 diminished, they will suffer, people will not
24 have the services they need. Right now in the
25 emergency room you have to wait maybe two,
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1 three, four hours sometimes to get taken care
2 of. We can't diminish those services any
3 more.
4 So for many good reasons which have
5 been stated by all of my colleagues here,
6 these cuts are dangerous and we can't tolerate
7 them. I vote no.
8 THE PRESIDENT: Senator O.
9 Johnson will be recorded in the negative.
10 The Secretary will continue.
11 THE SECRETARY: Senator Klein.
12 SENATOR KLEIN: Yes.
13 THE SECRETARY: Senator L.
14 Krueger.
15 SENATOR LIZ KRUEGER: To explain
16 my vote.
17 THE PRESIDENT: Senator L.
18 Krueger, to explain her vote.
19 SENATOR LIZ KRUEGER: Well, we've
20 heard a lot of rhetoric. And I've heard
21 several of my colleagues explain that they
22 agree with me our healthcare system is broken,
23 it doesn't work, it's on life support. And
24 they argue that the Governor's bill will do
25 greater harm.
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1 But I don't see coming out of this
2 chamber in the years that I've been here, or
3 the years that I've been following what goes
4 on here, any real proposals to restructure or
5 refocus a broken system. And I see that in
6 Governor Spitzer's bill. I see that he's
7 attempting to shift us to a system of expanded
8 preventive care, to primary care, to
9 community-based healthcare.
10 And I hope that as we go through
11 negotiations we win back some of the fights,
12 some of the losses, and we push even further.
13 Because I would argue that to fix our broken
14 system we need to move more dramatically
15 towards universal single-payer, because our
16 system is not getting better on its own. And
17 the newest reports show we're spending
18 31 percent of our healthcare dollars on the
19 administration of our healthcare system.
20 And our decisions can't be made
21 here on who sends mailings into our district.
22 And in fact, today I've listened to people say
23 my district loses from $60 million to
24 $77 million to $100 million. And it's true I
25 represent the largest hospitals in New York
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1 City. But they take the same 1 percent hit as
2 all of yours in this budget; I just have
3 bigger hospitals. And so, you're right, a
4 bigger explanation to make at home.
5 And of course I hate that we don't
6 have enough money for everyone's healthcare
7 needs. But continuing the status quo isn't
8 going to move us towards a better system where
9 poor New Yorkers don't get equal access to
10 healthcare, where HMOs and insurance companies
11 continue to pocket billions of dollars while
12 my colleagues on the other side of the aisle
13 here have refused to pass any legislation to
14 rein in insurance companies but have offered
15 "Freedom Health Plans" which free insurance
16 companies from having to pay out benefits for
17 sick people.
18 And yes, it is outrageous that
19 people have to wait in emergency rooms for
20 hours. But in my vision for improved
21 healthcare in the State of New York, people
22 get healthcare before they end up in an
23 emergency room. And people get to stay in
24 their community and their homes as long as
25 they can instead of being moved into nursing
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1 homes. And mentally ill people don't get
2 trapped in nursing homes because there's no
3 community-based services.
4 And so under the budget that you
5 are saying no to, we would have actually had
6 money, or we will have money to expand
7 community-based housing for the mentally ill
8 and community-based healthcare --
9 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Krueger,
10 the two-minute explanation period has expired.
11 SENATOR LIZ KRUEGER: Thank you,
12 Mr. President.
13 And just in closing, with the
14 proposals that I hear coming out -- but not in
15 bill form, only in resolution -- many of the
16 other important changes the Governor wants to
17 make in healthcare also won't go forward.
18 So I'll vote aye, Mr. President.
19 Thank you.
20 THE PRESIDENT: Senator L.
21 Krueger will be recorded in the affirmative.
22 The Secretary will continue the
23 roll.
24 THE SECRETARY: Senator C.
25 Kruger.
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1 SENATOR CARL KRUGER: Grudgingly,
2 yes.
3 THE SECRETARY: Senator Lanza.
4 SENATOR LANZA: No.
5 THE SECRETARY: Senator Larkin.
6 SENATOR LARKIN: Mr. President,
7 to explain my vote.
8 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Larkin,
9 to explain his vote.
10 SENATOR LARKIN: For about three
11 hours and 20 minutes now we've been listening
12 to this great big debate about healthcare.
13 Why don't you just go home tonight and take a
14 look at your district and explain to them that
15 you want a budget that cuts $1.3 billion out
16 of healthcare?
17 On Saturday I met with nursing
18 homes. Some of the people don't live in my
19 district, but their parents do. And they were
20 told, yes, we'll provide that service, but
21 it's going to be $7,500 more, or whatever it
22 might be for them. And the first thing they
23 said was, "What the hell are you going to do
24 to stop it?"
25 This man looked at me, he had the
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1 Distinguished Service Cross from Vietnam. And
2 he said, "You see this? I fought for freedom.
3 I fought that you as a legislature could go to
4 Albany or go to Washington and you would fight
5 for our families, like I did to protect your
6 hindsight 30 some years ago."
7 I'm ashamed of us. I remember the
8 last 12 years on this side of the aisle: Oh,
9 you're not spending enough, you're not
10 spending enough, you don't care about the
11 people.
12 What happened? We got a new
13 Governor and we got a shining tower and
14 everything is okay. Well, it isn't. And you
15 should be ashamed of yourself.
16 And I know you, and I know in your
17 heart that's not what you believe. But when
18 you start to talk about cuts, less service,
19 patients first -- and the media is giving you
20 all the glory, and the Governor walks on
21 water.
22 We have an incident in Washington,
23 D.C., called Walter Reed. One building and
24 everybody wants to fire and cut everybody
25 apart. But here we're talking about taking
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1 $1.3 billion and getting rid of it, but we're
2 not saying how we're going to take care of
3 those patients that are still there.
4 Now I heard someone say, "Yeah,
5 when we get to the next phase, we'll
6 straighten it all out." Do you have an
7 agreement with the second floor or the
8 Assembly? No, you have nothing.
9 What we're saying is that you have
10 an opportunity to say we want to straighten it
11 out. And the best way to straighten it out is
12 to vote no.
13 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Larkin
14 will be recorded in the negative.
15 The Secretary will read.
16 THE SECRETARY: Senator LaValle.
17 SENATOR LaVALLE: No.
18 THE SECRETARY: Senator Leibell.
19 SENATOR LEIBELL: No.
20 THE SECRETARY: Senator Libous.
21 SENATOR LIBOUS: No.
22 THE SECRETARY: Senator Little.
23 SENATOR LITTLE: No.
24 THE SECRETARY: Senator Maltese.
25 SENATOR MALTESE: No.
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1 THE SECRETARY: Senator
2 Marcellino.
3 SENATOR MARCELLINO: No.
4 THE SECRETARY: Senator Maziarz.
5 SENATOR MAZIARZ: No.
6 THE SECRETARY: Senator
7 Montgomery.
8 THE PRESIDENT: Senator
9 Montgomery, to explain her vote.
10 SENATOR MONTGOMERY: Yes,
11 Mr. President, to explain my vote.
12 Mr. President, I smell a rat. Now,
13 this is very strange to me that this bill was
14 put on the floor by none other than the
15 illustrious Majority Leader, and now all of
16 his members are voting against him, his bill.
17 And furthermore, they're all blasting us
18 because we are voting for it. Now, that's
19 strange to me.
20 But let me just say this is not the
21 final bill. I am sure that there are many
22 more hours, Mr. Majority Leader, as your
23 members vote against you -- there are many
24 more hours that we are going to be negotiating
25 on this issue.
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1 So we're not really voting for or
2 against the Governor's bill, we're voting --
3 this is at least I'm voting for the idea that
4 the Governor has put forward as it relates to
5 what is going to happen to healthcare delivery
6 in the state of New York.
7 He is upon on a mission to, as he
8 says, change the paradigm. That's all this is
9 about. So we have to figure out how do we get
10 to the right point in the right way. That
11 won't be resolved based on our vote for or
12 against this legislation. That has to be
13 negotiated out. I understand that.
14 But what I am voting for, what I'm
15 voting yes for, is I like the idea that the
16 Governor would like to see patients considered
17 the priority as it relates to our healthcare
18 delivery system. I had people, women sit in
19 front of me today from a community healthcare
20 center where they are cancer survivors, and
21 that center means all life to them. Should I
22 be concerned about us having more
23 opportunities for that kind of healthcare? I
24 think yes. I owe that to my constituents.
25 I thank you for looking out --
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1 Senator Alesi was looking out for my people.
