[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 16077-16081]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   MEDICARE PRESCRIPTION DRUG BENEFIT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2001, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. PALLONE. Madam Speaker, I wanted to take to the floor this 
evening to talk once again about the prescription drug issue, both the 
problem in terms of more and more Americans not being able to afford 
the price of prescription drugs and the need to provide an expansion of 
Medicare to cover prescription drugs under Medicare for America's 
seniors and disabled.
  I want to start out by saying that during the August break when I had 
a number of town meetings and forums and open houses at my district 
offices in New Jersey, this was the number one issue that my 
constituents came to me and talked about. Interestingly enough, it was 
not just the seniors who wanted to see Medicare expanded to include 
prescription drugs and wanted a benefit, but it was also a lot of 
younger people who expressed concerns about the rising cost of 
prescription drugs and their inability to pay for them.
  It amazes me that we are now back, and it is September, September 4. 
We have in the House of Representatives, the Congress as a whole, 
probably a month or 6 weeks or so at the most before we adjourn. Yet we 
are stuck in the fact that at this point there is no reason to believe 
that either a prescription drug benefit or a mechanism to control the 
price of prescription drugs is likely to pass before we adjourn. I 
think that that is a tragedy. I think there is nothing more important 
for us to do between now and the adjournment of this House sometime in 
October than to try to address both of these issues.
  I have talked many times about the need for a Medicare benefit that 
includes prescription drugs. Democrats in the House, unlike the 
Republicans, have taken the position and put forward a proposal that 
would expand Medicare to include a prescription drug

[[Page 16078]]

benefit. Basically, we have talked about it, and we have put forward a 
bill that would create a new Medicare program, very similar to what we 
have now for part B in Medicare that pays for seniors' doctors' bills 
and that simply says that seniors would pay so much a month, about $25, 
and 80 percent of the cost of their prescription drugs would be paid 
for by Medicare, by the Federal Government. There would be a $100 
deductible. The first $100 you would have to pay out of pocket. After 
that, 80 percent of the costs would be paid for; and there would be a 
20 percent copay, very similar to what seniors now have under Medicare 
for the payment of their doctor bills.
  The sad thing about it is that the Republicans in the House refuse to 
do that. Basically, what they have said is they want a privatization 
plan. I was very upset to see that during the course of the August 
break, President Bush repeatedly talked not only about the need to have 
a private drug benefit but also about privatizing Medicare and Social 
Security in general. Here we face a situation where our Federal budget 
is once again in deficit, and we are spending money from the Social 
Security trust fund to pay for other expenses of the government and the 
President continues to talk about privatizing Social Security as well 
as Medicare; and the Republicans push for a private program, saying, 
Well, we'll give the seniors some money and maybe they can go out and 
find a prescription drug plan in the private sector. They do not want 
to expand Medicare to provide a benefit.
  I would call upon my colleagues in the House, let us get together and 
let us push for a Medicare benefit, for a prescription drug program 
that really will make a difference. What is happening in the Senate is 
interesting as well. Over in the Senate they passed legislation on a 
bipartisan basis that would try to address the issue of price in some 
significant ways, most important, by plugging up some of the loopholes 
in the brand-name industry, in the patent system, whereby many of the 
name-brand companies have been able to prevent generic drugs from 
coming to market by expanding their patents and taking advantage of 
loopholes in the patent laws to make it more difficult to sell a 
generic drug when a patent should expire.
  I know it is a difficult concept, but the bottom line is that one way 
to reduce prices in a significant way is to pass the bill, the Schumer-
McCain bill, that passed the Senate and take it up here in the House 
and pass that bill or a similar bill in the House that would make it 
more difficult for these brand-name drug companies to extend their 
patents or to come up with another drug that is similar and say that 
generics could not come to market.
  We feel that we can make a difference, that maybe 40 percent of the 
cost of prescription drugs could be saved if some of these loopholes 
were cleared up and we were able to encourage the use of generics. The 
Senate also passed as part of the same bill the allowance for 
reimportation through Canada as a method of bringing drug costs down. 
We need to address this as well. The House should take up the Senate 
bill that deals with generics, that deals with the reimportation and 
simply pass it, or in other ways we have to deal with the price issue 
as well. There are many ways to deal with that, and I think we can talk 
about them more this evening.
  But the bottom line is this inaction, where the House passes this 
privatization of Medicare and tries to seek to provide a Medicare 
benefit through some kind of private insurance is not going to pass the 
Senate, and it should not because it is not going to be meaningful; and 
the idea of expanding generics and providing for reimportation as some 
method of bringing drug costs down is something that we should pass in 
the House and at least try to get something accomplished between now 
and the end of this session.
  I see one of my colleagues who has been so much a part of this debate 
all year, the gentleman from Arkansas, who owns a pharmacy and who is 
very familiar with some of the problems that seniors face with 
prescription drugs and I know who also has a very good bill on a 
bipartisan basis with, I guess, one of our colleagues from Missouri 
(Mrs. Emerson). He is working very hard to come up with a prescription 
drug benefit as well along the lines of what I discussed earlier. I am 
pleased to see him here and I yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. ROSS. I thank the gentleman from New Jersey. I am here tonight to 
rise in support of seniors all across Arkansas' Fourth Congressional 
District and seniors all across America who will continue once again 
tonight to go to bed unable to either afford their medicine or afford 
to take it properly.

