through the ohio skills bank, northeast ohio has decided to first focus on the health care, manufacturing and information technology sectors as key industries that have immediate workforce needs. my region is poised to leverage funding made available through the american recovery -- american reinvestment and recovery act with an existing and nimble infrastructure focusing on career pathways, industry partnerships and you increased training -- intreesed training. to best address -- increased training. to best address these needs with a you workforce with high skills, it is necessary to adjust funding, to adjust funding structure so that training opportunities are accessible and usable. the united states department of labor has asked that each state revise their state workforce investment act plans to reflect the strategies they intend to pursue and implement these goals. states have the opportunity to increase training capacity through the reauthorization of the workforce investment act with a few key shifts in how the funding is structured. to increase training as prioritized by congress,

and what this says is that the people of northeast ohio, in particular the 16th district, they respect legislators, they respect congressmen like ralph regula and his predecessor because they believe in our greatest asset which is our people. i reserve my time. the speaker pro tempore: the gentleman reserves the balance of his time. the gentleman from florida is recognized. mr. diaz-balart: thank you, mr. speaker. i will be brief. i want to echo the words of the gentleman from ohio. i think they're very well stated. i also want to thank the speaker of the house for coming down today and speaking in such kind and well deserved words, but kind words to a man that really loved this institution, loved this country, served both so very well. with that, mr. speaker, we have no further speakers so i would yield back the balance of my time. the speaker pro tempore: the gentleman yields back the balance of his time. mr. boccieri: mr. speaker, at this time with no further speakers, we will yield back our time as well. the speaker pro tempore: the gentleman yields back the balance of his time. th

the cuyahoga, which is a native american word meaning crooked river, winds through northeast ohio. if in fact you land at the cleveland airport, you can see the river wind its way right through downtown cleveland. there are banks of the river through several miles as it goes into cuyahoga county. it ultimately flows into lake e r*eu e in the city of cleveland. when scientists began studying the fish population of the cuyahoga, they found only a few species were able to survive in the polluted waters. many of the fish who remained were deformed. after years of hard work by the cuyahoga by citizens, by industry leaders, by government agencies, more than 60 different fish species can now be found in the river. madam president, that tells you what the efforts of government can do. it took more than a few activists in the city of cleveland. it took more than the cleveland city health department. it took more than the cuyahoga county health department. it took a strong national government and the environmental protection agency created, if you remember, during the presidency of richard n

dozen perhaps ten letters that read something like this from constituents in my ohio district and northeast ohio. people would say i'm against the clinton plan, i don't like socialized medicine. please keep the government out of my health care. i've been on medicare for 15 years and works just fine. so we know how well medicare has worked and we understand middelkerke's popularity and we know that government can in fact deliver health care with the private-sector. it's not socialist medicine. medicare simply as senator sanders suggests it is assisting in paying the bills. they don't hire the doctors or the nurses, they don't run the hospitals. they simply are the government in sure to displaced insurance companies and one other fact that really tells you how while medicare has worked is the simple fact. according to most surveys, virtually all surveys i've seen in studies of the richest countries in the world, the united states ranks near the bottom in terms of outcomes, in terms of life expectancy, in terms of the infant mortality, in terms of internal mortality and diabetes and in terms of obe

ryan: i would like to rise today to speak about an issue that is important to our community in northeast ohio, specifically the city of warren, city of youngstown dealing with the auto task force and the bankruptcy that have been going on in the auto industry. and the community that i come from has been adversely affected, not just over the past few months or few years, but really over the past 30 years. we have seen the loss of a tremendous amount of jobs. the home of delphi started many years ago by the packard brothers, steel mills, have been adversely affected over the past 30 years, but specifically eefer the past few months and new years given the problems in the auto industry. every day we wake up and read the newspapers, we have been getting bad news about layoffs. a steel company goes idle, a thousand jobs. general motors takes over the third shift, second shift. delphi went from 15,000 employees 20 or 30 years ago, down to just a few today. and a group that has been adversely affected with maybe not as much attention as should have been given are the delphi salary employees who have

madam speaker, in my district in northeast ohio it takes -- it would take 16 years for somebody making 40,000 a year to make $640,000. so again rather than correcting the mistake, they came up with, it wasn't even a fig leaf, it was a fig tree to pretend they were really mad about the bonuses they authorized with their vote. so we have been coming myself and other members, mr. mccotter from michigan, have been coming to the floor and i grew up playing a game called clue. very wonderful came to play around the kitchen table with your kids. hasbro i think is the manufacturer of it. so with apologies to hasbro, we came up with clue, because we -- if you played clue, madam speaker, i don't know if you're a clue player or not, the way it works is you start with a murder has been committed. in this case there wasn't a murder. it was pretty bad, but it wasn't murder, you start with what happened. what happened is that somebody put in a bill in the middle of the night, language that protected these bonuses that everybody became shocked about. so that's the crime in this particular instance. an

access to seeing the doctor that they choose and when i speak to my constituents back in ohio, in northeast ohio, i talk about the five p's of health care. the five p's. the fact that we need to cover all people. now, when we talk about covering all people, we need to understand that by not doing so, it's actually costing all of us paying into the system more money. those 46 million uninsured or underinsured people who can't seek access to their doctor because their health care effectively ended when they got their pink slip at their job because they can't afford a cobra payment, they are uninsured or underinsured and when they use the hospital emergency room as their primary care physician, they're costing all of us paying into the system four or five times more by using the hospital room, the emergency room, as their primary care physician. we need to cover all people. and to those americans who might be listening tonight, we need to understand that the american people -- the american taxpayer right now is paying to make sure that every man, woman and child in iraq has access to universal heal

if you came to northeast indiana, and i represent basecally fort wayne up to south bend, going along the michigan line and ohio line, you drive through an area with lots of water, rivers, in between is beautiful green farmland we aren't dry and parched like much of america, we have a green area. that gives us water, essential to most manufacturing. you can't build major manufacturing facilities where there isn't adequate water. many, many of those farms where people still farm we don't have the big corporate farms, we have small farms because one person from each sfamly, sometimes multifamily on one farm are working at auto parts plants and other plants throughout the district. thousands and thousands and thousands, they are at direct threat we talk more about our energy. i've been to the alternative energy labs in colorado. sandia labs in new mexico. major places where we look at alternative energy. indiana cannot get wind power. with we cannot get -- we don't have a way to get to 20% in the traditional alternative energy. some of my friends actually i've known for many years are putting in one of the biggest