2 I thank him for that. But I am too. I'm
3 looking out for all of the people that need
4 healthcare services, from the very young to
5 the very old in my district.
6 So I'm on the side of the Governor.
7 Let's change the paradigm. That's a good
8 thing.
9 And please, I don't know why your
10 members are voting against you. But I'm
11 voting yes for this bill.
12 SENATOR BRUNO: Mr. President.
13 THE PRESIDENT: Senator
14 Montgomery will be recorded in the negative.
15 Senator Bruno -- I'm sorry, Senator Montgomery
16 will be recorded in the affirmative.
17 Senator Bruno.
18 SENATOR BRUNO: Point of personal
19 privilege, Mr. President.
20 I believe -- Senator Montgomery, I
21 respectfully correct you. This is not my
22 bill. This is Governor Spitzer's program bill
23 as part of the budget.
24 And I guess smelling a rat is
25 better than being one. Thank you,
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1 Mr. President.
2 (Laughter, jeers.)
3 THE PRESIDENT: The Secretary
4 will continue the roll call.
5 THE SECRETARY: Senator Morahan.
6 SENATOR MORAHAN: No.
7 THE SECRETARY: Senator Nozzolio.
8 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: No.
9 THE SECRETARY: Senator Onorato.
10 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Onorato,
11 to explain his vote.
12 SENATOR ONORATO: Thank you,
13 Mr. President.
14 I rise -- I've been in the Senate
15 now for 23 years, and I'm coming up against a
16 first. I think this is the first time I've
17 ever seen the Majority put out a bill to
18 defeat. They've always put the bill out they
19 wanted to pass.
20 And I don't think that this is
21 proper, because first of all, we haven't gone
22 through the committees to negotiate. As
23 everyone in this room knows, this particular
24 bill is not going to stand as it has. It has
25 never, since I've been in the Senate, and
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1 neither has any of you -- if it does, I'll
2 take each and every one of you out to lunch
3 and campaign for you in your campaign for
4 reelection.
5 (Laughter.)
6 SENATOR ONORATO: And for that
7 reason, I'm voting in favor of this bill, to
8 give the joint legislative committees the
9 opportunity to revise it. I vote yes.
10 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Onorato
11 will be recorded in the affirmative.
12 The Secretary will read the roll
13 call.
14 THE SECRETARY: Senator
15 Oppenheimer.
16 SENATOR OPPENHEIMER: "Er."
17 Oppenheim-er.
18 (Laughter.)
19 THE PRESIDENT: Senator
20 Oppenheim-er, to explain her vote.
21 SENATOR OPPENHEIMER: I thought
22 you just said Oppenheim. All right, we're all
23 getting a little punchy, right?
24 What did I want to say before I
25 distracted myself?
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1 I am going to vote yes. And
2 actually, there's a couple of things I want to
3 say.
4 One is that last year I think the
5 cost of the Medicaid came somewhere to -- I'm
6 not exactly sure, but it was at 48 billion,
7 49 billion. And I said, Well, if it keeps
8 growing this way, we can forget about doing
9 anything else in the State of New York,
10 because now it's approaching half of our
11 entire budget.
12 So I'm glad we're doing something.
13 And we may not be doing something together,
14 but we will be talking and that's important.
15 The paradigm that has to be changed
16 is something that Velmanette Montgomery and
17 myself, we have been talking about till we're
18 blue in the face, which is we have to do
19 preventive medicine in this state. She talks
20 all the time about school-based healthcare,
21 and she's so right. And I speak a lot about
22 community-based family healthcare.
23 And you probably had people from
24 your districts up today. You've heard me talk
25 a lot about my Open Door, which has five
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1 different -- four centers in my Senate
2 district. And they provide the most
3 remarkable care, preventive care. The
4 children come there, they have the best
5 doctors, the parents are there, everything is
6 in place, and they're right smack in the
7 center of the area that needs the most, the
8 downtown inner cities.
9 And we must do this, because
10 otherwise we're not getting at the core of the
11 problem. And if we learn prevention, we will
12 not have the obesity and we will not have the
13 inactive children and we will have children
14 who are learning to read at much younger ages,
15 because we put that into our community-based
16 health centers. So that they walk around with
17 books when they're 6 months old -- well, they
18 don't walk. At one year, they walk around
19 hanging onto the books that they get in our
20 community centers.
21 So I think we have to have this
22 conversation. We know we will, because the
23 subcommittee on health will be meeting soon on
24 the budget. And we will be talking about
25 these things, and we will -- we know it will
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1 be changed. We know what we have now is not
2 what will be, and we have to work it through
3 together in the subcommittees.
4 I'll be voting yes.
5 THE PRESIDENT: Senator
6 Oppenheimer will be recorded in the
7 affirmative.
8 The Secretary will continue the
9 roll.
10 THE SECRETARY: Senator Padavan.
11 SENATOR PADAVAN: No.
12 THE SECRETARY: Senator Parker.
13 SENATOR PARKER: Aye.
14 THE SECRETARY: Senator Perkins.
15 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Perkins,
16 to explain his vote.
17 SENATOR PERKINS: I want to vote
18 no to the past, which has been one in which we
19 spent more and more money. And as someone
20 said, you should be getting more and more
21 service.
22 Frankly, in my district, which
23 happens to be one where we have perhaps the
24 second-most cuts in dollars and cents, we also
25 have some of the highest rates of infant
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1 mortality, HIV/AIDS. I'm a colon cancer
2 survivor. Mortality amongst black men, higher
3 than any other community in the city.
4 So I want to vote yes to the new
5 paradigm, the new paradigm that was presented
6 by the Governor that would maybe spend less
7 but probably provide more service, more
8 responsiveness to primary care, more
9 responsiveness to chronic care, chronic
10 illnesses, more responsiveness to preventive
11 measures.
12 And also, as you may know, I've had
13 the opportunity to do a lot of work around
14 lead, especially in New York City. And I
15 notice that we have a pretty bad lead problem
16 throughout the state. We're going to do
17 something about that too. And I'm glad to see
18 the Governor is being responsive to that
19 crisis.
20 And I know that we've had a problem
21 of high infant mortality in my district, and I
22 see there's money available to deal with
23 issues of that nature. And I know that
24 there's money available to deal with problems
25 of colon cancer, which is another serious
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1 problem.
2 So I know that there's been a lot
3 of love expressed by the other side for the
4 concerns of those of us who are in chronic
5 situations, and I appreciate that. And I look
6 forward to the next step in this budget dance,
7 in which we will hopefully begin to negotiate
8 more seriously.
9 Someone from Brooklyn called it
10 trickology. Where I come from, we call it
11 "politricks." Somebody said they smell a rat.
12 I don't know, but I know politricks when I see
13 it and when I hear it.
14 And I think Senator Onorato sort of
15 described it in terms of the Majority Leader
16 bringing out one bill and his members voting
17 against it. So --
18 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Perkins,
19 you've exceeded the time limit.
20 SENATOR PERKINS: In conclusion,
21 I just want to say that we have a long way to
22 go, this is very, very important legislation,
23 a very, very important budget. We need to
24 take it very serious. There's great illness
25 out there, and there's great hue and cry out
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1 there from a lot of sectors of our
2 communities. And we need to make sure that we
3 do this right, that we do this dance in a way
4 that is respectful --
5 THE PRESIDENT: Senator
6 Perkins --
7 SENATOR PERKINS: -- of the
8 seriousness of the problem. Thank you.
9 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Perkins,
10 how do you vote?
11 SENATOR PERKINS: I vote yes.
12 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Perkins
13 will be recorded in the affirmative.
14 The Secretary will continue the
15 roll.
16 THE SECRETARY: Senator Rath.
17 SENATOR RATH: No.
18 THE SECRETARY: Senator Robach.
19 SENATOR ROBACH: No.
20 THE SECRETARY: Senator Sabini.
21 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Sabini,
22 to explain his vote.
23 SENATOR SABINI: Thank you,
24 Mr. President.
25 Rather than a rat, I see this as a
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1 red herring. I don't see why this was brought
2 to the house in this manner. I agree with
3 Senator Onorato, this is a way of doing
4 business that -- I guess maybe I'll put the
5 best spin on it and say I hope it's in the
6 spirit of reform. We see a lot of Governor's
7 program bills come out without debate and that
8 we get to vote up and down based on the
9 merits. Because we haven't seen that yet.
10 And I hope maybe that's the shape of things to
11 come.
12 And I'm delighted that so many
13 folks from upstate and the suburbs are so
14 concerned about all the needs in our
15 districts. I didn't hear anyone mention my
16 district. Because actually, if I want to be
17 parochial, the hospital in my district does
18 very well under this budget. But that's not
19 why I'm voting in the affirmative.