                              {time}  1945

  As the gentleman from New Jersey mentioned, my wife and I do own a 
small-town family pharmacy. We live in Prescott, Arkansas, a town of 
3,400 people. Our pharmacy is a place where people come to share recent 
photographs of their children or grandchildren, to celebrate the good 
times together, and a place to gather to be there for one another 
during the difficult times.
  I have got to tell you that over the years in that small-town family 
pharmacy that we own back home in Prescott, Arkansas, I have seen too 
many bad times. I have seen too many seniors come through the door who 
have been to the doctor. Medicare has paid for them to go to the 
doctor, Medicare has paid for the tests to be run on them at the 
doctor's office or the hospital, and, as a result of all that, the 
doctor concludes that a senior citizen needs a certain prescription 
drug in order to get well or live a healthier lifestyle. They come 
through the door of our pharmacy and pharmacies throughout America to 
learn that they either cannot afford their medicine or cannot afford to 
take it properly.
  This is America, and we can do better than that by our seniors. That 
was a driving force behind my decision to run for the United States 
Congress. I wanted to come here, I wanted to come to the people's 
House, the United States House of Representatives, and pass legislation 
that would truly modernize Medicare, to include medicine for our 
seniors. Let me tell you why.
  There is a senior citizen, a retired pharmacist, a woman in Glenwood, 
Arkansas, who makes the point better than I can. She was a relief 
pharmacist in my hometown at the pharmacy that my mom and dad used when 
I was a small child growing up, which was not that long ago. She said 
back in those days, if she had a prescription that she was filling that 
cost over $5, that she would go ahead and fill the next prescription in 
line while she built up enough courage and confidence to go out and 
confront the patient and tell them that their medicine was going to 
cost $5.
  That really does drive home the point that today's Medicare really 
was designed for yesterday's medical care. That is what prescriptions 
cost back when we created Medicare.
  Even health insurance companies, who are obviously in the business of 
making profits, even they cover the cost of medicine. Why? Because they 
know it helps people live longer and healthier lifestyles and avoid 
needless doctor visits, needless hospital stays and needless surgeries, 
the kinds of things that I have personally witnessed in that small 
family pharmacy that my wife and I own back in Prescott, Arkansas.
  You see, I have seen seniors leave without their medicine, and, 
living in a small town, I learn a week later where they are in the 
hospital running up a $10,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 Medicare bill, or 
where they spent $100,000 in Medicare payments to have a leg removed, 
or where they are now spending $250,000 in Medicare payments to receive 
kidney dialysis. All these things are avoidable, but it happened to 
these seniors simply because they could not afford their medicine or 
could not afford to take it properly. Again, this is America, and we 
can do better than that by our seniors.
  So I came to Congress and I wrote a bipartisan bill with the 
gentlewoman from Missouri (Mrs. Emerson), a Republican. I did it in a 
bipartisan way because, you see, I think it is time for this Congress 
to unite behind the need

