[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 151 (Tuesday, November 15, 2005)]
[House]
[Page H10195]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            MEDICARE PRESCRIPTION DRUG BENEFIT IS A FAILURE

  Mr. EMANUEL. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take my Special 
Order at this time.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentleman from Illinois?
  There was no objection.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Emanuel) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. EMANUEL. Mr. Speaker, today marks the first day seniors can 
enroll in the new Medicare prescription drug benefit.
  When the Medicare drug bill passed this House more than 2 years ago, 
my colleagues on the other side of the aisle touted it as the greatest 
health care achievement since Medicare's inception. Today, we have a 
different reality.
  The Medicare drug benefit is an absolute failure. The way this thing 
is designed, one would think that Brownie from FEMA had something to do 
with it. It is a failure because of its complexity and inability to 
provide seniors with access to affordable drugs.
  My colleagues on the other side of the aisle have said this benefit 
would help 42 million Americans who are served by Medicare. But the 
only people who are really benefiting from this benefit are the 
pharmaceutical companies who gave $132 million over 10 years and have 
walked away with $139 billion in additional profits from this bill. 
Insurers who gave well over $100 million to the Republican Party are 
awarded with over $130 billion in additional profits, all paid for by 
the taxpayers.
  This bill was never designed with the customer in mind. This 
legislation was designed with the pharmaceutical companies and the HMOs 
and the insurance companies in mind. They could never have designed 
something this complex if they were thinking of people who were 65 
years and older whose 60 cents out of every dollar for their health 
care goes to prescription drugs. They could never have thought of that 
when they designed this legislation and this bill.
  Aside from the horrible corporate welfare, the complexity is a real 
shame here. But what is ironic is on this floor where we debated this, 
all the Republicans talked to us about how this choice was going to be 
a real win for the seniors. The gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. 
English) said, ``We are simply saying let us offer choices to 
seniors.'' The gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Weller) said, ``To qualify 
for Medicare, you qualify for this program, and you are going to have 
choice.'' The gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Camp) said, ``This Medicare 
bill offers a prescription drug benefit through competing private 
health insurance plans, marking the first time the private sector plans 
and consumer choice would be the principal vehicle for delivering 
Medicare benefits.''
  But it is all this choice that is causing the problem. Sometimes 
simplicity is better than choice, like Part A and Part B in the 
Medicare plan. Through all this choice, the only thing they have done 
is confuse seniors and driven up the profits for the pharmaceutical 
companies and the HMOs. There is no choice here. Mass confusion is what 
is going on.
  The benefit is so complicated and confusing that even beneficiaries 
who are PhDs say they cannot figure it out. A recent Kaiser Family 
Foundation poll found that more than six in ten seniors either barely 
understand the benefit or do not understand it at all.
  But just as important are the choices that the Republican Congress 
did not make. What did they not do? They did not do anything about the 
price of these drugs. They could have done something with direct 
negotiations just like Wal-Mart, just like Target, just like private 
sector companies, just like VA, the Veterans Administration does: 
negotiate, pool the resources, purchase bulk, just like every company 
in the private sector does. They refused to allow Medicare to do that. 
So we in America now are paying top premium dollar for drug and 
pharmaceutical prices and products that we could negotiate and get 
better pricing for. Why do we do that? Because of the pharmaceutical 
companies. And who is left holding the bag? The taxpayers and seniors.
  What else does this legislation refuse to do? It does not allow us to 
actually access products in Canada and Europe and allow competition to 
bring prices down. For a party dedicated to the principles of a free 
market, it is not understandable why they decided to choose a closed 
market, forcing America to pay the highest prices of any country in the 
world. Again, negotiation or allowing people access to the prices of 
drugs in Canada and Europe, we could have brought prices down; and, 
third, they could have allowed generics to get to the market faster. 
Three market ways: competition, open markets, negotiations. They could 
have brought the prices down and had a simpler plan, but there is 
nobody paying the piper for those ideas, and that is why the 
pharmaceutical companies are walking off with corporate welfare to the 
tune of $139 billion in additional profits, all paid for by the 
taxpayers, all brought to us by a Republican Congress.
  The final bill that created the drug benefit left seniors with a 
limited benefit that failed to reduce the cost of prescription drugs, 
gave them serious choices that have led to complexity.
  Now it is possible that seniors would understand the drug benefit a 
little better if this administration had distributed information to 
beneficiaries that was actually correct. But they botched that, too. 
The administration's own ``Medicare & You'' handbook included 
inaccurate information. Once the errors were discovered, CMS directed 
seniors to Medicare's Web site, even though over 75 percent of seniors 
have never used the Internet.
  Mr. Speaker, the Medicare prescription drug benefit is an absolute 
failure. It is a failure because it was never designed with the 
customer in mind.




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