Elected 1994, seat up 2006 Born: Feb. 22, 1952, Nashville Home: Nashville Education: Princeton U., A.B. 1974, Harvard Med. Schl., M.D. 1978 Religion: Presbyterian Marital Status: married (Karyn)

Career:

• Professional: Practicing surgeon, 1978-94; Dir., Vanderbilt Medical Ctr. Heart-Lung Transplant Program, 1986-93.

DC Office: 416 RSOB 20510, 202-224-3344; Fax: 202-228-1264; Web site: www.senate.gov/~frist

State Offices: Chattanooga, 423-894-2203; Jackson,901-424-9655; Kingsport,423-323-1252; Knoxville,423-602-7977; Memphis,901-683-1910; Nashville,615-352-9411.

Committees:

• NRSC Chairman
.
• Foreign Relations: African Affairs (RMM); International Operations & Terrorism; Near Eastern & South Asian Affairs.
• Health, Education, Labor & Pensions: Children & Families; Public Health (RMM).

Bill Frist, first elected to the Senate in 1994, grew up in Nashville, in an old Tennessee family; his father practiced medicine for 55 years and was the physician for six Tennessee governors. Frist graduated from Princeton and Harvard Medical School, studied at Mass General, in England and at Stanford, and became a heart and lung transplant surgeon, setting up the transplant program at Vanderbilt. He performed 250 transplants and wrote a book, Transplant, on the social and ethical issues of these surgeries; he has written more than 100 peer-reviewed articles. In 1968 his father and brother, Thomas Frist Jr., set up HCA, which through a 1994 merger became Columbia/ HCA, the world's largest hospital company; the new firm was hit with charges of Medicare violations in 1997, and Thomas Frist Jr. came back from semi-retirement to run it; he owns millions of dollars of the stock and Bill Frist has somewhere between $5 million and $25 million, put into blind trust. Frist also pilots his own airplane and runs marathons (51 seconds faster than Al Gore in 1998), and regularly does volunteer medical work on a mobile health clinic in Washington, and in Tennessee and--venturing into the war-torn "no-go zone"--in Sudan. For years Frist was unpolitical: he never voted until age 36, after he moved back to Nashville. When he was appointed by Democratic Governor Ned Ray McWherter to head a task force on Medicaid in 1992, many assumed he was a Democrat.

In 1994 Frist decided to run against Senator Jim Sasser, then Budget Committee chairman and a candidate for majority leader. He had tough primary opposition from east Tennessee businessman Bob Corker, who attacked him for not voting and for obtaining cats from animal shelters for experiments as a medical student. But Frist, spending liberally, carried the Nashville and Memphis media markets and beat Corker 44%-32%. In the general, Frist said he wanted to "give communities and individuals the freedom to solve problems and return to our basic conservative values," and backed welfare reform, federal spending cuts, school prayer and term limits; he follows Howard Baker in calling for citizen-politicians and pledged to serve just two terms--"Term limits for career politicians and the death penalty for career criminals," one ad said. Sasser emphasized school prayer, the balanced budget amendment and cracking down on illegal immigrants, and he ridiculed Frist as a bored, rich surgeon. Frist outspent Sasser, spending $3.7 million of his own money. Sasser led in polls up through October, but in November Frist won 56%-42%, carrying all the large metro areas and losing only scattered traditionally Democratic rural counties.

Frist is the first physician to serve in the Senate for 50 years; he points out that there were many more in the days of the citizen-politician. In September 1995 he resuscitated a constituent outside the Dirksen Office Building, and in July 1998 he ran over to the House and tended to those wounded in the shooting that killed two Capitol police officers. Naturally he got involved in health issues; the Senate ethics committee ruled that he is not prohibited from voting on any "legislation of general applicability to the health care industry." He played a key role on the 1996 health care bill on portability and pre-existing conditions, working to include Medical Savings Accounts. He also helped to write the provision guaranteeing insurance coverage for 48-hour hospital maternity stays. He worked to reauthorize the Ryan White CARE Act for the treatment and support of AIDS patients. He put on the income tax form a box to check off for information on organ donor cards. He worked to make sure Tennessee was not penalized for extending TennCare to uninsured children.

On some health issues Frist has worked with Democrats. With Jay Rockefeller, he sponsored a law to allow physicians and hospitals to establish service provider organizations to contract directly with Medicare. He backed the 1997 Clinton bill to ban discrimination by insurers by genetic traits and to assure privacy of genetic information. He supported Surgeon General nominees Henry Foster and David Satcher. He has supported doubling NIH funding over five years. In 2000 he worked with Ted Kennedy to forge a compromise on organ transplants, to try to reduce regional disparities; but the House, which backed the United Network of Organ Sharing, with its 62 separate geographic regions, refused to compromise. In 2000 Frist and Kennedy steered through a $919 million authorization for public health laws, including $540 million for research on bioterrorism and $180 million to refurbish Center for Disease Control labs. He passed a law with incentives for primary care physicians in rural and inner city areas, and worked to reauthorize the bone marrow registry, with recruitment of minorities. He helped get both houses to pass a 1998 law for research on women's health problems. Frist sponsored the ban on human cloning and supported the partial-birth abortion ban, "because it is needlessly risky to the woman, because it is an unnecessary procedure, because it is inhumane to the fetus, and because it is medically unacceptable and offends the very basic civil sensibilities of people all across this country."