[[Page 16079]]

to truly modernize Medicare, to provide medicine for our seniors, just 
as we have united on this war against terrorism.
  So we wrote a bill back in January. It was a very fair bill. It 
called for a $250 annual deductible. It called for an 80 percent/20 
percent copayment, with the government or Medicare paying the other 80 
percent.
  Basically what our bill did was treated going to the pharmacy like 
going to the doctor and going to the hospital. It gave you the freedom 
to get the medicine your doctor wanted you to have and it gave you the 
freedom to choose which pharmacy you wanted to use.
  Our bill took on the big drug manufacturers. We demanded the same 
kind of rebates from the big drug manufacturers to help offset the cost 
of this voluntarily but guaranteed Medicare Part D prescription drug 
benefit. We demanded the same kind of rebates from the big drug 
manufacturers to help pay for this program, just as the big HMOs have 
been demanding and receiving from the big drug manufacturers for years.
  Well, the Republican national leadership refused to give us a 
hearing, they refused to give us a vote on this bipartisan bill. And I 
continue to come to the floor and talk about the importance of it and 
remind folks and remind the Republican national leadership that this 
was a bipartisan bill, it was written by a Democrat and a Republican. 
But it took on the big drug manufacturers, and they refused to give us 
a hearing, they refused to give us a vote, and that is wrong.
  Then, some 4 months before the election, the Republican national 
leadership decided this was an important issue, so they began to write 
a bill. In fact, in the middle of writing the bill they had to adjourn 
the committee meeting to go to a fundraiser sponsored by the big drug 
manufacturers. Do not take my word for it, please look. It is in the 
Washington Post, $250,000 a person to attend this fundraiser for the 
Republicans.
  Then, after the fundraiser they went back into the committee and 
continued to write the bill, and then it passed the House. I voted 
against it, and I voted against it because I refused to vote for 
something that is no more than a false hope or a false promise for our 
seniors. That bill failed to take on the big drug manufacturers. That 
bill did very little, if anything, to help our seniors, and it was the 
first step toward privatizing Medicare.
  You see, this Republican prescription drug bill that passed the 
House, and did not get anywhere in the Senate, by the way, this bill 
that passed the House does not make prescription drugs a part of 
Medicare. It simply allows private insurance companies, dozens of them, 
to go knock on your door or your mom's door or your grandmother's door, 
all trying to sell the same policy.
  Then here is what it does. It would require you to pay a monthly 
premium, but they cannot tell us exactly how much. It would require you 
to pay the first $250 out of your own pocket.
  After that, it is more complicated than filling out an income tax 
return. On the next $1,000 worth of medicine that you need, you are 
only going to pay 20 percent. That sounds pretty good. On a $100 
prescription, you pay $20. After you spend $1,000, and as a small town 
family pharmacy owner, I can tell you for a lot of seniors that only 
takes a few months. After you spend $1,000, on the next $1,000, between 
$1,000 and $2,000, your copayment goes to 50 percent. In other words, 
on that $1,500 prescription you pay $50. Then after you have spent 
$2,000, and, again, as a small town family pharmacy owner, I can tell 
you it only takes a matter of months for some seniors to reach $2,000 
worth of medicine expenses, so after you spent $2,000, guess what? 
Between $2,000 and $3,700, you are back paying the full amount, a 100 
percent copayment to our seniors, and yet the bill requires them to 
continue to pay the monthly premium.
  If you add it all up, if my addition is right, counting the 
deductible and the premium and this complicated formula of how much you 
pay, depending on which day it is and on how much you spent in terms of 
the copayment, on the first $3,700 worth of medicine you need every 
