[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 147 (Tuesday, October 26, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S13146-S13147]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 PRESCRIPTION DRUG COVERAGE FOR SENIORS

  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, this is the sixth time I have come to the 
floor in recent days to talk about Medicare coverage for prescription 
medicine and particularly to talk about bipartisanship. I want to talk 
about this issue of prescriptions for senior citizens.
  I am very pleased to see my good friend and colleague from Oregon in 
the chair. He has been extremely supportive of the effort Senator Snowe 
and I have been making over these last few months to try to show that 
we can deal in a bipartisan manner with this issue of prescription 
drugs for the Nation's elderly. I think a lot of people have pretty 
much consigned this issue to part of the campaign trail in the fall of 
2000 and that Republicans and Democrats are just going to fight about 
it and nothing is going to get done. But what Senator Snowe and I have 
been talking about for the last few weeks is that we ought to act on 
this now; we ought to deal with it in this session of Congress. I thank 
the Chair, my friend and colleague from Oregon, because he has been 
very supportive.
  I am going to read this afternoon, as I have done on five previous 
occasions, from some of the letters we are getting from seniors across 
the State of Oregon who are concerned about this issue. In fact, this 
is part of a campaign Senator Snowe and I are making to urge seniors 
across the Nation, as we say in the poster, to send in their 
prescription drug bills. We hope they do send them to their Senators, 
in the hopes that we can galvanize bipartisan action in this session. 
It is more than a year until the next election. It would be a shame, 
with all of the suffering and hardship we are seeing in these letters, 
to have the Senate just take a pass on this issue and say, well, we 
will deal with it some other time and on some other day.

  So I am going to, as I have on five previous occasions, read from 
some of these letters in an effort to try to make the case for 
bipartisanship and action in this session.
  One senior from Lebanon wrote recently that she has about $990 per 
month in income. This senior spends about $175 of that for just one 
prescription each month. That leaves this older person a little over 
$700 a month on which to live. Think about what it is actually like for 
a senior citizen on a $990-a-month income to spend $175 of that for 
just one prescription each month. It is pretty clear that you just 
can't pay for necessities if you have to pay out of your monthly income 
that very large prescription drug bill.
  It would be one thing if that letter were a rarity, but here is 
another letter I got recently from a couple in The Dalles, OR--the 
Chair and I have been in that community often--who has to spend 
something like $1,500 a year for tamoxifen, a drug used to fight 
cancer. It is very clear that with their other health expenses, their 
dental work, eyeglasses, a variety of things that Medicare doesn't 
cover, this couple in The Dalles, OR, is walking on an economic 
tightrope, having to balance food costs against fuel costs, their fuel 
costs against their medical bills.
  So I am very hopeful that, as a result of this campaign Senator Snowe 
and I are making to urge seniors to send in their prescription drug 
bills, we are going to have a chance to respond in this session.
  I see our good friend, Senator Moynihan. He has really led in the 
area of health research and prevention. We talked a little bit about it 
on Friday last. What is so important about this issue and dealing with 
it in this session of Congress and not in 2001--by the way, we won't 
have the good fortune of having Senator Moynihan as a Member of this 
body then. The reason we ought to deal with it now is that the drugs 
seniors need most are preventive in nature.
  Back when I was director of the Gray Panthers, which was for about 7 
years before I was elected to the Congress--and I think the Chair was 
still practicing law at that time. It is clear that these new drugs can 
make a tangible, significant difference in the lives of our elderly 
people. I talked about a drug last week, an anticoagulant that a senior 
could get for just over $1,000 a year; and if they take that medicine, 
it can prevent strokes and debilitating illnesses that can cost more 
than $100,000 a year. Think of it--a modest, preventive investment in 
an anticoagulant drug, helping us to save $100,000 that seniors might 
need to treat a debilitating stroke.
  I am going to be brief this afternoon. I am going to wrap up with a 
few additional cases.
  In Portland, I was told by a constituent about her mother and father. 
They are 83 and 79 years old. Right now at their home in Portland, OR, 
they are being treated for diabetes, hypertension, and a variety of 
illnesses relating to arthritis. They have a monthly income of $1,600 a 
month. They are spending more than $400 of it on prescription 
medicine--25 percent of their monthly income for an older couple 83 and 
79 in our home State of Oregon just for prescription medicine.
  From Silverton, OR, a senior sent me a copy of all of her 
prescription drugs for 1 year. She spent more than $1,000. Her annual 
income that year was $868 a month. She is spending more than 10 percent 
of her income on prescription drugs.
  From Astoria, OR, a couple on a modest income wrote that for the 
first 10 months of 1999 they spent over $5,000 on their prescription 
drug costs.
  What Senator Snowe and I have said is that we have an opportunity to 
deal with this on a bipartisan basis. We can steer clear of price 
controls and one-size-fits-all Federal policy. We can use a model that 
we know works. It is based on the Federal Employee Health Plan, one 
that serves all of us and our families here in the Senate.
  Our bill is called the SPICE Program, the Senior Prescription 
Insurance Coverage Equity Act.
  Our legislation now is the only bipartisan prescription drug bill now 
before the Senate.
  Frankly, I am very confident in the bipartisan team I see assembled 
from the Finance Committee with Chairman Roth and Senator Moynihan.
  I would like to see as a result of seniors sending in to all the 
Senators--as this poster says, ``Send in your prescription drug 
bills''--I would like to see the Senate Finance Committee have the 
opportunity under Chairman Roth and Senator Moynihan to devise a good 
bipartisan proposal in this area.
  Senator Snowe and I have an approach that we think works. More than 
54 Members in the Senate have voted for the funding mechanism we have 
proposed. We have a majority in the Senate already on record supporting 
the funding approach that we would take.
  Frankly, when Chairman Roth and Senator Moynihan sit down, they may 
well have better ideas for dealing with it. It is not as if Senator 
Snowe and I are saying we have the last word in terms of dealing with 
this issue. What we are saying is given the severity of the problem, 
given the stakes and the chance to do some real good with anticoagulant 
drugs where $1,000 a year worth of help can save $100,000 in terms of 
the cost of a stroke, let's go forward, and let's not let this issue 
become fodder for the 2000 election.
  I am going to wrap up because the chairman and Senator Moynihan are 
here. They want to talk about this important trade bill, which I also 
happen to support.
  But I hope seniors will keep sending me copies of these bills. Just 
as the poster says, ``Send your prescription drug bills'' to your 
Senator. Senator Snowe and I are collecting these.
  We are going to talk again and again on the floor of the Senate about 
the importance of this issue.
  I think we can do this with market forces. We can use an approach 
that gives senior citizens the kind of bargaining power that a health 
maintenance organization has.