20 I'm voting in the affirmative
21 because I, along with other speakers before
22 me, believe that this is not the last we've
23 heard of this. This is an attempt to get
24 people to get on the record in a way that I
25 think is rather sad to try and reduce our
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1 state government to this level. Because it is
2 political, let's be honest about it. You know
3 it, I know it, we all know it.
4 So I'll be voting in the
5 affirmative with the knowledge -- not the
6 hope, with the knowledge -- that the Governor
7 and folks in our conference and hopefully
8 folks, from what I hear, in the other
9 conference really want to achieve quality,
10 sound healthcare and to protect the jobs of
11 New Yorkers as best we can with the resources
12 we have. I'm for that. I suspect you're for
13 that. I know the Governor's for that.
14 And I want to see those jobs
15 protected too. And I want to see those
16 institutions protected too. And I want to see
17 the nursing homes protected too. And I
18 believe there's a way to get that, and that's
19 through the conference committee.
20 But in the manner in which this was
21 proposed, I'll be voting in the affirmative.
22 Thank you.
23 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Sabini
24 will be recorded in the affirmative.
25 The Secretary will continue the
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1 roll.
2 THE SECRETARY: Senator Saland.
3 SENATOR SALAND: To explain my
4 vote.
5 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Saland,
6 to explain his vote.
7 SENATOR SALAND: Thank you,
8 Mr. President.
9 Mr. President, the one thing which
10 I have yet to hear today, and I've sat through
11 the duration of this debate, is
12 acknowledgement of the fact that healthcare,
13 for at least the past decade, whether it be
14 private or public, through Medicaid, has been
15 increasing by minimally twice the rate of
16 inflation, often double-digit.
17 The need for reform is not merely a
18 New York phenomenon, it's a national
19 phenomenon. It's a phenomenon in Washington,
20 it's a phenomenon in 49 other state capitals.
21 This side of the aisle has
22 attempted, certainly through the Medicaid task
23 force that was cochaired by Senator Hannon, to
24 try and move this dialogue forward in a
25 meaningful fashion.
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1 The bill presented by the Governor,
2 which I termed earlier a retread, is in fact
3 not a new paradigm. Words are cheap. There's
4 nothing new about it. Yes, he tossed in
5 baubles that provide some cover for those who
6 have been asked to support it. But the
7 hundreds of millions of dollars that he's
8 proposing to slash are the same hundreds of
9 millions of dollars that Governor Pataki
10 proposed to slash that we rejected.
11 So I don't know what the price was,
12 $10 million, $20 million, $30 million,
13 $40 million. The baubles are there. But you
14 know what? If you put a necklace on a pig,
15 it's still a pig. And this is a pig.
16 Regardless of what you want it to say,
17 regardless of how you want to dress it, it's
18 still a pig.
19 And the bottom line is is that it
20 should be defeated. It is not reform. It's
21 an effort to gouge the system to system, to
22 leave the patients in your district at risk,
23 to cripple the hospitals in your district --
24 for what purpose is beyond me. Serious reform
25 is the issue, and the Governor knew better,
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1 should have done better. And if this is the
2 best he can do, it's a woeful demonstration.
3 I vote in the negative.
4 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Saland
5 will be recorded in the negative.
6 The Secretary will continue the
7 roll.
8 THE SECRETARY: Senator Sampson.
9 SENATOR SAMPSON: Yes.
10 THE SECRETARY: Senator Savino.
11 SENATOR SAVINO: Yes.
12 THE SECRETARY: Senator
13 Schneiderman.
14 SENATOR SCHNEIDERMAN: Yes.
15 THE SECRETARY: Senator Serrano.
16 SENATOR SERRANO: Yes.
17 THE SECRETARY: Senator Seward.
18 SENATOR SEWARD: Mr. President,
19 to explain my vote.
20 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Seward,
21 to explain his vote.
22 SENATOR SEWARD: I've been
23 listening, Mr. President and my colleagues, to
24 the debate this afternoon. It's gone on three
25 to four hours.
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1 And it's important to debate
2 healthcare, it's a vitally important issue for
3 the people that we represent no matter where
4 in the state we may hail from. But the moment
5 to stand up and be counted has arrive, and
6 that's exactly what we're doing throughout
7 this roll call.
8 I've heard a lot of words expressed
9 through the debate today. People talk about
10 reform. But my colleagues, extension of the
11 sick tax is not reform. Massive cuts to our
12 very fine healthcare facilities is not reform.
13 I've heard about patients first. Once again,
14 tax increases and massive cuts that would
15 eliminate some 12,000 jobs in the healthcare
16 industry and destroy access to many people to
17 healthcare that they desperately need, that's
18 not putting patients first.
19 We've heard about train rides. You
20 know, this proposal included in the bill
21 before us would take the wheels off that
22 train. They're falling off. It's a train
23 wreck waiting to happen.
24 There's a better way. There's a
25 better way to proceed. First we have to
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1 defeat this bill and move forward in a better
2 way. Many of the proposals that have been
3 included in the Task Force on Medicaid Reform,
4 they've been passed by this house in the past.
5 We need some partners moving forward.
6 In the area of expanding health
7 insurance to more people in New York State,
8 this house has been on record with many
9 innovative approaches to making health
10 insurance more available and affordable. And
11 we're going to continue to press those
12 throughout the upcoming budget debate.
13 My friends, we need real reform.
14 We need real savings. There's a better way.
15 This bill is not the way to go.
16 I vote no.
17 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Seward
18 will be recorded in the negative.
19 The Secretary will read.
20 THE SECRETARY: Senator Skelos.
21 SENATOR SKELOS: Mr. President.
22 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Skelos,
23 to explain his vote.
24 SENATOR SKELOS: If I could
25 explain my vote.
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1 I'm really just shocked, dismayed
2 and I guess I could even use the word
3 befuddled from what I'm hearing from my
4 friends on the other side of the aisle. What
5 a difference a year makes. Last year when
6 these cuts were proposed, our good Lieutenant
7 Governor, then the Minority Leader, would be
8 sitting there pounding on the desk saying how
9 horrible these cuts are and we have to fight
10 them and we have to go forward and stop them.
11 And my good friends on the Democrat
12 side of the aisle would stand up and say, to a
13 person, Absolutely, yes, they're wrong-minded,
14 they're wrong, they're hurtful, they're
15 spiteful.
16 And now they sit there on that side
17 of the aisle like little marionettes, little
18 puppets waiting for the puppet master to tell
19 them what to do, as appendages.
20 (Loud response from floor.)
21 SENATOR SKELOS: As I mentioned
22 last week, they would be sitting there waiting
23 to be told what to do.
24 Whereas we had the courage, when
25 our Governor was wrong, to say "You're wrong,"
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1 and to vote to override those vetoes.
2 Now, we may come to that point if
3 there's an agreement between the Senate and
4 the Assembly. And I hope you have the courage
5 to override Governor Spitzer's vetoes in
6 healthcare if that does occur, that you have
7 the courage to do that.
8 Shortly you'll be voting for a
9 resolution. And within that resolution all
10 the little baubles that Senator Saland was
11 mentioning that you're hanging your hats on on
12 why you're voting yes are in that budget
13 resolution.
14 So, Mr. President, I have to vote
15 no on this. I was not sent to Albany to be a
16 puppet, to be an appendage. I was sent to
17 Albany to vote my conscience and to vote
18 what's in the best interests of the people of
19 my district and of all of Nassau County and
20 Long Island.
21 I vote no.
22 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Skelos
23 will be recorded in the negative.
24 The Secretary will read.
25 THE SECRETARY: Senator Smith.
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1 SENATOR SMITH: Yes.
2 THE SECRETARY: Senator
3 Stachowski.
4 THE PRESIDENT: Senator
5 Stachowski, to explain his vote.
6 SENATOR STACHOWSKI: Mr.
7 President, to explain my vote.
8 I wasn't really going to speak at
9 all, I was just going to vote yes quietly and
10 let it go. But here I'm getting lectured all
11 afternoon and into the night about voting for
12 a bill to get the budget process moving.
13 And I keep hearing about the
14 solutions they have on the other side. But if
15 they really had solutions on the other side,
16 we wouldn't be voting on the Governor's bill,
17 we'd be voting on the Republican health bill.
18 We don't have that.
19 We're going to have a Republican
20 health resolution. But a resolution doesn't
21 mean a thing in the budget process. It just
22 forwards along a generalization, not
23 specifics.