year, the government, through Medicare, actually through a private 
insurance company subsidized by Medicare, is going to provide you with 
help to the tune of about $600. $600 in savings on a $3,700 drug bill 
does not help seniors choose between buying their medicine, buying 
their groceries, paying their utility bills and paying rent. It is 
nothing more than a bogus plan.
  Now, I just spent 5 weeks on the August district work period 
traveling the 29 counties that make up Arkansas's Fourth Congressional 
District, one of the more rural and larger districts in America.
  Seniors came up to me every day and said, ``I know you are working 
hard for this Medicare prescription drug benefit. When are others going 
to begin to listen to you?'' And I told them I was coming back to the 
floor, just as I have done for the past 20 months, and I was going to 
continue to talk about this in hopes that people will listen, and they 
will listen to the fact that it is time to write a plan that is 
bipartisan, that it is time to write a plan that is fair, and that it 
is time to write a plan that takes on the big drug manufacturers.
  Let me tell you why. I recently conducted a survey. I compared the 
price of the five most commonly used brand name drugs that seniors use. 
I compared the price in Arkansas's Fourth Congressional District with 
the price paid by seniors for those same drugs in six other countries.
  Do you know what I found? I found that the price that seniors pay on 
average in Arkansas's Fourth Congressional District is 110 percent more 
than what seniors pay in these other countries. And that is wrong. We 
are talking about drugs that are being invented in America, oftentimes 
with government subsidized research. They are being made by Americans, 
they are being packaged by Americans, they are being shipped by 
Americans, and yet our seniors are asked to pay 110 percent more here 
than what we are requiring them to pay in other countries.
  If these other countries, places like Canada and Mexico, if those 
small governments can stand up to the big drug manufacturers and demand 
a fair price, why can we not? I am not here to beat up the big drug 
manufacturers. They create drugs that save lives and help us all to 
live healthier lifestyles, and I applaud them for that. But sometimes 
you have got to draw the line and say enough is enough.
  A recent study indicated that some drug manufacturers spent more 
money last year on those fancy TV ads than they did on research and 
development, finding cures for diseases. You know the kind of ads I am 
talking about, the ones that come on TV where they try to tell you 
which drug you need to tell your doctor you need.
  My colleagues, have you ever thought about that? That is crazy. That 
is crazy, and it is time that we held the big drug manufacturers 
accountable, and it is time that they step forward in good faith and 
say we want to do for a Medicare prescription drug plan what we have 
been doing for the big HMOs and the for-profit companies for years, and 
that is providing rebates to help offset the cost of the program.
  I am real disappointed at how the vote on the Republican plan, which 
was nothing more than a false hope and a false promise for our seniors, 
unfolded. They brought it to this floor for a vote at 2:39 a.m. on a 
Friday morning when seniors were fast asleep.
  I had a plan. I was proud to be one of four cosponsors, original 
sponsors, of a bill that would provide a meaningful prescription drug 
benefit. They would not listen to our bipartisan bill, so I came back 
with another one and was one of four original sponsors of a bill that 
basically again would treat going to the doctor and going to the 
hospital and going to the pharmacy all the same.
  Not only did they bring the bill, the Republican bill written by the 
drug manufacturers for the benefit of the drug manufacturers, to the 
floor at 2:39 on a Friday morning, they refused, they refused to allow 
us to offer up a substitute. They refused to allow us to offer up one 
single amendment to that bill.
  All 435 Members of this body were elected the same way, by the 
people,