On HMO regulation and prescription drugs, Frist has been the lead man in forging Republican positions. He served on the Medicare Commission that presented its premium support plan in March 1999. In June 2000 sponsored a Medicare reform bill with commission chairman John Breaux. Their plan would have private insurers competing to provide coverage to Medicare beneficiaries, overseen by a new government agency which would approve the content of plans; the idea is to evade the cumbersome HCFA bureaucracy in HHS. They seek to include prescription drug coverage as part of a larger reform of Medicare, with subsidies for all seniors and a progressive sliding scale of subsidies depending on income. Frist has also co-sponsored with Breaux and James Jeffords a plan to provide those uninsured and ineligible for Medicaid a tax credit, $1,000 for individuals and $2,000 for families, for amounts spent for health insurance; this would give them some of the same benefits others get for employer-provided health insurance. Frist worked on tobacco legislation with John McCain in 1998, but ended up opposing his bill; in 2000 they joined to sponsor a bill giving the FDA limited power to regulate tobacco marketing to children.

On other issues, Frist was the lead sponsor with Democrat Ron Wyden of the Ed-Flex bill which passed by a wide margin in March 1999; it would give school systems greater flexibility in return for holding them to greater accountability. He favors individual retirement accounts as part of Social Security. After a trip to Sudan, he said in 1998 that the Clinton administration's acquiescence to Sudanese government manipulation of humanitarian relief "may be a contributing factor in the horrendous prospect of widespread starvation." And in July 2000, after recounting the horrifying conditions he had seen in Sudan a week before, he got UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke to commit to a change in U.S. policy.

Senators of the same party from the same state often have acrimonious relationships, but Frist and Fred Thompson, elected the same year, seem to get on unusually well, although they disagree on about 20% of roll call votes--many of the disagreements are what you might expect between a doctor and a lawyer. They have worked in tandem on many Tennessee issues, including the 1998 TVA bill that refinanced its debt, saving $100 million, and added $50 million for its non-power activities, like the Land Between the Lakes park. They worked in 2000 to prepare TVA for deregulation. In December 2000 they got $6 million for a school of government to be named after Howard Baker at the University of Tennessee.

Frist came up for re-election in 2000, and Democrats were eager to field a strong candidate against him in order to help Al Gore in his native Tennessee. In summer 1999, 29-year-old Congressman Harold Ford of Memphis traveled across the state and attacked Frist for his holdings in Columbia/ HCA and his opposition to the Democrats' HMO regulation bill. He told state Democrats that he would decide whether to run by Labor Day. But he announced no decision and quit barnstorming, leaving Democrats with the prospect of having as their candidate John Jay Hooker, an up-and-coming politician 30 years before but now something of a joke; he won 29% as the Democratic nominee against Governor Don Sundquist in 1998. Ford's indecision and Hooker's notoriety kept Memphis businessman John Lowery, who once said he was willing to spend $1 million of his own money, out of the race. The Democratic nomination went to computer science professor Jeff Clark, who beat Hooker by just 810 votes in the August primary, 34.2%-33.8%, in a light turnout. Clark, as he put it himself, spent "zero dollars on television, zero dollars on radio and zero dollars on direct mail." He attacked Frist for the alleged Columbia/ HCA conflict and denounced pharmaceutical companies. Frist set up organizations in all 95 counties and ran ads stressing his achievements on education and health care and featuring testimonials from constituents. Frist won 65%-32%, with the highest number of votes cast for a candidate in Tennessee history. He lost only five of the 95 counties, including Al Gore's home in Smith County.

Frist, meanwhile, delivered the Republican response to Bill Clinton's State of the Union address in January 2000. In July 2000 he was named to replace the late Paul Coverdell as the liaison between George W. Bush's campaign and Republican senators. He worked on the Republican platform and spoke Thursday night at the Philadelphia convention. He was on an early list of possible vice presidential candidates. Tennessee Democrats and Republicans speculated that he was thinking of running for president some day. In December 2000 he was elected head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, with the assignment of bettering the party's total in a year when 20 Republican and 14 Democratic Senate seats are up.

Group Ratings
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2000	0	14	0	0	67	91	74	86	92	97	92
1999	0	--	0	0	8	--	73	100	92	--	--

National Journal Ratings
	1999 LIB	--	1999 CONS		2000 LIB	--	2000 CONS
Economic	30%	--	68%		0%	--	86%
Social	36%	--	59%		30%	--	68%
Foreign	23%	--	67%		27%	--	67%

Key Votes of the 106th Congress
1. Educ. Savings Accts. Y 2. Prescrip. Drug Benefit N 3. Delay Ergonomic Standards Y 4. Phase Out Estate Tax Y 5. Review Movie Violence Y 6. Gun Show Bckgrnd. Checks N		7. Ban Part.-Birth Abortion	Y
8. Broaden Hate Crimes List	N
9. NATO War in Serbia	N
10. Table Cuba Travel Ban	Y
11. Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty	N
12. Perm. Trade with China	Y

Election Results
2000 general	Bill Frist (R)	1,255,444	(65%)
	Jeff Clark (D)	621,152	(32%)
	Others	52,017	(3%)
2000 primary	Bill Frist (R)	unopposed
1994 general	Bill Frist (R)	834,226	(56%)
	James R. (Jim) Sasser (D)	623,164	(42%)
	Other	23,001	(2%)

Campaign Finance
2000	Receipts	Receipts from PACs	Expenditures
Bill Frist (R)	$4,385,454	$1,022,063	$4,664,737
Jeff Clark (D)	$186,469	$85,000	$173,406