24 So it's easy, when you're doing a
25 generalization, saying I'm going to cure all
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1 the ills in healthcare and replace all the
2 money to the hospitals and the nursing homes,
3 when that way, if you do it in a resolution,
4 you don't have to say how you're going to pay
5 for it.
6 And I don't want to be a stickler.
7 I would love to see a bill that would actually
8 work and do all the things, and then we
9 probably could all support that. But that's
10 not what we have.
11 And so I'm going to vote yes to get
12 the process moving and hope that somewhere
13 along the line we get to a place where we have
14 a bill that everybody can support that does
15 the things that everybody has been talking
16 about this afternoon.
17 I vote yes.
18 THE PRESIDENT: Senator
19 Stachowski will be recorded in the
20 affirmative.
21 The Secretary will continue the
22 roll.
23 THE SECRETARY: Senator Stavisky.
24 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Stavisky,
25 to explain her vote.
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1 SENATOR STAVISKY: Yes.
2 Mr. President, we've been assured that there
3 was really no politics involved in this, that
4 this bill is really -- what was the phrase --
5 politricks.
6 But here on Day 71, if this bill is
7 so bad, why was it reported out of committee?
8 But there was no politics involved.
9 I have never seen this sort of
10 thing happen before, and I've been watching
11 the Legislature for many years, where a bill
12 is deliberately reported out of committee so
13 that it can fail.
14 It seems to me that this is not the
15 last word on the bill, and that is why I am
16 going to be voting in the affirmative.
17 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Stavisky
18 will be recorded in the affirmative.
19 The Secretary will read.
20 THE SECRETARY: Senator
21 Stewart-Cousins.
22 SENATOR STEWART-COUSINS: Yes.
23 THE SECRETARY: Senator Thompson.
24 SENATOR THOMPSON: Yes.
25 THE SECRETARY: Senator Trunzo.
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1 SENATOR TRUNZO: No.
2 THE SECRETARY: Senator Valesky.
3 SENATOR VALESKY: Yes.
4 THE SECRETARY: Senator Volker.
5 SENATOR VOLKER: Mr. President,
6 to quickly explain my vote.
7 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Volker,
8 to quickly explain his vote.
9 SENATOR VOLKER: I certainly
10 recognize how uncomfortable it is for many of
11 my fellow Democrats in this chamber. And I
12 said "fellow Democrats."
13 (Laughter.)
14 SENATOR SMITH: Getting closer.
15 SENATOR VOLKER: Let me just say
16 to you --
17 THE PRESIDENT: May we have some
18 order in the chamber while Senator Volker --
19 SENATOR VOLKER: Let me just say
20 to you that it's fascinating to me, and my
21 colleagues have remarked about the reverse
22 here. And there's a lot of truth to that.
23 You know, this house has been the
24 strongest house on healthcare by far. We've
25 protected hospitals and nursing homes, and you
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1 on this side have castigated us when we even
2 thought about cuts.
3 George Pataki submitted virtually
4 the same so-called reform package, and it's a
5 different paradigm? It's the same stuff. I
6 mean, when I looked at it I thought, I could
7 track these easily.
8 What it is is it's saying we're
9 going to challenge the Legislature, and we're
10 going to call it reform, even though we're not
11 exactly sure what we're doing.
12 But I will tell you this. Now you
13 know what it is to have your Governor on the
14 second floor. We were pretty gentle with
15 George sometimes, but we always made him
16 change. We always went in and dug in.
17 And Senator Perkins, you talked
18 about lead. I was the leader of that and did
19 a lot of work on lead poisoning for years, and
20 we did a lot of stuff. The problem was we had
21 trouble with New York City. New York City
22 always opposed us because the trial lawyers --
23 I just want to mention this -- the trial
24 lawyers always wanted a piece of the action.
25 And we couldn't to it because of that. I only
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1 mention that because I know a little bit about
2 how this stuff goes.
3 But the bottom line is, here, this
4 is not reform. You're voting for the status
5 quo. You're voting for the status quo. What
6 we're doing is saying, all right, we stopped
7 George Pataki and we're also going to stop
8 Governor Spitzer from wrecking the healthcare
9 system.
10 I vote no.
11 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Volker
12 will be recorded in the negative.
13 The Secretary will continue the
14 roll.
15 THE SECRETARY: Senator Winner.
16 SENATOR WINNER: No.
17 THE SECRETARY: Senator Wright.
18 SENATOR WRIGHT: Nay.
19 THE SECRETARY: Senator Young.
20 SENATOR YOUNG: No.
21 THE PRESIDENT: The Secretary
22 will announce the results.
23 THE SECRETARY: Ayes, 29. Nays,
24 33.
25 THE PRESIDENT: The bill is lost.
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1 Senator Bruno.
2 SENATOR BRUNO: Mr. President, I
3 would move to table this bill.
4 THE PRESIDENT: So ordered.
5 SENATOR BRUNO: Mr. President,
6 can we at this time take up Resolution 898.
7 THE PRESIDENT: The Secretary
8 will read.
9 THE SECRETARY: By Senator Bruno,
10 Concurrent Resolution Number 898, adopting a
11 budget resolution proposing amendments to the
12 2007-2008 Executive Budget submission
13 pertaining to Health and Mental Hygiene
14 (Legislative Bills 2104A and 2108A).
15 THE PRESIDENT: The Secretary
16 will call the roll on the resolution.
17 (The Secretary called the roll.)
18 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Bruno.
19 SENATOR BRUNO: Mr. President, to
20 explain my vote.
21 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Bruno, to
22 explain his vote.
23 SENATOR BRUNO: This resolution
24 that's before us, just so that you're clear,
25 helps to fix the pain that those of you that
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1 voted for the Governor's bill, that you
2 inflict on your healthcare delivery system.
3 It puts back about $540 million of
4 the cuts to nursing homes and hospitals, takes
5 away the tax -- this Governor said no new
6 taxes -- $137 million tax in the bill that you
7 voted for that we eliminate in this
8 resolution. It also puts back about
9 $165 million in the trend factor of
10 2.5 percent for hospitals and nursing homes
11 that the Governor took out, that you voted on
12 that side of the aisle to support.
13 So, Mr. President and colleagues,
14 all of the good things that was in the
15 proposal that you were supporting is in this
16 resolution. Those that you talked about that
17 you needed that would be missing will not be
18 missing. They're in here.
19 But what we are doing is restoring
20 the severe cuts to nursing homes, hospitals,
21 doing away with the tax and returning the
22 trend factor that you supported last year,
23 that you have supported in the past when we
24 were dealing with this healthcare objectively.
25 I would recommend heartily that we
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1 support this resolution, and I vote in favor.
2 SENATOR CONNOR: Mr. President,
3 point of order.
4 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Connor,
5 point of order.
6 SENATOR CONNOR: Mr. President,
7 didn't we in the rules debate just a few weeks
8 ago have the Majority insist that a resolution
9 was not subject to a roll call and it was only
10 subject to a voice vote? Is the roll call
11 proper on a resolution, Mr. President? That's
12 my point of order.
13 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Connor,
14 your point of order is well taken. This is a
15 concurrent resolution calling specifically for
16 a roll call vote.
17 SENATOR BRUNO: Thank you,
18 Mr. President, for being so knowledgeable.
19 (Laughter.)
20 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Bruno
21 will be recorded in the affirmative.
22 Senator Hannon, to explain his
23 vote.
24 SENATOR HANNON: Thank you,
25 Mr. President.
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1 The resolution before you not only
2 enacts a wide array of restorations to make
3 sure that the essential core of the healthcare
4 system in this state can go forward, it avoids
5 the budget-wrenching results to hospitals and
6 nursing homes who would have money taken away
7 from them in the middle of their fiscal years.
8 It avoids a number of other draconian things.
9 Since I'm explaining my vote and
10 the hour is late, let me point out to my
11 colleagues on the other side of the aisle that
12 all of the things you thought were being
13 denied are not being denied. All of those
14 items -- the cervical cancer vaccines, the
15 lead, the what they call body mass index for
16 detecting obesity and leading to prevention of
17 juvenile diabetes -- all of those are in the
18 resolution.
19 And so if you're voting against
20 this resolution, all of those things that you
21 said were so good -- I can name them by name,
22 because I wrote them down -- you're voting
23 against them right now.
24 And besides that, you're also
25 voting against all of the programs that we
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1 have put forward as we think are filling in
2 the vast gaps that the Governor talked about
3 but omitted from that budget bill that we've
4 just laid on the table, including Wellness
5 Works, health information technology, neonatal
6 intensive care units, arthritis, Healthy
7 New York for the people who can't afford the
8 mammographies and the cervical cancer
9 screening that we purport to give, a hospice
10 program for all children in the state, several
11 programs in regard to health technology, an
12 introduction of actual quality initiatives
13 measuring the performance of care in hospitals
14 and making adjustments accordingly in regard
15 to reimbursements.