[[Page 16080]]

and we have been sent here to be a voice for the people. I say give us 
an opportunity to have a vote. I will not even be picky here. I am 
calling on the leadership to either give me a vote on a bipartisan bill 
that the gentlewoman from Missouri (Mrs. Emerson) and I wrote together, 
a bipartisan bill to help our seniors, or to give me a vote on the 
other bill that I wrote and offered up as a Democratic substitute to 
the Republican plan that passed that Friday morning at 2:39 a.m., that 
does nothing for our seniors other than offer up a false hope and a 
false promise.
  People who know me know that I am not partisan. I am sick and tired 
of all the partisan bickering that goes on in our Nation's capital. 
There have been times when I have stood and voted with President Bush. 
I believe there are extremists in both parties, and I am trying to 
bring people to the middle to find common-sense solutions to the 
problems that confront our Nation.
  I can tell you that on this issue the Republicans are wrong, and it 
is time for all of us to get right. It is time for all of us to come 
together. It is time for all of us to work in a bipartisan way to write 
a bill that will help bring down the high cost of prescription drugs 
for our seniors and for working families all across America.

                              {time}  2000

  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from 
Arkansas, my colleague, for everything that he said, because I think he 
is right on point on this issue of prescription drugs. But the two 
things that the gentleman stressed the most, or that I picked up the 
most, and they are clearly linked, and one is the effort on the part of 
the pharmaceutical industry to try to scuttle, in my opinion, both any 
effort in the House or in the Senate to address price, to try to bring 
down the cost of prescription drugs, and even the effort to scuttle a 
Medicare benefit, which the gentleman talked about and which we 
continue to stress.
  I just want to go through if I could a couple of those things, 
because the gentleman, first of all, mentioned the Washington Post 
article which was that day in, I guess it was in June, the night of 
June 19 when the GOP had the big fundraiser, the very day that we were 
in the Committee on Commerce and voting on a prescription drug benefit 
and we actually had to adjourn at 5 o'clock so that they could go to 
the Republican fundraiser. There was an article the next day, or 
actually it was that same day, and I am just going to read a couple of 
highlights of it.
  It says, ``Drug Firms Among Big Donors at GOP Event.'' It said, 
``Pharmaceutical companies are among 21 donors paying $250,000 each for 
red-carpet treatment at tonight's GOP fundraising gala staring 
President Bush, two days after Republicans unveiled a prescription drug 
plan the industry is backing, according to GOP officials.'' This is not 
Democrats talking. It 
says, ``Drug companies, in parti-
cular, have made a rich investment 
into tonight's event. Robert Ingram, GlaxoSmithKline PLC's chief 
operating officer, is the chief corporate fundraiser for the gala; his 
company gave at least $250,000. Pharmaceutical Research and 
Manufacturers of America,'' that is PhRMA, a trade group funded by the 
brand name companies, ``kicked in $250,000, too.''
  It says, ``PhRMA is also helping underwrite a television ad campaign 
touting the GOP's prescription drug plan.'' I am going to talk about 
that a little bit too. It goes on to talk about the different companies 
that contributed. But it said, ``Every company giving money to the 
event has business before Congress. But the juxtaposition of the 
prescription drug debate on Capitol Hill and drug companies helping to 
underwrite a major fundraiser highlights the tight relationship 
lawmakers have with groups seeking to influence them.
  ``A senior House GOP leadership aide said yesterday that Republicans 
are working hard behind the scenes on behalf of PhRMA to make sure,'' I 
mean that says it all. That is what it is all about. As the gentleman 
said, the sad thing about it is, what really went on here in June was 
that PhRMA and the drug companies got together and decided what they 
