[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 5]
[House]
[Pages 7412-7413]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                      MEDICARE PRESCRIPTION DRUGS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Green) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GREEN of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak tonight to discuss a 
report that was just released yesterday from the National Institute for 
Health Care Management Foundation, which stated that spending on 
prescription drugs has increased almost 19 percent in the last year. I 
am deeply troubled by this report, as it underscores a critical need 
for this Congress to modernize Medicare to include a prescription drug 
benefit.
  Spending on retail outpatient prescription drugs rose almost 19 
percent in 2000, from $111 billion to $131.9 billion. Approximately 
half of that spending increase can be attributed to just 23 
prescription drugs or pharmaceuticals. Among those drugs are the 
blockbuster ones we hear about, Vioxx, Lipitor, Celebrex and 
Glucophage, which I am not pronouncing correctly, but the very drugs 
that seniors rely on every day to treat chronic long-term illnesses 
such as diabetes, arthritis or high cholesterol. In fact, my mother-in-
law, of those four drugs, actually takes three of them every day.
  For the seniors that have no prescription drug coverage, they simply 
have no choice but to pay top dollar for these expensive medications or 
go without; and that is what they are doing every day, they are going 
without, because they cannot afford them. Fully one-third of our 
Medicare beneficiaries, and these are old numbers, because that was 
before so many of our Medicare HMOs withdrew from the market, at least 
one-third of them have no prescription drug coverage at all.

[[Page 7413]]

  I hear from constituents literally every day who have to make these 
tough choices on whether to pay their electric bill or their 
prescription drugs. In fact, I have a letter I just received today from 
a constituent who tells me: ``I am holding off on some of my 
medications until my Social Security checks are deposited in the bank 
on the 3rd, and I am out of some of them already.'' Seniors are 
struggling literally from Social Security check to Social Security 
check hoping they have enough medication until the end of the month.
  Another constituent of mine was hospitalized for a severe infection. 
When she was dismissed from the hospital she was given three new 
prescriptions, one which cost more than $700. Imagine an 85-year-old 
woman being asked to pay $700 for one prescription. The other two cost 
her an additional $150, bringing her grand total for these new 
prescriptions, only new ones for this current illness, to $850 on one 
trip to the pharmacy. Talk about adding insult to injury.
  Unfortunately, the high costs of prescription drugs are only getting 
worse. The recent government study predicts that the mapping of the 
human genome, the aging of the baby boom generation that I am a part 
of, and the increase in spending on biomedical research will lead to 
the introduction of more and more prescription drugs. This is the good 
part of it, because we are living longer and healthier, but this is 
sometimes a mixed blessing from a policy perspective. The influx of 
these drugs can only mean new treatments and therapies for what are now 
incurable and serious diseases, but it also means that the demand for 
these drugs and also the cost of these drugs will rise.
  Congress cannot sit idly by while our seniors, our parents and our 
grandparents, are forced to pay more and more of their hard-earned 
retirement on prescription drugs, and they cannot afford it. 
Unfortunately, we have seen little action during this Congress. We have 
actually had one or two hearings in the Subcommittee on Health of the 
Committee on Energy and Commerce, but we have not gone any further.
  For the past 100 days, all we have heard about is a tax cut. What we 
need to do is start addressing prescription drugs for senior citizens, 
those 40 million hard-working Americans who now rely on Medicare.
  The $300 billion I understand that may be in the budget that will 
actually come out of the Medicare reform legislation for prescription 
drugs is just not adequate. The real problem for our seniors is every 
time I go to the grocery store at home or a town hall meeting or visit 
with my seniors, I am approached on what we can do about prescription 
drugs for seniors. They want to know why in Washington we are not doing 
something about it, because they see it as an imperative that if it is 
not a problem today, it has been a problem for over a year and we have 
not addressed it.
  Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues on both sides, the majority and the 
minority, we need to pass a prescription drug benefit that is part of 
Medicare. Just like a doctor or hospital, our prescription drugs should 
be paid for for our seniors as part of Medicare. We may not be able to 
afford the 80 percent that we do now for doctors and hospitals, but we 
ought to be able to grow into that.
  Mr. Speaker, $300 billion is a start, but we have a long way to go. 
It is a crisis now for our senior citizens. It is a crisis for our 
parents and our grandparents, and we need to do something about it now.

                          ____________________



  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  (Mr. PALLONE addressed the House. His remarks will appear hereafter 
in the Extensions of Remarks.)

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