16 These are just some of the things
17 we've added. This is a very substantial
18 proposal. Conference committees begin in a
19 day or two. This is not something you can sit
20 back and wait. You just have to do something
21 more than by rote, the way you've been doing.
22 Mr. President, I vote in the
23 affirmative for this resolution.
24 THE PRESIDENT: Senator Hannon
25 will be recorded in the affirmative.
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1 The Secretary will announce the
2 results.
3 THE SECRETARY: Those recorded in
4 the negative on Concurrent Resolution Number
5 898 are Senators Adams, Breslin, Connor, Diaz,
6 Dilan, Duane, Gonzalez, Hassell-Thompson,
7 Huntley, C. Johnson, Klein, L. Krueger,
8 Montgomery, Onorato, Oppenheimer, Parker,
9 Perkins, Sabini, Sampson, Savino,
10 Schneiderman, Serrano, Smith, Stachowski,
11 Stavisky, Stewart-Cousins, Thompson and
12 Valesky.
13 Ayes, 34. Nays, 28.
14 THE PRESIDENT: The resolution is
15 adopted.
16 Senator Bruno.
17 SENATOR BRUNO: Mr. President,
18 can we at this time take up Resolution 895.
19 THE PRESIDENT: The Secretary
20 will read.
21 THE SECRETARY: Concurrent
22 Resolution Number 895, by Senator Bruno,
23 adopting a budget resolution proposing
24 amendments to the 2007-2008 Executive Budget
25 submission (Legislative Bills 2100B, 2101A,
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1 2102A, 2103B, 2104A, 2105B, 2106B, 2107B,
2 2108A, 2109B and 2110B).
3 THE PRESIDENT: The Secretary
4 will call the roll on the resolution.
5 (The Secretary called the roll.)
6 THE PRESIDENT: Results.
7 THE SECRETARY: Those recorded in
8 the negative on Concurrent Resolution Number
9 895 are Senators Adams, Breslin, Connor, Diaz,
10 Dilan, Duane, Gonzalez, Hassell-Thompson,
11 Huntley, C. Johnson, Klein, L. Krueger,
12 Montgomery, Onorato, Oppenheimer, Parker,
13 Perkins, Sabini, Sampson, Savino,
14 Schneiderman, Serrano, Smith, Stachowski,
15 Stavisky, Stewart-Cousins, Thompson and
16 Valesky.
17 Ayes, 34. Nays, 28.
18 THE PRESIDENT: The resolution is
19 adopted.
20 Senator Bruno.
21 SENATOR BRUNO: Mr. President,
22 can we take up the controversial reading of
23 the calendar in regular order.
24 THE PRESIDENT: The Secretary
25 will read.
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1 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
2 297, Senate Budget Bill, Senate Print 2100B,
3 an act making appropriations for the support
4 of government, PUBLIC PROTECTION AND GENERAL
5 GOVERNMENT BUDGET.
6 THE PRESIDENT: Read the last
7 section.
8 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
9 act shall take effect immediately.
10 THE PRESIDENT: The Secretary
11 will call the roll.
12 (The Secretary called the roll.)
13 THE PRESIDENT: Results.
14 THE SECRETARY: Those recorded in
15 the negative on Calendar Number 297 are
16 Senators Adams, Breslin, Connor, Diaz, Dilan,
17 Duane, Gonzalez, Hassell-Thompson, Huntley,
18 C. Johnson, Klein, L. Krueger, Montgomery,
19 Onorato, Oppenheimer, Parker, Perkins, Sabini,
20 Sampson, Savino, Schneiderman, Serrano, Smith,
21 Stachowski, Stavisky, Stewart-Cousins,
22 Thompson and Valesky.
23 Ayes, 34. Nays, 28.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
25 bill is passed.
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1 The Secretary will read.
2 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
3 301, Senate Budget Bill, Senate Print 2105B,
4 an act making appropriations for the support
5 of government, TRANSPORTATION, ECONOMIC
6 DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION
7 BUDGET.
8 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Read
9 the last section.
10 THE SECRETARY: Section 2. This
11 act shall take effect immediately.
12 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Call
13 the roll.
14 (The Secretary called the roll.)
15 THE SECRETARY: Those recorded in
16 the negative on Calendar Number 301 are
17 Senator Adams, Breslin, Connor, Diaz, Dilan,
18 Duane, Gonzalez, Hassell-Thompson, Huntley,
19 C. Johnson, Klein, L. Krueger, Montgomery,
20 Onorato, Oppenheimer, Parker, Perkins, Sabini,
21 Sampson, Savino, Schneiderman, Serrano, Smith,
22 Stachowski, Stavisky, Stewart-Cousins,
23 Thompson and Valesky.
24 Ayes, 34. Nays, 28.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
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1 bill is passed.
2 The Secretary will read.
3 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
4 302, Senate Budget Bill, Senate Print 2106B,
5 an act to amend the Civil Service Law and the
6 State Finance Law.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Read
8 the last section.
9 THE SECRETARY: Section 3. This
10 act shall take effect immediately.
11 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Call
12 the roll.
13 (The Secretary called the roll.)
14 THE SECRETARY: Those recorded in
15 the negative on Calendar Number 302 are
16 Senators Adams, Breslin, Connor, Diaz, Dilan,
17 Duane, Gonzalez, Hassell-Thompson, Huntley,
18 C. Johnson, Klein, L. Krueger, Montgomery,
19 Onorato, Oppenheimer, Parker, Perkins, Sabini,
20 Sampson, Savino, Schneiderman, Serrano, Smith,
21 Stachowski, Stavisky, Stewart-Cousins,
22 Thompson and Valesky.
23 Ayes, 34. Nays, 28.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
25 bill is passed.
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1 The Secretary will read.
2 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
3 304, Senate Budget Bill, Senate Print 2109B,
4 an act to authorize funding for the
5 Consolidated Local Street and Highway
6 Improvement Program.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Read
8 the last section.
9 THE SECRETARY: Section 18. This
10 act shall take effect immediately.
11 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Call
12 the roll.
13 (The Secretary called the roll.)
14 THE SECRETARY: Those recorded in
15 the negative on Calendar Number 304 are
16 Senators Adams, Breslin, Connor, Diaz, Dilan,
17 Duane, Gonzalez, Hassell-Thompson, Huntley,
18 C. Johnson, Klein, L. Krueger, Montgomery,
19 Onorato, Oppenheimer, Parker, Perkins, Sabini,
20 Sampson, Savino, Schneiderman, Serrano, Smith,
21 Stachowski, Stavisky, Stewart-Cousins,
22 Thompson and Valesky.
23 Ayes, 34. Nays, 28.
24 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
25 bill is passed.
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1 The Secretary will read.
2 THE SECRETARY: Calendar Number
3 305, Senate Budget Bill, Senate Print 2110B,
4 an act to amend the Tax Law.
5 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Read
6 the last section.
7 THE SECRETARY: Section 6. This
8 act shall take effect immediately.
9 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Call
10 the roll.
11 (The Secretary called the roll.)
12 THE SECRETARY: Those recorded in
13 the negative on Calendar Number 305 are
14 Senators Adams, Breslin, Connor, Diaz, Dilan,
15 Duane, Gonzalez, Hassell-Thompson, Huntley,
16 C. Johnson, Klein, L. Krueger, Montgomery,
17 Onorato, Oppenheimer, Parker, Perkins, Sabini,
18 Sampson, Savino, Schneiderman, Serrano, Smith,
19 Stachowski, Stavisky, Stewart-Cousins,
20 Thompson and Valesky.
21 Ayes, 34. Nays, 28.
22 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
23 bill is passed.
24 Senator Bruno, that completes the
25 controversial calendar.
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1 SENATOR BRUNO: Thank you,
2 Mr. President.
3 Can we now return to reports of
4 standing committees. I believe there's a
5 Finance Committee report at the desk. I ask
6 that it be read at this time.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: The
8 Secretary will read.
9 THE SECRETARY: Senator Johnson,
10 from the Committee on Finance, reports the
11 following nominations.
