mr. warner: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from virginia. mr. warner: i thank my friend, the senator from ohio, who's been such a leader on the underlying bill and who i have been proud to work on this clarification on this critical issue around cryptocurrencies. i thank the senator who is correct in his understanding. i would also like to add some additional clarifications. the bill ensures that digital asset market players who provide a platform to facilitate digital asset trades by taxpayers will be required -- will be considered brokers required to report information to the i.r.s., and taxpayers about those transactions. reporting entities may be digital asset exchanges or hosted wallet providers often called custodians or other agents involved in effectuating digital asset transactions. the bill recognizes that digital assets are different from stocks and bonds. for example some taxpayers regularly transfer digital assets between digital asset exchanges or to an off exchange wallet and then back to an exchange. those taxpayers need informati

president and ceo of position nard health warner thomas, objection hard is louisiana's largest non-profit academic health system and its largest private employer. mret all the way pack in january. so what does it look like on the ground there in the hospitals that you serve? >> it's certainly a very challenging situation today. we are seeing our cases increase exponentially in the last month, we're up 700% for the amount of patients we are seeing in the hospital in covid. really the pandemic evolved as a pandemic from the unvaccinated. 97% of the people with covid are unvaccinated and it's really just a situation where we see exponential growth. we're up 67% in one week and it certainly is growing exponentially every single day. >> lament has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country. are you seeing any movement as these cases explode and the hospitalizations go up? is that motivating? is that incentivizing people to take another look at the vaccine there? >> we are seeing some in the past couple of weeks. the louisiana vaccination rate is about 37% and as you were talking earlier, it is different in different parts of the state. in new o

mr. warner: mr. president? the presiding officer: the senator from virginia. mr. warner: mr. president, i also want to first of all thank all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. senator sinema and senator portman have taken the lead. i want to thank them both. senator portman for taking at least 40 seconds of my time by enumerating all of our colleagues who were part of this effort. i also want to thank the staff and acknowledge as he did the incredibly important role the white house played. at some point in this process, the white house realized that they couldn't just support this initiative but they actually had to own it. and they were intimately involved in all the details, something i know they'll share with all my democrat colleagues. i want to thank the majority leader. he has given us the time we need to get here, to get a -- close to 3,000-page bill to this floor this comprehensive. i know it's taken a little more time than maybe all of us thought. but the fact is we've been talking about this for 30 years under democrats, republicans, both plit cal parties