[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 6]
[House]
[Pages 8259-8260]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           DISCOUNT DRUG CARD

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Burns). Pursuant to the order of the 
House of January 20, 2004, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is 
recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, President Bush is in my home State of 
Ohio, campaigning for maybe the 25th time. He knows he has to spend a 
lot of time in Ohio because of what has happened to the Ohio economy 
since George Bush has been President.
  Ohio's lost one-sixth, one out of every six manufacturing jobs has 
left the State, some 170,000 manufacturing jobs every single month in 
the Bush administration; but as he travels throughout Ohio, he is going 
to stop in Dayton and do a little program, Ask President Bush, and the 
members of the Ohio delegation put a list of questions we would like to 
ask the President about the new Medicare prescription drug discount 
card that the gentleman from New Jersey asked about earlier. I would 
like to go through some of these questions, hoping, as we pose these to 
the President and wrote him a letter, that we can get answers to them.
  We asked the President, is it true that the Medicare law allows drug 
and insurance companies offering discount cards to change covered drugs 
and discounts weekly? Does this not mean that seniors may choose a card 
one week and pay for it and be stuck with it for a year that will be 
worth little or nothing to them the next week? We ask, if seniors are 
guaranteed discounts that last as little as 1 week, why must they sign 
up for a discount card for the entire year and only that discount card?
  The $600 annual benefit will mean a lot to very low-income seniors, 
but this benefit lasts only 2 years. Many of the same seniors may be 
unable to pass the assets test required for the low-income benefit that 
will take effect in 2006.
  We ask the President, why give low-income seniors help now and then 
pull the rug out from under them in 2 years, give them the help before 
the election, and after the election, the help's not there? If the 
Federal Government acknowledges those seniors need assistance, why are 
we excluding them after the Presidential election?
  Ohioans can save, we found, almost 50 percent by importing 
prescription drugs from Canada, same drugs, same dosage, same 
manufacturer, from what the price is in the United States. With the 
cost of popular drugs rising at triple the rate of inflation, we are 
asking the President how he can deny seniors and all Americans access 
to these safe, more affordable drugs from Canada and France and 
Germany, when all over the world people are paying so much less.
  The law creating the discount card program expressly prohibits the 
government from negotiating prices for prescription drugs, but the VA's 
price negotiation system has proven effective. We asked the President, 
why are

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America's seniors being denied the benefit of the government's buying 
power to leverage for lower prices?
  We pretty much know the answers to these questions because this drug 
discount card simply will not work. The more we know about it, drug 
prices go up 25 percent in a year. The discount card will give maybe 10 
or 15 percent. That is not price savings. That is really an insult. 
When we look at this, it is pretty easy to understand why.
  This prescription drug bill, the Medicare bill, was written by the 
insurance companies and written by the drug companies for the insurance 
companies and for the drug companies. President Bush brought the drug 
and insurance companies into the Lincoln Bedroom or into the Oval 
Office or somewhere in the White House and let them write this 
legislation. It is now the law of the land that now hurts our seniors, 
and there is not a real surprise there when the drug industry's already 
given President Bush tens of millions of dollars for his reelection. 
The word on the street in Washington is the drug industry will donate 
$100 million to the President's reelection campaign. The insurance 
industry is not quite as wealthy, not quite as generous, but will 
donate and has already donated millions of dollars to the President's 
reelection campaign. So it should come as no surprise that this is the 
kind of drug bill we get.
  Then to add insult to injury, the gentleman who wrote the language in 
the bill dealing with the discount drug card is, number one, a friend 
of the President's; and, number two, he has a discount drug card 
company. So we have got the drug industry writing the drug bill. We 
have got the insurance industry helping the drug industry write the 
drug bill, and now we have the discount card company writing the 
language for the discount cards.
  That is why America's seniors feel betrayed, because this Medicare 
bill is not for America's seniors. It is for President Bush's 
reelection campaign, for his fund-raising, and for those companies that 
are so powerful in this city.

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