12 As Commissioner of the Office of
13 Children and Family Services, Gladys Carrion,
14 Esquire, of the Bronx.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
16 Johnson.
17 SENATOR JOHNSON: I'd like to
18 move the nomination and call upon Senator Carl
19 Kruger.
20 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
21 Carl Kruger.
22 SENATOR CARL KRUGER: Thank you,
23 Senator Johnson.
24 Mr. President, firstly, on a
25 personal note, before I move the nomination of
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1 Gladys Carrion, I would like to take this
2 opportunity to sort of kick away the rubble
3 that's in the center of this battlefield today
4 and talk for a moment about why I am here and
5 why I am representing the Social Services
6 Committee in the Senate.
7 I think if we want to talk for a
8 moment about change and we want to talk about
9 bipartisan government, if we want to move
10 forward with a positive agenda, then we have
11 to talk about what happened in the last ten
12 days here in Albany.
13 Our Majority Leader, Senator Bruno,
14 in concurrence with Minority Leader Malcolm
15 Smith, made a historic move. And the move was
16 to take someone from the Minority party,
17 myself, a Democrat, and appoint me as the
18 chairperson of the Standing Committee on
19 Social Services.
20 That not only has narrowed the
21 aisle, but it's also narrowed the rhetoric.
22 It's made what was a partisan move a
23 bipartisan move. It says to all of us that
24 there is change taking place, and that's
25 positive change. It's change that says that
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1 we are going to be working together in unison
2 as a partnership, rather than individually,
3 but rather, this time, collectively.
4 So in the spirit of that change,
5 and as my first act as the chairperson of the
6 Committee on Social Services, after holding a
7 committee meeting this morning, I would like
8 to move the nomination of Gladys Carrion as
9 the Commissioner of the Office of Children and
10 Family Services.
11 As an acting commissioner,
12 Commissioner Carrion has been an exemplary
13 model for what we want to see happening as we
14 move that agency forward. With her long
15 history in government and in the private
16 sector, Commissioner Carrion brings a wealth
17 of knowledge and expertise at this critical
18 juncture, a juncture where we are going to use
19 our budgetary skills and the best that we can
20 do as legislators and as human beings to
21 understand the needs of children and families.
22 The developmentally disabled, the
23 underprivileged, the sick, the indigent will
24 find a place in the heart and in the mind of
25 Commissioner Carrion.
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1 So it's with great pleasure, and in
2 the spirit of what we're doing here today,
3 that I support the Governor's nomination of
4 Commissioner Carrion as our next Commissioner
5 of the Office of Children and Family Services.
6 Thank you.
7 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
8 you, Senator Kruger.
9 Senator Gonzalez.
10 SENATOR GONZALEZ: We thank you,
11 Mr. President.
12 I rise to second the nomination of
13 Gladys Carrion. I've had the distinct
14 pleasure of working with her through her many
15 capacities, especially when she was
16 Commissioner of Community Development in the
17 City of New York, and all the other aspects
18 where she has done a fine job.
19 And I commend the Governor for this
20 appointment, and I wish her well.
21 So thank you, Mr. President. God
22 bless her. Godspeed.
23 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
24 you, Senator Gonzalez.
25 Senator Diaz.
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1 SENATOR DIAZ: Thank you,
2 Mr. President.
3 Today, again, I rise up to support
4 and to second the nomination of Gladys
5 Carrion. This is another of those
6 appointments by the Governor that makes me
7 happy.
8 It makes me happy because Gladys is
9 not only a woman, is not only a Hispanic,
10 capable person, not only -- she not only was
11 the executive director of the Inwood House and
12 the executive director of Family Dynamics,
13 Incorporated, and worked for the Ford
14 Foundation, and she was also Commissioner of
15 the Community Development Agency, but she --
16 she is the wife of one of my good friends.
17 From 1993 to 1996, I served as the
18 Bronx commissioner in the Civilian Complaint
19 Review Board. And I had the honor and
20 privilege to work with her husband, the
21 Honorable Hector Soto. And there we did a lot
22 of things for the community.
23 And last week, Mr. President and
24 ladies and gentlemen, last week the Governor
25 also appointed Lorraine Cortes-Vazquez as the
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1 Secretary of State, and this body approved
2 that nomination last week. And today it gives
3 me an extra honor to say that Lorraine
4 Cortes-Vazquez resides in my district, the
5 district that I represent.
6 And the Governor today has
7 appointed another person that resides in my
8 district, Gladys Carrion.
9 So, ladies and gentlemen, the
10 Governor has been very fair and very
11 consistent in appointing good people from my
12 district, showing that the people of the 32nd
13 Senatorial District are good residents,
14 honorable residents, well prepared, well
15 qualified, and well recognized by this
16 Governor.
17 So the 32nd Senatorial District
18 today is proud and honored to second the
19 nomination of Gladys Carrion, because she
20 represents not only a Puerto Rican, a
21 Hispanic, a woman, and not only she is the
22 wife of Hector Soto, she's also a
23 representative, an honorable and distinguished
24 representative of the 32nd Senatorial
25 District.
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1 Thank you. Congratulations.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
3 you, Senator Diaz.
4 Senator Hassell-Thompson.
5 SENATOR HASSELL-THOMPSON: Thank
6 you, Mr. President.
7 I rise to say that while
8 Ms. Carrion does not live in my district, it
9 is still a great day for the Bronx, primarily
10 because her good works precede her.
11 And she has a tremendous job to do
12 for the children and families of the State of
13 New York. But she comes highly recommended by
14 a friend that we share in common who worked
15 for Families and Children with me in HIV and
16 AIDS many years ago. And I know that she's
17 going to do an extraordinary job for us.
18 And the Bronx is proud today to
19 welcome you to this new position. And I know
20 you're going to do well. Congratulations.
21 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
22 you, Senator Hassell-Thompson.
23 Senator Maltese.
24 SENATOR MALTESE: Mr. President,
25 I rise to second the nomination of Gladys
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1 Carrion as Commissioner of the Office of
2 Children and Family Services.
3 The hour is late, and it is a pity
4 that the hour is late and that we had so much
5 on the agenda, today because this nomination
6 by the Governor is of critical importance,
7 working with children and family services.
8 I'll be brief and just read the
9 titles and the positions that this wonderfully
10 qualified woman has held. The first, of
11 course, is with United Way as senior vice
12 president for community investment. With
13 Inwood House, executive director. Family
14 Dynamics, Incorporated, executive director.
15 Ford Foundation, program officer, urban
16 poverty. New York City Community Development
17 Agency, a commissioner.
18 New York City Board of Education,
19 the consultant and chair of the Chancellor's
20 Task Force on Latino Educational
21 Opportunities. The Workers' Compensation
22 Board, she served as general counsel,
23 supervising law judge, senior law judge. With
24 ASPIRA of New York, acting executive director.
25 Bronx Legal Services Corporation, managing
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1 attorney. Bronx Legal Services again, acting
2 unit director and staff attorney.
3 Her educational background is
4 paramount. She has a JD from NYU Law School
5 and a B.S. from Fordham.
6 And, Mr. President, I'm proud to
7 second the nomination of this superbly
8 qualified candidate to hold such a critically
9 important office.
10 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
11 you, Senator Maltese.
12 Senator Perkins.
13 SENATOR PERKINS: Thank you very
14 much.
15 I just wanted to take a quick
16 moment to express my congratulations. I had
17 the privilege of working with Ms. Carrion in
18 her capacity with the United Way. And when we
19 were working on workforce development issues,
20 particularly a special project that the
21 Council of the City of New York sponsored of
22 $50 million to create employment opportunities
23 in response to the Community Services Society
24 report on the high rates of unemployment
25 especially among African-American, Latino, and
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1 Asian communities.
2 So she was a leader in that regard,
3 and she obviously, with that experience,
4 convinces me and should convince all of us
5 that she has the sensitivity and the
6 appreciation of what her new job will entail
7 and the kind of concerns that our city and our
8 state have that need to be addressed.
9 So my congratulations and
10 appreciation for having had the opportunity to
11 work with her in the past.
12 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
13 you, Senator Perkins.
14 Senator Montgomery.
15 SENATOR MONTGOMERY: Yes, thank
16 you, Mr. President.
17 I would like to join my colleagues
18 in commending the Governor for this
19 appointment and congratulating Ms. Carrion,
20 Commissioner Carrion.
21 She has already presented in the
22 budget hearings her vision and her intent to
23 really make some critical changes and to make
24 a difference for the lives of the young people
25 that she will be responsible for in her role
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1 as commissioner. And I'm very excited about
2 that.
3 As we know, some of the most
4 troubled young people in our state will end up
5 under her purview in facilities and in
6 programs that she runs. And so I'm very happy
7 to have a person who is a woman, who is a
8 woman who has had a vast experience with those
9 difficult issues and areas that she will have
10 to sort out and deal with. And she brings a
11 sensitivity because she understands, I think,
12 from having been there what the needs of our
13 young people are.