  What is so sad about this is these vulnerable older people, such as 
the

[[Page S13147]]

ones I have described in these letters, are getting hit twice.
  First, Medicare doesn't cover their prescriptions. When the program 
began in 1965, it didn't cover the cost of prescriptions. So there is 
no coverage either under Part A or Part B of Medicare for most of the 
Nation's seniors.
  Second, the seniors end up subsidizing the big business. Big buyers 
can get discounts.
  So you have big buyers, health plans, and a variety of big purchasers 
using their marketplace clout in order to get a good price, and the 
senior citizen in Silverton or Pendleton, the Presiding Officer's 
hometown, who walks in and buys their prescription off the street ends 
up subsidizing those big buyers. That is not right.
  Senator Snowe and I are going to continue to try as a result of our 
conversation with colleagues to catalyze a bipartisan effort to address 
this issue.
  I think the question of adding prescription drugs to Medicare would 
be a real legacy for this session of the Senate.
  I think about all of the accomplishments of Senator Moynihan in this 
health care field over the years, what he has done in terms of graduate 
medical education, and what he has done in research is extraordinary. I 
would like to see as part of the great legacy that he leaves for his 
career in the Senate action on this bipartisan issue before he retires 
at the conclusion of this session of Congress.
  Mr. President, I will be back on the floor--I know Senator Snowe 
intends to as well--talking about this issue. We hope seniors send us a 
copy of their prescription drug bills. We are going to address this 
issue in a bipartisan way. I will be back on the floor soon to talk 
about this issue and bring other real, live, concrete cases to the 
Senate in hopes, as the Presiding Officer of the Senate and I have done 
at home in Oregon, we can work on this in a bipartisan kind of way.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York.
  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise once more to thank our dear 
colleague, the Senator from Oregon, for his remarks and his typically 
self-effacing mode. He said we may not have the last word. Indeed, we 
may not. But we have the first word. We have to do this together; that 
is, both sides of the aisle. We can. He and the Senator from Maine have 
the votes. But we need a vehicle.
  His most important point is that medication is now making that great 
move from treatment of disease to prevention. That is always the great 
advance in health for everyone. The single most important health 
measures that we have done in the last century have been to clean up 
our water supplies so that we don't get ill. These drugs do the same.
  He is right. I am with him.
  I yield the floor, sir.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware.

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