wanted the prescription drug bill to be. They were determined that it 
was not going to be an expansion of Medicare; it was just going to be 
an effort to maybe get people to go out to find private insurance. But 
most importantly, it would determine that it would not address price.
  The gentleman and I have talked before, and I am just going to 
mention again that in that Republican bill, they went so far at the 
request of the pharmaceutical companies to actually write into the law 
that there could not be any effort to address price. I just want to 
read this noninterference clause that is in the Republican bill. It 
says, the administrator of the program ``may not (i) require a 
particular formulary or institute a price structure for the 
reimbursement of covered outpatient drugs; (ii), interfere in any way 
with negotiations between PDP sponsors and Medicare+Choice 
organizations and drug manufacturers; and (iii), otherwise interfere 
with the competitive nature of providing such coverage.''
  Basically, what they say with this language is that there cannot be 
any discussion of price. There cannot be any effort on the part of the 
Federal agency that deals with this program to deal with price.
  Mr. Speaker, we did the opposite in our bill, and the gentleman 
mentioned that too. We said, in the Democratic bill, we specifically 
mandated that the Secretary of Health and Human Services negotiate, 
because now he is going to have 30 million, 40 million seniors, 
negotiate to bring the prices down, because he is now going to have 
tremendous power, having all of these seniors, so that he can negotiate 
with the drug companies just like we do with the Veterans 
Administration or with the military, and we can bring prices down maybe 
30, 40 percent. That is just one way to do it. There are all kinds of 
ways to do it. I talked about the generic bill before, that is a way to 
do it. Reimportation is a way to do it. But the Republicans do not want 
to do anything on the issue of price because basically they are in the 
pockets of this name brand drug industry.
  The other thing the gentleman mentioned and I will just mention 
briefly is this data that came out that showed that the big drug 
companies spent almost 2\1/2\ times as much on marketing/advertising/
administration as they spent on R&D. So the gentleman said, and he is 
right; sure, there is no question that these drug companies are coming 
up with miracle drugs, but that is less, 2\1/2\ times less than what 
they spend on the marketing and the advertising.
  This was done by FamiliesUSA, and it says, ``U.S. drug companies that 
market the 50 most often prescribed drugs to seniors spent almost 2\1/
2\ times as much on marketing/advertising/administration as they spent 
on R&D,'' according to the analysis. It goes into for each company the 
percentage of revenue spent on marketing and spent on R&D. Just a few, 
like Merck spent 13 percent on marketing/advertising, 5 percent on R&D. 
Pfizer, 35 percent on marketing/advertising; 15 percent on R&D. 
Bristol-Myers spent 27 on marketing/advertising; 12 percent on R&D. I 
mean these are facts, there is no way to get around it.
  The thing that really bothers me, though, is the fact that we went 
home for this August break, but before that the Republicans passed this 
fake bill at the request of the pharmaceuticals that does not even 
address price. And what did they do? They went out and they started, 
started even before we left, but it was in full force in August, this 
huge TV ad campaign, the so-called issue ads, but they are just really 
campaign ads, and they spent millions of dollars on these Republican 
candidates, only the ones that voted for the bill, voted for their 
bill, for the drug companies' bill, and so they influenced the policy 
writing the bill, getting the bill passed, and then rewarding the 
people who voted for it by spending millions of dollars on advertising 
to get them reelected. They have been doing it with this United Seniors 
Association, which is basically just a shell, I guess we could call it, 
for the drug industry.
  So I am saying the same thing the gentleman has already said, but it 
is