14 So I'm very, very happy. I look
15 forward to excitedly working with her. And,
16 again, commend her and congratulate her on
17 this appointment.
18 Thank you, Mr. President.
19 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
20 you, Senator Montgomery.
21 Are there any other Senators that
22 wish to be heard?
23 Hearing none, the question is on
24 the nomination of Gladys Carrion as
25 Commissioner of the Office of Children and
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1 Family Services. All in favor signify by
2 saying aye.
3 (Response of "Aye.")
4 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER:
5 Opposed, nay.
6 (No response.)
7 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Gladys
8 Carrion is hereby confirmed as Commissioner of
9 the Office of Children and Family Services.
10 (Applause.)
11 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER:
12 Commissioner Carrion is joined by her husband,
13 Hector Soto. Welcome.
14 The Secretary will read.
15 THE SECRETARY: As Commissioner
16 of the Department of Correctional Services,
17 Brian S. Fischer, of Spring Valley.
18 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
19 Johnson.
20 SENATOR JOHNSON: Move the
21 nomination.
22 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
23 Morahan.
24 SENATOR MORAHAN: On the
25 nomination. I would love to second this
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1 nomination of Brian Fischer.
2 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Excuse
3 me, Senator.
4 Can we have some order, please.
5 Thank you.
6 SENATOR MORAHAN: Maybe they
7 could take that outside.
8 Very briefly. I know the hour is
9 late, and our nominees have been waiting a
10 long time.
11 I don't know Mr. Fischer
12 personally, only what I've read in his resume,
13 and it's impressive. And as a constituent of
14 mine, I am delighted to move his nomination.
15 Mr. Fischer started in the
16 Corrections Department in 1975. He has worked
17 throughout the system, worked at many
18 facilities, has also initiated new programs
19 for those prisoners transferring or being
20 newly released.
21 And now he is being nominated by
22 the Governor to be the Corrections
23 Commissioner for the State of New York, I
24 think a cap of a very great career that was
25 always upwardly mobile.
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1 I'm your Senator, sir, in case you
2 don't know it. Okay? And I just want to
3 introduce myself to you and wish you all the
4 best as the new Commissioner.
5 Thank you.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
7 you, Senator Morahan.
8 Senator Nozzolio.
9 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Thank you,
10 Mr. President. On the nomination.
11 Mr. President and my colleagues, it
12 enthusiastically support this nomination of
13 Brian Fischer to be Corrections Commissioner.
14 That the department he oversees
15 will certainly be a very challenging one, that
16 the budget of the Department of Corrections is
17 well over $2 billion.
18 And I daresay that Brian Fischer,
19 in coming before the Corrections Committee of
20 this Senate, did a outstanding job in
21 explaining his role. That Senator Volker
22 pointed out in both of our committee reviews
23 that Brian Fischer worked his way through the
24 ranks of the Corrections Department, and
25 that's the type of insight we certainly will
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1 be benefiting from in the months ahead.
2 To have someone of his experience,
3 his activism, his view of corrections and his
4 steadfast working through the ranks in a
5 variety of different positions as a New York
6 State government worker certainly will bode
7 well for the department and for the state.
8 That the committee was very
9 impressed with Brian Fischer's qualifications
10 and experience. And that certainly we look to
11 work with him in the months ahead to ensure
12 our Department of Corrections is moving
13 forward, is providing safety and security for
14 the brave men and women who work behind those
15 walls, the approximately 25,000 correction
16 officers and other correctional personnel,
17 that those employees are going to be led by
18 Brian Fischer.
19 And I commend Governor Spitzer for
20 this appointment. And that we regret the hour
21 is late, his patience here certainly was
22 tested, but we look to see him to be a very
23 patient individual and run the department in
24 the same manner.
25 A very good nomination, the
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1 committee overwhelmingly supports it, and I
2 very much support it as well.
3 Thank you, Mr. President.
4 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
5 you, Senator Nozzolio.
6 Senator Adams.
7 SENATOR ADAMS: I also rise and I
8 agree with my colleague Senator Nozzolio that
9 Mr. Fischer has come up through the ranks.
10 And rarely are we afforded the opportunity to
11 have not only academic experience but, in
12 addition, the experience of men and women who
13 have been in a correctional facility.
14 And I think that having him on
15 board as the new commissioner is going to
16 assist us in turning the corner on how we use
17 the correctional facility to improve those men
18 and women who leave the facility.
19 So I congratulate you and I welcome
20 to have a joint effort of improving the
21 correctional facilities throughout our state.
22 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
23 you, Senator Adams.
24 Senator Volker.
25 SENATOR VOLKER: Yes, quickly.
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1 The hour, unfortunately, is late.
2 Brian, we're happy to have you on
3 board. You're the third in a series of
4 commissioners that have all come out of the
5 Correction Department, have graduated, as we
6 say. You come highly regarded by the former
7 commissioner, Glenn Goord, and by the top
8 people in the corrections field.
9 We're very much happy to have you
10 on board, and good luck to you in the future.
11 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
12 you, Senator Volker.
13 Senator Oppenheimer.
14 SENATOR OPPENHEIMER: Also
15 briefly.
16 The place where Mr. Fischer has
17 been for the last, what, six, seven years now
18 is Sing Sing, which is in my district. And I
19 have had the pleasure of going to Sing Sing on
20 several occasions, and they have some programs
21 there which are kind of unique to the system,
22 in that they have education programs both for
23 bachelor's and on to master's programs. And
24 this is something that we have funded through
25 really individual contributions, because as
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1 you all know the state no longer funds higher
2 education in prison -- which I hope we will be
3 able to change in the coming years.
4 They also have a very wonderful
5 program called -- it concerns theatrical
6 productions that the inmates put on. They
7 sometimes write the play, and they also
8 perform in it. It has demonstrated an ability
9 to bring out the responsibility and the
10 self-control that is necessary for these kind
11 of productions.
12 So there's just a lot of innovative
13 things happening in Sing Sing. And if we
14 could translate them throughout our system, I
15 think it would be very beneficial to the
16 inmates. And I think that would be, in turn,
17 very beneficial to all of us. Because when
18 they leave, they know how to read and write
19 and they are very much in control of their own
20 destinies and they know it.
21 Congratulations for the things you
22 have done and the things that you will do.
23 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
24 you, Senator Oppenheimer.
25 Are there any other Senators that
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1 wish to be heard?
2 Senator Montgomery.
3 SENATOR MONTGOMERY: Yes, I just
4 want to -- I rise to commend and congratulate
5 Superintendent -- Commissioner Fischer.
6 And let me just say that so many of
7 the people that you've worked with over there
8 and throughout the state over there in Sing
9 Sing, those programs that you have brought in
10 and allowed people who were incarcerated to
11 participate in, they come back to my district
12 and they are very different people because of
13 the work that you've done with them.
14 So I want to say here I appreciate
15 the work that you've done in the past and I
16 certainly look forward to being able to work
17 with you ongoing, because the lives that you
18 have in your jurisdiction, many of them will
19 be coming back to communities and districts
20 like mine.
21 So thank you, and I look forward to
22 working with you.
23 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
24 you, Senator Montgomery.
25 Any other Senators wish to be
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1 heard?
2 The question is on the nomination
3 of Brian S. Fischer as Commissioner of the
4 Department of Correctional Services. All in
5 favor signify by saying aye.
6 (Response of "Aye.")
7 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER:
8 Opposed, nay.
9 (No response.)
10 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Brian
11 S. Fischer is hereby confirmed as Commissioner
12 of the Department of Correctional Services.
13 (Applause.)
14 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Brian
15 Fischer is joined by his wife, Rhoda, and his
16 son, Scott Fischer. And I don't know if
17 they've stuck here with you, but in any event,
18 we welcome them here.
19 And, Commissioner, as the
20 representative of Elmira and Southport and
21 Monterey, I look forward to working with you
22 in the future. So congratulations on your
23 appointment.
24 The Secretary will read.
25 THE SECRETARY: As Commissioner
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1 of the Office of General Services, John C.
2 Egan, of Slingerlands.
3 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
4 Johnson.
5 SENATOR JOHNSON: I'd like to
6 move the nomination and ask that you recognize
7 Senator Breslin for a second.
8 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
9 Breslin.
10 SENATOR BRESLIN: Thank you,
11 Mr. President.
12 I rise to second the nomination of
13 John Egan, not only a constituent but a very
14 dear friend.
15 And I might add, I should
16 apologize; I told his son, Supreme Court Judge
17 John Egan, about ten after 3:00 that the
18 nomination should be taken up in about
19 15 minutes.
20 (Laughter.)
