Dems Advocate For Passage Of Campus Safety Act
Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:54PMFour years and five months after the Virginia Tech Shooting that killed 33 students, Reps. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) offered their endorsement of the Campus Safety Act, an initiative aimed towards providing students with better protection.
“The purpose of the legislation is to enable our institutions of higher education to more easily obtain the best information on how to keep our campuses safe and how to respond in the event of a campus emergency,” Scott told reporters at a press conference Thursday.
The Campus Safety Act will create a National Center for Campus Public Safety that will train campus public safety agencies, promote research to strengthen college safety and security, and serve as a central agency to disperse relevant campus safety information.
Cummings spoke of his 20-year old nephew, Christopher Cummings, who was murdered this year outside his apartment near Old Dominion University’s campus.
“We should not be sending our children to school and they come back in a coffin,” Cummings declared. “Christopher is dead. He is gone. The question now is what can we do to take our pain and frustration as a family and turn it around to bring some light out of his death. This legislation is without a doubt one of the best ways to do that.”
Scott has introduced the Campus Safety Act in the past and it has seen success in the House, having been passed in both the 110th and 111th Congresses.
Report Shows Women Have Disadvantage In Current Health Care System
Members of the Joint Economic Committee released a report Thursday that revealed 1.4 million women have lost their health insurance during the recession. More than 1 million of those lost were due to a spouse’s job loss.
“Clearly the system is broken when 1 million women lose their health insurance because their spouses lose their jobs,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.)
“Under the status quo, women are more vulnerable to higher health care costs than men and when they lose their coverage the impact is felt heavily on their children and their families,” Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said.
Sarah Wildman, a self-employed journalist and mother, testified about her experience with what she described as an “inappropriate health care plan”.
“I didn’t realize that my choice to start a family would put us into debt,” Wildman said, after receiving a $22,000 hospital bill from her health insurance company that initially claimed to cover maternity care. “When you buy insurance on your own, there’s no guarantee that what you pay for is what you get,” she said, calling her private sector health insurance “anti-middle class, anti-entrepreneurial, and anti-family.”
“It is so important that the voices of people like Mrs. Wildman not be drowned out,” Rep, Cummings said. “We can not allow the current system to continue to break America’s families, businesses, and economies, and we must not allow it to break American women,” he said, urging Congress to continue promoting health care reform legislation that ensures women access to quality health care without being charged higher premiums than men.