[[Page 16081]]

just upsetting, because we are back here now, we are taking the time 
here in Special Orders trying to explain all of this and, meanwhile, 
these ads are going on, multimillions of dollars saying just the 
opposite, 30 seconds, 1-minute ads. I do not know how we even succeed 
in getting the word out about what is really happening about here, but 
there is no question that we have to try, and that is why I appreciate 
the gentleman being here, once again.
  Mr. Speaker, I wanted to spend a little time just talking a bit more, 
if I could, about what the Democrats in the House have in mind for a 
Medicare prescription drug benefit and how that contrasts so much with 
the Republican proposal that passed the House. As I said before, what 
the Democrats have been saying is that the only effective way to 
provide a meaningful prescription drug benefit for seniors is if we 
simply expand Medicare, which has been a very successful program, 
probably one of the most successful Federal programs that ever existed, 
and we include a prescription drug benefit within the confines of the 
Medicare program.
  Now, what we have put forward, and this was the Democratic 
alternative to the Republican bill, as I said before, is very much 
modeled on Part D. Seniors now under Medicare get their hospital 
coverage under part A, and under part B of Medicare, they pay a premium 
of so much a month, and they get 80 percent of their doctor bills 
covered by Medicare, by the Federal program.
  Now, the House Democratic proposal adds a new Part D to Medicare that 
provides a similar voluntary prescription drug coverage for all 
Medicare beneficiaries beginning in 2005. The premium is $25 a month, 
the deductible is $100 a year, just like Part B; the coinsurance is 20 
percent, the beneficiary pays 20 percent, and Medicare pays 80 percent, 
and basically, it is a $2,000 out-of-pocket limit. After you have spent 
$2,000 out-of-pocket, because of the copayment, then the rest of your 
prescription drug bills are paid by the Federal Government 100 percent.
  For those who are low income, those seniors who cannot afford the 
premium, again, just like Part B, beneficiaries with incomes up to 150 
percent of poverty pay no premium or cost-sharing; beneficiaries with 
incomes between 150 to 175 percent of poverty pay no cost-sharing and 
receive assistance. So depending on your income, the Federal Government 
would actually pay for the premium or a certain part of the premium. 
But again, it is a 20 percent a month premium, so most seniors would 
pay the premium and they would get the benefit, just like they do with 
the current Part B under Medicare.
  Now, the amazing thing to me, and I do not want to keep stressing it 
all night, but the amazing thing to me is that during the August break 
I kept hearing the President of the United States constantly talk about 
the need to privatize not only a prescription drug program, which would 
be an expansion of Medicare, but actually talk about privatizing 
Medicare itself. He had a forum, I think it was in Waco, Texas around 
the middle of August, where he talked about, it was sort of an economic 
forum primarily, but he also talked about Medicare, and he said that he 
thought Medicare should be privatized. So what we are seeing on the 
part of the Republican leadership and the President is that they 
basically do not like Medicare. Not only would they not expand Medicare 
to cover prescription drugs, they do not like the traditional Medicare 
that we have now and that has been such a successful program that so 
many seniors depend upon.
  Mr. Speaker, this is not the first time that I have come to the floor 
to point out that so many in the Republican Party historically have 
been critical of Medicare itself, let alone expanding Medicare for 
prescription drugs. Despite Medicare's effectiveness at improving the 
health of America's seniors and the disabled, there are many 
Republicans that continue to oppose it. Former Speaker Gingrich once 
said that Medicare would wither on the vine because we think people are 
voluntarily going to leave it. Even as recently as 1995, the gentleman 
from Texas (Mr. Armey), who is the Republican majority leader now in 
the House of Representatives, called Medicare a program I would have no 
part of in a free world. Of course, the program is too popular to 
repeal, so instead the House Republican leadership has implemented a 
budget plan that is projected to raid all of the Medicare surplus.
  So what we are seeing here now with the Republican budget and with 
the Republican economic policy is that we go back into debt and we 
start borrowing from Social Security, we borrow from Medicare and, 
ultimately, these very good social programs, one a pension program, 
Social Security, and another a health care program, Medicare, 
eventually have no money, or have less and less money, and then we take 
that argument to say, well, if they have no money, we better come up 
with something else and we better privatize the program. It is 
unbelievable to me that this is the way that they are proceeding. So 
even though I wanted to stress the prescription drug program tonight, I 
cannot help but point out that this is part of a larger effort on the 
President's part and on the Republican leadership's part to talk about 
privatizing Medicare as well as Social Security.
  I think that the most important point that I can end with tonight is 
to point out that as Democrats we feel that it is our obligation to not 
only continue with a strong Medicare program, as well as a strong 
Social Security program, but that we need to build on those programs, 
and that is why when we talk about a prescription drug plan we want it 
to be part of Medicare, an expansion of Medicare, because that has been 
a very successful program. It is the only way to guarantee that every 
senior not only gets health care, but gets a prescription drug plan. If 
you privatize prescription drugs as a benefit, you have no guarantee 
that people in any particular part of the country are going to have 
access to health insurance because they probably will not be able to 
buy it. It will not be for sale. If you include it as part of Medicare, 
you guarantee that every senior is going to have access to a good 
prescription drug program.
  The last point I will make is that not only do we need to provide a 
benefit for seniors, we need to address the rising cost of prescription 
drugs, and whether that means that we, in the context of Medicare, give 
the Secretary negotiating power to bring prices down through 
negotiations over the cost of drugs, or it means that we deal with the 
generic issue, as I mentioned before, and plug up a lot of loopholes so 
that it is easier to bring generic drugs to market, or we allow 
reimportation as a last resort from Canada or other countries, we need 
to get at this price issue. I am just so upset over the fact that the 
Republican leadership in the House refuses to address the price issue. 
We are going to continue to make the price issue an important point and 
try to get something passed here on that issue as well as the benefit 
before we adjourn this Congress in October.

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