[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 16884-16885]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     PAYING FOR PRESCRIPTION DRUGS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of 
January 23, 2002, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone) is 
recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I would like to follow up on my two 
colleagues. The gentlewoman from North Carolina talked in great detail 
about why we need a prescription drug benefit for seniors and why it 
should be under Medicare as an expansion of Medicare, and my colleague 
from Ohio talked about the cost of prescription drugs and how the 
brand-name drug companies essentially have put on a program, a lobbying 
campaign, a very effective one to try to prevent any kind of changes in 
the law that would allow for generic drugs or other kinds of measures 
that would reduce costs, not only for seniors but for all Americans; 
and I think those two discussions by my colleagues really are at the 
heart of the issue.
  When it comes to prescription drugs, we need a benefit program under 
Medicare for senior citizens and those eligible for Medicare; and at 
the same time, we need to address the issue of costs and bring down 
costs for all Americans because increasingly more and more people 
cannot afford to pay for prescription drugs and go without. And I also 
add, the real problem here is the brand-name drug companies. They are 
artificially keeping the price of prescription drugs high in order to 
make even more profit than they would normally make.
  Let me say, the Democrats in the House of Representatives, my 
colleagues on the Democratic side, have proposed an answer to both of 
these problems, both to the benefit and to the costs. At the time when 
the Republicans and the Republican leadership were trying to move a 
prescription drug bill that would simply privatize the program and say, 
well, we will give people some money, senior citizens, and maybe they 
can go out and buy a prescription drug policy in the private sector.
  The Democrats were saying that would not work, and we came up with a 
prescription drug program under Medicare. We basically said that just 
like under Medicare now, they can pay so much per month in a premium to 
get their doctor bills paid. Most seniors pay a premium, so much per 
month under what is called part B of Medicare; and after the first $100 
deductible, 80 percent of the costs of their doctor bills are paid for 
by the Federal Government. We propose, as Democrats, doing the same 
thing with prescription drugs. A senior would pay about a $25 per-month 
premium. They would have a $100 deductible for the first $100 in drugs; 
and after that, 80 percent of the costs would be paid for by the 
Federal Government for all the prescription drug needs up to $2,500 a 
year, at which time everything would be paid for at 100 percent by the 
Federal Government.

[[Page 16885]]

  What we did in our Medicare benefit program in our proposal, by 
contrast to the Republicans, is we said the Secretary of Health and 
Human Services would be mandated to negotiate lower prices for all the 
seniors that were in the Medicare program, about 30 to 40 million 
seniors. Following up on what the Federal Government does with the 
Veterans Administration or with the military, we said the Secretary of 
Health and Human Services would be mandated to bring down costs for 
prescription drugs in the Medicare program because he would have the 
power to negotiate. We estimate that would bring down the cost of 
prescription drugs maybe 30, 40 percent over what they are now.
  The Republicans totally rejected the idea of expanding Medicare to 
include prescription drugs. They just want people to go out and buy 
their own private health insurance, and they put in their bill which 
passed the House of Representatives that the head of the Medicare 
program or the head of the prescription drug program that they were 
proposing would not have any authority to negotiate price reductions, 
in fact, would be forbidden from doing so.
  Why are they doing this? They are doing this because they do not want 
anything to negatively impact the drug companies. What the drug 
companies have been doing in this House of Representatives is very 
clear. From the very beginning they were giving huge amounts of money 
to the Republicans. They had a big fund raiser for them one night a 
couple of months ago when we were actually having these bills in 
committee being marked up, when they wrote the bill, the Republican 
bill, to make sure it was not an expansion of Medicare and did not 
impact costs in any way for drugs; and then they started putting up ads 
on TV where they promoted the Republican candidates for Congress or the 
Republican incumbents who voted for their own drug bill and said that 
people should vote for them because they are doing a very good job and 
providing people with a prescription drug benefit, which is simply not 
true.
  We heard that this year United Seniors, which is basically a front 
for PHARMA, for the prescription name drug industry has pumped another 
10, or I do not know how many, millions of dollars into an ad campaign. 
The bottom line is that the drug companies are going to do whatever 
they can with their Republican allies in Congress to make sure the 
issue of price is not addressed.
  What are the Democrats saying about price? We heard my colleague from 
Ohio. He has introduced a bill similar to what passed the Senate that 
basically tries to encourage generic drugs by eliminating some of the 
barriers that the name-brand drug companies have put in place that make 
it more difficult under the patent system for generic drugs to come to 
market.

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