21 SENATOR BRESLIN: John Egan, in
22 my opinion, is the finest public servant that
23 this state has ever seen. For my entire adult
24 life he has been an idol for many of us in the
25 Capital Region, taking OGS years ago to
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1 successes, the Department of Transportation,
2 the Dormitory Authority.
3 The Albany Airport, if you'll
4 remember, now the Albany International
5 Airport, was a very modest place until John
6 Egan got his hands on it. And, I might add,
7 assisted by the Majority Leader of this
8 Senate, Joe Bruno, who did so much to bring
9 Southwest here and do so many other things.
10 But John continued on by running
11 the Harriman Campus, redeveloping it, on the
12 Task Force for High Speed Rail. And it just
13 seemed that wherever you went to have
14 something done, it was John Egan there. And
15 many people I'm sure thought that there were
16 more than one John Egan. Well, there isn't.
17 And, you know, when this Governor
18 said he's going to bring the best and the
19 brightest, he brought the best and the
20 brightest in John Egan.
21 Thank you very much, Mr. President.
22 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
23 you, Senator Breslin.
24 Senator Larkin.
25 SENATOR LARKIN: Thank you,
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1 Mr. President.
2 You know, to stand up and nominate
3 or second the nomination of John Egan is a
4 true privilege.
5 You know, many times you get asked
6 to nominate somebody for something and you're
7 honored to do it. But I've been around this
8 chamber for 31 years. And when I first met
9 John Egan he was on the other side, like he is
10 today. But John Egan is not a person that
11 goes from side to side. John Egan has treated
12 everybody, regardless of whether they were
13 minority or majority, Senate or Assembly,
14 because his goal was to assist you in doing
15 something that was positive for your district.
16 Not for John Egan, but for what it meant in
17 your district and what it would mean for the
18 people of the State of New York.
19 Senator Breslin stole my thunder,
20 but I used it in a Senate meeting. You know,
21 when you start to look at somebody to do a
22 project, you have to look at him from all
23 aspects. John Egan is a man for all reasons.
24 John, I don't know how you do it,
25 but I'm honored that you would consider to
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1 come back, because you are the epitome for
2 everybody to look at who ever wants to be in
3 public service. You are the person they
4 should look at. And young people should
5 idolize you because of what you stand for and
6 the greatness you bring to the State of
7 New York.
8 Thank you very much, John.
9 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
10 you, Senator Larkin.
11 Senator Nozzolio.
12 SENATOR NOZZOLIO: Thank you,
13 Mr. President. I rise at this late hour with
14 your indulgence to briefly echo the comments
15 of my good friends Senator Breslin and Senator
16 Larkin.
17 That yes, I served in the State
18 Legislature for 25 years and through that time
19 have admired the actions of John Egan. We
20 debated a bill for three hours earlier today.
21 We certainly could have spent three hours
22 discussing the experience and career of John
23 Egan.
24 But I wish just to summarize and
25 say that, yes, you are in fact a model for
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1 those who study the management of public
2 service, those who are brought to public
3 service to do a job, to do it well.
4 That the gain of the OGS, though,
5 is the loss of the high-speed-rail project,
6 and that certainly was a project that John
7 Egan was very much involved with and that
8 would certainly in the long run help our
9 upstate economy a great deal.
10 Nonetheless, I think that his
11 position here will serve the state very well,
12 the taxpayers very well, and that I echo the
13 great sentiments by my colleagues in support
14 of John Egan, public servant.
15 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
16 you, Senator Nozzolio.
17 Senator Volker.
18 SENATOR VOLKER: Mr. President,
19 John Egan may be the most confirmed man here
20 in the history of the New York State
21 Legislature. I think I've spoken more on his
22 behalf than any other person I could ever
23 remember.
24 And for an Irishman, I have to -- I
25 never heard a bad word, and for an Irishman,
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1 that's really something.
2 (Laughter.)
3 SENATOR VOLKER: I've got to say,
4 John, that as I said to you in the Finance
5 Committee, "Did you do anything since the last
6 time we confirmed you?" And he said, "Not
7 that I know of." If there's anybody clean in
8 this capital, it's you, because we've
9 investigated you so many times.
10 But congratulations and good luck.
11 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
12 you, Senator Volker.
13 Senator Hassell-Thompson.
14 SENATOR HASSELL-THOMPSON: Thank
15 you, Mr. President.
16 It gives me pleasure to second this
17 nomination and to remind Mr. Egan that while
18 he may not remember me, I remember him quite
19 well. Several years ago, under the Cuomo
20 administration, I was on the Minority and
21 Women Business Advisory Task Force. And part
22 of our job was to put together the language
23 for what became 15A.
24 And I have to say that he was one
25 of the few commissioners that I worked with
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1 who was, first of all, a gentleman and
2 respectful, and his staff was cooperative in
3 helping us to develop the language that went
4 forward to become a major piece of legislation
5 in the State of New York representing the
6 needs of minorities and women in the business
7 community.
8 And I want to thank him for that
9 and to be very pleased to be in this position
10 today to be able to vote on his nomination for
11 this position.
12 Congratulations to you, Mr. Egan.
13 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
14 you, Senator Hassell-Thompson.
15 Any other Senators wish to be
16 heard?
17 The question is on the nomination
18 of John C. Egan as Commissioner of the Office
19 of General Services.
20 All in favor signify by saying aye.
21 (Response of "Aye.")
22 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER:
23 Opposed, nay.
24 (No response.)
25 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: John C.
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1 Egan is hereby confirmed as Commissioner of
2 the Office of General Services.
3 Congratulations.
4 (Applause.)
5 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER:
6 Commissioner Egan is also joined by his wife,
7 Ginny Egan, and his sons, Justice John Egan,
8 Jr., and Dan Egan.
9 Thank you for coming and
10 congratulations, Commissioner.
11 The Secretary will read.
12 THE SECRETARY: As Commissioner
13 of the Office of Temporary and Disability
14 Assistance, David A. Hansell, of New York
15 City.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
17 Johnson.
18 SENATOR JOHNSON: I'd like to
19 move the nomination and ask that you recognize
20 Senator Carl Kruger for a second.
21 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
22 Kruger.
23 SENATOR CARL KRUGER: Thank you,
24 Senator Johnson.
25 Mr. President, today, on behalf of
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1 the Committee on Social Services, I second the
2 nomination of David Hansell as the
3 Commissioner of Temporary and Disability
4 Assistance.
5 Mr. Hansell, currently the HRA,
6 Human Resources Administration, chief of staff
7 back in New York City, has a distinguished
8 record in public service.
9 He brings a clear and keen
10 understanding of the congruent efforts of the
11 disabilities and the needs for families and to
12 raise the bar and standard as we move forward
13 to make our citizenry self-sufficient, to
14 develop programs and be innovative into our
15 efforts to take people off of the public
16 assistance rolls and make them functioning
17 members of our society.
18 So on behalf of our committee, I
19 would like to compliment the Governor on his
20 appointment of David Hansell, and I believe
21 that he will be doing not only a good job for
22 us, but he'll a role model for others as they
23 move forward.
24 Thank you.
25 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Thank
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1 you, Senator Kruger.
2 Are there any other Senators that
3 wish to be heard?
4 The question is on the nomination
5 of David Hansell as Commissioner of the Office
6 of Temporary and Disability Assistance. All
7 in favor signify by saying aye.
8 (Response of "Aye.")
9 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER:
10 Opposed, nay.
11 (No response.)
12 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: David
13 Hansell is hereby confirmed as Commissioner of
14 the Office of Temporary and Disability
15 Assistance.
16 Congratulations.
17 (Applause.)
18 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER:
19 Commissioner Hansell is joined by his partner,
20 Robert Cimino, and his parents, Herbert and
21 Jeanne Hansell.
22 Welcome. Congratulations,
23 Commissioner.
24 Senator Volker.
25 SENATOR VOLKER: Is there any
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1 further business at the desk?
2 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: There
3 is no further business.
4 SENATOR VOLKER: Please recognize
5 Senator Dilan.
6 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: Senator
7 Dilan.
8 SENATOR DILAN: There will be a
9 Minority conference tomorrow, Tuesday, 10:30,
10 in Room 315.
11 Thank you.
12 SENATOR VOLKER: Mr. President,
13 there being no further business, we will
14 adjourn until tomorrow, Tuesday, March 13th,
15 at 11:00 a.m.
16 ACTING PRESIDENT WINNER: On
17 motion, the Senate stands adjourned until
18 Tuesday, March 13, at 11:00 a.m.
19 (Whereupon, at 9:26 p.m., the
20 Senate adjourned.)
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