health and wellness
specific accomplishments in senate

Tobacco:

• Authored the original language that passed in the U.S. House of Representatives to ban smoking on short-distance airline flights and worked with Senator Frank Lautenberg to enact the ban and extend it to all flights. Successfully extended the ban to international flights.

• Secured increased funding for tobacco prevention programs through the federal Office on Smoking and Health and enacted legislation that banned smoking in schools and child care centers nationwide.
  
  
• Stood up to the tobacco industry to hold it accountable for its decades of deception about the dangers of smoking and the tactics it used to lure children to begin smoking.

Dietary Supplements:

• Promoted a ban on ephedra: Brought intense public scrutiny to deaths and injuries suffered by consumers taking dietary supplements that contained ephedra and the unscrupulous behavior of ephedra manufacturers who hid reports of ephedra's risks, which led the FDA to ban products containing ephedra.


• Required adverse event reporting: Introduced legislation to protect consumers by requiring manufacturers of all dietary supplements to report to the FDA all serious adverse events associated with their products, and negotiated a strong bipartisan compromise that gained the support of dietary supplement defenders as well as consumer groups, resulting in legislation enacted into law requiring reporting of all serious adverse events associated with the use of dietary supplements and nonprescription drugs.
  
  
• Worked successfully to ban new forms of anabolic steroids.

Public Health:

Led a variety of efforts to improve public health, including successful initiatives to secure increased funding for comprehensive programs to treat and prevent asthma in children, expand funding for childhood immunization programs, fund innovative efforts to encourage organ donation, and eliminate the time limits on Medicare coverage of immunosuppressive drugs for transplant patients.

Health Insurance:

• Secured full tax deductibility of health insurance for the self employed;
  
  
• Preserved and temporarily expanded funding for state health insurance high-risk pools (including Illinois's pool) to cover more people who need health insurance; and
  
  
• Obtained Medicaid funding changes that saved Illinois health care providers $600 million over 5 years so they could continue to provide quality health care to low-income Illinoisans. Also secured passage of language blocking for one year a proposed Medicaid rule that would have reduced payments to government safety-net providers, which would have eliminated up to $623 million in federal funding for the Medicaid program in Illinois, including as much as $235 million in Cook County.
  
  
• Crafted and offered an innovative proposal that could expand access to affordable health insurance for small business owners and their employees by giving them access to health plans like those available to members of Congress.