Unanimous Consent Request--S. 1132

Floor Speech

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Mr. CRAPO. Mr. President, in reserving the right to object, first of all, I want to respond to Senator Kennedy. The first thing I want to say to Senator Kennedy is that I am impressed. He did this in only five pages. I wish we could all learn to write our legislation in five pages or less. I don't disagree with the history Senator Kennedy went through, with his powerful declaration, in that this is a critical issue that we must deal with, and I don't disagree with the fact that we have to have some serious pressure built here in the U.S. Congress to get this over the finish line.

That being said, I think we just got this language last night, and what Senator Kennedy is asking us to do today is to bypass the committee and go immediately to the floor with his language. There are several reasons I am going to have to, ultimately, object to that.

The first is that he is correct. I and a number of my colleagues who would be here if I were not standing here have a real problem with the solution, the mechanism, that Senator Kennedy has chosen--just outright price-fixing. Senator Kennedy doesn't even try to deny that. It goes beyond imposing government regulatory price controls in government-run programs by going through the private market as well. That is a solution mechanism that I have opposed and many of my colleagues oppose in terms of dealing with this issue. That is one of the key reasons for my objection.

The other one, though, is that the Committee on Finance, of which I am the ranking member, is working on this. I know that this is not an answer, because the Committee on Finance has been working on this now for a year or 2 or more, but there is work underway in a number of different arenas to try to get a handle on how to solve this without having to take the drastic step of just having the government come in and take control over the private sector market.

I will just point to, for example, what happened under the Trump administration in just the last couple of years. Through the Trump administration's effort to try to deal with this, a demonstration project has been operating under Medicare Part D in which the effort was to try to get the monthly cost of insulin down to $35 a month, and they have had some success in that program to demonstrate how it can be accomplished.

Now, look. I get that Medicare Part D is different than private sector insurance and that it is different than Medicaid and that it is different than other pieces of our healthcare system; it is also different than CHIP, but in one sector, a pretty significant sector, we have some solutions that are starting to show real potential.

In addition, as Senator Kennedy knows, I drafted legislation in the last Congress and am working on that legislation in this Congress that will deal not just with insulin but with many different other pieces of drug pricing in our system.

I can tell you that Senator Wyden himself, my counterpart on the Democratic side on the Finance Committee, has been working on his own ideas, and he and I have been working hard to prioritize this to get to a solution in the committee. I know, as I talked to Senator Wyden just before I came to the floor, that Senator Wyden and I both welcome the opportunity to work with Senator Kennedy as we try to put together that bipartisan solution.

I know that there would be other Senators on the other side of this issue who would stand here if I were not today and say they don't like this solution because they want it to go further in the other direction. They want to see a complete government takeover of the entire market and move to a single-payer system, that single payer being the government. That is another thing that some on my side have been working hard not to have happen.

There is a lot of political controversy over what the mechanism must be, and that is the primary reason I want this to be able to be worked on in the committee, in the proper way that we manage legislation in the Senate. I commit to Senator Kennedy that he can be as engaged as he wants to be with us in that as we move forward, but it is not the time right now to come and bypass that whole process.

I think Senator Kennedy would probably make a very powerful rejoinder that we have heard that we are working on it a lot and we need to now get to the point where we put solutions here on the floor for the entire Senate to consider, but today is not the day to do it by a unanimous consent request, and for that purpose I do object.

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